Light, Descending by Octavia Randolph

Author:Octavia Randolph [Randolph, Octavia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: John Ruskin
Publisher: Exemplar Editions
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

London: Spring 1861

Dearest St Crumpet––You can’t think how fusty the carriage was from Prato to Florence––but of course you can, you can think of EVERYTHING, including fusty carriages should you like, but Mama says you’re too fine a gentleman to bother with such ––but we are here now and tomorrow we go and see Mr Giotto’s Campanile at the Duomo and I shall look at it with care just as you told me, and make Emily and Percy look too. And I am trying to draw what I see in the sketchbook you gave me and hold my pencil that way you showed me. And trying not to get scolded, I wanted to give my hat the blue one to a little dusty girl that was in the garden of the hotel but Bun––Miss Bunnett stopped me. She is Bun to me and so you are delicious Crumpet, but I think I should add the St for respect. I wish St Crumpet you were with me too. And that it were not so hot, it is too hot for Irish roses. Love––your Rosie-posie.

Ruskin felt a sudden flush spring upon his cheek; his ears burned. “I am not alone,” he said aloud. “I shall not be alone.”

He read the letter again. She had never called him “Dearest” before, nor ended as she had–– “Love––your Rosie-posie.” His Rosie. His love. Rosie posie, Rosie fair, Rosie light and sweet as air. He thought of her oval face and more-slightly pointed chin; the tiny white-gold curls at the nape of the slender neck; eyes neither blue nor grey but some un-named alloyage possessing the smokiness of dusk; the lips perfect in profile but a little too full, almost petulant when she turned to you––a glistening rosebud, offering itself. The gravity of her gaze, like that, he imagined, of St. Ursula as a child. The face he had first loved when she was ten and he, nearing forty, had called at her mother’s request to meet the children and perhaps consent to give them a drawing lesson or two.

For that first lesson at Denmark Hill he had sketch books and new-sharpened pencils all prepared, and meant to begin the initial lesson with the elementary rules of perspective and the analysis of the essential qualities of triangles. The company was so delightful that the pencils remained untouched. After trooping the female LaTouches up to his mother––confined by infirmity to her bedroom suite, she gave the girls each a kiss for being able to identify two obscure passages in Exodus––he had relished taking them out into his gardens. The older Emily showed polite interest, but Rose devoured all she saw. Her pink cheeks and dancing eyes spurred him to drollery, and when they reached the pig-pens he soberly introduced them to the grunting black-and-white spotted denizens, insisting they were most intelligent and spoke perfect Irish. Even Maria LaTouche burst out laughing, but Rose laughed loudest and most charmingly of all.

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