But Baron Boncor had in him as much commonsense as good nature. He greeted this queer-looking trinity of unusual explorers with an instinctive courtesy that set them at their ease at once.
“Welcome to our dark forests, your Eminence!” he began. “Though I fear after your sunlit Italy you’ll have to be careful to keep your cloak about you. And you too, Master Spardo, for through my wife’s friendship with her good neighbour Lady Val, I’ve heard all about you and your strange steed here! Cheiron you call him, don’t you? They talk a lot about him in the Fortress stables when I take my old Basileus there for a rub down. Give Cheiron a kiss, Basileus! No, no, a real proper kiss! That’s the boy! I warrant he’s not so much younger than you are; and who can tell? You may, if you kiss each other often enough, turn into a real Centaur as he seems to be turning. But if you do—”
He was interrupted by the appearance of the most amazing human figure that any of them, man or beast, had ever seen in his life before. This personage came dancing into their midst, and not one of them could take his eyes off him for a second when once he appeared. He inhaled and sucked in and tried to drain up the essence of every living soul upon that spot, whether such a soul belonged to a man or an animal or a bird or a reptile or a toad or a worm or an insect. None of the three human beings present at that cross-track in the forest had a flicker of doubt as to who this intruder was, who thus came dancing into the midst of them.
It was Baron Maldung himself, the Lord of Lost Towers! Well, they had come to seek him. They had come to visit him. And here he was! Beneath his tunic and his breeches Baron Maldung was clothed in only two garments; but these two garments literally covered him from head to foot — that is to say, from half-way down his neck to the soles of both his feet. The under-garment was of thick, warm, white sheep’s wool; while the garment that covered it was of thin delicate coal-black satin.
Every movement the Baron made was like a step in a dance that he knew by heart: and as he fluttered from one to another of these five beings, two super-intelligent horses, and three rather unusual men, the lightly-blowing wind as it opened his tunic revealed the fact that this black satin covering he wore above his sheep’s-wool under-garment was an attempt, almost a pathetic attempt, on the part of this demonic man to round off his ungainly limbs into a sort of grace, at any rate into a grace that sheep’s wool alone could not give.
“O you must come, you must, you must, you must, all of you, now at once, now that you are here!” he murmured, as he and his shadow — for the sun seemed to be playing a private game with the two of them — danced their special man-and-his-shadow dance. And the wind too had a share in it; for the thin straight dusky hair of the Baron of Lost Towers was lifted up and down on his head as if by the puffs of a petulant rival of that obsequious shadow.
Probably owing to some instinctive gust of fellow-feeling for a being as much devoid of man’s moral sense as he was devoid of man’s self-righteous attitude towards his exploitation of animals, both horses now made an emphatic movement to follow him.
“Well, Basileus,” muttered Baron Boncor, “it evidently looks as if we men must obey the oracles of creatures who probably know the will of heaven better than we do! So come along my Christian friends! Let two legs follow four legs and all our eyes see what happens!”
It cannot be said that Bonaventura looked at Spardo or that Spardo nodded a reply to Bonaventura’s look. It might rather be said that the man on the back of Cheiron and the man at the side of Cheiron followed Baron Maldung as unquestioningly as if they were members of the Household of Lost Towers.
As for Baron Boncor of Cone, he brought up the rear upon Basileus with an expression on his good-natured bearded face which seemed to say: “Well! as long as I’ve got your crazy backs in front of me, I’m ready for anything! From behind I can see how things go. Chance often gives a chance to those who don’t mind bringing up the rear; and, if it doesn’t in this case, so be it.”
It was rather a startling surprise to both Spardo and Bonaventura when they found themselves completely clear of the forest, and saw in front of them, a vast reedy swamp that extended to the horizon in every direction, save the one from which they had come to the really terrifying bulk of Lost Towers.
Lost Towers looked at first sight like a ruin built entirely of black marble; but on nearer approach it showed itself to be anything but a ruin; for the vast blocks of black stone of which it was built had something Egyptian and pyramidal in their size, and although divided and broken up into many small domes and minarets and watch-towers, the general effect made a tremendous awe-inspiring impression upon everyone who had never seen it before. There was something staggering — in truth you might say almost shocking — about its antiquity. It looked as if it had been built of materials brought on barges through a network of canals from the sea-coast, a coast which had been reached by ship from Atlantis itself in pre-historic times. A very queer effect was produced upon a traveller’s nerves the moment he set eyes upon it, a disturbing, troubling, and bewildering effect. The first sight of it must have always touched some long-buried race-nerve in us all that goes back to antediluvian times.
It was certainly as queer a cortège as had ever reached that weird mass of domes and towers in all its incredibly long history, this little group that now approached its portentous entrance. By reason of its own Baron being the leader of this queer band, they were received in a manner bordering upon a religious ceremony.
Lady Lilt herself came out to meet them, dressed so extravagantly that Baron Boncor assured his grey horse that the lady must have been waiting for their arrival in a wardrobe-chamber looking out their way. The retainers who assembled on the small square of cut grass in front of the high, narrow, strangely painted gates, gates that never, by night or day, seemed entirely shut or entirely open, must have amounted to a dozen men and a dozen women, all dressed so much alike and all so mingled together that it was hard to distinguish men-servants from maid-servants as they surrounded the visitors.
But the apparel they all wore was so remarkable in its colour that only a very discerning eye would have been likely to detect that the materials, whereof these richly-coloured garments were made, were a sorry draggled-tailed patch-work of odds and ends, stitched together anyhow, a motley agglomeration of woven stuffs that had only two purposes; the first, to cover — you couldn’t say to warm — human bodies, and, the second, to receive the particular red-brown dye which had been the prerogative of a special family from somewhere in the far north, who, for several generations, had lived in Lost Towers, to prepare, to make, to mix, to adapt to every kind of weather, and to apply to every sort of fabric. This colour had exactly, precisely, and to the last nicety, the shade of the ground at the roots of the forest pines, and also of the narrow foot-wide paths that horsemen, and very often their dogs too, had to follow, as they made their way through the woods.
Baron Maldung himself resembled a middle-aged acrobat with a profile so startlingly like that of certain busts of the Emperor Nero that visitors to Lost Towers who had pilgrimaged to Rome wondered sometimes, especially when they observed the dictatorial manner of the Baron and the something like obsequiousness with which everyone treated him, whether he might not really be, as the man himself always maintained he was, descended from ancestors who had not come from the North at all, but from Rome itself.
There was a tall black poplar on one side of this stretch of grass, now crowded with retainers in the Lost Towers red-brown attire; and though there were few leaf-buds on it at this early season the great tree had a happy and vital look, as if its sap was already stirring. Not far from this benevolent forest-giant there grew a small thorn, and it happened that Bonaventura, whose hold on Chieron’s reins was entirely negligible, now that he had so much to see and so much more to think about, allowed the horse to press so closely against this leafless bush that a perceptible tuft of the creature’s skin with a patch of his fur was torn away by the bush’s powerful thorns.