What was it? wondered Patrasche.  He thought it could not be good or natural for the little lad to be so grave, and in his dumb fashion he tried all he could to keep Nello by him in the sunny fields or in the busy market-place.  But to the churches Nello would go:  most often of all would he go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the stones by the iron fragments of Quentin Matsys’s gate, would stretch himself and yawn and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in vain, until the doors closed and the child perforce came forth again, and winding his arms about the dog’s neck would kiss him on his broad, tawny-colored forehead, and murmur always the same words:  “If I could only see them.  Patrasche!—­if I could only see them!”

What were they? pondered Patrasche, looking up with large, wistful, sympathetic eyes.

One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar, he got in for a moment after his little friend and saw.  “They” were two great covered pictures on either side of the choir.

Nello was kneeling, rapt as in an ecstasy, before the altar-picture of the Assumption, and when he noticed Patrasche, and rose and drew the dog gently out into the air, his face was wet with tears, and he looked up at the veiled places as he passed them, and murmured to his companion, “It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just because one is poor and cannot pay!  He never meant that the poor should not see them when he painted them, I am sure.  He would have had us see them any day, every day:  that I am sure.  And they keep them shrouded there,—­shrouded in the dark, the beautiful things!—­and they never feel the light, and no eyes look on them, unless rich people come and pay.  If I could only see them, I would be content to die.”

But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to gain the silver piece that the church exacts as the price for looking on the glories of the Elevation of the Cross and the Descent of the Cross was a thing as utterly beyond the powers of either of them as it would have been to scale the heights of the cathedral spire.  They had never so much as a sou to spare:  if they cleared enough to get a little wood for the stove, a little broth for the pot, it was the utmost they could do.  And yet the heart of the child was set in sore and endless longing upon beholding the greatness of the two veiled Rubens.

The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an absorbing passion for Art.  Going on his ways through the old city in the early days before the sun or the people had risen, Nello, who looked only a little peasant-boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god.  Nello, cold and hungry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes, and the winter winds blowing amongst his curls and lifting his poor thin garments, was in a rapture of meditation, wherein all that he saw was the beautiful fair face of the Mary of the Assumption, with the waves of her golden hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of an eternal sun shining down upon her brow.  Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse which is called Genius.