Bedient moved raptly among the panels. He wondered how the artist had made the light fall upon the dull clay, always where the Christ stood or walked or hung…. "And how did you know He had such beautiful hands?" he asked.
Vina Nettleton looked startled, and the Grey One came closer, saying:
"I'm glad you see that. To me the hands are a particular achievement.
Do you notice the fine modelling at the outer edges of the palms, and
the trailing length of the fingers?"
"Yes," said Bedient, "as if you could not quite tell where the flesh ended and the healing magnetism began."
Vina Nettleton sat down upon one of the steps of a ladder and stared at him. The Grey One added:
"And yet you cannot say they are overdone. They are the hands of an artist, but not assertively so."
"It is my limitation that I don't know," he said, "but how is that effect obtained, that suggestion of psychic power?"
"Part is your sensitiveness of eye and understanding," the Grey One answered, "and the rest comes from our little woman making a prayer of her work; from taking an image of Him and the Others into the dark; of light, ascetic sleep and putting away the dreams of women——"
Scarlet showed under the transparent skin of the Nettleton temples now—as if putting away the dreams of women were not an unqualified success.
"It is all interesting. I am grateful to you both for letting me come," Bedient said with strange animation, eager yet full of hesitancy. "More wonderful than the hands, is the Face, which Miss Nettleton has kept averted throughout her entire idea. That's the way the Face appears to me. The disciples and the multitudes must have seen it so, except on rare, purposeful occasions…. He must have been slight and not tall, and delicate as you see Him. It was not that He lacked physical endurance, but He was worn, as those about Him did not understand, with constant inner agony. That was His great weariness…. It was not an imposing Figure. Nothing about Him challenged the Romans. They were but abandoned boys who bowed to the strength that roars, and the bulk that makes easy blood-letting. Even in custody, He was beneath the notice of most Romans, so inflamed and brutish from conquest were they; and Pilate, though the Tragic Instrument, was among the least ignoble of them——'"
Bedient felt vaguely the interest of Vina Nettleton in what he was saying. It was a remarkable moment. His mind was crowded with a hundred things to say; yet he was startled, diffident, in spite of the joy of speaking these things aloud.