Read Online The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys - Free Book Online

play on the great hunting horn that he always carried in his belt whether he was hunting or not, whether he was armed for battle or not, whether he was on horseback or on foot.
    The notes of Sir Mort’s horn were indeed unmistakable when heard; but had she, Lady Val asked herself, really heard them? She stood still listening. Not a sound came now from that sunlit forest. She made an impatient movement with her hands and shoulders and rushed boldly to the door. Once there she seized the massive brazen ring into which the iron rod, that made this entrance impregnable, fitted with what was to a particular vein in her nature an obliging and delectable exactitude, and jerked that iron bar to and fro sideways with a violence that required all the strength she possessed in her long slender arms, while she vaguely wondered what her two sons would feel if, instead of opening the door to listen to their father’s horn, she barred it against their re-entrance.
    It had become now, and she herself knew that there was something unusual in her mood, an absolute necessity, or atany rate an angry and desperate one, to hear the sound of Sir Mort’s horn; and although her neck was bare and although the wind that blew past her into that crowded entrance made her shiver, the craving she felt for that sound was stronger than her natural shrinking. Wider and wider she pushed the door open, and in an impulse of sheer frenzy she was on the point of rushing out, when a figure and a voice were upon her, and the powerful hands of the old nurse dragged her back into the hall and closed the door upon both the Sun and the wind.
    “Did Lil-Umbra go to her room?” whispered Lady Val to the nurse as they moved back together towards the crowd. “Not to my knowledge,” returned the other. “But I may have missed her on the way. It would be an easy thing to do.”
    Lady Val looked at that moment as if she would have liked to have struck the woman; but the wise old nurse, though she released the arm she was holding, showed no sign of having realized the amount of indignant passion which she had aroused. Indeed she knew the lady so well that every course and twist and tangent of the feelings that showed themselves at this dangerous moment were an old story to her.
    An onlooker at the scene might even have caught a faint trace of affectionate amusement in the quick look she threw upon Lady Val’s nervous fingers, which were now clasping and unclasping each other as if engaged in some convulsive dance.
    “So be it, my dear,” she said quietly. “I’ll go and find our runaway, if you go back to your visitors.”
    Slowly, stride by stride, holding his long spear just below its shining point, which now gleamed in the Sun in the way certain objects seem to have a special power of gleaming, as if they are consciously holding and reflecting the rays they catch, Sir Mort returned from his stroll to the small pool which in former days had been a crowded fish-pond, but which now only contained a solitary pike and a solitary perch, who, having divided the place between them, and devoured everything , were now watching each other with eyes that were both hungry and apprehensive.
    Sir Mort was a tall and slender, but a broad-shouldered man, of about sixty, whose most striking physical characteristicwas the shape of his skull, which was very long and very narrow and was perched like the skull of a vulture on the top of a long neck. The length and narrowness of Sir Mort’s head was emphasized by his deep hollow eye-sockets, out of which his eyes, dark-green in colour, glared forth with a very peculiar effect; for it was as if they had no connection with each other at all, but were, each of them, the solitary eye of a saurian creature whose eye was at the top of its scaly head.
    He had obviously snatched at the warmest and smallest jerkin to hand as he went out and at the smallest and lightest iron headpiece, which was scarcely more indeed than a band of metal round