"Perhaps you know the picture."
"No," I replied. "This is the first time that ever I came hither."
He took me forthwith to the wonderful frescoes of Le Sœur, and, walking quickly along them, stopped at length before the most horrid and ghastly picture that ever I set my eyes on. It was the picture of a dead man who spoke at his burial, and painted with such cunning suggestion and power that, gazing at it, I felt a veritable fear invade me. It was not merely that his face expressed all the horror, the impotent rage, the pain of his damnation, but there was also conveyed by the subtlest skill a certain consciousness in the sufferer that he received no more than his merits. It was as though you looked at a hypocrite, who knew that his hypocrisy was discovered.
"Well, what think you of it?" asked my companion. "It does credit to the painter's craftsmanship;" and his voice startled me, for, in my contemplation of the picture, I had clean forgotten his presence. The painting was indeed so vivid that it had raised up alert and active within my breast a thought which I had up till now, though not without effort, kept resolutely aloof from me.
"But yet more to his imagination," I replied perfunctorily, and moved away. Lord Bolingbroke followed me, and we quitted the monastery, and walked for some way in silence.
I had no mind for talk, and doubtless showed my disinclination, for my companion, though now and again he would glance at me with an air of curiosity, refrained from questions. To speak the truth, I was fulfilled—nay, I overbrimmed with shame. The picture lived before my eyes, receding in front of me through the streets of Paris. It seemed to complete and illustrate the rebuke which the rector had addressed to me that morning; it pointed a scornful commentary at my musings on the glory of arms. For the figure in the picture cried "hypocrite," and cried the word at me; and so insistently did the recollection of it besiege me that I came near to thinking it no finished painting limned upon the wall, and fixed so until such time as the colours should fade, but rather a living scene. I began almost to expect that the figures would change their order and disposition, that the dead man speaking would swerve from his attitude, and, as he spoke, and spoke "hypocrite," would reach out a bony and menacing finger towards me. So far had my fancies carried me when my kinsman touched me on the arm.
"It is as you say, Lawrence," he said, as though there had been no interval of silence since my last words—"it is the imagination, not the craftsmanship, which fixes the attention. It is the idea of a dead man speaking—no matter what he speaks."
There was a certain significance in his tone which I did not comprehend.
I stopped in the street.
"You were anxious to show me the picture," I said.