I felt his old worn body tremble as he embraced me and kissed me on the forehead in a fatherly way. With his hand still on my shoulder, he gazed long into my face as if in a dream, while a wave of memories, sorrows, and complaints passed across the ashy blue of his feeble eyes.
“How like you are to your father!” he added, in a still more affectionate voice, and his emotion took possession of me also. “It is a marvellous likeness. I feel as though I beheld Massenzio again in his youth, when we were companions in the Life Guards.... He seems to have come to life again. How like him you are, my boy!”
He took me by the hand and led me to the window, as if he wished to withdraw with me into the contemplation of long past things.
“How like him you are!” he repeated when he saw my face in the full light. “Oh, if that blessed soul were only living still. He ought not to have died, my God, he ought not to have died.”
He shook his head in token of regret over the phantom of that beautiful life so early cut off. And the sincerity of his affection was so great, that I was touched to the bottom of my soul, and I could no longer feel a stranger in that house where the memory of my dead was kept so reverently fresh. “Look,” added the Prince, stroking the point of his white beard, and smiling a smile in which I caught glimpses of Anatolia’s noble sweetness; “look how old I have grown!”
His whole figure betrayed a painful feebleness, but the radiance of his premature white hair gave his head a look of venerable majesty, and his brow still bore the hereditary stamp of his lordly race. His hands had escaped almost by a miracle from any injury by sickness and old age; there was no aged deformity about them. They were still strong and fair as if embalmed; those liberal hands of the munificent noble who had lavished his riches on the path of the exile, only that the eyes of his king might shine awhile longer with the reflection of fallen royalty. And as a kind of memorial of the treasures so prodigally spent there shone a cameo in his signet ring.
Those hands with their slow movements seemed, as the sluggish blood revived with the heat of memories, to be drawing some remnant of a vanished world out of a sphere of shadow, and this faculty gave them a singular meaning in my eyes. When the old man sat down and laid his hands on the arms of the chair, they seemed to me like relics, and I looked at them with a strange feeling of almost superstitious respect. They made me feel, very strongly, as if I were living at that moment in my own world of poetry, and not in the world of fact.
Seeing my eyes fixed on the carved gem, the prince smiled and said: “It is Violante’s portrait.”
He took off the ring and handed it to me.
The delicate work was by some ancient artist not unworthy of Pirgotelus or Dioscuridas; but the divine features of the Medusa, relieved against the blood-red background of sardonyx, corresponded so perfectly to the likeness of the proud creature, that I thought: “Truly then did she illuminate the art of bygone days, and from time immemorial bestowed upon durable matter the privilege of perpetuating the Idea of which she is to-day the Incarnation.”