Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

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“You need not mind me,” she said, confused. “I am very happy, looking at the pictures. Are you trying to make a picture out of that sky?”

“If I could,” he said; “but I don’t know how to do it; and if I did, it would not be believed, though people see the sunset every day. Did you ever see a Turner, Miss Margaret? Do you know he was the greatest artist—one of the greatest artists?”

“I have heard his name; but I never saw any pictures, never one except our own, and a few in other houses. I have heard, or rather I have read that name. Did he paint landscapes like you?”

“Like me!” Rob laughed. “You don’t know what you are saying. I am a poor creature, a beginner, a fellow that knows nothing. But he!—and he is very fond of sunsets, and paints them; but he dared no more have done that—”

Margaret looked up curiously into the western heavens. It was “all aflame,” and the glow of it threw a warm reflection upon her as she looked up wistfully, with a look of almost infantile, suddenly awakened wonder. Her face was very grave, startled, and full of awe, like one of Raphael’s child-angels. The idea was new to her. She, who thought these sketches so much more interesting than the sunset, it gave her a new sensation to hear of the great artist who had never dared to represent that which the careless heavens accomplish every day. Some floating conception of the greatness of that great globe of sky and air which kept herself suspended a very atom in its vastness, and of the littleness of any man’s attempt at representing it, came suddenly upon her, then floated away again, leaving her as eager as ever over Rob Glen’s poor little sketches. She turned them over with hurried hands. Some were of scenes she did not know, the lochs and hills of the West Highlands, which filled her with delight, and now and then an old tumble-down house, which interested her less.