"The Niobe of Phidias!"
The three women and the two young men then saw by the light of the tiny flame a shapeless fragment of marble. The nose had been broken and shattered. The place where the eyes ought to have been was hardly recognizable. Almost all the hair was missing. By chance, in all the dreadful destruction through which the head had passed, the lower lip and the chin had been spared. Accustomed as he was to the almost infantile mise-en-scène of the archæologist, Don Fortunato let the light shine full on the mutilated mouth and chin.
"What admirable life and suffering is displayed in that mouth!" cried Fregoso, "and what power there is in the chin!—Does it not express all the will and pride and energy of the queen who defied Latona?—You can hear the cry that issues from the lips.—Follow the line of the cheek. From what remains you can figure the rest.—And what a noble form the artist has given the nose!—Look at this."
He took up the head, placed it at a certain angle, drew out his handkerchief, and taking a portion of it in his hands, he stretched it across the base of the forehead at the place where there was nothing but a gaping fracture in the stone.
"There you have the line of the nose!—I can see it.—I can see the tears that flow from her eyes," and he placed the head at another angle. "I can see them!—Come!" he said, sighing, after a silence, "we must return to everyday life. Draw up the curtains and open the shutters."
When daylight once more lit up the shapeless mass Fregoso sighed again. Then, taking up a head, rather less battered than the Niobe, he bowed to Miss Marsh, whose technical knowledge and attentive attitude had appealed in a flattering way to his mania.
"Miss Marsh," he said, "you are worthy of possessing a fragment of a statue that once graced the Acropolis.—Will you allow me to offer you this head, one only recently discovered? Look how it smiles."
The head really seemed to smile in the old man's hands, with a curious, disquieting smile, mysterious and sensual at the same time.
"It is the Eginetan smile, is it not?" asked the American girl.
"Archæologists have given it that name on account of the statues upon the famous pediment. But I call it the Elysian smile, the ecstasy that ought to wreathe forever the lips of those tasting the eternal happiness, revealed in advance to the faithful by the gods and goddesses.—Remember the line Æschylus wrote about Helen: 'Soul serene as the calm of the seas.' That smile expresses the line completely."