She feared nothing now but that they would come and take him from her—snarled, holding him, when her one sick glint of day stole in to cross her vigil—was in love with utter solitude and blind night. Once, after a little or a long time—it was all one to her—she saw a thread of ghostly whiteness moving on the floor; watched it with basilisk eyes; thought, perhaps, it was his soul, lingering for hers according to its promise. The moving spot came on—stole into the wan, diffused streak of light cast from the grating;—and it was a great rat, with something bound about its neck.
She understood on the instant. Long since, her instinctive wit had told her—though she had not cared or been concerned to listen to it—that that sudden voice in the darkness had signified that Carlo was imprisoned somewhere hard by. Well, he had found this means to communicate with her—near a miracle, it might be; but miracles interested her no longer. No harm to let him know at last. He could not rob her of her dead.
She coaxed the creature to her; found him tame; read the message; re-fastened on the paper, and, by its glimmer, marked the way of his return.
Then she rose, and spoke, and, speaking, choked and died.
In the dark all cats are grey, and all women beautiful. But I think the countenance of this one had no need to fear the dawn.
CHAPTER XXVI
Amongst all her costly possessions in the Casa Caprona, there had once been none so loved, so treasured, so often consulted by Beatrice as a certain portrait of the little Parablist of San Zeno, which she had bought straight from the studio of its limner, Messer Antonello da Messina, at that time temporarily sojourning in Milan. This was the artist, pupil of Jan Van Eyck, who had been the first to introduce oil-painting into Italy; and the portrait was executed in the new medium. It was a work perpetrated con amore—one of the many in which the exaltation of the moment had sought to express itself in pigments, or marble, or metal. For, indeed, during that short spring of his promise, Bernardo's flower-face had come to blossom in half the crafts of the town.
Technically, perhaps, a little wan and flat, the head owed something, nevertheless, to inspiration. Through the mere physical beauty of its features, one might read the sorrow of a spiritual incarnation—the wistfulness of a Christ-converted Eros of the ancient cosmogonies. Here were the right faun's eyes, brooding pity out of laughter; the rather square jaw, and girlish pointed chin; the baby lips that seemed to have kissed themselves, shape and tint, out of spindle-berries; the little strutting cap and quill even, so queerly contrasted with the staid sobriety of the brow beneath. It was the boy, and the soul of the boy, so far as enthusiasm, working through a strange medium, could interpret it.
Beatrice, having secured, had hung the picture in a dim alcove of her chamber; and had further, to ensure its jealous privacy from all inquisition but her own, looped a curtain before. Here, then, a dozen times a day, when alone, had she been wont to pray and confess herself; lust with her finger-tips to charm the barren contours of the face into life; lay her hot cheek to the painted flesh, and weep, and woo, and appeal to it; seek to soften by a hundred passionate artifices the inflexible continence of its gaze.
But that had been all before the shock and frenzy of her final repulse. Not once since had she looked on it, until...