“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.