The Brazen Head (14 page)

He kept sitting down on his luxurious bed and then walking again down the passage. Had there been any luckless prisoner chained in the cell at the end of that passage, the rustle of that grey robe would have sounded like a new kind of wind from the limbo-cradle of Chaos.

Not for a moment did it enter the mind of Bonaventura that God had forsaken him. What he really felt, if the truth must be told, was that it was a shame and a disgrace that he, the recognized chief saint of all the saints on earth, should have, as his all-powerful and omnipotent deity, a deity who at an important crisis like this was not alive to the necessity of
impressing
these absurd and childish sons of Belial with the spiritual advantage they were bound to gain from associating with so famous a saint.

Yes, if the actual truth has to be told, it was with real irritation against his Creator that Bonaventura hitched up his grey robe, made the face he always made when he was
undertaking
something that required a real effort of courage—that is to say, sucked his lower lip into his mouth and tried hard to rumple and fold and curl his curiously malleable lips over his
teeth, till these latter resembled broken shells pinched tight within the squeezed-up remnants of a mutilated jelly-fish, and boldly began to descend the narrow winding stone steps that led to the lower stories of the building.

The only balustrade to support a person descending these winding stairs was a ship’s rope fastened to the wall by large bronze rings. Instead of the usual narrow arrow-slits all the way down in the massive outer wall of this descent, there was a foot-wide barred window on every landing, and through these windows came not only the full force of the wind but just now a most curious evening light, that struck the
consciousness
of this continental traveller as the very incarnation of the wailing of the wind.

It was a wet white light, and it was a white light that had a way of blurring and even of deforming and disfiguring the outlines of the objects it surrounded. Our visitor after a quick glance at the dark oaken doors, which on every landing—and he passed three in his descent—faced these windows, paused for a while on each landing to stare out between the rusty window-bars.

There was something about the white light, as it lifted every object the man looked at out of its own airy ocean and
presented
it to his vision, as if it were particularly anxious that he should fully take in how it was isolated in its individual
identity
from all the other objects, each of which, if he would only continue staring through those rusty bars, should in their proper sequence be presented to his attention.

It was from the window of the last of these small landings that he caught sight of what was obviously an enormous
oak-tree
, by the side of which was standing a large white lamb. Both the tree and the creature by its side were presented to the saintly traveller as if they had been mystical symbols, divided from all other visible objects in this white thick
encircling
sea of light.

The branches of the oak-tree were creaking in this unusual wind in a peculiarly personal manner, as if they were chanting the syllables of an immemorial incantation that the tree had learnt from the low mound on which it grew, and that the mound had learnt from some unknown angelic power that had been hovering round when that horrible devilish attack had
been made upon the mass of formless matter out of which the world arose.

The oak-tree was now trying to persuade the troubled creature at its side to accept the creaking and husky chant of its branches as the true oracular response to such agitated bleating on this wild night. The pleasure which Bonaventura derived from contemplating this ancient tree, and hearing its liturgical chant to its troubled year-old companion, was
considerably
interfered with by the annoyance he felt at God’s behaviour.

Yes, there was something that scraped and scratched his nerves in the petulant irritation he felt with God for letting this wind disturb everything. It is true that something in him responded to the storm. The creaking branches of that
incredibly
aged oak, borne on this wild wind that seemed to be carrying some desperate message to every ghost in Britain, did certainly—let us be fair to the man—have its effect on his Italian sensibility. But all the romantic emotion Bonaventura derived from it was spoilt by something vexing, fretting, chafing, ruffling, that came with the thought that God wasn’t protecting his partner in sanctity with the whole-hearted consideration which that partner’s life-long devotion deserved.

And yet, in spite of what he regarded as justifiable annoyance with God, Bonaventura couldn’t resist pressing his head against those rusty bars; and, like many other watchers from stone towers at that epoch—like young Lil-Umbra, for instance, as she watched, not many days ago, the encounter between Ghosta and Lilith—he was rewarded for his instinctive curiosity by a very unexpected event.

This was indeed nothing less than the appearance beside that oak-tree of none other than the bearded Baron Boncor of Cone, mounted on his war-horse, Basileus, and still writhing in pain from Maldung’s arrow stuck fast in his shoulder.

Bonaventura was very rarely driven to action by more than one strong emotion at the same time; and it would have been extremely unlike him to do anything but remain absolutely passive, when the instinct to cry out a warning to the rulers of Lost Towers strove in his breast with an instinct to do
something
to get that arrow out of Boncor’s shoulder. For to do Bonaventura justice, there was not a speck or grain of sadism
in him—that is to say, of delight in cruelty purely for its own sake.

What he would really have liked to do, secretly, quietly, unheard of by the people of the place, was to slip out of the house, extract that arrow from the man’s shoulder, and
command
him, in the name of the Pope, to gallop off.

What he now saw however reduced both instinctive impulses to nothing; and he just watched, in petrified fascination. For the bearded man suddenly leapt from the saddle and advanced between the trunk of the oak and the bleating young
motherless
sheep with the obvious intention of caressing it, if it allowed him to approach. But above the creaking of the oak’s branches and the disconsolate moaning of the wind rose that lamb’s cry, as it bounded off with its heavy tail swinging between its legs.

But at that very second the movement forward of the bearded Lord of Cone brought the arrow in his shoulder close to the mouth of his war-horse, who promptly, quietly, neatly and expeditiously seized it with his teeth, and plucking it forth with one quick backward jerk of his head, bit it in half and let it fall against the roots of the tree, from which position both its bloody point and its agitated feathers were whirled away on the wind towards the reeds of the swamp.

It was clear that the loss of blood following the arrow’s extraction left the genial Lord of Cone too weak to remount his saviour, for even with his arm round the animal’s neck when he tried to lead it away, he kept tottering so unsteadily that finally he evidently resolved to take very daring measures, for he lengthened the horse’s bridle by tying to it the long leather strap he was in the habit of using to tether him, so that he could eat grass or anything else he fancied while he was left alone, and proceeded to fasten these elongated reins round his own waist. Then shouting to the animal a brief and clear command in a familiar phrase well known to them both—a phrase that suggested hastening straight home to stable and straw and a well-filled bin—he folded his cloak about him and rolled over on his stomach with both arms outspread and his head thrown back.

Over the soft forest-grass, that was a special kind of grass and as delicate and tenuous as a mermaid’s hair, and over the
brown floor of the pine-needles Basileus now dragged his master, and did this so effectively that it wasn’t very long before Bonaventura’s eyes could follow them no further. Then and only then and not till then, he left the window, and calmly descending the remaining flight of stairs, directed his steps to where the sounds and smells and wavering lights and shadows made the locality of the supper-chamber discoverable.

He was clearly expected, although nobody had suggested waiting for him. But he was no sooner within the dining-hall than agitation upon agitation shook him. Why hadn’t these people sent somebody to fetch him, to accompany him into this dining-hall, to tell him where he was supposed to sit? They had waited on him, bathed him, anointed him, and then just left him to find his way alone to his seat at this important meal! That wasn’t the way to treat a person who, in the depth of his noble, heroic, spiritual, intellectual, and absolutely unique nature, was struggling at this very moment with the Greatest Temptation possible to a Great Man—namely whether to decide at this turning-point in his life to aim at acquiring the appearance of possessing the sort of statesmanlike sagacity which a man must appear to have if he is to be elected Pope, or simply to go on, as he was doing at present, emphasizing the unusual perfection of his spiritual purity as a real saint.

Something about the vision of the horse Basileus, pulling the arrow from the shoulder of that fair-bearded man and dragging him as if he’d been a load of hay over both brown earth and green earth, remained vivid in Bonaventura’s mind. He had the uncomfortable sensation that his own fate was being pulled along by a Power over which he himself had only partial control.

And yet he kept telling himself that this feeling could not possibly represent the truth. No one in the whole world, he kept telling himself, had as close and intimate a relation with God as he had. Of that he was absolutely certain. It was his life, his destiny, his whole being! It was what made Bonaventura
to be
Bonaventura; and all the world knew it!

Nobody who had ever lived understood God and the Will of God as thoroughly as he did I Nobody who had ever lived, except Jesus Christ—and of course you couldn’t bring Him into such a calculation—talked to God as he did, and was talked to
by God as he was. There could be no question; there could be no doubt about it. He and God understood each other in and out, up and down, body and soul, back and front!

As he moved slowly round that great square table with patient dignity and unflagging self-respect, he told himself that he and God must consider more carefully than they had done before, whether it would be better for the world if the cardinals in conclave decided, when the present Pope died, to elect him as his successor, or better for the world that they should nominate that one among them that he, Bonaventura, decided possessed the cleverest and the most practical brain.

“O God, my beloved companion,” he prayed desperately, as his staring eyes caught sight of a red stain on the edge of the table where Lady Lilt was seated, “I implore you to give me the power tonight, so to impress this evil woman and this evil man and this evil daughter, that it is resounded all over Christendom from the Thames to the Danube that Saint Bonaventura has snatched Lost Towers out of the jaws of Hell!”

It was then that he noticed that there was a large empty throne near where Baron Maldung was sitting, made of the sort of wood and of the sort of woven fabric covering the wood that lent themselves best to receiving the red-brown dye, and that next to this throne Lilith was resting, her entrancing white thighs exposed in such a manner that a man seated in that chair would naturally and inevitably, as he poured out his wine, rest his free hand upon one of those perfect limbs and lightly slide his caressing fingers between it and its mate.

He also noticed that the young girl herself was looking intently at him as he advanced towards where she sat. The air must have been full of strangely contradictory currents of thought as the saintly man approached that empty throne; for the intensity of these airy battles caused a deep hush to fall upon that whole assembly of revellers.

It was at this point that Bonaventura commanded in a clear voice one of the attendants to tie a white napkin securely round his eyes, “Lest I should forget for a moment before you all,” he said aloud, “the vows of purity I have made.”

The motives that led him to this move were subtler than he could himself have explained; but to one among them, had
his conscience prodded him, he would have shamelessly
confessed
—namely, a fear that it might be supposed he was so hungry and so greedy that the nakedness of Lilith was no temptation to him at all, in fact that he didn’t give her
presence
a thought. He even went so far as to repeat these words about his vow of purity as he allowed himself, still in the same dead silence, and taking exaggerated precautions not to stumble over any obstacle in the way, to be helped to reach his throne, and to be aided in seating himself there in close proximity to Lilith.

When, however, his hand fell, as fate beyond all human control compelled it to fall, upon that soft bare thigh, a shock of unmitigated lust so overpowered him as to change every plan he had made. Lust quivered through him with a compulsion so convulsive as to drive him into unexpected action. With something like a savage bound he leapt to his feet.

“I must beg you all,” he cried in a hoarse voice, a voice that was almost like an animal’s growl, “to—to pardon me”: and then in a second, while they all stared at him in
amazement
, he had recovered his self-possession.

“The truth is,” he went on, addressing them all easily and quietly, as if in some senatorial or ecclesiastical assembly, “the truth is, it is a privilege that I have been allowed by the Most High, to have illuminations or revelations direct from Himself. Such an illumination I have just had, bidding me leave you tonight and bidding me to ask you for a few
important
favours so as to make my departure easier, and my reception—for that is where my revelation tells me I must spend this coming night—at the Fortress of Roque more friendly and gracious.