“And is your copy still in existence?” Half involuntarily, Gerald took up the cast called Forgiveness.
“Yes,” replied the elder man, “it is in your hands now.”
The other laid his lips reverently on the smooth brow of the face which had reminded the German of the Nuremberg Virgin; the face which the Frenchman had thought French, the Italian girl Italian, and the American boy American.
“That cast, which you say is now called Forgiveness, has been enshrined in this room, behind the corner tapestry there, for more than a generation. It is older than you are. After Janvier died, I told myself it was not right to hide so much beauty from the world. But it wasn’t until after the Armistice that I mustered up courage to have three plaster copies made. And it was only last week that I sent a copy to each of our three largest art schools.”
“And you gave the casts the name, Forgiveness?”
“Ah, no, I left them nameless! But I must tell you a strange thing about that, too. At the time when I made the mould, we young artists were very much under the spell of Omar Khayyám’s fuzzy, fezzy philosophy; yes, quite entangled in the obscurantist beauty of the Vine! Fitzgerald’s verses and our own Vedder’s drawings were a cult with us. I couldn’t forgive as greatly as Janvier did. My wrong was less, and my pardoning power was less. And whenever I thought of the whole dreadful business, one of the Fitzgerald quatrains would ring in my ears; the one that ends
“‘For all the sin with which the face of man
Is blackened, Man’s forgiveness give—and take!’
“We thought it a sublime blasphemy in those days, but in these modern, higher-keyed times, no doubt it sounds tame enough. Anyway, it haunted me horribly; and to get rid of it, I carved it one rainy afternoon, in fine close letters like slanting rain, all around the outer edge of my cast. But times change, and we change. Thirty-five years later, when I looked the cast over, before giving it to the moulder to make the copies from, I knew that those lines no longer expressed what was in my heart. I had outgrown them. I knew that a better inscription would be, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ But I decided to have no inscription whatever, and to let the cast carry its own message of beauty. So, with a file, and very carefully, as I thought, I erased every word of that inscription like the slanting rain. Again and again I passed my fingers over it, until I was sure it was gone. Still, I suppose I must have left some breath of that word, Forgiveness, which the students at the Museum discovered. Though for the life of me, I can’t find a trace of it!”