But what struck Albertus Magnus most about this loquacious old gentleman was his attitude towards the Brazen Head. There was the Brazen Head, quite close to the ex-bailiff’s side, in fact almost touching the old man’s right shoulder; but its presence didn’t seem to disturb him in the least. Nor was it as if he altogether disregarded it. It was as if he and it had already reached some personal understanding between themselves, by virtue of which there was no longer any necessity for both of them to speak, since, when the ex-bailiff spoke, he spoke for them both.
“The whole trouble in this Fortress,” the ex-bailiff was presently murmuring, “comes from the fact that Lil-Umbra’s brothers are so different from each other that they are always arguing and disputing. This makes it necessary for Lil-Umbra to keep the balance between them, sometimes taking the side of Tilton the elder one, and sometimes the side of John the younger one.”
“But I should have thought,” protested the great teacher from Cologne, “that just for that very reason their sister’s mind would gain enormously and show signs of wonderful development.”
“You see, it’s like this, great Master,” murmured the old man rather querulously. “The elder boy is mad about architecture and about carving, while the younger thinks of nothing but what Friar Bacon has lately written or is likely to write; and the moment the poor girl feels sympathetic towards the artist brother, the other one, the younger one, gets indignant and begins railing against God and the church; and this of course sets the elder one off upon his particular hobby-horse, and they argue with each other just as, we are always being told, you great doctors of divinity dispute together, about essences and qualities and aspects and substances and forms, and how powerful angels are, and how crafty devils are, and whether the world had a beginning and whether it will have an end: and the result of all this is just the very opposite of what you have just now suggested; for the dear girl — and she is, I tell you, my lord, the sweetest and loveliest creature you ever saw — begins to hate the whole subject and to wish she’d been born a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, or anything rather than a Christian.”
“You will, I hope,” threw in Albert of Cologne eagerly, for he recognized at once that he was on dangerous ground; and he didn’t fail to notice that this peace-loving old gentleman, who wandered a little in his mind, had a deep tenderness for this young maiden who was the betrothed of Raymond de Laon, “you will, I hope, forgive an impertinent and even a discourteous question, but I’d be very thankful if you’d tell me what it was in the relations between this maid of whom you speak and her brother Tilton, the builder and sculptor with his own hands of a shrine to Our Lady, that made it possible for Bonaventura to accuse them of the terrible sin of incest?”
To his great relief this daring, rude, and even outrageous question did not seem to trouble the old ex-bailiff in the very least.
“O that’s easily explained, great Doctor! Searching round in the ardent spirit of a born sculptor for some living model for the figure of Our Lady that he was so anxious to carve for the shrine he was building, it naturally came into his head to make use of the perfect form and heavenly features of his chaste and beautiful sister.
“But when this accurst Bonaventura saw Master Tilton’s Blessed Virgin holding the Holy Babe, he commanded those bandits from Lost Towers to hammer the whole thing to bits! You may well indeed look horrified, O greatest of all Churchly Doctors, but I haven’t sat here since my retirement from office, with the lady Lil-Umbra visiting me daily, and Master Tilton and Master John, one or the other of them, coming in to see me pretty well once a week, without learning something of what goes on; learning, I mean, what historians learn by living after the event, only I’ve been learning it by watching the event closely and yet watching it from a certain distance while it was going on.
“And I can tell you this, great Doctor — and do you, as Master John, who has been trying to learn Greek, says Homer always says, ‘and do you lay it to heart’—all persons, whether male or female, who make it the chief object of their lives to seek out and uncover sexual sins and sexual obliquities in other persons, are themselves — and you can perceive it, O most renowned Doctor, in their countenance, especially in their mouths and nostrils and eyes — are themselves just the very ones to be most easily assailed by an itching desire to enjoy the very same lecherous sensations which they are so anxious to condemn.
“Now, O mighty Sage, please accept my word. The moment I encountered this Bonaventura at close quarters, I knew at once from the man’s eyes and mouth and lips and nostrils that he was the sort of person who could easily be completely obsessed by sexual lust. What sins this man has committed in his own life I have not of course, O great one from Cologne, any way of knowing. But this I can tell you and this I do know; though being a little shaky in my mind from old age, you must take what I tell you with your own reservations. This abominable legend about Lil-Umbra and Tilton is simply the outward and visible expression of the viciousness of the fellow’s own nature.”
These final words of the ex-bailiff were uttered with such intensity that the face of his hearer, which was as much a hieroglyph of sympathy as, according to the old man, Bonaventura’s was of lechery, positively became a quivering crow’s beak of concentrated attention.
“I would like to know very much indeed, O most renowned of doctors,” went on the old man, “just what you feel about this matter of Roger Bacon’s influence over young people, like our mutual friend Raymond de Laon and like Lady Lil-Umbra’s brother John. Do you consider that this Friar, who is such an adept in all these new scientific inventions, has a good or a bad influence over our younger generation? Whether because of the presence of That Thing”—and the old man gave a significant jerk of his shoulder in the direction of the object indicated—“or because of this wicked lie invented by Bonaventura, or simply because I’ve been more impressed than ever of late by the goodness and sweetness of Lady Lil-Umbra, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Friar Roger and his new science; and I’ve come to the conclusion, mighty Doctor, that there’s a change coming over the whole of Christendom — I might go so far as to say over the whole world — and I’ve decided that it’s the duty of all of us who are believers, to think out carefully for ourselves what our position is.
“It was all very well when we were young to just repeat the lessons taught us by our parents or by our priest or in our school, but when we become men — that’s what I’ve been thinking lately in this old armoury of ours, great master — we ought to ‘put away’, as holy scripture says, ‘childish things’; and not only so, but we ought to examine, yes! examine down to the very bottom, all our inherited presumptions, suppositions, and beliefs, everything in fact to which we’ve become accustomed, everything that we now take for granted; yes, examine it all, examine it over and over again from the very start, rejecting this and retaining that, as our separate, independent, individual spirit tells us, for it is our individual spirit that, at the bottom of everything, is, and always will—”