“Thank God for that at least,” said Anne of Norton, the always ailing woman who followed the Abbot with her sunk eyes. “And be sure I shall treasure this,” she touched the beads, “as long as I shall live.”
“I brought—trusted—it to you for that,” he replied, and took leave. When she told the Abbot how she had come by it, he said nothing, but as he and Thomas were storing the drugs that John handed over in the cell which backs on to the hospital kitchen-chimney, he observed, of a cake of dried poppy-juice: “This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body.”
“I have seen it,” said John.
“But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.”
“That is coming to me, too,” was the answer.
John spent the next fair May day out in the woods with the monastery swineherd and all the porkers; and returned loaded with flowers and sprays of spring, to his own carefully kept place in the north bay of the Scriptorium. There with his travelling sketch-books under his left elbow, he sunk himself past all recollections in his Great Luke.
Brother Martin, Senior Copyist (who spoke about once a fortnight) ventured to ask, later, how the work was going.
“All here!” John tapped his forehead with his pencil. “It has been only waiting these months to—ah God!—be born. Are ye free of your plain-copying, Martin?”
Brother Martin nodded. It was his pride that John of Burgos turned to him, in spite of his seventy years, for really good page-work.
“Then see!” John laid out a new vellum—thin but flawless. “There’s no better than this sheet from here to Paris. Yes! Smell it if you choose. Wherefore—give me the compasses and I’ll set it out for you—if ye make one letter lighter or darker than its next, I’ll stick ye like a pig.”