And he had gone on the following day, and peered out amongst the throng to see the same face again, but he saw it not; so he went quietly alone into the Lady Chapel to think of it, and build up the image in a picture of angels which he had thought, more than once, of painting. He never forgot the varied sensations which had been excited within him by that solitary ramble through private corridors into the Lady Chapel.
Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope have sung the delights of “hidden music.” Who has not stood at night in some quiet churchyard with his thoughts reverentially turned to heaven by the solemn strains of an evening hymn rippling out through the half-open doorway? Who has not sat without the precincts of cathedral choirs and felt the power of religious strains move him more deeply than when in the presence of the choristers? Is it that the mind likes to fall back upon itself now and then, to wed the music to its own hopes and aspirations?
The Lady Chapel was quite shut out from the choir, nave, and aisles. As Arthur stood there the whole of the auditory and performers were completely away from view. The altar-screen was between him and the gay parterre of bonnets, hemmed in by the surrounding margin of baize and matting. Around him were decaying monuments, themselves needing memorials (as Crabbe puts it in “The Borough”); half-finished slabs fresh from the hands of the restorer, and other evidences of the struggle of the present to preserve the past.
Subdued morning beams came in through tiers of lancet lights; and mounting up, echoing along the fretted roof of the nave, the strains of the chorus came streaming in upon him over the screen, filling the little chapel with exquisite harmonies which seemed to die away in mysterious vaults and corridors. In pianissimo passages of solo or chorus the music receded, and died away in the west, like faint memories of former strains.
This was a memory worth cherishing; but it was fixed in the artist’s mind as much by the association of the previous day as it was by its own intrinsic sublimity.
Six months afterwards it was that Arthur was introduced to Phœbe Tallant, and then that dear memory came back to him, softened into a kind of religious tint, as if it came through a painted window of the mind.
“This girl is my destiny,” thought Arthur at once; for the face was always in his mind, and somehow it was mixed up with thoughts that were above the world, mixed up with dreamy pictures of cathedral aisles, and with memories of swelling anthems.
For a time, after he knew Phœbe, Arthur feared he was drifting into morbid sensibility. He had led a sober, monkish kind of life for years, and with this new image in his mind he had at first given himself up to wanderings about the old cathedral, and a sort of fascinating unreal saint-worship which he carried out for a time on canvas; but as time wore on he grew out of these morbid habits and once more there was a healthy glow in his conversation and in his pictures. But he was desperately, madly in love, nevertheless.
CHAPTER VII
IS A SENTIMENTAL CHAPTER, CONTAINING A FEW MORAL REFLECTIONS BY THE WAY.
Yes, Arthur Phillips was desperately in love. A silly thing that, now-a-days, is it not? Love! All very well in poetry and romance; all very well for school-girls and beardless boys.