“Oh, I don’t think—I know nothing about it!” she cried. “I am only a beginner, and have never had any instruction at all!”
“Yes, I can see that,” he replied drily, “but let me tell you, you haven’t at all a bad notion of perspective! Plenty of people learn perspective painfully and never get as near it as that. I have always held that perspective came by nature—I never learned it, at any rate!”
He looked down at her then with considerable benignity, as supporting a beloved theory, adding, however, sharply, “I cannot understand how you manage to see through those. Well, persevere! You will find it come very nicely like that—And now, I must be off—!”
“Are you going to that place where I saw you the other day?” she enquired, with eager simplicity. Since he spoke to her as if he considered her a schoolgirl, she would use the privileges appertaining to that inchoate and irresponsible age towards him. At the same time she shot a glance—not precisely of the schoolgirl—in his direction, that was only rendered void and vain by the smoky barrier interposed between it and its object. In another minute she would have summoned up courage to ask him if she might go to Brignal with him, but he nonplussed her by raising his cap, in token of farewell, and making a quick, decisive movement across the bridge, as if he had not heard her question.
She sat down resignedly in the new place he had chosen for her, and made a few ineffectual strokes with her pencil. To herself she muttered, “I wonder how old?—a forward sixteen?—or a stunted eighteen, perhaps?” words which had obviously no reference to her drawing. She knitted her brows with all the petty rage of the amateur; she aggressively sharpened her pencil and broke it, five times over; and at last, in a flt of temper consistent with the extreme juvenility of Rivers’ presumed conception of her, tossed both the sketches into the Greta and watched them float easily away on the changing ripples.
“They will go down to where he is,” she thought, full of a sense of the continuity of this stream flowing down that long dark glen leading to the light, where the master sat in his earthly paradise and recked not of his hopeless and despairing pupil.
“And why should he?” was her next reflection. “What a fool I am! But, indeed, a man like that is wasted on Nature, and Nature is evidently the only thing in the world that he cares for!”
Signs of unusual activity, and the smell of piping hot pie-crust greeted her when she went rather drearily back to the inn for her luncheon.
The bare, barn-like room was swept and garnished unusually. Great bunches of pink phlox, tied up with blue ribbons, were nailed into the corners and clashed with the lavender-coloured plaster; festoons of miscellaneous verdure were disposed across and all round the severe texts on the walls, and the terrors of “Prepare to meet thy God!” were veiled in purple fuchias and yellow marigolds. Her humble little lunch of cold British beef was laid for her, as usual, on a corner of the tressel table. The landlady of the “Heather Bell” came up to her as she was eating it, and her buxom arms were floured to the elbow, where a couple of currants were sticking in token of her recent occupation.
“We’re that busy,” she began, breathlessly. “We’ve got a cheap trip comin’ fra’ Barney Cassel this afternoon—near a hundred of ’em. I’ve baked thirty pies this very morning, and I was a-goin’ to ask ye, Miss, if ye would mind gettin’ yer dinner along o’ the gentleman, for we shall na have seen the last on ’em till fair on to neet, and a tarrible mess they’se leave behind, I’se warrant ’em!”