What he would really have liked to do, secretly, quietly, unheard of by the people of the place, was to slip out of the house, extract that arrow from the man’s shoulder, and command him, in the name of the Pope, to gallop off.
What he now saw however reduced both instinctive impulses to nothing; and he just watched, in petrified fascination. For the bearded man suddenly leapt from the saddle and advanced between the trunk of the oak and the bleating young motherless sheep with the obvious intention of caressing it, if it allowed him to approach. But above the creaking of the oak’s branches and the disconsolate moaning of the wind rose that lamb’s cry, as it bounded off with its heavy tail swinging between its legs.
But at that very second the movement forward of the bearded Lord of Cone brought the arrow in his shoulder close to the mouth of his war-horse, who promptly, quietly, neatly and expeditiously seized it with his teeth, and plucking it forth with one quick backward jerk of his head, bit it in half and let it fall against the roots of the tree, from which position both its bloody point and its agitated feathers were whirled away on the wind towards the reeds of the swamp.
It was clear that the loss of blood following the arrow’s extraction left the genial Lord of Cone too weak to remount his saviour, for even with his arm round the animal’s neck when he tried to lead it away, he kept tottering so unsteadily that finally he evidently resolved to take very daring measures, for he lengthened the horse’s bridle by tying to it the long leather strap he was in the habit of using to tether him, so that he could eat grass or anything else he fancied while he was left alone, and proceeded to fasten these elongated reins round his own waist. Then shouting to the animal a brief and clear command in a familiar phrase well known to them both — a phrase that suggested hastening straight home to stable and straw and a well-filled bin — he folded his cloak about him and rolled over on his stomach with both arms outspread and his head thrown back.
Over the soft forest-grass, that was a special kind of grass and as delicate and tenuous as a mermaid’s hair, and over the brown floor of the pine-needles Basileus now dragged his master, and did this so effectively that it wasn’t very long before Bonaventura’s eyes could follow them no further. Then and only then and not till then, he left the window, and calmly descending the remaining flight of stairs, directed his steps to where the sounds and smells and wavering lights and shadows made the locality of the supper-chamber discoverable.
He was clearly expected, although nobody had suggested waiting for him. But he was no sooner within the dining-hall than agitation upon agitation shook him. Why hadn’t these people sent somebody to fetch him, to accompany him into this dining-hall, to tell him where he was supposed to sit? They had waited on him, bathed him, anointed him, and then just left him to find his way alone to his seat at this important meal! That wasn’t the way to treat a person who, in the depth of his noble, heroic, spiritual, intellectual, and absolutely unique nature, was struggling at this very moment with the Greatest Temptation possible to a Great Man — namely whether to decide at this turning-point in his life to aim at acquiring the appearance of possessing the sort of statesmanlike sagacity which a man must appear to have if he is to be elected Pope, or simply to go on, as he was doing at present, emphasizing the unusual perfection of his spiritual purity as a real saint.
Something about the vision of the horse Basileus, pulling the arrow from the shoulder of that fair-bearded man and dragging him as if he’d been a load of hay over both brown earth and green earth, remained vivid in Bonaventura’s mind. He had the uncomfortable sensation that his own fate was being pulled along by a Power over which he himself had only partial control.
And yet he kept telling himself that this feeling could not possibly represent the truth. No one in the whole world, he kept telling himself, had as close and intimate a relation with God as he had. Of that he was absolutely certain. It was his life, his destiny, his whole being! It was what made Bonaventura to be Bonaventura; and all the world knew it!
Nobody who had ever lived understood God and the Will of God as thoroughly as he did I Nobody who had ever lived, except Jesus Christ — and of course you couldn’t bring Him into such a calculation — talked to God as he did, and was talked to by God as he was. There could be no question; there could be no doubt about it. He and God understood each other in and out, up and down, body and soul, back and front!
As he moved slowly round that great square table with patient dignity and unflagging self-respect, he told himself that he and God must consider more carefully than they had done before, whether it would be better for the world if the cardinals in conclave decided, when the present Pope died, to elect him as his successor, or better for the world that they should nominate that one among them that he, Bonaventura, decided possessed the cleverest and the most practical brain.
“O God, my beloved companion,” he prayed desperately, as his staring eyes caught sight of a red stain on the edge of the table where Lady Lilt was seated, “I implore you to give me the power tonight, so to impress this evil woman and this evil man and this evil daughter, that it is resounded all over Christendom from the Thames to the Danube that Saint Bonaventura has snatched Lost Towers out of the jaws of Hell!”
It was then that he noticed that there was a large empty throne near where Baron Maldung was sitting, made of the sort of wood and of the sort of woven fabric covering the wood that lent themselves best to receiving the red-brown dye, and that next to this throne Lilith was resting, her entrancing white thighs exposed in such a manner that a man seated in that chair would naturally and inevitably, as he poured out his wine, rest his free hand upon one of those perfect limbs and lightly slide his caressing fingers between it and its mate.
He also noticed that the young girl herself was looking intently at him as he advanced towards where she sat. The air must have been full of strangely contradictory currents of thought as the saintly man approached that empty throne; for the intensity of these airy battles caused a deep hush to fall upon that whole assembly of revellers.
It was at this point that Bonaventura commanded in a clear voice one of the attendants to tie a white napkin securely round his eyes, “Lest I should forget for a moment before you all,” he said aloud, “the vows of purity I have made.”
The motives that led him to this move were subtler than he could himself have explained; but to one among them, had his conscience prodded him, he would have shamelessly confessed — namely, a fear that it might be supposed he was so hungry and so greedy that the nakedness of Lilith was no temptation to him at all, in fact that he didn’t give her presence a thought. He even went so far as to repeat these words about his vow of purity as he allowed himself, still in the same dead silence, and taking exaggerated precautions not to stumble over any obstacle in the way, to be helped to reach his throne, and to be aided in seating himself there in close proximity to Lilith.
When, however, his hand fell, as fate beyond all human control compelled it to fall, upon that soft bare thigh, a shock of unmitigated lust so overpowered him as to change every plan he had made. Lust quivered through him with a compulsion so convulsive as to drive him into unexpected action. With something like a savage bound he leapt to his feet.
“I must beg you all,” he cried in a hoarse voice, a voice that was almost like an animal’s growl, “to — to pardon me”: and then in a second, while they all stared at him in amazement, he had recovered his self-possession.