‘Yes, you have failed,’ he answered, somewhat sarcastically. ‘I should not imagine, in the first place, that you knew what the lines meant.’
‘No, I don’t think I do,’ Sara owned, deprecatingly.
‘Let us hope you never may. The meaning, when you come at it, is bitter—as bitter as anything well can be. Well’—he turned to her, and looked her in the face, with eyes which she felt were full of severity and full of concern—‘is that all?’
‘It is all I can show you,’ she replied hastily, ‘when I see how displeased you are.’
‘You are afraid of hearing the truth?’ asked Falkenberg, with a mocking smile.
With compressed lips, and a face which had grown pale, she threw a cover from another canvas, a larger one, on a second easel, and, leaving him to study it, turned away, and stood at the window, looking out, her heart beating so wildly that its throbs deafened her. Yet she heard him say:
‘Ah! at least one knows what this is intended for.’
It was a sketch merely, all except the head of the figure, in neutral first tints; and there was certainly no mistaking the subject. A man’s figure in imperial robes, leaning eagerly forward, stretching out his hands; his eyes fixed, his lips parted towards the sun, which suddenly bursts with a flood of light into the room, and illumines the desk and tablets, on which he had been inscribing his great Hymn. One could just catch this meaning; and the head of Julian the Apostate, which was boldly finished and beautiful, was a likeness of Jerome.
‘H’m!’ observed Falkenberg. ‘The Apostate—a curious idea.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I suppose that is all?’
‘All, except the studies I am doing with Herr Wilhelmi,’ she said, feeling all the pretty conceits with which she had tried to gloss over her work, small in amount, poor in execution, of the last three months, swept away, as cobwebs might be swept from a roof, till not a trace remained.