But, before he had finished, the look of pitiful exhaustion on the ex-bailiff’s face forced him to interrupt himself.
“Here, master,” he murmured, “sit down on this, and lean your back against this!” And lugging off the sheep’s wool neck-cloth that he had been wearing all that night, he laid it on the ground under the nearest tree-trunk and helped the old man to sit down.
Ghosta at once bent over him, while Colin and Clamp moved off. “Where — is — the — the — the Head?” murmured the old man anxiously, turning his own head this way and that.
Ghosta took the torch from John and ran to Peleg’s side; and John noticed that the first thing she whispered to the giant must have had to do with the arrow-wounds he’d received, for the giant promptly uncovered the places and held the light for her while she examined them.
“So all’s well?” John heard him utter in an interrogative whisper; and it was clear to him that the reply was reassuring.
As soon as she came back, still holding the torch, she asked the old man whether he wanted Peleg to bring the Brazen Head near to him, so that he could examine it. John could see that this bold question at once excited and troubled the ex-bailiff, for, snatching at Ghosta’s robe, he pulled her towards him till she sank on one knee, the torch held at arm’s length above her head.
After a second’s hesitation the old man began a rather bewildering and long-winded rigmarole about something he wanted to ask John. With considerable difficulty, but with more tact than he knew he possessed, John now listened to an agitated and complicated account of a conversation the ex-bailiff of Roque had had earlier in the month with John’s sister, Lil-Umbra.
The old gentleman seemed to have been deeply impressed not only by Lil-Umbra’s beauty but by her intelligence; and, as far as her young brother could make out from what he now heard, there had come a moment in the conversation when some mysterious presence, a presence whose nature neither of them really comprehended, seemed to come between them and to hover over them.
The old man had got it lodged in his head — John could see as much as that — that there was some magic bond, or some fatal link, between this mysterious Brazen Head of Friar Bacon’s invention and a beautiful young woman; and John himself was anxious to learn whether his own vague sense of something weird and unusual, and something that he couldn’t describe as either good or evil, either angelic or devilish, had been felt by Lil-Umbra also.
Old Heber’s hope was that Lil-Umbra may have talked to John about it; as he knew she was in the habit of discussing religious matters with both her brothers. The truth really was that Lil-Umbra’s nerves were so strung-up, and her heart was in such a state of tension, as to whether Raymond de Laon would or would not come to the armoury that night, that the whole subject of Friar Bacon and his Brazen Head passed her by very lightly indeed.
But now to the complete surprise of both the young man and the old man, and somewhat to the displeasure of Peleg, who by this time was towering above the three of them, and was by no means indifferent to this thing they were discussing, Ghosta broke in. “What was wanted,” she said quietly, “to the completion of Friar Bacon’s creation I was myself ready to supply; and at the request of the Friar, I did supply it.”
The sound of Peleg’s voice above their heads had a queerly hoarse note in it at this moment. “The best thing we can do tonight,” he said slowly, “is to carry the Head out of this forest and into the Fortress; and I would suggest that we straightway convey it into the armoury where it will remain under the particular protection of our friend here. I believe”—and at this point the giant laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder—“that your Father, Master John, will have no objection when he learns of this having been done. I don’t think our conveying the Head into the armoury need disturb anybody’s night’s rest. In fact I can make certain that it doesn’t by carrying it there myself, while Ghosta helps you, master bailiff.
“No one can have heard you leave or they’d have come with you. No one but yourself, I expect — isn’t that the case, master bailiff? — heard the noise those wretched Lost Towers men were making; and as you came out you couldn’t possibly have barred the door. The whole Fortress is no doubt asleep at this moment; and we shall take care to move so silently that we shan’t disturb a living soul in the place. I’ll be glad enough to have a rest and a lie-down myself; but I’m not so done-in as not to be able to take this old Brazen Head into our armoury! Once there, I warrant nobody will dare to meddle with it. It’ll soon become a regular shrine, and as sacred as Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin.”
While her giant was addressing them above their heads, Ghosta and the old man, who still had his back against the tree and John’s woollen neck-cloth under his buttocks, were exchanging some extremely curious thoughts. No scrupulous chronicler of human affairs can help being aware out of the instinctive observation of the narrating mind, of the weird manner in which, amid any group of agitated people, when one voice has been monopolizing everybody’s attention for several minutes, a hollow gulf of silence is created, across which all manner of disturbing thoughts pass from one person to another.
John himself at this moment, in his corner of this psychic gulf created by Peleg’s somewhat dictatorial and irritable monologue, felt so utterly tired, after all the energy he had spent that night, that his mind, in its exhausted state, like the mind of a person who stares vacantly at his bed-posts, began vaguely to wonder whether in this silence around them and with this hoarse voice sounding above their heads, other feelings than human ones, might be in the act of being exchanged, feelings for instance of the mosses, of the ferns, of the tree-roots even, that surrounded them on that forest-floor.
Such vegetation-feelings, John pondered, might be entangling themselves with his own human feelings at this very moment; for after all it was this group of trees and bushes which he had known since his infancy, and which, from what he had seen daily of them out of that postern-door of his birthplace, had become like the fireguard in his nursery, a malleable background to every story he told himself in his day-dreams at noon and to every story he was told by his night-dreams at midnight; and it would be only natural if, on its side, the background of roots and mosses and ferns and lichens and ivy and blades of grass projected obscure invisible sensations, which flitted in and out of his human ones.
But what was this? There was something else. Yes, there was something else at this moment, something that was intruding itself between the furtive and fitful feelings of mosses and roots and ferns and his own weightier cogitations.
“What the hell,” he groaned, “is this confounded thing that has now come into my head?” It was certainly in accordance with the multifarious influences that flit about in our life-stream, like shadowy tadpoles beneath thin ice, that it should have been what the Brazen Head itself was thinking — those thoughts, not of a God-created man, but of a man-created machine, which now butted in, like a misty cloud in the shape of the Minotaur, between the vegetation-feelings of that forest recess and the ideas, whatever they were, that were being exchanged between Ghosta and the old man with his back against the tree.