“Your presumption!”
“Yes; because I have sometimes thought my drawings were not so very, very bad; and I love Art so dearly, I would give anything in the world to be an artist!”
“You draw! You long to be an artist!” It was the only thing wanted to make Olive quite perfect in Meliora's eyes. She jumped up, and embraced her young favourite with the greatest enthusiasm. “I knew this was in you. All good people must have a love for Art. And you shall have your desire, for my brother shall teach you. I must go and tell him directly.”
But Olive resisted, for her poor little heart began to quake. What if her long-loved girlish dreams should be quenched at once—if Mr. Vanbrugh's stern dictum should be that she had no talent, and never could become an artist at all!
“Well, then, don't be frightened, my dear girl. Let me see your sketches. I do know a little about such things, though Michael thinks I don't,” said Miss Meliora.
And Olive, her cheeks tingling with that sensitive emotion which makes many a young artist, or poet, shrink in real agony, when the crude first-fruits of his genius are brought to light—Olive stood by, while the painter's kind little sister turned over a portfolio filled with a most heterogeneous mass of productions.
Their very oddity showed the spirit of Art that dictated them. There were no pretty, well-finished, young-ladyish sketches of tumble-down cottages, and trees whose species no botanist could ever define;—or smooth chalk heads, with very tiny mouths, and very crooked noses. Olive's productions were all as rough as rough could be; few even attaining to the dignity of drawing-paper. They were done on backs of letters, or any sort of scraps: and comprised numberless pen-and-ink portraits of the one beautiful face, dearest to the daughter's heart—rude studies, in charcoal, of natural objects—outlines, from memory, of pictures she had seen, among which Meliora's eye proudly discerned several of Mr. Vanbrugh's; while, scattered here and there, were original pencil designs, ludicrously voluminous, illustrating nearly every poet, living or dead.
Michael Vanbrugh's sister was not likely to be quite ignorant of Art. Indeed, she had quietly gathered up a tolerable critical knowledge of it. She went through the portfolio, making remarks here and there. At last she closed it; but with a look so beamingly encouraging, that Olive trembled for very joy.
“Let us go to Michael, let us go to Michael,” was all the happy little woman said. So they went.
Unluckily, Michael was not himself; he had been “pestered with a popinjay,” in the “shape of a would-be connoisseur, and he was trying to smooth his ruffled feathers, and compose himself again to solitude and “Alcestis.” His “well, what d'ye want?” was a sort of suppressed bellow, softening down a little at sight of Olive.