The only heat in the little room — but this was quite sufficient to make it perfectly warm — came from a stately bronze receptacle containing red-hot coals, with which the Baron’s retainers kept it liberally supplied both by day and by night.
What Master Peter was thinking at that moment had certainly little to do with either theology or metaphysics.
“Would it be to my advantage or to my disadvantage,” he was asking himself, “to tell this patronizing English lord about the magnetic shock I gave to this fool of a friar? What’s against my doing so is the fact that I don’t yet know how long the shock I gave him actually lasted; indeed I don’t know yet whether it knocked the breath out of him forever! I rather hope it didn’t, because there is still that little point about the value of manganese as an ingredient in the making of an elixir, that I ought to ask him. God knows why I forgot.”
What the Baron was thinking was: “All these confounded quacks, whether they call themselves scientists or astrologists or alchemists or metaphysicians or inventors or theologians, are only plotting to get power for themselves over other people and glory for themselves over each other! What we must realize is that life goes on exactly the same whether we’re with them or without them! When Lord Edward comes home from these absurd crusades we shall all know better where we stand. These damnable Scots want to be hammered into quiescence by somebody who understands the art of war, not the art of changing metals.
“And for these Welsh thieves who keep invading this country, if once metal-changers and sorcerers really begin, as they seem to be beginning, to rule the world, it won’t be long before we shall be conquered by some ancient British robber who claims to be descended from Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar.
“But I know what I must do with this rogue — for it’s clear he’s some sort of oriental gipsy with the devil knows what games and tricks up his sleeve — is to get that fellow Spardo to take him round the ring of all the manors about here, even if he’s got to mount him on that unfortunate beast with a man’s head coming out of his neck! They told me out yonder that this fellow swears he comes from Picardy and that he likes to be called Maitre Pierre. Well! he can Maître-Pierre it to his heart’s content with old Spardo dancing round him, and with that horse — what’s its classic name? — to ride on! By God! that’s what I’ll do!”
At this point, in this curious dialogue between two silences, there suddenly opened one of those queer holes, or gaps, or gulfs, or chasms in the psychic-contact of two speechless persons who are watching each other like two animals, each wondering, in a sort of trance of expectation, not exactly whether it would be a good thing to leap at the other’s throat, but whether the power that moves the world, whatever that power may be, will decide on their battling or embracing; and in this hollow void it was brought home to the Lord of the Manor that this Master Peter in front of him was really and truly some kind of Medium.
For what did my lord hear, clearly and unmistakably, at that identical instant, but the familiar voice, carried up on the eddying wind from the darkened forest below, of Spardo himself addressing his weird horse and of Cheiron answering his owner’s voice with one of those indescribable sounds made by a self-conscious and self-possessed animal, a sound that had grown to have its quite definite meaning in the language of their mutual understanding.
“Come out with me for a moment, Master Peter of Maricourt, will you please? I want you to meet some very old friends of mine!”
The wanderer from Picardy followed him without hesitation or demur. When they reached the ground-floor the Baron hurried his guest through the anteroom and the entrance-hall, till he got him to the main entrance of the Fortress, and once there, with nothing but a humorous nod to the gate-keeper and the exchange of a more reserved and even a slightly enigmatic quip with the gate-keeper’s wife, he pushed open one of the big gates, and with a hand on Master Peter’s shoulder got him into the open, where by the light of a lantern hung on the branch of a tree they found Cheiron eating a supper of oats, and his master squatting on a fir-stump beside him devouring from a bowl on his knees some sort of steaming stew which the gate-keeper’s wife must have provided.
“Where are you going to sleep tonight, Spardo?” The Lord of the Fortress never for a moment lost his special and peculiar power of propitiating the oddest, queerest, and most intransigent personalities in the world, whether in the human or sub-human sphere of life.
At this moment, without ceasing to transport to his mouth as much stew as his wooden spoon could carry, Spardo didn’t hesitate for a second in his reply to this question.
“With your permission, good my lord, I should like to tie up Cheiron in the horse-stall behind the Fortress; for I’ve got the permission of the dame at your gate, if yourself, good my lord, have no objection, to sleep in her gate-house across there.”
“Could the same good lady, do you suppose,” said the Lord of the Fortress, “find room on a mattress in the same retreat for my friend Maître Pierre, a foreign gentleman from Picardy?”
The said Master Peter, as may easily be imagined, did not miss one jot of the instinctive sagacity with which the Baron, upon whose good or bad, wise of foolish behaviour so many destinies in that corner of the west country depended, managed to eliminate himself completely, as the local potentate whose whim was law, and to create a half-humorous atmosphere of adventure in which they all were taking chances.
Nor did he miss the perfectly natural manner in which Spardo, who was now scraping the inside of his bowl with his spoon, entered into this game, and instead of rising from the tree-stump on which he was squatting, when he saw Cheiron straining to get some fodder that was just beyond his reach, called out to the Baron, “Kick that stuff nearer the horse, my lord, if you don’t mind!”
And when the Baron obeyed this curt command, Spardo only acknowledged it with a nod. It would be almost as difficult for the most penetrating chronicler to describe the thoughts that whirled through the head of Peter of Maricourt at this juncture, as it would be to describe what Cheiron himself was thinking.
But this much might certainly be hazarded: that if Cheiron’s thoughts were concentrated partly upon what Spardo had given him to eat, and partly on the question as to whence this food came and how much more of it was available in the place, wherever that place was, from which it came, Master Peter’s thoughts were concentrated, first on the question as to whether he dared to make another experiment with the perilous object he kept in a velvet bag between his legs, tightly pressed against his body close to his privy parts, or whether the present moment was even less propitious for an experiment of this sort than was the recent occasion in Roger Bacon’s room at Bumset Priory.
The object in that velvet bag, squeezed so scrupulously against his most hidden stretch of skin, was indeed the very centre and focus of Maître Pierre’s whole life. It was a magnet of immense and so far of quite unfathomed power.
Ever since he’d been a small boy Maître Pierre had been obsessed by a passion for magnetic experiments, and for the last twenty years his whole life had been given to the study of everything he could pick up on this queer topic.
The accumulated result of this frantic quest — for in many ways it was much more like this quest for the Sangraal than any ordinary alchemistic pursuit — was, as far as the man’s own secret life went, only alchemistic on the side. In its main conscious urge what Master Peter of Maricourt was after was nothing less than the deliberate manipulation of his own sexual force, by means of this powerful magnet, for the domination of the souls and wills and minds of other entities.
He was in fact at this moment absorbed in this particular game, just as he had been for the last twenty years, and it was Friar Bacon’s psychic awareness of this mania in his friend that always troubled and alarmed him when they were together, although it had a tremendous interest for him. The Friar never let it invade his own experimental work; and whenever it became evident to him as uppermost in Peter’s mind, it troubled him both in his nerves and in his conscience.