第7章 (第3/3页)
onversation had gone on to other things.
But Grant's interest in faces had remained and enlarged until it became a conscious study. A matter of case records and comparisons. It was, as he had said, not possible to put faces into any kind of category, but it was possible to characterize individual faces. In a reprint of a famous trial, for instance, where photographs of the principal actors in the case were displayed for the public's interest, there was never any doubt as to which was the accused and which the judge. Occasionally, one of the counsel might on looks have changed places with the prisoner in the dock - counsel were after all a mere cross-section of humanity, as liable to passion and greed as the rest of the world, but a judge had a special quality: an integrity and a detachment. So, even without a wig, one did not confuse him with the man in the dock, who had had neither integrity nor detachment.
Marta's James, having been dragged from his 'cubby hole', Had evidently enjoyed himself, and a fine selection of offenders, or their victims kept Grant entertained until The Midget brought his tea. As ht tidied the sheets together to put them away in his locker his hand came in contact with one that Had slipped off his chat and had lain all the afternoon unnoticed on the counterpane. Ht picked it up and looked at it.
It was the portrait of a man. A man dressed in the velvet cap and slashed doublet of the lathe fifteenth century. A maxi about thirty-five or thirty-six years old, lean anti clean shaven. He wore a rich jewelled collar, anti was in the act of putting a ring on the little linger of his right hand. But be was not looking at the ring. He was looking off into space.
Of all the portraits Grant had seen this afternoon this was tilt most individual. It was as if the artist had striven to put on canvas something that his talent was not sufficient to translate into paint. Tilt expression in the eyes - that most arresting and individual expression - had defeated him. So had the mouth: he Had not known how to make lips so thin and so wide look mobile, so the mouth was wooden and a failure. What he had bat succeeded in was in the bone structure of the face: the strong cheekbones, the hollows below them, the chin too large for strength.
Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge?