From his childhood he had heard tales of this ancestress of his, her beauty, her pride and her pitiful end, and now in his death throes the idea took hold of him that he was giving up his life in some mysterious way for this dead woman’s living sake, and that this cry from above actually came from Matilda Gaulter.
Thus as the pressure of that broken, broad-headed, rusty knife just below the apple of his throat made his life-blood spurt forth from beneath his chin till it drenched his distorted and desperate face, the dying youth felt absolutely convinced that he really was, in these death-gasps and under these spouts of blood, sacrificing his life for this old ancestress of his who had been so horribly wronged.
Black gulfs of death might swallow up his body and threaten his soul, but the fairy-tale Great-Granny of all the years of his life was saved forever!
XIII THE BRAZEN HEAD
Ralph Gaulter was the only one who, in this irresponsible three-cornered hurly-burly, lost his life. Others were wounded in the confusion but none of them mortally; while in the struggle of young John and his couple of henchmen with the red-brown bandits from Lost Towers it soon became clear that it was this latter group — tipsy though half of them were, and wildly excited though all of them were — who were destined to win; though when they had carried the Brazen Head away into the forest, and so well out of reach of all possible rescue or recovery, that Bonaventura himself felt justified in returning to the Priory, young John and his two companions obstinately pursued them.
Bonaventura evidently felt sure that when his red-brown allies had grown a little more sober they would finish the job and pound the Head to pieces. What really saved this unparalleled invention from destruction was not the protective magic, whether we call it “black” or “white”, of its creator. It was something, though it is impossible to say exactly what, in the Head itself, just as if by some inexplicable chance the creative energy in the Friar had overreached its proper scientific limits, and had created a being capable, not only of personifying its own identity, but of escaping altogether from the control of its creator.
By the power of his immense sacerdotal reputation over the whole of Europe, Bonaventura had finally managed so to convince the Prior that he had some special mandate from the Holy Father at Rome, that he was actually permitted to lead his bodyguard of reckless devils into the Friar’s chamber. Here he had made them open the sacred alcove and wrench from its recess and carry downstairs the imperturbable Head.
With the person of Bacon himself he could not meddle, for the Prior of Bumset was alone responsible for his official prisoner; but it was a startling as well as a bewildering surprise to him when the Friar made not the very faintest attempt to resist this sacrilegious and autocratic invasion of his chamber, but from an absolutely calm and wholly preoccupied absorption in what he was writing at his table, simply looked up once or twice, neither smiling nor frowning, but treating the whole incident as if the General of the Order and his piratical allies were so many negligible mice.
Of what happened later, when Bonaventura, leaving the destruction of the Brazen Head to his reckless allies, had honoured and delighted the Prior by consenting to share that epicurean ecclesiastic’s evening meal and to sleep that night under the priory roof, neither the Baron of Cone nor his over-wrought lady could ever get a clear or consecutive account.
It was obviously due to the commonsense and tact — yes! and no less to the courage — of Raymond de Laon that young Sir William was spared any grievous shock, whether to his person, or to his “amour propre,” or to his reputation, in the confused mêlée that accompanied the triumphant departure of the excited bandits of Lost Towers, carrying with them into the depth of the forest the Brazen Head.
They were not as numerous as they seemed to be, nor half as formidable, and they were so proud of being given “carte blanche” to be the violent executioners of the will and purpose of the Pope of Rome that they couldn’t resist shouting and dancing in a wild orgy of excitement round the mysterious object they were carrying.
Many of them waved spears and javelins. Others brandished two-edged swords. A few carried torches, and some had bows and arrows with which they just amused themselves, shooting blindly into the pine-trees above their heads, as if to dislodge any living creature who might be there, whether bird or bat or squirrel or wild-cat, anything in fact that might be up there and could be hit by a random shot. It took four of them to bear the weight of the Brazen Head, which they had fastened with ropes to a couple of fir-poles, and which in the thick grey darkness looked like the head of some colossal decapitated giant whom they had caught asleep.
The confused henchmen of Baron Boncor, who were much better armed, but at the same time much less certain of the reason of their arming, or of the cause of the turmoil, than any other of the groups involved, were endeavouring, in a thinly-dispersed, widely-scattered circle, to enclose the wild men of Lost Towers till they could be assaulted from every side at once and compelled to surrender their animate-inanimate spoil. The formation of this mobile circle had been the plan of Raymond de Laon and it would have been a very good plan if the course of events had followed any sort of rational order. But at that time of night and with no less than three Baronies, each acting like the troop of a separate dominion, events were badly diverted from their logical cause-and-effect sequence.
De Laon himself, armed with a long straight sword, and with a small round shield almost exactly like some of the shields depicted on certain ancient vase-paintings, kept running at full speed round this extended circle, exhorting its human figures to draw in as steadily and resolutely as possible round this dancing and shouting crew of excited bandits.
Young John of the Fortress, who hadn’t been left for long without full information of what was happening in regard to the greatest of all the inventions of his admired instructor, had soon appeared on the scene with a rather eccentric couple of Roque-Manor adherents ready to follow their leader anywhere, but really rather out for adventure than for any particular cause or principle; and all John did was to lead them blindly forward, straight towards the bandits who were carrying the Brazen Head, the appearance of which made the lad think, the moment he caught sight of it under the flickering torches, of the description in the Jewish Scriptures of the “Ark of the Covenant” containing the spiritual presence of Jehovah.
So well had all the Fortress people been trained by their lord and lady to keep an eye on Tilton and John and Lil-Umbra, while they let these young people feel they were completely free to act as they pleased, that the nearer young John — who had no weapon but a peculiar kind of axe fastened to a long pole, a weapon he had invented for himself— approached this thing of mystery, the more closely was he hedged in by two free-men of the Manor of Roque, who were both equally eccentric, but who could at a pinch hoist John upon their shoulders and make off with him.
All might have gone well for the friends and liberators of the Brazen Head; and the madly chanting bandits of Lost Towers might have been put to headlong flight, leaving their projected victim, free from even a single hammer-blow, staring up at his rescuers in divine detachment from his bed upon the silvery-grey ground-lichen, had it not been for one of those annoying accidents that we love to call “ironical”, because by the use of this classic word we endow the antics of acrobatic chance with a conscious flightiness that takes away the shame of our human frustration and defeat.
What actually happened was that at the very moment when young John and his supporters came near to advancing point-blank upon the ruffians who carried the Bronze Head, Sir William Boncor, the youngest belted knight of the longest-reigning monarch in the world, stumbled over a hole in the earth containing the offspring, a male and a female, of the common badger.