These little creatures had been well-suckled that day at noon by their mother; and as a result they crept in a sleepy manner to the mouth of their hole, thinking to themselves that the moment had come for a little independent exploration of the forest; but they felt so satisfied, and so cosy and comfortable, and also so sleepy, that they soon relinquished this desire, and curling themselves up fell into a deeper sleep than they had enjoyed for months.
And it was this happy sleep that was disturbed by the sharply-spurr’d heels of portly little Sir William. These came down on both their little heads, completely separating them from their necks and crushing them together into a pulp of flesh, bones, blood, and bloody hair, against a slab of rock-slate. It was upon this rock-slate thus plastered with a gouache of bones, blood, brains and hair that both the heels of our youthful knight slid awkwardly forward, bringing him down with a mighty crash upon his back-side and extracting from him the sort of indignant and outraged howl against the whole causal sequence of events that had led to this culminating collapse, such as an infant who can run and cry but cannot yet talk naturally utters when brought low.
This event proved to be a turning point in this chaotic skirmish, for it completely brought to an end all further participation of Cone Castle in the confused mêlée. Raymond de Laon, hurrying to pick up the fallen knight, whose howl he knew half-a-mile away, was soon followed by the rest of the Cone party, which was naturally, since it was all happening at the foot of Cone Castle, more numerous than John’s followers from Roque; and the result of this was that the blood-and-dirt-clad bearers of the Brazen Head, still recklessly blundering through the darkness, looking for a rock, or a heap of rocks, where they could smash the Head into smithereens, were only followed with any real obstinate determination by the eccentric couple of Fortress-men who through thick and thin stuck to young John.
John himself was agitated through his whole nature. This was the first time he had found himself engaged in a physical struggle the issue of which, whether bad or good, affected what was the main preoccupation of his life — his devotion to Friar Bacon and his work. The Lost Towers gang were still shouting and jesting and leaping and dancing through the darkness, as they swung the Brazen Head, bound with cords to a couple of poles, from one pair of bearers to another; and every now and then they banged at it with some log of wood they picked up in passing, or with some incongruous piece of culinary iron, that, like John’s own axe on a pole, was in some ways more deadly than an ordinary sword or spear.
They soon had gone so far, and John had had to follow them so fast, that not only was he himself completely puzzled as to the direction in which he was being led, but his two quaint attendants seemed as much at a loss as he was. One of these was a certain red-haired freeman of the manor called Colin Catteract, whose thin body, long shanks and peculiarly malleable physiognomy, instantaneously expressive of every fantasy that came into his head, made him by the destiny of his inmost identity the sort of individual who is born to be a player, a performer, an actor, especially in such a role as a court-clown or king’s jester.
The other was at the extremest opposite pole of human perversity. His name was Ralph Riddel-de-Rie, and he was the best carpenter in Roque, but he had such a habit of using the expression, “clamp ‘em up”—an expression that always suggested to the old ex-bailiff in the armoury the figure of some colossal demiurgic world-carpenter, fitting the Earth and the Moon into the sun’s chariot, before passing on to deal with Orion or the Pleiades — that he’d got the permanent nickname of “Clamp”. He was a short, squat, stumpy man, and was extremely reticent. But when he did utter any opinion, he did so in a portentous tone of grim and final decision.
The present moment however certainly lent itself better to the airy-fairy vivacity of Colin than to the heavy-weather determination of Clamp. These accurst bandits might be in a riotous mood at the moment, but they were skilled in making their way through all the regions of this locality, a locality where the densest thickets or bushes and brakes often led to morasses and pools and reedy swamps, out of which again, in still more surprising contrast, rose grassy slopes and mossy undulations, pillared by tall pines: and they could accomplish this, so completely did they know the whole district, in darkness as well as in the clearest moonlight.
Young John now began to experience real terror. Whither was he being led, he and his friends Colin and Clamp? Were they being decoyed, cunningly and artfully, by this dramatic show-off of a bacchanalian riot, round the utmost outskirts of the Manor of Roque, towards the very brink of the Lost Towers swamp?
It was extremely painful to him to watch that great dim phantasm of a Human Head go bobbing up and down in front of this mad crew; and he began to experience a strange feeling about the Head and a weird fear that It itself — yes! this magical construction of an inventor acting the part of God — might play Satan towards its Creator, and go over to the enemy!
The bandits, after all, weren’t so numerous. There were only about a dozen of them. John had already counted them. And it was clear to him that they were moving much more slowly than at the start. He and his companions had now not the slightest difficulty in keeping up with them. The odd thing was, that though, first one, and then another, among those who were not at the moment helping with the Head, turned round to take a good look at the three men, so obstinately following them, nobody made the faintest attempt to attack them or to stop their pursuit. Could he regard it as possible that they were waiting till they reached some particular spot on the borders of Lost Towers, some spot where they had already arranged that others of their band should await them, possibly under the command of Baron Maldung himself?
John’s uneasiness finally rose to such a pitch over the various terrifying possibilities his mind conjured up that he called his two friends to a halt under a massive pine-tree, and put to them the blunt and drastic question whether the three of them were, or were not, rushing madly into a grievous snare? Agitated though he was John couldn’t help being struck by the quaint contrast his two supporters made as he produced his small box of flint and tinder and put a light to the unlit torch Colin was carrying.
Colin himself had already begun to laugh, as was his habitual custom under all the chances and changes of mortal life. When he laughed, which was a simple and natural return to his normal condition, his childishly excited face, with the straight, pale, yellow hair waving above it, assumed the appearance of a flickering candleflame, of which his thin flexible body was the candlestick or empty bottle, from which protruded the finger of wax which contained the burning wick.
John had grown vaguely aware as they ran, though it was too dark to make out exactly what was happening to this companion of his, that poor Colin had begun to suffer, under the stress of their effort, some queer change in his appearance; and it was a comfort to see him restored once more to his accustomed look of a wildly blown candle in a dark bottle.
The stoical Clamp, on the contrary, turned towards them both in that flickering torch-ray his usual expression of obstinate indifference to all outward circumstance, or, to be more rigidly correct, to everything that occurred, whether it occurred within the mind or outside the mind.
It was clear that what Master Clamp had been destined by nature to be, or had by sheer force of will moulded himself into being, was what you might call a conscious inanimate, a thing made of wood, or of leather, or of baked clay, whose whole outward and inward nature implied submission — submission to whatever it might be, nervously interior or mechanically exterior, that pushed, impelled, flung, thrust, projected, rejected, lowered, elevated, inflamed, inspired, benumbed, froze, petrified it, according to a definite purpose.