“Ah! if we only knew that, at the beginning, Mr. Phillips,” said Mrs. Somerton earnestly, “if we could be content to learn that from other people’s experience: ‘better learn from your neighbour’s scathe than from your own;’ but we learn from our own, Mr. Phillips, we learn from our own.”
Arthur had upon a former occasion been struck with the snatches of moral and proverbial philosophy which characterised Mrs. Somerton’s conversations; but he had thought her a clever cynical countrywoman before, and had disliked her: now he rapidly felt himself beginning to take a deep interest in her.
“Folks that do wrong have generally plenty of excuses; but I have none worth the name of excuse, though they say a bad excuse is better than none. You are surprised at my talk: you will not be so before the night is over.”
“Surely nothing has happened that does not appear to me. Poor Mr. Tallant is dead, and you have been ill; is there anything else?” Arthur asked as calmly as he could.
“I won’t torture you,—I know your secret, sir. Miss Phœbe is well, though, poor soul, she is sadly cut up; but misery is no respecter of persons. Ambition and pride are the ruin of most people. You would hardly think I had been an ambitious, scheming woman, with plans far above the station I hold?” she went on excitedly.
“I have often thought that you would worthily fill a much higher position,” said Arthur.
“Ah, well, it is a long story, and I will not weary you with it; everybody thinks their own stories interesting to everybody else; but, there, mine need not be told. I have been an ambitious, scheming woman ever since I was a woman, and I have always been foiled. Half my life has been spent in studying how I should play the ace without knowing whether I held it or not, and in the other half I have been learning the truth of the proverb that wine poured out is not wine swallowed. Lincolnshire women have a way of talking in proverbs, Mr. Phillips: one can say a good deal like that without seeming to.”
Arthur was altogether at a loss to understand Mrs. Somerton; but he boded ill from all this apparent mystery, and yet a voice seemed to whisper hope all through it.
“You are in love with Miss Phœbe,” said Mrs. Somerton at length, and with singular abruptness; “I know it. I have not watched and watched with a mother’s eye for nothing, and I think the young lady loves you in return—if there is such a thing as love—and I begin to think there may be, or something better than love, something better than love.”
The woman repeated these latter words with unaffected tenderness as she remembered how kindly, how generously, how tenderly, her husband, Luke Somerton, had nursed her in her illness; how when he knew all, he had not upbraided her; how he had pitied her and bade her be of good heart, for that a wrong atoned for was a wrong undone; how in the early watches of the night she had seen him by her bedside wakeful and gentle, but yet manly, as she remembered him when he was young in the grand old Lincolnshire wolds.