The old master commenced his work, ever surrounded by these sad companions. Ever hearing the last murmurs of Otho, the last sighs of Mina, he carved the holy cross and the summit of Calvary; then the shameful scroll; then the sacred form. Ever haunted by his visions of the dead, he knew better to give to the divine Crucified the writhing of living agony joined to the beginning rigidity of death; he remembered the last quivering of human strength and the mysterious folds of the winding-sheet. It was only when he came to carve the face of Christ that imagination and memory ceased to furnish him a model. Mina's passionate grief and pious resignation; the mingled humiliation, repentance, grief, and rage of the murdered Otho could give naught to be reproduced in the countenance of a God. He must seek his model elsewhere; and Master Sebald had not asked for his mirror in vain.
Standing erect before his work, he began to chisel the face of Christ; and for the first time since his prison walls closed upon him he gazed upon his own reflection. The long gaze upon his white head and his grief-worn features satisfied him.
His own face was a book, a book of sorrows speaking most eloquently, wherein all bitterness, all failings, all regrets, and all terrors, the dreams of the artist, the humiliation of the master, the friend betrayed, the sufferings, of the father, the anguish of the condemned, had inscribed their memories and left their foot-prints. The agony of Master Sebald was already long, and had been cruel and stormy. Ah! the remembrances of Otho's treachery were as the wounds in the hands and feet; the brand of dishonor upon his brow was as the crown of thorns; and the last wound, the stab of the lance, was the loss of Mina. So, that after long contemplating his own features, the old sculptor knelt humbly before the work he had begun.
"Pardon, O Christ!" he said, "if I, a weak mortal, an unworthy and sinful man, dare, in carving thy sacred lineaments, trace mine. But I design not, O Lord! to show thee happy and full of peace, or radiant and glorious. I promised to present thee suffering, suffering even the death of the cross; I suffer that of the gibbet. A friend betrayed thee; a friend betrayed me. Thou wast loaded with insult and ignominy; I too had good cause to blush before my judges. Thou weepest over the sins of men, thy children; I over my child's grave. And as, O Lord! thou wert man as well as God, I may not offend thee in copying the anguish, the griefs, the sufferings that have left their print upon my brow. All these thou knowest, O Lord! but remorse thou couldst not know. That will I keep to myself, and in its stead I will place radiance, hope, and splendor of divinity. Ay, hope! for even on the cross didst thou hope and call upon thy Father!"
Here the old sculptor ceased, and bent before his work, while the shadows of despair darkened his brow. Then he cast a troubled look upon the statue, a look in which anguish mingled with prayer, confidence with terror.
"And can I hope?" he murmured. "Mina is in heaven. Shall I again see her?"
But no voice replied, and, sighing, he stood again erect. Then after a few moments of silent meditation he seized his chisel, and, making the sign of the cross, recommenced his work, and the stone seemed to breathe, to quiver, to palpitate as, one by one, the suffering lines came forth. Truly in Master Sebald's mirror were grief and unpitying and unending pain.
And he worked in spite of the gnawings of hunger, the want of sleep, the cold of the winter. He had ever within him strength and fire—the strength of expiation, the fire of penitence. But as he worked, his form became more stooped, and his eye less sure; his blood flowed feebler through his veins, and his breath grew more quick and gasping. But he needed but mind and hand, and his mind was clear, and his hand carved bravely still. And what cared he for the failing of an exhausted body? If, day by day, his face grew thinner, his eyes cavernous, his lips tighter, was not his model for all that the more real? Was it not a dying Christ he was carving?
At last his work was done. When the last blow of the chisel had been given, when the stone had received the final touch, when Christ hung there wounded, quivering, breathing, sublime, Master Sebald knelt before his work and bowed his forehead to the earth. The sculptor demanded his pay; the criminal his pardon. He prayed fervently and long; and when he rose, he knew that his child called, and that the hour of his deliverance was nigh, and, walking to the narrow opening which formed his only means of communication with men, he called aloud to his jailer:
"My Christ is finished! My task is done! Unseal the door and lead me to the executioner."