“I shall hope to have an opportunity to explain to you one of these days,” said Arthur.
“Nothing I hope ever occurred here to induce your absence?” said Phœbe.
“O no; on the contrary,” said Arthur, looking at the speaker with undisguised emotion, “engagements of a pressing character have kept me confined to my studio.”
Then the conversation dropped into matters of fact concerning the late Mr. Tallant’s troubles, his illness and death; and eventually Phœbe Somerton and Arthur shook hands, and Arthur asked permission to call and see his fair pupil on an early day, which permission was readily granted.
And so Arthur went back to Severntown, to his quiet house beneath the shadow of the old cathedral, full of new hopes, a new man, and with the future opening up to him bright and sunny.
He found several congratulatory letters at home about his work, “Seeking New Homes,” and two offers of purchase, the highest being fifteen hundred pounds.
This was cheerful; for though Arthur was by no means mercenary, he felt that this was a practical tribute to the excellence of his work; and, moreover, he had, as we have already learnt, been a heavy loser through the recent bank failures.
He sat in the firelight with his happy dreams, listening to the roar of the river without, and letting it bear away his thoughts on its bosom. The cathedral chimes fell dreamily upon his ear, and he thought of a merry village peal which might some day be rung in token of the consummation of his wildest hopes.
Thoughts of the cold damp church, with the coffin in it, would crop up now and then, but they had no abiding-place in his mind that night; happier thoughts crowded in and dispersed them.
His long lonely life, with quiet grassy spots in it here and there, and nooks of peace, dedicated to art, was before him. He travelled over it again in the firelight. He saw himself a studious boy without playmates, without companions; he saw himself verging into manhood with a strangely awakened love of art and nature, and with only a poor broken-down painter taking any interest in the mysterious signs which his genius would make in spite of himself. He saw his humble home and his toiling parent; a mother without one gleam of sympathy in common with his aspirations, and who only bore querulously with his odd ways, and a father whose besetting sin was the bottle, which was his ruin.