“Was she ever like that?” I whispered.
“She was beautiful,” murmured Patty fervently. “I remember him painting this.”
“And going away, and leaving it unfinished?” said I: for, indeed, the portrait was but sketched in, though masterly in its promise.
“Yes,” said the little girl, gulping. “And I never supposed what had become of it till now.”
It seemed incredible, the change that but a few envious years had wrought. Had love done this thing before me? Or could love forsaken so warp the loveliness which Love himself had created? It gave me a new little thrill of respect for the humanised Sophia; because, whatever the truth of her face, a man had been found to see this beauty in it.
“She was St. Cecilia,” whispered Patty. “There is the harp in her lap.”
It was without strings—an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be Madame de Crespigny.
Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me, and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. Ma vue et mes minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette. For the first time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities of her sex.
One day—it was some eighteen months later—returning from a commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She was transfigured—rejuvenated. The happiest light—bashful, coy, defiant, and surrendering its defiance—was in her eyes. She was more like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved religieuse of yesterday.
And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack, half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond—there he stood, no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a five-legged calf at a fair.