'I have heard, friends, that St. Francis called melancholy the worst of sins, and preached that whoso wished to please God must be cheerful. Let us drink to the wisdom of Francis and to eternal cheerfulness in God.'
These words were surprising to all the youths except Giovanni, who understood their intention.
'Eh, Master,' said Astro, shaking his head, 'it is very well to speak of cheerfulness, but how can we be cheerful while we crawl along the ground like grave-worms? Let the others toast what they please, but I will drink to wings and to the flying-machine. May the devil carry away the laws of gravity and of mechanics which interfere with us.'
'Without mechanics you won't fly far, my friend,' said the Master laughing.
After this the party broke up, and Leonardo would not allow Giovanni to return to his cold attic; he aided him to improvise a bed in his own room as near as might be to the hearth, where a few cinders still glowed red.
XIV
Giovanni had learned from Cesare that the master had all but finished the face of the Christ in the 'Last Supper'; he had asked several times to be allowed to see it, but Leonardo had always postponed the matter.
At last, one morning he took the lad to the Refectory, and there, in the place which had been vacant for sixteen years, between St. John and St. James, against the square of the open window, with the background of the quiet evening sky and the blue hills of Zion, Giovanni saw the Christ.
A few days later Leonardo sent him for a rare mathematical book to the house of the alchemist, Sacrobosco. He was returning late in the evening. The air was frosty and still, after a day of high wind and thaw; the pools and the ruts of the road were coated with ice; the low clouds seemed to cling motionless to the purple tops of the larches, in which were a few ruined and deserted nests. Darkness came on apace; on the dim verge of the horizon stretched the long copper and golden streak where the sun had gone down. The water in the Cantarana Canal, still unfrozen, seemed heavy, black as iron, and unfathomably deep.