THE
TALLANTS OF BARTON.

A Tale of Fortune and Finance.

BY

JOSEPH HATTON,

Author of “Bitter Sweets: a Love Story;” “Against the Stream,” etc., etc.

“The wheel of Fortune turns incessantly round, and who can say within himself,
I shall to-day be uppermost?”—Confucius.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.
1867.

[The Right of Translation is reserved.]

LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
IN THE SHADOW OF BERNE HILLS.

Barton Hall is a conspicuous feature of the landscape in the smiling Vale of Avonworth, and it stands beneath the shadow of Berne Hills. Built of white stone, and in the Italian style of architecture, it has the appearance of a modern mansion removed from Kensington Palace Gardens, and planted amongst the rare scenery of this beautiful western district of the Midlands.

All that wealth and taste can do to make the house generally worthy of the site has been lavished upon it, inside and out. It is furnished with everything that is costly and comfortable, with ornaments and articles of vertu from all parts of the earth.

A long gravelly drive leads up to the principal entrance, which is cut off from the park with iron fencing and chains. On the other side of the house there are conservatories of flowers and extensive gardens. Behind, at a short distance, there is stabling for many horses, shut out from view by shrubs and young trees.

In front of the house a smooth tract of mossy lawn ends in a sunk fence; and beyond lies the park, skirted by green fields, which mount up the Berne Hills and lose themselves in the foliage of oaks, and elms, and larches.

Here and there on the lawn are clumps of young aspiring cedars, silver birch trees, ash plants, and sycamores, hemmed round about with rims of white creepers and luxuriant mosses. In “Gems of the Poets,” pictorially adorned by Laydon, you will find a fanciful illustration of Gray’s well-known lines:

“Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.”

In the foreground there is a leafy vignette of exotic and other plants and trees sprouting up from an island-rock. Turn the water into grass, and replace the tall cocoa-nut trees with a couple of silver birches, and you have one of the Barton Hall lawn groups; for the place is so completely “shut out from the rude world” and the easterly and northern winds, that the climate is more like southern France than western England, and vegetation flourishes there nearly all the year round.

Close by the principal lodge-entrance to the park lies a clear deep lake, fed by a stream from the Berne Hills, and the rendezvous of innumerable wild and tame water-fowl.

Few places in broad England can compare with this modern house and grounds. The sunsets are more beautiful here than anywhere else in all this western land. The twilights are full of yellows, and delicate neutral tints, and shifting lights. And the mists that float about those Berne Hills, like angel shadows! and the gentle rains that follow them, filling the air with a thousand mixed perfumes, and brightening the greens and browns in the landscape,—they might make an artist frantic with delight.

In rain or sunshine, in winter or summer, Barton Hall, beneath the shadow of Berne Hills, is always beautiful. In evening sunsets, with the red light on its great flashing windows, and a tinge of gold on the vane of its Italian tower, you might take it for the romantic retreat of a southern king rather than the home of a merchant prince of Old England.

Christopher Tallant was to all intents and purposes a self-made man. He had begun life in a humble capacity in the counting-house of some great works in the north of England, where so many men of position and influence have made their way upwards from minor posts.

They look more at a boy’s talents than at his friends in those busy hives of industry northwards. No matter how highly a young fellow may be connected, he has no position without ability in these busy districts.

A rare practical race, these said northerners—a race to be brought up amongst, studied for example’s sake. As a class they do not possess the refinements of manner and speech of the southern races of England, and they do not count so much upon etiquette. They are rough like their north-east winds, but genial as their own firesides.

Their rivers are black with coal washings, and the banks thereof are crowded with great works, from which blazing furnaces, and forges, and flashes of sudden flame, cast ruddy reflections upon the sullen tide. Their fields are covered with pit-heaps, and iron works, and lime-kilns, and blasting cupolas. But here and there, in out-of-the-way places, you come upon romantic woods, and running streams, and rocky glens.

A wonderful land the north countrie, the seat of great enterprises, and the home of strong-limbed, strong-willed, clear-headed men; one would rather some of them had softer manners, but for our country’s good we can afford to sacrifice that if only in deference to their active brains and their inborn love of enterprise.

It was in the north, we say, where Mr. Christopher Tallant began life, and where the key-note of his career may be said to have been struck; but as a young man he had lived in the south-west of England, and had mastered the leading principles of trade and commerce in several great private and public works. He had proved himself an adept at legislative finance, at devising and carrying out great schemes; and at a comparatively early age he had raised himself to a position of commercial distinction and opulence.

He had been twice married. His first union was an unhappy one. It was altogether a mysterious marriage, which had puzzled and astonished his friends at the time, as well it might; for without the smallest warning the young fellow had returned from a short visit to London with a handsome, dashing woman, whom he introduced as his wife. At this time he was manager of the Vulcan Forge Works on the Avon, twenty miles on the other side of a famous western city, and he had the entrée to very respectable society.

It was some time before the little local coterie forgave his sudden introduction of the unknown London wife. In a very short time he had reason to repent his rashness and folly. His wife indulged in all kinds of extravagance; she led the local fashions, she indulged in fast flirtations which set all the gossips in the neighbourhood upon her; finally, an unwomanly passion for drink set in, and after a few years of wretchedness she died, leaving behind her one child, a son, who will make a prominent figure in this history.

The poor woman’s misconduct had but little impeded her husband’s worldly advances; he secured shares in several important patents; he became director of one or two companies; and started as an iron merchant on his own private account. At one time he held as his own property half the iron bars of a whole district. This was during a strike, after a period of great depression, and just before a time of sudden and unexpected activity.

Well, by-and-by, in the course of half-a-dozen years, the iron merchant married again, and took his wife home to that beautiful country residence near Severntown, and beneath the shadow of Berne Hills. He had only purchased the estate the year before his marriage.

His second wife, whom he had loved with a fervency characteristic of his earnest character, was the daughter of a nobleman, and an exceedingly handsome and lovable woman.

She died in giving birth to her first child, who, like her half-brother, is one of the leading characters in this story.

The death of his second wife had been a great affliction to Christopher Tallant. It was many months before he could bring himself even to look at his child. Travel and change of scene, lapse of time, increased ardour in business occupations, and new hopes, at length softened down his great sorrow, and enabled him to take his place in the great world calmly, and as became a man of his station and influence. His new hopes centred round his only son, who was a lad about eight years old when the merchant’s greatest trouble came upon him.

The boy exhibited considerable native talent. He was a smart, well-looking, promising fellow, full of life and spirits and courage. Before he was ten years old his father clung to him like a forlorn hope, and centred in him schemes of future power and greatness. The name of Tallant had of late years become famous in the world of trade and money, and the name should be perpetuated in this son with honour and distinction. This was the happiness which, it seemed to the merchant, Fate had decreed he should have at last.

Such, briefly, is the outline of Mr. Tallant’s history. We introduce him to our readers some two and twenty years after the death of his second wife,—a man over fifty years of age. At the time when we make his acquaintance he is Chairman of the great Meter Iron Works Company, a director of two of the principal railway companies, and a shareholder in many extensive city schemes.

Once a week he was to be found at the London offices of the Meter Works at Westminster, and he usually returned from London the same day. You could not have mistaken him for anything but a shrewd, conscientious man of business if you had known him. He was above the middle height, and usually wore a black shooting-coat, fitting the body tightly, and with pockets at the side; shepherd’s plaid trowsers, and a black velvet waistcoat. His hair was grey, and his face cleanly shaven. He had a quick, discerning eye, and withal a genial expression of countenance; for, though he had not forgotten the past, Time had been good to him, as it is good to other sufferers who have lost dear ones from their homes, and had comforted him with the affection of his children. He bore an excellent character for kindness, integrity, and honour; but he was known at the same time to be a man of unbending pride.

He was proud of his name, of his wealth, of his son, of his house, of his grounds, of his farms, of his estates; proud of everything. And to a certain extent it was a laudable pride, for his riches were the result of his own ability and industry. He felt, with a certain acknowledgment of the bounty of Providence, that he had made them all himself. He might have thanked God a little more for his worldly success and been none the less happy, and certainly more grateful; but it was his pride that he had worked his way up, from the lowest rung of the ladder, and that he stood on the top of it with safety.

Everything he had was better than anything anybody else had; he would have it so, and yet he was a kindly, courteous sort of man, whom you might have had pleasure in visiting. His pride of wealth would crop up now and then; but his wines were superb, his cuisine everything that could be desired, the views from his windows magnificent, his pictures modern and by the best moderns, his books modern and in glorious bindings, and his daughter—there was nothing more sweet to look upon in all the Avonworth valley, or beneath the Berne Hill shades, than the merchant’s only daughter.

CHAPTER II.
INTRODUCES THE READER TO THE MERCHANT’S SON AND DAUGHTER.

Do you know Dicksee’s picture of “Miranda?” It was exhibited at the Royal Academy a few years ago. There are copies of it in the Strand and Regent Street picture-shops.

It is a fair, sweet, spirituel face, full of inquiring love and innocence—a frank, open face, set off with a heavy wealth of bright brown hair—a sunny face, with red, parted lips, and all the pure soul of woman in the deep blue eyes.

When first we saw that picture, we could not, “for the life of us,” think where we had seen the earthly model of it. It haunted us for days; we dreamt about it; we bought the best copy we could procure; and at length, with the picture lying beside us, carefully packed, on the seat of a Great Western Railway carriage, a London purchase for our country library, we remembered Phœbe Tallant.

It hangs before us whilst we write, with all the story of the life of her whom it so much resembles mapped out in our mind.

Perhaps Phœbe Tallant was not quite so pretty as Mr. Dicksee’s picture, but she was as near an approach to it as one is likely to meet with once in a dozen years.

Occasional visitors at Barton Hall from London were in raptures with the bright, fair girl; and one or two young fellows had gone home desperately in love with her; but none of them dared hardly to think of their love in presence of Mr. Tallant: not that the merchant said much about Phœbe, not that she seemed to be on such affectionate terms with him as might have been expected; but he was proud of her beauty, proud of her accomplishments. And, moreover, it was shrewdly anticipated that Miss Tallant would not have anything like the dowry which the daughter of so wealthy a father ought to have; for the merchant was all engrossed in his heir.

Richard Tallant, who was destined by the old man for such a store of riches, was a dark, dashing young fellow, of five or six and twenty, when we first make his acquaintance—some half-a-dozen years older than his half-sister Phœbe.

He had been an Eton boy, had graduated at Oxford, and travelled through Europe and Asia.

He had already spent enough money recklessly, foolishly, ay, and wickedly, to have produced an annuity of at least a thousand a year. He was professedly one of the managing directors of the Meter Works, and resided in London to take the metropolitan and continental business of the company.

When his father complained of his enormous expenditure (which was very seldom, by the way), Richard Tallant alluded to his position in the world, his education, and his habits.

At Oxford he had been a don, not of learning, but of fashion; kept his hunters and his mail phaeton, and made many a scion of the old aristocracy envy the mushroom son of iron and railway debentures.

“You have given me every indulgence; you have bred me up in the hot-bed of luxury; I am just fresh from a European tour, where I travelled like a prince, to finish my college education, and now you expect me to pull in,” Richard would say, sitting astride one of the heavy mahogany chairs in the Westminster managerial room, and looking over the back of it at his father.

“I should not care, Dick, if you would only do the work of your office, as well as draw the salary,” Mr. Tallant would remark.

“Come, now, my dear governor, have you not told me you have enough invested to enable me to live like a prince all my life?”

“I may have been weak enough to say so; but I calculated upon your doing something towards keeping the money coming in.”

“You didn’t want me, you said, to be waiting, like some heirs, for your death, and then reckoning upon living in style; you would rather I had my fill of life, and see me enjoy it in your own days. Come now, father, you know you have said so,” said Richard, twirling his moustache, and tapping his patent-leather boot with a riding-whip.

“I fear I had not my usual foresight about me when I did say so,” said Mr. Tallant.

And he said truly; but having risen by hard work himself, and sprung from a comparatively humble position, Mr. Tallant was one of those men who like to see their children in the other extreme, and who, never having been within the pale of college and aristocratic life, believe, and truly, that, to be a leader therein, a merchant’s son must let his money fly freely, and like a prince indeed.

He had given his son a free rein. When first Richard went to Oxford, he had been snubbed by a young lord, and an epigram had been levelled at him, the point of which turned upon his name and origin; he was called the produce of fifty talents of silver invested in iron.

When Richard told his father this, the great merchant snapped his fingers, and said he could buy up all the Oxford lords in a heap, and, turning cleverly round upon their lordships, in reply to the epigrammatic hit at his son’s origin, he said,

“Never mind them, Dick; there’s as good blood in your veins as there is in any of theirs; it may not come from a swell who plundered the Saxons at the time of the Norman Conquest, or mixed in the vices of licentious courts; there is no dishonour in it, and it has to be proved yet whether to spring from merchant princes of England is not the highest of all descent.”

“Bravo,” said Mr. Richard Tallant; “why, father, you speak like an orator. That hit about the merchant princes would drive half-a-dozen hustings mad.”

Mr. Tallant had warmed up, and was angry; he paid no attention to his son’s comment; he only saw before him some “stuck up” aristocrat sneering at his name and origin.

“Look here, Dick,” he continued, producing a blank cheque, “fill that up in the presence of these aristocratic snobs, and show them what the Tallants can do.”

This was surely putting too much of power and revenge into the hands of a young man naturally frivolous and overbearing, and it no doubt influenced, in a great measure, his future career.

One would have given Mr. Christopher Tallant credit for more real worldly wisdom than this; he could, perhaps, have borne “the proud man’s contumely” himself; he might have shrugged his shoulders, and sneered at it, with a consoling thought about his wealth; he might have said to himself, “Ah, never mind, I could buy you up, stick and stone” (for he was weak, you see, on this point); but he would not have protested and been demonstrative: contempt would have been his answer, and, in the midst of his commercial cares, he would have speedily forgotten the inane taunt. To have his son treated with indifference, to see him taunted with his origin, by men who had nothing but their ancestors to boast about; this was a different thing altogether, and he chafed at it, and was angry indeed.

His pride was shocked. The feeling that he could buy everything was shaken. He was not accustomed to crosses, except such as his wealth or his energy could overcome; and his sense of injured honour, too, was touched.

“I would not have you do anything that is mean, Dick; there is nothing mean in being generous and open-handed; and there are two powers, it appears, at Oxford,—money and blood; don’t be afraid to hold your own; you have no reason to be ashamed of your birth, and you can make them ashamed of their poverty, the sneaks! Don’t spare them one jot, Dick; punish them, and show them what talents of silver invested in iron can do—the miserable sneaks!”

Thus all the merchant’s practical wisdom and his just pride were thrown to the winds; but he is not the only man of his class who, chafing at the arrogance of “gentle blood,” has sought revenge on Society at the shrine of Mammon, and obtained nothing in return but “a crown of golden sorrow.”

CHAPTER III.
BRINGS US TO THE HALL FARM, WHERE THE READER MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF THE SOMERTONS AND A CERTAIN LANDSCAPE PAINTER.

It lay on the western border of the park, and comprised about eight hundred acres of arable and pasture land.

The buildings were red brick, with white dressed corner stones and facings. There were model cow-houses, cattle-sheds, piggeries, barns, corn-lofts, and poultry pens, that would have satisfied even Mr. Mechi’s critical eye. An agricultural writer of considerable repute had, in truth, written an essay upon these model buildings, and it had been printed in an important agricultural and scientific review; for there were no better arranged buildings in the country.

Mr. Tallant, you know, would have the best of everything, and his bailiff encouraged him in having all the best things at his farm. There were carts from Crosskill, ploughs from Ransomes, threshing-machines from Clayton and Shuttleworth, reapers from America, clod-crushers, drills, rakes, hoes, harrows, and other implements from Banbury, Lincoln, Beverley, Worcester, Yorkshire, and Bristol.

Mr. Tallant had built these model farm-buildings himself. The Hall Farm had been an especial feature of the estate when he purchased it, but the buildings did not come up to his notions, and the result is before us.

Mr. Tallant brought all his commercial experience to bear upon the cultivation and management of the land. His bailiff, Mr. Luke Somerton, had been a Lincolnshire lord’s right hand in the management of a great farm on the Wolds, and he was the very man of all others to enter into Mr. Tallant’s idea of looking upon a farm in the same light as he would a manufactory.

The merchant maintained that good land would, in a very few years, amply repay a man for all he put into it; and Mr. Somerton was a thoroughgoing disciple of high cultivation. He had studied agricultural chemistry under a professor, and Mr. Tallant often said it was quite a treat to chat with him about Liebig’s theories, the value of agricultural statistics, tenant right, and leases. Richard Tallant did not agree with his father, and thought Luke Somerton’s talk a good deal of it “rot:” not that the bailiff cared for Mr. Richard’s opinion, or feared his father’s.

Luke Somerton was quite a gentleman in his way. He was a younger son of a Lincolnshire squire, and had been brought up to agriculture as a profession. He came to the Barton Hall Farm with Mr. Tallant, and he was likely to remain there as long as Mr. Tallant lived; for he was not only a scientific farmer, but he farmed profitably, and Mr. Tallant said that was what few amateur gentlemen farmers could say for their bailiffs in that district.

The farm-house was a substantial, handsome residence, surrounded with a prettily laid out garden, with shrubs and trees all scrupulously dwarfed and pruned. Hard by, and adjacent to the farm-buildings, was the stack-yard, and beyond were fields, mostly grass, with low fences and white gates.

Mr. Somerton was married, and had three children,—two sons and a daughter. His firstborn had left home when he was fifteen as an apprentice on board a merchant ship, which sailed from London for Bombay. The vessel had been spoken once, and had never been heard of afterwards; so Frank had long been mourned as lost, and there remained the bailiff, his daughter Amy, a girl about the age of Miss Tallant, and a son, Paul, three years younger.

Luke Somerton’s married life had not been a happy one. His wife had accepted his hand mainly out of spite, after she had angled unsuccessfully for his eldest brother. She was a proud disappointed woman; but a good housewife nevertheless, and Luke, by dint of perseverance, had successfully combated her overbearing disposition; so that though they could not be said to live happily and affectionately, as man and wife should do, they never had noisy open brawls and quarrels, as some couples have. If they sneered at each other and maintained opposite opinions on almost any given subject, they very rarely had loud disputes, and never passed a day without speaking to each other. They were opposed on principle; but Mrs. Somerton always managed to conclude her bickerings with something like overtures of reconciliation, which Luke accepted for what they were worth, and “tided over with,” until the next fencing bout came on.

Mrs. Somerton had been a handsome woman—a blonde—and might have continued handsome had she cultivated kindness of heart as well as her husband cultivated wheat. Hers was a nice face spoiled by a nasty temper. She was a fine woman, above the middle height, and there were little streaks of red upon her cheeks such as you see on the sunny side of a winter apple. There were lines about her mouth which disappointment and pride had placed there, during eighteen years of sourness and vexation of spirit. She was well mated so far as appearances went.

Her husband looked a thorough son of the soil, a tall, well-built, florid, intelligent, business-like Lincolnshire farmer, such as you will meet in the capacity of judge at country agricultural shows.

Their son Paul was at a boarding-school, and when this story begins, just about commencing life as a clerk in Mr. Tallant’s London offices.

His sister Amy was at home, and spent half her time at the Hall with Miss Tallant, who treated her very much as a sister.

Amy was not at all like the picture of Miranda. She was several shades darker than Miss Tallant, and neither a brunette nor a blonde; but she had a large black piercing eye, which looked at you from beneath gracefully-arched eyebrows. She was not so round as Phœbe; but her figure was supple, and well defined. Her mouth and chin were full of graceful curves, and her hair was bound closely to her head, setting off a pair of small white ears that gave a high character to the face. She was a well-bred, high-spirited girl, and accomplished too; for she had not only been fairly educated at her father’s expense, but she had had the benefit of much of the tuition which Miss Tallant had received, not only from a clever resident governess but from professors who came at intervals to Barton Hall.

Amongst the latter was one Mr. Arthur Phillips, who taught Miss Tallant drawing, and as he will figure rather prominently in this romance, we will introduce him at once, and tell you what he was like and all about him. He was a rising young artist who resided in the county town, though he might have made a successful position in London.

“I wonder you don’t go to town,” many persons would say to him; and his reply would be in effect,

“Why should I? I don’t care for London, and I like the country. I can go to town whenever I think proper, and the dealers will buy my pictures whether I go or not. What I get for them, and the few pupils I have in the county, give me enough for all my requirements, and enable me to study quietly and leisurely.”

But there was another reason why Arthur Phillips preferred the country, and that was a reason, which you may guess, for constant visits to the vale of Berne, beyond his desire to study the foliage of the district, and the lights and shadows of the Berne Hills, and the beautiful skies above.

It is true that many of his best sketches were transcriptions of the varied bits of landscape in this district; and he said he had never thoroughly understood Cuyp, Both and Ruysdael, Salvator Rosa, Wilson and Gainsborough, until he knew Berne valley in storm and sunshine, in spring and summer. He was never tired of painting Berne trees and Berne mosses, and the dealers bought these little sketchy bits almost as readily as they would now buy similar things by Birket Foster.

Mr. Phillips was an earnest lover of art; if he had not been a painter he would have been a poet. There was poetry in all his works, the true poetry of nature; and he was as well up in the principles and beauties of poetry as he was in chiaroscuro and perspective.

Nature had given him a mind worthy of the most perfect exterior, but she had denied him many of those charms of person which mostly delight the eye and captivate the heart of woman. He was under the ordinary height, a thin figure, with long black hair, and dark eyes set deeply in a face notable for sharply cut features. The expression was that of a thinker, and his manner nervous and retiring.

Mrs. Somerton had a great objection to Mr. Phillips.

“I don’t think his continually lurking about here bodes any good to those girls,” she said to her husband, over tea, as Mr. Phillips passed by with his sketch book under his arm.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Somerton, laughing. “You don’t think either of the girls will fall in love with an undersized whipper-snapper like Mr. Phillips?”

“There’s no knowing what poor silly women will fall in love with,” said Mrs. Somerton, with a sneer.

“No, nor men either, for the matter of that, dame, if you want to argue the point,” Luke replied, defiantly.

Mrs. Somerton, thus challenged, declined to pick up the gauntlet which she had so often before accepted. She was bent upon talking about Mr. Arthur Phillips.

“I don’t think Amy would be fool enough to be led away by his poetry and pictures, and fine speeches and things; but Miss Tallant’s soft enough for anything, and I wonder Mr. Tallant has that fellow continually about the place.”

“God bless us!” said Mr. Somerton, his honest face lighting up with a genial smile of amusement; “why, do you think Miss Tallant, with her beautiful face, and her equally beautiful dowry, is going to throw herself away upon poor little Phillips?”

“Why not? He writes poetry, and paints all sorts of nonsense, and talks like lackadaisical lovers talk in books; and I’m sure that’s the sort of thing that Miss Tallant’s flashy education has taught her to admire. Why didn’t her father let her go into London society? Why doesn’t she go to town for the season, and be a reigning beauty, as she might be? That’s the sort of education she should have had, and then she might have married a duke,” Mrs. Somerton said, with warmth.

“Why, you’re quite excited about it,” said Mr. Somerton; “I’ve not seen your eyes sparkle so since I don’t know when.”

“I hate to see such namby-pambyism,” went on Mrs. Somerton. “When a girl’s got a pretty face, a graceful manner, and plenty of money, she ought to take her place and marry a gentleman, not be buried alive in a stucco palace, with a half-gentleman, half-farmer, half-ironfounder father, a sneaking governess, and an ugly, romantic little painter.”

“Well, well, wife, it is no business of ours, and if it was, I don’t think there’s any foundation for alarm. Besides, your ambition ought to be satisfied if young Hammerton, as you say pays more delicate attentions to Amy than he does to Miss Tallant. But Master Hammerton must mind his eye; I’d break every bone in his body if he offered an insult to Amy.”

“Young Hammerton!” said Mrs. Somerton, with an affected sneer. “Do you think I’m vain and silly enough to think the daughter of a farm-bailiff has any chance of catching the next heir to an earldom, for her husband?”

“A farm-bailiff! Why such emphasis on farm-bailiff, Mistress Somerton? There may be as good blood in the veins of a farm-bailiff as there is in a Hammerton.”

Mrs. Somerton’s lip curled with a pitying, patronising expression, that put her husband into a towering passion; a most unusual circumstance.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed, rising from his seat, “a Somerton is as independent a man any day; there was never one of the race that didn’t always pay twenty shillings in the pound, and but wouldn’t fell a lord if he spoke a light word of any of their women: and, by heaven, I consider myself as good a man as any Hammerton, dead or living.”

“There, there, Luke; now don’t get into a passion,” said Mrs. Somerton, trying to speak soothingly, and like an injured woman, who had not given the slightest cause for passion to anybody in all her life.

“What’s the meaning of all this, Sarah? There’s something at the bottom of it.”

“Only a friendly gossip between man and wife; but that’s such a novelty in this house, is it not?”

“I have had enough experience to tell me that a friendly gossip like this is not meant for nothing, Sarah,” said Luke, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and pacing about the room.

Whether there was anything “at the bottom of it,” or not, did not further transpire at that moment, by reason of the Hon. Lionel Hammerton himself dismounting from his horse at the gate beyond the garden, and walking up to Mr. Somerton’s door.

CHAPTER IV.
THE METER IRON WORKS COMPANY.

The offices of Mr. Tallant and the Meter Works were at Westminster, in a magnificent newly erected block of buildings not far from the Houses of Parliament. They comprised the whole suite of apartments on the ground-floor, with a board-room above.

On the heavy swinging mahogany doors at the entrance were two thick brass plates, on one of which was engraven “Meter Iron Works Company,” and on the other “Christopher Tallant.”

The establishment was fitted up in the best possible style, with mahogany desks; the counting-house was very much like a bank, the whole of the monetary business of the great company, as well as that of Mr. Tallant, being conducted in town. Behind the counting-house was Mr. Christopher Tallant’s room, and that of his son Richard.

Mr. Tallant’s room was plainly but well furnished, and was only occupied once a week; but Mr. Richard’s room was fitted up in the highest style of office magnificence, like a gentleman’s library. There was a thick velvet-pile carpet upon the floor, a massive carved mahogany table in the centre of the room; several ponderous chairs with morocco seats; a quaint arm-chair stood before a writing-pad near the table. Where there were no book-shelves there were pictures of engines, and iron bridges, and curious girders, and wheels, in ponderous frames; and thick cloth curtains draped the two windows which looked into the street.

The offices were famous amongst men in the iron trade, and once or twice Mr. Tallant began to think they were getting a name politically; for several deputations had waited upon him there soliciting him to come forward for various boroughs at general elections.

But Mr. Christopher Tallant always said his ambition did not lie that way. Some day perhaps his son Dick might like to go into the House, and if he did, why go he should of course; but there was plenty of time to think about that; and so the deputations retired, wishing, in most cases, that there were not plenty of time to think about that, for there was gold indeed at the back of Christopher Tallant.

“By gad, you amuse me,” said Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, a college acquaintance of Mr. Richard Tallant’s, looking at the pictorial treasures of the room through an eye-glass. “To think of your going in for engines and machines, with idiotic cranks, and all that sort of thing. ’Pon my soul, it’s too funny.”

And Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs turned round, showed Mr. Richard Tallant his teeth, and said “haw, haw.” That was the way Mr. Gibbs laughed: that was how he laughed at Oxford, when a broken-hearted girl appealed to his sense of honour; that was how he laughed when he won two thousand pounds at Loo from a college friend, who said he was ruined, and threatened to throw himself into the Isis; that was how he laughed under all circumstances.

“One must put a sign of some sort up,” said Mr. Richard Tallant, twirling his moustache, and stretching his legs under the big library table. “What will you take, Shuff?”

“Anything you intend taking yourself, old boy; you are a pretty good judge; I’ll trust to your sense of what a fellow’s morning draught should be,” said Mr. Gibbs, grinning again, and saying “haw, haw” as before.

Mr. Tallant, junior, struck a gong upon the table, and a sober-looking old man in a dark livery obeyed the summons.

“Sherry, Thomas,” said Mr. Richard.

Thomas taking up a bunch of keys from the table, unlocked a cupboard by the fireplace, and carefully uncorked a dusty, black looking bottle, and set it before Mr. Tallant’s only son, with a couple of richly cut glasses.

Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs took a seat by the window, commended the wine as he drank it, and criticised any woman who chanced to pass on the other side of the street. He was not a beauty himself that he should be so critical of the looks of others. He had weak eyes, and shaky legs, a short cough, and a narrow chest. His enemies said he wore stays, and slept in gloves, to improve his figure and whiten his hands, which were naturally red, like his face, that was powdered after the manner of women. He was a man of fashion nevertheless, and had sprung of a noble stock; but the race flickered its last in him, and the estates had been divided by Jews in his grandfather’s time.

It was considered a daring thing to be hand and glove with Gibbs at Oxford, a dangerous and a delightful thing; for he was known to be the fastest man of his college, and he had been the ring-leader in everything wicked for years. He made himself Mr. Tallant’s champion when that gentleman was epigrammatically assailed, and ever afterwards constituted himself boon companion to the iron prince.

There was a rumour that Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs was compelled to leave college when he did on account of some offence committed against the regulations of the establishment; whether this was true or not, he left Oxford suddenly, and with no other honour than that of being the fastest man who had ever led a gown and town row, or hunted down a citizen’s daughter.

“You’ll be at the club to-night, of course,” Mr. Gibbs said, swinging his eye-glass round, and admiring the perfect fit of a pair of new boots.

“Yes,” said Mr. Richard, “shan’t be able to come before dinner; going to dine with a friend at seven.”

Mr. Gibbs showed his teeth, and said “haw, haw.”

“Will join you by ten,” Mr. Richard continued, smiling, and holding his empty glass between himself and the light to catch its diamond-like sparkles in the sun.

“What’s your little game to-night, then,” inquired Mr. Tallant, junior.

“Nothing, nothing; a bit of quiet Loo and a cigar. Young Hammerton is to join us by-and-by.”

“What, Earl Verner’s brother?” Mr. Richard inquired, with more than ordinary interest.

“The same—the paternal seat is near Barton Hall, you know.”

“Rather,” said Mr. Richard. “He’ll be deuced rich when the earl hops the twig; he is considerably older than Lionel and very shaky, they say; he often rides over to the Berne district. The governor says he likes to talk farming to the bailiff at the Hall Farm.”

“Gad bless me!” exclaimed Mr. Gibbs. “Are there any gals about?”

“There is one, old fellow, and a remarkably fine girl, too; but her mother’s a she-wolf, and her father!—why, Shuffy, he’d double you up with one hand and throw you into the road, if you put your nose into his place; he’d smell you out in no time;” and Mr. Richard Tallant laughed aloud at his lively picture of Mr. Gibbs’s imaginary discomfiture.

Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs bit his lip before he grinned and said “haw, haw” this time; and it was a little while before he had time to say, “Haw, what an infernally powerful savage he must be.”

Mr. Richard Tallant was, and had been for some time, of great pecuniary value to Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, who not only sponged upon the iron prince, but fleeced him at cards, and assisted at all his extravagances. Had it been otherwise, he would have resented the tone and manner of Mr. Tallant’s description of his perfect helplessness in the hands of Luke Somerton.

“You may laugh, Shuff, but by Jove it’s true; so take timely warning, and if ever you should go down to Barton Hall mind how you look at Amy Somerton.”

Mr. Tallant, senior, it would seem, had no liking for Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, and he had privately intimated to his son that he would rather that gentleman were not amongst the friends whom he introduced to Barton Hall.

“If ever I go to Barton Hall!” said Mr. Gibbs. “I begin to think I shall never have the opportunity; my distinguished and most hospitable friend, Richard Tallant, Esq., has not yet honoured me with an invitation, even to a shooting-party, on the estate which calls him heir.”

“Why, to tell you the truth,” replied Mr. Tallant, junior, with an air of great candour; “I can’t, you see; I’ve often thought I would make a clean breast of it, and tell you. The governor objects to you somehow or other; doesn’t like you; wishes me not to ask you to Barton.”

“That’s candid, begad,” said Mr. Gibbs, becoming a little redder in the face than usual. “Objects to me!”

“Stupid prejudice, but so it is; he doesn’t understand bucks of fashion like you, Shuff; and he’s heard about one or two of what you call your little affairs. And I am not very sorry either, Shuff; for I think the less he sees of you the better for me.”

“You’re devilish cool this morning, Dick Tallant, and—”

“And what?” said Mr. Tallant, hastily interrupting his friend, who showed unmistakable signs of anger. “Why, you know you’re an infernal rascal, Shuff, and that I’m not much better myself; so let’s have no brag about insults and all that sort of thing; I’m in with you for a short life and a merry one, so never mind the governor. Il ne faut pas éveiller le chat qui dort, as they say in France, vide Macdonnel.”

Mr. Shuffleton exhibited his teeth, and haw-hawed several times, and Mr. Tallant, junior, slapped him on the back.

“You’re a trump, Dick, ’pon my soul you are,” said Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, in an affected burst of magnanimity; “I was inclined to be savage just now, but I see the frankness of your disclosure in the true light, after your explanation.”

“All right, old fellow,” said Mr. Tallant, “give me your hand upon it, and we are Siamese twins again; but let us finish the sherry.”

The two friends fell to with a will after this, and chatted quite genially together about a hundred trivial things, until Big Ben tolled four o’clock, when Mr. Richard Tallant mounted a splendid mare, and, followed by a sprightly groom on an animal of almost equal value, ambled towards the Park; whilst Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs betook himself quietly to his lodgings in Kensington Park Gardens, prior to keeping an engagement, he said, at the Corner, before dinner.

“The infernal impudent humbug,” said Mr. Gibbs to himself, as he walked smartly homewards; “the twopenny-halfpenny mushroom, sprung from a northern dunghill—never mind, I’ll be even with him some day. Fifty talents of silver invested in iron! Of late the fellow has assumed an air of superiority, and a bullying manner, which is devilish hard to bear. Wait a little, wait a little, très bon ami; you’ll find yourself in the mire one of these days.”

It was hard to bear, no doubt, but Richard Tallant was a very profitable investment to Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, and he could afford to bottle up his Brummagem resentment; for such a fellow as Shuffleton Gibbs could hardly be said to have any honourable feelings of resentment. He was bankrupt, not only in purse, but in reputation; he might have got over the former in time, but he could never whitewash the latter.

Mr. Christopher Tallant had been proud of his son the first time he had seen him, prancing and capering in the Lady’s Mile, as he pranced and capered soon after Mr. Gibbs left him. Mr. Tallant had gone down to the Park quietly on foot, and, unobserved, had seen his son a leading man of fashion, on the best horse amongst the most magnificent of all the splendid animals there. He had seen him acknowledged by many a dashing rider, and had watched him turn out into the carriage-drive, to ride beside a gorgeous yellow brougham, with beautiful women in it. Somehow the merchant could not help feeling annoyed with himself for harbouring such a pride as this; but he had not forgotten the Oxford epigram, and he liked to see a Tallant riding about amongst the big men, the greatest swell of the lot.

CHAPTER V.
THE DIBBLES AND THEIR NEW LODGER.

Thomas Dibble, the porter, who held himself at the beck and call of the principals and officers of the Meter Iron Works Company at Westminster, lived in one of those numerous little streets which run off from the semi-aristocratic regions of St. George’s Square, South Belgravia, to Whitehall; and his wife let lodgings and wore gorgeous caps.

She was quite a study this Mrs. Dibble, quite a psychological study. She governed Dibble, and yet made him her shield and protection in the most amusing and complete fashion. She was a fat, rubicund woman, with her dress either unfastened behind or before, and her cap hanging on the back of her head, both in summer and winter, as if she were in a perpetual state of perspiration.

She was by no means an ill-looking woman. Dibble in his cups had told his friends that she was a regular beauty when first he knew her, as fair as waxwork, sir. But her tongue; well it was a caution, Mrs. Dibble’s tongue, and she had a sort of intermittent lisp, which instead of being an impediment in any way to the rapidity of her utterances only seemed to facilitate them, enabling her to slip and slide over an argument and abbreviate long words until her hearers might sometimes imagine she was pouring out a series of compound syllables in some unknown tongue. But that was only when she was in a passion, thank goodness, which did not occur more than once a week.

Dibble himself was a mild little fellow as a rule, and a profound admirer of Mrs. D.’s accomplishments. She had learnt to play the piano when she was at school in her youth; and when she sat down to a five-and-a-half octave square of Broadwood’s on Sunday nights in her black satin dress, Dibble would sit by the fire and feast his eyes upon her with unsophisticated delight.

It was not a very symmetrical figure neither, Mrs. Dibble’s, as you viewed it at the piano, and the two hooks-and-eyes which were undone near the middle of her back did not make it any the more elegant.

Mrs. Dibble usually thumped at the Old Hundredth and a wonderful variation of “Vital Spark,” until her cap fell off and her hair came down, when she would close the “box of music” and utter twenty voluble regrets that she had so few opportunities of practising and keeping up her fingering.

But Mr. Dibble did not agree with her on this point; it was the only one he was permitted to dispute; he vowed she played as well as if she had no end of practice.

“You be fit for a concert,” he would say, “that you be.”

Not that Thomas Dibble exactly knew what a concert was, never having been present at anything of the kind, except on the occasion of a soirée at Gloucester when he went to a Sunday school there.

Dibble was bred and born in Gloucestershire, and had risen from a kitchen menial to a place in the household at Barton Hall two counties off, whither he had been recommended by a clergyman of the cathedral city. He was not in Mr. Tallant’s service more than a year before he was promoted to the portership at Westminster.

The Barton housekeeper gave him an introduction to a relative of hers, Miss Wilhelmina Stikes, of Still Street, and after a few visits to that buxom spinster, Miss Stikes made love to Thomas, proposed to him, and married him in less than three months.

They had now been united some twenty years, and on the whole Mr. Dibble did not regret his bondage. He had always been accustomed to servitude; so the yoke of the fair-fat-and-loquacious Miss Stikes was not difficult to the patient and forbearing Thomas Dibble.

“So we are to ’ave a new lodger, Mithter Dibble, in the purthon of the bailifth’s son; well, so be it, though when my pa educated me for a lady, and being a builder he could do that because his property were naturally his own and if he had been thpared he would no doubt ’ave retired on it, educated for that thpere it never occurred to me that I should ’ave to take the hoffsprigs of bailifths into my house, but there is no knowing what we may come to, and if you fulfil the duties of the life which has come upon you, though without your own conthent I can’t see after all that there’s anything to be ashamed of,” said Mrs. Dibble to her husband after a tripe supper, on the evening when Mr. Richard Tallant had promised to meet his friend Gibbs at the club.

“Yes, he be coming to-morrow; and I was thinking he might have the little back sittin’ room,” said Dibble, deferentially.

“Thank you, Dib, for your thoughts, but I may remark, as I have remarked before, that I will do the thinking; I did it for my pa during all his contracts, and made out the thpethifications which were for two railway bridges, and more than one or two streeth, and ith not unlikely that I shall be fully competent to think for you, Mithter Dibble; but, at the thame time, I will own that I had thought of the back thitting-room mythelf, and there’s a chest of drawers bed which Captain MacStrawsel, of the Blues, said was a perfect bed of roses; and it may, therefore, be fairly reckoned that a bailifth’s son may recline upon that which, if his conscience is at rest, he may repose upon as well as in a palace.”

Mr. Dibble said “Yes,” and Mrs. Dibble mixed for him, as was her wont, a mild glass of gin, which he proceeded to sip in company with the accomplished partner of his bosom, who invariably said, whenever she took spirits publicly, “that it was not as she liked sperrits or any other allycholic liquors, but it were a necessity to her, seeing the great strain that was constant on her nerves, owing to having both mental and physical labour more than common.”

After a short visit to the farm, Paul Somerton went to London, and, after due introduction to Mrs. Dibble, entered upon his duties at the Iron Company’s offices. He saw little of Mr. Richard Tallant, and less of his father; but he heard a great deal about both from old Dibble.

Once a week Mrs. Dibble permitted Thomas to spend an evening out with Paul. She said she was not one for letting a young man run about London in an evening without a guide, and she thought her Thomas’s experience of the place might be of some benefit to Paul, and she would not hear of any opposition to an arrangement by which she proposed to set apart “closing time,” on Friday nights until half-past ten, for Thomas Dibble to show Paul Somerton some of the sights of London.

Mrs. Dibble also at the same time arranged to entertain her own particular friends at home on these evenings, and so balanced off her generosity to poor Dibble, her husband. Thomas Dibble soon became a bore to Paul Somerton.

So soon as the young man began to know his way about town, so soon did he become tired of Dibble, and ashamed of him, too; for Paul was not altogether a stranger to the manners and feelings of a gentleman, and was a good-looking fellow withal; whilst poor Dibble was nothing more than a respectable porter at any time.

Besides, Dibble was perpetually praising Mrs. Dibble, and would stop to buy hot potatoes in the street, and “penn’orths” of pudding; so Paul decided to shake him off, but his determination was changed by a letter from his sister.

“What should Amy want to know all about Mr. Richard for?” said Paul, reading a letter in bed, one Sunday morning, some weeks after his residence in London.

“And who is Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs; and what the deuce business is it of hers if young Hammerton is often with them?” he continued, staring up from the letter to the ceiling.

“Please, sir, it’s nine o’clock. Mrs. Dibble said I were to tell you,” said a voice through the keyhole.

“All right,” said Paul; “and hang Mrs. Dibble.”

“Were I to say so, please?” asked the voice.

“No, confound you,” said Paul; “but tell Dibble I shall go for a walk with him after chapel.”

It was the custom of Thomas Dibble to take what he called “a little constitutional” after chapel, and before dinner—just half-an-hour’s stroll, whilst Mrs. Dibble changed her chapel-going satin, and dished up the dinner.

It was a rare thing for Mr. Paul Somerton to volunteer to accompany Mr. Dibble; but he did so on the Sunday in question, and, as they walked by the Thames, watching the steamers pass and repass with their loads of noisy pleasure-seekers, Paul asked Dibble a variety of puzzling questions about Mr. Richard Tallant, and his friend, Shuffleton Gibbs.

“Ise no spy, Mr. Somerton, and Ise not an owl, or a dormouse,” said Mr. Dibble, looking as knowing as he could at Paul.

“Certainly not, Dib,” said Paul; “certainly not; you know a thing or two.”

“Well, I dur say, and I knows nothing about the things you speaks of.”

“What, don’t you know who Mr. Gibbs is, and how he lives, and why he is a friend of the son’s and not of the father’s?” asked Paul.

“It bain’t my business to know,” said Mr. Dibble.

Paul Somerton pumped old Dibble all the way home, but to little or no purpose; and the porter’s dogged silence aroused Paul’s own curiosity about his sister’s inquiries.

“Does Mr. Richard attend much at the office? Who and what is Mr. Gibbs? Are they particular friends of Mr. Hammerton? Do they meet together often? And where?”

These were the chief questions which Miss Amy Somerton required her brother Paul to answer.

Paul was fond of his sister, and had always looked up to her as one of superior knowledge to himself.

“I’ll tell you all you want to know, as soon as I can,” he wrote to Amy on the Monday. “But why are you so inquisitive?”

There are thousands of brothers and sisters without affection for each other. We say of So-and-so, “I loved him as if he were my brother;” or, “Mary So-and-so—if she had been my own sister, I could not have felt more regard for her.” It is flattering to our humanity that these illustrations of regard and affection should be in use. Nine families out of ten quarrel amongst themselves, and brothers and sisters are the deadliest enemies of brothers and sisters, thwarting each other in childhood and at maturity, stepping in each other’s way, disgracing each other, and making the very name they mutually bear hateful to both. Happy, indeed, are brothers and sisters who really and truly love each other; for there is not a holier, not a more beautiful passion.

Paul Somerton would have done anything in the world for Amy. He remembered so many hours made happy by her love and foresight. They had nearly broken their hearts over parting when he went to school; and Amy had quite a box-full of his boyish letters, carefully preserved. She thought there was the making of a great man in Paul; he was like his father in temper and disposition—frank and outspoken, a hater of shams.

At first when Amy had written to him about the doings of Mr. Tallant, and concerning Mr. Hammerton, Paul had scruples about his duty in the matter; but it was sufficient for Paul that Amy assured him that she had a proper and sufficient object in learning what she sought; and Paul determined that Amy should soon know all she desired.

CHAPTER VI.
THE TWO FRIENDS AND THE TWO VIGNETTES.

A fine old Norman cathedral, by the side of a famous river—the one celebrated in history, the other a favourite with poets so long ago as Spenser.

The great grey cathedral, with its high pitched towers, and its crumbling walls, threw big dark shadows on the green turf of the college close, where half-a-dozen comfortable houses formed two sides of a square. In the centre grew a clump of venerable elms, the home of a colony of crows which were everlastingly calling to each other from above.

The other two sides of the square were filled in by the cathedral’s grey walls, and an old gateway.

The river flowed on without—the famous river with its sedgy banks. It flowed on outside the monastic-like square, noiselessly mostly, bearing lazy barges on its big brown bosom towards the sea. When the floods came down from the west it roared and whirled along in curls and eddies, the colour of coffee, like Kingsley’s salmon river in the “Water Babies.”

In the distance, from the upper windows of the cathedral close, on that side where Arthur lived, you could see the Linktown hills, with their graceful curving lines cut out against the sky; and if you had stood upon the Linktowns you might have seen another range of hills, which shut out Barton Hall from the rude world.

Arthur Phillips, as I have said, lived in this College Green, and his studio was at the top of one of those old houses, which had a glorious landscape before it, with the Linktowns for a background.

It was a curious old room, Arthur’s studio, with mullioned windows in it, and a wonderfully carved fireplace, with grinning heads cut in the mantelpiece. Several lay-figures were carelessly placed at one end of the room, and there were a couple of easels with half-finished pictures upon them. A few sketches in oil and in water-colours were hung about the room, and there was a guitar upon an old carved couch, and a large portfolio beside it. The artist wore a loose blouse, and looked at home in manner and appearance amongst his miscellaneous treasures.

Young Hammerton was a handsome fellow, one of a handsome stock. The Hammertons had been Earls of Verner for a century or more, and there was never known an ill-looking man or woman amongst them since the period when they came into the old island with the Norman Conqueror.

But there must have been much Saxon intermarrying in the family if one might judge from the fair skin and brown curly hair of Lionel Hammerton. And he was of sturdy make withal—a fine specimen of a handsome young Englishman, with a full hazel eye, and white regular teeth.

Lionel and Arthur had known each other for several years, the friendship commencing through a series of drawing lessons which Arthur Phillips had given Mr. Hammerton at Earl Verner’s residence.

The Earl, Lionel’s brother, was a man of great taste in the arts, and he had been Arthur’s first patron.

Arthur had exhibited several pictures unsuccessfully at the great Midland Counties Exhibition, when Earl Verner singled out a landscape with figures in the foreground, by Mr. Phillips, as the best, the most conscientiously painted picture of that year.

This was Arthur’s first start; the Earl purchased the picture, and the papers spoke of it in high terms of praise. The Art Journal, in a brief sketch of the Exhibition, noticed this painting as the work of one of the most promising artists of the day; and next season two works of Arthur’s were hung at the Royal Academy, and Success came unto him, and marked him for her own.

Earl Verner gave him several commissions, and placed Lionel Hammerton under him as a pupil, and this was how their friendship began.

He was a contrast to Arthur Phillips, who often noticed it, and drew little caricature sketches to illustrate it, which Lionel laughed at, and threatened to send to Punch as character studies.

Lionel had, indeed, once sent one of Arthur’s funny bits to Punch, which brought a polite note from the editor of that famous periodical, soliciting a closer acquaintance with the artist; but Mr. Phillips was a lazy fellow, and his pencil only cut funny capers when Earl Verner’s brother stirred him up, and suggested comical subjects.

“By Jove! if I were not to come in now and then, and laugh at you, you’d die of melancholy,” said Lionel Hammerton, on one of his recent visits to Arthur’s studio.

“No, I don’t think that,” said Arthur, lighting the cigar which his friend handed to him; “but your society is fatal to dulness. I am too poor a companion to reciprocate the pleasure which your society gives me.”

“Nay, dear boy, you are wrong there; I have spent some of my happiest hours in this old studio of yours, Arthur. What is it that makes an artist’s den, as you call it, so free and easy, and yet so distingué?”

“One gets out of the world, and a little nearer the better land, in a room consecrated to art, even if the prophet be but a dotard, perhaps,” said Arthur.

“And its perfect freedom—the absence of conventionality—the Bohemian character of the class called artists—their opposition to the forms and ceremonies, eh?”

“The artist only worships one goddess, I suppose; and she permits smoking, loose garments, unwashed hands, and slippers. Light your cigar,” Arthur went on, carelessly, offering his friend a fusee.

“What a grand thing it is, too, the painter’s art; of all arts the most delightful, the most satisfying! He is not like the writer, who must be read and studied before his audience can understand and enjoy what he has done. The effect of the artist’s work on the beholder is instantaneous, the reward of his genius is immediate; to say nothing of his own personal delight and satisfaction. But I’m getting prosy, Arthur. Have you been into the Berne neighbourhood lately?”

“Yes, I was there during several days in last week,” said Arthur.

“Well, any news, mon ami: are your friends all well?”

Arthur looked at Mr. Hammerton with a curious smile, as he replied, “Do not my views of Avonworth Valley give additional charms to my studio, Lionel?”

“News or views—which did you say? views, of course—well, so they do, and so they will continue to do, as long as you find such lovely bits of nature there,” said Lionel, laughing.

“Which do you prefer—the landscape or the figure studies?” Arthur inquired, still smiling, though a little sadly.

“I like them both; but there was a head which you were going to finish when I was here last. I don’t see it anywhere,” said Lionel, whose eyes had been wandering into every corner of the room.

“Here it is,” said Arthur. “I have been making a double study of heads;” and he brought out of a small case, from a cupboard by the window, two water-colour sketches, and looked curiously into Lionel’s face as his handsome friend examined them.

The first was something like that picture which appeared in the Strand shops some years afterwards.

Mr. Phillips had drawn the face full, and thrown the hair backwards in wavy folds. The lips were parted, and the eyes looked you in the face, full of hope and trust, and innocence.

Lionel laid this first study down, after a hasty glance or two at it, and then fairly “devoured” the second one.

A smothered sigh of relief escaped from Arthur as he noticed this, and a happy smile moved his lips as he watched the expression of approval which lit up Lionel’s face whilst gazing at the darker beauty.

“By Jove,” said Lionel, after a long pause, “it is exquisite! What a head! Talk of blood, why this head has all the character of a high-bred racehorse.”

Arthur smiled, and puffed out a long thin wreath of smoke.

“What eyes! what a neck! And the hair bound tightly to the head, setting off those little ears! And the chin!—why, all the lines of beauty are exhausted here,” Lionel went on; and Arthur almost trembled with delight.

“Give me your hand,” he said at length, no longer able to control his feelings. “Give me your hand, Lionel Hammerton.”

“With all my heart,” said Lionel, looking as much astonished as he had previously been delighted. “But what, in the name of all the Arts and Sciences, is the matter with you? I’m not praising the painter, but the subject. You have not suddenly become vain, Arthur?”

“No, no,” said the artist, pushing back his long black hair; “it is because you are praising the subject that I am delighted, Lionel. You love Amy Somerton.”

“Stop, stop, not so fast, friend Arthur,” said Lionel, colouring a little, and appearing still more surprised at the artist’s unusual excitement.

“If you are in love at all, it is not with—with Miss Tallant?” Arthur went on, his big piercing eyes fixed intently on his friend.

“Oh, oh!” said Lionel, putting his hand upon Arthur’s shoulder, and laying down Amy Somerton’s portrait. “Oh, oh! Have I caught you in your own trap, my poor little friend?” said Lionel. “It is you who are in love! Nay, man, don’t look so woe-begone about it.”

“And you?” said Arthur, hanging his head like a schoolboy.

“May be some day, friend Arthur,” said Lionel; “but not with Miss Tallant—not with Miss Tallant.”

“Thank God for that!” said the artist, sitting down and fixing his eyes upon the distant hills, which the sun was making golden.

Lionel’s manner of meeting Arthur’s half confession of love for Miss Tallant and fear of rivalry, did not for the moment please the artist, whose sensitive nature revolted at the apparently cool and critical treatment of his friend.

But when young Hammerton said, “Arthur, my boy, don’t fear me, go in and win,” the artist forgot his momentary displeasure, and smiled half sadly, half comically, at his friend; and then told him how he had been unable to struggle against his admiration for Miss Tallant, and how it had ripened into love.

Lionel promising not to betray Arthur’s confidence, laughed at the artist’s notion that he was indulging in an utterly hopeless and futile passion.

“I suppose you will be at the Festival of the Three Choirs to-morrow,” said Mr. Hammerton by-and-by, when they had changed the subject and he had lighted his last cigar.

“I shall be in some part of the building,” Arthur said. “I have the entrée you know by certain private doors; I am rather a favourite with the Dean and Chapter. I look down upon you from arches high up aloft, I listen to the music at various points. I should be too restless to sit all the time squeezed up amongst the audience.”

Severntown, you must know, was celebrated for its Festival Concerts in the cathedral, which had been originated as early as 1724, resulting in noble collections for charitable purposes, and of which the local journalist a hundred years ago exclaimed, “May God grant that all charitable undertakings may be carried on with that becoming zeal and Ardency of Affection which Matters of such allow’d Importance must always very justly claim!” Newspaper writers in those days, you see, said what they had to say briefly, and tersely, and to the point.

I mention these Severntown Festivals not with any intention of describing one of them, but simply because of the train of thought which the mention of the event by Mr. Hammerton excited in the mind of Arthur Phillips.

It was at the Festival, three years previously, that Arthur had first seen Phœbe Tallant, a mere girl, but of such striking beauty that the image was fixed in his mind, as if it belonged to the glorious music,—sanctified by the time, and the place, and the holy strains.

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.

But may we not excuse an artist for fostering such a ridiculous passion? It is something in his line, you know. Painters, Senior Mammon will probably say, are ridiculous fellows at best. They spend their time in a fool’s paradise, studying the changes of the sky, making copies of trees and leaves, and lashing themselves into furious excitement about the glories of summer mornings and autumn sunsets.

You saw some of the race at Bettys-y-Coed, in Wales, you know, Senior Mammon, when you were “doing” the neighbourhood of Snowdon. Poor devils! you remember how they were roaming about the rivers and rocks, and painting beneath umbrella tents. And you saw how some of them were content to live in those little cottages, and how they trudged about in the hot sun on foot, with their colour-boxes and things strapped to their backs.

Don’t you remember saying to Signora Mammon that it was a pity the strapping fellows you meet at the Conway Falls are not better occupied than in sketching stones and trees.

You buy the artist’s pictures sometimes, to keep him from starving, because you are charitably disposed,—eh, Senior Mammon? And to obtain for yourself a character for taste, as that sort of thing is necessary in polite circles,—eh, dear friend?

“But they are poor devils, after all,” you say; and “an artist in love with Christopher Tallant’s daughter must be an idiot indeed.”

It is a pity Mr. Tallant is not informed of the tutor’s infernal presumption, you say. He would soon send him to the right-about, he’s such a proud fellow, you know, that Tallant.

“In love!” you repeat. “In rubbish! He should come with me, and air his little bit of brains on the Stock Exchange; he should know what it is to make a hundred thousand pounds in a week, and lose it in a day; he should see what women are, how they sell themselves body and soul for money.”

There, friend Mammon, you need say no more. Arthur Phillips does not understand you, and if he did, he would continue in love with Miss Tallant just the same.

Strange, it must be to love a woman with all your heart and soul, and let her live on, unconscious of your admiration; to be with her, to listen to her sweet soft voice, to assist in the development of her taste, to minister to her fancy, to cultivate her love of the beautiful; and yet not dare to confess your love!

The river flowed on its way, and the sun went down behind the hills; the tones of the evening bell echoed through the college yard; and long after the heir of the Verners had left his friend, the artist sat smoking his cigar in the twilight, thinking of Phœbe Tallant—thinking of her as he might think of some beautiful vision of the poet—thinking of her with a love in his heart that was more than love. And yet she seemed a necessity in his life, something that made life worth living for—something next to his art.

He was quite alone in the world; he had neither mother nor father. He had been brought up in a quiet, humble way, and his father and mother both died before their son had achieved success as an artist.

It would have been the greatest happiness possible for him at that time, could he have shown his father the picture which first made his name known to the world as a painter. His mother had been a querulous invalid most of her life, and had few feelings in common with her son. The father, on the contrary, had been full of hope and trust in Arthur; but he was not to live to see these hopes realised.

So that Arthur’s success had been tainted with a bitter sense of disappointment; he had no sympathiser in his triumph—none who knew how hard he had worked—none who knew the gigantic difficulties which he had overcome.

The people with whom he mixed knew him since success had come to his brush; and Phœbe Tallant had roused the strong feelings which had lain dormant within him.

His love, though excited by a sudden glimpse of the girl’s beauty, had been strengthened by gradual growth, by little graceful acts, indications of sympathy and interest on the part of his pupil. He had struggled against it, and had felt once or twice that he was guilty of a breach of trust in harbouring such a passion for a moment.

It was true Mr. Tallant had asked him, as a favour, to give lessons to his daughter. The merchant, as you know, liked to have things which everybody could not have, no matter what he paid for them: and it was with something of this feeling that he had obtained the services of an artist who had suddenly risen above the necessity of teaching.

“I did not wish to come here at first,” Arthur would argue to himself. “He almost forced me.”

The idea of marrying Miss Tallant had never once occurred to Arthur. In the first place, he regarded his passion as a piece of presumption. He was unworthy in every respect, he thought, of Phœbe’s love; and he never dreamed for a moment that she suspected the real state of his feelings towards her.

Although his name was so high in art, Mr. Tallant only looked upon Arthur as a tutor, and he would have regarded an offer of marriage for his daughter from such a source as an insult. But it was not in this mere worldly sense that Arthur felt himself inferior to Phœbe. His love and admiration had made a niche for her high up in his fancy, far beyond his brightest hopes, and he seemed to look up at her and worship, with a fearful, jealous, burning pleasure.

Who would have thought that so much passion could have a place behind that calm, thoughtful, and reserved manner of the landscape painter?

CHAPTER VIII.
IN WHICH PAUL SOMERTON ENTERS UPON A DELICATE, DIFFICULT, AND DANGEROUS TASK.

Mr. Richard Tallant was a member of several London clubs. The one to which his friend Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs invited him was a third-rate establishment, rapidly degenerating into a mere association of gamblers.

The members met in an evening and kept up in appearance mild whist at shilling points; but large bets were made upon the odd tricks, “each and every.”

Loo was not permitted because it was too much of a gambling game. The Ashford Club assumed a virtue they did not possess. Members might bet a thousand pounds on the odd trick at whist, but they must not play Loo.

It was here that Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs made most of his money, and there was every reason to fear that Richard Tallant was not above helping him. The spirit of gambling had fairly taken possession of Richard’s mind, and he sank with it into the practice of all sorts of vices.

In the City Mr. Richard Tallant was known as a young, wealthy, devil-may-care fellow, a man to know, and a man to fear. He often speculated largely, unknown to his father, and had more than once “rigged” the share market to great advantage. His position gave him excellent opportunities to obtain information which was of financial value, and Shuffleton Gibbs was deep enough to put his friend up to all sorts of stock-jobbing tricks that often turned him in good round sums of money.

One would have thought that this legalised gambling would have been sufficient for Mr. Tallant and his friend Gibbs; but Gibbs was an old card-sharper; he loved the fierce excitement of the table, and there was more certain success in a doctored card and a loaded dice than in stock-jobbing.

You see we don’t at all disguise Mr. Gibbs’s character; he was a thorough-paced blackguard, and Mr. Richard Tallant was graduating very successfully in the Blackguard school. At present he is not aware that Gibbs is indebted to anything but skill for his success at cards: he has never seen the disgraced Oxford roué’s private room.

Paul Somerton’s inquiries had not led him to a knowledge of all that we have here set down; but in less than a month he had come to the conclusion that Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs was a scoundrel, and that Mr. Richard Tallant was not conducting himself in a manner calculated to uphold the honour of his father’s name.

And young Hammerton, the heir to the earldom of Verner: no good could come of his association with Mr. Gibbs and Tallant junior. How persistent Amy was in her inquiries about Mr. Hammerton!