Yes, those attendant sylphs must have known perfectly well what was coming, for at the first quivering ripple in the tapestry of his chamber, they were off. And then it seemed to Bonaventura that this devil in the wind had begun to cause, not only ructions in the wood-work of the room — for there were groanings and creakings everywhere — but yawning chasms in the floor of life; for gobbets of red-brownishness and globules of brown-reddishness seemed being belched forth from a pre-historic cleft in the original matter of creation itself, as if this protoplasm of all existing things were relieving itself of some obnoxious suppuration due to a primal injury.
Everybody he met in this part of Wessex, as he pursued his obstinate enquiries with regard to what he loved to call the devil-worship of Friar Bacon, had told him about this particular wind that had been felt at this particular spot since the world began; but he had never anticipated that he himself would feel it as powerfully as this. He felt disturbed, not frightened, he hastened to assure himself, but agitated. He found it impossible to walk up and down with his accustomed dignified stride. He gave way to a series of jerky impulsive movements.
Probably he would not have yielded to these nervous debouchings to north and west, to south and east, and then round the world again, if he had not been alone; for it is queer with us mortals how some of us have completely different codes of behaviour for moments in solitude and moments when others, even if it be only one other, are there.
Bonaventura’s relations with God were peculiar to himself; for they were absolutely in the mind, or in the soul, that is to say, in his thoughts. He always took it for granted that God, being a Spirit, took no interest in, and had no effect upon, the movements of his body; unless points of conscience entered, which of course changed everything.
Poor Bonaventura! He hurried headlong down the passage outside his door till it ended in a door that was sealed up, as if it led to a mausoleum of the bones of lost angels. Back again he hurried, till he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the lower floors of the building; at which point he suddenly felt the curious sensation, not amounting to a night-mare-panic but belonging to the same special kind of fantastic horror, that he used to feel when his pious mother told him in his childhood how the Witch of Endor called up the prophet from the grave.
He kept sitting down on his luxurious bed and then walking again down the passage. Had there been any luckless prisoner chained in the cell at the end of that passage, the rustle of that grey robe would have sounded like a new kind of wind from the limbo-cradle of Chaos.
Not for a moment did it enter the mind of Bonaventura that God had forsaken him. What he really felt, if the truth must be told, was that it was a shame and a disgrace that he, the recognized chief saint of all the saints on earth, should have, as his all-powerful and omnipotent deity, a deity who at an important crisis like this was not alive to the necessity of impressing these absurd and childish sons of Belial with the spiritual advantage they were bound to gain from associating with so famous a saint.
Yes, if the actual truth has to be told, it was with real irritation against his Creator that Bonaventura hitched up his grey robe, made the face he always made when he was undertaking something that required a real effort of courage — that is to say, sucked his lower lip into his mouth and tried hard to rumple and fold and curl his curiously malleable lips over his teeth, till these latter resembled broken shells pinched tight within the squeezed-up remnants of a mutilated jelly-fish, and boldly began to descend the narrow winding stone steps that led to the lower stories of the building.
The only balustrade to support a person descending these winding stairs was a ship’s rope fastened to the wall by large bronze rings. Instead of the usual narrow arrow-slits all the way down in the massive outer wall of this descent, there was a foot-wide barred window on every landing, and through these windows came not only the full force of the wind but just now a most curious evening light, that struck the consciousness of this continental traveller as the very incarnation of the wailing of the wind.
It was a wet white light, and it was a white light that had a way of blurring and even of deforming and disfiguring the outlines of the objects it surrounded. Our visitor after a quick glance at the dark oaken doors, which on every landing — and he passed three in his descent — faced these windows, paused for a while on each landing to stare out between the rusty window-bars.
There was something about the white light, as it lifted every object the man looked at out of its own airy ocean and presented it to his vision, as if it were particularly anxious that he should fully take in how it was isolated in its individual identity from all the other objects, each of which, if he would only continue staring through those rusty bars, should in their proper sequence be presented to his attention.
It was from the window of the last of these small landings that he caught sight of what was obviously an enormous oak-tree, by the side of which was standing a large white lamb. Both the tree and the creature by its side were presented to the saintly traveller as if they had been mystical symbols, divided from all other visible objects in this white thick encircling sea of light.
The branches of the oak-tree were creaking in this unusual wind in a peculiarly personal manner, as if they were chanting the syllables of an immemorial incantation that the tree had learnt from the low mound on which it grew, and that the mound had learnt from some unknown angelic power that had been hovering round when that horrible devilish attack had been made upon the mass of formless matter out of which the world arose.
The oak-tree was now trying to persuade the troubled creature at its side to accept the creaking and husky chant of its branches as the true oracular response to such agitated bleating on this wild night. The pleasure which Bonaventura derived from contemplating this ancient tree, and hearing its liturgical chant to its troubled year-old companion, was considerably interfered with by the annoyance he felt at God’s behaviour.
Yes, there was something that scraped and scratched his nerves in the petulant irritation he felt with God for letting this wind disturb everything. It is true that something in him responded to the storm. The creaking branches of that incredibly aged oak, borne on this wild wind that seemed to be carrying some desperate message to every ghost in Britain, did certainly — let us be fair to the man — have its effect on his Italian sensibility. But all the romantic emotion Bonaventura derived from it was spoilt by something vexing, fretting, chafing, ruffling, that came with the thought that God wasn’t protecting his partner in sanctity with the whole-hearted consideration which that partner’s life-long devotion deserved.
And yet, in spite of what he regarded as justifiable annoyance with God, Bonaventura couldn’t resist pressing his head against those rusty bars; and, like many other watchers from stone towers at that epoch — like young Lil-Umbra, for instance, as she watched, not many days ago, the encounter between Ghosta and Lilith — he was rewarded for his instinctive curiosity by a very unexpected event.
This was indeed nothing less than the appearance beside that oak-tree of none other than the bearded Baron Boncor of Cone, mounted on his war-horse, Basileus, and still writhing in pain from Maldung’s arrow stuck fast in his shoulder.
Bonaventura was very rarely driven to action by more than one strong emotion at the same time; and it would have been extremely unlike him to do anything but remain absolutely passive, when the instinct to cry out a warning to the rulers of Lost Towers strove in his breast with an instinct to do something to get that arrow out of Boncor’s shoulder. For to do Bonaventura justice, there was not a speck or grain of sadism in him — that is to say, of delight in cruelty purely for its own sake.