“What do you mean,” she said, “by saying a hood is symbolical?”
“Have you never looked through an archway?” asked Herne, “and seen the landscape beyond as bright as a lost paradise? That is because there is a frame to the picture. . . . You are cut off from something and allowed to look at something. When will people understand that the world is a window and not a blank infinity; a window in a wall of infinite nothing? When I wear this hood I carry my window with me. I say to myself–this is the world that Francis of Assisi saw and loved because it was limited. The hood has the very shape of a Gothic window.”
Olive looked over her shoulder at John Braintree and said: “Do you remember what poor Monkey said? . . . No, it was just before you came.”
“Before I came?” asked Braintree in a momentary doubt.
“Before you first came here,” she answered colouring and looking again at the landscape. “He said he would have to look through a leper’s window.”
“A very typical medieval window, I should think,” said Braintree rather sourly.
The face of the man in medieval masquerade suddenly flamed as at a challenge to battle.
“Will you show me a King,” he cried, “a modern reigning King, by the grace of God, who will go and handle lepers in a hospital as St. Louis did?”
“I am not very likely,” said Braintree grimly, “to pay such a tribute to reigning Kings.”
“Or a popular leader either,” insisted the other. “St. Francis was a popular leader. If you saw a leper walking across this lawn, would you rush at him and embrace him?”