The Brazen Head (13 page)

As for Baron Boncor of Cone, he brought up the rear upon Basileus with an expression on his good-natured bearded face which seemed to say: “Well! as long as I’ve got your crazy backs in
front of me
, I’m ready for anything! From behind I can see how things go. Chance often gives a chance to those who don’t mind bringing up the rear; and, if it doesn’t in this case, so be it.”

It was rather a startling surprise to both Spardo and
Bonaventura
when they found themselves completely clear of the forest, and saw in front of them, a vast reedy swamp that
extended
to the horizon in every direction, save the one from which they had come to the really terrifying bulk of Lost Towers.

Lost Towers looked at first sight like a ruin built entirely of black marble; but on nearer approach it showed itself to be anything but a ruin; for the vast blocks of black stone of which it was built had something Egyptian and pyramidal in their size, and although divided and broken up into many small domes and minarets and watch-towers, the general effect made a tremendous awe-inspiring impression upon everyone who had never seen it before. There was something staggering—in truth you might say almost shocking—about its antiquity. It looked as if it had been built of materials brought on barges through a network of canals from the sea-coast, a coast which had been reached by ship from Atlantis itself in pre-historic times. A very queer effect was produced upon a traveller’s nerves the moment he set eyes upon it, a disturbing, troubling, and bewildering effect. The first sight of it must have always touched some long-buried race-nerve in us all that goes back to antediluvian times.

It was certainly as queer a cortège as had ever reached that weird mass of domes and towers in all its incredibly long history, this little group that now approached its portentous entrance. By reason of its own Baron being the leader of this queer band, they were received in a manner bordering upon a religious ceremony.

Lady Lilt herself came out to meet them, dressed so
extravagantly
that Baron Boncor assured his grey horse that the lady must have been waiting for their arrival in a wardrobe-
chamber
looking out their way. The retainers who assembled on
the small square of cut grass in front of the high, narrow, strangely painted gates, gates that never, by night or day, seemed entirely shut or entirely open, must have amounted to a dozen men and a dozen women, all dressed so much alike and all so mingled together that it was hard to distinguish men-servants from maid-servants as they surrounded the visitors.

But the apparel they all wore was so remarkable in its colour that only a very discerning eye would have been likely to detect that the materials, whereof these richly-coloured
garments
were made, were a sorry draggled-tailed patch-work of odds and ends, stitched together anyhow, a motley
agglomeration
of woven stuffs that had only two purposes; the first, to cover—you couldn’t say to warm—human bodies, and, the second, to receive the particular red-brown dye which had been the prerogative of a special family from somewhere in the far north, who, for several generations, had lived in Lost Towers, to prepare, to make, to mix, to adapt to every kind of weather, and to apply to every sort of fabric. This colour had exactly, precisely, and to the last nicety, the shade of the ground at the roots of the forest pines, and also of the narrow foot-wide paths that horsemen, and very often their dogs too, had to follow, as they made their way through the woods.

Baron Maldung himself resembled a middle-aged acrobat with a profile so startlingly like that of certain busts of the Emperor Nero that visitors to Lost Towers who had pilgrimaged to Rome wondered sometimes, especially when they observed the dictatorial manner of the Baron and the something like obsequiousness with which everyone treated him, whether he might not really be, as the man himself always maintained he was, descended from ancestors who had not come from the North at all, but from Rome itself.

There was a tall black poplar on one side of this stretch of grass, now crowded with retainers in the Lost Towers
red-brown
attire; and though there were few leaf-buds on it at this early season the great tree had a happy and vital look, as if its sap was already stirring. Not far from this benevolent forest-giant there grew a small thorn, and it happened that Bonaventura, whose hold on Chieron’s reins was entirely negligible, now that he had so much to see and so much more
to think about, allowed the horse to press so closely against this leafless bush that a perceptible tuft of the creature’s skin with a patch of his fur was torn away by the bush’s powerful thorns.

In a flash Baron Maldung observed this misadventure and quick as lightning leapt upon the offending thorn-bush and began hacking at it with a short sharp little war-axe which he unhooked from his belt. Lady Lilt, who had been tenderly stroking the deformity on the neck of Chieron, a deformity that to the eyes of Spardo seemed growing larger and more like a human head with every touch the lady gave it, now sprang to the side of her lord, and first with one bare arm and then with the other, though both arms were soon bleeding as the thorn-bush defended itself, held up the thing’s branches towards the slashing fury of Maldung’s war-axe.

The small bush was soon level with the ground; but the insanity of life-hatred in Maldung seemed to increase moment by moment with each advance in the demolition of those crumpled, twisted, wrinkled, broken little twigs, and, as can be imagined, each little drop of perspiration from the white arms that were acting like assistant executioners added to the man’s frenzy.

And it was at this moment, just when the now quite horizontal stream of afternoon sunlight had turned that small square of green grass into a radiant dance-lawn, that Spardo noticed that on the very edge of the reedy swamp there grew an
immensely
old oak-tree by the side of a small mound, and that upon this mound a very white full-grown lamb was bleating piteously. But all eyes, including Spardo’s, were now
concentrated
upon the exquisitely lovely and magnetically provocative daughter of the house, who now came forth to play
her
part in her parents’ battle with this sub-demonic vegetation.

Her part just now seemed to be the pretence that she had rushed forth from the hands of her tirewomen, in such haste to join the fight against these appalling monsters who had invaded this innocent world of noble animals, that she had been too hurried to remember to put all her clothes on. Her haste was, however, as even Spardo could see, attended by an exquisite delicacy of choice as to just where the effect of not
being fully dressed would be maddeningly tantalizing, and indeed, not only seductive, but what you might call ravishing.

And they all could see that to the human nerves of the good Baron Boncor such provocation was unendurable. In fact all that that good-natured warrior found gall enough to do under such exceptional tension was to take a dignified and simple farewell of Bonaventura and to give Spardo a definite
invitation
.

“Don’t you forget, Master Spardo, that you’ll always be welcome at Gone Castle, whenever your wanderings bring you our way!”

And then, not without some difficulty—for Basileus was showing signs in a manner not quite seemly in so warlike a steed, of being unduly attracted to Cheiron’s deformity—Baron Boncor turned his horse clear round and urged him into a rather shy and not wholly polite retreat.

But to retreat from Lost Towers, when once you had
discovered
it, was more difficult than the discovery. Lady Lilt lifted one long white arm to direct her husband’s attention to this retirement of their chief antagonist; and with her other arm she groped for the bow and quiver hanging over the shoulder of Baron Maldung. This small bow, with its arrow already notched against its extended string she thrust into Maldung’s hands. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” she hissed. And when the Baron of Lost Towers released the string and the feathered shaft pierced the flesh of Boncor’s right shoulder and remained there quivering, the blood that dripped in big drops upon the mane of Basileus was a much brighter red than the red-brown of the Lost Towers retinue.

But, though the blood was bright enough, the hand which held the bridle-reins was reduced to helpless impotence. But Basileus leaped forward and at a gallop now; nor was there any sign before they disappeared of the Baron falling from the horse’s back. It was then and only then, that Lady Lilt turned to lead their visitors past the still half-naked Lilith into the interior of Lost Towers.

The crowd of attendants, in their rich red-brown attire, seemed suddenly stricken with a weird sort of lethargy, and indeed displayed a tendency to drift and drift and drift without any purpose. But no aimless drifting disturbed the imperious though comical figure of Maldung, now busy at a job which absolutely absorbed him. This was nothing less, as
Bonaventura
quickly had an opportunity of realizing, than directing the covering with suitable colour of the carved mantles in the entrance-hall of Lost Towers of certain imperial Roman heads. These had been selected by the despotic Maldung—at least as far as Bonaventura was able to realize—purely for the sake of the devilish obsessions which possessed them.

But past this avenue of diabolical physiognomies the now thoroughly agitated General of the Franciscan Friars felt he had to go, if the obsequious salutation of Baron Maldung and the engaging gestures of Lady Lilt implied that at any rate tonight, whatever happened in the future, and he did begin to feel a little doubtful about converting these people, he was at least sure of a savoury supper and a comfortable bed.

It had been a comfort to him that the murderous arrow which he had seen lodged in the shoulder of Boncor hadn’t brought that worthy man down: and what he must do now was to make it clear that his stately strides towards the portal of Lost Towers were not accelerated by the sight of the provocative figure of the daughter of the house, just perceptible beyond the wicked and desperately unhappy visage of Tiberius Caesar, sated with his sadistic orgies, with his sub-human obsessions, with his super-human atrocities, and looking now as if scooped
out, gouged out, thunder-blasted out, after years of
petrifaction
from the substance of an internal rock.

Lilith was still playing her perpetual game; and it was
revealed
to Lady Lilt, and not wholly concealed even from our friend Spardo, that the present object of the girl’s felonious wiles was none other than the saintly personage, armoured in the chastity of grey cloth, wrapped in the chastity of grey vapourings, fortified in the chastity of grey theocracy, cramped in the chastity of grey idealism, who was now approaching the entrance to Lost Towers between the door-post on the left and the profile of Tiberius Caesar on the right.

More momentous to Lady Lilt than the galvanic though
invisible
cord, that was stretched so taut between the flitting and wavering adumbrations of her daughter’s milk-white thighs and the furtive attention of Bonaventura, was a parallel psychic cord that she now caught sight of, and by no means for the first time, between those same exposed whitenesses and the eyes of the girl’s father.

Aye, but O! what Spardo would have given, possibly even the remaining golden coin he had robbed him of, to know exactly what this Man in grey, this special pet of St. Francis, was thinking just then! Would the fellow have the gall to do what everybody else was far too scared to think of doing? Would he be brave enough actually to enter Lost Towers?

He himself felt glad enough to give Cheiron’s bridle a gentle twist and to turn the head of the half-human animal due south —that is to say, in the direction taken by that rider upon Basileus who now rode with an arrow in his shoulder.
Nobody
was interested enough, either in Spardo or his deformed steed, to follow their retreat; but had anyone done so, they would have been absolutely astonished at the speed with which Cheiron could move at such a crisis.

Meanwhile every step taken by Bonaventura towards the entrance to Lost Towers was attended by an intense and
meticulous
process of thought. In a certain sense the man was
undoubtedly
acting with real courage, and might without
exaggeration
have been called a very brave man. But his exorbitant notion of his own importance in the eyes of the God he worshipped, his puffed up conceit as to the eternal importance of the particular kind of sanctity he cultivated,
tainted this honourable courage with a less worthy tinge. “If,” he now said to himself, “I obstinately refuse to look at that girl, I shall make them think I am afraid of being tempted. What I must do is to make them understand that I and God——”

However bulging the man’s eyes may have been and
however
assiduously he kept feeling in his pocket to make certain his imperial gold pieces were still safe, it must be allowed that there was an element of childlike simplicity in this page-boy of omnipotence oddly mingled with his inordinate conceit.

Some might say that men think in words and women in images; but if in the case of Bonaventura we were to enter the slippery topic of the syntax of psychic expression and begin to quarrel with his way of saying “I and God”, it is only fair to remember that in speaking of his earthly parent he always said “I and my Father” instead of “My Father and I”.

“What,” so the man’s thoughts ran on, as he gravely
advanced
beneath an unusually high arch and proceeded to leave the marble Tiberius and his sadistic stare behind, “I must make them understand is that I enjoy resisting temptation too much to run away, though it is true that in the Paternoster I pray God not to lead me into it. But I must make them understand that I have so yielded myself to God that His will is now my will and my will entirely His will. It would not be for people’s good for me to let them know how much I enjoy gazing at the lovely little white breasts and delicious little white limbs of young girls; for vulgar, crude, rough, brutal, stupid, ordinary men wouldn’t be able to get the pleasure I get from this. It is all in my love for God and in God’s love for me. We love each other so much that I feel sure God allowed me to be with him—for this past-
and-present
intimacy is what you get when your love for God makes you feel one with Him—when He took the rib from Adam and out of it made Eve. When anyone loves God as I do He gives you wonderful privileges. For the sake of my great love for Him, God put back Time for me and allowed me to watch those embraces of Adam and Eve that created the human race, and the pleasure I get now from looking at this young girl is part of the pleasure which God, in return for
my great love, allowed me to enjoy when He let me watch Adam embracing Eve.”

Bonaventura had actually been clever enough as a boy to fool Saint Francis himself in this matter; for Saint Francis had regarded it as a perpetual miracle of grace the way in which his young friend resisted temptation, when all the while his young friend was enjoying the process of temptation itself more than he could possibly have enjoyed any fruition of desire.

Bonaventura was indeed thinking at this very moment that he might derive great satisfaction from a few weeks’ residence in Lost Towers, as long as he could pretend he was resisting the most maddening temptation of his life, whereas in reality he was resisting nothing. He went on trailing his grey mantle, in this crafty pretence, through corridor after corridor, followed by the growling and grimacing, the gurgling and grinning, the gallivanting and gobemouching Baron Maldung, and in reality deliciously enlivened, not at all, as they were all believing, tormented, teased, and tantalized to the last exquisite point of provocation, by lovely little Lilith.

Farther and farther, on and on, he was led, trailing his grey garment, while the fingers of his left hand never loosened their firm clutch on the leather bag under his robe. Up stairway after stairway he had to go, down passage after passage, till the guest-chamber, where he was to sleep when supper was over, was reached at last. He had been in many feudal castles and o a few royal palaces all over Europe. He had been in several Moorish and Byzantine and Coptic sanctuaries all through Mesopotamia. But he had never been before in such a luxurious room as this. It was clear at once to him, as he turned his devouringly prominent eyes on the bed that was to receiveU him, and on the hot and cold and lukewarm water that was to bathe him, and on the incredible varieties of ointments and balmy balsams that were to anoint him, and on all these conveniently exposed and yet daintily barred coals of fire that were to warm him, and above all on the three lovely and alluring young sylphs, all delicately wearing the
transparent
fabrics and red-brown dyes and exotic hieroglyphs of Lost Towers, who were so anxious to serve him that if “he and God” decided to devote a few weeks to the purification,
regeneration, sanctification, of all the dwellers in, and of all the dependents upon, these Lost Towers, there would be nothing in such delay to trouble the bodily well-being or vex the spiritual peace of God’s chosen servant.

But what was this? Suddenly, without warning, all his attendants vanished, and there was revealed to him a different aspect of life in this place. Borne upon winds that blew wildly through all its walls and over all its roofs, from forests that seemed to be beyond any forests of this world, and from swamps beyond any swamps of which he had ever heard, there came into that chamber the weird lamentable cry, ghastly and desperate, that had passed through every human building raised by the hand of man upon that particular spot since Britain was first divided from France by the salt sea: the cry of the wind that since the beginning of Time had made Lost Towers what it was.

Washed, anointed, oiled, combed and curled, catered for and courted by lovely attendants, and his purpose crowned by a miraculous concatenation of convenient conditions,
Bonaventura’s
instinctive reaction, when he heard this unusual wailing in the rafters of the roof above him and this long-drawn melancholy moaning in the corridors and landings and
stair-ways
and cellars beneath him, was simply to feel peevishly annoyed with the God he worshipped. He didn’t feel towards him as one heroic conspirator feels to another who has been propitiated and wheedled and fooled into betraying their cause.

What he felt was a simple irritation. God, he told himself, ought to have known better than allow the Powers of Darkness to make a saint, possessed of a piety like his piety, shiver. For shiver he did. The ministering angels who had been hovering round him must have known at the first faint stirring of these ancient black tapestries what was going to happen; for they all vanished before it happened.

There are those who might feel that, left alone with these alarming sounds, our saint’s vexation with his deity was not uncalled for. All around him was black tapestry representing terrifying battles between unicorns and river-horses, the former more red than brown, and the latter more brown than red, but both of them woven against that background of black in such a way as to annihilate completely in that portion of the
building all those emanations from free space, and all those blessed airs of boundless liberation, that are projected upon any atmosphere by the colours blue and green, quite apart from the objects that we are accustomed to see wearing these colours, such as blue sky and green grass. Reddish brown, and brownish red, and both of these in a peculiar and special mingling, such as Bonaventura had never seen in his life before, were diffused, not only from the tapestry in this weird place, but from rafters and ceilings and panels and doors, until a sort of atmospheric soul of that appalling colour, something that might indeed be called the mystic eidolon of that fearful and awful colour, permeated every square inch of the invisible air within these ill-fated walls.

Though of course in a sense you could only see it, in reality you were compelled to taste it, to swallow it, to touch it, to feel it, to absorb it, till it filled your whole body, as air fills a bubble.

Yes, those attendant sylphs must have known perfectly well what was coming, for at the first quivering ripple in the tapestry of his chamber, they were off. And then it seemed to Bonaventura that this devil in the wind had begun to cause, not only ructions in the wood-work of the room—for there were groanings and creakings everywhere—but yawning chasms in the floor of life; for gobbets of red-brownishness and globules of brown-reddishness seemed being belched forth from a pre-historic cleft in the original matter of creation itself, as if this protoplasm of all existing things were relieving itself of some obnoxious suppuration due to a primal injury.

Everybody he met in this part of Wessex, as he pursued his obstinate enquiries with regard to what he loved to call the devil-worship of Friar Bacon, had told him about this
particular
wind that had been felt at this particular spot since the world began; but he had never anticipated that he himself would feel it as powerfully as this. He felt disturbed, not frightened, he hastened to assure himself, but agitated. He found it impossible to walk up and down with his accustomed dignified stride. He gave way to a series of jerky impulsive movements.

Probably he would not have yielded to these nervous
debouchings
to north and west, to south and east, and then
round the world again, if he had not been alone; for it is queer with us mortals how some of us have completely different codes of behaviour for moments in solitude and moments when others, even if it be only one other, are there.

Bonaventura’s relations with God were peculiar to himself; for they were absolutely in the mind, or in the soul, that is to say, in his thoughts. He always took it for granted that God, being a Spirit, took no interest in, and had no effect upon, the movements of his body; unless points of conscience entered, which of course changed everything.

Poor Bonaventura! He hurried headlong down the passage outside his door till it ended in a door that was sealed up, as if it led to a mausoleum of the bones of lost angels. Back again he hurried, till he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the lower floors of the building; at which point he suddenly felt the curious sensation, not amounting to a
night-mare
-panic but belonging to the same special kind of fantastic horror, that he used to feel when his pious mother told him in his childhood how the Witch of Endor called up the prophet from the grave.