“And a good thing too!” hissed Lady Ulanda, rising to her feet and confronting her husband’s young friend across the outer edge of a picture of a terrifying sea, whose waves were breaking on the shores of what that primeval map called “the Land of Cathay,” and on whose breaking waves a monster was riding, whose head resembled the head of a colossal lizard and its rear end the tail of a gigantic dolphin.
“Forgive her, Raymond!” murmured the Baron gently. “The poor old girl had a bit of a shock a day or two ago.” Something in the tone of his voice induced Ulanda to resume her seat; though those ominous rings on her fingers jangled remorselessly still against the table’s edge.
“May I tell him about your visit to the Friar?” enquired the Baron; and added hurriedly: “I think I ought to tell him, you know, because then he’ll realize better our whole feeling about the Friar and his confounded Brazen Oracle.”
Ulanda’s reply to this question was only a bowing of her head still lower over her knees. But her husband firmly, though very gently, went on. “Yes, she went to see this Bacon fellow to ask him to help her in preparing some of those ointments for which our present-day ladies have such a mania — the sort of ointment, you know, that that queer tinker or whatever he is, who rides a horse with a swelling in its neck like the head of a man, is always trying to sell and swearing too — I’ve often heard him at it! — that it’s what they used in Babylon when the whale swallowed Jonah.
“And how do you suppose this modern Simon Magus received our lady! No! I’ll tell him, my precious. Don’t you interrupt! You can correct me later. He burst into a fit of fury and acted to Ulanda with unpardonable discourtesy — Forgive me, Raymond! It’s only my shoulder. I didn’t draw back from your hand — lean against the back of my neck. I don’t get the ghost of a twinge there! He’s not really a good bowman, our Lost Towers rogue: and I don’t myself think he’s much of a catch for Satan. I mean I don’t think he’s half as corrupt or half as clever as his wife and daughter. What do you say, my dear, on that nice point?”
But Ulanda who had flung herself back in her chair, her knuckles white with the intensity with which she clutched the carved lionheads at its elbow, took no notice of this amiable request.
“Tell him at once,” she ejaculated, spitting out the words in a low hoarse voice, and with as complete disregard for the presence of Raymond as if what she said had to pass no further than from one organic portion of her own person to another, “tell him at once,” and it was as if the gall within her addressed itself to the midriff within her, “that it matters nothing to us by whose hand this accurst wizard is unfrocked and sent begging, as long as it is done, and all his fabrications pounded into dust! Tell him to say to Bonaventura that when the job is completed, we hope to welcome him here and do all we can to help him in his hunt for other traffickers with the Devil!”
It was difficult for Raymond to get the precise expression on that curly-bearded face, as Boncor, while slowly rising from his chair, turned towards him.
What increased the young man’s uncertainty on this point was the fact that the act of rising caused a spasm of pain to pass through Boncor’s wounded shoulder, and this, though largely concealed by his beard, for pain affects the mouths of certain types of men more than their eyes or foreheads, did perceptibly obscure the intimately direct look which the Baron fixed upon his friend.
“I shall go downstairs with him at once, my dear, and deal with these Red-Brown Tunics from the Towers, and have a word with Turgo. You may depend on it, my treasure, that all your rightful dignity, and all your natural lady-like feelings will be considered to the uttermost in the arrangements your old adorer makes; so don’t worry! Keep the fire up and get out some wine by the time we come up again! And have a sip yourself for a while! We shan’t be as long as, O I know so well how long you’re now imagining we’ll be! You’ll see. Thanks, Raymond.”
And all that Ulanda could now hear were the double thuddings of their feet, her husband’s considerably heavier than his friend’s, as the two men tramped down the turret stairs.
Ulanda sat still, seeing nothing but the living heart of the fire in front of her, and hearing nothing but the dark, deep, dead silence that surrounded the crackling of those burning sticks. Her thoughts were much less desperate than Raymond could possibly have imagined, as he accompanied her husband into the reception chamber on the ground floor below. To be alone always suited her; and though she knew well at the bottom of her heart that her husband would never, in spite of his encouraging words, really see to it that her longed-for revenge on Roger Bacon would be brought about, she was able, now that she was no more actually in the presence of this friendship she hated so much, to treat the whole matter, and her own feelings about it, with something approaching a philosophic mind.
And the most powerful of all the divinities with whom it is our destiny to get more acquainted the older we grow — namely, that frivolous, merciless, apparently irresponsible goddess, whose name is Tyche or Chance — did not refuse at this crisis in her life to give the passionate Ulanda the breathing-space to which any sort of humane judicial authority would have taken for granted she was entitled; for there sounded now a quite different step upon the turret stairs, a step the familiar vibration of which in place of making her sit up and prepare for action made her relax with an ineffable sense of relief.
“O Mabbernob! Do you know what has just happened to me? And for the first time too in all the days of my life? And it wasn’t because I’m a real knight either, and knighted by the King himself! You’ll never guess, Mabbernob darling, what it was! But try a moment: O do try a moment to guess, before I sit down!”
An affectionately friendly and a comfortably appreciative smile spread softly over Ulanda’s whole personality. She felt — she always felt in this manner — just exactly as when, after a second’s submerging under the waters of unconsciousness, she had first beheld this only offspring of her love for the Lord of Cone lying beside her. It had not been very long before she found herself translating a constantly repeated sequence of babyish babblement into the word “Mabbernob,” by which the little creature was designating the womb from which it came and the paps that fed it.
“Well, well,” she now replied, in an affectionately jocular tone, “Honey-Pot holy, Honey-Pot mighty, Honey-Pot washed and dressed, tell Mabbernob the whole story!”
The young knight stalked solemnly to Ulanda’s side of the big table, placed the back of a hand clutching a pair of gauntlets against his left hip, tightened his bare fingers about the handle of his sword, and tilted his chin in the air. “It was,” he announced, “as I went into the ante-room just now. There were half-a-dozen fellows there, all trick’d out in that funny red-brown stuff they wear at the Towers, stuff that when you see it at close quarters is all made of rags, rags patched together you know, like the clots and clouts of wandering beggars on the Icen Way: and what must they do the moment they saw me standing there, but rush forward, kneel down before me, stretch out their arms towards me, and cry in the sort of voice — do you remember, Mabbernob? — in which those play-acting masqueraders who came from Sicily cried, when they acted Sabine prisoners begging to have back their wives!
“But what these poor devils cried was — but do tell me this, Mabbernob, before I go on; has Father been hunting over there and catching these wretches for sport instead of badgers and foxes? — what, I say, they cried was: