Tacita had not removed her eyes from the picture when Elena came to touch her arm, and whispered: “Do you know that you have not winked for half an hour?”
Tacita roused herself. “I scarcely care to look at anything else now,” she said. “I will glance about the room there, and then go home.”
She went into the Isabella room, and walked slowly along the wall. Nothing dazzled her after that Murillo. Even Fra Angelico’s angels looked insipidly sweet beside its ethereal sublimity. The “Perla” kept her but a moment. Those radiant black eyes of the “Concepcion” seemed to gaze at her from every canvas. She was about leaving the room, when something made her turn back to look again at an unremarkable picture catalogued as “A Madonna and Saints.” Of the two catalogues she saw, one ascribed it to Pordenone, the other to Giorgione. She glanced at it without interest, wondering why she had stopped. The Madonna and Child, and the woman who held out to them a basket of red and white roses might just as well not have been painted for any significance they had; and she was about turning away when she caught sight of a face in the shadowed corner of the canvas behind the kneeling woman.
This was no conventional saint. The man seemed to be dressed in armor, and his hand rested on a sword-hilt or the back of a chair. The shadows swathed him thickly, leaving the face alone distinct. One guessed at a slight and well-knit figure. The face was bronzed, and rather thin, the features as delicate as they could be without weakness. Dark auburn hair fell almost to the shoulders, a slight moustache shaded the lip, a small pointed beard the chin. The brows were prominent, and strong enough to redeem a weak face, even; and beneath them were the eyes that go with such brows, penetrating, steady, far-seeing, and deep-seeing. Those eyes were fixed on the Madonna and Child, not in adoration, but with an earnest attention. He stood erect, and seemed to be studying the characters of those two beings whom the woman before him knelt to worship. Yet, reserved and incisive as the look was, something of sweetness might be discerned in the man’s face.
Tacita, half turned to go away, remained gazing at that face, fascinated. What a fine strength and purity! What reserve and what firmness! It was a face that could flash like a storm-cloud. Would anything ever make such a man fear, or be weak, careless, or cruel?
Elena came and stood by her, but said nothing.
“Behold a man,” said Tacita, “whom I would follow through the world, and out of the world!”
Her companion did not speak.
“Why was I not in the world when he lived in it!” the girl went on. “Or why is he not here now! Fancy that face smiling approval of you! Elena, do the dead hear us?”
“The living hear us!” replied the woman. “Is the air dead because you cannot see it? Is it powerless because it is sometimes still? It is only the ignoble who go downward, and become as stones.”