"Wilkie Collins - I Say No" - читать интересную книгу автора (Collins Wilkie)

The servant who showed her the way to the garden was not favorably impressed by
the new pupil: Francine's temper asserted itself a little too plainly in her
face. To a girl possessing a high opinion of her own importance it was not very
agreeable to feel herself excluded, as an illiterate stranger, from the one
absorbing interest of her schoolfellows. "Will the time ever come," she wondered
bitterly, "when I shall win a prize, and sing and play before all the company?
How I should enjoy making the girls envy me!"
A broad lawn, overshadowed at one end by fine old trees--flower beds and
shrubberies, and winding paths prettily and invitingly laid out--made the garden
a welcome refuge on that fine summer morning. The novelty of the scene, after
her experience in the West Indies, the delicious breezes cooled by the rain of
the night, exerted their cheering influence even on the sullen disposition of
Francine. She smiled, in spite of herself, as she followed the pleasant paths,
and heard the birds singing their summer songs over her head.
Wandering among the trees, which occupied a considerable extent of ground, she
passed into an open space beyond, and discovered an old fish-pond, overgrown by
aquatic plants. Driblets of water trickled from a dilapidated fountain in the
middle. On the further side of the pond the ground sloped downward toward the
south, and revealed, over a low paling, a pretty view of a village and its
church, backed by fir woods mounting the heathy sides of a range of hills
beyond. A fanciful little wooden building, imitating the form of a Swiss
cottage, was placed so as to command the prospect. Near it, in the shadow of the
building, stood a rustic chair and table--with a color-box on one, and a
portfolio on the other. Fluttering over the grass, at the mercy of the
capricious breeze, was a neglected sheet of drawing-paper. Francine ran round
the pond, and picked up the paper just as it was on the point of being tilted
into the water. It contained a sketch in water colors of the village and the
woods, and Francine had looked at the view itself with indifference--the picture
of the view interested her. Ordinary visitors to Galleries of Art, which admit
students, show the same strange perversity. The work of the copyist commands
their whole attention; they take no interest in the original picture.
Looking up from the sketch, Francine was startled. She discovered a man, at the
window of the Swiss summer-house, watching her.
"When you have done with that drawing," he said quietly, "please let me have it
back again."
He was tall and thin and dark. His finely-shaped intelligent face--hidden, as to
the lower part of it, by a curly black beard--would have been absolutely
handsome, even in the eyes of a schoolgirl, but for the deep furrows that marked
it prematurely between the eyebrows, and at the sides of the mouth. In the same
way, an underlying mockery impaired the attraction of his otherwise refined and
gentle manner. Among his fellow-creatures, children and dogs were the only
critics who appreciated his merits without discovering the defects which
lessened the favorable appreciation of him by men and women. He dressed neatly,
but his morning coat was badly made, and his picturesque felt hat was too old.
In short, there seemed to be no good quality about him which was not perversely
associated with a drawback of some kind. He was one of those harmless and
luckless men, possessed of excellent qualities, who fail nevertheless to achieve
popularity in their social sphere.
Francine handed his sketch to him, through the window; doubtful whether the
words that he had addressed to her were spoken in jest or in earnest.