Meanwhile every step taken by Bonaventura towards the entrance to Lost Towers was attended by an intense and meticulous process of thought. In a certain sense the man was undoubtedly acting with real courage, and might without exaggeration have been called a very brave man. But his exorbitant notion of his own importance in the eyes of the God he worshipped, his puffed up conceit as to the eternal importance of the particular kind of sanctity he cultivated, tainted this honourable courage with a less worthy tinge. “If,” he now said to himself, “I obstinately refuse to look at that girl, I shall make them think I am afraid of being tempted. What I must do is to make them understand that I and God—”
However bulging the man’s eyes may have been and however assiduously he kept feeling in his pocket to make certain his imperial gold pieces were still safe, it must be allowed that there was an element of childlike simplicity in this page-boy of omnipotence oddly mingled with his inordinate conceit.
Some might say that men think in words and women in images; but if in the case of Bonaventura we were to enter the slippery topic of the syntax of psychic expression and begin to quarrel with his way of saying “I and God”, it is only fair to remember that in speaking of his earthly parent he always said “I and my Father” instead of “My Father and I”.
“What,” so the man’s thoughts ran on, as he gravely advanced beneath an unusually high arch and proceeded to leave the marble Tiberius and his sadistic stare behind, “I must make them understand is that I enjoy resisting temptation too much to run away, though it is true that in the Paternoster I pray God not to lead me into it. But I must make them understand that I have so yielded myself to God that His will is now my will and my will entirely His will. It would not be for people’s good for me to let them know how much I enjoy gazing at the lovely little white breasts and delicious little white limbs of young girls; for vulgar, crude, rough, brutal, stupid, ordinary men wouldn’t be able to get the pleasure I get from this. It is all in my love for God and in God’s love for me. We love each other so much that I feel sure God allowed me to be with him — for this past-and-present intimacy is what you get when your love for God makes you feel one with Him — when He took the rib from Adam and out of it made Eve. When anyone loves God as I do He gives you wonderful privileges. For the sake of my great love for Him, God put back Time for me and allowed me to watch those embraces of Adam and Eve that created the human race, and the pleasure I get now from looking at this young girl is part of the pleasure which God, in return for my great love, allowed me to enjoy when He let me watch Adam embracing Eve.”
Bonaventura had actually been clever enough as a boy to fool Saint Francis himself in this matter; for Saint Francis had regarded it as a perpetual miracle of grace the way in which his young friend resisted temptation, when all the while his young friend was enjoying the process of temptation itself more than he could possibly have enjoyed any fruition of desire.
Bonaventura was indeed thinking at this very moment that he might derive great satisfaction from a few weeks’ residence in Lost Towers, as long as he could pretend he was resisting the most maddening temptation of his life, whereas in reality he was resisting nothing. He went on trailing his grey mantle, in this crafty pretence, through corridor after corridor, followed by the growling and grimacing, the gurgling and grinning, the gallivanting and gobemouching Baron Maldung, and in reality deliciously enlivened, not at all, as they were all believing, tormented, teased, and tantalized to the last exquisite point of provocation, by lovely little Lilith.
Farther and farther, on and on, he was led, trailing his grey garment, while the fingers of his left hand never loosened their firm clutch on the leather bag under his robe. Up stairway after stairway he had to go, down passage after passage, till the guest-chamber, where he was to sleep when supper was over, was reached at last. He had been in many feudal castles and o a few royal palaces all over Europe. He had been in several Moorish and Byzantine and Coptic sanctuaries all through Mesopotamia. But he had never been before in such a luxurious room as this. It was clear at once to him, as he turned his devouringly prominent eyes on the bed that was to receiveU him, and on the hot and cold and lukewarm water that was to bathe him, and on the incredible varieties of ointments and balmy balsams that were to anoint him, and on all these conveniently exposed and yet daintily barred coals of fire that were to warm him, and above all on the three lovely and alluring young sylphs, all delicately wearing the transparent fabrics and red-brown dyes and exotic hieroglyphs of Lost Towers, who were so anxious to serve him that if “he and God” decided to devote a few weeks to the purification, regeneration, sanctification, of all the dwellers in, and of all the dependents upon, these Lost Towers, there would be nothing in such delay to trouble the bodily well-being or vex the spiritual peace of God’s chosen servant.
But what was this? Suddenly, without warning, all his attendants vanished, and there was revealed to him a different aspect of life in this place. Borne upon winds that blew wildly through all its walls and over all its roofs, from forests that seemed to be beyond any forests of this world, and from swamps beyond any swamps of which he had ever heard, there came into that chamber the weird lamentable cry, ghastly and desperate, that had passed through every human building raised by the hand of man upon that particular spot since Britain was first divided from France by the salt sea: the cry of the wind that since the beginning of Time had made Lost Towers what it was.
Washed, anointed, oiled, combed and curled, catered for and courted by lovely attendants, and his purpose crowned by a miraculous concatenation of convenient conditions, Bonaventura’s instinctive reaction, when he heard this unusual wailing in the rafters of the roof above him and this long-drawn melancholy moaning in the corridors and landings and stair-ways and cellars beneath him, was simply to feel peevishly annoyed with the God he worshipped. He didn’t feel towards him as one heroic conspirator feels to another who has been propitiated and wheedled and fooled into betraying their cause.
What he felt was a simple irritation. God, he told himself, ought to have known better than allow the Powers of Darkness to make a saint, possessed of a piety like his piety, shiver. For shiver he did. The ministering angels who had been hovering round him must have known at the first faint stirring of these ancient black tapestries what was going to happen; for they all vanished before it happened.
There are those who might feel that, left alone with these alarming sounds, our saint’s vexation with his deity was not uncalled for. All around him was black tapestry representing terrifying battles between unicorns and river-horses, the former more red than brown, and the latter more brown than red, but both of them woven against that background of black in such a way as to annihilate completely in that portion of the building all those emanations from free space, and all those blessed airs of boundless liberation, that are projected upon any atmosphere by the colours blue and green, quite apart from the objects that we are accustomed to see wearing these colours, such as blue sky and green grass. Reddish brown, and brownish red, and both of these in a peculiar and special mingling, such as Bonaventura had never seen in his life before, were diffused, not only from the tapestry in this weird place, but from rafters and ceilings and panels and doors, until a sort of atmospheric soul of that appalling colour, something that might indeed be called the mystic eidolon of that fearful and awful colour, permeated every square inch of the invisible air within these ill-fated walls.
Though of course in a sense you could only see it, in reality you were compelled to taste it, to swallow it, to touch it, to feel it, to absorb it, till it filled your whole body, as air fills a bubble.