Free The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys Page B

Raymond de Laon and this terribly licentious girl. “I mustcertainly ask him outright,” she decided, “the very next time we’re alone whether he is on speaking terms with this shameless girl! But till I have a chance of asking him that, I certainly mustn’t let him hold my hand again. O! I just can’t bear to think about it—Lilith Maldung waiting for him half-undressed outside our very gate!”
    But like most of us when we are still under twenty, Lil-Umbra hadn’t acquired the difficult art of putting painful possibilities out of her mind and the vision of Lilith by the wayside continued to obsess her thoughts with one horrible imagination after another. She felt ready to welcome any excuse that offered itself for not going straight into the armoury to talk to the ex-bailiff. She decided that it might be a timely occasion in the interest of her own physical comfort to visit the women’s corner of the retiring-yard, and this with slow and leisurely steps she proceeded to do, rinding the spot less frequented than might have been expected under existing circumstances .
    When, however, returning from this retreat with that vision of Lilith still biting like a rat at her tenderest nerve—for she still felt a curious desire to put off any possible encounter with Raymond de Laon till this image from Lost Towers had faded a little—she took the more roundabout of the alternative ways to the armoury, she found herself again following a passage along the outside wall of the Fortress, a passage which was once more in full view of her brother Tilton’s cheerful shrine.
    And so once more, urged by the insatiable demon of curiosity , she found herself standing on tiptoe at a similar arrow-slit -window and staring out as desperately as before into the dazzling afternoon sunshine. What she now saw caused her to gasp with the same kind of choking in her gullet that a female blackbird might suffer who suddenly perceives in her lonely nest a solitary cuckoo’s egg.
    Another girl was now rapidly approaching that provocative figure lying stretched out on the grassy bank by the edge of the path, and Lil-Umbra was as startled by the strangeness of the new girl’s look and her queer attire as by her astonishing beauty.
    “She must be a Spanish maiden,” Lil-Umbra told herself, “or a Jewish girl straight from Palestine! Who on earth brought her here and what does she want with us?”
    This time it happened that Lil-Umbra’s arrow-slit was so close to the alluring figure down there beneath her on the grass that she felt a faint uneasiness lest one or other of the two girls should look up and see her. “They wouldn’t see much,” she told herself, “in this blazing Sun and against all this grey stone; but they might see enough of my forehead and hair to realize that they’re being watched!”
    Lil-Umbra lowered her insteps by a fraction of an inch, thus bringing down her ivory-white forehead to a position only just above the support of that row of equally white knuckles; and it was from this position that she saw the new-comer pause by the side of the half-naked girl on the grass, evidently wishing to ask her a question.
    “What question is she going to ask?” Lil-Umbra said to herself. “She may be in attendance upon one of these noblewomen from France, or she may have come from the Priory.”
    And then she suddenly became aware that by some chance-sent miracle the wind, which in that glowing sunshine had been blowing from the east, suddenly shifted to the north, with the result that she could hear with perfect clearness every word the two were speaking.
    “I was only asking you,” she heard the stranger say, “where would be the best entrance into this Fortress-Castle for a serving-girl like me? I have only just come to this part of the world and I am working at present in the Priory kitchen, but they told me that the best thing to do if I wanted to meet anyone of my own race round here was to get an entrance ‘by