Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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As to the pictures themselves—not too many, all in a way masterpieces carefully hung—they seemed vistas opening through the greenery, carrying the vision at once into the scene or among the people represented. Only art could so feel for art, and the fact that the seeming simplicity was the result of much detailed thought and expense was nowhere apparent.

Brooke walked slowly to the upper end of the room, and seated herself in one of the recesses of an oddly divided settee, high of back and arm, that gave to each occupant complete seclusion. For a few minutes she leaned back against the soft velvet, letting the quiet atmosphere envelop her, and then raised her eyes to the two pictures that chanced to face her, peering at them in her seclusion, from under her wide hat, with a sidewise expression of eyes and lips slightly parted that reminded one of Mme. le Brun’s portrait of the charming Mme. Crussal.

The nearer picture was a marine, in which the Irish coast and waters of the Channel were revealed by light of the full moon, and between the headland and the foreground the white gulls were bedding themselves so closely that they made a second moon path on the water. Back flew Brooke’s thoughts across the sea,—England and Holland held her for a moment, then she slipped on to France, to Paris, where for a year she had worked in Ridgeway’s studio in the Rue Malesherbes and out at Passy, had been oftentimes elated and finally cast down. How a past mood can dominate the present as well as all surroundings! The next painting was of a stretch of low country threaded by a canal, cattle in the distance, and shivering poplars bending to the wind that scudded across the sky in threatening clouds, while in the foreground a flock of geese were looking about and pluming themselves against the coming storm.