'Ay, 'tis not Dianora's indisposition has disturbed you, but this woman's senseless gossip. Strange case! Have you never noticed, madonna, how sometimes a single absurdity on an indifferent subject from an uninteresting person will throw a gloom over the mind, and afflict us more than our proper cares?'
She bent her head silently; it was clear they understood each other too well for words to be always necessary.
Leonardo again addressed himself to work.
'Tell me something!' she cried.
'What shall I tell you?'
She smiled. 'Tell me about The Realm of Venus.'
The artist had certain favourite stories for La Gioconda; tales of travel, of natural phenomena, of plans for pictures. He knew them by heart, and would recite always in the same simple half-childlike words, accompanied by soft music, in his feminine voice, the old fable, or cradle-tale. Andrea and Atalante took their instruments, and when they had executed the motif which invariably preluded The Realm of Venus, he began:—
'The seafarers who live on the coasts of Cilicia tell of him who is destined to drown, that for a moment, during the most tremendous storms, he is permitted to behold the island of Cyprus, realm of the Goddess of Love. Around boil whirlwinds and whirlpools, and the voices of the waters; and great in number are the navigators who, attracted by the splendour of that island, have lost ships upon its rocks. Many a gallant bark has there been dashed to pieces, many sunk for ever in the deep! Yonder on the coast lie piteous hulks, overgrown with seaweed, half buried by sand. Of one the prow juts exposed; of another the stern; of another the gaping beams of its side, like the blackened ribs of a corpse. So many are they, that there it looks like the Resurrection Day, when the Sea shall give up its dead! But over the isle itself is a curtain of eternal azure, and the sun shines on flowery hills. And the stillness of the air is such, that when the priest swings the censer on the temple steps, the flame ascends to heaven straight, unwavering as the white columns and the giant cypresses mirrored in an untroubled lake lying inland, far from the shore. Only the streams that flow from that lake, and cascades leaping from one porphyry basin to another, trouble the solitude with their pleasant sound. Those drowning far at sea hear for a moment that soft murmur, and see the still lake of sweet waters, and the wind carries to them the perfume of myrtle and rose. Ever the more terrible the outer tempest, the profounder that calm in the island realm of the Cyprian.'
He ceased: the strains of lute and viol died away, and that silence followed which is sweeter than any music. As if lulled by the words just spoken, as if caught away from actual life by the long hush, a stranger to all things except the will of the artist, Monna Lisa, like calm and pure and fathomless water, looked into Leonardo's eyes with that mystic smile which was the very counterpart of his own. Giovanni Boltraffio, watching now one, now the other, thought of two mirrors, each reflecting, absorbing the other into infinity.