"Yes, is not our Christ perfect?" said Anastasia, smiling proudly. "He costs people many tears. But even I cannot help weeping, and I have played it with him thirty times." She passed her hand across his brow with a tender, maternal caress, as if she wished to console him for all his sufferings. "Does it not seem as if we saw the Redeemer Himself?"
The countess watched her with increasing sympathy. "You have a beautiful soul! Your friend was right, people should know you to receive the full impression of Mary."
"Yes, I play it too badly," replied Anastasia, whose native modesty prevented her recognition of the flattery conveyed in the countess' words.
"No--badly is not the word. But the delicate shadings of the feminine nature are lost in the vast space," the other explained.
"It may be so," replied Anastasia, simply. "But that is of no importance; no matter how we others might play--he would sustain the whole."
"And your brother, Anastasia, and all the rest--do you forget them?" said Freyer, rebukingly.
"Yes, dear Anastasia." The countess took Freyer's hand. "I have given my soul into the keeping of this Christ--but your brother's performance is also a masterpiece! It seems to me that you are unjust to him. And also to Pilate, whom I admired, the apostles and high-priests."
"Perhaps so. I don't know how the others act--" said Mary with an honesty that was fairly sublime. "I see only him, and when he is not on the stage I care nothing for the rest of the performance. It is because I am his mother: to a mother the son is beyond everything else," she added, calmly.
The countess looked at her in astonishment. Was it possible that a woman could love in this way? Yet there was no doubt of it. Had even a shadow of longing to be united to the man she loved rested on the soul of this girl, she could not have had thus crystalline transparency and absolute freedom from embarrassment.
These Madonnas are happy beings! she thought, yet she did not envy this calm peace.