I, as others, am profane.
—Robert Herrick.
John Gregory stood in the studio with his friend, the first greetings over.
“May I look at your work?” he asked, approaching Everett’s easel. The younger man stood behind him with sensitive, changing colour, and something almost like trepidation in the expression of his face.
There was a certain quality of command in John Gregory, of which he was himself, perhaps, usually unconscious, which produced in many minds a disproportionate anxiety to win his approval. As he stood now before Everett’s easel, however, he was not the awe-inspiring figure of Anna’s dream, or even of its sudden fulfilment, but simply an English gentleman in his rough travelling tweeds, a man of fifty or thereabout, noticeable for his height and splendid proportion, for a kind of rugged harmony of feature, and for the peculiarly piercing quality of his glance. His manner was characterized by repose which might have appeared stolidity had not the fire in his eyes denied the suggestion; his voice was deep and full, and he spoke with the roll and rhythm of accent common to educated Englishmen. The aspect of the man produced, altogether, an effect of almost careless freedom from form, the sense that here was one who had to do with what was actual and imperative, not with the adventitious and artificial; in fine, an essentially masculine and virile individuality,—a man born to lead, not to follow.
Beside him, Pierce Everett, with his delicate mobility of face and the slender grace of his frame, looked boyish and even effeminate, but there was nothing of superiority or patronage in Gregory’s bearing toward the young artist, but rather a kind of affectionate comradery peculiarly winning, and he entered into the study of the young man’s work with cordial and sympathetic interest.
The canvas before them was not a large one; the composition extremely simple; the single figure it presented was set in against a background of cold, low tones of yellow. A crumbling tomb of hewn stone, with tufts of dry grass growing in the crevices, hoary with age, stained with decay, was set against a steep hillside of sterile limestone. Leaning upon a broken pillar of this tomb stood the figure of a young girl, her hands dropped carelessly upon the rough stone before her, her head lifted and encircled by a faint nimbus, the eyes fixed in absorbed contemplation, and yet with a child’s passionless calm. The outlines of the figure, in white Oriental dress, were those of extreme youth, undeveloped and severe, the attitude had an unconscious childlike grace, the expression of the face was that of awe and wonder, with a curious mingling of joy and dread. The subject, easily guessed, was the Virgin in Contemplation in early girlhood.
The picture was nearly finished, only the detail of the foreground remained incomplete.
John Gregory stood for some time in silence. The face and figure before him possessed the expression of high, spiritual quality common to the early Florentines; there was little of fleshly or earthly beauty, but an aura of celestial purity, of virginal innocence and devout aspiration, was the more perceived.
“You have painted, like Fra Angelico, Everett, with heaven in your heart.”