"Do you know who it is?" I asked my school-fellow.
"How can you ask?" he exclaimed with boyish indignation. "It is our Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Jews crucified."
"No, Wladik," I answered with the utmost decision, "it isn't; it's Bocher David, who used to teach me until last spring."
Wladik was very angry, and scolded me well for saying such a dreadful thing, but he could not convince me that I was wrong: I knew what I knew. When I went home in the evening I told my father about the picture.
"Silly child," he said with a smile; "who could have painted it?"
"Our Frau Gräfin," I replied.
My father looked grave. "Well, well," he said thoughtfully, "it is almost incredible...."
"What?" I asked quickly. But he told me to be quiet.
I should not then have understood what he meant; but I heard the story afterward when I was older—the sad story of that picture of Christ in the chapel at Barnow—and learned that it was also, as I had supposed, a portrait of my old teacher, Bocher David.
It is a strange story, reader, and will seem all the more extraordinary to you, if you have been brought up in a Western home, and have been accustomed from your infancy to civilization and tolerance of others. It is also sad, very sad. But do not blame me for that, for my heart bleeds when I remember this over-true tale, which must be regarded as one of the dark riddles of life, and as the doing of that eternal, inscrutable Power that deals out darkness or light, happiness or misery, to the weak human heart....