"You do?" cried the duchess, in the most charmingly friendly way. "Where is it, pray? Tell me quickly, I beg, my dear Marmagne?"
"In the head of the statue of Mars, which Benvenuto has modelled in the garden of the Grand-Nesle."
IX
MARS AND VENUS
The reader will doubtless have guessed the truth, no less accurately than Marmagne, strange as it may have appeared at first glance. The head of the colossus was Colombe's place of retreat. Mars furnished apartments for Venus, as Jacques Aubry said. For the second time Benvenuto gave his handiwork a part to play in his life, summoned the artist to the assistance of the man, and embodied his fate in his statues as well as his thought and his genius. He had on an earlier occasion concealed his means of escape in one of his figures; he was now concealing Colombe's freedom and Ascanio's happiness in another.
But, having reached this point in our narrative, it becomes necessary for greater clearness to retrace our steps a moment.
When Cellini finished the story of Stefana, there was a brief pause. Benvenuto saw, among the phantoms which stood out vividly in his painful, obtrusive memories of the past, the melancholy, but serene features of Stefana, twenty years dead. Ascanio, with head bent forward, was trying to recall the pale face of the woman who had leaned over his cradle and often awoke him in his infancy, while the tears fell from her sad eyes upon his chubby cheeks. Colombe was gazing with deep emotion at Benvenuto, whom another woman, young and pure like herself, had loved so dearly: at that moment his voice seemed to her almost as soft as Ascanio's, and between the two, both of whom loved her devotedly, she felt instinctively that she was as safe as a child could be upon its mother's knee.
Benvenuto was the first to break the silence.
"Well!" he said, "will Colombe trust herself to the man to whom Stefana intrusted Ascanio?"
"You are my father, he my brother," replied Colombe, giving a hand to each of them with modest grace and dignity, "and I place myself blindly in your hands to keep me for my husband."