The Brazen Head (6 page)

The tall lean Master of Roque who, as the sole survivor, save for his own offspring, of the incorrigibly eccentric family of Abyssum, ceased now to take even the slowest steps towards his destination. In the downright language he would have used himself, he stopped dead. “My birthday come round again!” he thought, “and poor little Valentia, with all her values and valuations, will be fifty next August! Twenty years more, according to Holy Scripture, and we shall be an aged pair, and the place swarming with grandchildren! Well, well, well.”

He turned the glittering point of his spear earthward, and using both his powerful forearms, he forced it down so deeply into the earth that he soon was able to lean with the full weight of the pit of his stomach upon the large bronze knob that terminated the handle.

In this position, leaning on the handle of the spear that
belonged
to him and pressing its point into the ground that
belonged
to him, Sir Mort couldn’t resist indulging in a queer mental performance that he prayed to God he had been crafty enough to keep entirely to himself—namely an almost
ritualistic
trick of his, which from the days of his extremely weird childhood he had been led by the deepest thing in him to practise.

The deepest thing in Sir Mort was without doubt the intense egoism of his own soul, in other words his absolutely abnormal self-centredness. None of his offspring approached him in his awareness of his interior self or ego, or in his power of isolating it and of enjoying its isolation. Sir Mort imaged this soul of his in a curiously original and indeed a very erratic way. He saw it in the shape of a particular kind of spear, the kind whose spear-head grows wider and wider for several inches, then proceeds to narrow itself for the same number of inches before it reaches its sharp and piercing spear-point.

He saw it however as made, not of iron or bronze, but of flint. He saw it indeed as a spear with a flint arrow-head for
its point, a point enlarged to about a dozen times the size of an ordinary arrow-head. This spiritual spear with a super arrow-head became to Sir Mort the ultimate hieroglyph of himself; and in all his private and secret thoughts, which were often extremely fantastic, he actually saw himself as this same flint-headed spear.

He had got into the habit of imagining his inmost self in the shape of this spear with its flint super arrow-head driving its way through the mossy surface of the earth, while he forced himself to think of it as possessed of every one of his five senses.

Unknown to another soul—for Lady Val was the last
person
in the world to draw out of him such a secret—Sir Mort, who would have been regarded by his wife and by his sons and by all his neighbours, especially by his pious friend, Prior Bog of Bumset, as simply insane, had they known of these practices, imagined himself seeing the roots and the
earth-worms
and the cracks in the stones and the variously coloured veins of the different geological strata upon which his soul impinged as it descended deeper and deeper into the hole it was making!

He also forced himself to touch, to smell, and to taste, all these animal, vegetable and mineral entities into whose dwelling he was descending; and finally, so that his spiritual pilgrimage should miss nothing, he imagined himself listening, as he headed downwards, to the intercourse, in some sort of
earth-mould
language, which these roots and cracks and crevices, these worms in their subterranean dwellings indulged in among themselves, so that he could compare their mental reactions to life with his own.

But this was only the first “move”, so to speak, in Sir Mort’s intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air! On this
airborne
quest he was careful to avoid every conceivable collision. He avoided the Moon and he avoided every planet. He avoided all the falling stars.

And then, when he had got clear of all impediments in his aerial flight, he set himself to enjoy the pure touch of
nothingness
, the ineffable taste of nothingness, the indescribable smell
of nothingness, the god-like sight of the immeasurable recesses of nothingness, and finally, pervading his pilgrim-soul with the most exquisite pleasure of all, the unutterable symphonies of the music of nothingness.

And then he would force his spear-head soul to make a great dive out of the depths of the air into the depths of the sea, and it can well be believed how the touch, smell, taste, sight and sound of the swirling, the water-spouting, the whirlpooling, the towering and lowering, the roaring and soaring, the rumbling and grumbling, of the everlasting ocean, with both its eternal motion and its eternal identity, would satisfy to the full the insane void of his unending quest: and, finally and at last, into the hot fire of the Sun and the cold fire of the Moon; and from these into the incredible fires of all the living stars, until, out of earth, out of water, out of air, and out of fire, he wrested what his spear-head of a soul required for its imperishable nourishment. For the only thing in the world that Sir Mort feared was death—the thought of being
non-est
, of being as if he had never been.

He always felt, if only a shred of him remained—only a nail-paring, only a scab, only a tiny bone, only a handful of ashes—as long as this speck of the matter which had once belonged to his body remained, so that his unconquerable soul could hover over it, he would be still Sir Mort, he would not be dead yet.

He now raised himself up and pulled his spear out of the earth and stared in front of him into a great alder-bush from the heart of which, it suddenly had struck him, somebody was watching him. And then, in one quick beat of his pulse, he knew who it was. It was none other than his neighbour, Sir Maldung of Lost Towers. Not only was Sir Maldung watching him, but he held a drawn bow in his hand whose arrow was aimed straight at Sir Mort’s heart.

Sir Mort had never been calmer, stronger, quieter, more entirely collected, more absolutely poised in his mind than he was at that instant. He didn’t feel in the faintest degree afraid. It was a peculiarity of his that, as long as he had his wits about him, and saw clearly what his enemy was aiming at, not a flicker of apprehension crossed his mind.

“I shall know by his expression,” he said to himself, “when
he lets that arrow fly and I shall be perfectly able to dodge it before it touches me! I am myself a drawn bow and a pointed arrow! And when you are yourself both arrow and bow, it is fine sport to watch your enemy’s face!”

And certainly Sir Maldung’s face was something to watch at that moment. It was positively convulsed with the ultimate ecstasy of killing. His mouth was open and twisted awry; his eyes stared so intently that they seemed as if at any second they might flow or drip or sweat or soak into the alder-bush. His whole face was crumpled and wrung and knotted and sucked inwards.

And then in a second it relaxed like the bursting of a boil, and became, as far as any human expression was concerned, blurred and blotted out. Sir Mort dived to the ground; and the arrow skimmed over his back and quivered into the trunk of a fir-tree.

Sir Mort straightened his body and uttered a queer little laugh. But it did not occur to him to pursue the figure that was now in full flight. “Silly old devil!” he muttered; and strolled, as slowly as he had been doing before, towards the postern entrance of the Fortress of Roque.

“I’ll go,” thought Lil-Umbra, “as if Mother had sent me with an important message. I will not speak to a soul: and when anyone speaks to me I’ll pretend not to hear, or to be so occupied in delivering my message that though they see I can’t help hearing I need not take any notice of what people say. It
was
, after all, not only once but twice that I found Raymond de Laon there! Of course the first time he was there he couldn’t have had the faintest idea that I should be likely to come in. But that second time he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He seemed glad: very glad in fact, but he didn’t seem at all surprised.

“O! I do wonder what he feels about me! It’s so teasing never to know! That’s the worst of it with a grown-up boy. If it were John now, it would all be so easy! But of course
he
would have let it out to everybody and I’d have had all I could do to make him keep his mouth shut! I suppose I’ll never know with Raymond till he suddenly bursts out with it. He looks at me all the time: and that day we were alone at Cone Castle, when Baron Boncor had taken Will with him to London and I was turning the pages with him of one after another of those old books he is always finding in some secret recess in one of those lovely turrets of Cone Castle, I noticed how for some reason or other the hand I wasn’t using, to turn a page or to point at a picture, was held in his hand.

“But, O dear! I am afraid I’m just being silly! Plenty of girls much handsomer, cleverer, and more important than me, must have been attracted to him and tried to win his favour. And there’s that time he had—and he told me
himself
how much he enjoyed it!—when he was studying
philosophy
in Paris. He must have been a guest at all sorts of grand houses, and met lots of wonderful women! O why aren’t girls like me allowed to attend the lectures of these great Doctors? It is all
so
unfair! People don’t realize how lucky young men are in these clever modern days to be allowed to hear really important thinkers explaining the nature of——”

It was at this point that Lil-Umbra had to extricate herself from an extremely formidable group of crusaders from the south of Anjou who looked at her in the way—so she told herself—that such comrades-in-arms must have looked at every unravished maid they encountered in their holy campaign. “O why can’t we find out the real true nature,” so
Lil-Umbra’s
thoughts ran on, and they were rendered more rebellious still by contact with these consecrated warriors, “of such mysteries as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, and, let’s hope, put an end once for all to all the stuff the priests”—and here her thoughts were again
intensified
in their revolt by yet another body of guests, for she was now squeezing herself between a sculptured procession of angels in Purbeck marble and a group of excited persons who, although freemen of the Manor of Roque, were nevertheless, as far as their habits of thought went, on no higher level than the humblest serfs—“all the stuff the priests keep putting into our heads.”

It was soon after she had safely squeezed her way along this succession of marble angels, which must have been a strip of masonry left intact during the Fortress’s renovation a century earlier, that Lil-Umbra came upon a narrow window,
especially
adapted for defence by arrow-shooting, out of which, though she had to stand on tip-toe to do so, she couldn’t resist taking a peep into the surrounding forest. The Fortress was such an erratic and rambling erection, and it had been added to during so many experiments in castellated building
throughout
the years, that to Lil-Umbra’s surprise she found herself peering into a portion of the forest almost directly opposite the small unfinished shrine to Our Lady of the Holy Ass, now being so devotedly built by the two hands of Tilton alone, though Lil-Umbra had not failed to guess that it had been under the influence of some impious brain, possibly young John’s, that
Tilton had given his work that grotesque name: but at this moment it wasn’t of an ass or of a horse that she was thinking, as she pressed her chin upon her eight white knuckles in order to peer out of the arrow-slit in the ancient wall.

She was indeed experiencing a moment of heart-wrung disturbance such as any ordinary onlooker would have felt to be beyond all proportion to its cause, when she saw the figure of a young girl, of about her own height and slenderness, but dressed with a most subtle and most deliberate aim, in that unusually warm February sunshine, of making herself
exquisitely
provocative to masculine senses, lying sideways on a mantle which she had spread out on a mossy bank bordering on the well-trodden path that led—and didn’t Lil-Umbra know that path by heart!—from the postern-gate to the
unfinished
shrine of Our Lady of the Holy Ass.

It may easily be imagined that it was not only about the quick return to breakfast of her two brothers along that familiar forest-track that Lil-Umbra was now troubled. What if Raymond de Laon had taken into his head—O he too too easily might!—to pay a visit to the shrine Tilton was raising to Our Lady?

It was sufficiently unusual for the eldest son of the lord of a Manor as large as Roque, which everybody knew was more thickly populated than any other in the West Country, to design and plan such a shrine with his own brain and to build it and to carve it with his own hands, to have already started queer rumours in that part of England, without the
half-naked
daughter of the adjoining castle waylaying him between his new shrine and his parents’ dwelling!

For as the agitated, and indeed the now thoroughly upset, Lil-Umbra hurried on towards the armoury, she could not keep her mind from pondering on every aspect of the fact that she had herself seen Lilith, the only child of the wicked Baron Maldung and his half-mad lady of Lost Towers, stretched on the bank by the path as if tomorrow were the first of August rather than the first of February!

O it was impossible for the infatuated Lil-Umbra not to play with the tormenting idea that there already might exist God only knew what depraved understanding between
Raymond
de Laon and this terribly licentious girl. “I must
certainly ask him outright,” she decided, “the very next time we’re alone whether he is on speaking terms with this
shameless
girl! But till I have a chance of asking him that, I certainly mustn’t let him hold my hand again. O! I just can’t bear to think about it—Lilith Maldung waiting for him
half-undressed
outside our very gate!”

But like most of us when we are still under twenty,
Lil-Umbra
hadn’t acquired the difficult art of putting painful possibilities out of her mind and the vision of Lilith by the wayside continued to obsess her thoughts with one horrible imagination after another. She felt ready to welcome any excuse that offered itself for not going straight into the armoury to talk to the ex-bailiff. She decided that it might be a timely occasion in the interest of her own physical comfort to visit the women’s corner of the retiring-yard, and this with slow and leisurely steps she proceeded to do, rinding the spot less
frequented
than might have been expected under existing
circumstances
.

When, however, returning from this retreat with that vision of Lilith still biting like a rat at her tenderest nerve—for she still felt a curious desire to put off any possible encounter with Raymond de Laon till this image from Lost Towers had faded a little—she took the more roundabout of the alternative ways to the armoury, she found herself again following a passage along the outside wall of the Fortress, a passage which was once more in full view of her brother Tilton’s cheerful shrine.

And so once more, urged by the insatiable demon of
curiosity
, she found herself standing on tiptoe at a similar
arrow-slit
-window and staring out as desperately as before into the dazzling afternoon sunshine. What she now saw caused her to gasp with the same kind of choking in her gullet that a female blackbird might suffer who suddenly perceives in her lonely nest a solitary cuckoo’s egg.

Another girl was now rapidly approaching that provocative figure lying stretched out on the grassy bank by the edge of the path, and Lil-Umbra was as startled by the strangeness of the new girl’s look and her queer attire as by her astonishing beauty.

“She must be a Spanish maiden,” Lil-Umbra told herself, “or a Jewish girl straight from Palestine! Who on earth brought her here and what does she want with us?”

This time it happened that Lil-Umbra’s arrow-slit was so close to the alluring figure down there beneath her on the grass that she felt a faint uneasiness lest one or other of the two girls should look up and see her. “They wouldn’t see much,” she told herself, “in this blazing Sun and against all this grey stone; but they might see enough of my forehead and hair to realize that they’re being watched!”

Lil-Umbra lowered her insteps by a fraction of an inch, thus bringing down her ivory-white forehead to a position only just above the support of that row of equally white knuckles; and it was from this position that she saw the new-comer pause by the side of the half-naked girl on the grass, evidently wishing to ask her a question.

“What question is she going to ask?” Lil-Umbra said to herself. “She may be in attendance upon one of these
noblewomen
from France, or she may have come from the Priory.”

And then she suddenly became aware that by some
chance-sent
miracle the wind, which in that glowing sunshine had been blowing from the east, suddenly shifted to the north, with the result that she could hear with perfect clearness every word the two were speaking.

“I was only asking you,” she heard the stranger say, “where would be the best entrance into this Fortress-Castle for a serving-girl like me? I have only just come to this part of the world and I am working at present in the Priory kitchen, but they told me that the best thing to do if I wanted to meet anyone of my own race round here was to get an entrance ‘by hook or by crook’, as we used to say in the crusaders’ camp, into the Fortress of Roque.”

“The best thing for you to do, my good girl,” replied Lilith of Lost Towers, without moving to change her position or to wrap her garments more closely round her, “is to go right back to the Priory the way you came! Everybody round here knows perfectly well that Prior Bog is no man to cater for the tribal pretensions of a ship-wrecked, tossed-up slave-girl such as you! Get back to the Priory the way you came, my woman. That’s the road for you to take!”

Then it was that our young watcher through the arrow-slit saw an unexpected sight. For the new-comer deliberately moved forward and stood quite calmly by the side of the girl
lying on that grassy bank. Luckily for our observer, the stranger stood now looking directly westward towards Tilton’s shrine, and with her back not only to the Priory from which she had come, but also to the old Druidic stone-circle from which our friend that very morning had watched the Sun rise. And so it was possible for Lil-Umbra to see her profile clearly outlined against the trunk of a naked larch.

And there was such power as well as beauty in the profile she saw that she felt no surprise when the girl on the ground hurriedly got up and began re-assuming in haste every
garment
she had removed, and finally, apparently entirely under the psychic compulsion and the silent authority of the
wanderer
, began wrapping about her the ancestral cloak she had spread so carefully on the grass.

And now this mysterious foreign woman was answering the Lost Towers girl in language quite as formidable as her own but much more dignified and compelling.

“I am unknown to you,” Lil-Umbra heard her say, “while you are not unknown to me; but we are both face to face with all those frightful difficulties, and appalling choices among so many completely different courses of action such as afflict all women. Listen to me, then, Lilith of Lost Towers; and I will tell you what you had better do if you want to avoid a dreadful quarrel with your mother and father, a quarrel that might bring down your whole house in ruins.”

“What are you talking about, your poor slave from
Byzantium
? You say we’re both women. Don’t you see that the only important thing in our life
as
women is how to satisfy our love in the one direction and our hate in the other?”

The stranger made two or three short steps backward as Lilith said this and then made the same number forward again; and this rhythm she repeated as she went on speaking, while the tiptoe watcher, with her white chin pressed against her white knuckles, actually found her toes tapping the stone slab beneath her feet as if she were watching, or by some mysterious compulsion actually joining, some weird ritualistic
performance
.

And Lil-Umbra was unable to resist the curious feeling that the woman, who thus kept advancing and retiring in a sort of thaumaturgic sorcerer’s dance, was actually drawing into her
body as she did so the rays of this burning Sun and turning them into a protection against their chemical opposite, that is to say against some cold, dark, wet, hostile element from which emanated the very chill of death.

And all the while she was walking thus rhythmically
backwards
and forwards, she was chanting to Lilith of the Lost Towers what sounded as if it were the undying echo of some prehistoric war-challenge, the challenge of one long-extinct race to another extinct race, a challenge that had survived as an indestructible cry out of the heart of the earth itself, and issued forth from the earth in the form of dust and dew and spray and mist and vapour.

“The white skin and sweet flesh of a young girl like you,” she chanted, “if they be offered up as a living sacrifice to the powers of destruction, will recoil not only on those who offer them up, but on her to whom they belong!”

Lil-Umbra was more astonished than she would have
considered
it possible for her ever to have been in the house of her birth by what happened then. For Lilith of the Lost Towers seemed suddenly seized by a great panic. She clutched nervously and frantically at a few objects of attire that she had as yet, while putting on her clothes, neglected to
re-assume
, and holding these against her navel, she swung round, and with head down and her eyes on nothing but the path she was following, she bolted into the forest with the blind rush of a small animal desperate to escape.