LETTER XI.
TO J. D. ESQ., M. P.
The drawing which I made of the castle is finished—the Prince is charmed with it, and Glorvina insisted on copying it. This was as I expected—as I wished; and I took care to finish it so minutely, that her patience (of which she has no great store) should soon be exhausted in the imitation, and I should have something more of her attention than she generally affords me at my drawing-desk.
Yesterday, in the absence of the priest, I read to her as she drew. After a thousand little symptoms of impatience and weariness—“here,” said she, yawning—“here is a straight line I can make nothing of—do you know, Mr. Mortimer, I never could draw a perpendicular line in my life. See now my pencil will go into a curve or an angle; so you must guide my hand, or I shall——”
I “guide her hand to draw a straight line!”
“Nay then,” said I, with the ostentatious gravity of a pedagogue master, “I may as well do the drawing myself.”
“Well then,” said she, playfully, “do it yourself.”
Away she flew to her harp; while I, half lamenting, half triumphing, in my forbearance, took her pencil and her seat. I perceived, however, that she had not even drawn a single line of the picture, and yet her paper was not a mere carte-blanche—for close to the margin was written in a fairy hand, ‘Henry Mortimer, April 2d, 10 o’clock,’—the very day and hour of my entrance into the castle; and in several places, the half defaced features of a face evidently a copy of my own, were still visible.
If any thing could have rendered this little circumstance more deliciously gratifying to my heart, it was, that I had been just reading to her the anecdote of “the Maid of Corinth.”
I raised my eyes from the paper to her with a look that must have spoken my feelings; but she, unconscious of my observation began a favourite air of her favourite Carolan’s, and supposed me to be busy at the perpendicular line.