The youngest of all the knights on whom the aged and ailing son of the brother of Richard Coeur-de-Lion had bestowed the accolade shut his open mouth, half-closed his roving eyes, and frowned. He was evidently thinking hard: not pretending to think, but really thinking.
Then, with an upward leap of his whole slender little person and a metallic tinkling of the hilt of his dagger against the hilt of his sword as his excitable hands rushed to his belt, Sir William Boncor exclaimed eagerly: “Yes! oh yes! I heard him say once, when someone was talking about the Day of Judgment and the Last Day: ‘In my Philosophy,’ he said, ‘there is no Day of Judgment nor any Last Day. There is only Now. We are born. We grow up: we have children: we die. And then the next generation is born; grows up; and dies. That’s my Philosophy as to the way things go.”
Sir William’s flickering little frame subsided upon its heels with a gasp of ineffable self-satisfaction. The confident smile of generations of just men condemning a crazy aberration broadened upon his triumphant face. With a faint shrug of his shoulders he seemed to be saying to every doubting devil in the universe, “I am righteous, I am!” It was at this well-timed moment that the wily Mogol took advantage of the long, half-amused, half-puzzled, but by no means disarmed look, that Lady Val fixed upon the self-satisfied young knight, and without asking permission, or letting his companion make the slightest parting obeisance, took Ghosta’s arm and led her out of that vortex of crazy foam by the way they had entered it.
“Mother thinks,” Sir William began again, “that you don’t realize half of what Raymond puts into Lil-Umbra’s head. Mother even told father yesterday, when she was angry with him because he wouldn’t shave off his beard, that Raymond will soon be dressing up Lil-Umbra in boy’s clothes and taking her with him to Paris.”
The unction with which this youngest of all the newly-dubbed knights at the court of the doting old man, who had reigned longer than any living monarch in Christendom, let these words fall upon Lady Val’s tense nerves, was like the squeezing of a gobbet of spikenard upon an itching skin. As the ointment oozed forth upon the inflamed place, the fever behind it was driven in, not drawn out.
Lady Val’s whole face twitched and her fingers clasped and unclasped the brooch at her waist. And then, as she gazed at this tricked-out image of youthful conceit, who was talking to her about the vindictiveness — and didn’t she know intricacies of that underground stream well enough! — of her rival at Cone, there suddenly whirled up within her the blindest and most desperate wave of emotion she had ever felt in her life.
Her own mind, as it grew aware of what she felt, interpreted it as pure unmitigated and entirely justifiable indignation with Lady Ulanda of Cone, but in reality it was far more complicated. It was compounded of an intense revolt against the way fate had been treating her of late, mingled with a wild longing that her children’s Dormaquil blood might suddenly assert itself and turn the whole tide of events in a completely new direction. Under the pressure of this surge of emotion, in the flood of which so many long pent-up feelings were breaking loose, she felt as though at any moment she might easily do something unexpectedly violent. It was an emotion too general, as well as too blind, to be fully interpreted by the simple definition “hatred of Lady Ulanda”, but as the thing uncoiled itself from the deepest centre of her being she began to be afraid of what she might do.
Lady Val had very rarely been as conscious of her personal inner life as she was at this moment. The sudden loosening within her of this long dammed up reservoir of suppressed fury forced the torrent of emotion into a psychic channel that so far had been left high and dry. She very rarely thought of herself at all when she was angry with Sir Mort or with Tilton or John; and in Lil-Umbra’s case she was so used to associating her daughter’s personality with her own that, when she got angry with her, it was like her right hand getting angry with her left hand.
Anger with Lil-Umbra was indeed a unique feeling, too deep-rooted to be easily articulated. But what she felt at this particular moment was a wild identification of herself with the very substance of the great house in which she lived. She felt as if she herself were the Fortress of Roque, and that every stone, every carving, every buttress, every arrow-slit, every stair, every tower, every wall, every rafter, every gate, every door, every threshold to every door, of this whole old place was calling out from within herself to herself, and reminding her that they and she together were a living part and portion of the diffused presence of the spirits of all her ancestors.
She suddenly felt that the whole place, which was herself and yet much more than herself, was being threatened by her and her children with a ghastly doom, a doom irretrievable, inescapable, and final. She told herself that it was she and none other who had brought this doom upon them all; and that she had done it by yielding to her love for Sir Mort and letting him be the father of her children.
As with most of us at some desperate climax of our lives, the wild passion of anger, which had driven this tragic awareness into an inner chamber of her consciousness, changed its own nature when it had achieved this end. It was a strange sadness that now filled Lady Val’s soul, as she thought of this fatal name “Abyssum” drifting and floating and flowing across every surface and through every crevice and crack of the massive stones whereof the Fortress of Roque was built.
“He is too queer, too eccentric, too remote from real life,” she told herself, “to be able to save this place and to guard our name from oblivion.”
It was as if the agitated lady’s soul had been whirling round the outside of the Fortress as violently as it had whirled round the inside, for it happened at that moment that a single dead alder-leaf, stirred up from the bank of a small stream in the direction of Cone Castle, and wafted through one of the arrow-slit windows in some higher portion of the Fortress, came floating down to the floor of that ante-room.
Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest; and it rested on the ground almost mid-way between the comically pretentious young knight and the desperately agitated lady of the house. Whether either of them noticed this wrinkled symbol of the passing generations, as it fell between them, neither of them later would have been able to say. Very likely they both did, but without any reaction capable of being recalled.
Situations like this, when two human beings are brought together by fate, one of them in a state of feverish mental activity and the other in a state of complacent quiescence, one of them with nerves quivering and senses vibrant, and the other with both nerves and senses lulled into a trance of self-satisfaction, have the effect sometimes of putting very queer thoughts into the mind of one or other of the pair.
What came into the head of Lady Val at that moment was a fantastic theory of her husband’s about which he was in the habit of expatiating at great length and upon the most inopportune occasions. Sir Mort’s theory was — and though he would swear to her and to the children that it was based on his own experience, she never could see, however excited he got about it, that it was possible for one man’s experience to cover such an immense field — that there was what he was pleased to describe as an invisible Dimension that existed over the whole surface of land and sea; and that into this Dimension rushed all the thoughts and feelings and passions and even sensations of everything that was subject to these things.