Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [322]
But it was when he returned to work the next day that Osmund suffered worse.
As he made his way through the city gates, he heard the utters as he passed; when he arrived in the cathedral close, he noticed that the priests gave him contemptuous looks. Once in the cathedral itself, though he tried not to look into their faces, he knew that the masons were smirking, and as he reached his workbench, he saw the tall figure of Bartholomew standing nearby, grinning broadly. He pretended not to notice; but he felt himself blushing, and more than once during the morning he thought – or did he imagine it? – that he heard voices near him whispering the name Cristina.
The hours passed and mercifully he was left alone, but although he tried to concentrate, it was impossible not to think about his misery, and by the end of the morning he was in a black depression.
“Truly,” he thought, “I am being punished for my sins.”
The same thing happened the next day and the next. After four days he realised with disgust that he had achieved almost nothing at his work.
It was five days after the incident that by chance Osmund saw the girl again. This time, their encounter was not planned; she did not even know that he had seen her.
It happened just outside the city, when the mason was returning home at the end of the day. As he passed the old castle, he suddenly caught sight of her on the little lane that led down to the valley bottom. To his surprise he saw that she was not alone, but walking demurely hand in hand with a boy. Involuntarily he stopped and stared down at them. He knew the boy; he was young John, the son of the merchant William atte Brigge. Neither of the young people realised they were being watched. Half way down the lane they paused, and kissed.
He watched, transfixed.
But then, to his own surprise, Osmund the Mason found that he did not care. He felt no anger, no jealousy, hardly even lust. He shrugged. She’s out of my life now, he told himself.
But she was not. Despite the fact that he had come to hate Cristina, despite his misery, the haunting vision of a naked girl with cascading golden hair would still suddenly rise before him in his degradation, sending an unwanted spasm of lust through his body that left him shaking and despising himself more than ever. When, a week later, he reached his workbench and looked at the pitiful results of the previous days’ work, he fell on his knees and cried in despair: “Lord have mercy on me: you have cast me down and I am sunk in sin.”
He remembered the words of the priest, spoken to him so many years before and he moaned: “Truly, Lord, I am less, far less, even than the dust.” Was there to be no respite from this terrible malady? As he considered the matter and it seemed to him that there was not, he felt the hot tears spring to his eyes. “Lord, I am unworthy to serve you,” he murmured. “Let me die.”
It was now, at this final crisis of his humiliation, that his eyes happened to turn to the unfinished scene of the creation of Adam and Eve. And hardly thinking about what he was doing, without any hope that he would be able to make anything of the task he had given up so many times before, he began sadly to carve the little figure of Adam. As he did so, he gradually became aware that he was giving it his own squat body, with its large head and short legs. Not only that, the manly little fellow he was depicting, half solemn and half eager before his God, was an all too accurate representation of his own character, stripped so naked that for a moment he paused in embarrassment. But then he shrugged. He had already been as humiliated as it was possible to be; he had no further dignity to lose, and to his own surprise, he found the almost comic little figure rather engaging. There was something, he realised, rather touching in the little man’s naked pretension as he stared solemnly past God