Thus it was easy enough for Lady Val to give herself up to a certain rather bitter vein of meditation, for which she only had the appropriate leisure when, as at this moment, she was waiting for Sir Mort before taking the lead in some exacting social function.
“It’s no good,” she told herself, “imagining at this late stage what my life might have been if I hadn’t married Sir Mort and handed this place over to him with his weird Abyssum blood, for just as I never could understand his parents, so, though I love him from my heart as the father of my two boys and of our darling little Lil-Umbra, I do sometimes feel as if, being as I am the only living descendant and representative, in this ill-mannered and unruly island, of our old and civilized house of Dormequil, I might have done better had I given myself and our historic Manor of Roque to one of our cousins in Brabant, or even to one of our second cousins in Piedmont.
“But perhaps then I would have died childless; for with all the proud shrinking of what Mort calls my ‘virginal qualms’, if I’d given myself to a man of my own nervous sensitivity instead of to my old thick-skinned raper of Sabines, these dear children of mine might never have been born! But O I do wish that Mort had never let John go to that awful Regent’s College, as they call it, in Oxford, where this man they call the Doctor Mirabilis got hold of him. The boy’s head has been completely turned by this cunning Friar with his devilish sorceries! Thank God that Tilton has a firm head on his dear broad shoulders! He has always been the only really well-balanced, sensible one of our family, and I can only pray he’ll more and more take the lead.
“It doesn’t seem quite right for a young man as well-born and well-educated as Tilton to work like a mason with his own hands at that little shrine to Our Lady he’s building out there: but it shows what a good, firm, steady, reliable mind the dear boy has that he is anxious to serve God in a really practical way, rather than indulge in all these crazy and immoral ideas about inventing ships to fly to the Moon and boats to dive to the bottom of the sea and Heads of Brass to utter oracles. O my little John, my little John, if I, your mother, can’t get this nonsense out of your head I can only hope that when you’re a man you’ll find a woman who’ll be able to do what your mother can’t!”
At this point Lady Valentia was seized with such a spasm of frustration and with such a sense of all the weariness and disillusionment that exist in this human world, that she bowed her head over the arm of her chair, and closing her eyes uttered a piteous prayer to her guardian angel that she might go to sleep like those people in fairy-tales and not wake up till her husband was dead and John was a man and Lil-Umbra was happily married.
It was at this moment that Master Cortex, breathing heavily and gasping a little, not only by reason of the speed at which he’d come, but also from apprehension as to the effect of his news, was ushered into that little ante-chamber.
Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery jostled each other to be the first intermediary between this Euripidean messenger of fate and the lady of the manor; and Mother Guggery being the nearer at the start won the race. With a word and a wave she dismissed the scullery-boy who had ushered Cortex into the lady’s presence, and she would have dismissed Cortex too if she could have got his news out of him before doing so; but Lady Val’s instinctive tact and instantaneously available domestic wisdom anticipated any such move.
“What is it, Tex?” she enquired; and her choice of the diminutive syllable which Sir Mort always used for his doorkeeper so delighted the professional pride of Mistress Bundy’s stolid mate that he couldn’t resist giving to both Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery a grimly sardonic glance, not even including them in one general look but giving them each a separate rebuff, as if he said to the one, “You see it’s ‘Tex’ between your mistress and me,” and to the other, “You see how well she knows the way they treat door-keepers in King’s houses!”
“Did this man you’re speaking of,” enquired Lady Val, “I mean the one on the horse with two heads, mention how many were coming? Did he know if the saintly Bonaventura was among them?”
Having completely disposed of the two old wives, who were now so riddled with curiosity that nothing but direct dismissal by their mistress would have got rid of them, Cortex answered Lady Val’s questions with the utmost honesty.
“The man didn’t say how many they were, my lady, nor did he say whether Saint Bonaventura was coming with them. But he certainly said they would be at the great gate in a few minutes; so, as I knew you and Sir Mort, my lady, would wish them to have a taste of cook’s good oat-cakes on this morn of morns, I told him that their men would have to take their horses round to the stables themselves, and that if his noble lords were wearing heavy armour it had better be left in the gate-room, as we hadn’t——”
“Did the man tell you that Saint Bonaventura was coming with them?” interrupted Lady Val with some degree of impatience.
The Nurse and Mother Guggery looked significantly at each other as Cortex began to explain at length just when and how, in his recent conversation, the name Bonaventura had been introduced:
“Well, Tex,” Lady Val announced at last, “you’d better bring them all in here, into our reception-passage. Yes! All the lot of them! It won’t do to discriminate; ‘In for a shepherd’s crook, in for a royal sceptre!’ as the proverb says. But I wish Peleg and Lil-Umbra would come back! I can’t think where Lady Lil has made him carry her. Well! you’d better go back and wait for them at the gate. I must go to the kitchen at once and find out what we’ve got and what cook will be able to do with what we’ve got”—she broke off with a little cry and a gesture that might have been of exasperation or might have been of intense relief; and while Cortex with a rather dissatisfied countenance stalked out of the chamber, Lady Val turned to Nurse Rampant.
“I think,” she said, “that was the postern-gate. If it was, it must mean that Peleg and Lil-Umbra have come in. I expect you had better take the child to her room at once, Nurse. For I know her Father would want her to look her very best if what Cortex said is true and this company really comes straight from France. Cortex isn’t one to exaggerate, and I know there’s been talk of this saintly Bonaventura becoming a Cardinal, perhaps even Pope, if his glory goes on mounting up at its present rate.”
Seldom have three women separated more hurriedly and with expressions more definitely divided between lively excitement, irritable anxiety, and gloating interest than these three did now. But not much time elapsed before Nurse Rampant and Lady Valentia were in sight of each other again, although surrounded now, each of them, by a closely jostling crowd of extravagantly attired lords and ladies.
III
THE HOUSE OF ABYSSUM
The reception of guests in this central portion of the Fortress of Roque always took place in a wide and spacious but low-roofed passage, half cloister, half gothic corridor, between the kitchen and the dining-hall. Of these it was the kitchen that was far the more richly decorated, and in its roof, walls, and general aspect, far the more flamboyant, and grotesquely intricate in its ornamentation. The dining-hall was of much simpler and much older construction. In fact it must have reverted to an age only a little later than the withdrawal from Britain of the Roman Legions.
Entering it you felt you were entering what might have been a giant cave in a fairy-tale; and when you were within it, it was as if it had been through primeval forests that you had to thread your way, crossing some Roman road, and losing yourself in mouldering and broken-up vestiges of shadowy romance. It was the spacious cloistered passage between these two impressive constructions, the eastward-looking prehistoric dining-hall, and the westward-looking, intimately gothic and mediaeval kitchen, that was, upon this particular February morning, in the year of grace twelve hundred and seventy-two, when the little daughter of the house accompanied by the Mongolian giant Peleg came in through the postern-gate, more crowded than it had been since the day when the Norman bride of Llewelyn the Great was entertained here by Lady Val’s family.
The
crowd by which Lil-Umbra and Peleg were now confronted was indeed a brilliant one and yet it was also an extremely confused and motley one. If there were plenty of lords and ladies, there were also plenty of menials and dependents; some of these latter being almost strangers to the place, such as the blue-eyed, wispy-bearded rider of the deformed horse called Cheiron, others, like the Sygerius family, who had been Bailiffs of Roque for two or three generations, being wholly local people.
It was immediately apparent to Lil-Umbra and Peleg, even before Lady Val had been able to make her way through the crowd to reach them, that the chief topic of excited talk among all these people had to do with the coming of the famous Bonaventura, and with the relation between him and the equally famous—though some would say the abominably infamous—Friar Bacon.
The names Bacon and Bonaventura kept rising and falling like a musical refrain from all parts of the crowd. The impression Lil-Umbra first got was that at any moment the philosopher in disgrace and his saintly punisher might suddenly emerge from somewhere behind the scenes and burst into a dramatic dialogue. Then she suddenly became aware that there really was a violent argument between two excitable competitors for public attention approaching them through the crowd, but that this was a dispute between her own brothers.
She could hear her mother’s voice indignantly intervening as the two young men pushed their way through the astonished guests with the evident intention of going out through the door by which she and Peleg had come in.
“I know exactly what’s happened,” she told herself. “Tilton’s had his breakfast early, in the kitchen, as he often does, and he’s going out to work at his Lady Chapel.” And then, as she noticed that both brothers had caught sight of her, “I pray they’re not going to drag me into their dispute! If they try to I shall just say that we’d better leave theology to people who’re too old for anything else!”
But though both her brothers, and her mother too, had seen her, as she stood there by Peleg’s side, it was clearly not easy for them to disentangle themselves from the press of people. Lil-Umbra moved a little closer to her gigantic companion. On this particular morning, when she had seen the advancing Sun and the receding Moon exchanging some mysterious zodiacal password as they separated to pursue their different paths through space and time, it seemed to her as if some special wave of fate had swept this giant, with his Jewish father and his Tartar mother, into her life as a colossal raft, to which, if she could only cling tightly enough, all would end well.
A sharp-cutting phrase used by her brother John, as he and Tilton shook off the interference of their mother, reached her now like a high-pitched fog-bell in a storm-rocked harbour-mouth; but more agitating to her than John’s wild talk was a startling vision she suddenly had of Nurse Rampant hovering behind Lady Val. Her reply to this presence in the background was to twist her ringers desperately and tightly round a fold in the Tartar’s cloak; and the hard little knot made by this bird-like clutch upon the pliant silk of the man’s mantle became, as Lil-Umbra kept striking her other clenched hand upon it, a sort of musical instrument of inspired resistance to constituted authority.
Nor did this quaint combination of gigantic passivity with girlish revolt prove unsuccessful; for Nurse Rampant, who knew both the character of the mother and the character of the daughter better than anyone else in the world, saw so clearly the way things were drifting that she decided to leave Lady Valentia to deal with her three children and their unsocial behaviour as best she could, and turning her back upon them all hurried off to her own quarters.
“If I’m to dress the child,” she said to herself, “to please this crowd, they’ll have to send her up to me. I’m not going to wait any longer in this crazy hurly-burly!”
Things were indeed getting out of control. Both her brothers were now appealing to Lil-Umbra. Tilton was already finishing what was evidently a sentence he had begun before she had begun to listen to him. “Our learned rulers,” Tilton was saying, “are surely appointed by the Church, John, to direct our campaign against Satan, just as much as our secular captains are appointed by the State to organize our campaign against Saracens and Arabians and Turks and all other enemies.”
“But what I say,” broke in the shrill, high-pitched, rather rasping voice of John, “is that when we come to philosophy, and science, and mechanical invention, we touch a totally different aspect of life from that with which religion is concerned. If you take philosophy for instance,” and here John’s voice rose to such a penetrating pitch that all sorts of resplendently dressed ladies looked significantly at each other and drew nearer to listen, thinking perhaps that here was one of those dangerous heretics that the great Saint who accompanied them was on his way to suppress, “for instance, in regard to the difference between Mind and Matter, what, I ask you,” cried John, beginning to gesticulate like a practised teacher of philosophy, “are we to decide about the Aristotelian view of the Higher Reality compared with Plato’s system of Ideas? Or what are we to think about the nature of these immaculate ‘Ideas’? Are they perhaps to be considered as Godlike Entities in Themselves, or merely as subjective symbols of——”
“Stop this nonsense, John!” The interruption came from Lady Val. It may easily be believed that Lady Val’s indignant outcry had an instantaneous effect upon the already excited, jostling crowd that surrounded them. Everyone heard her words and everyone turned round to look at her; and those who were already absorbed in watching Tilton and John turned from them to their little sister, as if they felt sure that the only female among these precocious youngsters would have some opinion on “the Ideas of Plato” different from any that had ever been promulgated to a puzzled world.
The young girl began to feel as if from every little group of people round them there emanated a violent explosion of human emotion expressed in terms of intensely coloured and passionately gleaming inanimate objects. She had heard that the great “General” of the Franciscan order of preaching Friars—this Bonaventura they were all talking about—was furiously fond of preaching to vast crowds; and she seemed to see him now, as she clung to Peleg’s cloak in a sort of exhausted trance, as a great wavering pillar of light broken up into glittering facets in all manner of metallic mirrors across which were moving a wild array of gesticulating reflections.
On every side she felt aware of glimpses of blue and crimson ribbons, hastily caught flashes of waving feathers, shoulders scintillating with the polished links of special chain-armour that the wearers had been reluctant to remove, jewelled clasps at the folds of carefully adjusted robes, and silver-bordered gleaming knots of satin and silk fabrics holding together the slippery waftures of waving mantles, while here and there she actually noticed, among the ornaments worn by some of the foreign ladies who had appeared, convoluted sea-shells most curiously and fantastically tinctured with weird and unearthly colours totally alien to the sea-shore from which they had been gathered.
John neither hung his head nor answered back under Lady Val’s words. He just clutched his elder brother Tilton by the belt and went on sermonizing him in a murmur too low for their mother to hear. Lil-Umbra glanced up quickly at the countenance of her tall friend Peleg; and she saw that in spite of his height the Mongolian could follow John’s words and even approved of them.
Meanwhile she noticed that Lady Val had been suddenly captured by one of the grandest of the Bonaventurian female intruders, who wore a travelling-robe of black velvet over-scrawled by amazing hieroglyphics in purple and white of the most fantastic monsters to ward off all danger of bad luck; and by scrutinising this robe while its wearer’s volubility absorbed her mother’s attention, she derived a certain curious satisfaction which proved to herself though her brother would not have believed it that she had a real taste of her own for beautiful shapes and rare colours and artful designs.
John was now giving Tilton a long and extremely complicated discourse on the importance of never allowing his pious opinions about unusual yet perfectly natural events, such
as falling stars, whirlpools, cloud-bursts, earthquakes, tidal waves, and the like, to interfere with his daily observation of the ways and characteristics of the persons with whom he had to live, or to let these same theological opinions terrify him with apprehensions about the future of the world.
“Where Science and Philosophy are concerned,” John was now assuring his brother, “it is as bad for the authorities to interfere as it is for the brutal ignorance of the common herd! What I hold is——”
“How John does love to say ‘I hold’,’ ‘thought his little sister, “but I expect he’s right or Peleg wouldn’t look so pleased and mother wouldn’t look as if she didn’t even notice the exquisitely designed robe that lady’s got on!”
“I hold,” went on John, “that no vulgar prejudice and no high-placed authority has the right to meddle in any of these things.”
“You are unfair, John,” cried Tilton indignantly. “Isn’t he, Mother? Do speak, Mother——Pardon me, Lady”—this was addressed to the wearer of the pictured robe, but Tilton went steadily on addressing his mother—“Do tell him, Mother, please do, how unfair he is! Do make him see! What I say is really quite plain and simple. When there’s a possibility of wicked and vicious undermining with clever human reason of the long-ago revealed doctrines of the Church, doctrines that God himself——”
“O do for heaven’s sake shut up, Tilton!” interrupted John. “Aren’t you ashamed to put all this conventional rigmarole, all this hollow superficial humbug, into the head of Lil-Umbra? You agree with me, don’t you, Peleg? Since you’ve lived in this country you have seen, haven’t you, the cruel harm done to original scholarship and original thinking by the blind and obstinate tyranny of self-interest? You, as a Mongol, Peleg, must have seen among Asiatics of every sort this same terrible wrong being done to enlightened and uninhibited human thought by the tyranny of custom, tradition, habit, and common usage, blindly supported by the stupid self-interest of the particular persons who happen to be in power and who use their power to suppress the least stirring of new thought. You do agree with me, don’t you, Peleg?”
The Brazen Head Page 4
