Elyas, indeed, showed no signs of his past sickness, and as the leech, when Prothasy spoke to him, assured her that malignant influences no longer threatened, she was greatly comforted. He said himself that his memory failed, but no one else saw any unusual signs of this not uncommon complaint, and there was little doubt that he would be elected its master by the guild, which some two hundred years later was to stretch itself so far as to incorporate together “Carpenters, Masons, Joiners, and Glaziers and Painters.”
There was no such excitement on Candlemas Day as there had been five months before, for nothing hung on the uncovering of Hugh’s carving beyond learning whether his second work would equal the promise of his first, and this to the outer world meant little. To his own little world, and to the bishop, it meant much. The fame of his first work had come through difficulties and by a roundabout fashion; in this that he had now completed no one could either rightly or wrongly claim a part. When therefore, after the Hours, the bishop and a few of his clergy entered the choir, they found a knot of guild officers there, and all Gervase’s household, together with Hamlyn’s wife and daughters, and a few workmen who had not cared to keep holiday.
“No greenwood for thee, Hugh, to-day,” Elyas had said, and the young man was there himself, looking gravely content, and not, as Mistress Hamlyn expressed it, in the least puffed with pride.
At a sign from the bishop, he mounted the ladder and drew off the wrapping cloths.
Much had been seen during the carving, but now for the first time the work was beheld in its full beauty, and from the group there went up an irrepressible murmur of admiration.
It was a group of figures. At the top Our Lord and His Mother in glory; below, a single figure of Saint Cecilia drawing music from an instrument shaped something like a lute, but played with a bow; over her head, inclined gently to the left, a little angel hovered. The grace and sweetness of her attitude, the fall of the draperies, the delicacy of the workmanship, raised the beholders into enthusiasm, and though the corbel was not so prominent as the others, something in the angle in which it was seen, and the manner in which it stood out against the outer nave, added to the effect of beauty.
Hugh had modestly stood aside while the examination went on, but Joan had stolen to him and slipped her hand in his, and now Elyas turned and embraced him.
“Hugh,” he said, “I am proud to count thee as my son.”
Wat was there, too, absolutely beaming with delight, and seizing Hugh’s hand as if he would wring it off.
“Said I not, said I not,”—he began, and then, “no one can say aught against thy work now; but, Hugh—”