Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/80

70. In vain the torrential storm swept over the cornfields and vineyards of Toro, obscuring them in mist. He had no need of eyes, for he knew every league of the country; every undulation of the plain framed in the narrow space of the gate-posts was burnt on his brain. He could see them without eyes, and remember every familiar feature. He had ridden them in the hot sun, he had paced every weary step of them. He could have sworn that he still smelt the dust of it in his nostrils, and saw the magpie which had flown across the track when he returned to Toro after his mother s death. The innate egotism that lies in us all, making each one think himself the pivot of the world, arose within him in an intense revolt. That the sun should rise on the morrow and sparkle on the yellow cornfields, or that the morrow should again waken over them soaked in rain, as if he had never been, seemed to him unnatural, monstrous, in credible.

The pattering of the rain on the flagstones of the locutory, the moaning of the wind, formed a sort of symphony to his shapeless meditations. He turned from the door, and in the vacancy of his mood scanned the whitewashed walls. A few old pictures of saints — he recognised them as old acquaintances from the time he had come there with his mother; they burnt themselves into his brain now. If there was some remembering faculty in man that lived after the extinction of the body, he felt that he should know them again through all Eternity. There was one picture, half hidden in a dusky corner almost under the beams, that roused his curiosity. It must have been placed there since — life still presented problems to solve. He rose and stood before it, shading his eyes. "A fine picture," he muttered; "how in God's name has it got stranded here," and he looked again — looked intensely. There was something in it that touched him as he had never been Rh