The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain, the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which filled the valley--a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic, depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain--rose and persisted, while yet his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable thoughts.
Well, Phoebe might take her choice!--for they had come to the parting of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether different--foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line--anything! He could always earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of that. But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate one. Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity; and he would be as good as any one.
Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass. Well, let him!
What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had been the source and means of his truest education.
Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved.
Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.