‘I was saying that before the end of the year I went to Bury to strengthen the lead-work in the great Abbey east window there.’
‘Now that’s just one of the things I’ve never done. But I mind there was a cheap excursion to Chichester in Eighteen hundred Seventy-nine, an’ I went an’ watched ’em leading a won’erful fine window in Chichester Cathedral. I stayed watchin’ till ’twas time for us to go back. Dunno as I had two drinks p’raps, all that day.’
Hal smiled. ‘At Bury then, sure enough, I met my enemy Benedetto. He had painted a picture in plaster on the south wall of the Refectory—a noble place for a noble thing—a picture of Jonah.’
‘Ah! Jonah an’ his whale. I’ve never been as fur as Bury. You’ve worked about a lot,’ said Mr. Springett, with his eyes on the carter below.
‘No. Not the whale. This was a picture of Jonah and the pompion that withered. But all that Benedetto had shown was a peevish greybeard huggled up in angle-edged drapery beneath a pompion on a wooden trellis. This last, being a dead thing, he’d drawn it as ’twere to the life. But fierce old Jonah, bared in the sun, angry even to death that his cold prophecy was disproven—Jonah, ashamed, and already hearing the children of Nineveh running to mock him—ah, that was what Benedetto had not drawn!’
‘He better ha’ stuck to his whale, then,’ said Mr. Springett.
‘He’d ha’ done no better with that. He draws the damp cloth off the picture, an’ shows it to me. I was a craftsman too, d’ye see?
‘“’Tis good,” I said, “but it goes no deeper than the plaster."
‘“What?” he said in a whisper.
‘“Be thy own judge, Benedetto,” I answered. “Does it go deeper than the plaster?"