The Portrait's Gaze
肖像の視線
By the second morning I had grown bold enough to draw the sheets from the paintings in the long .
Most were landscapes, competent and forgettable, the sort of pictures bought by the yard rather than chosen.
But at the end of the room hung a that looked as if it had been waiting for the cloth to fall.
She was a young woman in a dark green , seated, her hands folded with a stillness that felt .
The painter had given her eyes an attention so precise that they appeared to follow me across the floor.
I moved to the left, and she watched me; I moved to the right, and still she watched.
I know the trick, of course, the way a well-painted pursues the viewer through simple geometry.
Knowing it, however, did nothing to lessen the sensation of being studied by someone patient and .
There was no name on the frame, only a date, and the date belonged to the century before last.
That afternoon I found, in a drawer of the housekeeper's room, a diary bound in cracked black leather.
The hand was small and hurried, as though the writer had feared being caught in the act of remembering.
Most entries recorded the ordinary weather of a servant's life, wages and washing and the price of candles.
Then, near the middle, the tone changed, and the writing pressed harder into the page.
The mistress, it said, would sit for hours before her own , speaking to it in a low voice.
She had died in that very room, the diary noted, in the green chair, facing the painted version of herself.
I closed the book with the particular care one uses for things one would rather not have opened.
When I returned to the , the chair beneath the was the same green as the .
I had not noticed it before, or had chosen, in some quiet corner of myself, not to notice.
It is a strange thing to feel watched by paint, and stranger still to feel it might be .
I told myself that a diary is only one person's account, coloured by and the long winter dark.
Yet I could not explain why the painted eyes seemed kinder now that I knew her story.
, perhaps, changes what we are able to see, softening the outlines of what once frightened us.
I sat in the green chair, which I had sworn to myself I would not do, and I looked up.
From that seat the no longer watched me; it seemed, instead, to be watching for someone else.
Whoever she waited for had not come in a hundred years, and might, I feared, be expected still.
That night I dreamed of folded hands, and woke to find my own arranged in exactly the same way.