The Brazen Head Read Online Free Page A

minute or two ago in contact with the retreating Moon, roused in the depths of the tragic loneliness into which he had been plunged a darting flame of a possible redemption of everything.
    This came like the leap of a shining fish out of a black pool, and the form it took was the form of a girl not much older than Lil-Umbra herself. But though of like age with the young creature now leaning so trustingly against him, the redemptive vision that rushed into his mind was that of a strangely appealing Jewish maid. Before the bloody day on which Sir Mort had earned his everlasting adhesion Peleg had met in this maid the ideal love of his whole life. She was certainly beautiful; but it was in a strange, very rare degree, and with a beauty that seemed perpetually re-created by some mysterious sorcery in herself. Her name was Ghosta, and on first setting eyes on her Peleg had experienced a thrill of unutterable pride at having in his own veins the blood of Israel.
    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