“Something better than love,” she continued—“friendship, benevolence, charity, sympathy—I know not what you call it; but perhaps it may be love, after all,” she went on; “and I don’t think there is any wrong ambition about you, Mr. Phillips, if you will forgive me for saying so. A man who can sit in the sun painting pictures and all that sort of thing, and be content with it, can’t very well be much wrong, except that he is only a painter after all. Don’t be angry, sir; we never thought much of painters in Lincolnshire; we used to look at them the same as we did poets and such like; but I have heard that some of them make money, and can keep up a good house. However, I will say no more about that; but somehow, sir, I think you will find things going favourably, so far as Phœbe is concerned. We shall see; if such should be the case, Mr. Phillips, no matter what you hear of me, you will not forget that I was the first to give you hope—that will be something to think of, perhaps some little consolation to me.”
Arthur was too much agitated to ask any questions. He thanked Mrs. Somerton as well as he could for what she had said, and he began to look out into the future with hope.
We never know how unexpectedly Hope may pay us a gorgeous visit; how often she comes when we least expect her. With death barring his way, and funeral plumes crossing his path, Arthur Phillips could hardly have expected Hope to come by his side and whisper so confidently of happiness almost beyond his most sanguine thoughts. Once or twice in the darkness, once or twice between the acts of the day’s solemn drama, a faint whisper had lighted up his soul as we have seen; but here he stood at last almost in the full blaze of hope, and the light had come from the darkest of all places, in his own estimation.
And so Arthur sat and pondered, and Mrs. Somerton quietly regarding him, dosed off into a quiet slumber, induced by the fatigue of thought and conversation which Arthur’s visit had occasioned.
Far away amongst the Lincolnshire meadows, where the long, lazy river flowed by the corn-fields and lingered amongst the reeds and rushes; far away in the green and golden fields, and over the brown and loamy furrows; hemmed in by short hedges, and dotted here and there with ricks of hay and straw and stray clumps of trees; far away amongst Lincolnshire homesteads, and mills with their swinging sails, and square-towered churches, and broad lanes, and long teams of horses dragging well-stocked waggons; far away in the past the mind of the bailiff’s wife was wandering, and the dream was a happy one, for it dealt with childhood only.
Arthur stole out whilst she slept. The mists had crept about the valley and were hovering over the hill-tops.
He started off to visit some of the familiar scenes where he had sat in the long summer days, wondering and hoping and painting in hazy romantic dreams which were not all happiness.
His thoughts were strangely mixed and intricate now: a host of anxious feelings had been awakened which he could not control, and which he could hardly understand.