The blind man served as guide. He
remembered the placement of each picture and identified for her:
"Muses by Holman Hunt . . . Mother
and Child . . . Rossetti . . . the old Christiansborg Castle, painted by the
Dane Christen Købke. " He
mispronounced that name, but she didn’t bother to correct him.
In the third room, the style of the pictures changed; even the untrained
visitor could see they were the work of a single artist, and one who preferred
to paint the same subject several times:women
with spears, women with masks, women with fishes’ tails.
Some of the canvases had been patchworked, cut apart and resewn, with
layers of paint crumbling off into colored dust at the seams.
Every one of them featured a woman with flaming red hair and
sharp, pale features—a woman the widow would rather not see here.
The blind man perhaps felt the same way, for he chose not to dwell on
these pictures. "Figures from mythology," he said merely, and he unlocked
the door to the fourth room, the one few visitors ever saw.
The thin windows there were covered in velvet, making the room a dark
cave.
The widow hesitated. She had
a mild dislike of the dark.
"This will be your painting’s home," the tall man said, as the
blind one felt his way inside.
"It is not my painting," she replied. "My husband left it to your gallery in his will. "
The tall man turned the screw for the gaslight.
"And this is not my gallery. The
owner lives up the mountain. "
Light from the glass globes flared over the room and then subsided.
Still the widow’s eyes were dazzled.
At first she saw only empty walls, and then something that made her raise
the black handkerchief to her lips.
"Er det"
"Yes," said her countryman. "It
is. "
It was a large cylinder with thick, slightly green glass walls.
The ends of the cylinder were of glass, too, and the craftsmanship was so
fine that the joinings were scarcely visible.
But it was what the cylinder held inside that constituted the great
wonder:the body of a woman,
floating in a clear liquid, with a blue velvet gown and hair such a brilliant
red that at first glance it appeared unnatural.
Again the blind man guessed the widow’s thoughts.
"She is real," he said. "True
flesh, preserved in alcohol and other fluids.
Go on, step closer and look. "
The spectacle presented an irresistible lure; against a good part of her
own will, the widow moved nearer. The
corpse’s hair and dress rippled faintly with the vibrations of her footsteps,
while the scent of alcohol burned her nostrils.
Up close, the body looked less alive; the flesh was a dead, arsenic
white, and it too seemed to ripple. The
face had lost some of its shape, as if the bones had turned to rubber; and most
grotesque of all, the eyes were missing.
"Melted," the tall man whispered in their native tongue, when he saw
where she was looking, "eaten away in the alcohol.
But he"—gesturing toward the other man— "he doesn’t know. "
The blind man clearly did not understand. "Is she not beautiful?" he asked, with his face turned toward the
coffin as if in all the world he could see this one thing.
He touched the top of the glass curve with the gloved hand, and the widow
had to swallow hard. She felt very
hot in her silks.
"Too beautiful for the grave," the blind man went on, answering his
own question. "Few scientists
know this method of preservation; I learned it expressly for her.
She was the last sight I saw before losing that faculty completely. "
If she breathed, she would surely be ill. "But—"
"It was not a slow death, though it took us weeks to repair. "
The blind man spoke as if the death itself were of no importance. "If you look closely, you might see little wounds in her
face and arms . . . "
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