She came to his rescue. “I bought another at the same time,” she said. “‘The Last Communion of St. Jerome,’ by—who is it? I forget.”
“Ah, you mean Domenichino’s ‘St. Jerome’?” The Complete Man was afloat again. “Poussin’s favourite picture. Mine too, very nearly. I’d like to see that.”
“It’s in my room, I’m afraid. But if you don’t mind.”
He bowed. “If you don’t.”
She smiled graciously to him and got up. “This way,” she said, and opened the door.
“It’s a lovely picture,” Gumbril went on, loquaciously now, behind her, as they walked down the dark corridor. “And besides, I have a sentimental attachment to it. There used to be a copy of an engraving of it at home, when I was a child. And I remember wondering and wondering—oh, it went on for years—every time I saw the picture; wondering why on earth that old bishop (for I did know it was a bishop) should be handing the naked old man a five-shilling piece.”
She opened a door; they were in her very pink room. Grave in its solemn and subtly harmonious beauty, the picture hung over the mantelpiece, hung there, among the photographs of the little friends of her own age, like some strange object from another world. From within that chipped gilt frame all the beauty, all the grandeur of religion looked darkly out upon the pink room. The little friends of her own age, all deliciously nubile, sweetly smiled, turned up their eyes, clasped Persian cats or stood jauntily, feet apart, hand in the breeches pocket of the land-girl’s uniform; the pink roses on the wallpaper, the pink and white curtains, the pink bed, the strawberry-coloured carpet, filled all the air with the rosy reflections of nakedness and life.
And utterly remote, absorbed in their grave, solemn ecstasy, the robed and mitred priest held out, the dying saint yearningly received, the body of the Son of God. The ministrants looked gravely on, the little angels looped in the air above a gravely triumphant festoon, the lion slept at the saint’s feet, and through the arch beyond, the eye travelled out over a quiet country of dark trees and hills.
“There it is,” she waved towards the mantelpiece.
But Gumbril had taken it all in long ago. “You see what I mean by the five-shilling piece.” And stepping up to the picture, he pointed to the round bright wafer which the priest holds in his hand and whose averted disk is like the essential sun at the centre of the picture’s harmonious universe. “Those were the days of five-shilling pieces,” he went on. “You’re probably too young to remember those large, lovely things. They came my way occasionally, and consecrated wafers didn’t. So you can understand how much the picture puzzled me. A bishop giving a naked old man five shillings in a church, with angels fluttering overhead, and a lion sleeping in the foreground. It was obscure, it was horribly obscure.” He turned away from the picture and confronted his hostess, who was standing a little way behind him smiling enigmatically and invitingly.