with these words Cardinal Salviati broke the silence that followed upon the Spanish Ambassador’s story. “I, too, can tell a tale which may somehow illuminate our theme.”As ever he spoke slowly and gently, and as ever the sweetness and authority of his voice captured the circle round him. He sat leaned back in his deep chair, so that his face with the ugly scar was in shadow. But his two hands, the beauty of which the great painter Camuccini has immortalized in his Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, rested on the arms of the chair, in the light of the candelabra, and from time to time, in an almost imperceptible movement, accompanied the modulations of his speech.“I myself,” he continued, “have not been in a position to follow from beginning to end the happenings which I shall have the honor of relating to you. But I am as firmly convinced of their veracity as if they had been part of my own experience. For they were told me by the friend of my childhood, Father Jacopo Parmecianino, who was the most honest and candid human being I have ever known.
