The Brazen Head Read Online Free

of Peter Lombard, or at least be acquainted with the Commentary on them by Albertus Magnus before you’d have a chance, even if you had a hare in one pocket and a rabbit in another, of getting a lesson from the great man.”
    Lil-Umbra gave vent to an exultant laugh, a laugh that rang out, rich and clear and resonant, towards the point in space whence the Moon was now retreating into the recesses of interminable remoteness; while the Hebraic Tartar, puzzled at her amusement, stared helplessly into the dazzling portion of the sky where the air like a huge celestial sponge had soaked up the burning rays of the Father of Life and Light and was diffusing them over the land and water of the whole Western world.
    “But, Peleg,” Lil-Umbra cried, “don’t forget that John has been taught by Friar Bacon since he was no older than I am. It’s a terrific secret, of course, and everybody, including John himself, always speaks of his studies in Oxford at Regent’s House, and of course he would again work at Oxford if Friar Bacon were back as he was before Bonaventura becameGeneral of the Order and had the Friar removed from Oxford and shut up, first in Paris, and then at Bumset under Bog. They say in Loam village that the reason my father keeps it so secret is that Bonaventura would be angry as Hell if he knew.
    “But of course Bumset Priory is in the village of Loam, which has always belonged to our Manor; so it wouldn’t be easy for Prior Bog to keep John out even if he wanted to, and you know what old Bog is, ready to serve as they say every master who comes along if he brings enough French wine. Father hasn’t told a soul about John’s going there so often. Sometimes I think even Mother doesn’t know! If she does, she’s a better keeper of things dark than anyone in the whole world!
    “But I think she does know. I can’t imagine Father not telling her when he must know that John tells Tilton and me everything about it.”
    Lil-Umbra could see that her bold divulging of this long and intimate association between her brother John and the notorious Friar Bacon was no small shock to her companion. The Tartar jerked back his head from the Sun-ray and gave it a rather strained twist sideways, a twist that enabled him to follow, as the girl had been doing, the retreat into space of that silvery Moon, but, instead of keeping his gaze there, he now suddenly lowered his head and turned his whole attention upon the murderous spikes of that iron mace he held on his lap, hugging it almost affectionately between his thighs, while with both his hands he abstractedly toyed with those appalling spikes, pressing his thumb against their vicious points in careful and calculated succession.
    What he was feeling in his mind was a black void of desperate loneliness. He had been of late congratulating himself on having a really deep and unique pact, unspoken and inarticulate , but none the less massively consolidated, with his master Sir Mort, but this revelation from the man’s daughter of a secret as important as this—and a secret connected with Sir Mort’s own son—gave the gigantic Mongol the feeling that he was not even yet a really intimate member of this family and that he had better take what comfort he could as he used to do as an orphan in Dalmatia by imagining himself alone in space like the star Aldebaran.
    But the wheel of his fate selected that moment to touch oneof those mysterious “opposites” concerning which he had just been talking. And it was brought about, by one of those secret chains of events that are often so confounding when they emerge out of the underground mole-runs of cause and effect into the twilight of consciousness, that some small token, either the sight at such a moment of an intensely glittering gleam where a particular Sun-ray truck a special spot on the spiky ball he was holding, or the reappearance of a tiny wisp of white cloud, totally forgotten until he recalled it now, that he had seen only a