Here he paused to observe the effect of his words upon his hearers, and it was clear to Lilith, who by this time had stolen round to the bottom of the table with a long black mantle wrapt hastily round her and was gazing intently at him with quivering lips and ghastly-white cheeks, that he was well-satisfied with the depth, the gulf, the abyss of silence into which his audience had been precipitated. “No,” he proceeded, in a very curious voice, the sort of voice a vulture might use who was holding in its claws, before the hungry beaks of its young, a dying lamb, from whose body, at each gasp of its breath, that is to say from each place where a claw entered its flesh, there ran a stream of blood, “no! no!” he went on, “and I am sure you will all understand exactly what I mean. For a man like this, who knows enough Greek to read the heathen philosophers, and enough Hebrew to pervert and twist the words of Jehovah to Moses, there is only one punishment. What I and God, I mean what God and I, have decided to do with him is to keep him in prison on bread and water, and take all his books and all the paraphernalia he uses in his inventions away from him, and thus compel him to live the life of a real Grey Friar — in other words compel this archdevil to live the life of a saint! His work is an open insult to the Order to which I who speak to you belong. What made him join us then, do you ask? Purely and simply to support himself while he went on with his devilish inventions! His family were ruined. He was without the means of subsistence. And so he became a Franciscan Friar. He must have said to himself: ‘I will go on with the inventions with which I shall eventually destroy both their worship and themselves,’—do you catch the devilry of his idea, beloved friends? — ’And meanwhile I shall live at their expense.’”
No sooner had Bonaventura finished speaking than Lady Lilt and Sir Maldung, as well as Lilith, whose long black mantle now trailed after her as she moved, made a circle round him, all three of them talking excitedly and at the same time.
It was not, however, as may easily be imagined, until after a prolonged and delicious supper at this same table — without the need for any blindfolding, and after a prolonged and undisturbed sleep in that luxurious bed on the top floor, without the need for any attendant sylphs, and without even knowing whether the wind was blowing or not — that the General of the Franciscan Friars, on just the sort of horse he had asked for, and with just the sort of escort he wanted, set out in the morning for the Fortress of Roque.
X THE JEW FROM TARTARY
Peleg took swift decisive measures, precipitate measures they might be called, to ascertain that it really and truly was, without any doubt or question, his true love of that wild night when his life was saved by Sir Mort on those crusader-battled borders between East and West, and when he made that vow of devoted fidelity to him into which he threw at one drastic fling all his Jewish intensity and all his Mongolian strength of will. And though his feeling about her was so absolute that there were moments when it actually rendered him as limp as a bending reed, he was aware at the same time of a strange shyness at the thought of their facing each other.
It was with something of a double motive, therefore, partly in order to put off for a little while longer the actual moment of this overwhelming encounter, and partly to make sure he was doing nothing treacherous to his sworn lord and master, Sir Mort, that well before noon on a fine February day, Peleg set out, when all his domestic tasks were over, to make sure of meeting this eccentric head of the House of Abyssum.
It was the very morning of the unexpected arrival of Bonaventura at the great gates of the Fortress and the morning also of the instantaneous departure, the moment the gate-keeper appeared, of a band of curious riders in ramshackle armour and motley patches of red-brown cloth.
What Peleg did to make sure of catching Sir Mort as he came out of the Fortress — for he knew enough of Lady Valentia’s weakness for distinguished foreigners to be quite certain that her husband, whatever feeling he might have for or against the General of the Franciscan Friars, wouldn’t stay long as a partner to their talk — was to run at full speed across the piece of ground that separated the point at which the big gates were visible from the point at which the postern-entrance was visible, a distance which he could cover in time enough to catch Sir Mort departing from either of the two exits.
He took care to carry with him his mace with the iron spikes round its heavy circular head, for he had vivid memories of certain occasions when Sir Mort was all for carrying him off on a sudden foray and he had to insist on returning for his favourite weapon.
It was outside the postern that he finally caught his man, and the dialogue that followed was eminently characteristic of them both.
“That fellow with the staring eyes is after my John’s friend, Friar Bacon. Holy Jesus, but he’s the devil of a wizard-hunter! Do you know what he wants? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind; though Lady Val thinks I ought to! He wants me to swear to Bog of Bumset that the Pope has told him I must take a few muscular serfs with me and haul the Brazen Head down from Bacon’s cell and lug the confounded thing here; so that here, if you please, here in our own grounds, here in this very strip of forest, the best piece of hunting-ground in the Manor, I can have this curst Brazen Head of his smashed to bits—to bits, mind you, and here, within a bow-shot, here, in less than a bow-shot, of this shrine Tilton’s so keen on building; and very well he’s building it too!
“If I’m a good fighter, Peleg, my Gim-crack Jew, Tilton’s a good designer, a good builder, a good carver, and a good one, I shouldn’t wonder too, at getting rid of smoke and soot. And here’s this staring-eyed fellow, who thinks his grey mantle’s as grand as Caesar’s purple, wants us to hammer to bits in front of my boy’s shrine a wizard-oracle, to whose funeral will come no doubt twenty devils far worse than any Brazen Head, who, when they see Tilton’s shrine to the Mother of God, you can bet your big Tartar soul, they’ll all come huddling into our house, and scenting out quick enough where my bed is, hug each other under it till midnight, and then — No, by God! I’m not going to have any Brazen Head hammered to bits in front of my door!”
Peleg had wisely held his peace during this indignant outburst; but as it went on he discovered that, without having said to himself anything resembling, “Now, my good friend, it’s your business to think out carefully where your interest lies in all this,” he had perceived, in a flash, in a pulse-beat, in the whirl of a swallow’s wings, just what he must say.
“O you are so right, dear my lord!” he murmured, leaning in such a manner upon the handle of his iron mace as not to tower above the man who had saved him and whom he served forever, “and I have just by good chance discovered something that will make it possible, I really do think, for me to be of more real use to you than alas! considering I owe everything to you, I can often be.”
“Aye? What’s that? What are you saying, big man? Have you caught this staring-eyed Pontifex-Cockolorum in flagrante delicto? Have you found him raping our Abbess?”
“May I speak quite freely, my lord?”
“Of course! Don’t we always? I to thee and thou to me’s the tune! So out with it, my Lion of Judah and Behemoth of Karakorum!”
“But, my dear lord, it goes back a long way and concerns my own private life very deeply. It is indeed, if you will allow me to say so, my dear lord, my chief secretum secretorum, and it is only because it was a thing of despair rather than of hope that I kept it to myself.”