IN WHICH RICHARD TALLANT VISITS BARTON
HALL AGAIN, AND ARTHUR PHILLIPS COMPLETES
A GREAT WORK.
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
“The silent pressure of the hand
Which friends too well can understand.”
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.