Read Online Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier - Free Book Online Page A

to see, and him looking at me all the while, made me feel faint.
    But he was my master. I was meant to do as he said.
    I pressed my lips together, then stepped up to the box, to the end where the lid had been lifted. I bent over and looked in at the square of milky glass fixed inside. There was a faint drawing of something on it.
    He draped his robe gently over my head so that it blocked out all light. It was still warm from him, and smelled of the way brick feels when it has been baked by the sun. I placed my hands on the table to steady myself and closed my eyes for a moment. I felt as if I had drunk my evening beer too quickly.
    “What do you see?” I heard him say.
    I opened my eyes and saw the painting, without the woman in it.
    “Oh!” I stood up so suddenly that the robe dropped from my head to the floor. I stepped back from the box, treading on the cloth.
    I moved my foot. “I’m sorry, sir. I will wash the robe this morning.”
    “Never mind about the robe, Griet. What did you see?”
    I swallowed. I was terribly confused, and a little frightened. What was in the box was a trick of the devil, or something Catholic I did not understand. “I saw the painting, sir. Except that the woman wasn’t in it, and it was smaller. And things were—switched around.”
    “Yes, the image is projected upside down, and left and right are reversed. There are mirrors that can fix that.”
    I did not understand what he was saying.
    “But—”
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t understand, sir. How did it get there?”
    He picked up the robe and brushed it off. He was smiling. When he smiled his face was like an open window.
    “Do you see this?” He pointed to the round object at the end of the smaller box. “This is called a lens. It is made of a piece of glass cut in a certain way. When light from that scene”—he pointed to the corner—“goes through it and into the box it projects the image so that we can see it here.” He tapped the cloudy glass.
    I was staring at him so hard, trying to understand, that my eyes began to water.
    “What is an image, sir? It is not a word I know.”
    Something changed in his face, as if he had been looking over my shoulder but now was looking at me. “It is a picture, like a painting.”
    I nodded. More than anything I wanted him to think I could follow what he said.
    “Your eyes are very wide,” he said then.
    I blushed. “So I have been told, sir.”
    “Do you want to look again?”
    I did not, but I knew I could not say so. I thought for a moment. “I will look again, sir, but only if I am left alone.”
    He looked surprised, then amused. “All right,” he said. He handed me his robe. “I’ll return in a few minutes, and tap on the door before I enter.”
    He left, closing the door behind him. I grasped his robe, my hands shaking.
    For a moment I thought of simply pretending to look, and saying that I had. But he would know I was lying.
    And I was curious. It became easier to consider it without him watching me. I took a deep breath and gazed down into the box. I could see on the glass a faint trace of the scene in the corner. As I brought the robe over my head the image, as he called it, became clearer and clearer—the table, the chairs, the yellow curtain in the corner, the back wall with the map hanging on it, the ceramic pot gleaming on the table, the pewter basin, the powder-brush, the letter. They were all there, assembled before my eyes on a flat surface, a painting that was not a painting. I cautiously touched the glass—it was smooth and cold, with no traces of paint on it. I removed the robe and the image went faint again, though it was still there. I put the robe over me once more, closing out the light, and watched the jeweled colors appear again. They seemed to be even brighter and more colorful on the glass than they were in the corner.
    It became as hard to stop looking into the box as it had been to take my eyes from the painting of the woman with the