A universal murmur, in such low tones among themselves as almost to convey the impression that, having been thus commended for stirring up the Friar’s mind, they were seized with the fear of so disturbing it by their lively discussion that the effect on his Opus Major would be destructive of the good they had already done, was the immediate result of this grateful appeal to their courtesy. Then without another word, and headed by Colin and Clamp, and followed by Ghosta and young John, they gave a series of quaint little good-night salutations and descended the stairs.
XV VISITOR FROM PICARDY
Friar Bacon was left standing alone in that topmost chamber of Bumset Priory. He still held the handle-end, so to speak, of the pen he had been using when he rose to return their valedictory gestures; and now automatically began moving it to and fro, as if the talk-charged air of that recently crowded room were itself the parchment upon which it was his destiny to hand down to posterity his ideas and his discoveries. Strange and far-reaching were the thoughts that passed through his head.
“Here am I,” he told himself, “one of the curious animals produced upon this planet that have come to be called men, and are now confronted by the necessity of recording for the benefit of future specimens of such creatures, what were the actual causes of our appearance upon this particular promontory of matter.”
The Friar at this point ceased inditing invisible words upon the invisible air, and, after deliberately replacing his pen upon the table by the side of his unfinished parchment page, crossed over to his bed and stretched himself out on his back upon it, with his head on the pillow, and clasped his shins with his hands.
“Little did I think,” he pondered, “what I should be doing in three years that night when Fontancourt showed me the letter he’d just had from our friend Petrus! Didn’t Fontancourt swear to me that Petrus would never stop studying magnetism or writing about his studies? Three years ago that was! O God, O God! what things have happened since then and are still happening!
“Why didn’t I tell those fellows just now before they went away that it was Peter Peregrinus, and not their old Roger, who first thought of using a lodestone to draw like to like; and that if it hadn’t been for that divine inspiration of his I could never have invented my Brazen Head? How we damnable inventors do love to hug our inventions and get drunk on the glory of them! And now I must needs defend my precious discoveries by setting this Dominican wolf upon our Franciscan fox!”
At this point the Friar let his thin legs sink down side by side on his bed, and lifting his clasped hands as high above his head as they could reach began murmuring — not in Latin, far less in Hebrew, but in the Wessex dialect of his native Ilchester — a homely and natural prayer: “O Everlasting God, who lookest down from far outside all this curst universe of matter which thou hast created”—and here he couldn’t resist using, with a wry touch of the incorrigible humour which not only characterized all his intercourse with others, but displayed itself even in his secretest thoughts about himself, and about the whole confused arena of contemporary speculation, as a little private joke between God and himself, the quaint, precise, technical, academic and metaphysical phrase for “outside our whole system of things”, namely the phrase “ab exstrinsico”, which, as he now muttered it aloud with a sort of chuckle in that slowly darkening room, would have had a queer effect upon any eavesdropper—“and ab exstrinsico save me!”
But after making this appeal to the Mystery at the back of all life, Roger Bacon closed his eyes with such a peaceful sigh that it was clear that he himself felt perfectly satisfied with his little private interview with his creator.
The Friar’s descent, or ascent shall we say, into the blessed land of oblivion, now gently and deliciously invaded by the feathered dreams of sleep, was soon disturbed however by a resolutely firm and yet cautiously light knocking at the door, a knocking which did not wake him at first, but mingled with his dreams, and mingled with them in such a curiously prophetic manner that he became vividly aware, even before he awoke, of the personality of the intruder, who was none other than his faithful friend and devoted adherent of a great many years, his servant Miles.
Miles and he had indeed been young men when their association first began, and Miles always absolutely refused to be known by any other name than this Roman word for a soldier. Miles came from the old Roman town of Durnovaria, a town which the people of Wessex had already begun to call Dorchester, just as the older name of Friar Roger’s own ancient market-town had recently come to be changed into Ilchester.
Yes! His waking dream had not misled him. There, in the fading, late-afternoon twilight, when he went to the door and opened it, standing erect on the threshold, was his friend, his man, his devoted under-study, his partner, his disciple, his obedient slave, his servitor, his alter ego, Miles of Dorchester!
“Master!” cried Miles in an ecstasy of joy; and flinging his hawk-feather cap into the middle of the room, he fell upon his knees, clasped the Friar tightly round the waist, and pressed his forehead hard against his hero’s navel.
“There, there, there!” murmured this latter reassuringly and tenderly, and very much in the tone with which a responsive dog-lover would soothe a majestic, over-emotional, over-sensitive wolf-hound; and as he spoke he raised Miles to his feet, led him across the floor incidentally picking up the man’s hawk-feather cap and handing it to him as they went, and seating him in the chair recently occupied by Ghosta, sat down opposite to him and laid his two clasped fists upon his page with the air of one who has decided to substitute some different form of urgent pressure for the one associated with pens and parchment.
One remarkable peculiarity of the man Miles was the way his countenance altered in a moment from a majestic, monumental, and commanding reserve, not unmixed with an astute alertness that had in it something of the primeval and bottomless cunning of a simple animal, into a melting abandonment to an emotion of devotion so extreme that it was almost painful to witness.
The Friar pressed his hand on the man’s shoulder as he himself got up again to set before them both some wine and a couple of goblets. Then, when the Dorchester-born warrior, who, while lifting his glass, looked, with his massive neck and his clear-cut profile, distinctly like a well-known bust of Caesar Augustus, had rested and refreshed himself a little, the Friar put the straight question to him, “Well, old friend,” he enquired, “and what’s the news?”
“He’s down there now. I left him in the lobby. They are all busy in the kitchen, and the Prior’s begun his dinner. So I left him in that dark entrance on that cushioned seat. He’ll be asleep, I wouldn’t wonder, when I go down to him. Shall I tell them in the kitchen that you’d like him to have his supper up here with you? And that whatever they’ve got for you will do for him too? Shall I tell them that you’d like a bottle or so more of wine and of the best they’ve got? And shall I say that they’d better bring out a mattress for him into the lobby where he is now and a few coverings for it?”
Had Ghosta been there still, or indeed had any feminine being been there, she would not have failed to follow the varying expressions that crossed the Friar’s face as he listened to this speech, and to follow them with growing astonishment. Friar Bacon’s countenance, together with the shape of his head, represented, as any intelligent woman would have recognised at once, or any man either, who happened to be possessed of that sort of visual penetration in which most women leave most men far behind, a perfect example of the pure intellect as it struggles almost always with difficulty, and generally totally in vain, to cope with the irrational changes and chances of human life upon this planet.