As for old Heber Sygerius, with this sylph-like figure crouching at his side, he really had begun to permit to his natural impulses certain liberties of imagination, such as would never have been allowed to lift their heads above the ground in the mind of her Mongol friend with his Hebraic conscience. “How strange it is,” the old man was pondering now to himself, “that the traditional separation between my lord’s daughter and my lord’s bailiff should totally stop, not only the faintest attempt on my part to meddle with this exquisite little creature, but also should prevent my explaining to her any of my private ideas about life in general, ideas that I worked out in my own head years and years before Friar Bacon was forced to leave Oxford and come among us as a half-condemned and half-imprisoned heretic.
“O! how I’d love to tell this sweet child everything I’ve worked out for myself about the wisest, cunningest, craftiest ways of enjoying life and holding our own against our enemies! And yet I’m not allowed by our absurd conventions to utter a single word to her as a man of the same race and the same village, face to face, an old man to a young woman, a wise grand-dad to a hasty child! O how I’d like to describe to you, you darling little creature, exactly what can be picked up of subtle wisdom from these half-burnt logs that are warming us both at this second!”
Lil-Umbra’s eyes were now fixed upon the door of the room, through which there undoubtedly did come at this moment a stir and a murmur as of a noisy and rather excited crowd. Glancing from her profile to the fire the old man couldn’t help noticing a perfect little blue flame that was leaping up and down on the segment of a log that still carried minute patches of greyish lichen upon its crumbling bark.
Then he looked back again at her exquisite profile. How could he, he asked himself, describe to her the very curious elation which he had felt a second ago through all his senses, an elation that gave him now a delicious aftermath of satisfaction, like a wave drawing back over a bank of pebbles? O how he longed to describe to this lovely young girl just what he had felt, and to ask her if she herself a minute ago, when that blue flame was flickering up and down between those logs, had felt anything in the least resembling it! Why was she staring so at the door at this moment? Expecting to be called by her nurse?
“No! I warrant she’s listening intently for the step of some particular young man! Well, if that’s the case,” thought the old man, “she certainly isn’t in the right mood to listen to an elaborate discussion centring round blue flames and burning logs.”
And then it struck the old man that, quite apart from the difficulties of sex, it was a shame that he couldn’t talk to this intelligent and sympathetic young woman about the life-philosophy he had worked out for himself. Since he had handed over the reeveship to his sturdy son, he had had a grand opportunity to work out the whole logical basis of a real life-philosophy that was entirely original and entirely his own.
And what he felt now was that he could make this girl understand things that neither of her brothers, nor Raymond de Laon nor young Sir William Boncor, would be able to apprehend, discoursed he to them never so wisely! O! why couldn’t he now boldly tell this clever little lady that there was such a thing as a subtle trick of so manipulating our nerves and our senses by our mind and our will that we could render ourselves completely independent of the fate that had made us a man, or a woman, or young, or old, or well-born or self-born, or strong, or weak, or naturally courageous, or naturally full of fear?
Why couldn’t he tell her about this discovery of his and about its connection with a power he had recently begun to develop in himself, old as he was, the power of getting into touch with something that was almost like consciousness in things that are considered completely inanimate.
It was at this moment that he gave a violent start and looked at Lil-Umbra in such a way that it came near to seriously scaring her.
“Didn’t you feel something then, little lady,” he cried, “something you never felt before in your whole life, no! not till a minute or two ago? I felt it; and though I’ve lived more than ten times as long as you, I’ve never felt anything like it! It was as if our thoughts, your beautiful young thoughts and my ugly old thoughts, had, for a second, yes! for half the beat of the pulse of a second, become one. No doubt it had to do with our sitting in silence by these dancing flames — and then we saw something, something that was standing between us, standing between you on your stool and me in this chair, something that was like that statue of Our Lady in Prior Bog’s private refectory — the one that’s so dark — dark as a gipsy, dark as a Jewess!”
Not a syllable of all this had been missed by Lil-Umbra, and it had its effect. The thoughts in that preposterously bare skull and in that delicate girlish head had in some mysterious unique manner become one, and “Something,” as old Heber had put it, had entered the room, had stayed in the room, and had stood or sat or crouched or planted itself between them.
And the thing that had done this was, as the young girl knew quite as fully and distinctly as the old man, nothing less than an image, or what the ancient Greeks called an “Eidolon”, of that dark and terribly beautiful woman, whom she had recently seen encountering Lilith of Lost Towers!
What the old man hadn’t sufficiently remembered during this whole interview was that they were waiting for the appearance of Lil-Umbra’s father, under whose authority they would both go to take their places at the first meal of the day. He himself had already swallowed a substantial bowl of barley-meal washed down by a good draught of ale, whereas Lil-Umbra, though she had got up so early and been with Peleg to the Stone Circle, had not tasted a thing. Her nervous agitation at this moment was certainly accentuated by this fasting.
It may even have had something to do with the nervous leap to her feet and the irrepressible cry, almost a little scream, with which she now greeted the opening of the door and the sudden appearance of the very person she was hoping for, namely young Raymond de Laon, accompanied by none other than her recent companion, the Tartar-Jew Peleg.
Polite and friendly, if extremely airy and casual, were the greetings with which young Raymond de Laon saluted the ex-bailiff as he carried off the girl, who herself was so excited that she even forgot to turn her head to nod to the old man till her curls were hidden by young De Laon’s broad shoulders. Peleg however closed the door quietly behind them and came straight up to Heber’s side.
“Has Sir Mort come back?” the old man enquired. Peleg nodded.
“And is this confounded Bonaventura, this ‘General’, if that’s what they call him, of the Friars come too?”
“He’s here now anyway,” answered Peleg, “but you never know with these clerical almighties! He’ll probably stroll round the kitchen first to see what sort of feast there’s going to be! Some say he’s one for fasting. But I doubt if he can practise that little game when he’s travelling! He won’t want to get so light that his horse will shake him off like a dead leaf.”
Heber smiled his most endearing smile at the tall Mongol.
“Lend me a hand, my boy, will you, to help me up? And, maybe, you’ll give me your arm to the dung-house next door, and then help me down to the hall?”
The Jewish Mongol obeyed and gravely helped him to his feet, and while he did so the eyes of both of them were drawn to the fire by a curious dance which a couple of lively blue flames took upon themselves to perform, for the special benefit, it might almost seem, of these two men.
We say “it might almost seem”, but as a matter of fact it was a completely different set of impressions that the middle-aged man and the old man derived from that dance. If there really were any sub-human and sub-conscious psychic impulse behind the motion of those two blue flames as they raced up and down that thin strip of pine-wood between a large spruce-log and a small larch-log, both logs having their own particular reaction of this performance, and if this psychic impulse had been interpreted by some new technical machine invented by Friar Bacon, it would at any rate have been made clear that such an impulse was a sub-sexual as well as a sub-human one.