The Brazen Head (5 page)

“Be a good girl now,” broke in her mother, who by this time had escaped from the lady with the hieroglyphic gown, “and go upstairs to Nurse. Your dear Father may be back any minute; and he’ll want to see you at your best at breakfast because I have invited the whole lot of these good people to this meal with us. I have just now been talking to the Countess of Corbière-Cantorac of Caen and she tells me that the Blessed Bonaventura himself has sworn he will be here if his horses
don’t fail him; though at the moment he’s visiting a leper’s hamlet near Ilchester. If your Father’s late, we’ll have to keep all these people entertained and amused as best we can. He wouldn’t like it for us to begin before he came.”

Any sagacious onlooker who had the intelligence to ponder on the under-currents of this scene would have already decided that Lady Val, in spite of the competent appearance of worldly poise that she managed to display, was not far from some kind of nervous collapse. Nor would that onlooker have been
mistaken
. The poor woman actually was on the verge of such a breakdown.

“O why, why, why,” she kept asking herself in the depths of her soul, “did our ancient family of Dormaquil ever allow itself to be betrayed by a romantic idiot like me into handing over Roque to a crazy breed like these Abyssums?”

What particularly disturbed her at this moment was the awkward and unconventional isolation of her three children along with that Tartar-Jew, Peleg. They are simply, she told herself, showing off their clever theories to each other, and totally forgetting their duty to the immemorial hospitality and prestige of the Manor of Roque. They ought to be moving about among this crowd with the graciousness of a proper family; whereas Tilton, I can see, is longing to go straight out to his half-built shrine and Lil only wants to put John in his place and show herself as clever as he is!

She turned away from the three of them for a moment and hurriedly examined the faces of the crowd. She soon realized that there were, sprinkled among the visitors or pilgrims from the other side of the channel, several of the richest freemen of the Manor; and she even fancied she saw a couple of serfs in their Sunday clothes. She had already noticed among the Manor officials what looked to her like the whole Sygerius family, except the old grandfather who was no doubt, as he always was, polishing and sharpening and cleaning the weapons in the armoury. This old gentleman had been the Reeve or Bailiff of the Manor for a quarter of a century, and his name was Heber, while the name of his son and successor was
Randolph
. Old Heber’s wife had died years ago, but the wife of Randolph, whose name was Madge, was full of youthful
liveliness
and daring, as was indeed the whole Sygerius family
 
including both Toby, Randolph’s eldest son, and Toby’s wife, an extremely pretty girl whose name was Kate, but who from childhood had had the nickname of Crumb.

“That silly girl of mine,” thought Lady Val, “must be got away from all these staring people! She
must
go to Nurse and change her clothes and do her hair and be ready to sit down at table when Sir Mort appears. O why, in God’s name,
doesn’t
he appear? He
said
he’d be back in half-an-hour. He
said
it was only to make sure about that dammed-up
mill-pool
that he went out like this. He always goes out for a breath of air before breakfast, but not for as long as this! I do so hate it when he disappears like this just when I want him most. O there’s Madge and Crumb by themselves! Randolph must have taken Toby off to help with all the horses. I must go and find out if they’re going to help me at this frightful breakfast. They ought to. They
both
ought to.”

Lady Val was no sooner lost to sight among the crowd than her eldest child, Tilton, after watching her vanish in pursuit of the middle-aged Madge and of Madge’s laughter-loving daughter-in-law, rose quickly and caught hold of John by his belt. Tilton was a loyal adherent of the New Testament, but in a practical, not an occult or mystical, sense.

He was a tall, muscular, athletic young man, with a candid, open face, straight fair hair, and large honest blue eyes. He had a free, high-spirited, frank integrity of manner that people found very appealing. He now caught his younger brother John round the shoulder and dragged him off towards that same small postern through which Peleg and Lil-Umbra had just come in.

As he thus possessed himself of his brother, he poured out a stream of words. “But you’ll see for yourself! You’ll see the expression I’m carving on Our Lady’s face. You needn’t worry about it being cold in my little chapel. I left a good brazier of red coals in there. Besides, the Sun will be shining through the window. Don’t be scared. I won’t keep you more than a second!”

Lil-Umbra couldn’t resist turning her head towards them and she was rewarded for her interest; for Tilton was so eager to explain to his younger brother exactly the point he had reached in his architectural and sculptural undertaking that,
with his hand on the door-bar, he went on eagerly with what he was saying.

“What I want particularly to show you, Johnny, my boy, is a smile I’ve carved on Our Lady’s face. It’s a smile; and yet it’s more than a smile. It’s a look of worship; and yet it’s a look of What’s being worshipped. I won’t keep you more than a second; so don’t speak till I’ve shown you! No! No! I don’t want to hear another word about reason and science! Wait till you’ve seen the look I’ve put on Our Lady’s face! Of course I couldn’t with only a chisel and hammer show all she was feeling; and of course anyway it would be absurd, even if I were a saint like this Bonaventura who annoys you and your miracle-working Doctor so much, to pretend that I could tell what the Mother of God was thinking. But it’s funny how far a person, if he feels anything of the sort at all, can go when he’s got a hammer and chisel in his hands! But it’s no good talking. You’ll see what I mean when we——”

At this point Tilton dislodged the door-bar and pushed the door open; and both boys, with a mutual gasp of pleasure at the bright sunshine and the smell of fir-trees, disappeared into the air. It may have been the shock of the open door—held ajar by Tilton till he finished his sentence—with its lively inrush of sun and air, or it may have been one of those
apparently
causeless stirrings of motivation that happen so
inexplicably
to us all, but the second her brothers were gone Lil-Umbra, with a quick glance at the crowd to make sure her mother was still engrossed with the Sygerian family, whispered to Peleg that, if there were any serious trouble over her disappearance, he’d better tell them that she could be found in the armoury, talking to old Heber Sygerius.

With this she left him, and forcing a path for herself through the thickest of the press, went off towards the open
courtyard
in the centre of the Fortress, where were the
privy-retreats
for both sexes, as well as storing-places for fuel and food and wine, and where there was even a miniature
tournament
-ground for knightly competition of every kind.

While Lil-Umbra, with a certain quickening of both heart and pulses, was making her way to the armoury, Nurse
Rampant
, always more anxious about her elder nurseling—that is to say Lady Val herself—than about that lady’s daughter,
had found it impossible to get absorbed in her needlework upstairs, and had hurriedly, though rather surreptitiously, made her way back to the scene of action. And this she had only done just in time: for Lady Val, having heard what she felt sure was the sound of her husband’s horn, had left Madge, and Madge’s daughter-in-law, Crumb, and had rushed to the postern-door.

The long-drawn, world-weary sigh of the solitary wind, as it passed over the roofs and entered the windows and doors of the Fortress of Roque, intensified the wild romantic prayer of Lil-Umbra that she might find by the armoury hearth, along with old Heber, no less a person than young Raymond de Laon himself. Because she had found him there once, she never entered the place without expecting to find him there again.

It was this same wind that brought what Lady Val felt sure was the sound of her husband’s horn. She had hardly realized that her eldest boy had only a second ago dragged his brother away to visit the little shrine he was building due west of the Fortress. Lady Val felt certain she had really heard the unmistakable series of defiant notes which her husband loved to play on the great hunting horn that he always carried in his belt whether he was hunting or not, whether he was armed for battle or not, whether he was on horseback or on foot.

The notes of Sir Mort’s horn were indeed unmistakable when heard; but had she, Lady Val asked herself, really heard them? She stood still listening. Not a sound came now from that sunlit forest. She made an impatient movement with her hands and shoulders and rushed boldly to the door. Once there she seized the massive brazen ring into which the iron rod, that made this entrance impregnable, fitted with what was to a particular vein in her nature an obliging and delectable exactitude, and jerked that iron bar to and fro sideways with a violence that required all the strength she possessed in her long slender arms, while she vaguely wondered what her two sons would feel if, instead of opening the door to listen to their father’s horn, she barred it against their re-entrance.

It had become now, and she herself knew that there was something unusual in her mood, an absolute necessity, or at
any rate an angry and desperate one, to hear the sound of Sir Mort’s horn; and although her neck was bare and although the wind that blew past her into that crowded entrance made her shiver, the craving she felt for that sound was stronger than her natural shrinking. Wider and wider she pushed the door open, and in an impulse of sheer frenzy she was on the point of rushing out, when a figure and a voice were upon her, and the powerful hands of the old nurse dragged her back into the hall and closed the door upon both the Sun and the wind.

“Did Lil-Umbra go to her room?” whispered Lady Val to the nurse as they moved back together towards the crowd. “Not to my knowledge,” returned the other. “But I may have missed her on the way. It would be an easy thing to do.”

Lady Val looked at that moment as if she would have liked to have struck the woman; but the wise old nurse, though she released the arm she was holding, showed no sign of having realized the amount of indignant passion which she had aroused. Indeed she knew the lady so well that every course and twist and tangent of the feelings that showed themselves at this dangerous moment were an old story to her.

An onlooker at the scene might even have caught a faint trace of affectionate amusement in the quick look she threw upon Lady Val’s nervous fingers, which were now clasping and unclasping each other as if engaged in some convulsive dance.

“So be it, my dear,” she said quietly. “I’ll go and find our runaway, if you go back to your visitors.”

Slowly, stride by stride, holding his long spear just below its shining point, which now gleamed in the Sun in the way certain objects seem to have a special power of gleaming, as if they are consciously holding and reflecting the rays they catch, Sir Mort returned from his stroll to the small pool which in former days had been a crowded fish-pond, but which now only contained a solitary pike and a solitary perch, who, having divided the place between them, and devoured
everything
, were now watching each other with eyes that were both hungry and apprehensive.

Sir Mort was a tall and slender, but a broad-shouldered man, of about sixty, whose most striking physical characteristic
was the shape of his skull, which was very long and very narrow and was perched like the skull of a vulture on the top of a long neck. The length and narrowness of Sir Mort’s head was emphasized by his deep hollow eye-sockets, out of which his eyes, dark-green in colour, glared forth with a very peculiar effect; for it was as if they had no connection with each other at all, but were, each of them, the solitary eye of a saurian creature whose eye was at the top of its scaly head.

He had obviously snatched at the warmest and smallest jerkin to hand as he went out and at the smallest and lightest iron headpiece, which was scarcely more indeed than a band of metal round his head, a band into which had been fastened a black-and-white feather.

As he approached his Manor-Fortress he soon recognized that both its material and psychic atmosphere were wholly different from what they had been when he set out an hour ago. There was now an intermittent hum of human voices, steps, cries, exclamations, agitations, conversations; and the cold east wind that was blowing across the forest, and rustling through the spruces and the still bare larches and pines, carried upon its breath and whirled up and down, and back and forth, and round and round, what might have been an invisible emanation from that startling and surprising
conglomeration
of human voices, human bodies, human gestures, human cries, along with sounds of all sorts rising from weapons of iron and brass and bronze and silver and gold.

“Is our land invaded from France?” was the first thought that rushed through that vulturine skull. But the next was a more rational one. “Fool that I am!” he muttered. “It’s that thrice-damnable son of a bitch they’ve made into a Saint who must be upon us with all his bloody followers! Poor darling care-driven Valentia! How agitated you must be! I pray John is still in the place and Tilton in not too
architectural
a mood! And I hope to the devil that our lusty old Jew Peleg has brought Lil-Umbra safe back! They can’t, surely, all this huge crowd, expect us to feed them?”

Instead of quickening his pace, as he made his way towards the postern door, the Lord of the Manor of Roque began to walk with unusual slowness, pressing the long handle of his spear heavily against the ground at each step.

“I’ve got to face the fact,” he told himself, “that whether I like it or don’t like it, and whether poor dear Valentia likes it or doesn’t like it, all this whole blasted crew will have to be fed this morning. I hope to God there’s enough in our kitchen to fill their damned bellies!”