“I don’t think I can do it; but if it will please you, Miss Margaret, I will try.”
“Oh, I know you can do it,” Margaret cried. “Oh, tell me what to bring for you—water? You have left your big book down-stairs, but I will run and fetch it, and the pencils, and—”
“Miss Margaret, I cannot let you wait upon me.”
“Oh, but I will, though; I like it. Fancy! when you are going to paint papa for me,” cried Margaret, flying down-stairs. She came up again, breathless, laughing and glowing, before he could think what was the right thing to do. “There it is,” she said, putting down the sketching-block before him, “and I will bring the water in a moment. You are not to stir. Oh, Mr. Glen, think what it will be to have a picture of papa!”
“But I cannot, indeed, make a picture of him. I cannot draw the figure; it is quite difficult. I am not so clever as you think,” cried Rob, with sudden fright. Margaret, carried away by the flutter of haste and pleasure, and half-childish familiar acquaintance, put up her hand as if to stop his mouth.
What wonder if Rob almost forgot himself. He half put out his hand to take hers, and he raised his eyes to hers with a look which somehow stopped the girl. She did not understand it, but it frightened her. She drew a little farther away, and her usual blush rushed over her face in a flood of color. “That will be the best place to sit,” she said, half abashed, she could not tell why. And Rob remembered himself, and took his place as she indicated. She stood by him, the most eager, watchful attendant. When she had got everything he could want, she put herself behind him, watching over his shoulder every line he drew. This was bad for the drawing; but it was wonderfully enchanting and inspiring for the young man thus elevated into an artist, a genius, a creator. He felt her hand upon his chair, he felt her breath as she bent over him, a kind of perfumed atmosphere of her enveloped him. Her eagerness grew as lines began to come on the paper, he hardly knew how, her voice ran on close by his ear with exclamations and broken notes of soft, subdued sound, half a whisper, half a cry. “Oh, is that how you begin?” Margaret cried; “me, I would have thought the chair first. Oh! that is his face and the line of the hair—yes; but what do you make that dot for in the middle? there is no spot there.”
“You know we must measure the lines, and see that one is in proportion with the other,” said Rob, holding up his pencil as a level; “it would not do to make one part larger than the other. I might take all my paper for one arm if I did not measure; and that is what beginners often do.”
“Oh!” said Margaret. She watched him with her head a little on one side, her lips just parted with eagerness and interest, her brown eyes all aglow. Sometimes her hand would touch his shoulder as she leaned more and more over him; her breath moved the hair on his temples, and went through and through the young man. And he was very open to this kind of influence. It did not require any mercenary hopes, any dazzling realization of an heiress, to send him into all the seductive beguilements of the love-dream. Jeanie had done it with her simple rural attractions—how much more her young mistress, with a whole romance about her, and so many charms, both visionary and real!
Rob was not a fortune-hunter, bent on an heiress. This was what his mother would have had him to be; but his nature was too susceptible for such a cold-blooded pursuit. He did what was far better, infinitely more likely to succeed, a greater stroke of genius than any skill of fortune-hunting—he fell simply over head and ears in love. He had done it before many times; it was not the intense and real passion which now and then carries a man out of himself, the love that has no room in its heart for more than one image. But still it was what he knew as that sentiment; and it was quite genuine. A little mist came into Rob’s eyes, through which he saw Sir Ludovic in his chair, the task he had set before him; his heart beat in his ears, a soft confusion and excitement seized him. He did not know what he was doing, as he sat there with Margaret looking over his shoulder. His experiences before of this same kind had been pleasant enough, but none of them had possessed the charm, the sweetness of this. Not only was she more charming than any of his former loves, but he himself was vaguely raised and elevated as to another sphere of being. In the dazzlement and tremor of the new crisis, the gratification of his vanity and self-regard, he seemed to himself only now to have attained his true sphere.
“Oh, how wonderful it is!” said Margaret; “two or three strokes with a lead-pencil, and there is papa! This is more wonderful than the views. Now his hand, Mr. Glen. How sleeping it is on the chair! You could tell he was sleeping only from the look of his hand. Hasn’t he a beautiful hand? I never saw one like it. My sister Jean’s is white, with dimples in it; they say she has a pretty hand; but then she has so many rings, and she never forgets them. But papa’s hand is beautiful, I think. Did you ever see one so fine? It has bones in it, but Jean’s has no bones. It is like himself in little. Don’t you think so, Mr. Glen?”