The Weird Picture

by John R. Carling

A loud cry broke from me, and I reeled back into the middle of the hall.

For my brother's face was staring at me from the canvas in lineaments not to be mistaken—in lineaments so startling in their fidelity to the original that I marvelled how I could have failed at the first to detect the resemblance. The beard and hair were wanting to complete the likeness: it was this omission that had delayed my recognition of it, just as it had prevented my recognition of the portrait sketch that Angelo had exhibited to me.

Overwhelmed with amazement I stood staring at the picture, rooted to the spot, without power to move from it. Whence had Angelo derived the marvellous art that had enabled him to limn my brother's face so faithfully, and yet to transform it so as to make it seem like the very image of death?

I lifted my eyes to the figure of Pompey mounted on his lofty pedestal, and as I gazed at the proud face, over which the changing moonbeams seemed to impart a smile of mockery, the picture assumed a new and terrible significance. An ordinary spectator might regard it simply as a splendid work of art, and see in it nothing more than was implied in its title—"The Fall of Cæsar;" but to me, familiar with the artist's aspiration, it was full of a latent symbolism expressive of his hopes at the time of painting it. It was no longer the conqueror of the East triumphing over the conqueror of the West, but Angelo in his own person exulting over the rival whom he had slain. The laurel-wreath on his brows represented the crown of fame which the exhibition of this very picture was to bring him; and the setting of Daphne's head in the shield that was braced tight to his arm expressed the confident conviction that she was destined one day to be linked to him. The artist's secret was revealed: he had killed my brother! In his morbid desire of fame, and in a spirit of hideous realism sometimes, though rarely, exemplified in the history of art, Angelo had murdered a fellow-mortal for the purpose of having by his side a dead man to serve as a model for the fallen Cæsar, even proceeding so far as to retain in his picture the very features of his victim.

The commission of this terrible deed, and the thought that now that his rival was dead Daphne would be his, had imparted to the mind of the artist a sort of diabolic inspiration—a tone of fiendish exaltation that had enabled him for the time being to rise superior to his ordinary mediocre powers, and to surprise the art-critics by producing a work far surpassing all his previous efforts.

He could expose this painting to public view with little fear that its exhibition would be attended with the discovery of his crime, owing to the fact that his victim (to represent faithfully the person of Cæsar) must be delineated as both bald and beardless, a fact that had imparted a very different look to the painted face; and moreover, since George had spent the years subsequent to his twentieth birthday in India, he was not known in Europe except to his own small circle of kinsfolk.

The only persons, then, whom the artist had cause to fear were the relatives of his victim, and returned Anglo-Indians.

I now understood his motive in calling my attention to the pen-and-ink sketch of George's face. It was to ascertain whether, in the event of seeing his picture, I should detect any resemblance to my brother in the bald and beardless head of Cæsar: hence his satisfaction at my want of perception, for he felt pretty certain that if I failed to recognise the likeness, other persons would be equally or more obtuse.

Yet, despite the apparent safety which my mental blindness had promised him, he had feared after all lest the picture should betray him, and the fracas that had occurred in the Vasari Gallery at Paris was a result of this fear.

The Indian officer, whom Angelo had ordered to be expelled from the gallery, was doubtless a friend of George's, belonging, perhaps, to the same regiment, and who, if permitted to see the work of art, might have discovered in the same more than was intended by its author.