Above his head was a painted ceiling, a battle scene, mellow with age, with the slightly artificial splendour of the early Sienese School. But from the walls, on every side, out of their dull gilded frames, faces peered down at him, measuring him with liquid eyes.
McTaggart felt a curious pride, swift and clean, run through him. These were his! The same blood stirred in his veins; here was his real inheritance!
He passed slowly along the room. Men in armour challenged him; Cardinals in scarlet robes; fair women smiled down; children paused in their play...
Then he came to the last picture, vivid, with its modern paint, in contrast to those earlier ones, softened by the touch of time.
A young girl in a white dress, a blue riband at her waist and a leghorn hat that swung from her arm wreathed with tiny pink roses. One hand, with taper [Transcriber's note: tapering?] fingers, lay on the sleek head of a greyhound, the other held her flowing skirts from beneath which a slender foot in white stocking and buckled shoe pointed its way down marble steps against a background of cypresses.
And the face? The smile so like his own, the dark hair piled high, the slim form and girlish grace...? Tears rose to the young man's eyes.
Here was his mother in her youth. Before that first season in Rome when she had met his father there, and, with the passion of her race, loved and married the hardy Scot, brought down the anger of her house and sailed away to that northern land never more to return home.
It seemed to her son that she smiled now with triumph in her glowing eyes; calling upon him to vindicate the choice she had made in the past.
And, suddenly, the deeper side of his nature responded to the cry. He saw that it lay within his hands to restore her tarnished honour now.
He drew himself up, his mouth firm, aware of a new responsibility. The fairy atmosphere had fled—this was life ... no mere adventure.