Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/81

Rh touched since he was a boy. Why? Because he, too, was to suffer presently, by his own Free Will, something of the same torture which still writhed in the pale limbs, still seemed to quiver in the eyelids of the man before him. Something in the image fascinated and subdued him, seized, held him, bound him so that his feet were as if they had been riveted to the floor with lead. A great pity, a supreme tenderness for the other man who had also suffered, not as he was about to do, for his own sins, but for the sins of the world, thrilled through his soul with a spasm of pain. His mother's eyes seemed to shine down on him from the canvas, swept away the next moment as if by a swift river. She too had suffered for his sins. She had thought of him, the son who had killed her, even in her death throes. Perhaps if she had been alive, his death, if not his life, might have been different.

And then happened what no words, colours, or sounds can translate, for it seemed to him (it is the Chronicler who speaks) that the dusky corner grew full of a soft radiance which suffused itself out of and about the picture. It seemed to him too that he heard strains of melody, now faint, now louder, which must have come from the harps and psalteries of the angels, so far away, so strangely sweet it floated in the atmosphere about him. It seemed too as if the locutory was full of motion, as if invisible figures were passing to and fro in a glad joyousness. It was as if a gentle flapping, a noiseless beating of wings that fanned his brow and stirred his hair, accompanied that marvellous music. And as he still looked confounded, and as it translated, the figure in the picture became distinct and more distinct, grew larger and still larger until he could see neither frame nor picture, but only the gigantic figure of the crucified looming from a celestial light — and in the excessive radiance that enveloped him, he saw the

The Yellow Book — Vol. XIII.