Free The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys

Not only was Sir Maldung watching him, but he held a drawn bow in his hand whose arrow was aimed straight at Sir Mort’s heart.
    Sir Mort had never been calmer, stronger, quieter, more entirely collected, more absolutely poised in his mind than he was at that instant. He didn’t feel in the faintest degree afraid. It was a peculiarity of his that, as long as he had his wits about him, and saw clearly what his enemy was aiming at, not a flicker of apprehension crossed his mind.
    “I shall know by his expression,” he said to himself, “whenhe lets that arrow fly and I shall be perfectly able to dodge it before it touches me! I am myself a drawn bow and a pointed arrow! And when you are yourself both arrow and bow, it is fine sport to watch your enemy’s face!”
    And certainly Sir Maldung’s face was something to watch at that moment. It was positively convulsed with the ultimate ecstasy of killing. His mouth was open and twisted awry; his eyes stared so intently that they seemed as if at any second they might flow or drip or sweat or soak into the alder-bush. His whole face was crumpled and wrung and knotted and sucked inwards.
    And then in a second it relaxed like the bursting of a boil, and became, as far as any human expression was concerned, blurred and blotted out. Sir Mort dived to the ground; and the arrow skimmed over his back and quivered into the trunk of a fir-tree.
    Sir Mort straightened his body and uttered a queer little laugh. But it did not occur to him to pursue the figure that was now in full flight. “Silly old devil!” he muttered; and strolled, as slowly as he had been doing before, towards the postern entrance of the Fortress of Roque.

IV
LIL-UMBRA
    “I’ll go,” thought Lil-Umbra, “as if Mother had sent me with an important message. I will not speak to a soul: and when anyone speaks to me I’ll pretend not to hear, or to be so occupied in delivering my message that though they see I can’t help hearing I need not take any notice of what people say. It was , after all, not only once but twice that I found Raymond de Laon there! Of course the first time he was there he couldn’t have had the faintest idea that I should be likely to come in. But that second time he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He seemed glad: very glad in fact, but he didn’t seem at all surprised.
    “O! I do wonder what he feels about me! It’s so teasing never to know! That’s the worst of it with a grown-up boy. If it were John now, it would all be so easy! But of course he would have let it out to everybody and I’d have had all I could do to make him keep his mouth shut! I suppose I’ll never know with Raymond till he suddenly bursts out with it. He looks at me all the time: and that day we were alone at Cone Castle, when Baron Boncor had taken Will with him to London and I was turning the pages with him of one after another of those old books he is always finding in some secret recess in one of those lovely turrets of Cone Castle, I noticed how for some reason or other the hand I wasn’t using, to turn a page or to point at a picture, was held in his hand.
    “But, O dear! I am afraid I’m just being silly! Plenty of girls much handsomer, cleverer, and more important than me, must have been attracted to him and tried to win his favour. And there’s that time he had—and he told me himself how much he enjoyed it!—when he was studying philosophy in Paris. He must have been a guest at all sorts of grand houses, and met lots of wonderful women! O why aren’t girls like me allowed to attend the lectures of these great Doctors? It is all so unfair! People don’t realize how lucky young men are in these clever modern days to be allowed to hear really important thinkers explaining the nature of——”
    It was at this point that Lil-Umbra had to extricate herself from an extremely formidable group of crusaders from the south of Anjou who looked at her in the way—so she told herself—that such