“Break off, John,” said the Sub-Cantor in an undertone.
“Eh? Gone, have they? I never heard. Hold a minute, Clement.”
The Sub-Cantor waited patiently. He had known John more than a dozen years, coming and going at St. Illod’s, to which monastery John, when abroad, always said he belonged. The claim was gladly allowed for, more even than other Fitz Otho’s, he seemed to carry all the Arts under his hand, and most of their practical receipts under his hood.
The Sub-Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.
“You’ve made her all Jewess,” said the Sub-Cantor, studying the olive-flushed cheek and the eyes charged with foreknowledge.
“What else was Our Lady?” John slipped out the pins. “Listen, Clement. If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes it.” He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.
“Then you’re for Burgos again—as I heard?”
“In two days. The new Cathedral yonder—but they’re slower than the Wrath of God, those masons—is good for the soul.”
“Thy soul?” The Sub-Cantor seemed doubtful.
“Even mine, by your permission. And down south—on the edge of the Conquered Countries—Granada way—there’s some Moorish diaper-work that’s wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the picture—as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.”