With these words he flung his left arm round his obsessed girl, administered to Cheiron’s flank a friendly tap with the knuckle of the hand from which the great mace was swinging, gave Cheiron’s master an affable nod, and muttering something in Hebrew, that might have meant, as far as Spardo could follow it, “Goodbye till we meet in Hell!” he strode off with the lady on his left and the mace on his right.
Whether to their eventual advantage or disadvantage, it is curious that no instinct warned Peleg just then that the worst possible moment for winning the favour of the Lady of Roque was during the particular hour she was accustomed to move to and fro between the manorial kitchen and the dining hall, with occasional interruptions from Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery, and intermittent debouchings up and down the steps leading to her daughter’s chamber. If it hadn’t been that his nerves were so strung-up by his possession of Ghosta that all life’s ordinary routine seemed projected to a distance, rather like that unknown vision upon which Cheiron’s gaze seemed to be fixed, he would certainly have realized this fact.
Indeed it may easily be that he did realize it, only not with sufficient intensity to allow it to influence his action. In any case, with a massive recklessness that was a deep element in his nature, though it was a rare event for him to draw upon it, Peleg led Ghosta to the great gate of the Fortress, where as a quite natural event the gate-keeper admitted them without even glancing up at his wife’s window to see if their entrance aroused her more shrewd attention.
Once inside the Fortress, the worthy Cortex straightway escorted them, without stopping to obtain the mediation of any of the servants, to the familiar corridor between the dining-hall and the kitchen, where at this hour Lady Val was almost always to be found. And there indeed they found her. And if we are to assume — though at these mysterious and fatal moments in human lives, where so many paths into the unknown future seem to offer themselves, it is a doubtful wisdom to assume anything — that happy relations between Sir Mort’s lady and Peleg’s lady was a desirable occurrence, it was unlucky that neither Nurse Rampant nor old mother Guggery happened to be present at this encounter; for both these women had the gift, refined upon by age-long practice, of softening and modifying the impact upon the touchy and susceptible Lady Val, of any troublesome intruder.
The Tartar giant saw in a moment how completely his attempt to establish a happy understanding between these two women was doomed to absolute failure. But it was too late to retreat now; and so he blundered on.
“Pardon my intrusion, my lady, but this is an old friend of mine who comes from that so much fought-over strip of land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where so many of your own renowned ancestors won their glory. I have already told my friend here many of those heroic stories that your revered children love to relate. Your son Tilton, for instance, has often told us about that amazing encounter between your great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Dormaquil, and that monstrous Tartar with three arms who fought with six sharp-pointed elephants’ tusks, one in each of his six hands; and who, after being chopped into sixteen pieces by your noble ancestor, was carried off to the top of Mount Carmel by eagles, and there was so completely disposed of that not a bone of his own nor the splinter of his ivory weapons was ever seen again. My friend here, my Lady, has thought of nothing else, since I told her about Sir Stephen and the other Dormaquils, and she begged me to bring her here just to see, if only for a moment, the living descendant of such heroic people.”
Peleg was so pleased with the whole situation, so proud of himself in Ghosta’s presence for his tactful speech, and so proud of himself in Lady Val’s presence for making it so easy for Ghosta to keep a discreet silence, that Sir Mort would have thought him pathetically childish not to have detected what was going on, all the while he was speaking, between the two women.
But then Sir Mort knew the mother of his three children better than the wisest of his henchmen could possibly know the lady of his house. Besides, Peleg was not only a foreigner and an oriental; he was also a giant, and looking down upon that pair of feminine brows and eyebrows, each of them quivering with implacable hostility, he was so impervious to the wordless, and you might almost say to the mindless, aura of antagonism, automatically generated between them, that he stept backwards as if to avoid a blow at the tone in Lady Val’s voice as she remarked to Ghosta:
“You want employment here, I take it? Are you prepared to do any kind of work? Or do you want something special? We’ve no opening just now for a new hand indoors, but it’s quite possible, if you apply to our bailiff, Master Randolph Sygerius, that he’ll be able to find you work in the garden. We depend a lot on green food and we gather it all the year round; so if you—”
“I happen to be quite satisfied with what I’m doing in the Convent just at present, Lady, I thank you. Indeed so far I’ve never been driven to work out-of-doors, but if ever—”
“Where, if I may enquire,” interrupted Lady Val, her voice growing shrill, “were you brought up? My family here have given work I know, in past times, to black females. In fact if I remember correctly, my grandfather’s bailiff employed a family of Ethiopians. Of course this particular family may have been the slaves of some trader who died over here when he was selling leopards’ skins; but if you wait in the scullery till after dinner, you’ll be able, or Peleg here will be able on your behalf, to catch Master Randy, our present bailiff. Do you help, may I ask, in the Convent latrine? I remember there was—”
“My lady, my lady—” broke in Peleg at this point. “My friend here is a learned Jewess, who has worked with Doctors and with Rabbis of our ancient faith, copying, for instance, with pencils and brushes certain faded pages in the Hebrew scriptures. And so, no doubt, though the Convent kitchen must already have come to depend on her delicate touch with their food, we can hardly expect—”
“Be quiet, Peleg!” almost screamed Lady Val. “Since you brought this woman here to stare at me with her bold, black, impertinent eyes, perhaps you’ll tell me whether she wants to be allowed to prepare for me some of those Jewish spells with her pencils and her brushes, such as I can use on my enemies in this place? If so, you can tell her that, though she may have bewitched you and some of those simple nuns, who in such things are no wiser than children, I won’t have her bewitching me or my young daughter! But take her into the scullery, Peleg, and find a corner there for her till after dinner and then take her back to the convent. I don’t want any Jewish sorceress in my house or garden or kitchen! And what’s more—” This was added, when, without any other retort, Ghosta had wrapt her mantle more tightly round her shoulders and pulled her hood more closely round her face and had turned her dark eyes with a mute interrogation towards Peleg—“And what’s more,” announced Lady Val, “I shall have to have a very serious talk with Sir Mort about this whole subject of your making friends with women of this kind. But let that go now.”
This “let that go” was uttered in the confident tone of a person for whom victory in a battle implies the power to be generous.
“You must tell Cook, Peleg,” she went on, “to give your friend what supper she has time to scrape together while she’s dishing up dinner. I can see she hasn’t been taught in her childhood, and hasn’t had an opportunity to learn since, how a well-brought-up maiden, of any race in the world, behaves when she enters anyone’s house; but I’m sure she didn’t mean to be rude, just standing there and staring. I don’t know anything about Pharisees and Sadducees, and not much about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; but I do know that because Queen Jezabel worshipped idols, she was thrown out of a window to be eaten by dogs. So you can, both of you, see that I am not quite ignorant of the Hebrew scriptures—”