“Isn’t it queer to think,” commented Ghosta, “how many historical characters such as we read about in the scriptures, and such as they lecture about in the universities, like Moses and Joshua and like Plato and Socrates and Julius Caesar and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, must have noticed in their colleges and palaces and temples, and especially at crucial moments in their lives, these millions of dancing atoms! What did Socrates feel when these tiny atoms came dancing into his cell while he was waiting for the executioner with the Hemlock?”
“A question indeed, my dear!” echoed the Friar. “And I’d mighty well like to hear how Plato, who was so confoundedly clever at reaching that great teacher’s secret thoughts, and cleverer still at giving them the particular twist that would make them fit into his own ideal system, would describe how the great self-doomed corrupter of youth would have argued with such an one, if some God had endowed one of those motes up there with the power of speech and started it off on a metaphysical protest against the claim of the human race to be the only judge amid the atomic children of the Cosmos!”
“O Father, my dear Father!” cried Ghosta in huge delight. “Do go on imagining what one of those tiny dots of matter would say to Socrates if it did question him!”
“Well! for one thing, my dear child,” rejoined the Friar, and then he stopped abruptly.
Ghosta, who was turning from him to that descending sun-fall of dancing motes, and then back again to him, had a look of reverence on her face as if he’d really been the great magician that most of his enemies and a few of his friends considered him, and as if he might, at any moment, without moving a hand or a foot, give orders to that sun-stream to alter its course, and as if the sun-ray might obey him, and after making a disconcerting circle round their chamber, might hasten to the door, and vanish down the tower-stairs.
But he went on quite calmly. “Don’t you suppose, my dear, that this whole business of being one of the lucky millions of dust-specks, out of the trillions and quadrillions of less lucky ones, must be so exciting to every one of those little objects that the whole of its being would be so absorbed in what is happening to it that it wouldn’t have a particle of power left to ask any question of anybody. Yes, and I would say — and wouldn’t you, my dear girl, say the same? — that if it had any choice left to it, it would feel it was wiser to lavish all its power of response on that lucky moment than to ponder on suitable philosophical questions to put to—”
At this point they were interrupted by shouts and cries outside, by a clatter of feet on the stairs, and by the flinging open of the door. It was young John who now rushed in, followed by Colin and Clamp, and three or four of the Fortress’s most active retainers. John was carrying a broken piece of statuary pressed against his chest; and this he hurriedly flung down on the Friar’s bed in the corner, after a quick nervous glance at the despoiled alcove hard-by where once stood the Brazen Head.
“What on earth is this, Master John?” cried Ghosta, rising to her full height and hurrying to the bed to see what the young man had deposited there. But Friar Bacon remained seated with his pen still between his fingers, and the only special movement he made that Clamp and Colin, who were both observing him closely, were able to discern, was that he began to draw some sort of Euclidian figure at the bottom of the parchment in front of him, and that this Euclidian figure was an equal-sided square surrounded by a circle.
“Father! Father!” murmured Ghosta a moment later, “do, for Heaven’s sake, look at this!” and, shaking off young John, who tried to hold her back, and advancing straight to the Friar’s chair, from the side opposite to where Clamp had already begun to watch with mute and fascinated absorption the movements of the Friar’s pen, she thrust under Roger Bacon’s eyes what clearly was the broken half of a female head, elaborately chiselled out of a block of very hard stone.
But a torrent of verbal eloquence, like the sound of a breaking wave to the splashing tune of which the Friar studied what Ghosta thrust beneath his eyes, was uttered by the excitable Colin, and accompanied by such lavish gesticulation that it was like being addressed by one of those flocks of winged angels speaking with one voice, such as in religious altar-pieces often form the flying chariot of God the Father as it descends from Heaven.
“The General of the Franciscan Order, this thrice-accurst Bonaventura,” cried Colin making his voice resound through every portion of the chamber, and it was as if the quivering sun-ray, which had removed itself altogether, had suddenly returned in a new incarnation of pure sound, “has now with the help of those ruffians from Lost Towers, whom he swears he has converted, and at the command of the Pope, whom he swears he represents, begun meddling with Master Tilton’s statue of Our Lady in that shrine he’s building!
“And do you know what this false saint has done now? He has started a shocking and wicked rumour, entirely a lie, of course, but you know how these lies spread — that Master John’s sister and his brother Tilton have been found guilty of incest! And — as if that wasn’t enough! — do you know what further lie he’s invented? He swears that our Master Tilton, heir to the Manor of Roque and to the Fortress Castle, which his mother’s family have held since the days of King Stephen, has an even greater sin on his conscience than incest with his sister! For — says this pretty saint, who behaves far worse than Judas — our Master Tilton has committed the supreme sacrilegious sin, of carving the face of Our Lady in the centre of this shrine so that she shall resemble his sister with whom he has sinned!”
“Has Bonaventura really had the gall, John my friend, to go to such lengths as this man says?”
The Friar’s voice was as steady, and his manner as quiet and collected, as if he were referring to no more than a point of propriety in some public, metaphysical debate; but Ghosta noticed that he made a slight motion of his hand as if to wave back a little both Colin and Clamp and the two or three armed men who accompanied them.
“Yes, Master, across my heart and on my life,” replied John. “That’s what he’s done! My mother is so upset that she has shut herself up with my sister and won’t allow her to go riding with Raymond de Laon, as the two of them had arranged to do today, for fear that this wretched Bonaventura, with his Lost Towers troop, might kidnap her or imprison her, or even carry her with him in a ship to Rome, as he has already done with other ladies who have been accused of various offences of the same sort.
“As for my father, he refuses to take the thing seriously. He says that Tilton ought to be hunting wild boars in the forest instead of building shrines with his own hands and using Lil-Umbra as his model for the Mother of God. But I notice that he has remained at home since the trouble started, and that he’s set a guard outside the shrine, to make sure that this mock-saint doesn’t excite his cohort of ‘converted’ robbers to destroy the whole shrine and ruin Tilton’s hard work on it for nearly a year!
“What drove me to come, most honoured Friar, to make a special appeal to you, was the fact that I chanced to hear” —young John flushed a little as he announced this, revealing the fact that he had not been able to resist the temptation to listen at his parents’ door—“to hear my father tell my mother that if they attacked the shrine again, or came anywhere near the postern-gate again, he would arm all our people, both serfs and freemen, and make such an attack on that damned Lost Towers as would settle them for ever and a day! You see, most reverend Friar, this man undoubtedly was at one time the Pope’s emissary or legate or ambassador or whatever the proper legal name is — round here they use a word for him that’s too bawdy to repeat — and no doubt at that time when he had the proper seals of office he might have been able to carry off Lil-Umbra, and Tilton too, to Rome and accuse them there. But as it is, with no official credentials from the Pope, and with no proper royal support from our sick King, I don’t believe he can do very much to hurt us, except start rumours and spread lies.”