Yes, this youthful virgin of his own race became from the moment he saw her the supreme light of his life. But it had been in vain that he had rushed round the battlefield and the camp trying desperately to find her again. They had met: they had looked into each other’s eyes: they had loved: and then the girl had vanished. And when all was over, and he had become for life the free slave of the House of Roque, it was as if she had been carried off on a cloud.
Like himself she must, he supposed, have been willingly or unwillingly carried off by some Anglo-Norman crusader to a castle in the north of Africa or on the borders of Palestine or in Gascony or Sicily or Piedmont or somewhere in England or Ireland or Scotland or Wales or peradventure on the shores of the Bosphorus.
But there now shot into the heart of the smouldering crater of his desperation a weird and unaccountable hope, based on something as slight as that wisp of cloud on the Moon or that dazzling Sun-gleam on the ball of spikes, but something from whose fluttering motion, like a will-of-the-wisp crossing a death-swamp, there arose a suggestion of salvation.
The mysterious Friar Bacon, now a prisoner of Prior Bog of Bumset, possessed a queer servant who was never known by any other name than that of “Miles”, an appellation which, being interpreted, might be said to mean an extremely private, reserved, original, exceptional, but also an extremely professional soldier: and it had recently happened that, while Peleg was delivering a message to Prior Bog of Bumset, this same Miles had made a casual allusion which for Peleg had been like the sudden appearance, above a scoriac plain and under a dull, grey, monotonous, and devitalized sky, of a miraculous waterspout.
For a second he felt as if he were himself being changed, like Lot’s wife, into a pillar of salt; but at the next moment both these mirages of sensation — himself as the pillar of salt, and the wild, mad, hope-against-hope chance that Miles was referring to Ghosta — melted into each other and floated away into space like a triumphantly burst bubble.
What Miles had alluded to in passing, without attributing any especial interest to it, was the fact that one of the Priory servants who helped Master Tuck the chief cook had declared that the said Master Tuck had recently purchased at the price of ten silver Jewish shekels a Jewish woman who had been brought over among the followers of some crusader from Mesopotamia.
Of course there was only one chance in ten thousand that this Jewish woman was his lost Ghosta; but at least it was not impossible. O if she were! If she only were! Such a chance, if it really came true, would reduce to a grain of black dust every despair he’d ever felt!
“Did you groan then, Peleg?” Lil-Umbra suddenly enquired, “or did you crush down in your heart a shout of joy? I’m sure you made a very important noise. I make important noises myself sometimes when I just have to do something but don’t want anybody else to know!”
“Little lady—” he began; but stopped abruptly.
“Yes, Peleg: were you going to tell me just then your very, very greatest secret?”
“What makes you say that, little lady?”
“Because I heard you make a noise in the bottom of your heart like Father makes when Mother asks him what’s the matter with him! I know perfectly well what’s the matter with him. He’s got something on his mind that he wants to take out of the place where it hurts and carry away to some great desert-plain or mountain-side where he can turn it over and over and over in his mind and nobody be a bit the wiser!”
“He’ll be the wiser himself, won’t he, little lady?”
“Oh yes! But nobody else will know! That’s the great thing; nobody else to know what we’ve got down at the very bottom of us! But tell me this, Peleg. Why do you keep twisting your head round towards the Moon? And then start staring so straight into the blaze of the Sun? And then hang your head low down and fix your eyes on a root or a stone or a molehill or on one of those funny clumps of grey lichen? — and then, after that, as if you wanted to end up with something more exciting than anything on earth, why do you lift your chin up and stop looking at anything but the sky, just the sky alone, as if you expected some angel to come flying down towards you?”
The Tartar giant lowered his head and gazed earnestly at the young girl.
“I’ll tell you exactly, little lady, why I look at things as you say, and in such a definite order, beginning with the Sun and ending with the universal air. As I look at each of these things in turn I make the motion of my mind that I make when Sir Mort, your Dad, is worshipping and I am with him in church, or on the march, or at a sacred shrine, or at some gathering of the crusaders. All of us in the whole world, little lady, worship in our own way and as we worship do something to the Thing we’re worshipping; and we do this according to our different natures. Having an animal nature what I imagine myself doing to all the Deities I worship is eating them.”
Lil-Umbra gave a cry of delight and clapped her hands. “Of course,” went on Peleg, “I don’t ask you to believe that I really and truly eat the Moon or the Sun or the Earth or the Air. I only mean that I ‘make the motino’ of eating each of these things, and then afterwards imagine that I’m getting the comfortable and delicious feeling of having eaten them! In short, to tell you the real truth, little lady, I pretend to myself I’m eating these things, and play at eating them as little boys play at cutting off heads and arms and legs in imaginary tournaments!
“I admit, dear heart, when it comes to the Air it’s not easy to pretend to myself that I’m eating it. But a person can pretend almost anything: and that’s all I ask, the right to pretend I’m eating air.”
“O Peleg! Peleg!” cried Lil-Umbra, in a frenzy of delight. “I’ll do exactly what you do when I’m sick to death of Religion. Oh yes, I will! And I’ll ask John to ask Friar Bacon what his opinion is of this method of worshipping. But shall I tell you a great secret, Peleg? From what I’ve seen Father do when I’ve been watching him and he doesn’t know anyone is watching him, I believe he has a funny way of worshipping, just as you have. But Roger Bacon thinks the best way to worship is to invent things! John says Roger Bacon is now inventing a Brazen Head, that one day when he’s finished with it will utter oracles very, very helpful to us and to our country. That’s an exciting way to worship, isn’t it? To invent a talking Brazen Head!”
As she spoke the girl smiled radiantly at the giant; but the mention of John brought back upon Peleg all the old cloud of deadly gloom. The thought that no one had told him anything about John having become a personal pupil of Friar Bacon, and that every single one of them, including Sir Mort, Lady Val, the elder boy Tilton, John himself, and even this little Lil-Umbra, had deliberately concealed from him this important piece of news — which wasn’t only family news but was also political, ecclesiastical, and international news — was a crushing blow.
What it meant was — so he told himself — that he was not the feudal retainer of the house of Abyssum that he had begun to assume he was, but just a hired man who had to fight for them, eat for them, and sleep for them, and whose sustenance was his wage. So once again his terribly imaginative desperation returned; and he felt as if this secretiveness towards him of the family he served was enough in itself to cast him into outer darkness and to turn him into one of those lost souls he was always hearing about from the pious Christians around him who loved to remind each other of the possibility for their enemies of what they called “the Second Death”. That very expression “the Second Death” came back with appalling vividness at this moment; and Peleg felt as if he were clinging desperately to one of the horns of that waning Moon that was now vanishing in space, while an unspeakably horrible monster of colossal size resembling an enormous cuttlefish dragged and dragged at him to pull him down to that same bottomless chasm in the floor of the ocean out of which, according to the blasphemous notion of the Baron Maldung and Lady Lilt, the whole vegetable world and all the grain upon which we live emerged at the beginning like one multiform devil with green sap for blood.