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.”