In the Palazzo Giovanelli there is one of the loveliest of Giorgiones. It is called “His Family,” and it represents a beautiful nude woman with her child and her lover. It seemed to me an outrage that this young brother should know nothing of the world, of life. I was determined that he should see this picture. I think I expected Brother Leo to be shocked when he saw it. I know I was surprised that he looked at it—at the serene content of earth, its exquisite ultimate satisfaction—a long time. Then he said in an awed voice:
“It is so beautiful that it is strange any one in all the world can doubt the love of God who gave it.”
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful; do you believe there is anything more beautiful?” I asked rather cruelly.
“Yes,” said Brother Leo, very quietly; “the love of God is more beautiful, only that cannot be painted.”
After that I showed him no more pictures, nor did I try to make him understand life. I had an idea that he understood it already rather better than I did.
When I took him back to the piazza, it was getting on toward sunset, and we sat at one of the little tables at Florian’s, where I drank coffee. We heard the band and watched the slow-moving, good-natured Venetian crowd, and the pigeons winging their perpetual flight.
All the light of the gathered day seemed to fall on the great golden church at the end of the piazza. Brother Leo did not look at it very much; his attention was taken up completely in watching the faces of the crowd, and as he watched them I thought to read in his face what he had learned in that one day in Venice—whether my mission had been a success or a failure; but, though I looked long at that simple and childlike face, I learned nothing.
What is so mysterious as the eyes of a child?
But I was not destined to part from Brother Leo wholly in ignorance. It was as if, in his open kindliness of nature, he would not leave me with any unspoken puzzle between us. I had been his friend and he told me, because it was the way things seemed to him, that I had been his teacher.
We stood on the piazzetta. I had hired a gondola with two men to row him back; the water was like beaten gold, and the horizon the softest shade of pink.