The Brazen Head (23 page)

“Good God!” cried John, “that’s the old man! I’d know his voice anywhere! Peleg, do you hear him? It’s the old bailiff! What on earth is
he
doing out there at this time of night? The family would be furious if they knew! How have they let him get out of the Fortress? Is he alone?”

But John was talking now to nobody but Ghosta; for Peleg
had at once responded to the voice, and had been followed at a mad rush by Colin, whose crazy chucklings and wild gestures had been reduced to the purposeful leapings of a high-mettled steed, and also by Clamp, who kept blurting out as he bounced and bumped along, “I know’d it! I know’d it! I know’d it! I could have told ‘ee the whole tale if ye’d cuzzensented to ask it of I! Yes, I could have lighted up this whole blind,
blubbered
, bloated, blistered fog-patch we’ve gone and got lost in! Why didn’t ye come to I ‘stead of letting this kid of a Colin What’s-a-clock show itself off?”

And indeed it now struck young John, who was standing close to Ghosta, while she calmly watched the tide of events, that it was only the special kind of darkness of this particular night that had prevented them from recognizing how close they were at this moment to that little postern-door into the Fortress, of which Tilton and he had made use all their lives.

“
Here we all are, Master
!” The genial voice of the Jewish Mongol carried such an implication of relief, of storms over and haven reached at last, that, as Ghosta moved forward to greet the old bailiff, John knew at once that his flash of insight was absolutely correct, and that they were now at this actual moment at the furthest end of the thick group of oaks and pines, which he had looked at since he was a child and about which, since they were first conscious of such things, they had heard their parents arguing.

Lady Val had always wanted to have those trees cut down, or at least considerably thinned out, as she regarded them as a perfect ambush both for wolves and for wolfish men; but such dense thickets of forest-growth were what, in the whole of Roque, her husband, who was a born hunter, especially loved.

Ghosta had never met the ex-bailiff before, as the old man only left the armoury for the Fortress dinner, his other meals being brought to him as he sat by the fire; so there now ensued in that wild place quite a formal and even courtly ceremonial. John felt it was incumbent upon him in the absence of both the lord and the mistress of the Manor, as well as of their elder son, to play the part of host; and the already somewhat exhausted old gentleman, who approached them leaning very heavily on Peleg’s arm, was now compelled to stand as erect as he could and shake hands, not only with Ghosta, but with
both Colin and Clamp, while John, constantly interrupted by each gentleman in turn, did his best, with a good deal of blundering pedantry and not a little silly facetiousness, to introduce the one as a lively court-jester and the other as a disillusioned, cynical sage.

But, before he had finished, the look of pitiful exhaustion on the ex-bailiff’s face forced him to interrupt himself.

“Here, master,” he murmured, “sit down on
this
, and lean your back against
this
!” And lugging off the sheep’s wool neck-cloth that he had been wearing all that night, he laid it on the ground under the nearest tree-trunk and helped the old man to sit down.

Ghosta at once bent over him, while Colin and Clamp moved off. “Where—is—the—the—the Head?” murmured the old man anxiously, turning his own head this way and that.

Ghosta took the torch from John and ran to Peleg’s side; and John noticed that the first thing she whispered to the giant must have had to do with the arrow-wounds he’d received, for the giant promptly uncovered the places and held the light for her while she examined them.

“So all’s well?” John heard him utter in an interrogative whisper; and it was clear to him that the reply was reassuring.

As soon as she came back, still holding the torch, she asked the old man whether he wanted Peleg to bring the Brazen Head near to him, so that he could examine it. John could see that this bold question at once excited and troubled the ex-bailiff, for, snatching at Ghosta’s robe, he pulled her towards him till she sank on one knee, the torch held at arm’s length above her head.

After a second’s hesitation the old man began a rather
bewildering
and long-winded rigmarole about something he wanted to ask John. With considerable difficulty, but with more tact than he knew he possessed, John now listened to an agitated and complicated account of a conversation the ex-bailiff of Roque had had earlier in the month with John’s sister, Lil-Umbra.

The old gentleman seemed to have been deeply impressed not only by Lil-Umbra’s beauty but by her intelligence; and, as far as her young brother could make out from what he now heard, there had come a moment in the conversation when some mysterious presence, a presence whose nature neither of
them really comprehended, seemed to come between them and to hover over them.

The old man had got it lodged in his head—John could see as much as that—that there was some magic bond, or some fatal link, between this mysterious Brazen Head of Friar Bacon’s invention and a beautiful young woman; and John himself was anxious to learn whether his own vague sense of something weird and unusual, and something that he couldn’t describe as either good or evil, either angelic or devilish, had been felt by Lil-Umbra also.

Old Heber’s hope was that Lil-Umbra may have talked to John about it; as he knew she was in the habit of discussing religious matters with both her brothers. The truth really was that Lil-Umbra’s nerves were so strung-up, and her heart was in such a state of tension, as to whether Raymond de Laon would or would not come to the armoury that night, that the whole subject of Friar Bacon and his Brazen Head passed her by very lightly indeed.

But now to the complete surprise of both the young man and the old man, and somewhat to the displeasure of Peleg, who by this time was towering above the three of them, and was by no means indifferent to this thing they were discussing, Ghosta broke in. “What was wanted,” she said quietly, “to the
completion
of Friar Bacon’s creation I was myself ready to supply; and at the request of the Friar, I did supply it.”

The sound of Peleg’s voice above their heads had a queerly hoarse note in it at this moment. “The best thing we can do tonight,” he said slowly, “is to carry the Head out of this forest and into the Fortress; and I would suggest that we straightway convey it into the armoury where it will remain under the particular protection of our friend here. I believe”—and at this point the giant laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder—“that your Father, Master John, will have no objection when he learns of this having been done. I don’t think our conveying the Head into the armoury need disturb anybody’s night’s rest. In fact I can make certain that it doesn’t by carrying it there myself, while Ghosta helps you, master bailiff.

“No one can have heard you leave or they’d have come with you. No one but yourself, I expect—isn’t that the case,
master bailiff?—heard the noise those wretched Lost Towers men were making; and as you came out you couldn’t possibly have barred the door. The whole Fortress is no doubt asleep at this moment; and we shall take care to move so silently that we shan’t disturb a living soul in the place. I’ll be glad enough to have a rest and a lie-down myself; but I’m not so done-in as not to be able to take this old Brazen Head into our armoury! Once there, I warrant nobody will dare to meddle with it. It’ll soon become a regular shrine, and as sacred as Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin.”

While her giant was addressing them above their heads, Ghosta and the old man, who still had his back against the tree and John’s woollen neck-cloth under his buttocks, were exchanging some extremely curious thoughts. No scrupulous chronicler of human affairs can help being aware out of the instinctive observation of the narrating mind, of the weird manner in which, amid any group of agitated people, when one voice has been monopolizing everybody’s attention for several minutes, a hollow gulf of silence is created, across which all manner of disturbing thoughts pass from one person to another.

John himself at this moment, in
his
corner of this psychic gulf created by Peleg’s somewhat dictatorial and irritable monologue, felt so utterly tired, after all the energy he had spent that night, that his mind, in its exhausted state, like the mind of a person who stares vacantly at his bed-posts, began vaguely to wonder whether in this silence around them and with this hoarse voice sounding above their heads, other feelings than human ones, might be in the act of being
exchanged
, feelings for instance of the mosses, of the ferns, of the tree-roots even, that surrounded them on that forest-floor.

Such vegetation-feelings, John pondered, might be
entangling
themselves with his own human feelings at this very moment; for after all it was this group of trees and bushes which he had known since his infancy, and which, from what he had seen daily of them out of that postern-door of his
birthplace
, had become like the fireguard in his nursery, a
malleable
background to every story he told himself in his day-dreams at noon and to every story he was told by his night-dreams at midnight; and it would be only natural if, on
its
side, the
background of roots and mosses and ferns and lichens and ivy and blades of grass projected obscure invisible sensations, which flitted in and out of his human ones.

But what was this? There was something else. Yes, there was something else at this moment, something that was intruding itself between the furtive and fitful feelings of mosses and roots and ferns and his own weightier cogitations.

“What the hell,” he groaned, “is this confounded thing that has now come into my head?” It was certainly in accordance with the multifarious influences that flit about in our life-stream, like shadowy tadpoles beneath thin ice, that it should have been what the Brazen Head itself was thinking—those thoughts, not of a God-created man, but of a man-created machine, which now butted in, like a misty cloud in the shape of the Minotaur, between the vegetation-feelings of that forest recess and the ideas, whatever they were, that were being exchanged between Ghosta and the old man with his back against the tree.

For there is no doubt that the “something” of which John suddenly became aware was some thought from the Brazen Head. And what the chronicler of these things cannot escape calling to mind was the lack of response that the old ex-bailiff had found in John’s sister Lil-Umbra when the latter, her head full of the possible appearance of Raymond de Laon in the armoury, was doing her best to be nice to him. But this lack of response was now wholly compensated for in the old bailiff’s mind by Ghosta’s attitude.

Young John and the old man were however both vaguely conscious that it was some mysterious connection between the Brazen Head and Ghosta that was now giving to the voice of Peleg, as it rumbled hoarsely above their heads, an irritable and dictatorial tone. The giant concluded with these words: “I’ll fetch the Head now, and carry it straight to the postern; for I can see exactly where we are, torch or no torch! Better give the torch back to Master John, Ghosta, and then you all——” and he threw this out, like a handful of crumbs, in the direction of Colin and Clamp, who, conscious of not being altogether indispensable as the drama thickened, had linked themselves together in the last few minutes in a rather childish though very natural way.

Clamp had picked up a moss-grown stick from the ground that had a couple of tiny ferns growing out of the middle of it, and had poked Colin with it to show him this phenomenon, and the flickering torch had at once revealed those small ferns; and Colin had promptly seized the end of this interesting stick, and now neither of this quaint pair would be likely to relax his grasp.

It was clear that, in their uneasiness as to whether they would be allowed to follow the others into the interior of the Fortress, this mossy stick gave them some curious support, as well as uniting them on this particular occasion.

“And then you can all,” Peleg concluded, “follow me to the little door. Isn’t that the thing, Master John?”

John, who had begun to long for his comfortable bed in the little room that had been his own now for a couple of years, agreed at once; and Peleg, without even glancing at Ghosta, who had obediently handed the torch to John, snatched up the latter’s woollen scarf upon which the old man was no longer sitting, and clapping it upon his own head like a turban, rushed over to where the Brazen Head was surveying them all with the stark indifference of a rocky landscape, and seizing it in his two hands heaved it into the air till he held it propt up on the top of his head. The effort required for this was so great that it drew from him a really terrifying sound, a sound such as Samson must have made when, with the central pillars of the Temple of Dagon in his arms, he bowed himself down and brought down with him the whole of that great building.

An outrush of blood from the two arrow-hurts in his
shoulders
accompanied this sound; and John, who was close to Ghosta, heard a similar sound, bursting unconsciously it would seem, from her; and it certainly was all he could do to restrain in himself a cry of amazement.

But he had the wit to see what the two of them had to do at this important juncture. He began hurriedly helping the ex-bailiff to his feet. “
You
take hold of him on
your
side,” he said to Ghosta, “and I’ll help him on my side!”

And then he shouted after the departing figure of their friend, who was carrying away the Brazen Head on his own head as if it were a gargoyle made of the fossilized features of some antediluvian giant, belonging to the same race, though
of an earlier breed, as the man who was carrying it. “Wait for us at the postern, Peleg! We’ll help you in with it!”

The thoughts and feelings of the old man as he stumbled along over the tree-roots and over the mossy stones, while John’s torch flung the sort of wayward and flickering bursts of illumination that can be both angelic guides and devilish betrayers, grew more and more intense and more and more unrestrained as they drew near the postern-gate.