A piece of the sweetened pasta, browned by the oven, fell from the prince’s mouth to his waistcoat. He picked it up and put it in his mouth again.
“No more manners than the piebald dog,” the old woman commented.
“Will you teach me, then? I will give —”
“No,” she said. “I can’t teach you. You are not ready. I can tell that by ...” she reached out a finger-nail (it had not been cleaned lately) and let it rest a moment between his brows. . . the eyes. Maybe some day.”
Her look, which had been a trifle abstracted, now came to focus on the present once again. Swiftly she scanned the table, then again she put her gaze on the guest. “And the zoop was no good, I suppose. They makes it better in Bella, I am sure.”
Heroic measures were called for, else she might begin asking about the pudding. “First rate it was, Madamka. No, they don’t. And here’s something to prove it.” And something popped up and peeped out of the doctor’s pocket and described a parabola as it passed over the table. It was the size, shape, and glitter of a gold royal, and so perhaps it was one — though who can indeed be sure, as it came to rest in Madamka’s left ear, whither one would not have wished to follow and examine. Evidently feeling no such non-wish or scruple, she did examine it, immediately redeposited it in her bosom, made an antique curtsy (during which at least seventeen bones were heard to snap, crackle, and pop), and left the dining room in such haste as to make one suspect that she may have suspected Eszterhazy of being willing to change his mind.
Eszterhazy had earlier smoked a long pipe of the local, infernally strong dabag as it was called; he felt now a desire for the Indian weed, but in a milder and mellower form. Also he desired to remove traces of the meal from face and fingers. So, leaving his host with his own long pipe, his feet into the fireplace, and being smoked by sundry smokes; Eszterhazy ascended with measured tread up to his rooms.
Paradox was plentiful within the halls of Castle Popoff. When Eszterhazy went to wash his hands and face, he saw the basin was marble and the ewer was onyx; but when, having by and by dropped a quantity of segar ashes, he looked for a broom to sweep it up, he found no semblance of the familiar citified item of yellow straw, fitted up and stitched together by Tartar or Gypsy aided by a device like an enormous tuning-fork, no: he saw a bundle of coarse vegetation rudely bound to the butt-end of a stick; in short, a twopenny bezom such as one’s country-cousin’s servants use to expel the dried mud from the porch. Eszterhazy decided to let the ash lie. The Indian segar had been rolled around a reed; withdrawn before smoking, this left quite a nice air-channel, and required no cutting or biting of the end: curiously, as the ash fell upon the dark drugget, it retained the hole where the reed had been, thus clearly identifying itself to be the ash of a Trichinopoly cheroot, as any fool could plainly see, and hardly required reading a monograph on the subject.
Next morning. Going through the Great Hall in hopes of finding some breakfast other than the one deposited in his ante-room — a panikin of coffee astringent enough to tan hides, a pot of quite cold maize-pap, and the pick- led head of a large lacustrine fish — passing through the Great Hall, adorned with rude and massive furniture, on or in which giants might have sat cross-legged and smaller men have camped, with rusting and not so rusting stag-spears and boar-spears, spring-guns and man-traps, banners warped and tattered with very great age, a ragged and hairless hide which might just possibly be (he thought, afterwards) the skin of a flayed enemy — walking through the Great Hall, Eszterhazy heard a low, murmuring voice, apparently coming from a room with an open door; automatically, he peeped in and paused.
It was evidently the chapel (or evidently a chapel) and within, with a minuscule congregation, someone was celebrating the Divine Liturgy. Or, to use the phrase favored by another facet of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, someone was saying mass. Very well, the House of Popoff, though it had not particularly impressed him as being particularly pious, had a chaplain. And the Chaplain was reciting his daily Office. No reason why not. Though it was slightly surprising that the chapel door was almost immediately and silently closed in his, Eszterhazy’s, face. Still —
In the immense kitchen where the somewhat surprised staff was giving him such citified foods as a pan of gammon and eggs, browned bread with goose grease (he declined the cracklings, at least for breakfast), and a cup of “weak” coffee — it was quite strong enough to satisfy the Death’s Head Hussars, whose coffee was famously strong — in this corner of the huge kitchen, Dr. Eszterhazy let his mind wander back to the scene in the small room. Maybe the chaplain was some hedge-parson with dubious credentials, and that was why they did not want the guest to see him and perhaps inadvertently make a report. Well enough; understandable — but why, in that case, since Eszterhazy knew no such cleric, why was he so sure that he had at least partly recognized the priest, though indeed his face he had not seen.
Then, too, he was — despite the briefness of his glimpse — absolutely sure that the service being celebrated was neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox; certainly it was not Uniate (or Eastern Catholic) either; having experienced many an English Sunday, he knew that it was not Anglican: what, then, was it?
Easier to ask, than answer.
Somewhat he had seemed to sense affinities to the Rites of Malabar. But the Malabar Rites had been abolished. Hadn’t they? And, anyway, somewhat he hadn’t seemed. So — certainly it was something else. So. In which case, what else?
Of a kitchen-hand he asked at a venture, “Is that a Romi service they are holding up yonder?”
The kitchen-hand’s reply, smacking nothing of the Council ofNicea, was, in toto, “You don’t like your eggs, my Little Lord?”
It didn’t smack of the Council of Trent, either.
“Sure I like them. Let’s have another piece of gammon, here —”
“There bain’t another piece oLgammon, my Little Lord —”,
and I’ll let you have some real good snuff, Swartbloi’s, the best in Bella.” Eyes gleaming and nostrils twitching, the kitchen-hand departed, walking fast. By and by he returned, depositing on Dr. Eszterhazy’s plate something resembling a desiccated bat.
“Cook have locked the larder, my Little Lord, and she keeps the key atween her you-know-whats; but I’ve brought ’ee a pickled pigeon, my Little Lord, up from the Servants’ Cellar; and I’ve told Cellarman I’ll share the nose-baccy with he.”
Somehow the “Little Lord,” Engelbert Eszterhazy, A.B., Phil.B., M.A., M.S., M.D., D. Muc., D. Phil., Ph.D., D. Sc., and much more, did not fancy the pickled pigeon; but he gave over the snuff anyway. And, by and by, his host appearing, they went up to the Old Book Room in the South Tower and looked at a lot of old books. And then they went up into the mountains and tried — by word and song and gesture and something more — to move a lot of old boulders.
Some of them they did move, and some of them they didn’t move.
And what with one thing and another, the scene in the semi-secret sanctuary quite went from his mind. And it was a long time before it returned.
The earth of the Red Mountain (not very far off was the Black Mountain, Montenegro, an independent country whose prince-bishops had not very long ago become kings) — the earth of the Red Mountain had been transmuted by spring rain into red mud, and Eszterhazy did not move with perfect ease.