There was a narrow footpath
between two rows of tall quaint old tombstones, with skulls and crossbones
out upon the moss-grown stone; a path leading to another gate which opened
upon a wide patch of heath skirted by a scanty firwood.
This was the wildest bit of landscape about Arden, and Clarissa loved it
with all an artist's love. She had sketched that belt of fir-trees under
almost every condition--with the evening sun behind them, standing blackly
out against the warm crimson light; or later, when the day had left no more
than a faint opal glimmer in the western sky; later still, in the fair
summer moonlight, or en a blusterous autumn afternoon, tossed by the
pitiless wind. There was a poetry in the scene that seemed to inspire her
pencil, and yet she could never quite satisfy herself. In short, she
was not Turner; and that wood and sky needed the pencil of a Turner to
translate them fully. This evening she had brought her pocket sketch-book
with her. It was the companion of all her lonely walks.
She sat down upon the low boundary-wall of the churchyard, close by the
rustic wooden gate through which she had come, facing the heath and the
firwood, and took out her sketch-book. There was always something new;
inexhaustible Nature had ever some fresh lesson for her. But this evening
she sat idle for a long time, with her pencil in her hand; and when at last
she began to draw, it was no feature of heathy ridge or dark firwood, but a
man's face, that appeared upon the page.
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