He gazed up at
them again, and laughed a little nervously. Then he fixed his eyes
on the opposite wall. One of the pictures was moving. The thought
in his brain had given birth to the movement he had imagined. It
was a woman's face in the picture, young and beautiful, and it
nodded to him, one moment radiant with light, the next caught in
shadows that cast over it a gloom. He jumped from his chair and
went so that he stood directly under it.
A current of warm air shot up into his face from the floor. It was
this air that was causing movement in the picture, and he looked
down. What he discovered broke the spell he was under. About him
were the relics of age, of a life long dead. Rubens might have sat
in that room, and mourned over his handiwork, lost in a
wilderness. The stingy Louis might have recognized in the spindle-
legged table a bit of his predecessor's extravagance, which he had
sold for the good of the exchequer of France; a Gobelin might have
reclaimed one of the woven landscapes on the wall, a Grosellier
himself have issued from behind the curtained bed. Philip himself,
in that environment, was the stranger. It was the current of warm
air which brought him back from the eighteenth to the twentieth
century.
Pages:
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217