“Well, my Lord Albertus, shall we move on again? It’s not more than a mile from here.”
“I’m at your service, my son; and I warrant that you, my lads”—and he gave the Cone Castle group a friendly smile—“will be thankful enough to exchange our theology for a beaker of good ale or even a flagon of cider!”
XVIII THE VIGIL
The silence of them all was very marked as they threaded their way between mossy fir-stumps and ferny rocks, while the hot noon-rays, hidden by one branch and revealed between two branches, and forever being broken and intercepted by the dark feathery foliage of ancestral pines, turned the endless bluebells, upon which it seemed impossible to avoid treading, into an elfin army of some aboriginal pixy-monarch, who though confronted by a cohort of giants was by no means frustrated in his attempt to add yet another outpost to his sylvan realm. It was indeed a natural part, this speechless silence of them all, of the sweltering docility of every forest creature under the royal glare of the lord of life.
When they came in sight of the Great Gate of the Fortress a curious psychic event occurred. This was an event that, in itself without any further evidence, is a proof that all those wild and desperate feelings which reach us from every quarter of the horizon, passing from the north to the west, and from the west, through the north again, to the south, are sometimes fully justified.
For here, precisely and exactly here, where, by a superhuman and Herculean heave, such as more than the muscles of any ordinary human frame could have endured without cracking or breaking, the Lord of the Manor of Roque lifted the horse Cheiron from his four hooves and rolled him over on the ground, the appalling strain of the effort he made, and the weird desperation of the awareness accompanying it, had actually created a living spirit.
And at this point in their approach to this spot every single one of this small company, including Raymond and Albert the Great, felt a definite stab in the region of their heart, as if an invisible spirit had struck them just there.
And if Albert of Cologne had boldly enquired: “To what tribe of spirits do you belong?” this “Genius Loci” might well have answered with the words: “I am the spirit of a supernatural effort, an effort that was not only an effort of muscles but an effort of will and an effort of mind and an effort that drew into itself a positively unlawful, insupportable, and intolerable strength from all the living things about it, from the trees, from the creatures of the earth, from the birds of the air, from the actual stones and rocks and earth-mould of this place, so that”, thus might the spirit of that shock, the spirit of that superhuman strain have replied to the bold question of the sage from Cologne, “so that I am a spirit which to the end of time, yes! until ice from above, or fire from below, destroy this whole forest, will embody in a shudder of this air the effort this man made; one of the most terrific efforts ever made on this earth since Hercules lifted up the Giant Antaeus in his arms to strangle him in the air; and I, the spirit of this appalling effort, will remain here to guard this man’s gate against all his enemies unto the third and fourth millennium of his descendants!”
It was about this man, the Lord of the Manor of Roque and the master of the Fortress, that Albertus Magnus enquired at once, the moment he was ushered by Raymond de Laon in to the presence of Lady Val.
“Yes, O yes!” the lady replied, “and I’ll certainly tell him that your first question, reverend sir, was about his health. He strained something inside him. Gorthruk, our manor leech, who came here five years ago straight from Oxford, and is said to have studied medicine under the court physician in Paris, is of opinion that though the injury itself can never, by the nature of it, heal itself, my husband will very shortly be well enough to resume his hunting and fishing and his usual protective investigations round the outskirts of the Manor.
“Gorthruk has given us an ivory box containing three or four compartments each one of which contains several differently tasting tablets. Gorthruk says that, in his own village of Tintinhull, the blacksmith has been kept alive by just such curative pills for four and twenty years, after a strain similar to the one suffered by my husband; only his trouble — the blacksmith’s I mean — was caused by a wrestling-match with the bailiff of the Manor of Montacute who was a very heavy man, and thus, when the blacksmith of Tintinhull picked him up in his arms and threw him into the village duck-pond, the village priest, whose name was Humph, and who came from Gloster, had to wade into the pond to get him out; for he hit his head on Gammer Grundy’s bucket, which had lain there, down in the mud, since the days of Thomas a Becket.”
Raymond de Laon had never before heard his betrothed’s mother talk in this free and easy way; but he told himself it must be due to the fact that all women, especially those in responsible positions and those with important households to look after, are invariably anxious to win favour with church dignitaries.
They are also, Raymond’s erratic thoughts ran on, often much more interested than are their hunting and fishing and fighting husbands, in historical and philosophical subjects, in spite of the fact that their opportunities for such studies are so much less. As to the easy homeliness of Lady Val’s talk, “don’t they all go on in that sort of way,” Raymond said to himself, “when they want to captivate us? The only alternative I suppose would be sculleries, store-cupboards, and meat-skewers, with a sagacious allusion, or even a sly glance now and again, towards bed-clothes.”
Whether sage or sly in her welcome, Lady Val soon disposed of her chief guest, and arranged for the Gone Castle contingent to dine at an earlier hour than was usual and at a special table in the dining-hall. She likewise gave her most regal and gracious permission to Raymond, as a reward for his skill as a tutelary ambassador, to take Lil-Umbra for a couple of hours’ ride in the forest.
“You’d better,” she added, as the pair went off, “start, and come back too, by the main entrance. Your father has placed such a powerful guard at Tilton’s shrine that there’s no possible danger from that quarter. But as nurse always used to say, ‘It’s silly to shout till the Devil’s gone out.’”
With a big silver tray arranged conveniently between them upon a stool made of exquisitely slender delicately twisted willow-twigs, upon which stood two glasses and a huge beaker of red wine and a few oaten cakes, the old ex-bailiff of the manor of Roque found a perfect listener to his rambling talk in the great Albert of Cologne.
Accustomed to the part of the chief talker in the presence of less experienced, less volatile, less egocentric and much younger hearers, it was an indescribable relief to Albert the Great to rest and recline in this ancient armoury and listen in peace to this old gentleman’s rambling stories of an up-and-down long life full of the simple power of representative authority and of the simple piety of unquestionable conviction.
There in the background, just as if “It” also was listening to the old man’s talk, stood the Brazen Head, its confused multiple-mooded expression rejecting placidly any dogmatic solution of the entangled problem of existence. It may well be believed that Albertus Magnus didn’t confine himself to listening. Every now and again with the subtle wisdom of a born decipherer of difficult old documents he interpolated at certain turning-points a question by which into the unpremeditated debouchings of the senile narrator there was insinuated a flickering lantern, tied, as it were, round the neck of a darting bird, a lantern that might be compared to some providential firefly giving a celestial clarification to our dark pilgrimage through the mists of Chaos to the City of Cosmos.