The news of Mr. Christopher Tallant’s death brought down his son by the earliest train. He hired a fly at the Avonworth Hotel, and reached Barton in the afternoon of a cold November day.
He felt that his conduct had hurried on the sad event which brought him once again in the vale of Avonworth. The telegram which Phœbe had considered it her duty to send to him, had for a moment struck him down like a blow. But of late he had so thoroughly schooled himself to his fate, had so trampled upon conscience and feeling, that he soon recovered his former coolness.
The thought occurred to him whether any change had been made in the will which he knew had been signed in his favour. Was this fine estate his own? Were those fields and woods his? Had that property in Yorkshire, those splendid farms on the wolds, reverted to the only son of Christopher Tallant? How much had the old man left?
It occurred to him that his father might have changed his will, indeed he had every reason to believe that such had been his intention. But he would not let this more than probable contingency have a settled place in his thoughts; for the desire of possession came upon him as the country conveyance dragged slowly along through the fine well-timbered park which had been fields within his own memory—fields overgrown with hedges and elm trees, and gorse and brushwood.
The blinds were down in all parts of the house, and Chester, the late Mr. Tallant’s man, opened the hall door slowly, and took Mr. Richard’s coat and hat without a smile or a word.
“Where is my sister?” said Richard, with an air of authority and command.
“I will inquire, sir,” said the old man.
“Tell her to come to me in the library; and look here, bring me some dry sherry.”
“Yes, sir,” said Chester.
Richard Tallant had qualms of conscience as he entered the familiar hall; a sense of fear came over him; he remembered all of a sudden the thousand acts of parental kindness and liberality that had been lavished upon him. Conscience would not let him forget all this, and honour reminded him how low he had fallen; so he spoke loud and gave commands, and assumed a tone of authority.
Phœbe soon came, pale and careworn, and with the tears in her eyes, she submitted to be kissed, and she kissed Richard in return, but she said not a word.
“Have you nothing to say?” Richard asked, after a few moments; “no explanation to give?”
“Don’t ask me for explanations—Chester will tell you about it,” she replied, softly and tenderly.
“Oh, very well, as you please, as you please,” he said, assisting himself to the sherry.
“Will you come up-stairs and see him?” Phœbe asked, putting her hand upon his arm, and wondering for a moment at his changed appearance.
He could not meet the glance of those big inquiring eyes.
“See whom?” he asked loudly and filling another glass.
“See our father,” said Phœbe in a whisper.
The son paused, with the sherry partly raised to his lips, and replaced the full glass upon the table.
“Come,” said Phœbe; “come, I will go with you.”
“No,” he said at length with a great effort, and withdrawing his arm from her gentle touch, “No; by-and-by.”
He dare not look upon that cold white face; for whilst Phœbe was talking, conscience gripped him savagely and made him a coward. He could look at nothing but the floor, and there the very boards seemed to twit him with his infamy and ingratitude.
His only relief was to rush to the bell and ring for Chester, and when he came, Phœbe glided out of the room to her chamber.
It had been a particularly sad and anxious time for Phœbe, and she appeared to stand alone in her sorrow. Arthur Phillips, from whom she had been wont occasionally to ask advice upon minor things, and in whose talk about art she had been so often engrossed, had not been near the house for months; the change which had recently come over Amy, Richard Tallant’s estrangement from her father, that father’s sorrow and death, all seemed to come upon her, blow after blow, and to leave her without one sympathising soul to whom she could look for a ray of hope and comfort.
What had become of Arthur Phillips? She had wondered a hundred times. His absence had been like something gone out of her life—like some domestic affliction. Her palette and canvas had lost all interest for her now. They had reminded her too much of her deep and secret sympathy in all that concerned him. She did not confess to herself that she loved him, and, truth to tell, she hardly knew that she did love him; but his absence was a hardship. His quiet homage was something that satisfied her; his warm enthusiasm about the beautiful and the true; his stories of painters who had won their way to fame and fortune by dint of their inborn genius and industry; his judgment about books; his criticisms on poetry; his compliments when she had been more than ordinarily successful in some touch of colour: all this had been part of her existence, and with Arthur’s absence had come all the manifold troubles which had afflicted her young life, clouded her hopes, and covered her with a sorrow too deep for words.
And what had Arthur Phillips been doing all this time? Painting that grand picture which he said he would paint when last we heard him speak some months ago.
The commercial panic had sorely afflicted a special local manufacture in which a large number of men and women had been employed at Severntown. As Arthur was returning home, on the day following that evening when we saw him at work in the fields, he met a number of operatives thrown out of work, who with no chance of the factory being re-opened, had set out “on tramp.” Arthur questioned them, and found that on the next morning nearly a hundred families were going to leave by train for Liverpool on their way to Australia. Subscriptions had been entered into to promote a scheme of emigration started by the operatives themselves, and this first exodus would take place the next morning.
Few of us but will remember, at some period of life, standing in a railway station, and watching the departure of a train containing some one the taking leave of whom excited all those human sensibilities which find vent in
We have seen to the luggage, found out the best seat for our friend, advised him to keep clear of the draft, begged of him to write at an early day, and done a variety of other trivial things by way of keeping the little time occupied, and smothering as much as possible the sorrows of parting. And then, when the squeezing of the hand was over, and the engine had shrieked the signal of departure, and the train had moved off, and grown less and less until it was out of sight, we have stood gazing at the long lines of rails over which it had disappeared, with thoughts and regrets too deep for words. Let us not deny such touches of nature. The most querulous, petulant, hard-hearted of mortals have experienced these emotions, and with something of the fear that the future might sever those ties of friendship, the danger of the breaking of which Bulwer Lytton describes so forcibly when he says: “The true sadness is not in the pain of parting—it is in the when and the how you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view; from the passionate farewell to the woman who has your heart in her keeping, to the cordial good-bye exchanged with pleasant companions at a watering-place, a country-house, or the close of a festive day’s blithe and careless excursion—a chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and Time’s busy fingers are not practised in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may: will it be in the same way? with the same sympathies? with the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely.”
Here was Arthur’s inspiration; he read the simple thoughts and the attendant quotation in a newspaper. The parting with Lionel Hammerton had prepared him for it, and all of a sudden he said to himself, “This shall be my great picture, and I will call it ‘Seeking New Homes.’”
He was at the railway station with the dawn of the next day, busily engaged sketching various points.
By-and-by, as the emigrants began to arrive, he made hurried sketches of faces and costumes, and in the course of an hour or two he stood there, fully realising all the inspiration which had come upon him in the highway: his broad elastic sympathies had been excited to the full, and he stood watching the train that had gone, almost with tears in his eyes—stood amidst numerous little affecting groups of men and women, and shared their sorrows.
The train which had gone was gaily decorated with ribbons, and had quite a holiday appearance; the passengers had been singing some well-known ballad; and the friends left behind had cheered them. People must do something to keep down that choking sensation which the strongest have felt at parting, and songs and cheering were capital resources for “driving dull care away,” on the occasion of a hundred poor families seeking the means of existence in a distant land.
Great battles have no more moving incidents than those social catastrophes which fall now and then upon manufacturing districts, bringing all the ills of poverty and starvation, and forced idleness upon poor, uneducated, improvident people. At these times instances enough of self-sacrifice and love crop up amongst them to make up for all the stories of selfishness and brutality that come out in their prosperity.
Arthur Phillips did not fail to take in the whole of that scene at the railway station: he did not forget those men and women with the blanched cheeks and tearful eyes. To them the parting could not be otherwise than painfully significant. It was a separation more fruitful of grief and apprehension than the common parting of friends. It was a forced exile, which those left behind might soon be compelled to follow—a flying from one ill to another, between which those left behind stood wavering, with little ones around them looking up for comfort and finding none.
The artist bent himself to his work from that very day. At night he completed his various sketches and studied his subject, and in the day he painted from early morn to evening—painted for very life—painted for love, and money, and fame, and sympathy. It was striking out in a new line, but he had no fear of the result. In less than a month the picture began to assume form and character; never had artist worked with more rapidity and with more earnestness of purpose. The work had never flagged—it had gone on day by day without interruption or change of plan. The subject was so thoroughly mapped out in the artist’s mind, that time alone stood between him and its completion. The figures were few but full of character, and the last touch was given to the whole on that morning when Mr. Tallant died.
The story was wonderfully told: the picture was a poem on canvas—full of human nature, brimming over with sympathy. As a work of art—for conception, drawing, perspective colour, it was truly a grand picture; and Arthur felt his success as he sat before it that morning, when the sun was shining upon the dead man at Barton Hall.
On the next day, before the picture could hardly be said to be dry, Arthur had it packed, and he posted with it to London, where he had arranged for it to be hung at a winter exhibition. Josephs the dealer, who had previously purchased everything Mr. Phillips chose to let him have, had heard some whisper about it, and had visited Arthur the week before; but the artist could not be prevailed upon to show the picture to anybody but his old housekeeper who had nursed him when he was a boy, and she had sat before it and cried and sobbed over it almost heart-broken: then Arthur felt that he had painted a great picture, and he knew it when he unveiled it again in that long room in Suffolk-street, Pall Mall, before a small critical company.
In a few hours “Seeking New Homes” was talked of in artistic and literary society all over London, and when everybody was asking everybody else if they had seen the new picture, Arthur Phillips drove down to Paddington and took a ticket for Avonworth.