“I’ve got the best of all possible ones now, haven’t I?” he replied to Spardo, with an ingratiating smile. “Didn’t you tell me just now that you were unemployed?”
“Hitherto,” replied the bastard son of the King of Bohemia, “it has been my destiny to serve laymen: lordly laymen, it is true, and persons not devoid of coins of silver and coins of gold, but people tell me that great churchmen like thyself, O most Seraphic Doctor, are very particular and very exacting about the way your food is prepared and your off-scourings disposed of and your garments kept clean. I can see at this actual moment, O most saintly of doctors, several very filthy stains on your beautiful grey mantle, due no doubt — no! I’m not being rude to you, my lord doctor; I’m just indicating the absolute necessity that men like yourself who are so spiritual and so sensitive, and who so feel very, very, very far from the stupid unenlightened masses of men, and just as far from their stupid unenlightened authorities—”
“Silence, man! Who has taught you to talk like that? Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equally stupid and ignorant in the presence of his holy spirit? Are we not all equally selfish and greedy and lascivious and treacherous and deceitful under the blinding fire of his eternal righteousness and the terrible thunder of his fearful truth?”
The deformed Cheiron was so agitated by this threatening voice so close to his ears that he came to a stop and began trembling from head to tail.
“To whom have you been listening?” repeated the grey-robed rider on Cheiron’s back. “You, fresh from our religious France and our more than religious Italy, you, a wanderer across Christian Europe from the idolatries of the East, where, I ask you, have you picked up this devilish talk about ignorant masses and stupid authorities? Have you been listening to this Satanic sorcerer who has dared to assume the dress of a Friar just because he has lost his money, this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon? Or are all the misbegotten islanders in this Godforsaken Britain of yours so savage that if anyone wants to win their favour they’ve got to talk to them in this unholy way? But do you really think, O most generous of all possible wanderers through haunted forests, that you can go on guiding me to Lost Towers? You seem to me, Master Spardo, a rather tired and worn-out man yourself. I can’t help seeing that you drag your feet very heavily, and even kick the tree-stumps and the earth-mounds and the fallen logs as you go along; and I noticed just now that your eyes kept shutting of their own accord, as if at any moment you might fall asleep as you walked.”
“We shan’t be much longer now, reverend lord,” replied Spardo, “and once there I may find a place where I can sleep in their kitchen and my horse may be able to sleep in their stable, while you, being entertained by Baron Maldung and Lady Lilt, will come to your own conclusion about their daughter Lilith, of whom rumour round here says things I won’t repeat to a sacred gentleman like yourself.”
After that brief summary of the situation, the three of them moved on, with the saintly Bonaventura in the saddle, with Cheiron on his faithfully plodding four legs, and with Spardo’s weary head and half-closed eyes drooping and nodding more and more heavily.
Spardo’s thoughts, in spite of what he had just said, were by no means in any kitchen. They were in a much grander place. He was imagining himself luxuriating on heaps of soft cushions and sipping the particular kind of French wine, of a yellowish tint, which from his Bohemian childhood he had always loved best of all the wines in the world.
As for Bonaventura, he was thinking very hard, as he rode on, about his own future destiny. “If I continue,” he was saying to himself, “as effectively as I have done hitherto, in dominating my lower nature by my higher nature; if, in fact, I do attain in the eyes of the world the reputation of being a real saint, will this reputation interfere with my chance, for there can be no doubt I have a very good chance, of being elected Pope?
“Of course it does satisfy me to a mighty large extent to dominate my lower nature like I do, and to feel that in me, and to feel that others feel that in me, the Will of God triumphs over the Will of Satan. But with a character like mine it isn’t enough to dominate Satan in myself; I feel an imperative need to dominate Satan in others too. Yes! and not only in individuals. I feel a need to dominate Satan in groups, classes, societies, tribes, races, countries, nations, hemispheres, worlds! But my real life is my inward life. And I and God alone know the majestic secrets of my inner life.
“The wonderful thing about me, and the thing wherein I differ most from ordinary people, is that I don’t want to dominate the world by action. I want to dominate it by just being what I am; by just being myself. And in this I resemble Jesus Christ. I and God alone know what a destiny-changing moment it was in the history of Christendom when Saint Francis sought me out, among all the rest, and gave me that gift of Healing which he gave to nobody else.
“But what I and God alone know is a yet deeper secret even than that; a secret that I would not have let God know if I hadn’t decided he would have found it out for himself; the way my mother before I was born felt me give a leap in her womb every time God was mentioned. She even — and this deep secret nobody in the world knows but I and God — she even prayed to God all night long, while my father by her side was snoring like a Lombardy hog, that just one tiny little infinitesimal drop of God’s holy ethereal spiritual and invisible seed might mingle with the substance of their earthly terrestrial and mundane seeds, when she and my father became one in my begetting.
“Yes! I and God, alone in all the world, heard that prayer of my mother; and I and God, alone in all the world, know how lovely the face of my mother was — how it was transformed, transfigured, illuminated, entranced, and beside itself with mystical love, when she made that prayer. For I was in you, then, God, wasn’t I, and not in my mother’s womb? O how can I thank you enough, God, for separating me from, and selecting me out of, and putting me above, the myriads of ordinary souls whereof the world is so full! But I must think, think, think, whether it would be better for me, from now on, to go forward increasing my spirituality as a saint, or to develop that other side of sanctity which is quite as deeply natural to me and implanted in me — the sort of wisdom that Solomon had when he decided between those two women with the living baby and the dead baby. That is the sort of wisdom we need in our Pope, and if I were Pope, I would have the greatest opportunity anyone could have in the whole world to make people obey the will of God as opposed to the will of Satan.
“Perhaps,” so Bonaventura’s thoughts ran on, “the inspiration of mine about converting to God and His Church this whole outpost of Devilry they call Lost Towers does really and truly combine both the spirituality and the wisdom of a true saint. But suppose this devil of a Baron Maldung puts me to death?”
He gave a little gasp like a frog in a cave at the striking of flint and steel. “Well, in that case I wonder how far my—” But Bonaventura’s thoughts of spiritual advancement and of everlasting felicity were now interrupted by the sound of a horn quite close to them; and he quickly turned to his companion, who was evidently, although still plodding along by Cheiron’s side, so nearly asleep that he could hear nothing.
“What’s that over there? Did you hear that? For God’s sake, listen, man! It’s just the other side of those trees!”
Spardo slowly turned his head causing his long, slender, wispy beard to brush away several flies from Cheiron’s deformity. “Yes, by Holy Jesus I do hear it,” he groaned, “and what’s more, O most seraphic of doctors, I can tell you whose horn it is! It’s the horn of Bailiff Sygerius and I expect he’s calling for one of his own rascally boys! The fellow hasn’t been bailiff for more than six months. His dad, old Heber Sygerius, has only just given up the job, and I rather—”