And when he had mastered some difficult combination of ornament, he would clap his hands in self-congratulation. Brother Parphenas so enjoyed the solitude and calm of night that he had learned to work by lamp-light. He used to say that the colours took on unexpected shades, and that the yellow light did no harm to drawings in the realm of pure fancy.
In his narrow cell Parphenas lighted the earthen lamp and placed it on a plank, among his little flasks, fine brushes, and colour-boxes of vermilion, silver, and liquid gold. He crossed himself cautiously, dipped his brush, and began to paint the outspread tails of two peacocks above a frontispiece. The golden peacocks, on a green field, were drinking at a streamlet of turquoise, with raised beaks and outstretched necks. Other rolls of parchment lay by him, unfinished. His world was a supernatural and charming world. Bordering the text of the page ran an embroidery of fabulous creations; a faery architecture of fantastic trees and animals. Parphenas thought of nothing while he created these things, but a happy serenity transformed his face. Hellas, Assyria, Persia, the Indies, Byzantium idealised, and the troubled vision of future worlds, of all peoples, and of all ages; these mingled in the paradise of the monk, and shone, with a glitter as of jewels, round the initial letters of the holy books.
This one represented the Baptism. St. John was pouring water on the head of Christ, and at his elbow the Pagan god of rivers was amiably tilting a water-jar, while the former proprietor of the bank (that is to say, the Devil) held a towel in readiness to offer the Saviour after the ceremony.
Brother Parphenas in his innocence had no fear of the old gods. They used to amuse him. He regarded them as long ago converted to Christianity. He never failed to place the god of mountains, in the shape of a naked youth, on the summit of every hill. When he was drawing the passage of the Red Sea, a woman holding an oar symbolised the Sea, and a naked man, inscribed Bodos, stood for the Abyss engulfing Pharaoh, while on the bank sat a melancholy woman, in a tan-coloured tunic, denoting the Desert.
Here, there, and everywhere, in the curve of a horse's neck, the fold of a robe, the simple pose of a god lying on his elbow, were evidences of antique grace and simplicity.
But on this night his "play" interested the artist no more. His tireless fingers were shaky, and the smile had left his lips.
Listening awhile, he opened a cedar-wood box, took out an awl used in the binding of books, crossed himself, and shielding the ruddy flame of the lamp with his hand, noiselessly issued from his cell. It was hot in the silent corridor. No sound was heard but the buzzing of a fly taken in a spider's web.
Parphenas went down to the church, which was lighted by a single lamp, placed before the old ivory-carved diptych. Two large sapphires in the aureole of Jesus, who was sitting on the Virgin's arm, had been carried off by the Pagans, and transferred to their original setting in the Temple of Dionysus. These black hollows in the yellow ivory were to Parphenas wounds in some living body.
"No, I cannot bear it," he murmured, kissing the hand of the Infant Jesus. "I cannot bear it; 'twould be better to die!"
These sacrilegious marks in the ivory tortured and angered him more than outrage on a human being.