The Brazen Head (15 page)

“What my revelation commands me to beg from you is simply this, that you put at my disposal a very quiet horse, preferably an old and good-tempered horse, such as I shall be able myself to ride, and, in addition to this, put me in the care of a small party of well-armed horsemen, who will hand me over in safety to the gatekeeper of Roque Fortress and then return to you at once without demanding anything for themselves, anything except”—here Bonaventura’s voice rose to something that resembled the clanging of a great
cracked bell—“except what I am now going to make plain to you all.”

That the man was sincere in the emotion he displayed must at any rate have been plain to all. One undeniable
manifestation
of it was the fact that as he spoke he wept, and as he wept his mouth and cheeks assumed the only too familiar screwed-up grimace of a small child in a fit of crying, and there was something weirdly and grotesquely impressive about the ringing and yet broken words with which this emotional saint, who had the power of weeping without sobbing, began to make his point clear.

“As you know only too well, you people of Lost Towers, there is a conspiracy against you through this whole district, based on the absurd idea that you are—what of course we
all
are, for it is the unusual condition of the children of men—more evil than good.

“Now this is what I propose to do on your behalf, my dear friends, and it is extremely simple. I
had
thought that the conclave of cardinals intended—at least that is what I imagined my angel of revelation hinted to me—to elect me Pope; but I no longer think that this is their intention. What I believe now to be the purpose of God is that I am to watch very
carefully
the whole array of ecclesiastical leaders, and when I have decided which particular one would make the ablest Pope, that I should pray night and day for the welfare of that good and wise man; and then, when the present Pope dies, I can name as his successor the man I have been observing and praying for all these days.

“Yes, I can name him at the conclave of cardinals; and I think, without serious opposition, get him elected Pope. And this is what I can do for you, my friends of Lost Towers, in return for your kindness to me. When I and God—I mean of course when God and I—have appointed the next Pope, and he is firmly seated in the Chair of Saint Peter, he will naturally wish to reward his heavenly Helper who is God, as well as his earthly Helper who is I.

“It is then that I shall make it clear to the Holy Father how he can reward us
both at the same time
. I shall tell him how he may spend on behalf of Lost Towers a good round sum of Saint Peter’s shekels. I shall tell him that Lost Towers has
been for centuries like those cities in Palestine that God told Moses to build for the runaways from justice, who wanted to cling to the horns of the altars of the Levites and there to escape being slain by the avengers of blood. I shall tell him that he had better build an Aims-House for the aged of both sexes, in the immediate vicinity of Lost Towers, with six small independent houses for women, and a larger house of two stories for the Master of the establishment. I shall tell the Pope that the inmates had better be called ‘Tower Canons’ and ‘Tower Canonesses’, and that he had better pay the Master of the place a good large income yearly, so as to render him completely independent of all influence from outside. The name of the Holy Father, whether that name be Leo or Pius or Gregory or Martin or Nicholas or Clement or Urban, shall be, I shall assure him, inscribed over the gateway to the Master’s Lodge, where it shall remain forever and forever.

“And now there remains only one thing more I must ask of you all, namely, that none of you will conceal from the world, but rather will reveal to the world in all directions, that it is purely and simply by the sudden appearance among you of me and God—I mean of course of God and me—that you have all been so absolutely and entirely turned from the error of your ways as to call upon the Pope and God—I mean of course upon God and the Pope—to raise up in your midst such a monument of your conversion as this Lost Towers Aims-House for aged runaways from the justice of the
kingdoms
of subsequent generations. This having been built, your remotest descendants will fall upon their knees on this spot, and tap the very ground where Lost Towers stands, in reverence and worship for evermore!

“And do
you
ask me, my lovely Daughter of the house—and do
you
ask me, my gracious Lady of the house—and do
you
ask me, O great Baron of Lost Towers!—what your evermore loyal and devoted pair of friends, I and God, are going to do next, when you have escorted us to the Fortress of Roque and have left us with the Gate-Keeper of Roque and have returned in peace to your own place?

“Well, I will tell you in a moment what I and God intend to do next. But, before telling you, I must let you know that the instinct in me which orders every smallest move I
make, and half-creates everything I hear, see, touch, feel, or even smell, compels me to insist once again, as I always do, and always must do, wherever I go upon the surface of this earth, that the whole secret of the ultimate mystery of life is contained in those precious, holy, sweet, delectable, celestial, angelic, cherubic, seraphic, ineffable four letters composing the word Love!

“Love is simply all there is! And it is more than that. It is all there was and all there will ever be! Love is like water and air and fire; and it goes flowing, floating, flaming, round the earth, penetrating the earth, proliferating the earth,
perforating
the earth, and one day swallowing up the earth!

“And yet you ask what I and God are going to do next, when you, my loving friends, have left me at Roque. I will tell you in simple language. We, that is to say the All-powerful whose essence is Love, and I his humble, his negligible, his self-obliterating, self-negating, self-annihilating servant, whose essence is obedience and who has made
his
will
my
will to a degree bewildering to the whole human race, have decided that the Devil has incarnated Himself in the personality of this notorious magician, Roger Bacon, who devotes his time, his money, his leisure, his learning, wholly, entirely, and absolutely to inventing and constructing a Head of Brass that shall think as a man, and speak as a man, and even utter opinions on how the country should be ruled, like a man.

“Well, my dear friends, you who are now announcing to the entire world that you yourselves, by the mediation of his less than nothing servant, who is your do-nothing,
tittle-nothing
, scrap-nothing, flip-nothing, pip-nothing of a beggarly Bonaventura, are about to accept the pardon and peace of a stately Aims-House from the Holy Father, may now learn that the great God of Love and I, his disciple in Love, are about to punish, punish, punish, punish this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon, till not only his Brazen Head but his own worse than brazen skull will split into atoms.

“Yes, my beloved friends, who have today begun telling the whole world how dearly I, who am His most loving lover since the time when John of Love his very self lay in His bosom, do verily and utterly love you and how I have shown it with regard to the Holy Father, I am going to tell you now
how God through me and I through God will punish this abomination of desolation who calls himself Friar Bacon!”

Here he paused to observe the effect of his words upon his hearers, and it was clear to Lilith, who by this time had stolen round to the bottom of the table with a long black mantle wrapt hastily round her and was gazing intently at him with quivering lips and ghastly-white cheeks, that he was
well-satisfied
with the depth, the gulf, the abyss of silence into which his audience had been precipitated. “No,” he proceeded, in a very curious voice, the sort of voice a vulture might use who was holding in its claws, before the hungry beaks of its young, a dying lamb, from whose body, at each gasp of its breath, that is to say from each place where a claw entered its flesh, there ran a stream of blood, “no! no!” he went on, “and I am sure you will all understand exactly what I mean. For a man like this, who knows enough Greek to read the heathen philosophers, and enough Hebrew to pervert and twist the words of Jehovah to Moses, there is only one
punishment
. What I and God, I mean what God and I, have decided to do with him is to keep him in prison on bread and water, and take all his books and all the paraphernalia he uses in his inventions away from him, and thus compel him to live the life of a real Grey Friar—in other words compel this
archdevil
to live the life of a saint! His work is an open insult to the Order to which I who speak to you belong. What made him join us then, do you ask? Purely and simply to support himself while he went on with his devilish inventions! His family were ruined. He was without the means of
subsistence
. And so he became a Franciscan Friar. He must have said to himself: ‘I will go on with the inventions with which I shall eventually destroy both their worship and themselves,’—do you catch the devilry of his idea, beloved friends?—’And meanwhile I shall live at their expense.’”

No sooner had Bonaventura finished speaking than Lady Lilt and Sir Maldung, as well as Lilith, whose long black mantle now trailed after her as she moved, made a circle round him, all three of them talking excitedly and at the same time.

It was not, however, as may easily be imagined, until after a prolonged and delicious supper at this same table—without
the need for any blindfolding, and after a prolonged and
undisturbed
sleep in that luxurious bed on the top floor, without the need for any attendant sylphs, and without even knowing whether the wind was blowing or not—that the General of the Franciscan Friars, on just the sort of horse he had asked for, and with just the sort of escort he wanted, set out in the morning for the Fortress of Roque.

Peleg took swift decisive measures, precipitate measures they might be called, to ascertain that it really and truly was,
without
any doubt or question, his true love of that wild night when his life was saved by Sir Mort on those crusader-battled borders between East and West, and when he made that vow of devoted fidelity to him into which he threw at one drastic fling all his Jewish intensity and all his Mongolian strength of will. And though his feeling about her was so absolute that there were moments when it actually rendered him as limp as a bending reed, he was aware at the same time of a strange shyness at the thought of their facing each other.

It was with something of a double motive, therefore, partly in order to put off for a little while longer the actual moment of this overwhelming encounter, and partly to make sure he was doing nothing treacherous to his sworn lord and master, Sir Mort, that well before noon on a fine February day, Peleg set out, when all his domestic tasks were over, to make sure of meeting this eccentric head of the House of Abyssum.

It was the very morning of the unexpected arrival of
Bonaventura
at the great gates of the Fortress and the morning also of the instantaneous departure, the moment the gate-keeper appeared, of a band of curious riders in ramshackle armour and motley patches of red-brown cloth.

What Peleg did to make sure of catching Sir Mort as he came out of the Fortress—for he knew enough of Lady Valentia’s weakness for distinguished foreigners to be quite certain that her husband, whatever feeling he might have for or against the General of the Franciscan Friars, wouldn’t stay long as a partner to their talk—was to run at full speed across the piece
of ground that separated the point at which the big gates were visible from the point at which the postern-entrance was visible, a distance which he could cover in time enough to catch Sir Mort departing from either of the two exits.

He took care to carry with him his mace with the iron spikes round its heavy circular head, for he had vivid memories of certain occasions when Sir Mort was all for carrying him off on a sudden foray and he had to insist on returning for his favourite weapon.

It was outside the postern that he finally caught his man, and the dialogue that followed was eminently characteristic of them both.

“That fellow with the staring eyes is after my John’s friend, Friar Bacon. Holy Jesus, but he’s the devil of a wizard-hunter! Do you know what he wants? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind; though Lady Val thinks I ought to! He wants me to swear to Bog of Bumset that the Pope has told him I must take a few muscular serfs with me and haul the Brazen Head down from Bacon’s cell and lug the confounded thing here; so that
here
, if you please,
here
in our own grounds,
here
in this very strip of forest, the best piece of hunting-ground in the Manor, I can have this curst Brazen Head of his smashed to bits—
to bits
, mind you, and
here
, within a bow-shot,
here
, in less than a bow-shot, of this shrine Tilton’s so keen on building; and very well he’s building it too!

“If I’m a good fighter, Peleg, my Gim-crack Jew, Tilton’s a good designer, a good builder, a good carver, and a good one, I shouldn’t wonder too, at getting rid of smoke and soot. And here’s this staring-eyed fellow, who thinks his grey mantle’s as grand as Caesar’s purple, wants us to hammer to bits in front of my boy’s shrine a wizard-oracle, to whose funeral will come no doubt twenty devils far worse than any Brazen Head, who, when they see Tilton’s shrine to the Mother of God, you can bet your big Tartar soul, they’ll all come huddling into our house, and scenting out quick enough where my bed is, hug each other under it till midnight, and then——No, by God! I’m not going to have any Brazen Head hammered to bits in front of my door!”

Peleg had wisely held his peace during this indignant
outburst
; but as it went on he discovered that, without having said
to himself anything resembling, “Now, my good friend, it’s your business to think out carefully where your interest lies in all this,” he had perceived, in a flash, in a pulse-beat, in the whirl of a swallow’s wings, just what he must say.

“O you are so right, dear my lord!” he murmured, leaning in such a manner upon the handle of his iron mace as not to tower above the man who had saved him and whom he served forever, “and I have just by good chance discovered something that will make it possible, I really do think, for me to be of more real use to you than alas! considering I owe everything to you, I can often be.”

“Aye? What’s that? What are you saying, big man? Have you caught this staring-eyed Pontifex-Cockolorum
in flagrante delicto
? Have you found him raping our Abbess?”

“May I speak quite freely, my lord?”

“Of course! Don’t we always? I to thee and thou to me’s the tune! So out with it, my Lion of Judah and Behemoth of Karakorum!”

“But, my dear lord, it goes back a long way and concerns my own private life very deeply. It is indeed, if you will allow me to say so, my dear lord, my chief
secretum secretorum
, and it is only because it was a thing of despair rather than of hope that I kept it to myself.”

A peculiar tone in the giant’s voice quieted Sir Mort’s wrought-up nerves. He fumbled at the leather belt round his waist that kept his hunting horn in a convenient position.

“Tell me straight out, Peleg, old friend, what you’re talking about.”

“About a woman, my lord.”

“Ah! Ah! And what a double-dyed fool I was not to think of that before! Here have you been, a proud, handsome, majestic, powerful man, and, just because you’re such a giant and outside the category of common men, I let myself—fool that I was!—assume that you lacked the natural feelings of every man born into the world who isn’t a sodomite! Well, old friend, tell me her name quick, and where she’s to be found, and by God! I’ll get her for you even if she lives in Karakorum!”

Peleg did not hesitate. “She is a girl I made friends with just before that bloody fight, where, save for you, my lord, I should now be under the earth. Her name is Ghosta. She is a
Jewess from Mesopotamia and she is now working in the Abbess’s kitchen here. Lay-Brother Tuck from Prior Bog’s kitchen told me about her. He told Friar Bacon too about her and the Friar wished to see her, and she went to see him, unknown to her nuns and unknown to the Prior.”

“So that’s it!” chuckled Sir Mort with a friendly grimace. “Kitchen to kitchen, eh? And do you want to marry this ghost of a girl from Mesopotamia? If that’s the idea, you old Jewish Goliath, you’ll have to go to Lady Val. She’s the one who arranges our matrimonial affairs. But I daresay I could—but what’s the matter, Peleg? Do you feel ill? You’re not going to faint are you? You look as if you’d seen something worse than a ghost-girl!”

“I—haven’t—seen—her—yet,” stammered the agitated giant.

Sir Mort looked at him intently. “You’re bewitched, old friend. There’s no doubt about it. I see you’re feeling exactly the sort of thing that I felt myself when I fell in love with Lady Val a quarter of a century ago, when I’d only caught one glimpse of her at the Winchester tourney. Well, the best thing
you
can do, Peleg my lad, is to go straight away now and find your girl and have a good talk, a long talk with her, and
discover
what she wants to do! She may be so happy with those nuns and made such a pet of, that she won’t want to consider moving to the Fortress kitchen, even if Lady Val had room for her here. On the other hand she may—Holy Jesus, take care! What is the matter with you? Are you ill, Peleg?”

The giant would indeed have fallen prone on his face if Sir Mort hadn’t caught him in his arms. He hadn’t lost
consciousness
however; and when his master propt him up in a sitting-posture with his broad back against the trunk of a pine, he still had the wit left to grope for his iron mace, and when he’d got it in his grasp, to prop it up between his knees, the round bronze ball of its handle, about the size of an apple, pressing against his chin.

Sir Mort laid a hand on his head. “What
you
want, my boy, is a sip of that strong water Nurse used to give Tilton when he got one of his fainting-fits. If I weren’t afraid of those damned red devils from Lost Towers, who brought that
Bonaventura
here, lighting on you and slaughtering you or carrying
you off, I’d leave you here and get a drop of that stuff from Nurse. Look up, big sonny! Let a man see your face. If you’re bewitched to this tune, before you’ve even seen the wench, what’ll you be when you meet her face to face?”

At this the giant did raise his head, and the two men stared gravely for a moment into each other’s eyes. Then Sir Mort hesitated no longer. “By the wounds of Jesus, I’ll risk it! Don’t you dare to move! And if any of those red-jerkin’d villains come along, you just pretend to be dying till they get near and then give them what for with your iron mace! If you threaten one of the sods with it, the rest will bolt!”

And with a nod and a grim shadow of a smile, he took himself off; and Peleg was left alone, propt up against that pine. His feelings grew queerer and queerer as he waited. “Am I really bewitched?” he thought, “and is it possibly that she’s always been some kind of a demon and not a real girl at all? Well; I’ll be damned if I care if she is a demon. She’s my true love, demon or no demon. I’d sooner go down to Hell with her than to the highest Heaven with anybody else!

“But it’s all very well for
me
to think like that! The point is: what does
she
think? It’s no good for me to go on telling myself these crazy stories about her, while she, maybe, doesn’t give me a thought, or, if she does, has lost all wish to see me again! Besides I must remember that by this time she’s older, and no doubt wiser, and may not at all be in a mood to be carried away by the great love of a hulking monster like me. She’s probably decided that all this business of having children and taking care of children, and having a man and taking care of a man, is simply slavery; whereas if she retains her maidenhood and finds some work for herself that suits her and that doesn’t tax her strength beyond a certain point, she may go on being absolutely independent.

“Of course her danger in
that
direction would be the risk of becoming a nun with holy Jesus in the offing and the Holy Ghost—Ghost for Ghosta!—on the horizon. And this sort of life must in many ways, when you really come to think of it in detail, be
no independence at all
! O Ghosta, Ghosta, what are
you
, now at this very moment, thinking about? Does the faintest thought of your lover ever cross your mind?”

At this point Peleg’s cogitations were interrupted by the reappearance of Sir Mort accompanied by both his sons; nor did our Mongolian fail to notice that, as usually happened in their father’s company, the two lads were in a state of quiet fraternal expectation, ready for anything to happen, and
interested
in anything that did happen, but not engaged in an angry argument, as they had such a tendency to be when with their mother or their sister.

“You’re sure your mother said it was pure Neapolitan, that white wine, and not some crazy drink that Tuck of Bumset has concocted and that’s been smuggled into our kitchen from theirs?”

Sir Mort’s words were addressed to Tilton, who held in his hands with exemplary care a four-sided bottle of colourless liquid closed with a glass stopper of an emerald tint.

“O yes, Father,” Tilton replied, quietly enough, but with obvious eagerness to see what effect upon the gigantic patient this particular beverage would have, and excitedly ready to be the one called upon to administer this cure for over-excitement.

“Mother said she’d just given a glass of it to Nurse when Nurse was so upset by Lil-Umbra’s taking John’s side—wasn’t she, John?—that her hands shook till she dropped a plate on the stone floor and it broke into three pieces; and John said—didn’t you, John?—that one piece was Lil-Umbra and one was himself and one was me. Here it is! Shall I give it to Peleg?”

Sir Mort gravely nodded; and Peleg taking it from the boy’s hand, and removing the stopper, poured the whole contents of the bottle down his throat in three long gulps. The effect on the big man was instantaneous. He handed back the phial that had contained this saving grace to Tilton; and quite calmly and naturally squared his shoulders, grasped his great mace by the middle, and bending his head automatically towards his master, and deliberately and with great dignity towards the two lads, went off with long and rapid strides in the direction of the Priory and the Convent.

As he went, the strangest feelings swept through him,
affecting
his attitude to everything in the world. He felt perfectly calm, but prepared to fight to the death, for two inexhaustible causes, each of which he saw at that moment in close
connection
with a separate aspect of the scenery through which
he was hurrying, the first with a long line of stately pines and the second with a distant hill-top upon which at that moment rested a large white cloud.

His first cause was to win Ghosta against all the world, and his second was, when once he had won her, to fight on behalf of her people, her tribe, her ideas, her religion—yes, on behalf of everything that belonged to her, of everything she loved and represented, of everything she had set her heart upon, whether to do or to enjoy.

There was even a third cause that came to him as he passed a dark avenue descending into a mossy gully; and this was to fight to the death against all the things and people and customs and ways and systems and institutions, which she loathed and hated! It was just when he was passing this sombre declivity, which the Sun himself, even at the high hour of noon, seemed to hesitate to enter, that he heard behind him the sound of running feet and the quick panting breath of the runner.

He stopped and swung round, tightening his hold on his mace. And there, behold, was young John! John never looked his age. He was over eighteen; but any stranger seeing him as he looked at that moment would have taken him for sixteen or seventeen. John’s eyes were hazel in colour, and were large and full of spirit; in fact they gave the impression that his soul was much nearer the surface of his skin than is usual with young men; and as Peleg waited till the lad got his breath, he told himself that it was no wonder this learned Friar, whom everyone talked about, enjoyed teaching a boy like this.