“Better take Maître Pierre de Maricourt”—for the traveller had evidently instructed the boy from the Priory kitchen exactly how to announce him—“upstairs to your little room, Father. And then you’ll be able to tell us better and clearer about him, so that Mother, and we all, can do him the honour which we feel sure he deserves. Tilton and John and I are so keen to know all about him that we might be a bother to him. But with you to explain—” And Lil-Umbra ended with a pathetically beseeching glance at Lady Val, as much as to say, “I’ll be very very good and do everything, yes, everything, you want me to do, if only you’ll agree to this!”
But the Lord of the Fortress was so quick in taking his daughter’s wise hint that Lady Val had no chance to intervene, nor had her brothers a chance to accompany the two of them, even with the politest intentions. For throwing his powerful right arm round the slim, frail, weedy little body of his guest, as if he were his uncle rather than his host, he hurried him upstairs to the “little room” to which Lil-Umbra referred.
This, as a matter of fact, was a small apartment next door to their large bed-chamber, an apartment where the Baron kept the smaller, rarer, daintier, more delicate, more breakable utensils of his hunting, fishing, spearing and arrow-shooting gear.
The Baron himself and Peter of Maricourt in Picardy would have indeed been a perfect subject for a painter in oils, had one such been there to watch them; and indeed the mere sight of them, as they sat facing each other in the Baron’s “Little Room”, might possibly, had Tilton been daring enough and unscrupulous enough to slip up there after them and peep at them through the half-open door, have turned him from a sculptor into a painter.
It was a characteristic of several of the rooms in the Fortress that the doors were so constructed that it was physically impossible for them to be properly shut, so that the young man could have watched them for some time with an interest that might have inspired him with a passion for portrait-painting.
Yes, if the boy had been rude enough to follow them, the effect of the extraordinary vibrations thrown off all the time from the person of Master Peter might have affected this serious-minded young man’s life in a really startling manner.
But Tilton did not follow them into that little room with the door that couldn’t shut. We may imagine his doing so; but he didn’t and that ends it. The chance came. The chance was not taken. The particular sight that, if it had been taken, would have changed his whole life, was never seen by him.
Chroniclers of human history talk of Fate, or Destiny, of what Homer calls “Keer” or doom. But all the time it is the great goddess of Chance — the present chronicler shirks using her name, because to anglicize it we have to turn the Greek letter called “upsilon” into our “Y”, which always tempts us to pronounce it like our “i”, which spoils its beauty altogether — yes, all the time it is the great goddess of Chance who turns the scale at the supreme crises of our life.
But though the sight of their figures facing each other remained unseen, Master Peter of Maricourt in Picardy and the Lord of the Fortress of Roque certainly did not “beat”, as the saying is, “about the bush”.
“What is that fool of a Friar made of,” queried Master Peter, “that he spends all his time, now that you people have got his Brazen Head, in writing long elaborate criticisms of these miserable doctors in Oxford and Paris, when he must know perfectly well that they are all tarred with the same brush and the same tar, the brush of obstruction and the tar of abstraction?
“And what a simple mind the fellow must have to make these attacks on the stupidity of the great mass of people and on the ignorance of their teachers! What does the man expect of our poor wretched human race? Hasn’t it been the same from the beginning? Can you or anybody else imagine anything different? Jesus Holy! How can the fellow suppose that even the cleverest of our masters with a class of young men before him as simple as our boys are — and they weren’t very different in the days of Confucius or the days of Socrates! — can bring, to what he tells these kids, inspiration and wit and insight enough to start them off looking up words in their Greek and Latin dictionaries?
“And the double-dyed idiot goes further even than that! Do you know, my lord, what I saw with my own eyes written on one of his carefully chosen parchment sheets? You would never guess! Nothing less than a passionate appeal to these teachers and to the young men who themselves want to become teachers, young men of good birth, like your own sons, to study Hebrew! Of course he’s perfectly right — you and I, my lord, don’t need a Grey Friar to tell us that—in indicating that the translations of Hebrew, all except that of the incomparable Jerome, are pretty rotten. But will these kids he’s catering for find the time, find the grammars, find the god-given or devil-given wit, to correct these treacherous and dangerous mistakes?
“How much better it would be for him, my Lord, if he would do what I do — that is to say leave all this theological business alone, and concentrate on experiment and invention; on experiment first, to find out what can be invented so as to be in harmony with Nature; and then, when we’ve got our invention, experiment again to find how far its use can go and yet remain in harmony with Nature.”
The perfectly abysmal self-satisfaction expressed at that moment in the unnaturally large face, under the alarmingly large forehead and beneath that huge crop of jet black hair, roused in the Baron of Roque more anger than he had felt for many a long year. But he succeeded in restraining himself from displaying anything but the alert interest of a polite host in the presence of a voluble guest for several seconds of expectant silence.
“Surely, O great Experimenter, surely, O great Inventor,” his alert pose seemed to say, as he leant forward from the round, hard, circular, gilded seat of his small upright armchair and clasped his fingers over his right knee, letting his foot thus balanced in the air sway interrogatively, “surely a man of your calibre didn’t allow a simple grey friar of the order we all know so well,” the Baron’s mute expectancy went on, “to reduce you to the position of a silent listener at a theological lecture?”
The invisible chronicler of all these events, which were of course both physical and psychical, cannot help noting how much more detached from any sort of egotism or self-assertion was this lord of the biggest Manor in Wessex than this plain soldier from Maricourt in Picardy.
The psychic difference between them displayed itself physically with nearly perfect propriety in the way the two men consciously or unconsciously managed their mouths. The red point of Master Peter’s tongue kept darting out from between his lips, just as if it were the instantaneously deadly sting of a human-headed Goblin armed with the poison of a hornet; while behind the lips of the Baron’s mouth some unspoken word seemed roaming about, testing and trying every surface of the walls of its prison-house, as if conscientiously seeking the entrance to a promised passage of escape, concerning whose existence, though it was supported by universal consent, he himself was rather doubtful.
The only light in what, throughout the whole Fortress, was known as “The Little Room” came from a large oil-lamp in which two wicks, each with its own particular flame, floated quietly, and by their light, on the thin sill of a small square window, looking out on nothing but darkness and square stone towers, a small gnat could be seen marching resolutely up and down.