“I’ll hear nothing about Antwerp! You will stay, Antonio, you will stay. Your wife and child-all honor to them. I have seen your wife’s portrait. Good, nourishing bread! Here you have ambrosia and manna. You know whom I mean; Sophonisba is attached to you; the queen says so.”
“And I gratefully feel it. It is hard to leave your gracious Majesty and Sophonisba; but bread, Sire, bread—is necessary to life. I shall leave friends here, dear friends—it will be difficult, very difficult, to find new ones at my age.”
“It is the same with me, and for that very reason you will stay, if you are my friend! No more! Farewell, Antonio, till we meet again, perhaps to-morrow, in spite of a chaos of business. Happy fellow that you are! In the twinkling of an eye you will be revelling in colors again, while the yoke, the iron yoke, weighs me down.”
Moor thought he should be able to work undisturbed after the king had left him, and left the door unbolted. He was standing before the easel after dinner, engaged in painting, when the door of the corridor leading to the treasury was suddenly flung open, without the usual warning, and Philip again entered the studio. This time his cheeks wore a less pallid hue than in the morning, and his gait showed no traces of the solemn gravity, which had become a second nature to him,—on the contrary he was gay and animated.
But the expression did not suit him; it seemed as if he had donned a borrowed, foreign garb, in which he was ill at ease and could not move freely.
Waving a letter in his right hand, he pointed to it with his left, exclaiming:
“They are coming. This time two marvels at once. Our Saviour praying in the garden of Gethsemane, and Diana at the Bath. Look, look! Even this is a treasure. These lines are from Titian’s own hand.”
“A peerless old man,” Moor began; but Philip impetuously interrupted: “Old man, old man? A youth, a man, a vigorous man. How soon he will be ninety, and yet—yet; who will equal him?”
As he uttered the last words, the monarch stopped before Sophonisba’s portrait, and pointing to it with the scornful chuckle peculiar to him, continued gaily:
“There the answer meets me directly. That red! The Venetian’s laurels seem to have turned your high flown pupil’s head. A hideous picture!”