“Your poor mother, Lucio--she mends?” “She mends a little, Messer.” “All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.” “The story, Messer!” “Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of it--how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate, promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing that was--a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her child’s and her husband’s hair; you know--or doth the story lie? It relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage, fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon. Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There ends the story--and she mends, you say?” “Faith is the great physician, Messer.” “Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.” He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes. “The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!” He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards. “There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.” From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things. Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished--the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.