“_Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer!_ I saw him again--but now, before I fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!” The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the island. “Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!” The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash. And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French upon the opposite shore--and victory. A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the thunder’s. It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice speaking close by: “I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to renew my compact with Destiny.” He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor himself. “By God’s favour, sire,” he said. “Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away. Leonardo da Vinci “I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense--divine creation by deputy, that is to say--whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting--a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union--and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions. The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders. “Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.” He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.