LUD-IN-THE-MIST

                             HOPE MIRRLEES




                               CHAPTER I

                     MASTER NATHANIEL CHANTICLEER


The Free State of Dorimare was a very small country, but, seeing that
it was bounded on the south by the sea and on the north and east by
mountains, while its centre consisted of a rich plain, watered by
two rivers, a considerable variety of scenery and vegetation was to
be found within its borders. Indeed, towards the west, in striking
contrast with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect
of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate distinctly exotic.
Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps; for beyond the Debatable
Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland. There
had, however, been no intercourse between the two countries for many
centuries.

The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital,
Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers
about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It
had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered
with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten
apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and
tawny sails; it had flat brick houses--not the mere carapace of human
beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves
with each generation under their changeless antique roofs. It had old
arches, framing delicate landscapes that one could walk into, and a
picturesque old graveyard on the top of a hill, and little open squares
where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by
birds and lovers and insects and children. It had, indeed, more than
its share of pleasant things; for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.

Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the handsomest houses of Lud-in-the-Mist had belonged for
generations to the family of Chanticleer. It was of red brick, and
the front, which looked on to a quiet lane leading into the High
Street, was covered with stucco, on which flowers and fruit and shells
were delicately modelled, while over the door was emblazoned a fine,
stylized cock--the badge of the family. Behind, it had a spacious
garden, which stretched down to the river Dapple. Though it had no lack
of flowers, they did not immediately meet the eye, but were imprisoned
in a walled kitchen-garden, where they were planted in neat ribands,
edging the plots of vegetables. Here, too, in spring was to be found
the pleasantest of all garden conjunctions--thick yew hedges and fruit
trees in blossom. Outside this kitchen-garden there was no need of
flowers, for they had many substitutes. Let a thing be but a sort of
punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be
delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely
preoccupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate
objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will
admirably fill the role of a flower.

In early summer it was the doves, with the bloom of plums on their
breasts, waddling on their coral legs over the wide expanse of lawn,
to which their propinquity gave an almost startling greenness, that
were the flowers in the Chanticleers' garden. And the trunks of birches
are as good, any day, as white blossom, even if there had not been the
acacias in flower. And there was a white peacock which, in spite of
its restlessness and harsh shrieks, had something about it, too, of a
flower. And the Dapple itself, stained like a palette, with great daubs
of colour reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface,
in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the
trees of Fairyland, where it had its source--even the Dapple might be
considered as a flower growing in the garden of the Chanticleers.

There was also a pleached alley of hornbeams. To the imaginative, it
is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You
enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed
outside--it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost
palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole
in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that!
You must turn back ... too late! The spacious portal by which you
entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.

       *       *       *       *       *

Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the family, was a
typical Dorimarite in appearance; rotund, rubicund, red-haired, with
hazel eyes in which the jokes, before he uttered them, twinkled like a
trout in a burn. Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite;
though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of one's
neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should
regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving
you for a portrait--a portrait that, probably, when you or he die,
will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit,
nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however
handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background,
in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke
of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every
modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more
disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at
in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.

All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only surprised, but
incredulous, had they been told he was not a happy man. Yet such was
the case. His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless
fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it
would lie almost dormant--almost, but never entirely.

He knew the exact date of its genesis. One evening, many years ago,
when he was still but a lad, he and some friends decided as a frolic to
dress up as the ghosts of their ancestors and frighten the servants.
There was no lack of properties; for the attics of the Chanticleers
were filled with the lumber of the past: grotesque wooden masks, old
weapons and musical instruments, and old costumes--tragic, hierophantic
robes that looked little suited to the uses of daily life. There were
whole chests, too, filled with pieces of silk, embroidered or painted
with curious scenes. Who has not wondered in what mysterious forests
our ancestors discovered the models for the beasts and birds upon
their tapestries; and on what planet were enacted the scenes they have
portrayed? It is in vain that the dead fingers have stitched beneath
them--and we can picture the mocking smile with which these crafty
cozeners of posterity accompanied the action--the words "February,"
or "Hawking," or "Harvest," having us believe that they are but
illustrations of the activities proper to the different months. We know
better. These are not the normal activities of mortal men. What kind of
beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore
they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never
know. Our ancestors keep their secret well.

Among the Chanticleers' lumber there was also no lack of those
delicate, sophisticated toys--fans, porcelain cups, engraved
seals--that, when the civilisation that played with them is dead,
become pathetic and appealing, just as tunes once gay inevitably
become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned
to dust. But those particular toys, one felt, could never have been
really frivolous--there was a curious gravity about their colouring and
lines. Besides, the moral of the ephemeral things with which they were
decorated was often pointed in an aphorism or riddle. For instance,
on a fan painted with wind-flowers and violets were illuminated these
words: "Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it
is culled from Flowers."

These trifles clearly belonged to a later period than the masks and
costumes. Nevertheless, they, too, seemed very remote from the daily
life of the modern Dorimarites.

Well, when they had whitened their faces with flour and decked
themselves out to look as fantastic as possible, Master Nathaniel
seized one of the old instruments, a sort of lute ending in the carving
of a cock's head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and,
crying out, "Let's see if this old fellow has a croak left in him!"
plucked roughly at its strings. They gave out one note, so plangent,
blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood
as if petrified.

Then one of the girls saved the situation with a humourous squawk, and,
putting her hands to her ears, cried, "Thank you, Nat, for your cat's
concert! It was worse than a squeaking slate." And one of the young
men cried laughingly, "It must be the ghost of one of your ancestors,
who wants to be let out and given a glass of his own claret." And the
incident faded from their memories--but not from the memory of Master
Nathaniel.

He was never again the same man. For years that note was the apex of
his nightly dreams; the point towards which, by their circuitous and
seemingly senseless windings, they had all the time been converging.
It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law
of chemical changes--that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For
instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the
fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she
would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never
seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, "But, of course, you
know it isn't really the apple. It's the Note."

The influence that this experience had had upon his attitude to daily
life was a curious one. Before he had heard the note he had caused his
father some uneasiness by his impatience of routine and his hankering
after travel and adventure. He had, indeed, been heard to vow that
he would rather be the captain of one of his father's ships than the
sedentary owner of the whole fleet.

But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young
man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated
in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic
things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already
lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together
with a distrust of the homely things he cherished. With what familiar
object--quill, pipe, pack of cards--would he be occupied, in which
regular recurrent action--the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the
weekly auditing of his accounts--would he be engaged when IT, the
hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his
furniture, his walls, his pictures--what strange scene might they
one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their
presence?

Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing
tenderness of one who gazes on the past: his wife, sitting under the
lamp embroidering, and retailing to him the gossip she had culled
during the day; or his little son, playing with the great mastiff on
the floor.

This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a voice in the
cry of the cock, which tells of the plough going through the land,
the smell of the country, the placid bustle of the farm, as happening
now, all round one; and which, simultaneously, mourns them as things
vanished centuries ago.

From his secret poison there was, however, some sweetness to be
distilled. For the unknown thing that he dreaded could at times be
envisaged as a dangerous cape that he had already doubled. And to lie
awake at night in his warm feather bed, listening to the breathing
of his wife and the soughing of the trees, would become, from this
attitude, an exquisite pleasure.

He would say to himself, "How pleasant this is! How safe! How warm!
What a difference from that lonely heath when I had no cloak and the
wind found the fissures in my doublet, and my feet were aching, and
there was not moon enough to prevent my stumbling, and IT was lurking
in the darkness!" enhancing thus his present well-being by imagining
some unpleasant adventure now safe behind him.

This also was the cause of his taking a pride in knowing his way about
his native town. For instance, when returning from the Guildhall to his
own house he would say to himself, "Straight across the market-place,
down Appleimp Lane, and round by the Duke Aubrey Arms into the High
Street.... I know every step of the way, every step of the way!"

And he would get a sense of security, a thrill of pride, from every
acquaintance who passed the time of day with him, from every dog to
whom he could put a name. "That's Wagtail, Goceline Flack's dog. That's
Mab, the bitch of Rackabite the butcher, I know them!"

Though he did not realise it, he was masquerading to himself as a
stranger in Lud-in-the-Mist--a stranger whom nobody knew, and who was
thus almost as safe as if he were invisible. And one always takes a
pride in knowing one's way about a strange town. But it was only this
pride that emerged completely into his consciousness.

The only outward expression of this secret fear was a sudden,
unaccountable irascibility, when some harmless word or remark happened
to sting the fear into activity. He could not stand people saying, "Who
knows what we shall be doing this time next year?" and he loathed such
expressions as "for the last time," "never again," however trivial the
context in which they appeared. For instance, he would snap his wife's
head off--why, she could not think--if she said, "Never again shall I
go to that butcher," or "That starch is a disgrace. It's the last time
I shall use it for my ruffs."

This fear, too, had awakened in him a wistful craving for other men's
shoes that caused him to take a passionate interest in the lives of
his neighbors; that is to say if these lives moved in a different
sphere from his own. From this he had gained the reputation--not
quite deserved--of being a very warm-hearted, sympathetic man, and he
had won the heart of many a sea-captain, of many a farmer, of many
an old working-woman by the unfeigned interest he showed in their
conversation. Their long, meandering tales of humble normal lives were
like the proverbial glimpse of a snug, lamp-lit parlour to a traveller
belated after nightfall.

He even coveted dead men's shoes, and he would loiter by the hour
in the ancient burying-ground of Lud-in-the-Mist, known from time
immemorial as the Fields of Grammary. He could justify this habit by
pointing out the charming view that one got thence of both Lud and
the surrounding country. But though he sincerely loved the view, what
really brought him there were such epitaphs as this:

                                 BAKER

                   WHO HAVING PROVIDED THE CITIZENS
                  OF LUD-IN-THE-MIST FOR SIXTY YEARS
                        WITH FRESH SWEET LOAVES
                    DIED AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY-EIGHT
                 SURROUNDED BY HIS SONS AND GRANDSONS.

How willingly would he have changed places with that old baker! And
then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all
epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.




                              CHAPTER II

               THE DUKE WHO LAUGHED HIMSELF OFF A THRONE
                   AND OTHER TRADITIONS OF DORIMARE


Before we start on our story, it will be necessary, for its proper
understanding, to give a short sketch of the history of Dorimare and
the beliefs and customs of its inhabitants.

Lud-in-the-Mist was scattered about the banks of two rivers, the Dapple
and the Dawl, which met on its outskirts at an acute angle, the apex
of which was the harbour. Then there were more houses up the side of a
hill, on the top of which stood the Fields of Grammary.

The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became so broad at
Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that town, twenty miles inland though it
was, all the advantages of a port; while the actual seaport town itself
was little more than a fishing village. The Dapple, however, which had
its source in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held)
and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble
little stream, and played no part in the commercial life of the town.
But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that 'The Dapple
flows into the Dawl.' It had come to be employed when one wanted to
show the inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents;
but, possibly, it had originally another application.

The wealth and importance of the country was mainly due to the Dawl. It
was thanks to the Dawl that girls in remote villages of Dorimare wore
brooches made out of walrus tusks, and applied bits of unicorns' horns
to their toothache, that the chimney-piece in the parlour of almost
every farm-house was adorned with an ostrich egg, and that when the
ladies of Lud-in-the-Mist went out shopping or to play cards with their
friends, their market-basket or ivory markers were carried by little
indigo pages in crimson turbans from the Cinnamon Isles, and that pigmy
peddlers from the far North hawked amber through the streets. For the
Dawl had turned Lud-in-the-Mist into a town of merchants, and all the
power and nearly all the wealth of the country was in their hands.

But this had not always been the case. In the old days Dorimare had
been a duchy, and the population had consisted of nobles and peasants.
But gradually there had arisen a middle-class. And this class had
discovered--as it always does--that trade was seriously hampered by a
ruler unchecked by a constitution, and by a ruthless, privileged class.
Figuratively, these things were damming the Dawl.

Indeed, with each generation the Dukes had been growing more capricious
and more selfish, till finally these failings had culminated in Duke
Aubrey, a hunchback with a face of angelic beauty, who seemed to be
possessed by a laughing demon of destructiveness. He had been known,
out of sheer wantonness, to gallop with his hunt straight through a
field of standing corn, and to set fire to a fine ship for the mere
pleasure of watching it burn. And he dealt with the virtue of his
subjects' wives and daughters in the same high-handed way.

As a rule, his pranks were seasoned by a slightly sinister humour. For
instance, when on the eve of marriage a maid, according to immemorial
custom, was ritually offering her virginity to the spirit of the farm,
symbolised by the most ancient tree on the freehold, Duke Aubrey would
leap out from behind it, and, pretending to be the spirit, take her at
her word. And tradition said that he and one of his boon companions
wagered that they would succeed in making the court jester commit
suicide of his own free will. So they began to work on his imagination
with plaintive songs, the burden of which was the frailty of all lovely
things, and with grim fables comparing man to a shepherd, doomed to
stand by impotent, while his sheep are torn, one by one, by a ravenous
wolf.

They won their wager; for coming into the jester's room one morning
they found him hanging from the ceiling, dead. And it was believed that
echoes of the laughter with which Duke Aubrey greeted this spectacle
were, from time to time, still to be heard proceeding from that room.

But there had been pleasanter aspects to him. For one thing, he had
been an exquisite poet, and such of his songs as had come down were
as fresh as flowers and as lonely as the cuckoo's cry. While in the
country stories were still told of his geniality and tenderness--how he
would appear at a village wedding with a cart-load of wine and cakes
and fruit, or of how he would stand at the bedside of the dying, grave
and compassionate as a priest.

Nevertheless, the grim merchants, obsessed by a will to wealth, raised
up the people against him. For three days a bloody battle raged in the
streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in which fell all the nobles of Dorimare.
As for Duke Aubrey, he vanished--some said to Fairyland, where he
was living to this day. During those three days of bloodshed all the
priests had vanished also. So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke and
its cult.

In the days of the Dukes, fairy things had been looked on with
reverence, and the most solemn event of the religious year had been
the annual arrival from Fairyland of mysterious, hooded strangers with
milk-white mares, laden with offerings of fairy fruit for the Duke and
the high-priest.

But after the revolution, when the merchants had seized all the
legislative and administrative power, a taboo was placed on all things
fairy.

This was not to be wondered at. For one thing, the new rulers
considered that the eating of fairy fruit had been the chief cause of
the degeneracy of the Dukes. It had, indeed, always been connected with
poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present
sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common
sense of a burgher-class in the making. There was certainly nothing
morbid about the men of the revolution, and under their regime what one
can only call the tragic sense of life vanished from poetry and art.

Besides, to the minds of the Dorimarites, fairy things had always
spelled delusion. The songs and legends described Fairyland as a
country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon
wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense,
hourly offered holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and
the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these things
long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees,
the lamps into glow-worms, the precious stones into potsherds, and the
magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged
crones muttering over a fire of twigs.

The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally jealous of the
solid blessings of mortals, and, clothed in invisibility, would crowd
to weddings and wakes and fairs--wherever good victuals, in fact, were
to be found--and suck the juices from fruits and meats--in vain, for
nothing could make them substantial.

Nor was it only food that they stole. In out-of-the-way country places
it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to
resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance--otherwise, why
should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which
the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the
Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers.
The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between
the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the "Silent People";
and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were
carried to Fairyland.

Another tradition said that their only means of communication was
poetry and music; and in the country poetry and music were still called
"the language of the Silent People."

Naturally enough, men who were teaching the Dawl to run gold, who were
digging canals and building bridges, and seeing that the tradesmen gave
good measure and used standard weights, and who liked both virtues
and commodities to be solid, had little patience for flimsy cheats.
Nevertheless, the new rulers were creating their own form of delusion,
for it was they who founded in Dorimare the science of jurisprudence,
taking as their basis the primitive code used under the Dukes and
adapting it to modern conditions by the use of legal fictions.

Master Josiah Chanticleer (the father of Master Nathaniel), who had
been a very ingenious and learned jurist, had drawn in one of his
treatises a curious parallel between fairy things and the law. The men
of the revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. But
whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests had been allowed to
partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to rich and poor alike.
Again, fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort
of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose. But, whereas fairy
magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic
of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.

In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But
then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose
with reality--and no one really believes it.

Gradually, an almost physical horror came to be felt for anything
connected with the Fairies and Fairyland, and society followed the law
in completely ignoring their existence. Indeed, the very word "fairy"
became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest
insult one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call him "Son of a
Fairy."

But, on the painted ceilings of ancient houses, in the peeling frescoes
of old barns, in the fragments of bas-reliefs built into modern
structures, and, above all, in the tragic funereal statues of the
Fields of Grammary, a Winckelmann, had he visited Dorimare, would have
found, as he did in the rococo Rome of the eighteenth century, traces
of an old and solemn art, the designs of which served as poncifs to the
modern artists. For instance, a well-known advertisement of a certain
cheese, which depicted a comic, fat little man menacing with knife and
fork an enormous cheese hanging in the sky like the moon, was really
a sort of unconscious comic reprisal made against the action depicted
in a very ancient Dorimarite design, wherein the moon itself pursued a
frieze of tragic fugitives.

Well, a few years before the opening of this story, a Winckelmann,
though an anonymous one, actually did appear in Lud-in-the-Mist;
although the field of his enquiries was not limited to the plastic
arts. He published a book, entitled _Traces of Fairy in the
Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare_.

His thesis was this: that there was an unmistakable fairy strain
running through the race of Dorimarites, which could only be explained
by the hypothesis that, in the olden days, there had been frequent
intermarriage between them and the Fairies. For instance, the red hair,
so frequent in Dorimare, pointed, he maintained, to such a strain.
It was also to be found, he asserted, in the cattle of Dorimare. For
this assertion he had some foundation, for it was undeniable that
from time to time a dun or dapple cow would bring forth a calf of a
bluish tinge, whose dung was of a ruddy gold. And tradition taught
that all the cattle of Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned
into dung when it had crossed the border. Tradition also taught that
all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was indisputable that
the cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from time to time as red as
poppies, and the lilies as red as damask roses. Moreover, he discovered
traces of the Fairies' language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and
in some of their names. And, to a stranger, it certainly produced an
odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and
Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by
the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in
the same breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted
Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt's Rump; or to find names like
Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as
Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.

With regard to the designs of old tapestries and old bas-reliefs,
he maintained that they were illustrations of the flora, fauna, and
history of Fairyland, and scouted the orthodox theory which explained
the strange birds and flowers as being due either to the artists'
unbridled fancy or to their imperfect control of their medium, and
considered that the fantastic scenes were taken from the rituals of the
old religion. For, he insisted, all artistic types, all ritual acts,
must be modelled on realities; and Fairyland is the place where what we
look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur.

If the antiquary, then, was correct, the Dorimarite, like a Dutchman of
the seventeenth century, smoking his churchwarden among his tulips, and
eating his dinner off Delft plates, had trivialised to his own taste
the solemn spiritual art of a remote, forbidden land, which he believed
to be inhabited by grotesque and evil creatures given over to strange
vices and to dark cults ... nevertheless in the veins of the Dutchman
of Dorimare there flowed without his knowing it the blood of these same
evil creatures.

It is easy to imagine the fury caused in Lud-in-the-Mist by the
appearance of this book. The printer was, of course, heavily fined, but
he was unable to throw any light on its authorship. The manuscript, he
said, had been brought to him by a rough, red-haired lad, whom he had
never seen before. All the copies were burned by the common hangman,
and there the matter had to rest.

In spite of the law's maintaining that Fairyland and everything to do
with it was non-existent, it was an open secret that, though fairy
fruit was no longer brought into the country with all the pomp of
established ritual, anyone who wanted it could always procure it in
Lud-in-the-Mist. No great effort had ever been made to discover the
means and agents by which it was smuggled into the town; for to eat
fairy fruit was regarded as a loathsome and filthy vice, practised in
low taverns by disreputable and insignificant people, such as indigo
sailors and pigmy Norsemen. True, there had been cases known from time
to time, during the couple of centuries that had elapsed since the
expulsion of Duke Aubrey, of youths of good family taking to this vice.
But to be suspected of such a thing spelled complete social ostracism,
and this, combined with the innate horror felt for the stuff by every
Dorimarite, caused such cases to be very rare.

But some twenty years before the opening of this story, Dorimare had
been inflicted with a terrible drought. People were reduced to making
bread out of vetches and beans and fern-roots; and marsh and tarn were
rifled of their reeds to provide the cattle with food, while the Dawl
was diminished to the size of an ordinary rill, as were the other
rivers of Dorimare--with the exception of the Dapple. All through
the drought the waters of the Dapple remained unimpaired; but this
was not to be wondered at, as a river whose sources are in Fairyland
has probably mysterious sources of moisture. But, as the drought
burned relentlessly on, in the country districts an ever-increasing
number of people succumbed to the vice of fairy fruit-eating ... with
tragic results to themselves, for though the fruit was very grateful
to their parched throats, its spiritual effects were most alarming,
and every day fresh rumours reached Lud-in-the-Mist (it was in the
country districts that this epidemic, for so we must call it, raged) of
madness, suicide, orgiastic dances, and wild doings under the moon. But
the more they ate the more they wanted, and though they admitted that
the fruit produced an agony of mind, they maintained that for one who
had experienced this agony life would cease to be life without it.

How the fruit got across the border remained a mystery, and all the
efforts of the magistrates to stop it were useless. In vain they
invented a legal fiction (as we have seen, the law took no cognisance
of fairy things) that turned fairy fruit into a form of woven silk
and, hence, contraband in Dorimare; in vain they fulminated in the
Senate against all smugglers and all men of depraved minds and filthy
habits--silently, surely, the supply of fairy fruit continued to meet
the demand. Then, with the first rain, both began to decrease. But
the inefficiency of the magistrates in this national crisis was never
forgotten, and "feckless as a magistrate in the great drought" became a
proverb in Dorimare.

As a matter of fact, the ruling class of Dorimare had become
incapable of handling any serious business. The wealthy merchants of
Lud-in-the-Mist, the descendants of the men of the revolution and the
hereditary rulers of Dorimare had, by this time, turned into a set of
indolent, self-indulgent, humorous gentlemen, with hearts as little
touched to tragic issues as those of their forefathers, but with none
of their forefathers' sterling qualities.

A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which
lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting
material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different
from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and
it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be. For
one thing, wealth had ceased to be a delicate, exotic blossom. It had
become naturalised in Dorimare, and was now a hardy perennial, docilely
renewing itself year after year, and needing no tending from the
gardeners.

Hence sprang leisure, that fissure in the solid masonry of works
and days in which take seed a myriad curious little flowers--good
cookery, and shining mahogany, and a fashion in dress, that, like a
baroque bust, is fantastic through sheer wittiness, and porcelain
shepherdesses, and the humours, and endless jokes--in fact, the toys,
material and spiritual, of civilisation. But they were as different as
possible from the toys of that older civilisation that littered the
attics of the Chanticleers. About these there had been something tragic
and a little sinister; while all the manifestations of the modern
civilisation were like fire-light--fantastic, but homely.

Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country.
And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less
about the common people for whom they legislated.

For instance, they were unaware that in the country Duke Aubrey's
memory was still green. It was not only that natural children still
went by the name of "Duke Aubrey's brats"; that when they saw a falling
star old women would say, "Duke Aubrey has shot a roe"; and that on
the anniversary of his expulsion, maidens would fling into the Dapple,
for luck, garlands woven out of the two plants that had formed the
badge of the Dukes--ivy and squills. He was a living reality to the
country people; so much so that, when leakages were found in the vats,
or when a horse was discovered in the morning with his coat stained
and furrowed with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape
punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the culprit. And there
was not a farm or village that had not at least one inhabitant who
swore that he had seen him, on some midsummer's eve, or some night of
the winter solstice, galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with
harlequin ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable
bells.

But of Fairyland and its inhabitants the country people knew no more
than did the merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist. Between the two countries
stood the barrier of the Debatable Hills, the foothills of which were
called the Elfin Marches, and were fraught, tradition said, with every
kind of danger, both physical and moral. No one in the memory of man
had crossed these hills, and to do so was considered tantamount to
death.




                              CHAPTER III

                       THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE


The social life of Lud-in-the-Mist began in spring and ended in autumn.
In winter the citizens preferred their own fire-sides; they had an
unreasoning dislike of being out after nightfall, a dislike due not so
much to fear as to habit. Though the habit may have sprung from some
forgotten danger that, long ago, had made their ancestors shun the dark.

So it was always with relief as well as with joy that they welcomed the
first appearance of spring--scarcely crediting at first that it was a
reality shared by all the world, and not merely an optical delusion
confined to their own eyes in their own garden. There, the lawn was
certainly green, the larches and thorns even startlingly so, and the
almonds had rose-coloured blossoms; but the fields and trees in the
hazy distance beyond their own walls were still grey and black. Yes,
the colours in their own garden must be due merely to some gracious
accident of light, and when that light shifted the colours would vanish.

But everywhere, steadily, invisibly, the trees' winter foliage of white
sky or amethyst grey dusk was turning to green and gold.

All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring,
and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is
becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught
in a spider's web, and how little lemon-coloured buds are studding the
thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts--they
come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is
hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves--and all the other trees in
turn.

And at first we delight in the diversity of the colours and shapes of
the various young leaves--noting how those of the birch are like a
swarm of green bees, and those of the lime so transparent that they are
stained black with the shadow of those above and beneath them, and how
those of the elm diaper the sky with the prettiest pattern, and are the
ones that grow the most slowly.

Then we cease to note their idiosyncrasies, and they merge, till
autumn, into one solid, unobtrusive green curtain for throwing into
relief brighter and sharper things. There is nothing so dumb as a tree
in full leaf.

It was in the spring of his fiftieth year that Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer had his first real anxiety. It concerned his only son
Ranulph, a little boy of twelve years old.

Master Nathaniel had been elected that year to the highest office in
the state--that of Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of
Dorimare. Ex officio, he was president of the Senate and chief justice
on the Bench. According to the constitution, as drawn up by the men of
the revolution, he was responsible for the safety and defence of the
country in case of attack by sea or land; it was for him to see that
both justice and the country's revenues were properly administered; and
his time was held to be at the disposal of the most obscure citizen
with a grievance.

Actually--apart from presiding on the Bench--his duties had come to
consist of nothing more onerous than being a genial and dignified
chairman of a comfortable and select club, for that was what in reality
the Senate had now become. Nevertheless, though it was open to question
whether his official duties were of the slightest use to anyone, they
were numerous enough to occupy most of his time and to cause him to be
unconscious of the under-currents in his home.

Ranulph had always been a dreamy, rather delicate child, and backward
for his years. Up to the age of seven, or thereabouts, he had caused
his mother much anxiety by his habit, when playing in the garden, of
shouting out remarks to an imaginary companion. And he was fond of
talking nonsense (according to the ideas of Lud-in-the-Mist, slightly
obscene nonsense) about golden cups, and snow-white ladies milking
azure cows, and the sound of tinkling bridles at midnight. But children
are apt, all the world over, to have nasty little minds; and this type
of talk was not uncommon among the children of Lud-in-the-Mist, and, as
they nearly always grew out of it, little attention was paid to it.

Then, when he was a few years older, the sudden death of a young
scullery maid affected him so strongly that for two days he would not
touch food, but lay with frightened eyes tossing and trembling in bed,
like a newly-caught bird in a cage. When his shocked and alarmed mother
(his father was at the seaport town on business at the time) tried to
comfort him by reminding him that he had not been particularly fond of
the scullery-maid while she was alive, he had cried out irritably, "No,
no, it isn't her ... it's the thing that has happened to her!"

But all that was when he was still quite a little boy, and, as he grew
older, he had seemed to become much more normal.

But that spring his tutor had come to Dame Marigold to complain of
his inattention at his studies, and sudden unreasonable outbreaks of
passion. "To tell the you truth, ma'am, I think the little fellow can't
be well," the tutor had said.

So Dame Marigold sent for the good old family doctor, who said there
was nothing the matter with him but a little overheating of the blood,
a thing very common in the spring; and prescribed sprigs of borage in
wine: "the best cordial for lazy scholars," and he winked and pinched
Ranulph's ear, adding that in June he might be given an infusion of
damask roses to complete the cure.

But the sprigs of borage did not make Ranulph any more attentive to his
lessons; while Dame Marigold had no longer need of the tutor's hints
to realise that the little boy was not himself. What alarmed her most
in his condition was the violent effort that he had evidently to make
in order to react in the least to his surroundings. For instance, if
she offered him a second helping at dinner, he would clench his fists,
and beads of perspiration would break out on his forehead, so great an
effort did it require to answer Yes or No.

There had never been any real sympathy between Ranulph and his mother
(she had always preferred her daughter, Prunella), and she knew that if
she were to ask him what ailed him he would not tell her; so, instead,
she asked Ranulph's great ally and confidant, Master Nathaniel's old
nurse, Mistress Hempen.

Hempie, as they called her, had served the family of Chanticleer for
nearly fifty years, in fact ever since the birth of Master Nathaniel.
And now she was called the housekeeper, though her duties were of the
lightest, and consisted mainly of keeping the store-room keys and
mending the linen.

She was a fine, hale old country-woman, with a wonderful gift for
amusing children. Not only did she know all the comic nursery stories
of Dorimare (Ranulph's favourite was about a pair of spectacles whose
ambition was to ride on the nose of the Man-in-the-Moon, and who, in
vain attempts to reach their goal, were always leaping off the nose of
their unfortunate possessor), but she was, as well, an incomparable
though sedentary playfellow, and from her arm-chair would direct,
with seemingly unflagging interest, the manoeuvres of lead soldiers
or the movements of marionettes. Indeed, her cosy room at the top of
the house seemed to Ranulph to have the power of turning every object
that crossed its threshold into a toy: the ostrich egg hanging from
the ceiling by a crimson cord, the little painted wax effigies of his
grandparents on the chimney-piece, the old spinning-wheel, even the
empty bobbins, which made excellent wooden soldiers, and the pots
of jam standing in rows to be labelled--they all presented infinite
possibilities of being played with; while her fire seemed to purr more
contentedly than other fires and to carry prettier pictures in its red,
glowing heart.

Well, rather timidly (for Hempie had a rough edge to her tongue, and
had never ceased to look upon her mistress as a young and foolish
interloper), Dame Marigold told her that she was beginning to be a
little anxious about Ranulph. Hempie shot her a sharp look over her
spectacles, and, pursing her lips, drily remarked, "Well, ma'am, it's
taken you a long time to see it."

But when Dame Marigold tried to find out what she thought was the
matter with him, she would only shake her head mysteriously, and mutter
that it was no use crying over spilt milk, and least said soonest
mended.

When finally the baffled Dame Marigold got up to go, the old woman
cried shrilly: "Now, ma'am, remember, not a word of this to the master!
He was never one that could stand being worried. He's like his father
in that. My old mistress used often to say to me, 'Now, Polly, we won't
tell the master. He can't stand worry.' Aye, all the Chanticleers
are wonderful sensitive." And the unexpressed converse of the last
statement was, "All the Vigils, on the other hand, have the hides of
buffaloes."

Dame Marigold, however, had no intention of mentioning the matter as
yet to Master Nathaniel. Whether or not it was due to the Chanticleers'
superior sensitiveness of soul, the slightest worry, as she knew to her
cost, made him unbearably irritable.

He had evidently, as yet, noticed nothing himself. Most of his day was
spent in the Senate and his counting-house; besides, his interest in
other people's lives was not extended to those of his own household.

As to his feelings for Ranulph, it must be confessed that he looked
upon him more as an heirloom than as a son. In fact, unconsciously, he
placed him in the same category as the crystal goblet with which Duke
Aubrey's father had baptized the first ship owned by a Chanticleer, or
the sword with which his ancestor had helped to turn Duke Aubrey off
the throne--objects that he very rarely either looked at or thought
about, though the loss of them would have caused him to go half mad
with rage and chagrin.

However, one evening, early in April, the matter was forced upon his
attention in a very painful manner.

By this time spring had come to all the world, and the citizens
of Lud-in-the-Mist were beginning to organise their life for
summer--copper vessels were being cleaned and polished for the coming
labours of the still-room, arbours in the gardens swept out and
cleaned, and fishing-tackle overhauled; and people began to profit by
the longer days by giving supper-parties to their friends.

Nobody in Lud-in-the-Mist loved parties more than Master Nathaniel.
They were a temporary release. It was as if the tune of his life were
suddenly set to a different and gayer key; so that, while nothing was
substantially changed, and the same chairs stood in the same places,
with people sitting in them that he met every day, and there was
even the same small, dull ache in one of his teeth, nevertheless the
sting, or rather the staleness, was taken out of it all. So it was
very gleefully that he sent invitations to all his cronies to come
"and meet a Moongrass cheese"--as he had done every April for the last
twenty-five years.

Moongrass was a village of Dorimare famous for its cheeses--and rightly
so, for to look at they were as beautiful as Parian marble veined with
jade, and they had to perfection the flavour of all good cheeses--that
blending of the perfume of meadows with the cleanly stench of the
byre. It was the Moongrass cheeses that were the subject of the comic
advertisement described in a previous chapter.

By seven o'clock the Chanticleers' parlour was filled with a crowd of
stout, rosy, gaily-dressed guests, chattering and laughing like a flock
of paroquets. Only Ranulph was silent; but that was to be expected
from a little boy of twelve years old in the presence of his elders.
However, he need not have sulked in a corner, nor responded quite so
surlily to the jocular remarks addressed him by his father's guests.

Master Nathaniel, of course, had a well-stored cellar, and the evening
began with glasses of delicious wild-thyme gin, a cordial for which
that cellar was famous. But, as well, he had a share in a common
cellar, owned jointly by all the families of the ruling class--a
cellar of old, mellow jokes that, unlike bottles of wine, never ran
dry. Whatever there was of ridiculous or lovable in each member of
the group was distilled into one of these jokes, so that at will one
could intoxicate oneself with one's friends' personalities--swallow,
as it were, the whole comic draught of them. And, seeing that in these
old jokes the accumulated irritation that inevitably results from
intimacy evaporated and turned to sweetness, like the juice of the
grape they promoted friendship and cordiality--between the members of
the group, that is to say. For each variety of humour is a sort of
totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites
into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off
from all the rest of the world. Perhaps the chief reason for the lack
of sympathy between the rulers and the ruled in Dorimare was that, in
humour, they belonged to different totems.

Anyhow, everyone there tonight shared the same totem, and each one of
them was the hero of one of the old jokes. Master Nathaniel was asked
if his crimson velvet breeches were a blackish crimson because, many
years ago, he had forgotten to go into mourning for his father-in-law;
and when Dame Marigold had, finally, tentatively pointed out to him his
omission, he had replied angrily, "I am in mourning!" Then, when with
upraised eyebrows she had looked at the canary-coloured stockings that
he had just purchased, he had said sheepishly, "Anyhow, it's a blackish
canary."

Few wines have as strong a flavour of the grape as this old joke had of
Master Nathaniel. His absent-mindedness was in it, his power of seeing
things as he wanted them to be (he had genuinely believed himself to
be in mourning) and, finally, in the "blackish canary" there was the
tendency, which he had inherited, perhaps, from his legal ancestors,
to believe that one could play with reality and give it what shape one
chose.

Then, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle was asked whether the Honeysuckles
considered a Moongrass cheese to be a cheese; the point being that
Master Ambrose had an exaggerated sense of the importance of his own
family, and once in the law-courts, when the question arose as to
whether a dragon (there were still a few harmless, effete dragons
lurking in caves in out-of-the-way parts of Dorimare) were a bird or a
reptile, he had said, with an air of finality, "The Honeysuckles have
always considered them to be reptiles." And his wife, Dame Jessamine,
was asked if she wanted her supper "on paper," owing to her habit of
pinning her husband down to any rash promise, such as that of a new
barouche, by saying, "I'd like that on paper, Ambrose."

And then there was Dame Marigold's brother, Master Polydore Vigil, and
his wife, Dame Dreamsweet, and old Mat Pyepowders and his preposterous,
chattering dame, and the Peregrine Laquers and the Goceline Flacks and
the Hyacinth Baldbreeches--in fact, all the cream of the society of
Lud-in-the-Mist, and each of them labelled with his or her appropriate
joke. And the old jokes went round and round, like bottles of port, and
with each round the company grew more hilarious.

The anonymous antiquary could have found in the culinary language
of Dorimare another example to support his thesis; for the menu
of the supper provided by Dame Marigold for her guests sounded
like a series of tragic sonnets. The first dish was called "The
Bitter-Sweet Mystery"--it was a soup of herbs on the successful
blending of which the cooks of Lud-in-the-Mist based their reputation.
This was followed by "The Lottery of Dreams," which consisted of
such delicacies as quail, snails, chicken's liver, plovers' eggs,
peacocks' hearts, concealed under a mountain of boiled rice. Then came
"True-Love-in-Ashes," a special way of preparing pigeons; and last,
"Death's Violets," an extremely indigestible pudding decorated with
sugared violets.

"And now!" cried Master Nathaniel gleefully, "here comes the turn of
our old friend! Fill your glasses, and drink to the King of Moongrass
Cheeses!"

"To the King of Moongrass Cheeses!" echoed the guests, stamping with
their feet and banging on the table. Whereupon Master Nathaniel seized
a knife, and was about to plunge it into the magnificent cheese, when
suddenly Ranulph rushed round to his side and, with tears in his eyes,
implored him, in a shrill terrified voice, not to cut the cheese. The
guests, thinking it must be some obscure joke, tittered encouragingly,
and Master Nathaniel, after staring at him in amazement for a few
seconds, said testily, "What's taken the boy? Hands off, Ranulph, I
say! Have you gone mad?" But Ranulph's eyes were now starting out of
his head in fury, and, hanging on to his father's arm, he screamed in
his shrill, childish voice, "No, you won't! you won't, you won't! I
won't let you!"

"That's right, Ranulph!" laughed one of the guests. "You stand up to
your father!"

"By the Milky Way! Marigold," roared Master Nathaniel, beginning to
lose his temper, "what's taken the boy, I ask?"

Dame Marigold was looking nervous. "Ranulph! Ranulph!" she cried
reproachfully, "go back to your place, and don't tease your father."

"No! No! No!" shrieked Ranulph still more shrilly, "he shall not kill
the moon ... he shall not, I say. If he does, all the flowers will
wither in Fairyland."

How am I to convey to you the effect that these words produced on
the company? It would not be adequate to ask you to imagine your own
feelings were your host's small son suddenly, in a mixed company, to
pour forth a stream of obscene language; for Ranulph's words were
not merely a shock to good taste--they aroused, as well, some of the
superstitious terror caused by the violation of a taboo.

The ladies all blushed crimson, the gentlemen looked stern, while
Master Nathaniel, his face purple, yelled in a voice of thunder, "Go
to bed this instant, Ranulph ... and I'll come and deal with you later
on"; and Ranulph, who suddenly seemed to have lost all interest in the
fate of the cheese, meekly left the room.

There were no more jokes that evening, and on most of the plates the
cheese lay neglected; and in spite of the efforts of some of the
guests, conversation flagged sadly, so that it was scarcely nine
o'clock when the party broke up.

When Master Nathaniel was left alone with Dame Marigold he fiercely
demanded an explanation of Ranulph's behaviour. But she merely shrugged
her shoulders wearily, and said she thought the boy must have gone mad,
and told him how for some weeks he had seemed to her unlike himself.

"Then why wasn't I told? Why wasn't I told?" stormed Master Nathaniel.
Again Dame Marigold shrugged her shoulders, and, as she looked at him,
there was a gleam of delicate, humourous contempt in her heavily-lidded
eyes. Dame Marigold's eyes, by the way, had a characteristic, which
was to be found often enough among the Ludites--you would have called
them dreamy and languorous, had it not been for the expression of the
mouth, which with its long satirical upper lip, like that of an old
judge, and the whimsical twist to its corners, reacted on the eyes,
and made them mocking and almost too humourous--never more so than when
she looked at Master Nathaniel. In her own way she was fond of him. But
her attitude was not unlike that of an indulgent mistress to a shaggy,
uncertain-tempered, performing dog.

Master Nathaniel began to pace up and down the room, his fists
clenched, muttering imprecations against inefficient women and the
overwhelming worries of a family man--in his need for a victim on whom
to vent his rage, actually feeling angry with Dame Marigold for having
married him and let him in for all this fuss and to-do. And his shadowy
fears were more than usually clamorous. Dame Marigold, as she sat
watching him, felt that he was rather like a cockchafer that had just
flounced in through the open window, and, with a small, smacking sound,
was bouncing itself backwards and forwards against its own shadow on
the ceiling--a shadow that looked like a big, black velvety moth. But
it was its clumsiness, and blundering ineffectualness that reminded her
of Master Nathaniel; not the fact that it was banging itself against
the shadow.

Up and down marched Master Nathaniel, backwards and forwards bounced
the cockchafer, hither and thither flitted its soft, dainty shadow.
Then, suddenly, straight as a die, the cockchafer came tumbling down
from the ceiling and, at the same time, Master Nathaniel--calling over
his shoulder, "I must go up and see that boy"--dashed from the room.

He found Ranulph in bed, sobbing his heart out, and as he looked at
the piteous little figure he felt his anger evaporating. He laid his
hand on the boy's shoulder and said not unkindly: "Come, my son; crying
won't mend matters. You'll write an apology to Cousin Ambrose, and
Uncle Polydore, and all the rest of them, tomorrow; and then--well,
we'll try to forget about it. We're none of us quite responsible for
what we say when we're out of sorts ... and I gather from your mother
you've not been feeling quite the thing these past weeks."

"It was something made me say it!" sobbed Ranulph.

"Well, that's a nice, easy way of getting out of it," said Master
Nathaniel more sternly. "No, no, Ranulph, there's no excuse for
behaviour like that, none whatever. By the Harvest of Souls!" and his
voice became indignant, "Where did you pick up such ideas and such
expressions?"

"But they're true! They're true!" screamed Ranulph.

"I'm not going into the question of whether they're true or not. All
I know is that they're not the things talked about by ladies and
gentlemen. Such language has never before been heard under my roof, and
I trust it never will be again ... you understand?"

Ranulph groaned, and Master Nathaniel added in a kinder voice, "Well,
we'll say no more about it. And now what's all this I hear from your
mother about your being out of sorts, eh?"

But Ranulph's sobs redoubled. "I want to get away! to get away!" he
moaned.

"Away? Away from where?" and there was a touch of impatience in Master
Nathaniel's voice.

"From ... from things happening," sobbed Ranulph.

Master Nathaniel's heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to
understand. "Things happening?" he said in a voice that he endeavoured
to make jocular. "I don't think anything very much happens in Lud, does
it?"

"All the things," moaned Ranulph, "summer and winter, and days and
nights. All the things!"

Master Nathaniel had a sudden vision of Lud and the surrounding
country, motionless and soundless, as it appeared from the Fields
of Grammary. Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person,
a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he
himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For
Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness,
alarm.

Ranulph had now stopped sobbing, and was lying there quite still. "The
whole of me seems to have got inside my head, and to hurt ... just like
it all gets inside a tooth when one has toothache," he said wearily.

Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open
mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound
for restlessness--how well he knew the state of mind these things
expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to
mould the body's attitude to its own shape.

He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well
both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like
the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but
there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once
swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth
part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering
without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase,
when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its
hunters--like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.

But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of
one's pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able
to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!

It was in a slightly husky voice that, laying his hand on Ranulph's,
he said, "Come, my son, this won't do." And then, with a twinkle, he
added, "Chivvy the black rooks away from the corn."

Ranulph gave a little shrill laugh. "There are no black rooks--all the
birds are golden," he cried.

Master Nathaniel frowned--with that sort of thing he had no patience.
But he determined to ignore it, and to keep to the aspect of the case
for which he had real sympathy. "Come, my son!" he said, in a tenderly
rallying voice. "Tell yourself that tomorrow it will all be gone. Why,
you don't think you're the only one, do you? We all feel like that at
times, but we don't let ourselves be beaten by it, and mope and pine
and hang our heads. We stick a smile on our faces and go about our
business."

Master Nathaniel, as he spoke, swelled with complacency. He had never
realised it before, but really it was rather fine the way he had
suffered in silence, all these years!

But Ranulph had sat up in bed, and was looking at him with a strange
little smile.

"I'm not the same as you, father," he said quietly. And then once more
he was shaken by great sobs, and screamed out in a voice of anguish, "I
have eaten fairy fruit!"

At these terrible words Master Nathaniel stood for a moment dizzy with
horror; then he lost his head. He rushed out on to the landing, calling
for Dame Marigold at the top of his voice.

"Marigold! Marigold! Marigold!"

Dame Marigold came hurrying up the stairs, calling out in a frightened
voice, "What is it, Nat? Oh, dear! What is it?"

"By the Harvest of Souls, hurry! Hurry! Here's the boy saying he's been
eating ... the stuff we don't mention. Suffering cats! I'll go mad!"

Dame Marigold fluttered down on Ranulph like a plump dove.

But her voice had none of the husky tenderness of a dove as she cried,
"Oh, Ranulph! You naughty boy! Oh, dear, this is frightful! Nat! Nat!
What are we to do?"

Ranulph shrank away from her, and cast an imploring look towards his
father. Whereupon Master Nathaniel took her roughly by the shoulders
and pushed her out of the room, saying, "If that is all you can say,
you'd better leave the boy to me."

And Dame Marigold, as she went down the stairs, terrified,
contemptuous, sick at heart, was feeling every inch a Vigil, and
muttering angrily to herself, "Oh, these Chanticleers!"

We are not yet civilised enough for exogamy; and, when anything
seriously goes wrong, married couples are apt to lay all the blame at
its door.

Well, it would seem that the worst disgrace that could befall a family
of Dorimare had come to the Chanticleers. But Master Nathaniel was no
longer angry with Ranulph. What would it serve to be angry? Besides,
there was this new tenderness flooding his heart, and he could not but
yield to it.

Bit by bit he got the whole story from the boy. It would seem that some
months ago a wild, mischievous lad called Willy Wisp who, for a short
time, had worked in Master Nathaniel's stables, had given Ranulph one
sherd of a fruit he had never seen before. When Ranulph had eaten it,
Willy Wisp had gone off into peal upon peal of mocking laughter, crying
out, "Ah, little master, what you've just eaten is FAIRY FRUIT, and
you'll never be the same again ... ho, ho, hoh!"

At these words Ranulph had been overwhelmed with horror and shame: "But
now I nearly always forget to be ashamed," he said. "All that seems to
matter now is to get away ... where there are shadows and quiet ... and
where I can get ... more fruit."

Master Nathaniel sighed heavily. But he said nothing; he only stroked
the small, hot hand he was holding in his own.

"And once," went on Ranulph, sitting up in bed, his cheeks flushed,
his eyes bright and feverish, "in the garden in full daylight I saw
them dancing--the Silent People, I mean--and their leader was a man in
green, and he called out to me, 'Hail, young Chanticleer! Some day I'll
send my piper for you, and you will up and follow him!' And I often see
his shadow in the garden, but it's not like our shadows, it's a bright
light that flickers over the lawn. And I'll go, I'll go, I'll go, I'll
go, some day, I know I shall!" and his voice was frightened and, at the
same time, triumphant.

"Hush, hush, my son!" said Master Nathaniel soothingly, "I don't think
we'll let you go." But his heart felt like lead.

"And ever since ... since I ate ... the fruit," went on Ranulph,
"everything has frightened me ... at least, not only since then,
because it did before too, but it's much worse now. Like that cheese
tonight ... anything can suddenly seem queer or terrible. But
since ... since I ate that fruit I sometimes seem to see the reason why
they're terrible. Just as I did tonight over the cheese, and I was so
frightened that I simply couldn't keep quiet another minute."

Master Nathaniel groaned. He too had felt frightened of homely things.

"Father," said Ranulph suddenly, "What does the cock say to you?"

Master Nathaniel gave a start. It was as if his own soul were speaking
to him.

"What does he say to me?"

He hesitated. Never before had he spoken to anyone about his inner
life. In a voice that trembled a little, for it was a great effort to
him to speak, he went on, "He says to me, Ranulph, he says ... that the
past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is
made of the present, and that the present is always here. And he says
that the dead long to be back again on the earth, and that...."

"No! No!" cried Ranulph fretfully, "he doesn't say that to me. He tells
me to come away ... away from real things ... that bite one. That's
what he says to me."

"No, my son. No," said Master Nathaniel firmly. "He doesn't say that.
You have misunderstood."

Then Ranulph again began to sob. "Oh, father! father!" he moaned, "they
hunt me so--the days and nights. Hold me! Hold me!"

Master Nathaniel, with a passion of tenderness such as he had never
thought himself capable of, lay down beside him, and took the little,
trembling body into his arms, and murmured loving, reassuring words.

Gradually Ranulph stopped sobbing, and before long he fell into a
peaceful sleep.




                              CHAPTER IV

                 ENDYMION LEER PRESCRIBES FOR RANULPH


Master Nathaniel awoke the following morning with a less leaden heart
than the circumstances would seem to warrant. In the person of Ranulph
an appalling disgrace had come upon him, and there could be no doubt
but that Ranulph's life and reason were both in danger. But mingling
with his anxiety was the pleasant sense of a new possession--this
love for his son that he had suddenly discovered in his heart, and it
aroused in him all the pride and the pleasure that a new pony would
have done when he was a boy.

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not
solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they
were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And,
even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave
them to wither on the ground.

He would have liked to vent his rage on Willy Wisp. But during the
previous winter Willy had mysteriously disappeared. And though a whole
month's wages had been owing to him, he had never been seen or heard of
since.

However, in spite of his attitude to facts, the sense of responsibility
that had been born with this new love for Ranulph forced him to take
some action in the matter, and he decided to call in Endymion Leer.

Endymion Leer had arrived in Lud-in-the-Mist some thirty years ago, no
one knew from where.

He was a physician, and his practice soon became one of the biggest in
the town, but was mainly confined to the tradespeople and the poorer
part of the population, for the leading families were conservative,
and always a little suspicious of strangers. Besides, they considered
him apt to be disrespectful, and his humour had a quality that made
them vaguely uncomfortable. For instance, he would sometimes startle a
polite company by exclaiming half to himself, "Life and death! Life and
death! They are the dyes in which I work. Are my hands stained?" And,
with his curious dry chuckle, he would hold them out for inspection.

However, so great was his skill and learning that even the people who
disliked him most were forced to consult him in really serious cases.

Among the humbler classes his was a name to conjure with, for he was
always ready to adapt his fees to the purses of his patients, and
where the purses were empty he gave his services free. For he took a
genuine pleasure in the exercise of his craft for its own sake. One
of the stories told about him was that one night he had been summoned
from his bed to a farm-house that lay several miles beyond the walls
of the town, to find when he got there that his patient was only a
little black pig, the sole survivor of a valuable litter. But he took
the discovery in good part, and settled down for the night to tend the
little animal; and by morning he was able to declare it out of danger.
When, on his return to Lud-in-the-Mist, he had been twitted for having
wasted so much time on such an unworthy object, he had answered that
a pig was thrall to the same master as a Mayor, and that it needed as
much skill to cure the one as the other; adding that a good fiddler
enjoys fiddling for its own sake, and that it is all the same to him
whether he plays at a yokel's wedding or a merchant's funeral.

He did not confine his interests to medicine. Though not himself by
birth a Dorimarite, there was little concerning the ancient customs of
his adopted country that he did not know; and some years ago he had
been asked by the Senate to write the official history of the Guild
Hall, which, before the revolution, had been the palace of the Dukes,
and was the finest monument in Lud-in-the-Mist. To this task he had for
some time devoted his scanty leisure.

The Senators had no severer critic than Endymion Leer, and he was
the originator of most of the jokes at their expense that circulated
in Lud-in-the-Mist. But to Master Nathaniel Chanticleer he seemed to
have a personal antipathy; and on the rare occasions when they met his
manner was almost insolent.

It was possible that this dislike was due to the fact that Ranulph when
he was a tiny boy had seriously offended him; for pointing his fat
little finger at him he had shouted in his shrill baby voice:

    "Before the cry of Chanticleer
    Gibbers away Endymion Leer."

When his mother had scolded him for his rudeness, he said that he had
been taught the rhyme by a funny old man he had seen in his dreams.
Endymion Leer had gone deadly white--with rage, Dame Marigold supposed;
and during several years he never referred to Ranulph except in a voice
of suppressed spite.

But that was years ago, and it was to be presumed that he had at last
forgotten what had, after all, been nothing but a piece of childish
impudence.

The idea of confiding to this upstart the disgraceful thing that had
happened to a Chanticleer was very painful to Master Nathaniel. But if
anyone could cure Ranulph it was Endymion Leer, so Master Nathaniel
pocketed his pride and asked him to come and see him.

As Master Nathaniel paced up and down his pipe-room (as his private
den was called) waiting for the doctor, the full horror of what had
happened swept over him. Ranulph had committed the unmentionable
crime--he had eaten fairy fruit. If it ever became known--and these
sort of things always did become known--the boy would be ruined
socially for ever. And, in any case, his health would probably be
seriously affected for years to come. Up and down like a see-saw went
the two aspects of the case in his anxious mind ... a Chanticleer had
eaten fairy fruit; little Ranulph was in danger.

Then the page announced Endymion Leer.

He was a little rotund man of about sixty, with a snub nose, a freckled
face, and with one eye blue and the other brown.

As Master Nathaniel met his shrewd, slightly contemptuous glance he had
an uncomfortable feeling which he had often before experienced in his
presence, namely that the little man could read his thoughts. So he did
not beat about the bush, but told him straight away why he had called
him in.

Endymion Leer gave a low whistle. Then he shot at Master Nathaniel
a look that was almost menacing and said sharply, "Who gave him the
stuff?"

Master Nathaniel told him it was a lad who had once been in his service
called Willy Wisp.

"Willy Wisp?" cried the doctor hoarsely. "Willy Wisp?"

"Yes, Willy Wisp ... confound him for a double-dyed villain," said
Master Nathaniel fiercely. And then added in some surprise, "Do you
know him?"

"Know him? Yes, I know him. Who doesn't know Willy Wisp?" said the
doctor. "You see not being a merchant or a Senator," he added with a
sneer, "I can mix with whom I choose. Willy Wisp with his pranks was
the plague of the town while he was in it, and his Worship the Mayor
wasn't altogether blessed by the townsfolk for keeping such a rascally
servant."

"Well, anyway, when I next meet him I'll thrash him within an inch of
his life," cried Master Nathaniel violently; and Endymion Leer looked
at him with a queer little smile.

"And now you'd better take me to see your son and heir," he said, after
a pause.

"Do you ... do you think you'll be able to cure him?" Master Nathaniel
asked hoarsely, as he led the way to the parlour.

"I never answer that kind of question before I've seen the patient, and
not always then," answered Endymion Leer.

Ranulph was lying on a couch in the parlour, and Dame Marigold was
sitting embroidering, her face pale and a little defiant. She was still
feeling every inch a Vigil and full of resentment against the two
Chanticleers, father and son, for having involved her in this horrible
business.

Poor Master Nathaniel stood by, faint with apprehension, while Endymion
Leer examined Ranulph's tongue, felt his pulse and, at the same time,
asked him minute questions as to his symptoms.

Finally he turned to Master Nathaniel and said, "I want to be left
alone with him. He will talk to me more easily without you and your
dame. Doctors should always see their patients alone."

But Ranulph gave a piercing shriek of terror. "No, no, no!" he cried.
"Father! Father! Don't leave me with him."

And then he fainted.

Master Nathaniel began to lose his head, and to buzz and bang again
like a cockchafer. But Endymion Leer remained perfectly calm. And
the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.
Master Nathaniel found himself gently but firmly pushed out of his own
parlour, and the door locked in his face. Dame Marigold had followed
him, and there was nothing for them to do but to await the doctor's
good pleasure in the pipe-room.

"By the Sun, Moon, and Stars, I'm going back!" cried Master Nathaniel
wildly. "I don't trust that fellow, I'm not going to leave Ranulph
alone with him, I'm going back."

"Oh, nonsense, Nat!" cried Dame Marigold wearily. "Do please be calm.
One really must allow a doctor to have his way."

For about a quarter of an hour Master Nathaniel paced the room with
ill-concealed impatience.

The parlour was opposite the pipe-room, with only a narrow passage
between them, and as Master Nathaniel had opened the door of the
pipe-room, he soon was able to hear a murmur of voices proceeding from
the parlour. This was comforting, for it showed that Ranulph must have
come to.

Then, suddenly, his whole body seemed to stiffen, the pupils of his
eyes dilated, he went ashy white, and in a low terrified voice he
cried, "Marigold, do you hear?"

In the parlour somebody was singing. It was a pretty, plaintive air,
and if one listened carefully one could distinguish the words.

    "And can the physician make sick men well,
    And can the magician a fortune divine
    Without lily, germander, and sops in wine?
    With sweet-brier,
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine."

"Good gracious, Nat!" cried Dame Marigold, with a mocking look of
despair. "What on earth is the matter now?"

"Marigold! Marigold!" he cried hoarsely, seizing her wrists, "don't you
hear?"

"I hear a vulgar old song, if that's what you mean. I've known it all
my life. It is very kind and domesticated of Endymion Leer to turn
nursemaid and rock the cradle like this!"

But what Master Nathaniel had heard was the Note.

For a few seconds he stood motionless, the sweat breaking out on his
forehead. Then blind with rage, he dashed across the corridor. But he
had forgotten the parlour was locked, so he dashed out by the front
door and came bursting in by the window that opened on to the garden.

The two occupants of the parlour were evidently so absorbed in each
other that they had noticed neither Master Nathaniel's violent assault
on the door nor yet his entry by the window.

Ranulph was lying on the couch with a look on his face of extraordinary
peace and serenity, and there was Endymion Leer, crouching over him and
softly crooning the tune to which he had before been singing words.

Master Nathaniel, roaring like a bull, flung himself on the doctor,
and, dragging him to his feet, began to shake him as a terrier does a
rat, at the same time belabouring him with every insulting epithet he
could remember, including, of course, "Son of a Fairy."

As for Ranulph, he began to whimper, and complain that his father had
spoiled everything, for the doctor had been making him well.

The din caused terrified servants to come battering at the door,
and Dame Marigold came hurrying in by the garden window, and, pink
with shame, she began to drag at Master Nathaniel's coat, almost
hysterically imploring him to come to his senses.

But it was only to exhaustion that he finally yielded, and relaxed
his hold on his victim, who was purple in the face and gasping for
breath--so severe had been the shaking.

Dame Marigold cast a look of unutterable disgust at her panting,
triumphant husband, and overwhelmed the little doctor with apologies
and offers of restoratives. He sank down on a chair, unable for a few
seconds to get his breath, while Master Nathaniel stood glaring at
him, and poor Ranulph lay whimpering on the couch with a white scared
face. Then the victim of Master Nathaniel's fury got to his feet, gave
himself a little shake, took out his handkerchief and mopped his
forehead, and with a little chuckle and in a voice in which there was
no trace of resentment, remarked, "Well, a good shaking is a fine thing
for settling the humours. Your Worship has turned doctor! Thank you ...
thank you kindly for your physic."

But Master Nathaniel said in a stern voice, "What were you doing to my
son?"

"What was I doing to him? Why, I was giving him medicine. Songs were
medicines long before herbs."

"He was making me well," moaned Ranulph.

"What was that song?" demanded Master Nathaniel, in the same stern
voice.

"A very old song. Nurses sing it to children. You must have known it
all your life. What's it called again? You know it, Dame Marigold,
don't you? 'Columbine'--yes, that's it. 'Columbine.'"

The trees in the garden twinkled and murmured. The birds were
clamorous. From the distance came the chimes of the Guildhall clock,
and the parlour smelt of spring-flowers and pot-pourri.

Something seemed to relax in Master Nathaniel. He passed his hand over
his forehead, gave an impatient little shrug, and, laughing awkwardly,
said, "I ... I really don't quite know what took me. I've been anxious
about the boy, and I suppose it had upset me a little. I can only beg
your pardon, Leer."

"No need to apologize ... no need at all. No doctor worth his salt
takes offence with ... sick men," and the look he shot at Master
Nathaniel was both bright and strange.

Again Master Nathaniel frowned, and very stiffly he murmured "Thank
you."

"Well," went on the doctor in a matter-of-fact voice, "I should like to
have a little private talk with you about this young gentleman. May I?"

"Of course, of course, Dr. Leer," cried Dame Marigold hastily, for she
saw that her husband was hesitating. "He will be delighted, I am sure.
Though I think you're a very brave man to trust yourself to such a
monster. Nat, take Dr. Leer into the pipe-room."

And Master Nathaniel did so.

Once there the doctor's first words made him so happy as instantly to
drive away all traces of his recent fright and to make him even forget
to be ashamed of his abominable behaviour.

What the doctor said was, "Cheer up, your Worship! I don't for a moment
believe that boy of yours has eaten--what one mustn't mention."

"What? What?" cried Master Nathaniel joyfully. "By the Golden Apples of
the West! It's been a storm in a tea-cup then? The little rascal, what
a fright he gave us!"

Of course, he had known all the time that it could not be true! Facts
could never be as stubborn as that, and as cruel.

And this incorrigible optimist about facts was the same man who walked
in daily terror of the unknown. But perhaps the one state of mind was
the outcome of the other.

Then, as he remembered the poignancy of the scene between himself and
Ranulph last night and, as well, the convincingness of Ranulph's story,
his heart once more grew heavy.

"But ... but," he faltered, "what was the good of this cock and bull
story, then? What purpose did it serve? There's no doubt the boy's ill
in both mind and body, and why, in the name of the Milky Way, should
he go to the trouble of inventing a story about Willy Wisp's giving
him a taste of that damned stuff?" and he looked at Endymion Leer
appealingly, as much as to say, "Here are the facts. I give them to
you. Be merciful and give them a less ugly shape."

This Endymion Leer proceeded to do.

"How do we know it was ... 'that damned stuff'?" he asked. "We have
only Willy Wisp's word for it, and from what I know of that gentleman,
his word is about as reliable as ... as the wind in a frolic. All
Lud knows of his practical jokes ... he'd say anything to give one a
fright. No, no, believe me, he was just playing off one of his pranks
on Master Ranulph. I've had some experience in the real thing--I've
an extensive practice, you know, down at the wharf--and your son's
symptoms aren't the same. No, no, your son is no more likely to have
eaten fairy fruit--than you are."

Master Nathaniel smiled, and stretched his arms in an ecstasy of
relief. "Thank you, Leer, thank you," he said huskily. "The whole thing
was appalling that really I believe it almost turned my head. And
you are a very kind fellow not to bear me a grudge for my monstrous
mishandling of you in the parlour just now."

For the moment Master Nathaniel felt as if he really loved the queer,
sharp-tongued, little upstart.

"And now," he went on gleefully, "to show me that it is really
forgotten and forgiven, we must pledge each other in some wild-thyme
gin ... my cellar is rather noted for it, you know," and from a corner
cupboard he brought out two glasses and a decanter of the fragrant
green cordial, left over from the supper-party of the previous night.

For a few minutes they sat sipping in silent contentment.

Then Endymion Leer, as if speaking to himself, said dreamily, "Yes,
this is perhaps the solution. Why should we look for any other cure
when we have the wild-thyme distilled by our ancestors? Wild time? No,
time isn't wild ... time-gin, sloe-gin. It is very soothing."

Master Nathaniel grunted. He understood perfectly what Endymion Leer
meant, but he did not choose to show that he did. Any remark verging on
the poetical or philosophical always embarrassed him. Fortunately, such
remarks were rare in Lud-in-the-Mist.

So he put down his glass and said briskly, "Now then, Leer, let's go to
business. You've removed an enormous load from my mind, but, all the
same, the boy's not himself. What's the matter with him?"

Endymion Leer gave an odd little smile. And then he said, slowly and
deliberately, "Master Nathaniel, what is the matter with you?"

Master Nathaniel started violently.

"The matter with me?" he said coldly. "I have not asked you in to
consult you about my own health. We will, if you please, keep to that
of my son."

But he rather spoiled the dignified effect his words might have had by
gobbling like a turkey cock, and muttering under his breath, "Damn the
fellow and his impudence!" Endymion Leer chuckled.

"Well, I may have been mistaken," he said, "but I have sometimes had
the impression that our Worship the Mayor was, well, a whimsical
fellow, given to queer fancies. Do you know my name for your house? I
call it the Mayor's Nest. The Mayor's Nest!"

And he flung back his head and laughed heartily at his own joke, while
Master Nathaniel glared at him, speechless with rage.

"Now, your Worship," he went on in a more serious voice. "If I have
been indiscreet you must forgive me ... as I forgave you in the
parlour. You see, a doctor is obliged to keep his eyes open ... it
is not from what his patients tell him that he prescribes for them,
but from what he notices himself. To a doctor everything is a
symptom ... the way a man lights his pipe even. For instance, I once
had the honour of having your Worship as my partner at a game of cards.
You've forgotten probably--it was years ago at the Pyepowders. We lost
that game. Why? Because each time that you held the most valuable
card in the pack--the Lyre of Bones--you discarded it as if it had
burnt your fingers. Things like that set a doctor wondering, Master
Nathaniel. You are a man who is frightened about something."

Master Nathaniel slowly turned crimson. Now that the doctor mentioned
it, he remembered quite well that at one time he objected to holding
the Lyre of Bones. Its name caused him to connect it with the Note.
As we have seen, he was apt to regard innocent things as taboo. But to
think that somebody should have noticed it!

"This is a necessary preface to what I have got to say with regard to
your son," went on Endymion Leer. "You see, I want to make it clear
that, though one has never come within a mile of fairy fruit, one can
have all the symptoms of being an habitual consumer of it. Wait! Wait!
Hear me out!"

For Master Nathaniel, with a smothered exclamation, had sprung from his
chair.

"I am not saying that you have all these symptoms ... far from it. But
you know that there are spurious imitations of many diseases of the
body--conditions that imitate exactly all the symptoms of the disease,
and the doctors themselves are often taken in by them. You wish me
to confine my remarks to your son ... well, I consider that he is
suffering from a spurious surfeit of fairy fruit."

Though still angry, Master Nathaniel was feeling wonderfully relieved.
This explanation of his own condition that robbed it of all mystery
and, somehow, made it rational, seemed almost as good as a cure. So
he let the doctor go on with his disquisition without any further
interruption except the purely rhetorical ones of an occasional
protesting grunt.

"Now, I have studied somewhat closely the effects of fairy fruit,"
the doctor was saying. "These effects we regard as a malady. But, in
reality, they are more like a melody--a tune that one can't get out of
one's head," and he shot a very sly little look at Master Nathaniel,
out of his bright bird-like eyes.

"Yes," he went on in a thoughtful voice, "its effects, I think, can
best be described as a changing of the inner rhythm by which we live.
Have you ever noticed a little child of three or four walking hand in
hand with its father through the streets? It is almost as if the two
were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they
hold each other's hand, they might be walking on different planets ...
each seeing and hearing entirely different things. And while the father
marches steadily on towards some predetermined goal, the child pulls
against his hand, laughs without cause, makes little bird-like swoops
at invisible objects. Now, anyone who has tasted fairy fruit (your
Worship will excuse my calling a spade a spade in this way, but in my
profession one can't be mealy-mouthed)--anyone, then, who has tasted
fairy fruit walks through life beside other people to a different tune
from theirs ... just like the little child beside its father. But one
can be born to a different tune ... and that, I believe, is the case
with Master Ranulph. Now, if he is ever to become a useful citizen,
though he need not lose his own tune, he must learn to walk in time to
other people's. He will not learn to do that here--at present. Master
Nathaniel, you are not good for your son."

Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and in a stifled voice he
said, "What then do you recommend?"

"I should recommend his being taught another tune," said the doctor
briskly. "A different one from any he has heard before ... but one
to which other people walk as well as he. You must have captains and
mates, Master Nathaniel, with little houses down at the seaport town.
Is there no honest fellow among them with a sensible wife with whom
the lad could lodge for a month or two? Or stay," he went on, without
giving Master Nathaniel time to answer, "life on a farm would do as
well--better, perhaps. Sowing and reaping, quiet days, smells and
noises that are like old tunes, healing nights ... slow-time gin! By
the Harvest of Souls, Master Nathaniel, I'd rather any day, be a farmer
than a merchant ... waving corn is better than the sea, and waggons
are better than ships, and freighted with sweeter and more wholesome
merchandise than all your silks and spices; for in their cargo are
peace and a quiet mind. Yes. Master Ranulph must spend some months on a
farm, and I know the very place for him."

Master Nathaniel was more moved than he cared to show by the doctor's
words. They were like the cry of the cock, without its melancholy. But
he tried to make his voice dry and matter of fact, as he asked where
this marvellous farm might be.

"Oh, it's to the west," the doctor answered vaguely. "It belongs to
an old acquaintance of mine--the widow Gibberty. She's a fine, fresh,
bustling woman and knows everything a woman ought to know, and her
granddaughter, Hazel, is a nice, sensible, hard-working girl. I'm
sure...."

"Gibberty, did you say?" interrupted Master Nathaniel. He seemed to
have heard the name before.

"Yes. You may remember having heard her name in the law-courts--it
isn't a common one. She had a case many years ago. I think it was a
thieving labourer her late husband had thrashed and dismissed who sued
her for damages."

"And where exactly is this farm?"

"Well, it's about sixty miles away from Lud, just out of a village
called Swan-on-the-Dapple."

"Swan-on-the-Dapple? Then it's quite close to the Elfin Marches!" cried
Master Nathaniel indignantly.

"About ten miles away," replied Endymion Leer imperturbably. "But
what of that? Ten miles on a busy self-supporting farm is as great a
distance as a hundred would be at Lud. Still, under the circumstances,
I can understand your fighting shy of the west. I must think of some
other plan."

"I should think so indeed!" growled Master Nathaniel.

"However," continued the doctor, "you have really nothing to fear
from that quarter. He would, in reality, be much further moved from
temptation there than here. The smugglers, whoever they are, run great
risks to get the fruit into Lud, and they're not going to waste it on
rustics and farmhands."

"All the same," said Master Nathaniel doggedly, "I'm not going to have
him going so damnably near to ... a certain place."

"The place that does not exist in the eyes of the law, eh?" said
Endymion Leer with a smile.

Then he leaned forward in his chair, and gazed steadily at Master
Nathaniel. This time, his eyes were kind as well as piercing. "Master
Nathaniel, I'd like to reason with you a little," he said. "Reason I
know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent.
But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief."

He sat silent for a few seconds, as if choosing in advance the words
he meant to use. Then he began, "We have the misfortune of living in
a country that marches with the unknown; and that is apt to make the
fancy sick. Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless,
they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world."

He paused for a second to chuckle over his own pun, and then went on,
"But, for once, let us look things straight in the face, and call them
by their proper names. Fairyland, for instance ... no one has been
there within the memory of man. For generations it has been a forbidden
land. In consequence, curiosity, ignorance, and unbridled fancy have
put their heads together and concocted a country of golden trees
hanging with pearls and rubies, the inhabitants of which are immortal
and terrible through unearthly gifts--and so on. But--and in this I am
in no way subscribing to a certain antiquary of ill odour--there is
not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does
not become fairy. Think of the Dapple, or the Dawl, when they roll
the sunset towards the east. Think of an autumn wood, or a hawthorn
in May. A hawthorn in May--there's a miracle for you! Who would ever
have dreamed that that gnarled stumpy old tree had the power to do
that? Well, all these things are familiar sights, but what should we
think if never having seen them we read a description of them, or saw
them for the first time? A golden river! Flaming trees! Trees that
suddenly break into flower! For all we know, it may be Dorimare that is
Fairyland to the people across the Debatable Hills."

Master Nathaniel was drinking in every word as if it was nectar. A
sense of safety was tingling in his veins like a generous wine ...
mounting to his head, even, a little bit, so unused was he to that
particular intoxicant.

Endymion Leer eyed him, with a little smile. "And now," he said,
"perhaps your Worship will let me talk a little of your own case. The
malady you suffer from should, I think, be called 'life-sickness.'
You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you
brain-sick. There, beneath you, all round you, there surges and swells,
and ebbs and flows, that great, ungovernable, ruthless element that we
call life. And its motion gets into your blood, turns your head dizzy.
Get your sea legs, Master Nathaniel! By which I do not mean you must
cease feeling the motion ... go on feeling it, but learn to like it; or
if not to like it, at any rate to bear it with firm legs and a steady
head."

There were tears in Master Nathaniel's eyes and he smiled a little
sheepishly. At that moment his feet were certainly on terra firma; and
so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent
temper of our soul that for the moment he felt that he would never feel
"life-sickness" again.

"Thank you, Leer, thank you," he murmured. "I'd do a good deal for you,
in return for what you've just said."

"Very well, then," said the doctor briskly, "give me the pleasure of
curing your son. It's the greatest pleasure I have in life, curing
people. Let me arrange for him to go to this farm."

Master Nathaniel, in his present mood, was incapable of gainsaying
him. So it was arranged that Ranulph should shortly leave for
Swan-on-the-Dapple.

It was with a curious solemnity that, just before he took his leave,
Endymion Leer said, "Master Nathaniel, there is one thing I want you to
bear in mind--I have never in my life made a mistake in a prescription."

As Endymion Leer trotted away from the Chanticleers he chuckled to
himself and softly rubbed his hands. "I can't help being a physician
and giving balm," he muttered. "But it was monstrous good policy as
well. He would never have allowed the boy to go, otherwise."

Then he started, and stood stock-still, listening. From far away there
came a ghostly sound. It might have been the cry of a very distant
cock, or else it might have been the sound of faint, mocking laughter.




                               CHAPTER V

               RANULPH GOES TO THE WIDOW GIBBERTY'S FARM


But Endymion Leer was right. Reason is only a drug, and its effects
cannot be permanent. Master Nathaniel was soon suffering from
life-sickness as much as ever.

For one thing, there was no denying that in the voice of Endymion Leer
singing to Ranulph, he had once again heard the Note; and the fact
tormented him, reason with himself as he might.

But it was not sufficient to make him distrust Endymion Leer--one might
hear the Note, he was convinced, in the voices of the most innocent;
just as the mocking cry of the cuckoo can rise from the nest of the
lark or the hedge sparrow. But he was certainly not going to let him
take Ranulph away to that western farm.

And yet the boy was longing, nay craving to go, for Endymion Leer, when
he had been left alone with him in the parlour that morning, had fired
his imagination with its delights.

When Master Nathaniel questioned him as to what other things Endymion
Leer had talked about, he said that he had asked him a great many
questions about the stranger in green he had seen dancing, and had made
him repeat to him several times what exactly he had said to him.

"Then," said Ranulph, "he said he would sing me well and happy. And I
was just beginning to feel so wonderful, when you came bursting in,
father."

"I'm sorry, my boy," said Master Nathaniel. "But why did you first of
all scream so and beg not to be left alone with him?"

Ranulph wriggled and hung his head. "I suppose it was like the cheese,"
he said sheepishly. "But, father, I want to go to that farm. Please let
me go."

For several weeks Master Nathaniel steadily refused his consent. He
kept the boy with him as much as his business and his official duties
would permit, trying to find for him occupations and amusements that
would teach him a "different tune." For Endymion Leer's words, in spite
of their having had so little effect on his spiritual condition, had
genuinely and permanently impressed him. However, he could not but see
that Ranulph was daily wilting and that his talk was steadily becoming
more fantastic; and he began to fear that his own objection to letting
him go to the farm sprang merely from a selfish desire to keep him with
him.

Hempie, oddly enough, was in favour of his going. The old woman's
attitude to the whole affair was a curious one. Nothing would make her
believe that it was not fairy fruit that Willy Wisp had given him. She
said she had suspected it from the first, but to have mentioned it
would have done no good to anyone.

"If it wasn't that what was it then?" she would ask scornfully. "For
what is Willy Wisp himself? He left his place--and his wages not paid,
too, during the twelve nights of Yule-tide. And when dog or servant
leaves, sudden like, at that time, we all know what to think."

"And what are we to think, Hempie?" enquired Master Nathaniel.

At first the old woman would only shake her head and look mysterious.
But finally she told him that it was believed in the country districts
that, should there be a fairy among the servants, he was bound to
return to his own land on one of the twelve nights after the winter
solstice; and should there be among the dogs one that belonged to Duke
Aubrey's pack, during these nights he would howl and howl, till he was
let out of his kennel, and then vanish into the darkness and never be
seen again.

Master Nathaniel grunted with impatience.

"Well, it was you dragged the words from my lips, and though you are
the Mayor and the Lord High Seneschal, you can't come lording it over
my thoughts ... I've a right to them!" cried Hempie, indignantly.

"My good Hempie, if you really believe the boy has eaten ... a certain
thing, all I can say is you seem very cheerful about it," growled
Master Nathaniel.

"And what good would it do my pulling a long face and looking like one
of the old statues in the fields of Grammary I should like to know?"
flashed back Hempie. And then she added, with a meaning nod, "Besides,
whatever happens, no harm can ever come to a Chanticleer. While Lud
stands the Chanticleers will thrive. So come rough, come smooth, you
won't find me worrying. But if I was you, Master Nat, I'd give the boy
his way. There's nothing like his own way for a sick person--be he
child or grown man. His own way to a sick man is what grass is to a
sick dog."

Hempie's opinion influenced Master Nathaniel more than he would like to
admit; but it was a talk he had with Mumchance, the captain of the Lud
Yeomanry, that finally induced him to let Ranulph have his way.

The Yeomanry combined the duties of a garrison with those of a police
corps, and Master Nathaniel had charged their captain to try and find
the whereabouts of Willy Wisp.

It turned out that the rogue was quite familiar to the Yeomanry, and
Mumchance confirmed what Endymion Leer had said about his having turned
the town upside down with his pranks during the few months he had
been in Master Nathaniel's service. But since his disappearance at
Yule-tide, nothing had been seen or heard of him in Lud-in-the-Mist,
and Mumchance could find no traces of him.

Master Nathaniel fumed and grumbled a little at the inefficiency of
the Yeomanry; but, at the bottom of his heart he was relieved. He had
a lurking fear that Hempie was right and Endymion Leer was wrong,
and that it had really been fairy fruit after all that Ranulph had
eaten. But it is best to let sleeping facts lie. And he feared that if
confronted with Willy Wisp the facts might wake up and begin to bite.
But what was this that Mumchance was telling him?

It would seem that during the past months there had been a marked
increase in the consumption of fairy fruit--in the low quarters of
town, of course.

"It's got to be stopped, Mumchance, d'ye hear?" cried Master Nathaniel
hotly. "And what's more, the smugglers must be caught and clapped into
gaol, every mother's son of them. This has gone on too long."

"Yes, your Worship," said Mumchance stolidly, "it went on in the
time of my predecessor, if your Worship will pardon the expression"
(Mumchance was very fond of using long words, but he had a feeling that
it was presumption to use them before his betters), "and in the days
of his predecessor ... and way back. And it's no good trying to be
smarter than our forebears. I sometimes think we might as well try and
catch the Dapple and clap it into prison as them smugglers. But these
are sad times, your Worship, sad times--the 'prentices wanting to be
masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every
dirty little urchin thinking he can give impudence to his betters! You
see, your Worship, I sees and hears a good deal in my way of business,
if you'll pardon the expression ... but the things one's eyes and ears
tells one, they ain't in words, so to speak, and it's not easy to tell
other folks what they say ... no more than the geese can tell you how
they know it's going to rain," and he laughed apologetically. "But I
shouldn't be surprised--no, I shouldn't, if there wasn't something
brewing."

"By the Sun, Moon, and Stars, Mumchance, don't speak in riddles!" cried
Master Nathaniel irritably. "What d'ye mean?"

Mumchance shifted uneasily from one foot to the other: "Well, your
Worship," he began, "it's this way. Folks are beginning to take a
wonderful interest in Duke Aubrey again. Why, all the girls are wearing
bits of tawdry jewelry with his picture, and bits of imitation ivy and
squills stuck in their bonnets, and there ain't a poor street in this
town where all the cockatoos that the sailors bring don't squawk at you
from their cages that the Duke will come to his own again ... or some
such rubbish, and...."

"My good Mumchance!" cried Master Nathaniel, impatiently, "Duke Aubrey
was a rascally sovereign who died more than two hundred years ago. You
don't believe he's going to come to life again, do you?"

"I don't say that he will, your Worship," answered Mumchance evasively.
"But all I know is that when Lud begins talking about him, it generally
bodes trouble. I remember how old Tripsand, he who was Captain of the
Yeomanry when I was a little lad, used always to say that there was a
deal of that sort of talk before the great drought."

"Fiddlesticks!" cried Master Nathaniel.

Mumchance's theories about Duke Aubrey he immediately dismissed from
his mind. But he was very much disturbed by what he had said about
fairy fruit, and began to think that Endymion Leer had been right
in maintaining that Ranulph would be further from temptation at
Swan-on-the-Dapple than in Lud.

He had another interview with Leer, and the long and short of it was
that it was decided that as soon as Dame Marigold and Hempie could get
Ranulph ready he should set out for the widow Gibberty's farm. Endymion
Leer said that he wanted to look for herbs in the neighbourhood, and
would be very willing to escort him there.

Master Nathaniel, of course, would much have preferred to have gone
with him himself; but it was against the law for the Mayor to leave
Lud, except on circuit. In his stead, he decided to send Luke Hempen,
old Hempie's grand-nephew. He was a lad of about twenty, who worked in
the garden and had always been the faithful slave of Ranulph.

On a beautiful sunny morning, about a week later, Endymion Leer came
riding up to the Chanticleers' to fetch Ranulph, who was impatiently
awaiting him, booted and spurred, and looking more like his old self
than he had done for months.

Before Ranulph mounted, Master Nathaniel, blinking away a tear or two,
kissed him on the forehead and whispered, "The black rooks will fly
away, my son, and you'll come back as brown as a berry, and as merry as
a grig. And if you want me, just send a word by Luke, and I'll be with
you as fast as horses can gallop--law or no law." And from her latticed
window at the top of the house appeared the head and shoulders of old
Hempie in her nightcap, shaking her fist, and crying, "Now then, young
Luke, if you don't take care of my boy--you'll catch it!"

Many a curious glance was cast at the little cavalcade as they trotted
down the cobbled streets. Miss Lettice and Miss Rosie Prim, the two
buxom daughters of the leading watchmaker who were returning from their
marketing considered that Ranulph looked sweetly pretty on horseback.
"Though," added Miss Rosie, "they do say he's a bit ... queer, and it
is a pity, I must say, that he's got the Mayor's ginger hair."

"Well, Rosie," retorted Miss Lettice, "at least he doesn't cover it up
with a black wig, like a certain apprentice I know!"

And Rosie laughed, and tossed her head.

A great many women, as they watched them pass, called down blessings
on the head of Endymion Leer; adding that it was a pity that he was
not Mayor and High Seneschal. And several rough-looking men scowled
ominously at Ranulph. But Mother Tibbs, the half-crazy old washerwoman,
who, in spite of her forty summers danced more lightly than any maiden,
and was, in consequence, in great request as a partner at those tavern
dances that played so great a part in the life of the masses in
Lud-in-the-Mist--crazy, disreputable, Mother Tibbs, with her strangely
noble innocent face, tossed him a nosegay and cried in her sing-song
penetrating voice, "Cockadoodle doo! Cockadoodle doo! The little
master's bound for the land where the eggs are all gold!"

But no one ever paid any attention to what Mother Tibbs might say.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing worth mentioning occurred during their journey to Swan; except
the endless pleasant things of the country in summer. There were beech
spinneys, wading up steep banks through their own dead leaves; fields
all blurred with meadow-sweet and sorrel; brown old women screaming at
their goats; acacias in full flower, and willows blown by the wind into
white blossom.

From time to time, terrestrial comets--the blue flash of a kingfisher,
the red whisk of a fox--would furrow and thrill the surface of the
earth with beauty.

And in the distance, here and there, standing motionless and in
complete silence by the flowing Dapple, were red-roofed villages--the
least vain of all fair things, for they never looked at their own
reflection in the water, but gazed unblinkingly at the horizon.

And there were ruined castles covered with ivy--the badge of the old
order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming
to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of
bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides
violets. And the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so
firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would
have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual
process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really
green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago
it had been green?

And the nymph whom all travellers pursue and none has ever yet
caught--the white high-road, glimmered and beckoned to them through the
dusk.

All these things, however, were familiar sights to any Ludite. But
on the third day (for Ranulph's sake they were taking the journey in
easy stages) things began to look different--especially the trees;
for instead of acacias, beeches, and willows--familiar living things
for ever murmuring their secret to themselves--there were pines and
liege-oaks and olives. Inanimate works of art they seemed at first and
Ranulph exclaimed, "Oh, look at the funny trees! They are like the old
statues of dead people in the Fields of Grammary!"

But, as well, they were like an old written tragedy. For if human, or
superhuman, experience, and the tragic clash of personality can be
expressed by plastic shapes, then one might half believe that these
tortured trees had been bent by the wind into the spiritual shape of
some old drama.

Pines and olives, however, cannot grow far away from the sea. And
surely the sea lay to the east of Lud-in-the-Mist, and with each mile
they were getting further away from it? It was the sea beyond the Hills
of the Elfin Marches--the invisible sea of Fairyland--that caused these
pines and olives to flourish.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was late in the afternoon when they reached the village of
Swan-on-the-Dapple--a score of houses straggling round a triangle of
unreclaimed common, on which grew olives and stunted fruit trees, and
which was used as the village rubbish heap. In the distance were the
low, pine-covered undulations of the Debatable Hills--a fine unchanging
background for the changing colours of the seasons. Indeed, they lent a
dignity and significance to everything that grew, lay, or was enacted,
against them; so that the little children in their blue smocks who were
playing among the rubbish on the dingy common as our cavalcade rode
past, seemed to be performing against the background of Destiny some
tremendous action, similar to the one expressed by the shapes of the
pines and olives.

When they had left the village, they took a cart-track that branched
off from the high-road to the right. It led into a valley, the gently
sloping sides of which were covered with vineyards and corn-fields.
Sometimes their path led through a little wood of liege-oaks with
trunks, where the bark had been stripped, showing as red as blood, and
everywhere there were short, wiry, aromatic shrubs, beset by myriads of
bees.

Every minute the hills seemed to be drawing nearer, and the pines with
which they were covered began to stand out from the carpet of heath in
a sort of coagulated relief, so that they looked like a thick green
scum of watercress on a stagnant purple pond.

At last they reached the farm--a fine old manor-house, standing among
a cluster of red-roofed barns, and supported, heraldically, on either
side by two magnificent plane-trees, with dappled trunks of tremendous
girth.

They were greeted by the barking of five or six dogs, and this brought
the widow hurrying out accompanied by a pretty girl of about seventeen
whom she introduced as her granddaughter Hazel.

Though she must have been at least sixty by then, the widow Gibberty
was still a strikingly handsome woman--tall, imposing-looking, and with
hair that must once have had as many shades of red and brown as a bed
of wallflowers smouldering in the sun.

Then a couple of men came up and led away the horses, and the
travellers were taken up to their rooms.

As befitted the son of the High Seneschal, the one given to Ranulph was
evidently the best. It was large and beautifully proportioned, and in
spite of its homely chintzes and the plain furniture of a farm-house,
in spite even of the dried rushes laid on the floor instead of a
carpet, it bore unmistakable traces of the ancient magnificence when
the house had belonged to nobles instead of farmers.

For instance, the ceiling was a fine specimen of the flat enamelled
ceilings that belonged to the Duke Aubrey period in domestic
architecture. There was just such a ceiling in Dame Marigold's bedroom
in Lud. She had stared up at it when in travail with Ranulph--just
as all the mothers of the Chanticleers had done in the same
circumstances--and its colours and pattern had become inextricably
confused with her pain and delirium.

Endymion Leer was put next to Ranulph, and Luke was given a large
pleasant room in the attic.

Ranulph was not in the least tired by his long ride, he said. His
cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright, and when the widow had left him
alone with Luke, he gave two or three skips of glee, and cried, "I do
love this place, Luke." At six o'clock a loud bell was rung outside
the house, presumably to summon the labourers to supper; and, as the
widow had told them it would be in the kitchen, Ranulph and Luke, both
feeling very hungry, went hurrying down.

It was an enormous kitchen, running the whole length of the house;
in the olden days it had been the banqueting hall. It was solidly
stone-vaulted, and the great chimney place was also of stone, and
decorated in high relief with the skulls and flowers and arabesques
of leaves ubiquitous in the art of Dorimare. It was flanked by giant
fire-dogs of copper. The floor was tiled with a mosaic of brown and red
and grey-blue flag-stones.

Down the centre of the room ran a long narrow table laid with pewter
plates and mugs, for the labourers and maid servants who came flocking
in, their faces shining from recent soap and scrubbing, and stood about
in groups at the lower end of the room, grinning and bashful from the
presence of company. According to the good old yeoman custom they had
their meals with their masters.

It was a most delicious supper--a great ham with the aromatic flavour
of wood-smoke, eaten with pickled cowslips; brawn; a red-deer pie;
and, in honour of the distinguished guests, a fat roast swan. The
wine was from the widow's own grapes and was flavoured with honey and
blackberries.

Most of the talking was done by the widow and Endymion Leer. He was
asking her if many trout had been caught that summer in the Dapple, and
what were their markings. And she told him that a salmon had recently
been landed weighing ten pounds.

Ranulph, who had been munching away in silence, suddenly looked up at
them, with that little smile of his that people always found a trifle
disconcerting.

"That isn't real talk," he said. "That isn't the way you really talk to
each other. That's only pretence talk." The widow looked very surprised
and very much annoyed. But Endymion Leer laughed heartily and asked him
what he meant by "real talk;" Ranulph, however, would not be drawn.

But Luke Hempen, in a dim inarticulate way, understood what he meant.
The conversation between the widow and the doctor had not rung true;
it was almost as if their words had a double meaning known only to
themselves.

A few minutes later, a wizened old man with very bright eyes came into
the room and sat down at the lower end of the table. And then Ranulph
really did give everyone a fright, for he stopped eating, and for a few
seconds stared at him in silence. Then he gave a piercing scream.

All eyes turned toward him in amazement. But he sat as if petrified,
his eyes round and staring, pointing at the old man. "Come, come, young
fellow!" cried Endymion Leer, sharply; "what's the meaning of this?"

"What ails you, little master?" cried the widow.

But he continued pointing in silence at the old man, who was leering
and smirking and ogling, in evident delight at being the centre of
attention.

"He's scared by Portunus, the weaver," tittered the maids.

And the words "Portunus," "old Portunus the weaver," were bandied from
mouth to mouth down the two sides of the table.

"Yes, Portunus, the weaver," cried the widow, in a loud voice, a hint
of menace in her eye. "And who, I should like to know, does not love
Portunus, the weaver?"

The maids hung their heads, the men sniggered deprecatingly.

"Well?" challenged the widow.

Silence.

"And who," she continued indignantly, "is the handiest most obliging
fellow to be found within twenty miles?"

She glared down the table, and then repeated her question.

As if compelled by her eye, the company murmured "Portunus."

"And if the cheeses won't curdle, or the butter won't come, or the wine
in the vats won't get a good head, who comes to the rescue?"

"Portunus," murmured the company.

"And who is always ready to lend a helping hand to the maids--to break
or bolt hemp, to dress flax, or to spin? And when their work is over to
play them tunes on his fiddle?"

"Portunus," murmured the company.

Suddenly Hazel raised her eyes from her plate and they were sparkling
with defiance and anger.

"And who," she cried shrilly, "sits by the fire when he thinks no one
is watching him roasting little live frogs and eating them? Portunus."

With each word her voice rose higher, like a soaring bird. But at
the last word it was as if the bird when it had reached the ceiling
suddenly fell down dead. And Luke saw her flinch under the cold
indignant stare of the widow.

And he had noticed something else as well.

It was the custom in Dorimare, in the houses of the yeomanry and the
peasantry, to hang a bunch of dried fennel over the door of every room;
for fennel was supposed to have the power of keeping the Fairies. And
when Ranulph had given his eerie scream, Luke had, as instinctively as
in similar circumstances a mediaeval papist would have made the sign of
the Cross, glanced towards the door to catch a reassuring glimpse of
the familiar herb.

But there was no fennel hanging over the door of the widow Gibberty.

The men grinned, the maids tittered at Hazel's outburst; and then there
was an awkward silence.

In the meantime, Ranulph seemed to have recovered from his fright and
was going on stolidly with his supper, while the widow was saying to
him reassuringly, "Mark my words, little master, you'll get to love
Portunus as much as we all do. Trust Portunus for knowing where the
trout rise and where all the birds' nests are to be found ... eh,
Portunus?"

And Portunus chuckled with delight and his bright eyes twinkled.

"Why," the widow continued, "I have known him these twenty years. He's
the weaver in these parts, and goes the round from farm to farm, and
the room with the loom is always called 'Portunus' Parlour.' And there
isn't a wedding or a merry-making within twenty miles where he doesn't
play the fiddle."

Luke, whose perceptions owing to the fright he had just had were
unusually alert, noticed that Endymion Leer was very silent, and that
his face as he watched Ranulph was puzzled and a little anxious.

When supper was over the maids and labourers vanished, and so did
Portunus; but the three guests sat on, listening to the pleasant whirr
of the widow's and Hazel's spinning-wheels, saying but little, for the
long day in the open air had made all three of them sleepy.

At eight o'clock a little scrabbling noise was heard at the door.
"That's the children," said Hazel, and she went and opened it, upon
which three or four little boys came bashfully in from the dusk.

"Good evening, my lads," said the widow, genially. "Come for your bread
and cheese ... eh?"

The children grinned and hung their heads, abashed by the sight of
three strangers.

"The little lads of the village, Master Chanticleer, take it in turn to
watch our cattle all night," said the widow to Ranulph. "We keep them
some miles away along the valley where there is good pasturage, and the
herdsman likes to come back to his own home at night."

"And these little boys are going to be out all night?" asked Ranulph in
an awed voice.

"That they are! And a fine time they'll have of it too. They build
themselves little huts out of branches and light fires in them. Oh,
they enjoy themselves."

The children grinned from ear to ear; and when Hazel had provided each
of them with some bread and cheese they scuttled off into the gathering
dusk.

"I'd like to go some night, too," said Ranulph.

The widow was beginning to expostulate against the idea of young Master
Chanticleer's spending the night out of doors with cows and village
children, when Endymion Leer said, decidedly, "That's all nonsense! I
don't want my patient coddled ... eh! Ranulph? I see no reason why he
shouldn't go some night if it amuses him. But wait till the nights are
warmer."

He paused just a second, and added, "towards Midsummer, let us say."

They sat on a little longer; saying but little, yawning a great deal.
And then the widow suggested that they should all go off to bed.

There were home-made tallow candles provided for everyone, except
Ranulph, whose social importance was emphasised by a wax one from Lud.

Endymion Leer lit it for him, and then held it at arm's length and
contemplated its flame, his head on one side, eyes twinkling.

"Thrice blessed little herb!" he began in a whimsical voice. "Herb o'
grease, with thy waxen stem and blossom of flame! Thou art more potent
against spells and terrors and the invisible menace than fennel or
dittany or rue. Hail! antidote to the deadly nightshade! Blossoming in
the darkness, thy virtues are heartsease and quiet sleep. Sick people
bless thee, and women in travail, and people with haunted minds, and
all children."

"Don't be a buffoon, Leer," said the widow roughly; in quite a
different voice from the one of bluff courtesy in which she had
hitherto addressed him. To an acute observer it would have suggested
that they were in reality more intimate than they cared to show.

       *       *       *       *       *

For the first time in his life Luke Hempen had difficulty in getting
off to sleep.

His great-aunt had dinned into him for the past week, with many a
menacing shake of her old fist, that should anything happen to Master
Ranulph she would hold him, Luke, responsible, and even before leaving
Lud the honest, but by no means heroic, lad, had been in somewhat of a
panic; and the various odd little incidents that had taken place that
evening were not of a nature to reassure him.

Finally he could stand it no longer. So up he got, lit his candle, and
crept down the attic stairs and along the corridor to Ranulph's room.

Ranulph, too, was wide awake. He had not put out his candle, and was
lying staring up at the fantastic ceiling.

"What do you want, Luke?" he cried peevishly. "Why won't anyone ever
leave me alone?"

"I was just wondering if you were all right, sir," said Luke
apologetically.

"Of course I am. Why shouldn't I be?" and Ranulph gave an impatient
little plunge in his bed.

"Well, I was just wondering, you know."

Luke paused; and then said imploringly, "Please, Master Ranulph, be a
good chap and tell me what took you at supper time when that doitered
old weaver came in. You gave me quite a turn, screaming like that."

"Ah, Luke! Wouldn't you like to know!" teased Ranulph.

Finally he admitted that when he had been a small child he had
frequently seen Portunus in his dreams, "And that's rather frightening,
you know, Luke."

Luke, much relieved, admitted that he supposed it was. He himself was
not given to dreaming; nor did he take seriously the dreams of others.

Ranulph noticed his relief; and rather an impish expression stole into
his eyes.

"But there's something else, Luke," he said. "Old Portunus, you know,
is a dead man."

This time Luke was really alarmed. Was his charge going off his head?

"Get along with you, Master Ranulph!" he cried, in a voice that he
tried to make jocose.

"All right, Luke, you needn't believe it unless you like," said
Ranulph. "Good night, I'm off to sleep."

And he blew out his candle and turned his back on Luke, who, thus
dismissed, must needs return to his own bed, where he soon fell fast
asleep.




                              CHAPTER VI

                  THE WIND IN THE CRABAPPLE BLOSSOMS


About a week later, Mistress Hempen received the following letter from
Luke:

    Dear Auntie,--

    I trust this finds you as well as it leaves me. I'm remembering
    what you said, and trying to look after the little master, but this
    is a queer place and no mistake, and I'd liefer we were both safe
    back in Lud. Not that I've any complaint to make as to victuals and
    lodging, and I'm sure they treat Master Ranulph as if he was a
    king--wax candles and linen sheets and everything that he gets at
    home. And I must say I've not seen him looking so well, nor so
    happy for many a long day. But the widow woman she's a rum customer
    and no mistake, and wonderful fond of fishing, for a female. She
    and the doctor are out all night sometimes together after trout,
    but never a trout do we see on the table. And sometimes she looks
    so queerly at Master Ranulph that it fairly makes my flesh creep.
    And there's no love lost between her and her granddaughter, her
    step-granddaughter I should say, her who's called Miss Hazel, and
    they say as what by the old farmer's will the farm belongs to her
    and not to the widow. And she's a stuck-up young miss, very high
    and keeping herself to herself. But I'm glad she's in the house all
    the same, for she's well liked by all the folk on the farm and I'd
    take my oath that though she's high she's straight. And there's a
    daft old man that they call Portunus and it's more like having a
    tame magpie in the house than a human man, for he can't talk a
    word of sense, it's all scraps of rhyme, and he's always up to
    mischief. He's a weaver and as cracked as Mother Tibbs, though
    he do play the fiddle beautiful. And it's my belief the widow walks
    in fear of her life for that old man, though why she should beats
    me to know. For the old fellow's harmless enough, though a bit
    spiteful at times. He sometimes pinches the maids till their arms
    are as many colours as a mackerel's back. And he seems sweet on
    Miss Hazel though she can't abear him, though when I ask her about
    him she snaps my head off and tells me to mind my own business. And
    I'm afraid the folk on the farm must think me a bit high myself
    through me minding what you told me and keeping myself to myself.
    Because it's my belief if I'd been a bit more friendly at the
    beginning (such as it's my nature to be) I'd have found out a thing
    or two. And that cracked old weaver seems quite smitten by an old
    stone statue in the orchard. He's always cutting capers in front of
    it, and pulling faces at it, like a clown at the fair. But the
    widow's scared of him, as sure as my name's Luke Hempen. And Master
    Ranulph does talk so queer about him--things as I wouldn't demean
    myself to write to an old lady. And I'd be very glad, auntie, if
    you'd ask his Worship to send for us back, because I don't like
    this place, and that's a fact, and not so much as a sprig of fennel
    do they put above their doors.--And I am, Your dutiful
    grand-nephew,

                                                           LUKE HEMPEN.

Hempie read it through with many a frown and shake of her head,
and with an occasional snort of contempt; as, for instance, where
Luke intimated that the widow's linen sheets were as fine as the
Chanticleers'.

Then she sat for a few minutes in deep thought.

"No, no," she finally said to herself, "my boy's well and happy and
that's more than he was in Lud, these last few months. What must be
must be, and it's never any use worrying Master Nat."

So she did not show Master Nathaniel Luke Hempen's letter.

As for Master Nathaniel, he was enchanted by the accounts he received
from Endymion Leer of the improvement both in Ranulph's health and
state of mind. Ranulph himself too wrote little letters saying how
happy he was and how anxious to stay on at the farm. It was evident
that, to use the words of Endymion Leer, he was learning to live life
to a different tune.

And then Endymion Leer returned to Lud and confirmed what he had said
in his letters by his accounts of how well and happy Ranulph was in the
life of a farm.

The summer was simmering comfortably by, in its usual sleepy way, in
the streets and gardens of Lud-in-the-Mist. The wives of Senators and
burgesses were busy in still-room and kitchen making cordials and jams;
in the evening the streets were lively with chattering voices and the
sounds of music, and 'prentices danced with their masters' daughters
in the public square, or outside taverns, till the grey twilight began
to turn black. The Senators yawned their way through each other's
speeches, and made their own as short as possible that they might
hurry off to whip the Dapple for trout or play at bowls on the Guild
Hall's beautiful velvety green. And when one of their ships brought
in a particularly choice cargo of rare wine or exotic sweetmeats they
invited their friends to supper, and washed down the dainties with the
good old jokes.

Mumchance looked glum, and would sometimes frighten his wife by gloomy
forebodings; but he had learned that it was no use trying to arouse the
Mayor and the Senate.

Master Nathaniel was missing Ranulph very much; but as he continued to
get highly satisfactory reports of his health he felt that it would be
selfish not to let him stay on, at any rate till the summer was over.

Then the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in
yellow and red. And the days began to shrink under one's very eyes. And
Master Nathaniel's pleached alley was growing yellower and yellower,
and on the days when a thick white mist came rolling up from the Dapple
it would be the only object in his garden that was not blurred and
dimmed, and would look like a pair of gigantic golden compasses with
which a demiurge is measuring chaos.

It was then that things began to happen; moreover, they began at the
least likely place in the whole of Lud-in-the-Mist--Miss Primrose
Crabapple's Academy for young ladies.

Miss Primrose Crabapple had for some twenty years "finished" the
daughters of the leading citizens; teaching them to sing, to dance,
to play the spinet and the harp, to preserve and candy fruit, to wash
gauzes and lace, to bone chickens without cutting the back, to model
groups of still life in every imaginable plastic material, edible and
non-edible--wax, butter, sugar--and to embroider in at least a hundred
different stitches--preparing them, in fact, to be one day useful and
accomplished wives.

When Dame Marigold Chanticleer and her contemporaries had first been
pupils at the Academy, Miss Primrose had only been a young assistant
governess, very sentimental and affected, and full of nonsensical
ideas. But nonsensical ideas and great practical gifts are sometimes
found side by side, and sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the
slightest influence on action.

Anyhow, the ridiculous gushing assistant managed bit by bit to get the
whole direction of the establishment into her own hands, while the old
dame to whom the school belonged became as plastic to her will as were
butter, sugar or wax to her clever fingers; and when the old lady died
she left her the school.

It was an old rambling red-brick house with a large pleasant garden,
and stood a little back from the high-road, about half a mile beyond
the west gate of Lud-in-the-Mist.

The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of
romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its
walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached
alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to
them.

Do not for a moment imagine that they were sentimental about it. The
ladies of Lud were never sentimental. It was as an old comic song that
they remembered their school-days. Perhaps it is always with a touch
of wistfulness that we remember old comic songs. It was at any rate
as near as the ladies of Lud could get to the poetry of the past. And
whenever Dame Marigold Chanticleer and Dame Dreamsweet Vigil and the
rest of the old pupils of the Academy foregathered to eat syllabub and
marzipan and exchange new stitches for their samplers, they would be
sure sooner or later to start bandying memories about these funny old
days and the ridiculous doings of Miss Primrose Crabapple.

"Oh, do you remember," Dame Marigold would cry, "how she wanted to
start what she called a 'Mother's Day', when we were all to dress up
in white and green, and pretend to be lilies standing on our mothers'
graves?"

"Oh, yes!" Dame Dreamsweet would gurgle, "And mother was so angry when
she found out about it. 'How dare the ghoulish creature bury me alive
like this?' she used to say."

And then they would laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks.

Each generation had its own jokes and its own secrets; but they were
always on the same pattern; just as when one of the china cups got
broken, it was replaced by another exactly like it, with the same
painted border of squills and ivy.

There were squills and ivy all over the Academy, embroidered on the
curtains in each bedroom, and on all the cushions and screens, painted
in a frieze around the wall of the parlour, and even stamped on the
pats of butter. For one of Miss Primrose Crabapple's follies was a
romantic passion for Duke Aubrey--a passion similar to that cherished
by highchurch spinsters of the last century for the memory of Charles
I. Over her bed hung a little reproduction in water-colours of his
portrait in the Guildhall. And on the anniversary of his fall, which
was kept in Dorimare as a holiday, she always appeared in deep mourning.

She knew perfectly well that she was an object of ridicule to her
pupils and their mothers. But her manner to them was not a whit less
gushing in consequence; for she was much too practical to allow her
feelings to interfere with her bread and butter.

However, on the occasions when her temper got the better of her
prudence she would show them clearly her contempt for their pedigree,
sneering at them as commercial upstarts and interlopers. She seemed
to forget that she herself was only the daughter of a Lud grocer, and
at times to imagine that the Crabapples had belonged to the vanished
aristocracy.

She was grotesque, too, in appearance, with a round moon face, tiny
eyes, and an enormous mouth that was generally stretched into an
ingratiating smile. She always wore a green turban and gown cut in
the style of the days of Duke Aubrey. Sitting in her garden among her
pretty little pupils she was like a brightly-painted Aunt Sally, placed
there by a gardener with a taste for the baroque to frighten away the
birds from his cherries and greengages.

Though it was flowers that her pupils resembled more than
fruit--sweetpeas, perhaps, when fragrant, gay, and demure, in muslin
frocks cut to a pattern, but in various colours, and in little
poke-bonnets with white frills, they took their walk, two and two,
through the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist.

At any rate it was something sweet and fresh that they suggested, and
in the town they were always known as the "Crabapple Blossoms."

Recently they had been in a state of gleeful ecstasy. They had reason
to believe that Miss Primrose was being courted, and by no less a
person than Endymion Leer.

He was the school physician, and hence to them all a familiar figure.
But, until quite lately, Miss Primrose had been a frequent victim of
his relentless tongue, and many a time a little patient had been forced
to stuff the sheet into her mouth to stifle her laughter, so quaint and
pungent were the snubs he administered to their unfortunate schoolmarm.

But nearly every evening this summer his familiar cane and bottle-green
hat had been seen in the hall. And his visits they had learned from the
servants were not professional; unless it be part of a doctor's duties
to drop in of an evening to play a game of cribbage with his patients,
and sample their cakes and cowslip wine.

Moreover, never before had Miss Primrose appeared so frequently in new
gowns.

"Perhaps she's preparing her bridal chest!" tittered Prunella
Chanticleer. And the very idea sent them all into convulsions of mirth.

"But do you really think he'll marry her? How could he!" said
Penstemmon Fliperarde. "She's such an old fright, and such an old
goose, too. And they say he's so clever."

"Why, then they'll be the goose and the sage!" laughed Prunella.

"I expect he wants her savings," said Viola Vigil, with a wise little
nod.

"Or perhaps he wants to add her to his collection of antiques,"
tittered Ambrosine Pyepowders.

"Or to stick her up like an old sign over his dispensary!" suggested
Prunella Chanticleer.

"But it's hard on Duke Aubrey," laughed Moonlove Honeysuckle, "to be
cut out like this by a snuffy old doctor."

"Yes," said Viola Vigil. "My father says it's a great pity she doesn't
take rooms in the Duke Aubrey's Arms, because," and Viola giggled and
blushed a little, "it would be as near as she'd ever get to his arms,
or to anybody else's!"

But the laughter that greeted this last sally was just a trifle
shame-faced; for the Crabapple Blossoms found it a little too daring.

At the beginning of autumn, Miss Primrose suddenly sent all the
servants back to their homes in distant villages; and, to the
indignation of the Crabapple Blossoms, their places were filled (only
temporarily, Miss Primrose maintained) by the crazy washerwoman,
Mother Tibbs, and a handsome, painted, deaf-mute, with bold black eyes.
Mother Tibbs made but an indifferent housemaid, for she spent most of
her time at the garden gate, waving her handkerchief to the passers-by.
And if, when at her work, she heard the sound of a fiddle or flute,
however distant, she would instantly stop whatever she was doing and
start dancing, brandishing wildly in the air broom, or warming-pan, or
whatever domestic implement she may have been holding in her hands at
the time.

As for the deaf-mute--she was quite a good cook, but was, perhaps,
scarcely suited to employment in a young ladies' academy, as she was
known in the town as "Bawdy Bess."

One morning Miss Primrose announced that she had found them a new
dancing master (the last one had been suddenly dismissed, no one knew
for what reason), and that when they had finished their seams they were
to come up to the loft for a lesson.

So they tripped up to the cool, dark, pleasant loft, which smelt of
apples, and had bunches of drying grapes suspended from its rafters.
Long ago the Academy had been a farm-house, and on the loft's oak
panelled walls were carved the interlaced initials of many rustic
lovers, dead hundreds of years ago. To these Prunella Chanticleer
and Moonlove Honeysuckle had recently added a monogram formed of the
letters P. C. and E. L.

Their new dancing-master was a tall, red-haired youth, with a
white pointed face and very bright eyes. Miss Primrose, who always
implied that it was at great personal inconvenience and from purely
philanthropic motives that their teachers gave them their lessons,
introduced him as "Professor Wisp, who had very kindly consented to
teach them dancing," and the young man made his new pupils a low bow,
and turning to Miss Primrose, he said, "I've got you a fiddler, ma'am.
Oh, a rare fiddler! It's your needlework that has brought him. He's a
weaver by trade, and he dearly loves pictures in silk. And he can give
you some pretty patterns to work from--can't you, Portunus?" and he
clapped his hands twice.

Whereupon, "like a bat dropped from the rafters," as Prunella, with an
inexplicable shudder, whispered to Moonlove, a queer wizened old man,
with eyes as bright as Professor Wisp's, all mopping and mowing, with a
fiddle and a bow under his arm, sprang suddenly out of the shadows.

"Young ladies!" cried Professor Wisp, gleefully, "this is Master
Portunus, fiddler to his Majesty the Emperor of the Moon,
jester-in-chief to the Lord of Ghosts and Shadows ... though his jests
are apt to be silent ones. And he has come a long long way, young
ladies, to set your feet a dancing. Ho, ho, hoh!"

And the professor sprang up at least three feet in the air, and landed
on the tips of his toes, as light as a ball of thistledown, while
Master Portunus stood rubbing his hands, and chuckling with senile glee.

"What a vulgar young man! Just like a cheap Jack on market-day,"
whispered Viola Vigil to Prunella Chanticleer.

But Prunella, who had been looking at him intently, whispered back,
"I'm sure at one time he was one of our grooms. I only saw him once,
but I'm sure it's he. What can Miss Primrose be thinking of to engage
such low people as teachers?"

Prunella had, of course, not been told any details as to Ranulph's
illness.

Even Miss Primrose seemed somewhat disconcerted. She stood there,
mouthing and blinking, evidently at a loss what to say. Then she turned
to the old man, and, in her best company manner, said she was delighted
to meet another needlework enthusiast; and, turning to Professor Wisp,
added in her most cooing treacley voice, "I must embroider a pair of
slippers for the dear doctor's birthday, and I want the design to be
very original, so perhaps this gentleman would kindly lend me his
sampler."

At this the professor made another wild pirouette, and, clapping his
hands with glee, cried, "Yes, yes, Portunus is your man. Portunus will
set your stitches dancing to his tunes, ho, ho, hoh!"

And he and Portunus dug each other in the ribs and laughed till the
tears ran down their cheeks.

At last, pulling himself together, the Professor bade Portunus tune up
his fiddle, and requested that the young ladies should form up into two
lines for the first dance.

"We'll begin with 'Columbine,'" he said.

"But that's nothing but a country dance for farm servants," pouted
Moonlove Honeysuckle.

And Prunella Chanticleer boldly went up to Miss Primrose, and said,
"Please, mayn't we go on with the jigs and quadrilles we've always
learned? I don't think mother would like me learning new things. And
'Columbine' is so vulgar."

"Vulgar! New!" cried Professor Wisp, shrilly. "Why, my pretty Miss,
'Columbine' was danced in the moonlight when Lud-in-the-Mist was
nothing but a beech wood between two rivers. It is the dance that the
Silent People dance along the Milky Way. It's the dance of laughter and
tears."

"Professor Wisp is going to teach you very old and aristocratic dances,
my dear," said Miss Primrose reprovingly. "Dances such as were danced
at the court of Duke Aubrey, were they not, Professor Wisp?"

But the queer old fiddler had begun to tune up, and Professor Wisp,
evidently thinking that they had already wasted enough time, ordered
his pupils to stand up and be in readiness to begin.

Very sulkily it was that the Crabapple Blossoms obeyed, for they were
all feeling as cross as two sticks at having such a vulgar buffoon for
their master, and at being forced to learn silly old-fashioned dances
that would be of no use to them when they were grown-up.

But, surely, there was magic in the bow of that old fiddler! And,
surely, no other tune in the world was so lonely, so light-footed, so
beckoning! Do what one would one must needs up and follow it.

Without quite knowing how it came about, they were soon all tripping
and bobbing and gliding and tossing, with their minds on fire, while
Miss Primrose wagged her head in time to the measure, and Professor
Wisp, shouting directions the while, wound himself in and out among
them, as if they were so many beads, and he the string on which they
were threaded.

Suddenly the music stopped, and flushed, laughing, and fanning
themselves with their pocket-handkerchiefs, the Crabapple Blossoms
flung themselves down on the floor, against a pile of bulging sacks in
one of the corners, indifferent for probably the first time in their
lives to possible damage to their frocks.

But Miss Primrose cried out sharply, "Not there, dears! Not there!"

In some surprise they were about to move, when Professor Wisp whispered
something in her ear, and, with a little meaning nod to him, she said,
"Very well, dears, stay where you are. It was only that I thought the
floor would be dirty for you."

"Well, it wasn't such bad fun after all," said Moonlove Honeysuckle.

"No," admitted Prunella Chanticleer reluctantly. "That old man can
play!"

"I wonder what's in these sacks; it feels too soft for apples," said
Ambrosine Pyepowders, prodding in idle curiosity the one against which
she was leaning.

"There's rather a queer smell coming from them," said Moonlove.

"Horrid!" said Prunella, wrinkling up her little nose.

And then, with a giggle, she whispered, "We've had the goose and the
sage, so perhaps these are the onions!"

At that moment Portunus began to tune his fiddle again, and Professor
Wisp called out to them to form up again in two rows.

"This time, my little misses," he said, "it's to be a sad solemn dance,
so Miss Primrose must foot it with you--'a very aristocratic dance,
such as was danced at the court of Duke Aubrey'!" and he gave them a
roguish wink.

So admirable had been his imitation of Miss Primrose's voice that, for
all he was such a vulgar buffoon, the Crabapple Blossoms could not help
giggling.

"But I'll ask you to listen to the tune before you begin to dance it,"
he went on. "Now then, Portunus!"

"Why! It's just 'Columbine' over again...." began Prunella scornfully.

But the words froze on her lips, and she stood spellbound and
frightened.

It was 'Columbine,' but with a difference. For, since they had last
heard it, the tune might have died, and wandered in strange places, to
come back to earth, an angry ghost.

"Now, then, dance!" cried Professor Wisp, in harsh, peremptory tones.

And it was in sheer self-defence that they obeyed--as if by dancing
they somehow or other escaped from that tune, which seemed to be
themselves.

    "Within and out, in and out, round as a ball,
    With hither and thither, as straight as a line,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier
    And bon-fire
    And strawberry-wire
    And columbine,"

sang Professor Wisp. And in and out, in and out of a labyrinth of
dreams wound the Crabapple Blossoms.

But now the tune had changed its key. It was getting gay once
more--gay, but strange, and very terrifying.

    "Any lass for a Duke, a Duke who wears green,
    In lands where the sun and the moon do not shine,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier
    And bon-fire
    And strawberry-wire
    And columbine,"

sang Professor Wisp, and in and out he wound between his pupils--or,
rather, not wound, but dived, darted, flashed, while every moment his
singing grew shriller, his laughter more wild.

And then--whence and how they could not say--a new person had joined
the dance.

He was dressed in green and he wore a black mask. And the curious thing
was that, in spite of all the crossings and recrossings and runs down
the middle, and the endless shuffling in the positions of the dancers,
demanded by the intricate figures of this dance, the newcomer was never
beside you--it was always with somebody else that he was dancing. You
never felt the touch of his hand. This was the experience of each
individual Crabapple Blossom.

But Moonlove Honeysuckle caught a glimpse of his back; and on it there
was a hump.




                              CHAPTER VII

          MASTER AMBROSE CHASES A WILD GOOSE AND HAS A VISION


Master Ambrose Honeysuckle had finished his midday meal, and was
smoking his churchwarden on his daisy-powdered lawn, under the branches
of a great, cool, yellowing lime; and beside him sat his stout
comfortable wife, Dame Jessamine, placidly fanning herself to sleep,
with her pink-tongued mushroom-coloured pug snoring and choking in her
lap.

Master Ambrose was ruminating on the consignment he was daily expecting
of flowers-in-amber--a golden eastern wine, for the import of which his
house had the monopoly in Dorimare.

But he was suddenly roused from his pleasant reverie by the sound of
loud excited voices proceeding from the house, and turning heavily in
his chair, he saw his daughter, Moonlove, wild-eyed and dishevelled,
rushing towards him across the lawn, followed by a crowd of servants
with scared faces and all chattering at once.

"My dear child, what's this? What's this?" he cried testily.

But her only answer was to look at him in agonized terror, and then to
moan, "The horror of midday!"

Dame Jessamine sat up with a start and rubbing her eyes exclaimed,
"Dear me, I believe I was napping. But ... Moonlove! Ambrose! What's
happening?"

But before Master Ambrose could answer, Moonlove gave three
blood-curdling screams, and shrieked out, "Horror! Horror! The tune
that never stops! Break the fiddle! Break the fiddle! Oh, Father,
quietly, on tiptoe behind him, cut the strings. Cut the strings and let
me out, I want the dark."

For an instant, she stood quite still, head thrown back, eyes alert
and frightened, like a beast at bay. Then, swift as a hare, she tore
across the lawn, with glances over her shoulder as if something were
pursuing her, and, rushing through the garden gate, vanished from their
astonished view.

The servants, who till now had kept at a respectful distance, came
crowding up, their talk a jumble of such exclamations and statements
as "Poor young lady!" "It's a sunstroke, sure as my name's Fishbones!"
"Oh, my! it quite gave me the palpitations to hear her shriek!"

And the pug yapped with such energy that he nearly burst his mushroom
sides, and Dame Jessamine began to have hysterics.

For a few seconds Master Ambrose stood bewildered, then, setting his
jaw, he pounded across the lawn, with as much speed as was left him by
nearly fifty years of very soft living, out at the garden gate, down
the lane, and into the High Street.

Here he joined the tail of a running crowd that, in obedience to the
law that compels man to give chase to a fugitive, was trying hard to
catch up with Moonlove.

The blood was throbbing violently in Master Ambrose's temples, and his
brains seemed congested. All that he was conscious of, on the surface
of his mind, was a sense of great irritation against Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer for not having had the cobbles on the High Street recently
renewed--they were so damnably slippery.

But, underneath this surface irritation, a nameless anxiety was buzzing
like a hornet.

On he pounded at the tail end of the hunt, blowing, puffing, panting,
slipping on the cobbles, stumbling across the old bridge that spanned
the Dapple. Vaguely, as in delirium, he knew that windows were flung
open, heads stuck out, shrill voices enquiring what was the matter,
and that from mouth to mouth were bandied the words, "It's little Miss
Honeysuckle running away from her papa."

But when they reached the town walls and the west gate, they had to
call a sudden halt, for a funeral procession, that of a neighbouring
farmer, to judge from the appearance of the mourners, was winding its
way into the town, bound for the Fields of Grammary, and the pursuers
had perforce to stand in respectful silence while it passed, and allow
their quarry to disappear down a bend of the high road.

Master Ambrose was too impatient and too much out of breath consciously
to register impressions of what was going on round him. But in the
automatic unquestioning way in which at such moments the senses do
their work, he saw through the windows of the hearse that a red liquid
was trickling from the coffin.

This enforced delay broke the spell of blind purpose that had hitherto
united the pursuers into one. They now ceased to be a pack, and broke
up again into separate individuals, each with his own business to
attend to.

"The little lass is too nimble-heeled for us," they said, grinning
ruefully.

"Yes, she's a wild goose, that's what she is, and I fear she has led us
a wild goose chase," said Master Ambrose with a short embarrassed laugh.

He was beginning to be acutely conscious of the unseemliness of the
situation--he, an ex-Mayor, a Senator and judge, and, what was more,
head of the ancient and honourable family of Honeysuckle, to be
pounding through the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist at the tail end of a
crowd of 'prentices and artisans, in pursuit of his naughty, crazy
wild goose of a little daughter!

"Pity it isn't Nat instead of me!" he thought to himself. "I believe
he'd rather enjoy it."

Just then, a farmer came along in his gig, and seeing the hot
breathless company standing puffing and mopping their brows, he asked
them if they were seeking a little lass, for, if so, he had passed her
a quarter of an hour ago beyond the turnpike, running like a hare, and
he'd called out to her to stop, but she would not heed him.

By this time Master Ambrose was once more in complete possession of his
wits and his breath.

He noticed one of his own clerks among the late pursuers, and bade
him run back to his stables and order three of his grooms to ride off
instantly in pursuit of his daughter.

Then he himself, his face very stern, started off for the Academy.

It was just as well that he did not hear the remarks of his late
companions as they made their way back to town; for he would have found
them neither sympathetic nor respectful. The Senators were certainly
not loved by the rabble. However, not having heard Moonlove's eldritch
shrieks nor her wild remarks, they supposed that her father had been
bullying her for some mild offence, and that, in consequence, she had
taken to her heels.

"And if all these fat pigs of Senators," they said, "were set running
like that a little oftener, why, then, they'd make better bacon!"

Master Ambrose had to work the knocker of the Academy door very hard
before it was finally opened by Miss Primrose herself.

She looked flustered, and, as it seemed to Master Ambrose, a little
dissipated, her face was so pasty and her eyelids so very red.

"Now, Miss Crabapple!" he cried in a voice of thunder, "What, by the
Harvest of Souls, have you been doing to my daughter, Moonlove? And if
she's been ill, why have we not been told, I should like to know? I've
come here for an explanation, and I mean to get it."

Miss Primrose, mopping and mowing, and garrulously inarticulate, took
the fuming gentleman into the parlour. But he could get nothing out
of her further than disjointed murmurs about the need for cooling
draughts, and the child's being rather headstrong, and a possible touch
of the sun. It was clear that she was scared out of her wits, and,
moreover, there was something she wished to conceal.

Master Ambrose, from his experience on the Bench, soon realized that
this was a type of witness upon whom it was useless to waste his time;
so he said sternly, "You are evidently unable to talk sense yourself,
but perhaps some of your pupils possess that useful accomplishment.
But I warn you if ... if anything happens to my daughter it is you that
will be held responsible. And now, send ... let me see ... send me down
Prunella Chanticleer, she's always been a sensible girl with a head on
her shoulders. She'll be able to tell me what exactly is the matter
with Moonlove--which is more than you seem able to do."

Miss Primrose, now almost gibbering with terror, stammered out
something about "study hours," and "regularity being so desirable," and
"dear Prunella's having been a little out of sorts herself recently."

But Master Ambrose repeated in a voice of thunder, "Send me Prunella
Chanticleer, at once."

And standing there, stern and square, he was a rather formidable figure.

So Miss Primrose could only gibber and blink her acquiescence and
promise him that "dear Prunella" should instantly be sent to him.

When she had left him, Master Ambrose paced impatiently up and down,
frowning heavily, and occasionally shaking his head.

Then he stood stock-still, in deep thought. Absently, he picked up from
the work-table a canvas shoe, in process of being embroidered with
wools of various brilliant shades.

At first, he stared at it with unseeing eyes.

Then, the surface of his mind began to take stock of the object. Its
half finished design consisted of what looked like wild strawberries,
only the berries were purple instead of red.

It was certainly very well done. There was no doubt but that Miss
Primrose was a most accomplished needle-woman.

"But what's the good of needlework? It doesn't teach one common sense,"
he muttered impatiently.

"And how like a woman!" he added with a contemptuous little snort,
"Aren't red strawberries good enough for her? Trying to improve on
nature with her stupid fancies and her purple strawberries!"

But he was in no mood for wasting his time and attention on a
half-embroidered slipper, and tossing it impatiently away he was about
to march out of the room and call loudly for Prunella Chanticleer, when
the door opened and in she came.

Had a stranger wanted to see an upper class maiden of Lud-in-the-Mist,
he would have found a typical specimen in Prunella Chanticleer.

She was fair, and plump, and dimpled; and, as in the case of her
mother, the ruthless common sense of her ancestors of the revolution
had been trivialized, though not softened, into an equally ruthless
sense of humour.

Such had been Prunella Chanticleer.

But, as she now walked into the room, Master Ambrose exclaimed to
himself, "Toasted cheese! How plain the girl has grown!"

But that was a mere matter of taste; some people might have thought her
much prettier than she had ever been before. She was certainly less
plump than she used to be, and paler. But it was the change in the
expression of her eyes that was most noticeable.

Hitherto, they had been as busy and restless (and, in justice to the
charms of Prunella let it be added, as golden brown) as a couple of
bees in summer--darting incessantly from one small object to another,
and distilling from each what it held of least essential, so that
in time they would have fashioned from a thousand trivialities that
inferior honey that is apt to be labeled "feminine wisdom."

But, now, these eyes were idle.

Or, rather, her memory seemed to be providing them with a vision so
absorbing that nothing else could arrest their gaze.

In spite of himself, Master Ambrose felt a little uneasy in her
presence. However, he tried to greet her in the tone of patronizing
banter that he always used when addressing his daughter or her friends.
But his voice had an unnatural sound as he cried, "Well, Prunella, and
what have you all been doing to my Moonlove, eh? She came running home
after dinner, and if it hadn't been broad daylight, I should have said
that she had seen a ghost. And then off she dashed, up hill and down
dale, like a paper chaser without any paper. What have you all been
doing to her, eh?"

"I don't think we've been doing anything to her, Cousin Ambrose,"
Prunella answered in a low, curiously toneless voice.

Ever since the scene with Moonlove that afternoon, Master Ambrose had
had an odd feeling that facts were losing their solidity; and he had
entered this house with the express purpose of bullying and hectoring
that solidity back to them. Instead of which they were rapidly
vanishing, becoming attenuated to a sort of nebulous atmosphere.

But Master Ambrose had stronger nerves and a more decided mind than
Master Nathaniel. Two facts remained solid, namely that his daughter
had run away, and that for this Miss Crabapple's establishment was
responsible. These he grasped firmly as if they had been dumb-bells
that, by their weight, kept him from floating up to the ceiling.

"Now, Prunella," he said sternly, "there's something very queer about
all this, and I believe you can explain it. Well? I'm waiting."

Prunella gave a little enigmatical smile.

"What did she say when you saw her?" she asked.

"Say? Why, she was evidently scared out of her wits, and didn't
know what she was saying. She babbled something about the sun being
too hot--though it seems to me very ordinary autumn weather that
we're having. And then she went on about cutting somebody's fiddle
strings ... oh, I don't know what!"

Prunella gave a low cry of horror.

"Cut the fiddle strings!" she repeated incredulously. And then she
added with a triumphant laugh, "she can't do that!"

"Now, young lady," he cried roughly, "no more of this rubbish! Do you
or do you not know what has taken Moonlove?"

For a second or two she gazed at him in silence, and then she said
slowly, "Nobody ever knows what happens to other people. But,
supposing ... supposing she has eaten fairy fruit?" and she gave a
little mocking smile.

Silent with horror, Master Ambrose stared at her.

Then he burst out furiously, "You foul-mouthed little hussy! Do you
dare to insinuate...."

But Prunella's eyes were fixed on the window that opened on to the
garden, and instinctively he looked in that direction too.

For a second he supposed that the portrait of Duke Aubrey that hung
in the Senate Room of the Guildhall had been moved to the wall of
Miss Primrose's parlour. Framed in the window, against the leafy
background of the garden stood, quite motionless, a young man in
antique dress. The face, the auburn ringlets, the suit of green, the
rustic background--everything, down to the hunting horn entwined with
flowers that he held in one hand, and the human skull that he held in
the other, were identical with those depicted in the famous portrait.

"By the White Ladies of the Fields!" muttered Master Ambrose, rubbing
his eyes.

But when he looked again the figure had vanished.

For a few seconds he stood gaping and bewildered, and Prunella seized
the opportunity of slipping unnoticed from the room.

Then he came to his senses, on a wave of berserk rage. They had been
playing tricks, foul, vulgar tricks, on him, on Ambrose Honeysuckle,
Senator and ex-Mayor. But they should pay for it, by the Sun, Moon and
Stars, they should pay for it! And he shook his fist at the ivy and
squill bedecked walls.

But, in the meantime, it was he himself who was paying for it. An
appalling accusation had been made against his only child; and,
perhaps, the accusation was true.

Well, things must be faced. He was now quite calm, and, with his stern
set face, a much more formidable person than the raging spluttering
creature of a few seconds ago. He was determined to get to the bottom
of this affair, and either to vindicate his daughter from the foul
insinuation made by Prunella Chanticleer, or else, if the horrible
thing were true (and a voice inside him that would not be silenced kept
saying that it was true) to face the situation squarely, and, for the
good of the town, find out who was responsible for what had happened
and bring them to the punishment they merited.

There was probably no one in all Lud-in-the-Mist who would suffer
in the same degree from such a scandal in his family as Master
Ambrose Honeysuckle. And there was something fine in the way he thus
unflinchingly faced the possibility. Not for a moment did he think of
hushing the matter up to shield his daughter's reputation.

No, justice should run its course even if the whole town had to know
that Ambrose Honeysuckle's only child--and she a girl, which seemed,
somehow, to make it more horrible--had eaten fairy fruit.

As to his vision of Duke Aubrey, that he dismissed as an hallucination
due to his excited condition and perhaps, as well, to the hysterical
atmosphere that seemed to lie like a thick fog over the Academy.

Before he left Miss Primrose's parlour his eyes fell on the half
embroidered slipper he had impatiently tossed away on the entrance of
Prunella Chanticleer.

He smiled grimly; perhaps, after all, it had not been due to mere
foolish feminine fancy that the strawberries were purple instead of
red. She may have had real models for her embroidery.

He put the slipper in his pocket. It might prove of value in the law
courts.

But Master Ambrose was mistaken in supposing that the berries
embroidered on the slipper were fairy fruit.




                             CHAPTER VIII

            ENDYMION LEER LOOKS FRIGHTENED, AND A BREACH IS
                       MADE IN AN OLD FRIENDSHIP


Master Ambrose fully expected on reaching home to find that one of the
grooms he had despatched after Moonlove had returned with her in safe
custody.

This, however, was not the case, and he was confronted with another
frightful contingency. Moonlove had last been seen running, at a speed
so great and so unflagging as to hint at some sustaining force that was
more than human, due West. What if she were making for the Debatable
Hills? Once across those hills she would never again be seen in
Dorimare.

He must go to Mumchance at once, and give the alarm. Search parties
must immediately be sent to ransack the country from one end to the
other.

On his way out he was stopped by Dame Jessamine in the fretful
complaining condition that he always found so irritating.

"Where have you been, Ambrose?" she cried querulously. "First Moonlove
screaming like a mad cockatoo! And then you rushing off, just after
your dinner too, and leaving me like that in the lurch when I was
so upset that I was on the verge of swooning! Where did you go to
Ambrose?" and her voice grew shrill. "I do wish you would go to Miss
Primrose and tell her she must not let Moonlove be such a tom-boy and
play practical jokes on her parents ... rushing home in the middle of
the day like that and talking such silly nonsense. She really is a
very naughty girl to give us such a fright. I feel half inclined to go
straight off to the Academy and give her a good scolding."

"Stop chattering, Jessamine, and let me go," cried Master Ambrose.
"Moonlove is not at the Academy."

And he found a sort of savage satisfaction in calling back over his
shoulder as he hurried from the room, "I very much fear you will never
see your daughter again, Jessamine."

About half an hour later, he returned home even more depressed than
when he had set out, owing to what he had learned from Mumchance as
to the recent alarming spread in the town of the consumption of fairy
fruit. He found Endymion Leer sitting in the parlour with his wife.

Her husband's parting words had brought on an attack of violent
hysterics and the alarmed servants, fearing a seizure, had, on their
own responsibility, summoned the only doctor of Lud in whom they had
any faith, Endymion Leer. And, judging from Dame Jessamine's serene
and smiling face, he had succeeded in removing completely the terrible
impression produced by her husband's parting words, and in restoring to
what she was pleased to call her mind its normal condition, namely that
of a kettle that contains just enough water to simmer comfortably over
a low fire.

She greeted Master Ambrose with a smile that for her was quite eager.

"Oh, Ambrose!" she cried, "I have been having such a pleasant talk with
Dr. Leer. He says girls of her age often get silly and excited, though
I'm sure I never did, and that she's sure to be brought home before
night. But I do think we'd better take her away from Miss Primrose's.
For one thing she has really learned quite enough now--I know no one
who can make prettier groups in butter. So I think we had better give a
ball for her before the winter, so if you will excuse me, Dr. Leer, I
have just a few things to see to...." and off she bustled to overhaul
Moonlove's bridal chest, which, according to the custom of Dorimarite
mothers, she had been storing, ever since her daughter's birth, with
lace and velvets and brocade.

Not without reason, Dame Jessamine was considered the stupidest woman
in Lud-in-the-Mist. And, in addition, the Ludite's lack of imagination
and inability to feel serious emotions, amounted in her to a sort of
affective idiocy.

So Master Ambrose found himself alone with Endymion Leer; and, though
he had never liked the man, he was very glad to have the chance of
consulting him. For, socially, however great his shortcomings might
be, Master Ambrose knew him to be undeniably the best doctor in the
country, and a very clever fellow into the bargain.

"Leer," he said solemnly, when Dame Jessamine had left the room, "there
are very queer things happening at that Academy ... very queer things."

"Indeed?" said Endymion Leer, in a tone of surprise. "What sort of
things?"

Master Ambrose gave a short laugh: "Not the sort of things, if my
suspicions are correct, that one cares to talk about--even between men.
But I can tell you, Leer, though I'm not what one could call a fanciful
man, I believe if I'd stayed much longer in that house I should have
gone off my head, the whole place stinks with ... well, with pernicious
nonsense, and I actually found myself, I, Ambrose Honeysuckle, seeing
things--ridiculous things."

Endymion Leer looked interested.

"What sort of things, Master Ambrose?" he asked.

"Oh, it's not worth repeating--except in so far as it shows that the
fancies of silly overwrought women can sometimes be infectious. I
actually imagined that I saw the Senate room portrait of Duke Aubrey
reflected on the window. And if I take to fancying things--well, there
must be something very fishy in the offing."

Endymion Leer's expression was inscrutable.

"Optical delusions have been known before, Master Ambrose," he said
calmly. "Even the eyes of Senators may sometimes play them tricks.
Optical delusions, legal fictions--and so the world wags on."

Master Ambrose grunted. He loathed the fellow's offensive way of
putting things.

But he was sore at heart and terribly anxious, and he felt the need of
having his fears either confirmed or dispelled, so, ignoring the sneer,
he said with a weary sigh: "However, that's a mere trifle. I have grave
reasons for fearing that my daughter has ... has ... well, not to put
too fine a point on things, I'm afraid that my daughter has eaten fairy
fruit."

Endymion Leer flung up his hands in horror, and then he laughed
incredulously.

"Impossible, my dear sir, impossible! Your good lady told me you were
sadly anxious about her, but let me assure you such an idea is mere
morbidness on your part. The thing's impossible."

"Is it?" said Master Ambrose grimly; and producing the slipper from his
pocket he held it out, saying, "What do you say to that? I found it in
Miss Crabapple's parlour. I'm not much of a botanist, but I've never
seen purple strawberries in Dorimare ... toasted cheese! What's taken
the man?"

For Endymion Leer had turned livid, and was staring at the design on
the shoe with eyes as full of horror as if it had been some hideous
goblin.

Master Ambrose interpreted this as corroboration of his own theory.

He gave a sort of groan: "Not so impossible after all, eh?" he said
gloomily. "Yes, that I very much fear is the sort of stuff my poor
little girl has been given to eat."

Then his eyes flashed, and clenching his fist he cried, "But it's not
her I blame. Before I'm many days older I'll smoke out that nest of
wasps! I'll hang that simpering old woman from her own doorpost. By the
Golden Apples of the West I'll...."

Endymion Leer had by this time, at any rate externally, recovered his
equanimity.

"Are you referring to Miss Primrose Crabapple?" he asked in his usual
voice.

"Yes, Miss Primrose Crabapple!" boomed Master Ambrose, "nonsensical,
foul-minded, obscene old...."

"Yes, yes," interrupted Endymion Leer with good-humoured impatience,
"I daresay she's all of that and a great deal more, but, all the same,
I don't believe her capable of having given your daughter what you
think she has. I admit, when you first showed me that slipper I was
frightened. Unlike you, I am a bit of a botanist, and I certainly have
never seen a berry like that in Dorimare. But after all that does
not prove that it grows ... across the hills. There's many a curious
fruit to be found in the Cinnamon Isles, or in the oases of the Amber
Desert ... why, your own ships, Master Ambrose, sometimes bring such
fruit. The ladies of Lud have no lack of exotic fruit and flowers to
copy in their embroidery. No, no, you're a bit unhinged this evening,
Master Ambrose, else you would not allow so much as the shadow of foul
suspicions like these to cross your mind."

Master Ambrose groaned.

And then he said a little stiffly, "I am not given, Dr. Leer, to
harbouring foul suspicions without cause. But a great deal of mischief
is sometimes done by not facing facts. How is one to explain my
daughter's running away, due west, like one possessed? Besides,
Prunella Chanticleer as much as told me she had ... eaten a certain
thing ... and ... and ... I'm old enough to remember the great drought,
so I know the smell, so to speak, of evil, and there is something very
strange going on in that Academy."

"Prunella Chanticleer, did you say?" queried Endymion Leer with an
emphasis on the last word, and with a rather odd expression in his eyes.

Master Ambrose looked surprised.

"Yes," he said. "Prunella Chanticleer, her school fellow and intimate
friend."

Endymion Leer gave a short laugh.

"The Chanticleers are ... rather curious people," he said drily, "Are
you aware that Ranulph Chanticleer has done the very thing you suspect
your daughter of having done?"

Master Ambrose gaped at him.

Ranulph had certainly always been an odd and rather disagreeable boy,
and there had been that horrid little incident at the Moongrass cheese
supper-party ... but that he actually should have eaten fairy fruit!

"Do you mean? Do you mean...?" he gasped.

Endymion Leer nodded his head significantly: "One of the worst cases I
have ever known."

"And Nathaniel knows?"

Again Endymion Leer nodded.

A wave of righteous indignation swept over Master Ambrose. The
Honeysuckles were every bit as ancient and honourable a family as the
Chanticleers, and yet here was he, ready to tarnish his escutcheon for
ever, ready if need be to make the town crier trumpet his disgrace
from the market-place, to sacrifice money, position, family pride,
everything, for the good of the community. While the only thought of
Nathaniel, and he the Mayor, was to keep his skeleton safely hidden in
the cupboard.

"Master Ambrose," continued Endymion Leer, in a grave impressive voice,
"if what you fear about your daughter be true, then it is Master
Nathaniel who is to blame. No, no, hear me out," as Master Ambrose
raised a protesting hand. "I happen to know that some months ago
Mumchance warned him of the alarming increase there has been recently
in Lud in the consumption of ... a certain commodity. And I know that
this is true from my practice in the less genteel parts of the town.
Take it from me, Master Ambrose, you Senators make a great mistake in
ignoring what takes place in those low haunts. Nasty things have a way
of not always staying at the bottom, you know--stir the pond and they
rise to the top. Anyway, Master Nathaniel was warned, yet he took no
steps."

He paused for a few seconds, and then, fixing his eyes searchingly on
Master Ambrose, he said, "Did it never strike you that Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer was a rather ... curious man?"

"Never," said Master Ambrose coldly. "What are you insinuating, Leer?"

Endymion Leer gave a little shrug: "Well, it is you who have set the
example in insinuations. Master Nathaniel is a haunted man, and a bad
conscience makes a very good ghost. If a man has once tasted fairy
fruit he is never the same again. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps,
long ago, when he was a young man...."

"Hold your tongue, Leer!" cried Master Ambrose angrily. "Chanticleer
is a very old friend of mine, and, what's more, he's my second cousin.
There's nothing wrong about Nathaniel."

But was this true? A few hours ago he would have laughed to scorn any
suggestion to the contrary. But since then, his own daughter ... ugh!

Yes, Nathaniel had certainly always been a very queer fellow--touchy,
irascible, whimsical.

A swarm of little memories, not noticed at the time, buzzed in Master
Ambrose's head ... irrational actions, equivocal remarks. And, in
particular, one evening, years and years ago, when they had been
boys ... Nat's face at the eerie sound produced by an old lute. The
look in his eyes had been like that in Moonlove's today.

No, no. It would never do to start suspecting everyone--above all his
oldest friend.

So he let the subject of Master Nathaniel drop and questioned Endymion
Leer as to the effects on the system of fairy fruit, and whether there
was really no hope of finding an antidote.

Then Endymion Leer started applying his famous balm--a balm that varied
with each patient that required it.

In most cases, certainly, there was no cure. But when the eater was
a Honeysuckle, and hence, born with a healthy mind in a healthy body
there was every reason to hope that no poison could be powerful enough
to undermine such a constitution.

"Yes, but suppose she is already across the border?" said Master
Ambrose. Endymion Leer gave a little shrug.

"In that case, of course, there is nothing more one can do," he replied.

Master Ambrose gave a deep sigh and leant back wearily in his chair,
and for a few minutes they sat in silence.

Drearily and hopelessly Master Ambrose's mind wandered over the events
of the day and finally settled, as is the way with a tired mind, on the
least important--the red juice he had noticed oozing out of the coffin,
when they had been checked at the west gate by the funeral procession.

"Do the dead bleed, Leer?" he said suddenly.

Endymion Leer sprang from his chair as if he had been shot. First he
turned white, then he turned crimson.

"What the ... what the ..." he stuttered, "what do you mean by that
question, Master Ambrose?"

He was evidently in the grip of some violent emotion.

"Busty Bridget!" exclaimed Master Ambrose, testily, "what, by the
Harvest of Souls, has taken you now, Leer? It may have been a silly
question, but it was quite a harmless one. We were stopped by a funeral
this afternoon at the west gate, and I thought I saw a red liquid
oozing from the coffin. But, by the White Ladies of the Fields, I've
seen so many queer things today that I've ceased to trust my own eyes."

These words completely restored Endymion Leer's good humour. He flung
back his head and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Why, Master Ambrose," he gurgled, "it was such a grisly question that
it gave me quite a turn. Owing to the deplorable ignorance of this
country I'm used to my patients asking me rather queer things ... but
that beats anything I've yet heard. 'Do the dead bleed? Do pigs fly?'
Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Then, seeing that Master Ambrose was beginning to look stiff and
offended, he controlled his mirth, and added, "Well, well, a man as
sorely tried as you have been today, Master Ambrose, is to be excused
if he has hallucinations ... it is wonderful what queer things we
imagine we see when we are unhinged by strong emotion. And now I must
be going. Birth and death, Master Ambrose, they wait for no man--not
even for Senators. So I must be off and help the little Ludites into
the world, and the old ones out of it. And in the meantime don't
give up hope. At any moment one of Mumchance's good Yeomen may come
galloping up with the little lady at his saddle-bow. And then--even if
she should have eaten what you fear she has--I shall be much surprised
if a Honeysuckle isn't able with time and care to throw off all effects
of that foul fodder and grow up into as sensible a woman--as her
mother."

And, with these characteristic words of comfort, Endymion Leer bustled
off on his business.

Master Ambrose spent a most painful evening, his ears, on the one hand,
alert for every sound of a horse's hoof, for every knock at the front
door, in case they might herald news of Moonlove; and, at the same
time, doing their best not to hear Dame Jessamine's ceaseless prattle.

"Ambrose, I wish you'd remind the clerks to wipe their shoes before
they come in. Have you forgotten you promised me we should have a
separate door for the warehouse? I've got it on paper.

"How nice it is to know that there's nothing serious the matter with
Moonlove, isn't it? But I don't know what I should have done this
afternoon if that kind Doctor Leer hadn't explained it all to me. How
could you run away a second time, Ambrose, and leave me in that state
without even fetching my hartshorn? I do think men are so heartless.

"What a naughty girl Moonlove is to run away like this! I wonder when
they'll find her and bring her back? But it will be nice having her
at home this winter, won't it? What a pity Ranulph Chanticleer isn't
older, he'd do so nicely for her, wouldn't he? But I suppose Florian
Baldbreeches will be just as rich, and he's nearer her age.

"Do you think Marigold and Dreamsweet and the rest of them will be
shocked by Moonlove's rushing off in this wild way? However, as Dr.
Leer said, in his quaint way, girls will be girls.

"Oh, Ambrose, do you remember my deer-coloured tuftaffity, embroidered
with forget-me-nots and stars? I had it in my bridal chest. Well, I
think I shall have it made up for Moonlove. There's nothing like the
old silks, or the old dyes either--there were no galls or gum-syrups
used in them. You remember my deer-coloured tuftaffity, don't you?"

But Master Ambrose could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet, and
cried roughly, "I'll give you a handful of Yeses and Noes, Jessamine,
and it'll keep you amused for the rest of the evening sorting them out,
and sticking them on to your questions. I'm going out."

He would go across to Nat's ... Nat might not be a very efficient
Mayor, but he was his oldest friend, and he felt he needed his sympathy.

"If ... if any news comes about Moonlove, I'll be over at the
Chanticleers. Let me know at once," he called over his shoulder, as he
hurried from the room.

Yes, he was longing for a talk with Nat. Not that he had any belief in
Nat's judgement; but he himself could provide all that was needed.

And, apart from everything else, it would be comforting to talk to
a man who was in the same boat as himself--if, that is to say, the
gossip retailed by Endymion Leer were true. But whether it were true
or not Leer was a vulgar fellow, and had had no right to divulge a
professional secret.

So huge did the events of the day loom in his own mind, that he felt
sure of finding their shadow lying over the Chanticleers; and he was
prepared to be magnanimous and assure the conscience-stricken Master
Nathaniel that though, as Mayor, he may have been a little remiss and
slack, nevertheless, he could not, in fairness, be held responsible for
the terrible thing that had happened.

But he had forgotten the gulf that lay between the Magistrates and
the rest of the town. Though probably the only topics of conversation
that evening in every kitchen, in every tavern, in every tradesman's
parlour, were the good run for his money little Miss Honeysuckle had
given her revered father that afternoon, and the search parties of
Yeomen that were scouring the country for her--not to mention the
terrible suspicions as to the cause of her flight he had confided to
Mumchance; nevertheless not a word of it all had reached the ears of
the other Magistrates.

So, when the front-door of the Chanticleers was opened for him, he was
greeted by sounds of uproarious laughter proceeding from the parlour.

The Polydore Vigils were spending the evening there, and the whole
party was engaged in trying to catch a moth--flicking at it with their
pocket-handkerchiefs, stumbling over the furniture, emulating each
other to further efforts in the ancient terms of stag-hunting.

"Come and join the fun, Ambrose," shouted Master Nathaniel, crimson
with exertion and laughter.

But Master Ambrose began to see red.

"You ... you ... heartless, gibbering idiots!" he roared.

The moth-hunters paused in amazement.

"Suffering Cats! What's taken you, Ambrose?" cried Master Nathaniel.
"Stag-hunting, they say, was a royal sport. Even the Honeysuckles might
stoop to it!"

"Don't the Honeysuckles consider a moth a stag, Ambrose?" laughed
Master Polydore Vigil.

But that evening the old joke seemed to have lost its savour.

"Nathaniel," said Master Ambrose solemnly, "the curse of our country
has fallen upon you and me ... and you are hunting moths!"

Now, "curse" happened to be one of the words that had always frightened
Master Nathaniel. So much did he dislike it that he even avoided the
words that resembled it in sound, and had made Dame Marigold dismiss a
scullery-maid, merely because her name happened to be Kirstie.

Hence, Master Ambrose's words sent him into a frenzy of nervous
irritation.

"Take that back, Ambrose! Take that back!" he roared. "Speak for
yourself. The ... the ... the cur ... nothing of that sort is on me!"

"That is not true, Nathaniel," said Master Ambrose sternly. "I have
only too good reason to fear that Moonlove is stricken by the same
sickness as Ranulph, and...."

"You lie!" shouted Master Nathaniel.

"And in both cases," continued Master Ambrose, relentlessly, "the cause
of the sickness was ... fairy fruit."

Dame Dreamsweet Vigil gave a smothered scream, Dame Marigold blushed
crimson, and Master Polydore exclaimed, in a deeply shocked voice, "By
the Milky Way, Ambrose, you are going a little too far--even if there
were not ladies present."

"No, Polydore. There come times when even ladies must face facts. You
see before you two dishonoured men--Nathaniel and myself. One of our
statutes says that in the country of Dorimare each member of a family
shall be the master of his own possessions, and that nothing shall
be held in common but disgrace. And before you are many days older,
Polydore, your family, too, may be sharing that possession. Each one of
us is threatened in what is nearest to us, and our chief citizen--hunts
moths!"

"No, no, Nathaniel," he went on in a louder and angrier voice, "you
needn't glare and growl! I consider that you, as Mayor of this town,
are responsible for what has happened today, and...."

"By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" bellowed Master Nathaniel, "I haven't the
slightest idea what you mean by 'what has happened today,' but whatever
it is, I know very well I'm not responsible. Were you responsible last
year when old Mother Pyepowders's yapping little bitch chewed up old
Matt's pet garters embroidered by his first sweetheart, and when...."

"You poor, snivelling, feeble-minded buffoon! You criminal nincompoop!
Yes, criminal, I say," and at each word Master Ambrose's voice grew
louder. "Who was it that knew of the spread of this evil thing and took
no steps to stop it? Whose own son has eaten it? By the Harvest of
Souls you may have eaten it yourself for all I know...."

"Silence, you foul-mouthed, pompous, brainless, wind-bag! You ...
you ... foul, gibbering Son of a Fairy!" sputtered Master Nathaniel.

And so they went at it, hammer and tongs, doing their best to destroy
in a few minutes the fabric built up by years of fellowship and mutual
trust.

And the end of it was that Master Nathaniel pointed to the door, and in
a voice trembling with fury, told Master Ambrose to leave his house,
and never to enter it again.




                              CHAPTER IX

                      PANIC AND THE SILENT PEOPLE


The following morning Captain Mumchance rode off to search Miss
Primrose Crabapple's Academy for fairy fruit. And in his pocket was a
warrant for the arrest of that lady should his search prove successful.

But when he reached the Academy he found that the birds had flown. The
old rambling house was empty and silent. No light feet tripped down its
corridors, no light laughter wakened its echoes. Some fierce wind had
scattered the Crabapple Blossoms. Miss Primrose, too, had disappeared.

A nameless dread seized Captain Mumchance as he searched through the
empty silent rooms.

He found the bedrooms in disorder--drawers half opened, delicately
tinted clothing heaped on the floor--indicating that the flitting had
been a hurried one.

Beneath each bed, too, he found a little pair of shoes, very down at
heel, with almost worn-out soles, looking as if the feet that had worn
them must have been very busy.

He continued his search down to the kitchen premises, where he found
Mother Tibbs sitting smiling to herself, and crooning.

"Now, you cracked harlot," he cried roughly, "what have you been up
to, I'd like to know? I've had my eye on you, my beauty, for a very
long time. If I can't make you speak, perhaps the judges will. What's
happened to the young ladies? Just you tell me that!"

But Mother Tibbs was more crazy than usual that day, and her only
answer was to trip up and down the kitchen floor, singing snatches of
old songs about birds set free, and celestial flowers, and the white
fruits that grow on the Milky Way.

Mumchance was holding one of the little shoes, and catching sight of
it, she snatched it from him, and tenderly stroked it, as if it had
been a wounded dove.

"Dancing, dancing, dancing!" she muttered, "dancing day and night! It's
stony dancing on dreams."

And with an angry snort Mumchance realized, not for the first time in
his life, that it was a waste of time trying to get any sense out of
Mother Tibbs.

So he started again to search the house, this time for fairy fruit.

However, not a pip, not a scrap of peel could he find that looked
suspicious. But, finally, in the loft he discovered empty sacks with
great stains of juice on them, and it could have been no ordinary
juice, for some of the stains were colours he had never seen before.

The terrible news of the Crabapple Blossoms' disappearance spread like
wildfire through Lud-in-the-Mist. Business was at a standstill. Half
the Senators, and some of the richer tradesmen, had daughters in the
Academy, and poor Mumchance was besieged by frantic parents who seemed
to think that he was keeping their daughters concealed somewhere on his
person. They were all, too, calling down vengeance on the head of Miss
Primrose Crabapple, and demanding that she should be found and handed
over to justice.

It was Endymion Leer who got the credit for finding her. He brought
her, sobbing and screaming, to the guard-room of the Yeomanry. He said
he had discovered her wandering about, half frantic, on the wharf,
evidently hoping to take refuge in some outward bound vessel.

She denied all knowledge of what had happened to her pupils, and said
she had woken up that morning to find the birds flown.

She also denied, with passionate protestations, having given them fairy
fruit. In this, Endymion Leer supported her. The smugglers, he said,
were men of infinite resource and cunning, and what more likely than
that they should have inserted the stuff into a consignment of innocent
figs and grapes?

"And school girls being one quarter boy and three quarters bird," he
added with his dry chuckle, "they cannot help being orchard thieves ...
and if there isn't an orchard to rob, why, they'll rob the loft where
the apples are kept. And if the apples turn out not to be apples--why,
then, no one is to blame!" Nevertheless, Miss Primrose was locked up in
the room in the Guildhall reserved for prisoners of the better class,
pending her trial on a charge of receiving contraband goods in the form
of woven silk--the only charge, owing to the willful blindness of the
law, on which she could be tried.

In the meantime a couple of the Yeomen, who had been scouring the
country for Moonlove Honeysuckle, returned with the news that they
had chased her as far as the Debatable Hills, and had last seen her
scrambling like a goat up their sides. And no Dorimarite could be
expected to follow her further.

A couple of days later the Yeomen sent to search for the other
Crabapple Blossoms returned with similar news. All along the West Road
they had heard rumours of a band of melancholy maidens flitting past
to the sound of sad wild ditties. And, finally, they had come upon a
goatherd who had seen them disappearing, like Moonlove, among the folds
of the terrible hills.

So there was nothing further to be done. The Crabapple Blossoms had by
now surely perished in the Elfin Marches, or else vanished for ever
into Fairyland.

These were sad days in Lud-in-the-Mist--all the big houses with their
shutters down, the dancing halls and other places of amusement closed,
sad, frightened faces in the streets--and, as if in sympathy with human
things, the days shortening, the trees yellowing, and beginning to shed
their leaves.

Endymion Leer was much in request--especially in the houses that
had hitherto been closed to him. Now, he was in and out of them all
day long, exhorting, comforting, advising. And wherever he went he
managed to leave the impression that somehow or other Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer was to blame for the whole business.

There was no doubt about it, Master Nathaniel, these days, was the most
unpopular man in Lud-in-the-Mist.

In the Senate he got nothing but sour looks from his colleagues;
threats and insults were muttered behind him as he walked down the High
Street; and one day, pausing at a street corner where a puppet-show
was being exhibited, he found that he himself was the villain of the
piece. For when the time-honoured climax was reached and the hero was
belabouring the villain's wooden head with his cudgel, the falsetto
voice of the concealed showman punctuated the blows with such comments
as: "There, Nat Cock o' the Roost, is a black eye to you for small
loaves ... and there's another for sour wine ... and there's a bloody
nose to you for being too fond of papples and ares."

Here the showman changed his voice and said, "Please, sir, what are
papples and ares?" "Ask Nat Cock o' the Roost," came the falsetto,
"and he'll tell you they're apples and pears that come from across the
hills!"

Most significant of all, for the first time since Master Nathaniel had
been head of the family, Ebeneezor Prim did not come himself to wind
the clocks. Ebeneezor was a paragon of dignity and respectability, and
it was a joke in Lud society that you could not really be sure of your
social status till he came to wind your clocks himself, instead of
sending one of his apprentices.

However, the apprentice he sent to Master Nathaniel was almost as
respectable looking as he was himself. He wore a neat black wig, and
his expression was sanctimonious in the extreme, with the corners of
his mouth turned down, like one of his master's clocks that had stopped
at 7:25.

Certainly a very respectable young man, and one who was evidently fully
aware of the unsavoury rumours that were circulating concerning the
house of Chanticleer; for he looked with such horror at the silly
moon-face with its absurd revolving moustachios of Master Nathaniel's
grandfather clock, and opened its mahogany body so gingerly, and,
when he had adjusted its pendulum, wiped his fingers on his pocket
handkerchief with such an expression of disgust, that the innocent
timepiece might have been the wicked Mayor's familiar--a grotesque
hobgoblin tabby cat, purring, and licking her whiskers after an obscene
orgy of garbage.

But Master Nathaniel was indifferent to these manifestations of
unpopularity. Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a
sort of carminative.

When the news first reached him of the flight of the Crabapple Blossoms
he very nearly went off his head. Facts suddenly seemed to be becoming
real.

For the first time in his life his secret shadowy fears began to
solidify--to find a real focus; and the focus was Ranulph.

His first instinct was to fling municipal obligations to the winds
and ride post-haste to the farm. But what would that serve after all?
It would be merely playing into the hands of his enemies, and by his
flight giving the public reason to think that the things that were said
about him were true.

It would be madness, too, to bring Ranulph back to Lud. Surely there
was no place in Dorimare more fraught with danger for the boy these
days than was the fairy fruit-stained town of Lud. He felt like a rat
in a trap.

He continued to receive cheerful letters from Ranulph himself and good
accounts of him from Luke Hempen, and gradually his panic turned into
a sort of lethargic nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him
from the necessity of taking action. It was as if the future were a
treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so
that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the
slightest use.

He found no comfort in his own home. Dame Marigold, who had always
cared for Prunella much more than for Ranulph, was in a condition of
nervous prostration.

Each time the realization swept over her that Prunella had eaten fairy
fruit and was either lost in the Elfin Marches or in Fairyland itself,
she would be seized by nausea and violent attacks of vomiting.

Indeed, the only moments of relief he knew were in pacing up and down
his own pleached alley, or wandering in the Fields of Grammary. For
the Fields of Grammary gave him a foretaste of death--the state that
will turn one into a sort of object of art (that is to say if one is
remembered by posterity) with all one's deeds and passions simplified,
frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people gaze at,
and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them.

And the pleached alley brought him the peace of still life--life that
neither moves nor suffers, but only grows in silence and slowly matures
in secret.

The Silent People! How he would have liked to be one of them!

But sometimes, as he wandered in the late afternoon about the streets
of the town, human beings themselves seemed to have found the secret
of still life. For at that hour all living things seemed to cease from
functioning. The tradesmen would stand at the doors of their shops
staring with vacant eyes down the street--as detached from business as
the flowers in the gardens, which looked as if they too were resting
after their day's work and peeping idly out from between their green
shutters.

And lads who were taking their sweethearts for a row on the Dapple
would look at them with unseeing eyes, while the maidens gazed into the
distance and trailed their hands absently in the water.

Even the smithy, with its group of loungers at its open door,
watching the swing and fall of the smith's hammer and the lurid red
light illuminating his face, might have been no more than a tent at
a fair where holiday makers were watching a lion tamer or the feats
of a professional strong man; for at that desultory hour the play of
muscles, the bending of resisting things to a human will, the taming
of fire, a creature more beautiful and dangerous than any lion, seemed
merely an entertaining spectacle that served no useful purpose.

The very noises of the street--the rattle of wheels, a lad whistling,
a pedlar crying his wares--seemed to come from far away, to be as
disembodied and remote from the activities of man as is the song of the
birds.

And if there was still some bustle in the High Street it was as
soothing as that of a farmyard. And the whole street--houses, cobbles,
and all--might almost have been fashioned out of growing things cut
by man into patterns, as is a formal garden. So that Master Nathaniel
would wander, at that hour, between its rows of shops and houses, as if
between the thick green walls of a double hedge of castellated box, or
down the golden tunnel of his own pleached alley.

If life in Lud-in-the-Mist could always be like that there would be no
need to die.




                               CHAPTER X

                             HEMPIE'S SONG


There were days, however, when even the silent things did not soothe
Master Nathaniel; when the condition described by Ranulph as the
imprisoning of all one's being into a space as narrow as a tooth,
whence it irradiates waves of agony, became so overwhelming, that he
was unconscious of the external world.

One late afternoon, a prey to this mood, he was mooning about the
Fields of Grammary.

In the epitaphs on the tombstone one could read the history of
Dorimarite sensibility from the quiet poignancy of those dating from
the days of the Dukes--"Eglantine mourns for Endymion, who was Alive
and now is Dead;" or "During her Life Ambrose often dreamed that
Forget-Me-Not was Dead. This Time he woke up and found that it was
True"--followed by the peaceful records of industry and prosperity of
the early days of the Republic, down to the cheap cynicism of recent
times--for instance, "Here lies Hyacinth Quirkscuttle, weaver, who
stretched his life as he was wont to do the list of his cloth far
beyond its natural limits, and, to the great regret of his family, died
at the age of XCIX."

But, that afternoon, even his favourite epitaph, the one about
the old baker, Ebeneezor Spike, who had provided the citizens of
Lud-in-the-Mist with fresh sweet loaves for sixty years, was powerless
to comfort Master Nathaniel.

Indeed, so strangled was he in the coils of his melancholy that the
curious fact of the door of his family chapel being ajar caused in him
nothing but a momentary, muffled surprise.

The chapel of the Chanticleers was one of the loveliest monuments of
Lud. It was built of rose-coloured marble, with delicately fluted
pillars, and worked in low relief with the flowers and panic stricken
fugitives, so common in the old art of Dorimare. Indeed, it looked like
an exquisite little pleasure-house; and tradition said that this it had
originally been--one of Duke Aubrey's, in fact. And it certainly was in
accordance with his legend to make a graveyard the scene of his revels.

No one ever entered except Master Nathaniel and his household to
fill it with flowers on the anniversaries of his parents' death.
Nevertheless, the door was certainly ajar.

The only comment he made to himself was to suppose that the pious
Hempie had been up that day to commemorate some anniversary,
remembered only by herself, in the lives of her dead master and
mistress, and had forgotten to lock it up again.

Drearily he wandered to the western wall and gazed down upon
Lud-in-the-Mist, and so drugged was he with despair that at first he
was incapable of reacting in the slightest degree to what his eyes were
seeing.

Then, just as sometimes the flowing of the Dapple was reflected in the
trunks of the beeches that grew on its banks, so that an element that
looked as if it were half water, half light, seemed rippling down them
in ceaseless zones--so did the objects he saw beneath him begin to be
reflected in fancies, rippling down the hard, unyielding fabric of his
woe; the red-roofed houses scattered about the side of the hill looked
as if they were crowding helter-skelter to the harbour, eager to turn
ships themselves and sail away--a flock of clumsy ducks on a lake of
swans; the houses beyond the harbour seemed to be preening themselves
preparatory to having their portrait taken. The chimneys were casting
becoming velvet shadows on the high-pitched slanting roofs. The
belfries seemed to be standing on tiptoe behind the houses--like tall
serving lads, who, unbeknown to their masters, have succeeded in
squeezing themselves into the family group.

Or, perhaps, the houses were more like a flock of barn-door fowls,
of different shapes and sizes, crowding up at the hen wife's "Chick!
chick! chick!" to be fed at sunset.

Anyhow, however innocent they might look, they were the repositories
of whatever dark secrets Lud might contain. Houses counted among the
Silent People. Walls have ears, but no tongue. Houses, trees, the
dead--they tell no tales.

His eye travelled beyond the town to the country that lay beyond,
and rested on the fields of poppies and golden stubble, the smoke of
distant hamlets, the great blue ribbon of the Dawl, the narrow one of
the Dapple--one coming from the north, one from the west, but, for
some miles beyond Lud-in-the-Mist, seeming to flow in parallel lines,
so that their convergence at the harbour struck one as a geometrical
miracle.

Once more he began to feel the balm of silent things, and seemed to
catch a glimpse of that still, quiet landscape the future, after he
himself had died.

And yet ... there was that old superstition of the thraldom in
Fairyland, the labour in the fields of gillyflowers.

No, no. Old Ebeneezor Spike was not a thrall in Fairyland.

       *       *       *       *       *

He left the Fields of Grammary in a gentler mood of melancholy than the
frost-bound despair in which he had gone there.

When he got home he found Dame Marigold sitting dejectedly in the
parlour, her hands lying limply on her lap, and she had had the fire
already lighted although evening had not yet set in.

She was very white, and there were violet shadows under her eyes.

Master Nathaniel stood silently at the door for a few seconds watching
her.

There came into his head the lines of an old song of Dorimare:--

    I'll weaver her a wreath of the flowers of grief
    That her beauty may show the brighter.

And suddenly he saw her with the glamour on her that used to madden
him in the days of his courtship, the glamour of something that is
delicate, and shadowy, and far-away--the glamour that lets loose the
lust of the body of a man for the soul of a woman.

"Marigold," he said in a low voice.

Her lips curled in a little contemptuous smile: "Well, Nat, have you
been out baying the moon, and chasing your own shadow?"

"Marigold!" and he came and leaned over the back of her chair.

She started violently. Then she cried in a voice, half petulant, half
apologetic, "I'm sorry! But, you know, I can't bear having the back of
my neck touched! Oh, Nat, what a sentimental old thing you are!"

And then it all began over again--the vain repinings, the veiled
reproaches; while the desire to make him wince struggled for the
ascendancy with the habit of mercy, engendered by years of a mild,
slightly contemptuous tenderness.

Her attitude to the calamity was one of physical disgust, mingled with
petulance, a sense of ill-usage, and, incredible though it may seem, a
sense of its ridiculous aspect.

Occasionally she would stop shuddering, to make some such remark as:
"Oh, dear! I can't help wishing that old Primrose herself had gone off
with them, and that I could have seen her prancing to the fiddle and
screeching like an old love-sick tabby cat."

Finally Master Nathaniel could stand it no longer. He sprang to his
feet, exclaiming violently: "Marigold, you madden me! You're ... you're
not a woman. I believe what you need is some of that fruit yourself.
I've a good mind to get some, and force it down your throat!"

But it was an outrageous thing to have said. And no sooner were the
words out of his mouth than he would have given a hundred pounds to
have them unsaid.

What had taken his tongue! It was as if an old trusty watch-dog had
suddenly gone mad and bitten him.

But he could stay no longer in the parlour, and face her cold,
disgusted stare. So, sheepishly mumbling an apology, he left the room.

Where should he go? Not to the pipe-room. He could not face the
prospect of his own company. So he went upstairs and knocked at
Hempie's door.

However much in childhood a man may have loved his nurse, it is seldom
that, after he has grown up, he does not feel ill at ease and rather
bored when he is with her. A relationship that has become artificial,
and connected, on one side, with a sense of duty rather than with
spontaneous affection, is always an uncomfortable one.

And, for the nurse, it is particularly bitter when it is the
magnanimous enemy--the wife--who has to keep her "boy" up to his duty.

For years Dame Marigold had had to say at intervals, "Nat, have you
been up to see Hempie lately?" or "Nat, Hempie has lost one of her
brothers. Do go and tell her you're sorry."

So, when Master Nathaniel found himself in the gay little room, he felt
awkward and tongue-tied, and was too depressed to have recourse to
the somewhat laboured facetiousness with which he was in the habit of
greeting the old woman.

She was engaged in darning his stockings, and she indignantly showed
him a particularly big hole, shaking her head, and exclaiming, "There
never was a man so hard on his stockings as you, Master Nat! I'd very
much like to find out before I die what you do to them; and Master
Ranulph is every bit as bad."

"Well, Hempie, as I always say, you've no right to blame me if my
stockings go into holes, seeing that it's you who knitted them,"
retorted Master Nathaniel automatically.

For years Hempie's scolding about the condition in which she found his
stockings had elicited this reply. But, after these days of nightmare,
there was something reassuring in discovering that there were still
people in the world sane enough, and with quiet enough minds, to be put
out by the holes in a pair of worsted stockings.

Hempie had, indeed, taken the news of the Crabapple Blossoms very
calmly. It was true she had never cared very much for Prunella,
maintaining always that "she was just her mother over again." All the
same, Prunella remained Master Nathaniel's daughter and Ranulph's
sister, and hence had a certain borrowed preciousness in the eyes of
Hempie. Nevertheless she had refused to indulge in lamentations, and
had preserved on the subject a rather grim silence.

His eye roved restlessly over the familiar room. It was certainly
a pleasant one--fantastic and exquisitely neat. "Neat as a Fairy's
parlour"--the old Dorimarite expression came unbidden to his mind.

There was a bowl of autumn roses on the table, faintly scenting the air
with the hospitable, poetic perfume that is like a welcome to a little
house with green shutters and gay chintzes and lavender-scented sheets.
But the host who welcomes you is dead, the house itself no longer
stands except in your memory--it is the cry of the cock turned into
perfume. Are there bowls of roses in the Fairies' parlours?

"I say, Hempie, these are new, aren't they?" he said, pointing to a
case of shells on the chimney-piece--very strange shells, as thin as
butterfly's wings and as brightly coloured. And, as well, there were
porcelain pots, which looked as if they had been made out of the petals
of poppies and orchids, nor could their strange shapes ever have been
turned on a potter's wheel in Dorimare.

Then he gave a low whistle, and, pointing to a horse-shoe of pure gold,
nailed on to the wall, he added, "And that, too! I'll swear I've never
seen it before. Has your ship come in, Hempie?"

The old woman looked up placidly from her darning: "Oh! these came when
my poor brother died and the old home was broken up. I'm glad to have
them, as I never remember a time when they weren't in the old kitchen
at home. I often think it's strange how bits of chiney and brittle
stuff like that lives on, long after solid flesh and bone has turned
to dust. And it's a queer thing, Master Nat, as one gets old, how one
lives among the dumb. Bits of chiney ... and the Silent People," and
she wiped a couple of tears from her eyes.

Then she added, "Where these old bits of things came from I never
rightly knew. I suppose the horse-shoe's valuable, but even in bad
harvests my poor father would never turn it into money. He used to
say that it had been above our door in his father's time, and in his
grandfather's time, and it had best stay there. I shouldn't wonder if
he thought it had been dropped by Duke Aubrey's horse. And as for the
shells and pots ... when we were children, we used always to whisper
that they came from beyond the hills."

Master Nathaniel gave a start, and stared at her in amazement.

"From beyond the hills?" he repeated, in a low, horrified voice.

"Aye, and why not?" cried Hempie, undaunted. "I was country-bred,
Master Nat, and I learned not to mind the smell of a fox or of a civet
cat ... or of a Fairy. They're mischievous creatures, I daresay,
and best left alone. But though we can't always pick and choose our
neighbours, neighbourliness is a virtue all the same. For my part, I'd
never have chosen the Fairies for my neighbours--but they were chosen
for me. And we must just make the best of them."

"By the Sun, Moon, and Stars, Hempie!" cried Master Nathaniel in a
horrified voice, "you don't know what you're talking about, you...."

"Now, Master Nat, don't you try on your
hoighty-toighty-his-Worship-the-Mayor-of-Lud-in-the-Mist-knock-you-down-and-be-thankful-for-small-mercies
ways with me!" cried Hempie, shaking her fist at him. "I know very well
what I'm talking about. Long, long ago I made up my mind about certain
things. But a good nurse must keep her mind to herself--if it's not the
same as that of her master and mistress. So I never let on to you when
you were a little boy, nor to Master Ranulph neither, what I thought
about these things. But I've never held with fennel and such like. If
folks know they're not wanted, it just makes them all the more anxious
to come--be they Fairies or Dorimarites. It's just because we're all
so scared of our neighbours that we get bamboozled by them. And I've
always held that a healthy stomach could digest anything--even fairy
fruit. Look at my boy, now, at Ranulph--young Luke writes he's never
looked so bonny. No, fairy fruit nor nothing else can poison a clean
stomach."

"I see," said Master Nathaniel drily. He was fighting against the sense
of comfort that, in spite of himself, her words were giving him. "And
are you quite happy, too, about Prunella?"

"Well, and even if I'm not," retorted Hempie, "where's the good of
crying, and retching, and belching, all day long, like your lady
downstairs? Life has its sad side, and we must take the rough with the
smooth. Why, maids have died on their marriage eve, or, what's worse,
bringing their first baby into the world, and the world's wagged on all
the same. Life's sad enough, in all conscience, but there's nothing to
be frightened about in it or to turn one's stomach. I was country-bred,
and as my old granny used to say, 'There's no clock like the sun and
no calendar like the stars.' And why? Because it gets one used to the
look of Time. There's no bogey from over the hills that scares one like
Time. But when one's been used all one's life to seeing him naked, as
it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns
that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And
to watch Time teaches one to sing. They say the fruit from over the
hills makes one sing. I've never tasted so much as a sherd of it, but
for all that I can sing."

Suddenly, all the pent-up misery and fear of the last thirty years
seemed to be loosening in Master Nathaniel's heart--he was sobbing,
and Hempie, with triumphant tenderness, was stroking his hands and
murmuring soothing words, as she had done when he was a little boy.

When his sobs had spent themselves, he sat down on a stool at her feet,
and, leaning his head against her knees, said, "Sing to me, Hempie."

"Sing to you, my dear? And what shall I sing to you? My voice isn't
what it once was ... well, there's that old song--'Columbine,' I think
they call it--that they always seem singing in the streets these
days--that's got a pretty tune."

And in a voice, cracked and sweet, like an old spinet, she began to
sing:

    "When Aubrey did live there lived no poor.
    The lord and the beggar on roots did dine
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier,
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine."

As she sang, Master Nathaniel again heard the Note. But, strange to
say, this time it held no menace. It was as quiet as trees and pictures
and the past, as soothing as the drip of water, as peaceful as the
lowing of cows returning to the byre at sunset.




                              CHAPTER XI

                    A STRONGER ANTIDOTE THAN REASON


Master Nathaniel sat at his old nurse's feet for some minutes after she
had stopped singing. Both his limbs and his mind seemed to be bathed in
a cool, refreshing pool.

So Endymion Leer and Hempie had reached by very different paths the
same conclusion--that, after all, there was nothing to be frightened
about; that, neither in sky, sea, nor earth was there to be found a
cavern dark and sinister enough to serve as a lair for IT--his secret
fear.

Yes, but there were facts as well as shadows. Against facts Hempie had
given him no charm. Supposing that what had happened to Prunella should
happen to Ranulph? That he should vanish for ever across the Debatable
Hills.

But it had not happened yet--nor should it happen as long as Ranulph's
father had wits and muscles.

He might be a poor, useless creature when menaced by the figments of
his own fancy. But, by the Golden Apples of the West, he would no
longer sit there shaking at shadows, while, perhaps, realities were
mustering their battalions against Ranulph.

It was for him to see that Dorimare became a country that his son could
live in in security.

It was as if he had suddenly seen something white and straight--a
road or a river--cutting through a sombre, moonlit landscape. And the
straight, white thing was his own will to action.

He sprang to his feet and took two or three paces up and down the room.

"But I tell you, Hempie," he cried, as if continuing a conversation,
"they're all against me. How can I work by myself! They're all against
me, I say."

"Get along with you, Master Nat!" jeered Hempie tenderly. "You were
always one to think folks were against you. When you were a little boy
it was always, 'You're not cross with me, Hempie, are you?' and peering
up at me with your little anxious eyes--and there was me with no more
idea of being cross with you than of jumping over the moon!"

"But, I tell you, they are all against me," he cried impatiently. "They
blame me for what has happened, and Ambrose was so insulting that I had
to tell him never to put his foot into my house again."

"Well, it isn't the first time you and Master Ambrose have
quarrelled--and it won't be the first time you make it up again. It
was, 'Hempie, Brosie won't play fair!' or 'Hempie, it's my turn for a
ride on the donkey, and Nat won't let me!' And then, in a few minutes,
it was all over and forgotten. So you must just step across to Master
Ambrose's, and walk in as if nothing had happened, and, you'll see,
he'll be as pleased as Punch to see you."

As he listened, he realized that it would be very pleasant to put
his pride in his pocket and rush off to Ambrose and say that he was
willing to admit anything that Ambrose chose--that he was a hopelessly
inefficient Mayor, that his slothfulness during these past months had
been criminal--even, if Ambrose insisted, that he was an eater of, and
smuggler of, and receiver of, fairy fruit, all rolled into one--if only
Ambrose would make friends again.

Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps
it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such
pains to make them thrive.

But Master Nathaniel was a self-indulgent man, and ever ready to
sacrifice both dignity and expediency to the pleasure of yielding to a
sentimental velleity.

"By the Golden Apples of the West, Hempie," he cried joyfully, "you're
right! I'll dash across to Ambrose's before I'm a minute older," and he
made eagerly for the door.

On the threshold he suddenly remembered how he had seen the door of
his chapel ajar, and he paused to ask Hempie if she had been up there
recently, and had forgotten to lock it.

But she had not been there since early spring.

"That's odd!" said Master Nathaniel.

And then he dismissed the matter from his mind, in the exhilarating
prospect of "making up" with Ambrose.

It is curious what tricks a quarrel, or even a short absence, can
play with our mental picture of even our most intimate friends. A few
minutes later, as Master Ambrose looked at his old playmate standing
at the door, grinning a little sheepishly, he felt as if he had just
awakened from a nightmare. This was not "the most criminally negligent
Mayor with whom the town of Lud-in-the-Mist had ever been cursed;"
still less was it the sinister figure evoked by Endymion Leer. It was
just queer old Nat, whom he had known all his life.

Just as on a map of the country round Lud, in the zig-zagging lines he
could almost see the fish and rushes of the streams they represented,
could almost count the milestones on the straight lines that stood for
roads; so, with regard to the face of his old friend--every pucker and
wrinkle was so familiar that he felt he could have told you every one
of the jokes and little worries of which they were the impress.

Master Nathaniel, still grinning a little sheepishly, stuck out his
hand. Master Ambrose frowned, blew his nose, tried to look severe, and
then grasped the hand. And they stood there fully two minutes, wringing
each other's hand, and laughing and blinking to keep away the tears.

And then Master Ambrose said, "Come into the pipe-room, Nat, and try a
glass of my new flower-in-amber. You old rascal, I believe it was that
that brought you!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A little later when Master Ambrose was conducting Master Nathaniel back
to his house, his arm linked in his, they happened to pass Endymion
Leer.

For a few seconds he stood staring after them as they glimmered down
the lane beneath the faint moonlight. And he did not look overjoyed.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night was filled to the brim for Master Nathaniel with sweet,
dreamless sleep. As soon as he laid his head on the pillow he seemed
to dive into some pleasant unknown element--fresher than air, more
caressing than water; an element in which he had not bathed since he
first heard the Note, thirty years ago. And he woke up the next morning
light-hearted and eager; so fine a medicine was the will to action.

He had been confirmed in it by his talk the previous evening with
Master Ambrose. He had found his old friend by no means crushed by his
grief. In fact, his attitude to the loss of Moonlove rather shocked
Master Nathaniel, for he had remarked grimly that to have vanished for
ever over the hills was perhaps, considering the vice to which she had
succumbed, the best thing that could have happened to her. There had
always been something rather brutal about Ambrose's common sense.

But he was as anxious as Master Nathaniel himself that drastic measures
should immediately be taken for stopping the illicit trade and
arresting the smugglers. They had decided what these measures ought
to be, and the following days were spent in getting them approved and
passed by the Senate.

Though the name of Master Nathaniel stank in the nostrils of his
colleagues, their respect for the constitution was too deep seated
to permit their opposing the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High
Seneschal of Dorimare; besides, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle was a man of
considerable weight in their councils, and they were not uninfluenced
by the fact that he was the seconder of all the Mayor's proposals.

So a couple of Yeomen were placed at each of the gates of Lud, with
orders to examine not only the baggage of everyone entering the town,
but, as well, to rummage through every waggon of hay, every sack of
flour, every frail of fruit or vegetables. As well, the West road
was patrolled from Lud to the confines of the Elfin Marches, where a
consignment of Yeomanry were sent to camp out, with orders day and
night to watch the hills. And the clerk to the Senate was ordered to
compile a dossier of every inhabitant of Lud.

The energy displayed by Master Nathaniel in getting these measures
passed did a good deal towards restoring his reputation among the
townsfolk. Nevertheless that social barometer, Ebeneezor Prim,
continued to send his new apprentice, instead of coming himself,
to wind his clocks. And the grandfather clock, it would seem, was
protesting against the slight. For according to the servants, it would
suddenly move its hands rapidly up and down its dial, which made it
look like a face, alternating between a smirk and an expression of woe.
And one morning Pimple, the little indigo page, ran screaming with
terror into the kitchen, for, he vowed, from the orifice at the bottom
of the dial, there had suddenly come shooting out a green tongue like a
lizard's tail.

As none of Master Nathaniel's measures brought to light a single
smuggler or a single consignment of fairy fruit, the Senate were
beginning to congratulate themselves on having at last destroyed the
evil that for centuries had menaced their country, when Mumchance
discovered in one day three people clearly under the influence of the
mysterious drug and with their mouth and hands stained with strangely
coloured juices.

One of them was a pigmy pedlar from the North, and as he scarcely knew
a word of Dorimarite no information could be extracted from him as
to how he had procured the fruit. Another was a little street urchin
who had found some sherds in a dustbin, but was in too dazed a state
to remember exactly where. The third was the deaf-mute known as Bawdy
Bess. And, of course, no information could be got from a deaf-mute.

Clearly, then, there was some leakage in the admirable system of the
Senate.

As a result, rebellious lampoons against the inefficient Mayor were
found nailed to the doors of the Guildhall, and Master Nathaniel
received several anonymous letters of a vaguely threatening nature,
bidding him to cease to meddle with matters that did not concern him,
lest they should prove to concern him but too much.

But so well had the antidote of action been agreeing with his
constitution that he merely flung them into the fire with a grim laugh
and a vow to redouble his efforts.




                              CHAPTER XII

              DAME MARIGOLD HEARS THE TAP OF A WOODPECKER


Miss Primrose Crabapple's trial was still dragging on, clogged by all
the foolish complications arising from the legal fiction that had
permitted her arrest. If you remember, in the eye of the law fairy
fruit was regarded as woven silk, and many days were wasted in a
learned discussion of the various characteristics of gold tissues,
stick tuftaffities, figured satins, wrought grograines, silk mohair and
ferret ribbons.

Urged partly by curiosity and, perhaps, also by a subconscious hope
that in the comic light of Miss Primrose's personality recent events
might lose something of their sinister horror, one morning Dame
Marigold set out to visit her old schoolmistress in her captivity.

It was the first time she had left the house since the tragedy, and,
as she walked down the High Street she held her head high and smiled a
little scornful smile--just to show the vulgar herd that even the worst
disgrace could not break the spirit of a Vigil.

Now, Dame Marigold had very acute senses. Many a time she had
astonished Master Nathaniel by her quickness in detecting the faintest
whiff of any of the odours she disliked--shag, for instance, or onions.

She was equally quick in psychological matters, and would detect the
existence of a quarrel or love affair long before they were known to
anyone except the parties concerned. And as she made her way that
morning to the Guildhall she became conscious in everything that was
going on round her of what one can only call a change of key.

She could have sworn that the baker's boy with the tray of loaves on
his head was not whistling, that the maid-servant, leaning out of a
window to tend her mistress's pot-flowers, was not humming the same
tune that they would have been some months ago.

This, perhaps, was natural enough. Tunes, like fruit, have their
seasons, and are, besides, ever forming new species. But even the
voices of the hawkers chanting "Yellow Sand!" or "Knives and Scissors!"
sounded disconcertingly different.

Instinctively, Dame Marigold's delicate nostrils expanded, and the
corners of her mouth turned down in an expression of disgust, as if she
had caught a whiff of a disagreeable smell.

On reaching the Guildhall, she carried matters with a high hand. No,
no, there was no need whatever to disturb his Worship. He had given
her permission to visit the prisoner, so would the guardian take her
up immediately to her room.

Dame Marigold was one of those women who, though they walk blindfold
through the fields and woods, if you place them between four walls have
eyes as sharp as a naturalist's for the objects that surround them. So,
in spite of her depression, her eyes were very busy as she followed
the guardian up the splendid spiral staircase, and along the panelled
corridors, hung, here and there, with beautiful bits of tapestry. She
made a mental note to tell Master Nathaniel that the caretaker had not
swept the staircase, and that some of the panelling was worm-eaten and
should be attended to. And she would pause to finger a corner of the
tapestry and wonder if she could find some silk just that powder blue,
or just that old rose, for her own embroidery.

"Why, I do declare, this panel is beginning to go too!" she murmured,
pausing to tap on the wall.

Then she cried in a voice of surprise, "I do believe it's hollow here!"

The guardian smiled indulgently--"You are just like the doctor,
ma'am--Doctor Leer. We used to call him the Woodpecker, when he was
studying the Guildhall for his book, for he was for ever hopping about
and tapping on the walls. It was almost as if he were looking for
something, we used to say. And I'd never be surprised myself to come on
a sliding panel. They do say as what those old Dukes were a wild crew,
and it might have suited their book very well to have a secret way out
of their place!" and he gave a knowing wink.

"Yes, yes, it certainly might," said Dame Marigold, thoughtfully.

They had now come to a door padlocked and bolted. "This is where we
have put the prisoner, ma'am," said the guardian, unlocking it. And
then he ushered her into the presence of her old schoolmistress.

Miss Primrose was sitting bolt upright in a straight backed old
fashioned chair, against a background of fine old tapestries, faded to
the softest loveliest pastel tints--as incongruous with her grotesque
ugliness as had been the fresh prettiness of the Crabapple Blossoms.

Dame Marigold stood staring at her for a few seconds in silent
indignation. Then she sank slowly on to a chair, and said sternly,
"Well, Miss Primrose? I wonder how you dare sit there so calmly after
the appalling thing you have brought about."

But Miss Primrose was in one of her most exalted moods--"On her high
hobby-horse," as the Crabapple Blossoms used to call it. So she merely
glittered at Dame Marigold contemptuously out of her little eyes,
and, with a lordly wave of her hand, as if to sweep away from her
all mundane trivialities, she exclaimed pityingly, "My poor blind
Marigold! Perhaps of all the pupils who have passed through my hands
you are the one who are the least worthy of your noble birthright."

Dame Marigold bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and said in a low voice
of intense irritation, "What do you mean, Miss Primrose?"

Miss Primrose cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and, in her most treacly
voice she answered, "The great privilege of having been born a woooman!"

Her pupils always maintained that "woman," as pronounced by Miss
Primrose, was the most indecent word in the language.

Dame Marigold's eyes flashed: "I may not be a woman, but, at any rate,
I am a mother--which is more than you are!" she retorted.

Then, in a voice that at each word grew more indignant, she said, "And,
Miss Primrose, do you consider that you yourself have been 'worthy of
your noble birthright' in betraying the trust that has been placed
in you? Are vice and horror and disgrace and breaking the hearts of
parents 'true womanliness' I should like to know? You are worse than
a murderer--ten times worse. And there you sit, gloating over what
you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor--as
complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon
forced to herd goats! I do really believe...."

But Miss Primrose's shrillness screamed down her low-toned indignation:
"Shake me! Stick pins in me! Fling me into the Dapple!" she shrieked.
"I will bear it all with a smile, and wear my shame like a flower given
by him!"

Dame Marigold groaned in exasperation: "Who, on earth, do you mean by
'him', Miss Primrose?"

Then her irrepressible sense of humour broke out in a dimple, and she
added: "Duke Aubrey or Endymion Leer?"

For, of course, Prunella had told her all the jokes about the goose and
the sage.

At this question Miss Primrose gave an unmistakable start; "Duke
Aubrey, of course!" she answered, but the look in her eyes was sly,
suspicious, and distinctly scared.

None of this was lost upon Dame Marigold. She looked her slowly up and
down with a little mocking smile; and Miss Primrose began to writhe and
to gibber.

"Hum!" said Dame Marigold, meditatively.

She had never liked the smell of Endymion Leer's personality.

The recent crisis had certainly done him no harm. It had doubled his
practice, and trebled his influence.

Besides, it cannot have been Miss Primrose's beauty and charms that had
caused him to pay her recently such marked attentions.

At any rate, it could do no harm to draw a bow at a venture.

"I am beginning to understand, Miss Primrose," she said slowly.
"Two ... outsiders, have put their heads together to see if they
could find a plan for humiliating the stupid, stuck-up, 'so-called
old families of Lud!' Oh! don't protest, Miss Primrose. You have
never taken any pains to hide your contempt for us. And I have always
realized that yours was not a forgiving nature. Nor do I blame you. We
have laughed at you unmercifully for years--and you have resented it.
All the same I think your revenge has been an unnecessarily violent
one; though, I suppose, to 'a true woooman,' nothing is too mean, too
spiteful, too base, if it serves the interests of 'him'!"

But Miss Primrose had gone as green as grass, and was gibbering with
terror: "Marigold! Marigold!" she cried, wringing her hands, "How can
you think such things? The dear, devoted Doctor! The best and kindest
man in Lud-in-the-Mist! Nobody was angrier with me over what he called
my 'criminal carelessness' in allowing that horrible stuff to be
smuggled into my loft, I assure you he is quite rabid on the subject
of ... er ... fruit. Why, when he was a young man at the time of the
great drought he was working day and night trying to stop it, he...."

But not for nothing was Dame Marigold descended from generations of
judges. Quick as lightning, she turned on her: "The great drought? But
that must be forty years ago ... long before Endymion Leer came to
Dorimare."

"Yes, yes, dear ... of course ... quite so ... I was thinking of what
another doctor had told me ... since all this trouble my poor head gets
quite muddled," gibbered Miss Primrose. And she was shaking from head
to foot.

Dame Marigold rose from her chair, and stood looking down on her in
silence for a few seconds, under half-closed lids, with a rather cruel
little smile.

Then she said, "Good-bye, Miss Primrose. You have provided me with most
interesting food for thought."

And then she left her, sitting there with frightened face against the
faded tapestry.

That same day, Master Nathaniel received a letter from Luke Hempen that
both perplexed and alarmed him.

It was as follows:

    Your Worship,--I'd be glad if you'd take Master Ranulph away from
    this farm, because the widow's up to mischief, I'm sure of that,
    and some of the folks about here say as what in years gone by she
    murdered her husband, and she and somebody else, though I don't
    know who, seem to have a grudge against Master Ranulph, and, if I
    might take the liberty, I'll just tell your Worship what I heard.

    It was this way--one night, I don't know how it was, but I couldn't
    get to sleep, and thinking that a bite, may be, of something would
    send me off, towards midnight I got up from my bed to go and look
    in the kitchen for a bit of bread. And half-way down the stairs I
    heard the sound of low voices, and someone said, "I fear the
    Chanticleers," so I stood still where I was, and listened. And I
    peeped down and the kitchen fire was nearly out, but there was
    enough left for me to see the widow, and a man wrapped up in a
    cloak, sitting opposite to her with his back to the stairs, so I
    couldn't see his face. Their talk was low and at first I could only
    hear words here and there, but they kept making mention of the
    Chanticleers, and the man said something like keeping the
    Chanticleers and Master Ambrose Honeysuckle apart, because Master
    Ambrose had had a vision of Duke Aubrey. And if I hadn't known the
    widow and how she was a deep one and as fly as you make them, I'd
    have thought they were two poor daft old gossips, whose talk had
    turned wild and nasty with old age. And then the man laid his hand
    on her knee, and his voice was low, but this time it was so clear
    that I could hear it all, and I think I can remember every word of
    it, so I'll write it down for your Worship: "I fear counter orders.
    You know the Chief and his ways--at any moment he might betray his
    agents. Willy Wisp gave young Chanticleer fruit without my
    knowledge. And I told you how he and that doitered old weaver of
    yours have been putting their heads together, and that's what has
    frightened me most."

    And then his voice became too low for me to hear, till he said,
    "Those who go by the Milky Way often leave footprints. So let him
    go by the other."

    And then he got up to go, and I crept back to my room. But not a
    wink of sleep did I get that night for thinking over what I had
    heard. For though it seemed gibberish, it gave me the shivers, and
    that's a fact. And mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones, so
    I hope your Worship will excuse me writing like this, and that
    you'll favour me with an answer by return, and take Master Ranulph
    away, for I don't like the look in the widow's eye when she looks
    at him, that I don't.

    And hoping this finds your Worship well as it leaves me,--I am,
    Your Worship's humble obedient servant,

                                                           LUKE HEMPEN.

How Master Nathaniel longed to jump on to his horse and ride post-haste
to the farm! But that was impossible. Instead, he immediately
despatched a groom with orders to ride day and night and deliver a
letter to Luke Hempen, which bade him instantly take Ranulph to the
farm near Moongrass (a village that lay some fifteen miles north of
Swan-on-the-Dapple) from which for years he had got his cheeses.

Then he sat down and tried to find some meaning in the mysterious
conversation Luke had overheard.

Ambrose seeing a vision! An unknown Chief! Footprints on the Milky Way!

Reality was beginning to become very shadowy and menacing.

He must find out something about this widow. Had she not once appeared
in the law-courts? He decided he must look her up without a moment's
delay.

He had inherited from his father a fine legal library, and the
bookshelves in his pipe-room were packed with volumes bound in vellum
and old calf of edicts, codes, and trials. Some of them belonged to
the days before printing had been introduced into Dorimare, and were
written in the crabbed hand of old town-clerks.

It made the past very real, and threw a friendly, humourous light upon
the dead, to come upon, when turning those yellow parchment pages, some
personal touch of the old scribe's, such as a sententious or facetious
insertion of his own--for instance, "The Law bides her Time, but my
Dinner doesn't!" or the caricature in the margin of some forgotten
judge. It was just as if one of the grotesque plaster heads on the old
houses were to give you, suddenly, a sly wink.

But it was the criminal trials that, in the past, had given Master
Nathaniel the keenest pleasure. The dry style of the Law was such a
magnificent medium for narrative. And the little details of every-day
life, the humble objects of daily use, became so startlingly vivid,
when, like scarlet geraniums breaking through a thick autumn mist, they
blazed out from that grey style ... so vivid, and, often, fraught with
such tragic consequences.

Great was his astonishment when he discovered from the index that
it was among the criminal trials that he must look for the widow
Gibberty's. What was more, it was a trial for murder.

Surely Endymion Leer had told him, when he was urging him to send
Ranulph to the farm, that it had been a quite trivial case, concerning
an arrear of wages, or something, due to a discharged servant?

As a matter of fact, the plaintiff, a labourer of the name of Diggory
Carp, had been discharged from the service of the late Farmer Gibberty.
But the accusation he brought against the widow was that she had
poisoned her husband with the sap of osiers.

However, when he had finished the trial, Master Nathaniel found himself
in complete sympathy with the judge's pronouncement that the widow was
innocent, and with his severe reprimand to the plaintiff, for having
brought such a serious charge against a worthy woman on such slender
grounds.

But he could not get Luke's letter out of his head, and he felt that he
would not have a moment's peace till the groom returned with news from
the farm.

As he sat that evening by the parlour fire, wondering for the hundredth
time who the mysterious cloaked stranger could have been whose back had
been seen by Luke, Dame Marigold suddenly broke the silence by saying,
"What do you know about Endymion Leer, Nat?"

"What do I know of Endymion Leer?" he repeated absently. "Why, that
he's a very good leach, with very poor taste in cravats, and, if
possible, worse taste in jokes. And that, for some unknown reason, he
has a spite against me...."

He broke off in the middle of his sentence, and muttered beneath his
breath, "By the Sun, Moon and Stars! Supposing it should be...."

Luke's stranger had said he feared the Chanticleers.

A strange fellow, Leer! The Note had once sounded in his voice. Where
did he come from? Who was he? Nobody knew in Lud-in-the-Mist.

And, then, there were his antiquarian tastes. They were generally
regarded as a harmless, unprofitable hobby. And yet ... the past
was dim and evil, a heap of rotting leaves. The past was silent and
belonged to the Silent People.... But Dame Marigold was asking another
question, a question that had no apparent connection with the previous
one: "What was the year of the great drought?"

Master Nathaniel answered that it was exactly forty years ago, and
added quizzically, "Why this sudden interest in history, Marigold?"

Again she answered by asking him a question. "And when did Endymion
Leer first arrive in Dorimare?"

Master Nathaniel began to be interested. "Let me see," he said
thoughtfully. "It was certainly long before we married. Yes, I
remember, we called him in to a consultation when my mother had
pleurisy, and that was shortly after his arrival, for he could still
only speak broken Dorimarite ... it must be thirty years ago."

"I see," said Dame Marigold drily. "But I happen to know that he was
already in Dorimare at the time of the drought." And she proceeded to
repeat to him her conversation that morning with Miss Primrose.

"And," she added, "I've got another idea," and she told him about the
panel in the Guildhall that sounded hollow and what the guardian had
said about the woodpecker ways of Endymion Leer. "And if, partly for
revenge for our coldness to him, and partly from a love of power," she
went on, "it is he who has been behind this terrible affair, a secret
passage would be very useful in smuggling, and would explain how all
your precautions have been useless. And who would be more likely to
know about a secret passage in the Guildhall than Endymion Leer!"

"By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" exclaimed Master Nathaniel excitedly, "I
shouldn't be surprised if you were right, Marigold. You've got a head
on your shoulders with something in it more useful than porridge!"

And Dame Marigold gave a little complacent smile.

Then he sprang from his chair, "I'm off to tell Ambrose!" he cried
eagerly.

But would he be able to convince the slow and obstinate mind of Master
Ambrose? Mere suspicions are hard to communicate. They are rather like
the wines that will not travel, and have to be drunk on the spot.

At any rate, he could but try.

"Have you ever had a vision of Duke Aubrey, Ambrose?" he cried,
bursting into his friend's pipe-room.

Master Ambrose frowned with annoyance. "What are you driving at, Nat?"
he said, huffily.

"Answer my question. I'm not chaffing you, I'm in deadly earnest. Have
you ever had a vision of Duke Aubrey?"

Master Ambrose moved uneasily in his chair. He was far from proud of
that vision of his. "Well," he said, gruffly, "I suppose one might call
it that. It was at the Academy--the day that wretched girl of mine ran
away. And I was so upset that there was some excuse for what you call
visions."

"And did you tell anyone about it?"

"Not I!" said Master Ambrose emphatically; then he caught himself up
and added, "Oh! yes I believe I did though. I mentioned it to that
spiteful little quack, Endymion Leer. I'm sure I wish I hadn't. Toasted
Cheese! What's the matter now, Nat?"

For Master Nathaniel was actually cutting a caper of triumph and glee.

"I was right! I was right!" he cried joyfully, so elated by his own
acumen that for the moment his anxiety was forgotten.

"Read that, Ambrose," and he eagerly thrust into his hands Luke
Hempen's letter.

"Humph!" said Master Ambrose when he had finished it. "Well, what are
you so pleased about?"

"Don't you see, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently. "That
mysterious fellow in the cloak must be Endymion Leer ... nobody else
knows about your vision."

"Oh, yes, Nat, blunt though my wits may be I see that. But I fail to
see how the knowledge helps us in any way." Then Master Nathaniel told
him about Dame Marigold's theories and discoveries.

Master Ambrose hummed and hawed, and talked about women's reasoning,
and rash conclusions. But perhaps he was more impressed, really, than
he chose to let Master Nathaniel see. At any rate he grudgingly agreed
to go with him by night to the Guildhall and investigate the hollow
panel. And, from Master Ambrose, this was a great concession; for it
was not the sort of escapade that suited his dignity.

"Hurrah, Ambrose!" shouted Master Nathaniel. "And I'm ready to bet a
Moongrass cheese against a flask of your best flower-in-amber that
we'll find that rascally quack at the bottom of it all!"

"You'd always a wonderful eye for a bargain, Nat," said Master Ambrose
with a grim chuckle. "Do you remember, when we were youngsters, how you
got my pedigree pup out of me for a stuffed pheasant, so moth-eaten
that it had scarcely a feather to its name, and, let me see, what else?
I think there was a half a packet of mouldy sugar-candy...."

"And I threw in a broken musical-box whose works used to go queer in
the middle of 'To War, Bold Sons of Dorimare,' and burr and buzz like
a drunk cockchafer," put in Master Nathaniel proudly. "It was quite
fair--quantity for quality."




                             CHAPTER XIII

                   WHAT MASTER NATHANIEL AND MASTER
                    AMBROSE FOUND IN THE GUILDHALL


Master Nathaniel was much too restless and anxious to explore the
Guildhall until the groom returned whom he had sent with the letter to
Luke Hempen.

But he must have taken the order to ride night and day literally--in
so short a time was he back again in Lud. Master Nathaniel was, of
course, enchanted by his despatch, though he was unable to elicit from
him any detailed answers to his eager questions about Ranulph. But it
was everything to know that the boy was well and happy, and it was
but natural that the fellow should be bashful and tongue-tied in the
presence of his master.

But the groom had not, as a matter of fact, come within twenty miles of
the widow Gibberty's farm.

In a road-side tavern he had fallen in with a red-haired youth, who had
treated him to glass upon glass of an extremely intoxicating wine; and,
in consequence, he had spent the night and a considerable portion of
the following morning sound asleep on the floor of the tavern.

When he awoke, he was horrified to discover how much time he had
wasted. But his mind was set at rest on the innkeeper's giving him
a letter from the red-haired youth, to say that he deeply regretted
having been the indirect cause of delaying a messenger sent on pressing
business by the High Seneschal (in his cup the groom had boasted of the
importance of his errand), and had, in consequence, ventured to possess
himself of the letter, which he guaranteed to deliver at the address
on the wrapper as soon, or sooner, as the messenger could have done
himself.

The groom was greatly relieved. He had not been long in Master
Nathaniel's service. It was after Yule-tide he had entered it.

       *       *       *       *       *

So it was with a heart relieved from all fears for Ranulph and free
to throb like a schoolboy's with the lust of adventure that Master
Nathaniel met Master Ambrose on the night of the full moon at the
splendid carved doors of the Guildhall.

"I say, Ambrose," he whispered, "I feel as if we were lads again, and
off to rob an orchard!"

Master Ambrose snorted. He was determined, at all costs, to do his
duty, but it annoyed him that his duty should be regarded in the light
of a boyish escapade.

The great doors creaked back on their hinges. Shutting them as quietly
as they could, they tip-toed up the spiral staircase and along the
corridor described by Dame Marigold: whenever a board creaked under
their heavy steps, one inwardly cursing the other for daring to be so
stout and unwieldy.

All round them was darkness, except for the little trickles of light
cast before them by their two lanthorns.

A house with old furniture has no need of guests to be haunted. As
we have seen, Master Nathaniel was very sensitive to the silent
things--stars, houses, trees; and often in his pipe-room, after the
candles had been lit, he would sit staring at the bookshelves, the
chairs, his father's portrait--even at his red umbrella standing up in
the corner, with as great a sense of awe as if he had been a star-gazer.

But that night, the brooding invisible presences of the carved panels,
the storied tapestries, affected even the hard-headed Master Ambrose.
It was as if that silent population was drawing him, by an irresistible
magnetism, into the zone of its influence.

If only they would speak, or begin to move about--those silent rooted
things! It was like walking through a wood by moonlight.

Then Master Nathaniel stood still.

"This, I think, must roughly be the spot where Marigold found the
hollow panel," he whispered, and began tapping cautiously along the
wainscotting.

A few minutes later, he said in an excited whisper, "Ambrose! Ambrose!
I've got it. Hark! You can hear, can't you? It's as hollow as a drum."

"Suffering Cats! I believe you're right," whispered back Master
Ambrose, beginning, in spite of himself, to be a little infected with
Nat's absurd excitement.

And then, yielding to pressure, the panel slid back, and by the light
of their lanthorns they could see a twisting staircase.

For a few seconds they gazed at each other in silent triumph. Then
Master Nathaniel chuckled, and said, "Well, here goes--down with our
buckets into the well! And may we draw up something better than an
old shoe or a rotten walnut!" and straightway he began to descend the
stairs, Master Ambrose valiantly following him.

The stairs went twisting down, down--into the very bowels of the earth,
it seemed. But at long last they found themselves in what looked like a
long tunnel.

"Tally ho! Tally ho!" whispered Master Nathaniel, laughing for sheer
joy of adventure, "take it at a gallop, Brosie; it may lead to an open
glade ... and the deer at bay!"

And digging him in the ribs, he added, "Better sport than moth hunting,
eh?" which showed the completeness of their reconciliation.

Nevertheless, it was very slowly, and feeling each step, that they
groped their way along the tunnel.

After what seemed a very long time Master Nathaniel halted, and
whispered over his shoulder, "Here we are. There's a door ... oh,
thunder and confusion on it for ever! It's locked."

And, beside himself with irritation at this unlooked-for obstacle, he
began to batter and kick at the door, like one demented.

He paused a minute for breath, and from the inside could be heard a
shrill female voice demanding the pass-word.

"Pass-word?" bellowed back Master Nathaniel, "by the Sun, Moon and
Stars and the Golden Apples of the West, what...."

But before he could finish his sentence, the door was opened from the
other side, and they marched into a low, square room, which was lit by
one lamp swinging by a chain from the ceiling--for which there seemed
but little need, for a light more brilliant than that of any lamp, and
yet as soft as moonlight, seemed to issue from the marvelous tapestries
that hung on the walls.

They were dumb with amazement. This was as different from all the other
tapestry they had ever seen as is an apple-tree in full blossom against
a turquoise sky in May to the same tree in November, when only a few
red leaves still cling to its branches, and the sky is leaden. Oh,
those blues, and pinks, and brilliant greens! In what miraculous dyes
had the silks been dipped?

As to the subjects, they were those familiar to every
Dorimarite--hunting scenes, fugitives chased by the moon, shepherds
and shepherdesses tending their azure sheep. But, depicted in these
brilliant hues, they were like the ashes of the past, suddenly, under
one's very eyes, breaking into flame. Heigh-presto! The men and women
of a vanished age, noisy, gaudy, dominant, are flooding the streets,
and driving the living before them like dead leaves.

And what was this lying in heaps on the floor? Pearls and sapphires,
and monstrous rubies? Or windfalls of fruit, marvellous fruit, fallen
from the trees depicted on the tapestry?

Then, as their eyes grew accustomed to all the brilliance, the two
friends began to get their bearings; there could be no doubt as to the
nature of that fruit lying on the floor. It was fairy fruit, or their
names were not respectively Chanticleer and Honeysuckle.

And, to their amazement, the guardian of this strange treasure was none
other than their old acquaintance Mother Tibbs.

Her clear, child-like eyes that shone like lamps out of her seared
weather-beaten face, were gazing at them in a sort of mild surprise.

"If it isn't Master Hyacinth and Master Josiah!" she exclaimed, adding,
with her gay, young laugh, "to think of their knowing the pass-word!"

Then she peered anxiously into their faces: "Are your stockings wearing
well yonder? The last pair I washed for you didn't take the soap as
they should. Marching down the Milky Way, and tripping it beyond the
moon, is hard on stockings."

Clearly she took them for their own fathers.

Meanwhile, Master Ambrose was drawing in his breath, with a noise as
if he were eating soup, and creasing his double chins--sure signs, to
anyone who had seen him on the Bench, that he was getting ready to
hector.

But Master Nathaniel gave him a little warning nudge, and said
cordially to their hostess, "Why, our stockings, and boots too, are
doing very nicely, thank you. So you didn't expect us to know the
pass-word, eh? Well, well, perhaps we know more than you think," then,
under his breath to Master Ambrose, "By my Great-aunt's Rump, Ambrose,
what was the pass-word?"

Then turning again to Mother Tibbs, who was slightly swaying from her
hips, as if in time to some jig, which she alone could hear, he said,
"You've got some fine tapestry. I don't believe I've ever seen finer!"

She smiled, and then coming close up to him, said in a low voice,
"Does your Worship know what makes it so fine? No? Why, it's the fairy
fruit!" and she nodded her head mysteriously, several times.

Master Ambrose gave a sort of low growl of rage, but again Master
Nathaniel shot him a warning look, and said in a voice of polite
interest, "Indeed! Indeed! And where, may I ask, does the ... er ...
fruit come from?"

She laughed merrily, "Why, the gentlemen bring it! All the pretty
gentlemen, dressed in green, with their knots of ribands, crowding down
in the sunrise from their ships with the scarlet sails to suck the
golden apricocks, when all in Lud are fast asleep! And then the cock
says Cockadoodledoo! Cockadoodledooooo!" and her voice trailed off,
far-away and lonely, suggesting, somehow, the first glimmer of dawn on
ghostly hayricks.

"And I'll tell you something, Master Nat Cock o' the Roost," she went
on, smiling mysteriously, and coming close up to him, "you'll soon be
dead!"

Then she stepped back, smiling and nodding encouragingly, as if to say,
"There's a pretty present I've given you! Take care of it."

"And as for Mother Tibbs," she went on triumphantly, "she'll soon be a
fine lady, like the wives of the Senators, dancing all night under the
moon! The gentlemen have promised."

Master Ambrose gave a snort of impatience, but Master Nathaniel said
with a good-humoured laugh, "So that's how you think the wives of the
Senators spend their time, eh? I'm afraid they've other things to do.
And as to yourself, aren't you getting too old for dancing?"

A slight shadow passed across her clear eyes. Then she tossed her head
with the noble gesture of a wild creature, and cried, "No! No! As long
as my heart dances my feet will too. And nobody will grow old when the
Duke comes back."

But Master Ambrose could contain himself no longer. He knew only too
well Nat's love of listening to long rambling talk--especially when
there happened to be some serious business on hand.

"Come, come," he cried in a stern voice, "in spite of being
crack-brained, my good woman, you may soon find yourself dancing to
another tune. Unless you tell us in double quick time who exactly these
gentlemen are, and who it was that put you on guard here, and who
brings that filthy fruit, and who takes it away, we will ... why, we
will cut the fiddle strings that you dance to!"

This threat was a subconscious echo of the last words he had heard
spoken by Moonlove. Its effect was instantaneous.

"Cut the fiddle strings! Cut the fiddle strings!" she wailed; adding
coaxingly, "No, no, pretty master, you would never do that! Would he
now?" and she turned appealingly to Master Nathaniel. "It would be
like taking away the poor man's strawberries. The Senator has peaches
and roasted swans and peacock's hearts, and a fine coach to drive in,
and a feather bed to lie late in of a morning. And the poor man has
black bread and baked haws, and work ... but in the summer he has
strawberries and tunes to dance to. No, no, you would never cut the
fiddle strings!"

Master Nathaniel felt a lump in his throat. But Master Ambrose was
inexorable: "Yes, of course I would!" he blustered; "I'd cut the
strings of every fiddle in Lud. And I will, too, unless you tell us
what we want to know. Come, Mother Tibbs, speak out--I'm a man of my
word."

She gazed at him beseechingly, and then a look of innocent cunning
crept into her candid eyes and she placed a finger on her lips, then
nodded her head several times and said in a mysterious whisper,
"If you'll promise not to cut the fiddle strings I'll show you the
prettiest sight in the world--the sturdy dead lads in the Fields of
Grammary hoisting their own coffins on their shoulders, and tripping
it over the daisies. Come!" and she darted to the side of the wall,
drew aside the tapestry and revealed to them another secret door. She
pressed some spring, it flew open disclosing another dark tunnel.

"Follow me, pretty masters," she cried.

"There's nothing to be done," whispered Master Nathaniel, "but to
humour her. She may have something of real value to show us."

Master Ambrose muttered something about a couple of lunatics and
not having left his fireside to waste the night in indulging their
fantasies; but all the same he followed Master Nathaniel, and the
second secret door shut behind them with a sharp click.

"Phew!" said Master Nathaniel: "Phew!" puffed Master Ambrose, as they
pounded laboriously along the passage behind their light-footed guide.

Then they began to ascend a flight of stairs, which seemed
interminable, and finally fell forward with a lurch on to their knees,
and again there was a click of something shutting behind them.

They groaned and cursed and rubbed their knees and demanded angrily to
what unholy place she had been pleased to lead them.

But she clapped her hands gleefully, "Don't you know, pretty masters?
Why, you're where the dead cocks roost! You've come back to your own
snug cottage, Master Josiah Chanticleer. Take your lanthorn and look
round you."

This Master Nathaniel proceeded to do, and slowly it dawned on him
where they were.

"By the Golden Apples of the West, Ambrose!" he exclaimed, "if we're
not in my own chapel!"

And, sure enough, the rays of the lanthorn revealed the shelves lined
with porphyry coffins, the richly wrought marble ceiling, and the
mosaic floor of the home of the dead Chanticleers.

"Toasted Cheese!" muttered Master Ambrose in amazement.

"It must have two doors, though I never knew it," said Master
Nathaniel. "A secret door opening on to that hidden flight of steps.
There are evidently people who know more about my chapel than I do
myself," and suddenly he remembered how the other day he had found its
door ajar.

Mother Tibbs laughed gleefully at their surprise, and then, placing one
finger on her lips, she beckoned them to follow her; and they tip-toed
after her out into the moonlit Fields of Grammary, where she signed to
them to hide themselves from view behind the big trunk of a sycamore.

The dew, like lunar daisies, lay thickly on the grassy graves. The
marble statues of the departed seemed to flicker into smiles under the
rays of the full moon; and, not far from the sycamore, two men were
digging up a newly-made grave. One of them was a brawny fellow with
the gold rings in his ears worn by sailors, the other was--Endymion
Leer.

Master Nathaniel shot a look of triumph at Master Ambrose, and
whispered, "A cask of flower-in-amber, Brosie!"

For some time the two men dug on in silence, and then they pulled out
three large coffins and laid them on the grass.

"We'd better have a peep, Sebastian," said Endymion Leer, "to see that
the goods have been delivered all right. We're dealing with tricky
customers."

The young man, addressed as Sebastian, grinned, and taking a clasp
knife from his belt, began to prise open one of the coffins.

As he inserted the blade into the lid, our two friends behind the
sycamore could not help shuddering; nor was their horror lessened by
the demeanor of Mother Tibbs, for she half closed her eyes, and drew
the air in sharply through her nostrils, as if in expectation of some
delicious perfume.

But when the lid was finally opened and the contents of the coffin
exposed to view, they proved not to be cere cloths and hideousness,
but--closely packed fairy fruit.

"Toasted Cheese!" muttered Master Ambrose; "Busty Bridget!" muttered
Master Nathaniel.

"Yes, that's the goods all right," said Endymion Leer, "and we'll take
the other two on trust. Shut it up again, and help to hoist it on to my
shoulder, and do you follow with the other two--we'll take them right
away to the tapestry-room. We're having a council there at midnight,
and it's getting on for that now."

Choosing a moment when the backs of the two smugglers were turned,
Mother Tibbs darted out from behind the sycamore, and shot back into
the chapel, evidently afraid of not being found at her post. And she
was shortly followed by Endymion Leer and his companion.

At first, the sensations of Master Nathaniel and Master Ambrose were
too complicated to be expressed in words, and they merely stared at
each other, with round eyes. Then a slow smile broke over Master
Nathaniel's face, "No Moongrass cheese for you this time, Brosie," he
said. "Who was right, you or me?"

"By the Milky Way, it was you, Nat!" cried Master Ambrose, for once, in
a voice of real excitement. "The rascal! The unmitigated rogue! So it's
him, is it, we parents have to thank for what has happened! But he'll
hang for it, he'll hang for it--though we have to change the whole
constitution of Dorimare! The blackguard!"

"Into the town probably as a hearse," Master Nathaniel was saying
thoughtfully, "then buried here, then down through my chapel into the
secret room in the Guildhall, whence, I suppose, they distribute it by
degrees. It's quite clear now how the stuff gets into Lud. All that
remains to clear up is how it gets past our Yeomen on the border ...
but what's taken you, Ambrose?"

For Master Ambrose was simply shaking with laughter; and he did not
laugh easily.

"Do the dead bleed?" he was repeating between his guffaws; "why, Nat,
it's the best joke I've heard these twenty years!"

And when he had sufficiently recovered he told Master Nathaniel about
the red juice oozing out of the coffin, which he had taken for blood,
and how he had frightened Endymion Leer out of his wits by asking him
about it.

"When, of course, it was a bogus funeral, and what I had seen was the
juice of that damned fruit!" and again he was seized with paroxysms of
laughter.

But Master Nathaniel merely gave an absent smile; there was something
vaguely reminiscent in that idea of the dead bleeding--something he
had recently read or heard; but, for the moment, he could not remember
where.

In the meantime, Master Ambrose had recovered his gravity. "Come,
come," he cried briskly, "we've not a moment to lose. We must be off at
once to Mumchance, rouse him and a couple of his men, and be back in a
twinkling to that tapestry-room, to take them red-handed."

"You're right, Ambrose! You're right!" cried Master Nathaniel. And off
they went at a sharp jog trot, out at the gate, down the hill, and into
the sleeping town.

They had no difficulty in rousing Mumchance and in firing him with
their own enthusiasm. As they told him in a few hurried words what
they had discovered, his respect for the Senate went up in leaps and
bounds--though he could scarcely credit his ears when he learned of the
part played in the evening's transactions by Endymion Leer.

"To think of that! To think of that!" he kept repeating, "and me who's
always been so friendly with the Doctor, too!"

As a matter of fact, Endymion Leer had for some months been the
recipient of Mumchance's complaints with regard to the slackness
and inefficiency of the Senate; and, in his turn, had succeeded in
infecting the good Captain's mind with sinister suspicions against
Master Nathaniel. And there was a twinge of conscience for disloyalty
to his master, the Mayor, behind the respectful heartiness of his tones
as he cried, "Very good, your Worship. It's Green and Juniper what are
on duty tonight. I'll go and fetch them from the guard-room, and we
should be able to settle the rascals nicely."

As the clocks in Lud-in-the-Mist were striking midnight the five of
them were stepping cautiously along the corridors of the Guildhall.
They had no difficulty in finding the hollow panel, and having pressed
the spring, they made their way along the secret passage.

"Ambrose!" whispered Master Nathaniel flurriedly, "what was it exactly
that I said that turned out to be the pass-word? What with the
excitement and all I've clean forgotten it."

Master Ambrose shook his head. "I haven't the slightest idea," he
whispered back. "To tell you the truth, I couldn't make out what she
meant about your having used a pass-word. All I can remember your
saying was 'Toasted Cheese!' or 'Busty Bridget!'--or something equally
elegant."

Now they had got to the door, locked from the inside as before.

"Look here, Mumchance," said Master Nathaniel, ruefully, "we can't
remember the pass-word, and they won't open without it."

Mumchance smiled indulgently, "Your Worship need not worry about the
pass-word," he said. "I expect we'll be able to find another that will
do as well ... eh, Green and Juniper? But perhaps first--just to be in
order--your Worship would knock and command them to open."

Master Nathaniel felt absurdly disappointed. For one thing, it shocked
his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to
violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum
expenditure of energy. Besides, he had so looked forward to showing off
his new little trick!

So it was with a rueful sigh that he gave a loud rat-a-tat-tat on the
door, calling out, "Open in the name of the Law!"

These words, of course, produced no response, and Mumchance, with the
help of the other four, proceeded to put into effect his own pass-word,
which was to shove with all their might against the door, two of the
hinges of which he had noticed looked rusty.

It began to creak, and then to crack, and finally they burst into ...
an empty room. No strange fruit lay heaped on the floor; nothing hung
on the walls but a few pieces of faded moth-eaten tapestry. It looked
like a room that had not been entered for centuries.

When they had recovered from their first surprise, Master Nathaniel
cried fiercely, "They must have got wind that we were after them, and
given us the slip, taking their loads of filthy fruits with them,
I'll...."

"There's been no fruit here, your Worship," said Mumchance in a voice
that he was trying hard to keep respectful; "it always leaves stains,
and there ain't any stains here."

And he couldn't resist adding, with a wink to Juniper and Green, "I
daresay it's your Worship's having forgotten the pass-word that's done
it!" And Juniper and Green grinned from ear to ear.

Master Nathaniel was too chagrined to heed this insolence; but Master
Ambrose--ever the champion of dignity in distress--gave Mumchance such
a look that he hung his head and humbly hoped that his Worship would
forgive his little joke.




                              CHAPTER XIV

                      DEAD IN THE EYE OF THE LAW


The following morning Master Nathaniel woke late, and got up on
the wrong side of his bed, which, in view of the humiliation and
disappointment of the previous night, was, perhaps, pardonable.

His temper was not improved by Dame Marigold's coming in while he was
dressing to complain of his having smoked green shag elsewhere than in
the pipe-room: "And you know how it always upsets me, Nat. I'm feeling
quite squeamish this morning, the whole house reeks of it ... Nat! you
know you are an old blackguard!" and she dimpled and shook her finger
at him, as an emollient to the slight shrewishness of her tone.

"Well, you're wrong for once," snapped Master Nathaniel; "I haven't
smoked shag even in the pipe-room for at least a week--so there! Upon
my word, Marigold, your nose is a nuisance--you should keep it in a
bag, like a horse!"

But though Master Nathaniel might be in a bad temper he was far from
being daunted by what had happened the night before.

He shut himself into the pipe-room and wrote busily for about a quarter
of an hour; then he paced up and down committing what he had written
to memory. Then he set out for the daily meeting of the Senate. And
so absorbed was he with the speech he had been preparing that he was
impervious, in the Senators' tiring-room, to the peculiar glances cast
at him by his colleagues.

Once the Senators had donned their robes of office and taken their
places in the magnificent room reserved for their councils, their
whole personality was wont suddenly to alter, and they would cease to
be genial, easy-going merchants who had known each other all their
lives and become grave, formal--even hierophantic, in manner; while
abandoning the careless colloquial diction of every day, they would
adopt the language of their forefathers, forged in more strenuous and
poetic days than the present.

In consequence, the stern look in Master Nathaniel's eye that morning,
when he rose to address his colleagues, the stern tone in which he said
"Senators of Dorimare!" might have heralded nothing more serious than a
suggestion that they should, that year, have geese instead of turkeys
at their public dinner.

But his opening words showed that this was to be no usual speech.

"Senators of Dorimare!" he began, "I am going to ask you this morning
to awake. We have been asleep for many centuries, and the Law has sung
us lullabies. But many of us here have received the accolade of a very
heavy affliction. Has that wakened us? I fear not. The time has come
when it behooves us to look facts in the face--even if those facts bear
a strange likeness to dreams and fancies.

"My friends, the ancient foes of our country are abroad. Tradition says
that the Fairies" (he brought out boldly the horrid word) "fear iron;
and we, the descendants of the merchant-heroes, must still have left in
us some veins of that metal. The time has come to prove it. We stand to
lose everything that makes life pleasant and secure--laughter, sound
sleep, the merriment of fire-sides, the peacefulness of gardens. And if
we cannot bequeath the certainty of these things to our children, what
will boot them their inheritance? It is for us, then, as fathers as
well as citizens, once and for all to uproot this menace, the roots of
which are in the past, the branches of which cast their shadow on the
future.

"I and another of your colleagues have discovered at last who it was
that brought this recent grief and shame upon so many of us. It will
be hard, I fear, to prove his guilt, for he is subtle, stealthy, and
mocking, and, like his invisible allies, his chief weapon is delusion.
I ask you all, then, to parry that weapon with faith and loyalty,
which will make you take the word of old and trusty friends as the
only touchstone of truth. And, after that--I have sometimes thought
that less blame attaches to deluding others than to deluding oneself.
Away, then, with flimsy legal fictions! Let us call things by their
names--not grograine or tuftaffity, but fairy fruit. And if it be
proved that any man has brought such merchandise into Dorimare, let him
hang by his neck till he be dead."

Then Master Nathaniel sat down.

But where was the storm of applause he had expected would greet his
words? Where were the tears, the eager questions, the tokens of deeply
stirred feelings?

Except for Master Ambrose's defiant "Bravos!" his speech was received
in profound silence. The faces all round him were grim and frigid,
with compressed lips and frowning brows--except the portrait of Duke
Aubrey--he, as usual, was faintly smiling.

Then Master Polydore Vigil rose to his feet, and broke the grim silence.

"Senators of Dorimare!" he began, "the eloquent words we have just
listened to from his Worship the Mayor can, strangely enough, serve as
a prelude--a golden prelude to my poor, leaden words. I, too, came here
this morning resolved to bring your attention to legal fictions--which,
sometimes, it may be, have their uses. But perhaps before I say my say,
his Worship will allow the clerk to read us the oldest legal fiction
in our Code. It is to be found in the first volume of the Acts of the
twenty-fifth year of the Republic, Statute 5, chapter 9."

Master Polydore Vigil sat down, and a slow grim smile circulated round
the hall, and then seemed to vanish and subside in the mocking eyes of
Duke Aubrey's portrait.

Master Nathaniel exchanged puzzled glances with Master Ambrose; but
there was nothing for it but to order the clerk to comply with the
wishes of Master Polydore.

So, in a small, high, expressionless voice, which might have been the
voice of the Law herself, the clerk read as follows:

"Further, we ordain that nothing but death alone shall have power to
dismiss the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare
before the five years of his term of office shall fully have expired.
But, the dead, being dumb, feeble, treacherous and given to vanities,
if any Mayor at a time of menace to the safety of the Dorimarites be
held by his colleagues to be any of these things, then let him be
accounted dead in the eye of the Law, and let another be elected in his
stead."




                              CHAPTER XV

                            "HO, HO, HOH!"


The clerk shut the great tome, bowed low, and withdrew to his place;
and an ominous silence reigned in the hall.

Master Nathaniel sat watching the scene with an eye so cold and aloof
that the Eye of the Law itself could surely not have been colder. What
power had delusion or legal fictions against the mysterious impetus
propelling him along the straight white road that led he knew not
whither?

But Master Ambrose sprang up and demanded fiercely that the honourable
Senator would oblige them by an explanation of his offensive
insinuations.

Nothing loth, Master Polydore again rose to his feet, and, pointing a
menacing finger at Master Nathaniel, he said: "His worship the Mayor
has told us of a man stealthy, mocking, and subtle, who has brought
this recent grief and shame upon us. That man is none other than his
Worship the Mayor himself."

Master Ambrose again sprung to his feet, and began angrily to protest,
but Master Nathaniel, ex cathedra, sternly ordered him to be silent and
to sit down.

Master Polydore continued: "He has been dumb, when it was the time
to speak, feeble, when it was the time to act, treacherous, as the
desolate homes of his friends can testify, and given to vanities. Aye,
given to vanities, for what," and he smiled ironically, "but vanity in
a man is too great a love for grograines and tuftaffities and other
costly silks? Therefore, I move that in the eye of the Law he be
accounted dead."

A low murmur of approval surged over the hall.

"Will he deny that he is over fond of silk?"

Master Nathaniel bowed, in token that he did deny it.

Master Polydore asked if he would then be willing to have his house
searched; again Master Nathaniel bowed.

There and then?

And Master Nathaniel bowed again.

So the Senate rose and twenty of the Senators, without removing their
robes, filed out of the Guildhall and marched two and two towards
Master Nathaniel's house.

On the way who should tag himself on to the procession but Endymion
Leer. At this, Master Ambrose completely lost his temper. He would like
to know why this double-dyed villain, this shameless Son of a Fairy,
was putting his rancid nose into the private concerns of the Senate!
But Master Nathaniel cried impatiently, "Oh, let him come, Ambrose, if
he wants to. The more the merrier!"

You can picture the consternation of Dame Marigold when, a few minutes
later, her brother--with a crowd of Senators pressing up behind
him--bade her, with a face of grave compassion, to bring him all the
keys of the house.

They proceeded to make a thorough search, ransacking every cupboard,
chest and bureau. But nowhere did they find so much as an incriminating
pip, so much as a stain of dubious colour.

"Well," began Master Polydore, in a voice of mingled relief and
disappointment, "it seems that our search has been a...."

"Fruitless one, eh?" prompted Endymion Leer, rubbing his hands, and
darting his bright eyes over the assembled faces. "Well, perhaps it
has. Perhaps it has."

They were standing in the hall, quite close to the grandfather's clock,
which was ticking away, as innocent and foolish-looking as a newly-born
lamb.

Endymion Leer walked up to it and gazed at it quizzically, with his
head on one side. Then he tapped its mahogany case--making Dame
Marigold think of what the guardian at the Guildhall had said of his
likeness to a woodpecker.

Then he stood back a few paces and wagged his finger at it in comic
admonition ("Vulgar buffoon!" said Master Ambrose quite audibly), and
then the wag turned to Master Polydore and said, "Just before we go, to
make quite sure, what about having a peep inside this clock?"

Master Polydore had secretly sympathised with Master Ambrose's
ejaculation, and thought that the Doctor, by jesting at such a time,
was showing a deplorable lack of good breeding.

All the same, the Law does not shrink from reducing thoroughness to
absurdity, so he asked Master Nathaniel if he would kindly produce the
key of the clock.

He did so, and the case was opened; Dame Marigold made a grimace and
held her pomander to her nose, and to the general amazement that
foolish, innocent-looking grandfather's clock stood revealed as a
veritable cornucopia of exotic, strangely coloured, sinister-looking
fruits.

Vine-like tendrils, studded with bright, menacing berries were twined
round the pendulum and the chains of the two leaden weights; and at
the bottom of the case stood a gourd of an unknown colour, which had
been scooped hollow and filled with what looked like crimson grapes,
tawny figs, raspberries of an emerald green, and fruits even stranger
than these, and of colour and shape not found in any of the species of
Dorimare.

A murmur of horror and surprise arose from the assembled company. And,
was it from the clock, or down the chimney, or from the ivy peeping in
at the window?--from somewhere quite close came the mocking sound of
"Ho, ho, hoh!"

Of course, before many hours were over the whole of Lud-in-the-Mist was
laughing at the anti-climax to the Mayor's high-falutin' speech that
morning in the Senate. And in the evening he was burned in effigy by
the mob, and among those who danced round the bon-fire were Bawdy Bess
and Mother Tibbs. Though it was doubtful whether Mother Tibbs really
understood what was happening. It was an excuse for dancing, and that
was enough for her.

It was reported, too, that the Yeomanry and their Captain, though not
actually taking part in these demonstrations, stood looking on with
indulgent smiles.

Among the respectable tradesmen in the far from unsympathetic crowd
of spectators was Ebeneezor Prim the clockmaker. He had, however, not
allowed his two daughters to be there; and they were sitting dully at
home, keeping the supper hot for their father and the black-wigged
apprentice.

But Ebeneezor came back without him, and Rosie and Lettice were too
much in awe of their father to ask any questions. The evening dragged
wearily on--Ebeneezor sat reading _The Good Mayor's Walk Through
Lud-in-the-Mist_ (a didactic and unspeakably dreary poem, dating from
the early days of the Republic), and from time to time he would glance
severely over the top of his spectacles at his daughters, who were
whispering over their tatting, and looking frequently towards the door.

But when they finally went upstairs to bed the apprentice had not yet
come in, and in the privacy of their bedroom the girls admitted to each
other that it was the dullest evening they had spent since his arrival,
early in spring. For it was wonderful what high spirits were concealed
behind that young man's prim exterior.

Why, it was sufficient to enliven even an evening spent in the society
of papa to watch the comical grimaces he pulled behind that gentleman's
respectable back! And it was delicious when the shrill "Ho, ho, hoh!"
would suddenly escape him, and he would instantly snap down on the top
of it his most sanctimonious expression. And then, he seemed to possess
an inexhaustible store of riddles and funny songs, and there was really
no end to the invention and variety of his practical jokes.

The Misses Prim, since their earliest childhood, had craved for a
monkey or a cockatoo, such as sailor brothers or cousins brought to
their friends; their father, however, had always sternly refused to
have any such creature in his house. But the new apprentice had been
ten times more amusing than any monkey or cockatoo that had ever come
from the Cinnamon Isles.

The next morning, as he did not come for his usual early roll and glass
of home-made cordial, the two girls peeped into his room, and found
that his bed had not been slept in; and lying neglected on the floor
was the neat black wig. Nor did he ever come back to claim it. And when
they timidly asked their father what had happened to him, he sternly
forbade them ever again to mention his name, adding, with a mysterious
shake of the head, "For some time I have had my suspicions that he was
not what he appeared."

And then he sighed regretfully, and murmured, "But never before have I
had an apprentice with such wonderfully skillful fingers."

As for Master Nathaniel--while he was being burned in effigy in the
market-place, he was sitting comfortably in his pipe-room, deep in an
in-folio.

He had suddenly remembered that it was something in the widow
Gibberty's trial that was connected in his mind with Master Ambrose's
joke about the dead bleeding. And he was re-reading that trial--this
time with absorption.

As he read, the colours of his mental landscape were gradually
modified, as the colours of a real landscape are modified according to
the position of the sun. But if a white road cuts through the landscape
it still gleams white--even when the moon has taken the place of the
sun. And a straight road still gleamed white across the landscape of
Master Nathaniel's mind.




                              CHAPTER XVI

                      THE WIDOW GIBBERTY'S TRIAL


The following day, with all the masquerading that the Law delights in,
Master Nathaniel was pronounced in the Senate to be dead. His robes
of office were taken off him, and they were donned by Master Polydore
Vigil, the new Mayor. As for Master Nathaniel--was wrapped in a shroud,
laid on a bier and carried to his home by four of the Senators, the
populace lining the streets and greeting the mock obsequies with
catcalls and shouts of triumph.

But the ceremony over, when Master Ambrose, boiling with indignation at
the outrage, came to visit his friend, he found a very cheerful corpse
who greeted him with a smack on the back and a cry of "Never say die,
Brosie! I've something here that should interest you," and he thrust
into his hand an open in-folio.

"What's this?" asked the bewildered Master Ambrose.

There was a certain solemnity in Master Nathaniel's voice as he
replied, "It's the Law, Ambrose--the homoeopathic antidote that our
forefathers discovered to delusion. Sit down this very minute and read
that trial through."

As Master Ambrose knew well, it was useless trying to talk to Nat about
one thing when his mind was filled with another. Besides, his curiosity
was aroused, for he had come to realize that Nat's butterfly whims were
sometimes the disguise of shrewd and useful intuitions. So, through
force of long habit, growling out a protest about this being no time
for tomfoolery and rubbish, he settled down to read the volume at the
place where Master Nathaniel had opened it, namely, at the account of
the trial of the widow Gibberty for the murder of her husband.

The plaintiff, as we have seen, was a labourer, Diggory Carp by name,
who had been in the employ of the late farmer. He said he had been
suddenly dismissed by the defendant just after harvest, when it was not
easy to find another job.

No reason was given for his dismissal, so Diggory went to the farmer
himself, who, he said, had always been a kind and just master, to beg
that he might be kept on. The farmer practically admitted that there
was no reason for his dismissal except that the mistress had taken a
dislike to him. "Women are kittle cattle, Diggory," he had said, with
an apologetic laugh, "and it's best humouring them. Though it's hard
on the folks they get their knife into. So I fear it will be best for
every one concerned that you should leave my service, Diggory."

But he gave him a handful of florins over and above his wages, and
told him he might take a sack of lentils from the granary--if he were
careful that the mistress did not get wind of it.

Now, Diggory had a shrewd suspicion as to why the defendant wanted to
get rid of him. Though she was little more than a girl--she was the
farmer's second wife and more like his daughter's elder sister than her
stepdame--she had the reputation of being as staid and sensible as a
woman of forty. But Diggory knew better. He had discovered that she had
a lover. One evening he had come on her in the orchard, lying in the
arms of a young foreigner, called Christopher Pugwalker, a herbalist,
who had first appeared in the neighbourhood just before the great
drought.

"And from that time on," said Diggory, "she had got her knife into me,
and everything I did was wrong. And I believe she hadn't a moment's
peace till she'd got rid of me. Though, if she'd only known, I was no
blab, and not one for blaming young blood and a wife half the age of
her husband."

So he and his wife and his children were turned out on the world.

The first night they camped out in a field, and when they had lighted
a fire Diggory opened the sack that, with the farmer's permission, he
had taken from the granary, in order that his wife might make them some
lentil soup for supper. But lo and behold! instead of lentils the sack
contained fruit--fruit that Diggory Carp, as a west countryman, born
and bred near the Elfin Marches, recognised at the first glance to be
of a kind that he would not dream of touching himself or of allowing
his wife and children to touch ... the sack, in fact, contained fairy
fruit. So they buried it in the field, for, as Diggory said, "Though
the stuff be poison for men, they do say as how it's a mighty fine
manure for the crops."

For a week or so they tramped the country, living from hand to mouth.
Sometimes Diggory would earn a little by doing odd jobs for the
farmers, or by playing the fiddle at village weddings, for Diggory, it
would seem, was a noted fiddler.

But with the coming of winter they began to feel the pinch of poverty,
and his wife bethought her of the trade of basket-making she had
learned in her youth; and, as they were camping at the time at the
place where grew the best osiers for the purpose, she determined to
see if her fingers had retained their old cunning. As the sap of these
particular osiers was a deadly poison, she would not allow the children
to help her to gather them.

So she set to and make wicker urns in which the farmers' wives could
keep their grain in winter, and baskets of fancy shapes for lads to
give to their sweethearts to hold their ribbands and fal-lals. The
children peddled them about the countryside, and thus they managed to
keep the pot boiling.

The following summer, shortly before harvest, Diggory's eldest girl
went to try and sell some baskets in the village of Swan. There she
met the defendant, whom she asked to look at her wares, relying on not
being recognised as a daughter of Diggory's, through having been in
service at another farm when her father was working at the Gibbertys'.

The defendant seemed pleased with the baskets, bought two or three, and
got into talk with the girl about the basket-making industry, in the
course of which she learned that the best osiers for the purpose were
very poisonous. Finally she asked the girl to bring her a bundle of the
osiers in question, as making baskets, she said, would make a pleasant
variety, of an evening, from the eternal spinning; and in the course of
a few days the girl brought her, as requested, a bundle of the osiers,
and was well paid for them.

Not long afterwards came the news that the farmer Gibberty had died
suddenly in the night, and with it was wafted the rumour of foul play.
There was an old custom in that part of the country that whenever there
was a death in the house all the inmates should march in procession
past the corpse. It was really a sort of primitive inquest, for it
was believed that in the case of foul play the corpse would bleed at
the nose as the murderer passed it. This custom, said Diggory, was
universally observed in that part of the country, even in cases as free
from all suspicion as those of women dying in child-bed. And in all the
taverns and farm-houses of the neighbourhood it was being whispered
that the corpse of the farmer Gibberty, on the defendant's walking past
it, had bled copiously, and when Christopher Pugwalker's turn had come
to pass it, it had bled a second time.

And knowing what he did, Diggory Carp came to feel that it was his duty
to lodge an accusation against the widow.

His two reasons, then, for thinking her guilty were that the corpse
had bled when she passed it, and that she had bought from his daughter
osiers the sap of which was poisonous. The motive for the crime he
found in her having a young lover, whom she wished should stand in her
dead husband's shoes. It was useless for the defendant to deny that
Pugwalker was her lover--the fact had for months been the scandal of
the neighbourhood, and she had finally lost all sense of shame and had
actually had him to lodge in the farm for several months before her
husband's death. This was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by the
witnesses summoned by Diggory.

As for the bleeding of the corpse: vulgar superstitions did not fall
within the cognizance of the Law, and the widow ignored it in her
defence. However, with regard to that other vulgar superstition to
which the plaintiff had alluded, fairy fruit, she admitted, in passing,
that very much against her wishes her late husband had sometimes used
it as manure--though she had never discovered how he procured it.

As to the osiers--she allowed that she had bought a bundle from the
plaintiff's daughter; but that it was for no sinister purpose she was
able conclusively to prove. For she summoned various witnesses--among
others the midwife from the village, who was always called in in cases
of sickness--who had been present during the last hours of the farmer,
and who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who
all of them swore that his death had been a painless one. And various
physicians, who were summoned as expert witnesses, all maintained that
the victim of the poisonous sap of osiers always died in agony.

Then she turned the tables on the plaintiff. She proved that Diggory's
dismissal had been neither sudden nor unjust; for, owing to his
thieving propensities, he had often been threatened with it by her late
husband, and several of the farm-servants testified to the truth of her
words.

As to the handful of florins and the sack of lentils, all she could say
was that it was not like the farmer to load a dishonest servant with
presents. But nothing had been said about two sacks of corn, a pig,
and a valuable hen and her brood, which had disappeared simultaneously
with the departure of the plaintiff. Her husband, she said, had been
very angry about it, and had wanted to have Diggory pursued and clapped
into gaol; but she had persuaded him to be merciful. The long and the
short of it was that the widow left the court without a stain on her
character, and that a ten years' sentence for theft was passed on
Diggory.

As for Christopher Pugwalker, he had disappeared shortly before the
trial, and the widow denied all knowledge of his whereabouts.




                             CHAPTER XVII

                           THE WORLD-IN-LAW


"Well," said Master Ambrose, as he laid down the volume, "the woman was
clearly as innocent as you are. And I should very much like to know
what bearing the case has upon the present crisis."

Master Nathaniel drew up his chair close to his friend's and said in
a low voice, as if he feared an invisible listener, "Ambrose, do you
remember how you startled Leer with your question as to whether the
dead could bleed?"

"I'm not likely to forget it," said Master Ambrose, with an angry
laugh. "That was all explained the night before last in the Fields of
Grammary."

"Yes, but supposing he had been thinking of something else--not of
fairy fruit. What if Endymion Leer and Christopher Pugwalker were one
and the same?"

"Well, I don't see the slightest reason for thinking so. But even if
they were--what good would it do us?"

"Because I have an instinct that hidden in that old case is a good
honest hempen rope, too strong for all the gossamer threads of Fairie."

"You mean that we can get the rascal hanged? By the Harvest of Souls,
you're an optimist, Nat. If ever a fellow died quietly in his bed
from natural causes, it was that fellow Gibberty. But, for all that,
there's no reason to lie down under the outrageous practical joke that
was played off on you yesterday. By my Great-aunt's Rump, I thought
Polydore and the rest of them had more sense than to be taken in by
such tomfoolery. But the truth of it is that that villain Leer can make
them believe what he chooses."

"Exactly!" cried Master Nathaniel eagerly. "The original meaning of
Fairie is supposed to be delusion. They can juggle with appearances--we
have seen them at it in that tapestry-room. How are we to make any
stand against an enemy with such powers behind him?"

"You don't mean that you are going to lie down under it, Nat?" cried
Master Ambrose indignantly.

"Not ultimately--but for a time I must be like the mole and work in
secret. And now I want you to listen to me, Ambrose, and not scold me
for what you call wandering from the point and being prosy. Will you
listen to me?"

"Well, yes, if you've got anything sensible to say," said Master
Ambrose grudgingly.

"Here goes, then! What do you suppose the Law was invented for,
Ambrose?"

"What was the Law invented for? What are you driving at, Nat? I suppose
it was invented to prevent rapine, and robbery, and murder, and all
that sort of thing."

"But you remember what my father said about the Law being man's
substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be
shadowy cheats--delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he
creates for himself another form of delusion--the world-in-law, subject
to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to
his heart's content, and says, 'If I choose I shall make a man old
enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into
silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself,
and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it--the
man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as
he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the
fairies."

For the life of him, Master Ambrose could not suppress a grunt of
impatience. But he was a man of his word, so he refrained from further
interruption.

"Beyond the borders of the world-in-law," continued Master Nathaniel,
"that is to say, the world as we choose for our convenience that it
should appear, there is delusion--or reality. And the people who live
there are as safe from our clutches as if they lived on another planet.
No, Ambrose, you needn't purse up your lips like that ... everything
I've been saying is to be found more or less in my father's writings,
and nobody ever thought him fantastic--probably because they never took
the trouble to read his books. I must confess I never did myself till
just the other day."

As he spoke he glanced up at the portrait of the late Master Josiah,
taken in the very arm-chair he, Nathaniel, was at that very moment
sitting in, and following his son's every movement with a sly, legal
smile. No, there had certainly been nothing fantastic about Master
Josiah.

And yet ... there was something not altogether human about these bright
bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah also heard
the Note ... and fled from it to the world-in-law?

Then he went on: "But what I'm going to say now is my own idea.
Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the planet
that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say, the
world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? No, no, Ambrose! You
promised to hear me out!" (For it was clear that Master Ambrose was
getting restive.) "Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the other,
but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the terms of
the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one planet is a
spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That what in the
world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the
world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood? In short, that
Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher Pugwalker?"

Master Ambrose's impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly
feared that Nathaniel's brain had been unhinged by his recent
misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: "I believe you think
I've gone off my head, Brosie--but I've not, I promise you. In plain
language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of
something in the eye of the Law he'll go on triumphing over us and
laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children
till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral
procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It's
our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might as
soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage."

"Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn't be too
difficult," said Master Ambrose drily. "You seem to consider that in
what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts--launch
a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular
convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker."

Master Nathaniel laughed: "I'm in hopes we can prove it without legal
fiction," he said. "The widow Gibberty's trial took place thirty-six
years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has
discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to
understand that he did not arrive till considerably later ... and the
reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as Leer.
Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty. Pugwalker
was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright you gave him
with your question, 'Do the dead bleed?' Nothing will make me believe
that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and
the coffin with fairy fruit ... he might think of that on second
thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to convince you,
and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I was in the
other--it's our one hope, Ambrose."

"Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more nonsense in
half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I've been coming to the
conclusion that you're not such a fool as you look--and, after all,
in Hempie's old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the
dragon's tail."

Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal
compliment--it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all.

"Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going to set about
launching your legal fiction, eh?"

"Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the
trial--Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any
rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud's no place for me just
now."

Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have
to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this ... this ... this
cobweb of lies and buffoonery and ... well, delusion, if you like? I
can tell you, I haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough
side of my tongue--but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on
them."

"But we'll break the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we'll
break it, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; "we'll dredge the
shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the gallows, or
my name's not Chanticleer!"

"Well," said Master Ambrose, "seeing you've got this bee in your
bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it's the
embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman's
parlour, and now that her affair is settled there's no more use for
it." (The variety of "silk" found in the Academy had finally been
decided to be part "barratine tuftaffity" and part "figured mohair,"
and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) "I told
you how the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious
enough--he thought it was fairy fruit--it seems to take so little to
set your brain romancing there's no telling what you mayn't discover
from it! I'll have it sent over to you tonight."

"You're very kind, Ambrose. I'm sure it will be most valuable," said
Master Nathaniel ironically.

During Miss Primrose's trial the slipper had from time to time been
handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the
slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between
tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague
sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series of
birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience
of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration. He had
little hope of being able to extricate any useful information from that
slipper--still, Ambrose must have his joke.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel rose
to his feet and said, "This may be a long business, Ambrose, and we may
not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we pledge each other in
wild thyme gin?"

"I'm not the man to refuse your wild-thyme gin, Nat. And you don't
often give one a chance of tasting it, you old miser," said Master
Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with facetiousness. When he had
been given a glass filled with the perfumed grass-green syrup, he
raised it, and smiling at Master Nathaniel, began, "Well, Nat...."

"Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a
sudden silly whim that we must should take an oath I must have read
when I was a youngster in some old book ... the words have suddenly
come back to me. They go like this: 'We' (and then we say our own
names), 'Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the
Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes,
that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm
it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor
more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who
rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.' Say it after
me, Ambrose."

"By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have I heard such
fustian!" grumbled Master Ambrose.

But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd ceremony, and
Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do was to humour him, for
who could say what the future held in store and when they might meet
again. So, in a protesting and excessively matter-of-fact voice, he
repeated after him the words of the oath.

When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? For it was the
vow taken by the candidates for initiation into the first degree of the
ancient Mysteries of Dorimare.

Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master Nathaniel was a dead
man.




                             CHAPTER XVIII

                        MISTRESS IVY PEPPERCORN


The tasks assigned to the clerks in Master Nathaniel's counting-house
did not always concern cargoes and tonnage. For instance, once for
two whole days they had not opened a ledger, but had been kept busy,
under their employer's supervision, in cutting out and pinning together
fantastic paper costumes to be worn at Ranulph's birthday party. And
they were quite accustomed to his shutting himself into his private
office, with strict injunctions that he was not to be disturbed, while
he wrote, say, a comic valentine to old Dame Polly Pyepowders, popping
his head frequently round the door to demand their help in finding a
rhyme. So they were not surprised that morning when told to close their
books and to devote their talents to discovering, by whatever means
they chose, whether there were any relations living in Lud of a west
country farmer called Gibberty who had died nearly forty years ago.

Great was Master Nathaniel's satisfaction when one of them returned
from his quest with the information that the late farmer's widowed
daughter, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, had recently bought a small grocer's
shop in Mothgreen, a village that lay a couple of miles beyond the
north gate.

There was no time to be lost, so Master Nathaniel ordered his horse,
put on the suit of fustian he wore for fishing, pulled his hat well
down over his eyes, and set off for Mothgreen.

Once there, he had no difficulty in finding Mistress Ivy's little shop,
and she herself was sitting behind the counter.

She was a comely, apple-cheeked woman of middle age, who looked as
if she would be more in her element among cows and meadows than in a
stuffy little shop, redolent of the various necessities and luxuries of
a village community.

She seemed of a cheerful, chatty disposition, and Master Nathaniel
punctuated his various purchases with quips and cranks and friendly
questions.

By the time she had weighed him out two ounces of snuff and done them
up in a neat little paper poke she had told him that her maiden name
had been Gibberty, and that her late husband had been a ship's captain,
and she had lived till his death in the seaport town. By the time she
had provided him with a quarter of lollipops, he knew that she much
preferred a country life to trade. And by the time a woolen muffler had
been admired, purchased and done up in a parcel, she had informed him
that she would have liked to have settled in the neighbourhood of her
old home, but--there were reasons.

What these reasons were took time, tact and patience to discover. But
never had Master Nathaniel's wistful inquisitiveness, masquerading
as warm-hearted sympathy, stood him in better stead. And she finally
admitted that she had a stepmother whom she detested, and whom,
moreover, she had good reason to distrust.

At this point Master Nathaniel considered he might begin to show his
hand. He gave her a meaning glance; and asked her if she would like to
see justice done and rascals getting their deserts, adding, "There's
no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no
tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses
of the Law."

Mistress Ivy looked a little scared. "Who may you be, sir, please?" she
asked timidly.

"I'm the nephew of a farmer who once employed a labourer called Diggory
Carp," he answered promptly.

A smile of enlightenment broke over her face.

"Well, who would have thought it!" she murmured. "And what may your
uncle's name have been? I used to know all the farmers and their
families round our part."

There was a twinkle in Master Nathaniel's candid hazel eyes: "I doubt
I've been too sharp and cut myself!" he laughed. "You see, I've worked
for the magistrates, and that gets one into the habit of setting traps
for folk ... the Law's a wily lady. I've no uncle in the West, and I
never knew Diggory Carp. But I've always taken an interest in crime and
enjoyed reading the old trials. So when you said your name had been
Gibberty my mind at once flew back to a certain trial that had always
puzzled me, and I thought perhaps, the name Diggory Carp might unlock
your tongue. I've always felt there was more behind that trial than met
the eye."

"Did you indeed?" said Mistress Ivy evasively. "You seem mighty
interested in other folks' affairs," and she looked at him rather
suspiciously.

This put Master Nathaniel on his mettle. "Now, hark'ee, Mistress Ivy,
I'm sure your father took a pleasure in looking at a fine crop, even
if it was in another man's field, and that your husband liked good
seamanship...."

And here he had to break off his dissertation and listen, which he
did very patiently, to a series of reminiscences about the tastes and
habits of her late husband.

"Well, as I was saying," he went on, when she paused for a moment to
sigh, and smile and wipe her eyes with the corner of her apron, "what
the sight of a field filled to the brim with golden wheat was to your
father, and that of a ship skilfully piloted into harbour was to your
husband, the sight of Justice crouching and springing on her prey is
to me. I'm a bachelor, and I've managed to put by a comfortable little
nest-egg, and there's nothing I'd like to spend it on better than in
preventing Justice being balked of her lawful prey, not to mention
helping to avenge a fine fellow like your father. We old bachelors, you
know, have our hobbies ... they're quieter about the house than a crowd
of brats, but they're sometimes quite as expensive," and he chuckled
and rubbed his hands.

He was thoroughly enjoying himself, and seemed actually to have become
the shrewd, honest, and somewhat bloodthirsty old fellow he had
created. His eyes shone with the light of fanaticism when he spoke
of Justice, the tiger; and he could picture the snug little house he
lived in in Lud--it had a little garden gay with flowers, and a tiny
lawn, and espalier fruit trees, to the care of which he dedicated his
leisure hours. And he had a dog, and a canary, and an old housekeeper.
Probably, when he got home tonight, he would sit down to a supper of
sausages and mashed, followed by a toasted cheese. And then, when he
had finished his supper, he would get out his collection of patibulary
treasures, and over a bowl of negus finger lovingly the various bits
of gallows rope, the blood-stained glove of a murdered strumpet, the
piece of amber worn as a charm by a notorious brigand chief, and gloat
over the stealthy steps of his pet tiger, the Law. Yes, his obscure
little life was as gay with hobbies as his garden was with flowers. How
comfortable were other men's shoes!

"Well, if what you mean," said Mistress Ivy, "is that you'd like to
help punish wicked people, why, I wouldn't mind lending a hand myself.
All the same," and again she looked at him suspiciously, "what makes
you think my father didn't come by a natural death?"

"My nose, good lady, my nose!" and, as he spoke, he laid a knowing
finger alongside the said organ. "I smelt blood. Didn't it say in the
trial that the corpse bled?"

She bridled, and cried scornfully, "And you, to be town-bred, too, and
an educated man from the look of you, to go believing that vulgar talk!
You know what country people are, setting everything that happens to
the tunes of old songs. It was two drops of blood when the story was
told in the tavern at Swan, and by the time it had reached Moongrass it
was a gallon. I walked past the corpse with the others, and I can't say
I noticed any blood--but, then, my eyes were all swelled with crying.
All the same, it's what made Pugwalker leave the country."

"Indeed?" cried Master Nathaniel, and his voice was very eager.

"Yes. My stepmother was never the kind to be saucy with--though I had
no cause to love her, I must say she looked like a queen, but he was a
foreigner and a little bit of a chap, and the boys in the village and
all round gave him no peace, jumping out at him from behind hedges and
chasing him down the street, shouting, 'Who made the corpse of Farmer
Gibberty bleed?' and such like. And he just couldn't stand it, and
slipped off one night, and I never thought to see him again. But I've
seen him in the streets of Lud, and not long ago too--though he didn't
see me."

Master Nathaniel's heart was thumping with excitement. "What is he
like?" he asked breathlessly.

"Oh! very like what he was as a young man. They say there's nothing
keeps you young like a good conscience!" and she laughed drily. "Not
that he was ever much to look at--squat and tubby and freckled, and
such saucy prying eyes!"

Master Nathaniel could contain himself no longer, and in a voice hoarse
with excitement he cried, "Was it ... do you mean the Lud doctor,
Endymion Leer?"

Mistress Ivy pursed up her mouth and nodded meaningfully.

"Yes, that's what he calls himself now ... and many folks set such
store by him as a doctor, that, to hear them talk, one would think a
baby wasn't properly born unless he'd brought it into the world, nor a
man properly dead unless he'd closed his eyes."

"Yes, yes. But are you sure he is the same as Christopher Pugwalker?
Could you swear to him in court?" cried Master Nathaniel eagerly.

Mistress Ivy looked puzzled. "What good would it do to swear at him?"
she asked doubtfully. "I must say I never held with foul language in
a woman's mouth, nor did my poor Peppercorn--for all that he was a
sailor."

"No, no!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently, and proceeded to explain
to her the meaning of the expression. She dimpled a little at her own
blunder, and then said guardedly, "And what would bring me into the law
courts, I should like to know? The past is over and done with, and what
is done can't be undone."

Master Nathaniel fixed her with a searching gaze, and, forgetting his
assumed character, spoke as himself.

"Mistress Peppercorn," he said solemnly, "have you no pity for the
dead, the dumb, helpless dead? You loved your father, I am sure. When
a word from you might help to avenge him, are you going to leave that
word unsaid? Who can say that the dead are not grateful for the loving
thoughts of the living, and that they do not rest more quietly in
their graves when they have been avenged? Have you no time or pity
left for your dead father?"

During this speech Mistress Ivy's face had begun working, and at the
last words she burst into sobs. "Don't think that, sir," she gasped;
"don't think that! I remember well how my poor father used to sit
looking at her of an evening, not a word passing his lips, but his eyes
saying as clearly as if it had been his tongue, 'No, Clem,' (for my
stepmother's name was Clementine), 'I don't trust you no further than I
see you, but, for all that, you can turn me round your little finger,
because I'm a silly, besotted old fool, and we both know it.' Oh! I've
always said that my poor father had both his eyes wide open, in spite
of him being the slave of her pretty face. It was not that he didn't
see, or couldn't see--what he lacked was the heart to speak out."

"Poor fellow! And now, Mistress Ivy, I think you should tell me all you
know and what it is that makes you think that, in spite of the medical
evidence to the contrary, your father was murdered," and he planted his
elbows on the counter and looked at her squarely in the face.

But Mistress Ivy trimmed. "I didn't say that poor father was poisoned
with osiers. He died quiet and peaceful, father did."

"All the same, you think there was foul play. I am not entirely
disinterested in this matter, now that I know Dr. Leer is connected
with it. I happen to bear him a grudge."

First Mistress Ivy shut the door on to the street, and then leant over
the counter, so that her face was close to his, and said in a low
voice: "Why, yes, I always did think there had been foul play, and I'll
tell you why. Just before my father died we'd been making jam. And
one of poor father's funny little ways was to like the scum of jam or
jelly, and we used to keep some of every boiling in a saucer for him.
Well, my own little brother Robin, and her little girl--a little tot
of three--were buzzing round the fruit and sugar like a pair of little
wasps, whining for this, sticking their fingers into that, and thinking
they were helping with the jam-making. And suddenly my stepmother
turned round and caught little Polly with her mouth all black with
mulberry juice. And oh, the taking she was in! She caught her and shook
her, and ordered her to spit out anything she might have in her mouth;
and then, when she found out it was mulberries, she cooled down all of
a sudden and told Polly she must be a good girl and never put anything
in her mouth without asking first.

"Now, the jam was boiled in great copper cauldrons, and I noticed a
little pipkin simmering on the hearth, and I asked my stepmother what
it was. And she answered carelessly, 'Oh, it's some mulberry jelly,
sweetened with honey instead of sugar, for my old grandfather at home.'
And at the time I didn't give the matter another thought. But the
evening before my father died ... and I've never mentioned this to a
soul except my poor Peppercorn ... after supper he went and sat out in
the porch to smoke his pipe, leaving her and him to their own doings
in the kitchen; for she'd been brazen-faced enough, and my father weak
enough, actually to have the fellow living there in the house. And my
father was a queer man in that way--too proud to sit where he wasn't
wanted, even in his own kitchen. And I'd come out, too, but I was hid
from him by the corner of the house, for I had been waiting for the
sun to go down to pick flowers, to take to a sick neighbour the next
day. But I could hear him talking to his spaniel, Ginger, who was like
his shadow and followed him wherever he went. I remember his words as
clearly as if it had been yesterday: 'Poor old Ginger!' he said, 'I
thought it would be me who would dig your grave. But it seems not,
Ginger, it seems not. Poor old lady, by this time tomorrow I'll be
as dumb as you are ... and you'll miss our talks, poor Ginger.' And
then Ginger gave a howl that made my blood curdle, and I came running
round the corner of the house and asked father if he was ailing, and
if I could fetch him anything. And he laughed, but it was as different
as chalk from cheese from the way he laughed as a rule. For poor
father was a frank-hearted, open-handed man, and not one to hoard up
bitterness any more than he would hoard up money; but that laugh--the
last I heard him give--was as bitter as gall. And he said, 'Well, Ivy,
my girl, would you like to fetch me some peonies and marigolds and
shepherd's thyme from a hill where the Silent People have danced, and
make me a salad from them?' And seeing me looking surprised, he laughed
again, and said, 'No, no. I doubt there are no flowers growing this
side of the hills that could help your poor father. Come, give me a
kiss--you've always been a good girl.' Now, these are flowers that old
wives use in love potions, as I knew from my granny, who was very wise
about herbs and charms, but father had always laughed at her for it,
and I supposed he was fretting over my stepmother and Pugwalker, and
wondering if he could win her heart back to him.

"But that night he died, and it was then that I started wondering
about that jelly in the pipkin, for him, liking scum as he did, and
always having a saucer of it set aside for him, it wouldn't have been
difficult to have boiled up some poison for him without any danger of
other folks touching it. And Pugwalker knew all about herbs and such
like, and could have told her what to use. For it was as plain as
print that poor father knew he was going to die, and peonies make a
good purge; and I've often wondered since if it was as a purge that he
wanted these flowers. And that's all I know, and perhaps it isn't much,
but it's been enough to keep me awake many a night of my life wondering
what I should have done if I'd been older. For I was only a little maid
of ten at the time, with no one I could talk to, and as frightened of
my stepmother as a bird of a snake. If I'd been one of the witnesses, I
dare say it would have come out in court, but I was too young for that."

"Perhaps we could get hold of Diggory Carp?"

"Diggory Carp?" she repeated in surprise. "But surely you heard what
happened to him? Ah, that was a sad story! You see, after he was sent
to gaol, there came three or four terrible lean years, one after the
other. And food was so dear, no one, of course, had any money for
buying fancy goods like baskets ... and the long and the short of it
was that when Diggory came out of gaol he found that his wife and
children had died of starvation. And it seemed to turn his wits, and
he came up to our farm, raging against my stepmother, and vowing that
someday he'd get his own back on her. And that night he hanged himself
from one of the trees in our orchard, and he was found there dead the
next morning."

"A sad story," said Master Nathaniel. "Well, we must leave him out
of our calculations. All you've told me is very interesting--very
interesting indeed. But there's still a great deal to be unravelled
before we get to the rope I'm looking for. One thing I don't understand
is Diggory Carp's story about the osiers. Was it a pure fabrication of
his?"

"Poor Diggory! He wasn't, of course, the sort of man whose word one
would be very ready to take, for he did deserve his ten years--he was
a born thief. But I don't think he would have had the wits to invent
all that. I expect the story he told was true enough about his daughter
selling the osiers, but that it was only for basket-making that she
wanted them. Guilt's a funny thing--like a smell, and one often doesn't
quite know where it comes from. I think Diggory's nose was not mistaken
when it smelt out guilt, but it led him to the wrong clue. My father
wasn't poisoned by osiers."

"Can you think what it was, then?"

She shook her head. "I've told you everything I know."

"I wish you knew something more definite," said Master Nathaniel a
little fretfully. "The Law dearly loves something it can touch--a
blood-stained knife and that sort of thing. And there's another matter
that puzzles me. Your father seems, on your showing, to have been
a very indulgent sort of husband, and to have kept his jealousy to
himself. What cause was there for the murder?"

"Ah! that I think I can explain to you," she cried. "You see, our farm
was very conveniently situated for ... well, for smuggling a certain
thing that we don't mention. It stands in a sort of hollow between the
marches and the west road, and smugglers like a friendly, quiet place
where they can run their goods. And my poor father, though he may have
sat like a dumb animal in pain when his young wife was gallivanting
with her lover, all the same, if he had found out what was being
stored in the granary, Pugwalker would have been kicked out of the
house, and she could have whistled for him till she was black in the
face. My father was easy-going enough in some ways, but there were
places in him as hard as nails, and no woman, be she never so much of a
fool (and, fair play to my stepmother, she was no fool), can live with
a man without finding out where these places are."

"Oh, ho! So what Diggory Carp said about the contents of that sack was
true, was it?" And Master Nathaniel inwardly thanked his stars that no
harm had come to Ranulph during his stay in such a dangerous place.

"Oh, it was true, and no mistake; and, child though I was at the time,
I cried through half one night with rage when they told me what the
hussy had said in court about my father using the stuff as manure and
her begging him not to! Begging him not to, indeed! I could have told
them a very different story. And it was Pugwalker that was at the back
of that business, and got the granary key from her, so they could run
their goods there. And shortly before my father died he got wind of
it--I know that from something I overheard. The room I shared with my
little brother Robin opened into theirs, and we always kept the door
ajar, because Robin was a timid child, and fancied he couldn't go to
sleep unless he heard my father snoring. Well, about a week before
my father died I heard him talking to her in a voice I'd never known
him to use to her before. He said he'd warned her twice already that
year, and that this was the last time. Up to that time he'd held his
head high, he said, because his hands were clean and all his doings
straight and fair, and now he warned her for the last time that unless
this business was put a stop to once and for all, he'd have Pugwalker
tarred and feathered, and make the neighbourhood too hot for him to
stay in it. And, I remember, I heard him hawking and spitting, as if
he'd rid himself of something foul. And he said that the Gibbertys had
always been respected, and that the farm, ever since they had owned
it, had helped to make the people of Dorimare straight-limbed and
clean-blooded, for it had sent fresh meat and milk to market, and good
grain to the miller, and sweet grapes to the vintner, and that he would
rather sell the farm than that poison and filth should be sent out of
his granary, to turn honest lads into idiots gibbering at the moon. And
then she started coaxing him, but she spoke too low for me to catch
the words. But she must have been making him some promise, for he said
gruffly, 'Well, see that it's done, then, for I'm a man of my word.'

"And in not much more than a week after that he was dead--poor father.
And I count it a miracle that I ever grew up and am sitting here now
telling you all this. And a still greater one that little Robin grew
up to be a man, for he inherited the farm. But it was her own little
girl that died, and Robin grew up and married, and though he died in
his prime it was through a quinsy in his throat, and he always got on
with our stepmother, and wouldn't hear a word against her. And she has
brought up his little girl, for her mother died when she was born. But
I've never seen the lass, for there was never any love lost between
me and my stepmother, and I never went back to the old house after I
married."

She paused, and in her eyes was that wistful, tranced look that always
comes when one has been gazing at things that happened to one long ago.

"I see, I see," said Master Nathaniel meditatively. "And Pugwalker? Did
you ever see him again till you recognized him in the streets of Lud
the other day?"

She shook her head. "No, he disappeared, as I told you, just before the
trial. Though I don't doubt that she knew his whereabouts and heard
from him--met him even; for she was always going out by herself after
nightfall. Well, well, I've told you everything I know--though perhaps
I'd have better held my tongue, for little good comes of digging up the
past."

Master Nathaniel said nothing; he was evidently pondering her story.

"Well," he said finally, "everything you have told me has been very
interesting--very interesting indeed. But whether it will lead to
anything definite is another matter. All the evidence is purely
circumstantial. However, I'm very grateful to you for having spoken to
me as freely as you've done. And if I find out anything further I'll
let you know. I shall be leaving Lud shortly, but I shall keep in touch
with you. And, under the circumstances, perhaps it would be prudent to
agree on some word or token by which you would recognize a messenger
as really coming from me, for the fellow you knew as Pugwalker has
not grown less cunning with advancing years--he's full of guile, and
let him once get wind of what we're after, he'd be up to all sorts of
tricks to make our plans miscarry. What shall the token be?"

Then his eyes began to twinkle: "I've got it!" he cried. "Just to give
you a little lesson in swearing, which you say you dislike so much,
we'll make it a good round oath. You'll know a messenger comes from me
if he greets you with the words, By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the
Golden Apples of the West!"

And he rubbed his hands in delight, and shouted with laughter. Master
Nathaniel was a born tease.

"For shame, you saucy fellow!" dimpled Mistress Ivy. "You're as bad as
my poor Peppercorn. He used always...."

But even Master Nathaniel had had his fill of reminiscences. So he cut
her short with a hearty good-bye, and renewed thanks for all she had
told him.

But he turned back from the door to hold up his finger and say with
mock solemnity, "Remember, it's to be By the Sun, Moon and Stars and
the Golden Apples of the West!"




                              CHAPTER XIX

                     THE BERRIES OF MERCIFUL DEATH


Late into that night Master Nathaniel paced the floor of his pipe-room,
trying to pierce through the intervening medium of the dry words of the
Law and the vivider though less reliable one of Mistress Ivy's memory,
and reach that old rustic tragedy, as it had been before the vultures
of Time had left nothing of it but dry bones.

He felt convinced that Mistress Ivy's reconstruction was correct--as
far as it went. The farmer had been poisoned, though not by osiers. But
by what? And what had been the part played by Pugwalker, alias Endymion
Leer? It was, of course, gratifying to his vanity that his instinctive
identification of the two had been correct. But how tantalizing it
would be if this dead man's tale was to remain but a vague whisper, too
low to be heard by the ear of the Law!

On his table was the slipper that Master Ambrose had facetiously
suggested might be of use to him. He picked it up, and stared at it
absently. Ambrose had said the sight of it had made Endymion Leer
jump out of his skin, and that the reason was obvious. And yet those
purple strawberries did not look like fairy fruit. Master Nathaniel had
recently become but too familiar with the aspect of that fruit not to
recognize it instantly, whatever its variety. Though he had never seen
berries exactly like these, he was certain that they did not grow in
Fairyland.

He walked across to his bookcase and took out a big volume bound in
vellum. It was a very ancient illustrated herbal of the plants of
Dorimare.

At first he turned its pages somewhat listlessly, as if he did not
really expect to find anything of interest. Then suddenly he came on
an illustration, underneath which was written THE BERRIES OF MERCIFUL
DEATH. He gave a low whistle, and fetching the slipper laid it beside
the picture. The painted berries and the embroidered ones were
identical.

On the opposite page the berries were described in a style that a
literary expert would have recognized as belonging to the Duke Aubrey
period. The passage ran thus:--

                     THE BERRIES OF MERCIFUL DEATH

    These berries are wine-coloured, and crawl along the ground, and
    have the leaves of wild strawberries. They ripen during the first
    quarter of the harvest moon, and are only to be found in certain
    valleys of the West, and even there they grow but sparsely; and,
    for the sake of birds and children and other indiscreet lovers of
    fruit, it is well that such is the case, for they are a deadly and
    insidious poison, though very tardy in their action, often lying
    dormant in the blood for many days. Then the poison begins to speak
    in itchings of the skin, while the tongue, as though in punishment
    for the lies it may have told, becomes covered with black spots, so
    that it has the appearance of the shards of a ladybird, and this is
    the only warning to the victim that his end is approaching. For, if
    evil things ever partake of the blessed virtues, then we may say
    that this malign berry is mercifully cruel, in that it spares its
    victims belchings and retchings and fiery humours and racking
    colics. And, shortly before his end, he is overtaken by a pleasant
    drowsiness, yielding to which he falls into a peaceful sleep, which
    is his last. And now I will give you a receipt, which, if you have
    no sin upon your conscience, and are at peace with the living and
    the dead, and have never killed a robin, nor robbed an orphan, nor
    destroyed the nest of a dream, it may be will prove an antidote to
    that poison--and may be it will not. This, then, is the receipt:
    Take one pint of salad oil and put it into a vial glass, but first
    wash it with rose-water, and marygold flower water, the flowers
    being gathered towards the West. Wash it till the oil comes white;
    then put it into the glass, and then put thereto the buds of
    Peonies, the flowers of Marygold and the flowers and tops of
    Shepherd's Thyme. The Thyme must be gathered near the side of a
    hill where the Fairies are said to dance.

Master Nathaniel laid down the book, and his eyes were more frightened
than triumphant. There was something sinister in the silent language in
which dead men told their tales--with sly malice embroidering them on
old maids' canvas work, hiding them away in ancient books, written long
before they were born; and why were his ears so attuned to this dumb
speech?

For him the old herbalist had been describing a murderer, subtle,
sinister, mitigating dark deeds with mercy--a murderer, the touch of
whose bloody hands was balm to the sick in body, and whose voice could
rock haunted minds to sleep. And, as well, in the light of what he
already knew, the old herbalist had told a story. A violent, cruel,
reckless woman had wished to rid herself of her enemy by the first
means that came to her hand--osiers, the sap of which produced an
agonizing, cruel death. But her discreet though murderous lover took
the osiers from her, and gave her instead the berries of merciful death.

The herbalist had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the villain
of the story was Endymion Leer.

Yes, but how should he make the dead tell their tale loud enough to
reach the ear of the Law?

In any case, he must leave Lud, and that quickly.

Why should he not visit the scene of this old drama, the widow
Gibberty's farm? Perhaps he might there find witnesses who spoke a
language understood by all.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning he ordered a horse to be saddled, packed a few
necessaries in a knapsack, and then he told Dame Marigold that, for
the present, he could not stay in Lud. "As for you," he said, "you had
better move to Polydore's. For the moment I'm the most unpopular man
in town, and it would be just as well that they should think of you as
Vigil's sister rather than as Chanticleer's wife."

Dame Marigold's face was very pale that morning and her eyes were very
bright. "Nothing would induce me," she said in a low voice, "ever again
to cross the threshold of Polydore's house. I shall never forgive him
for the way he has treated you. No, I shall stay here--in your house.
And," she added, with a little scornful laugh, "you needn't be anxious
about me. I've never yet met a member of the lower classes that was a
match for one of ourselves--they fall to heel as readily as a dog. I'm
not a bit afraid of the mob, or anything they could do to me."

Master Nathaniel chuckled. "By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" he cried
proudly, "you're a chip off the old block, Marigold!"

"Well, don't stay too long away, Nat," she said, "or else when you come
back you'll find that I've gone mad like everybody else, and am dancing
as wildly as Mother Tibbs, and singing songs about Duke Aubrey!" and
she smiled her charming crooked smile.

Then he went up to say good-bye to old Hempie.

"Well, Hempie," he cried gaily. "Lud's getting too hot for me. So I'm
off with a knapsack on my back to seek my fortune, like the youngest
son in your old stories. Will you wish me luck?"

There were tears in the old woman's eyes as she looked at him, and then
she smiled.

"Why, Master Nat," she cried, "I don't believe you've felt so
light-hearted since you were a boy! But these are strange times when
a Chanticleer is chased out of Lud-in-the-Mist! And wouldn't I just
like to give those Vigils and the rest of them a bit of my mind!" and
her old eyes flashed. "But don't you ever get downhearted, Master Nat,
and don't ever forget that there have always been Chanticleers in
Lud-in-the-Mist, and that there always will be! But it beats me how
you're to manage with only three pairs of stockings, and no one to mend
them."

"Well, Hempie," he laughed, "they say the Fairies are wonderfully
neat-fingered, and, who knows, perhaps in my wanderings I may fall
in with a fairy housewife who will darn my stockings for me," and he
brought out the forbidden word as lightly and easily as if it had been
one in daily use.

About an hour after Master Nathaniel had ridden away Luke Hempen
arrived at the house, wild-eyed, dishevelled, and with very startling
news. But it was impossible to communicate it to Master Nathaniel, as
he had left without telling anyone his destination.




                              CHAPTER XX

                           WATCHING THE COWS


In the interval between his two letters--the one to Hempie, and the
one to Master Nathaniel--Luke decided that his suspicions had been
groundless, for the days at the farm were buzzing by with a soothing
hum like that of summer insects, and Ranulph was growing gay and
sunburned.

Then towards autumn Ranulph had begun to wilt, and finally Luke
overheard the strange conversation he had reported in his letter to
Master Nathaniel, and once again the farm grew hateful to him, and he
followed Ranulph as if he were his shadow and counted the hours for the
order to come from Master Nathaniel bidding them return to Lud.

Perhaps you may remember that on his first evening at the farm Ranulph
had wanted to join the children who watched the widow's cows at night,
but it had evidently been nothing but a passing whim, for he did not
express the wish again.

And then at the end of June--as a matter of fact it was Midsummer
day--the widow had asked him if he would not like that night to join
the little herdsmen. But towards evening had come a steady downfall of
rain, and the plan had fallen through.

It was not alluded to again till the end of October, three or four
days before Master Nathaniel left Lud-in-the-Mist. It had been a very
mild autumn in the West and the nights were fresh rather than cold,
and when, that evening, the little boys came knocking at the door for
their bread and cheese, the widow began to jeer at Ranulph, in a hearty
jovial way, for being town-bred and never having spent a night under
the sky.

"Why don't you go tonight with the little herdsmen? You wanted to when
you first came here, and the Doctor said it would do you no harm."

Now Luke was feeling particularly downcast that night; no answer had
come from Master Nathaniel to his letter, though it was well over a
week since he had written. He felt forlorn and abandoned, with a weight
of responsibility too heavy for his shoulders, and he was certainly
not going to add to that weight by allowing Ranulph to run the risk of
catching a bad chill. And as well, any suggestion that came from the
widow was greeted by him with suspicion.

"Master Ranulph," he cried excitedly, "I can't let you go. His Worship
and my old auntie wouldn't like it, what with the nights getting damp
and all. No, Master Ranulph, be a good little chap and go to your bed
as usual."

As he was speaking he caught Hazel's eye, and she gave him an almost
imperceptible nod of approval.

But the widow cried, with a loud scornful laugh, in which Ranulph
shrilly joined: "Too damp, indeed! When we haven't had so much as a
drop of rain these four weeks! Don't let yourself be coddled, Master
Ranulph. Young Hempen's nothing but an old maid in breeches. He's as
bad as my Hazel. I've always said that if she doesn't die an old maid,
it isn't that she wasn't born one!"

Hazel said nothing, but she fixed her eyes beseechingly on Luke.

But Ranulph, I fear, was a very spoiled little boy, and, into the
bargain, he dearly loved annoying Luke; so he jumped up and down,
shouting, "Old maid Hempen! Old maid Hempen! I'm going--so there!"

"That's right, little master!" laughed the widow. "You'll be a man
before I am."

And the three little herdsmen, who had been watching this scene with
shy amusement, grinned from ear to ear.

"Do as you like, then," said Luke sullenly, "but I'm coming too. And,
anyway, you must wrap up as warmly as you can."

So they went upstairs to put on their boots and mufflers.

When they came down Hazel, with compressed lips and a little frown
knitting her brows, gave them their rations of cheese and bread and
honey, and then, with a furtive glance in the direction of the widow,
who was standing with her back turned, talking to the little herdsmen,
she slipped two sprigs of fennel into Luke's button-hole. "Try and get
Master Ranulph to wear one of them," she whispered.

This was not reassuring. But how is an undergardener, not yet turned
eighteen, to curb the spoiled son of his master--especially when a
strong-willed, elderly woman throws her weight into the other scale?

"Well, well," said the widow, bustling up, "it's high time you were
off. You have a full three miles walk before you."

"Yes, yes, let's be off!" cried Ranulph excitedly; Luke felt it would
be useless to protest further, so the little cavalcade dived into the
moonlit night.

The world was looking very beautiful. At one end of the scale of
darkness stood the pines, like rich black shadows; at the other end of
the scale were the farm buildings, like white glimmering human masks.
And in between these two extremes were all the various degrees of
greyness--the shimmer of the Dapple that was more white than grey, and
all the different trees--plane-trees, liege-oaks, olives--and one could
almost recognize their foliage by their lesser or greater degree of
density.

On they trudged in silence, up the course of the Dapple--Luke too
anxious and aggrieved to talk, Ranulph buried too deep in dreams, and
the little herdsmen far too shy. There were nothing but rough cattle
paths in the valley--heavy enough going by day, and doubly so by night,
and before they had yet gone half the way Ranulph's feet began to lag.

"Would you like to rest a bit and then go back?" said Luke eagerly.

But Ranulph shook his head scornfully and mended his pace.

Nor did he allow himself to lag again till they reached their
destination--a little oasis of rich pasturage, already on rising ground
though still a mile or two away from the hills.

Once here--in their own kingdom, as it were--the little herdsmen became
lively and natural; laughing and chatting with Ranulph, as they set
about repairing such breaches as had been made in the huts by the rough
and tumble of twelve odd hours. Then there was wood to be collected,
and a fire to be lit--and into these tasks Ranulph threw himself with a
gay, though rather feverish, vigour.

At last they settled down to their long watch--squatting round the
fire, and laughing for sheer love of adventure as good campaigners
should; for were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours
equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal
of night and day?

The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly
munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour
created by the fire-light was like the planet Earth--a little freak of
brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows.

Suddenly Luke noticed that each of the three little herdsmen was, like
himself, wearing a sprig of fennel.

"I say! why are all you little chaps wearing fennel?" he blurted out.

They stared at him in amazement.

"But you be wearing a bit yourself, Master Hempen," said Toby, the
eldest.

"I know"--and he could not resist adding in an offhand tone--"it was
a present from a young lady. But do you always wear a bit in these
parts?" he added.

"Always on this night of the year," said the children. And as Luke
looked puzzled, Toby cried in surprise, "Don't you wear fennel in Lud
on the last night of October?"

"No, we don't," answered Luke, a little crossly, "and why should we, I
should like to know?"

"Why," cried Toby in a shocked voice, "because this is the night when
the Silent People--the dead, you know--come back to Dorimare."

Ranulph looked up quickly. But Luke scowled; he was sick to death of
western superstitions, and into the bargain he was feeling frightened.
He removed the second sprig of fennel given him by Hazel from his
button-hole, and holding it out to Ranulph, said, "Here, Master
Ranulph! Stick that in your hatband or somewhere."

But Ranulph shook his head. "I don't want any fennel, thank you, Luke,"
he said. "I'm not frightened."

The children gazed at him in half-shocked admiration, and Luke sighed
gloomily.

"Not frightened of ... the Silent People?" queried Toby.

"No," answered Ranulph curtly. And then he added, "At least not
tonight."

"I'll wager the widow Gibberty, at any rate, isn't wearing any fennel,"
said Luke, with a harsh laugh.

The children exchanged queer little glances and began to snigger. This
aroused Luke's curiosity: "Now then, out with it, youngsters! Why
doesn't the widow Gibberty wear fennel?"

But their only answer was to nudge each other, and snigger behind their
fingers.

This put Luke on his mettle. "Look here, you bantams," he cried, "don't
you forget that you've got the High Seneschal's son here, and if you
know anything about the widow that's ... well, that's a bit fishy, it's
your duty to let me know. If you don't, you may find yourselves in gaol
some day. So you just spit it out!" and he glared at them as fiercely
as his kindly china-blue eyes would allow.

They began to look scared. "But the widow doesn't know we've seen
anything ... and if she found out, and that we'd been blabbing, oh my!
wouldn't we catch it!" cried Toby, and his eyes grew round with terror
at the mere thought.

"No, you won't catch it. I'll give you my word," said Luke. "And if
you've really anything worth telling, the Seneschal will be very
grateful, and each of you may find yourselves with more money in your
pockets than your three fathers put together have ever had in all their
lives. And, anyhow, to begin with, if you'll tell me what you know,
you can toss up for this knife, and there's not a finer one to be
found in all Lud," and he waved before their dazzled eyes his greatest
treasure, a magnificent six-bladed knife, given him one Yule-tide by
Master Nathaniel, with whom he had always been a favourite. At the
sight of this marvel of cutlery, the little boys proved venal, and in
voices scarcely above a whisper and with frequent frightened glances
over their shoulders, as if the widow might be lurking in the shadows
listening to them, they told their story.

One night, just before dawn, a cow called Cornflower, from the
unusually blue colour of her hide, who had recently been added to the
herd, suddenly grew restless and began to moo, the strange moo of blue
cows that was like the cooing of doves, and then rose to her feet and
trotted away into the darkness. Now Cornflower was a very valuable cow
and the widow had given them special injunctions to look after her, so
Toby, leaving the other two to mind the rest of the herd, dashed after
her into the thinning darkness and though she had got a good start of
him was able to keep in her track by the tinkling of her bell. Finally
he came on her standing at the brink of the Dapple and nozzling the
water. He went close up to her and found that she had got her teeth
into something beneath the surface of the stream and was tearing at it
in intense excitement. Just then who should drive up in a cart but the
widow and Doctor Endymion Leer. They appeared much annoyed at finding
Toby, but they helped him get Cornflower away from the water. Bits of
straw were hanging from her mouth and it was stained with juices of a
colour he had never seen before. The widow then told him to go back to
his companions, and said she would herself take Cornflower back to the
herd in the morning. And, to account for her sudden appearance on the
scene, she said she had come with the doctor to try and catch a very
rare fish that only rose to the surface an hour before sunrise. "But
you see," went on Toby, "my dad's a great fisherman, and often takes me
out with him, but he never told me about this fish in the Dapple that
can only be caught before sunrise, and I thought I'd just like to have
a peep at it. So instead of going back to the others right away, I hid,
I did, behind some trees. And they took some nets, they did, out of the
cart, but it wasn't fish they drew up in them ... no it wasn't." He was
suddenly seized with embarrassment, and he and his two little friends
again began to snigger.

"Out with it!" cried Luke impatiently. "What was in their nets? You'll
not get the knife for only half a story, you know."

"You say, Dorian," said Toby bashfully, nudging the second eldest boy;
but Dorian, too, would only giggle and hang his head.

"I don't mind saying!" cried Peter, the youngest, valiantly. "It was
fairy fruit--that's what it was!"

Luke sprang to his feet. "Busty Bridget!" he exclaimed in a horrified
voice. Ranulph began to chuckle. "Didn't you guess right away what it
was, Luke?" he asked.

"Yes," went on Peter, much elated by the effect his words had produced,
"it was wicker baskets all full of fairy fruit, I know, because
Cornflower had torn off the top of one of them."

"Yes," interrupted Toby, beginning to think that little Peter had
stolen enough of his thunder, "she had torn off the top of one of the
baskets, and I've never seen fruit like it; it was as if coloured stars
had fallen from the sky into the grass, and were making all of the
valley bright, and Cornflower, she was eating as if she would never
stop ... more like a bee among flowers, she was, than a common cow. And
the widow and the doctor, though of course they were put out, they
couldn't help laughing to see her. And her milk the next morning--oh
my! It tasted of roses and shepherd's thyme, but she never came back
to the herd, for the widow sold her to a farmer who lived twenty miles
away, and...."

But Luke could contain himself no longer. "You little rascals!" he
cried, "to think of all the trouble there is in Lud just now, and the
magistrates and the town guard racking their brains to find out how the
stuff gets across the border, and three little bantams like you knowing
all about it, and not telling a soul! Why did you keep it to yourselves
like that?"

"We were frightened of the widow," said Toby sheepishly. "You won't
tell that we've blabbed," he added in an imploring voice.

"No, I'll see that you don't get into trouble," said Luke. "Here's the
knife, and a coin to toss up for it with ... toasted Cheese! A nice
place this, we've come to! Are you sure, young Toby, it was Dr. Leer
you saw?" Toby nodded his head emphatically. "Aye, it was Dr. Leer and
no mistake--here's my hand on it." And he stuck out a brown little paw.

"Well, I'm blessed! Dr. Leer!" exclaimed Luke; and Ranulph gave a
little mocking laugh.

Luke fell into a brown study; surprise, indignation, and pleasant
visions of himself swaggering in Lud, praised and flattered by all as
the man who had run the smugglers to earth, chasing each other across
the surface of his brain. And, in the light of Toby's story, could it
be that the stranger whose mysterious conversation with the widow he
had overheard was none other than the popular, kindly doctor, Endymion
Leer? It seemed almost incredible.

But on one thing he was resolved--for once he would assert himself, and
Ranulph should not spend another night at the widow Gibberty's farm.

Toby won the toss and pocketed the knife with a grin of satisfaction,
and by degrees the talk became as flickering and intermittent as the
light of the dying fire, which they were too idle to feed with sticks;
and finally it was quenched to silence, and they yielded to the curious
drugged sensation that comes from being out of doors and wide awake at
night.

It was as if the earth had been transported to the sky, and they
had been left behind in chaos, and were gazing up at its towns and
beasts and heroes flattened out in constellations and looking like the
stippled pictures in a neolithic cave. And the Milky Way was the only
road visible in the universe.

Now and then a toad harped on its one silvery note, and from time to
time a little breeze would spring up and then die down.

Suddenly Ranulph broke the silence with the startling question, "How
far is it from here to Fairyland?"

The little boys nudged one another and again began to snigger behind
their hands.

"For shame, Master Ranulph!" cried Luke indignantly, "talking like that
before youngsters!"

"But I want to know!" said Ranulph petulantly.

"Tell what your old granny used to say, Dorian," giggled Toby.

And Dorian was finally persuaded to repeat the old saying: "A thousand
leagues by the great West Road and ten by the Milky Way."

Ranulph sprang to his feet, and with rather a wild laugh, he cried,
"Let's have a race to Fairyland. I bet it will be me that gets there
first. One, two, three--and away!"

And he would actually have plunged off into the darkness, had not the
little boys, half shocked, half admiring, flung themselves on him and
dragged him back.

"There's an imp of mischief got into you tonight, Master Ranulph,"
growled Luke.

"You shouldn't joke about things like that ... specially tonight,
Master Chanticleer," said Toby gravely.

"You're right there, young Toby," said Luke, "I only wish he had half
your sense."

"It was just a bit of fun, wasn't it, Master Chanticleer? You didn't
really want us to race to ... yonder?" asked little Peter, peering
through the darkness at Ranulph with scared eyes.

"Of course it was only fun," said Luke.

But Ranulph said nothing.

Again they lapsed into silence. And all round them, subject to blind
taciturn laws, and heedless of man, myriads of things were happening,
in the grass, in the trees, in the sky.

Luke yawned and stretched himself. "It must be getting near dawn," he
said.

They had successfully doubled the dangerous cape of midnight, and he
began to feel secure of safely weathering what remained of their dark
voyage.

It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed, and,
with Sancho Panza, to bless the man who invented it. They shuddered,
and drew their cloaks closer round their shoulders.

Then, something happened. It was not so much a modification of the
darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that
one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade
of its density ... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the
hills she is bleeding to death.

At first the spot was merely a degree less black than the rest of the
sky. Then it turned grey, then yellow, then red. And the earth was
undergoing the same transformation. Here and there patches of greyness
broke out in the blackness of the grass, and after a few seconds one
saw that they were clumps of flowers. Then the greyness became filtered
with a delicate sea-green; and next, one realized that the grey-green
belonged to the foliage, against which the petals were beginning to
show white--and then pink, or yellow, or blue; but a yellow like that
of primroses, a blue like that of certain wild periwinkles, colours so
elusive that one suspects them to be due to some passing accident of
light, and that, were one to pick the flower, it would prove to be pure
white.

Ah, there can be no doubt of it now! The blues and yellows are real and
perdurable. Colour is steadily flowing through the veins of the earth,
and we may take heart, for she will soon be restored to life again. But
had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed that a star was
quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth.

And now the valley is again red and gold with vineyards, the hills are
clothed with pines, and the Dapple is rosy.

Then a cock crowed, and another answered it, and then another--a
ghostly sound, which, surely, did not belong to the smiling, triumphant
earth, but rather to one of those distant dying stars.

But what had taken Ranulph? He had sprung to his feet and was standing
motionless, a strange light in his eyes.

And then again, from a still more distant star, it seemed, another cock
crowed, and another answered it.

"The piper! the piper!" cried Ranulph in a loud triumphant voice.
And, before his astonished companions could get to their feet, he was
dashing up one of the bridle-paths towards the Debatable Hills.




                              CHAPTER XXI

                           THE OLD GOATHERD


For a few seconds they stood petrified, and then Luke was seized with
panic, and, calling to the little boys to stay where they were, dashed
off in pursuit.

Up the path he pounded, from time to time shouting angrily to Ranulph
to come back, but the distance between them grew ever wider.

Luke's ears began to sing and his brain to turn to fire, and he seemed
to lose all sense of reality--it was not on the earth that he was
running, but through the airless deserts of space.

He could not have said how long he struggled on, for he who runs hard
leaves time behind as well as space. But finally his strength gave way,
and he fell, breathless and exhausted, to the ground.

When he had sufficiently recovered to think of starting again the
diminishing speck that had been Ranulph had completely vanished.

Poor Luke began to swear--at both Ranulph and himself.

Just then he heard a tinkle of bells, and down the bridle-path came a
herd of goats and a very ancient herdsman--to judge, at least, from his
bowed walk, for his face was hidden by a hood.

When he had got up to Luke, he stood still, leaning heavily on his
stick, and peered down at him from underneath the overhanging flap of
his hood with a pair of very bright eyes.

"You've been running hard, young master, by the looks of ye," he said,
in a quavering voice. "You be the second young fellow as what I've seen
running this morning."

"The second?" cried Luke eagerly. "Was the other a little lad of about
twelve years old with red hair, in a green leathern jerkin embroidered
in gold?"

"Well, his hair was red and no mistake, though as to the jerkin...."
And here he was seized with a violent attack of coughing, and it took
all Luke's patience not to grab him by the shoulders and shake the
words out of him.

"Though as to the jerkin--my eyes not being as sharp as they once
were...."

"Oh! never mind about the jerkin," cried Luke. "Did you stop and speak
to him?"

"But about that jerkin--you do cut an old man short, you do ... it
might have been green, but then again it might have been yellow. But
the young gentleman what I saw was not the one as you're after."

"How do you know?"

"Why, because he was the Seneschal's son--the one I saw," said the old
man proudly, as if the fact put him at once into a superior position to
Luke.

"But it's the Seneschal's son--Master Ranulph Chanticleer, that I'm
after, too!" cried Luke, eagerly. "How long is it since you saw him? I
must catch up with him."

"You'll not do that, on your two feet," said the goatherd calmly. "That
young gentleman, and his yellow jerkin and his red hair, must be well
on the way to Moongrass by now."

"To Moongrass?" And Luke stared at him in amazement.

"Aye, to Moongrass, where the cheeses come from. You see it was this
way. I'm goatherd to the Lud yeomanry what the Seneschal has sent to
watch the border to keep out you know what. And who should come running
into their camp about half an hour ago with his red jerkin and his
green hair but your young gentleman. 'Halt!' cries the Yeoman on guard.
'Let me pass. I'm young Master Chanticleer,' cries he. 'And where are
you bound for?' cries the Yeoman on guard. 'For Fairyland,' says he.
And then didn't they all laugh! And the little chap flew into quite a
rage, and said he was off to Fairyland, and no one should stop him.
And, of course, that just made them laugh all the more. But though they
wouldn't let him go to Fairyland, the young rascal...." And here the
old man was seized with a paroxysm of wheezy laughter which brought on
another bout of coughing.

"Well, as I was saying," he went on, when he had recovered, "they
wouldn't let him through to Fairyland, but they said they would ride
back with him where he came from. 'No, you won't,' says he; 'my dad,'
says he, 'don't want me to go back there, never any more.' And he
whisks out a letter signed by the Seneschal, bidding him leave the
widow Gibberty's farm, where he was staying, and go straight off to
Farmer Jellygreen's at Moongrass. So one of the Yeomen saddled his
horse, and the youngster got up behind him, and they set off for
Moongrass by one of the cattle-paths running northeast, which comes out
at about the middle of the road between Swan and Moongrass. So that's
that, my young fellow." In his relief Luke tossed his cap into the air.

"The young rascal!" he cried joyfully; "fancy his never having told me
he'd got a letter from his Worship, and me expecting that letter for
the last three days, and getting stomach-ache with worry at its not
coming! And saying he was off to a certain place, too! A nice fright
he's given me. But thank'ee, gaffer, thank'ee kindly. And here's
something for you to drink the health of Master Ranulph Chanticleer,"
and with a heart as light as a bird's, he began to retrace his steps
down the valley.

But what was that faint sound behind him? It sounded suspiciously like
the Ho, ho, hoh! of that impudent Willy Wisp, who for a short time, had
been one of his Worship's grooms.

He stopped, and looked round. No one was visible except the old
goatherd in the distance, leaning on his stick. What he had heard could
have been nothing but the distant tinkle of the goat bells.

When he reached the farm, he found it in a tumult. The little boys had
frightened Hazel out of her wits, and confirmed her worst fears by the
news that "Master Ranulph had run away towards the hills, and that
Master Hempen had run after him."

"Granny!" cried Hazel, wringing her hands, "a messenger must be sent
off post-haste to the Seneschal!"

"Stuff and nonsense!" cried the widow, angrily. "You mind your own
business, miss! Long before any messenger could reach Lud, the lads
will be back safe and sound. Towards the hills, indeed! That Luke
Hempen is a regular old woman. It's just a bit of Master Ranulph's fun.
He's hiding behind a tree, and will jump out on them with a 'Boo!'
Never in my life have I heard so much fuss about nothing." And then,
turning to the farm-servants, who were clustering round the children
with scared, excited eyes, she bade them go about their business, and
let her hear no more nonsense.

Her words sounded like good sense, but, for all that, they did not
convince Hazel. Her deep distrust of the widow was almost as old as
herself, and her instinct had told her for some time that the widow was
hostile to Ranulph.

Never for a moment did Hazel forget that she, not the widow, was the
rightful owner of the farm. Should she for once assert her position,
and, in direct defiance of the widow, report what had happened to the
law-man of the district and send a messenger to Master Nathaniel?

But, as everybody knows, legal rights can be but weaklings--puny little
child princes, cowed by their bastard uncles, Precedent and Seniority.

No, she must wait till she was of age, or married, or ... was there any
change of condition that could alter her relations with the widow, and
destroy the parasite growth of sullen docility which, for as long as
she could remember, had rotted her volition and warped her actions?

Hazel clenched her fists and set her teeth ... she would assert
herself!--she would!... now, at once? Why not give them, say, till
noon, to come back? Yes, she would give them till noon.

But before then, a rather shame-faced Luke arrived with his confession
that Master Ranulph had made proper fools of them.

"So, Miss Hazel, if you'll give me a bite of something, and lend me
a horse, I'll go after the young scamp to Moongrass. To think of his
giving us the slip like that and never having told me he'd heard from
his father! And there was me expecting a letter from his Worship every
day, telling us to leave at once, and...."

Hazel raised her eyebrows. "You were expecting a letter ordering you to
leave us? How was that?"

Luke turned red, and mumbled something inaudible. Hazel stared at him
for a few seconds in silence, and then she said quietly, "I'm afraid
you were wise if you asked the Seneschal to remove Master Ranulph."

He gave her a shrewd glance. "Yes ... I fear this is no place for
Master Ranulph. But if you'd excuse me for being so bold, miss, I'd
like to give you a word of warning--don't you trust that Endymion Leer
further than you can see him, and don't you ever let your Granny take
you out fishing!"

"Thank you, Master Hempen, but I am quite able to look after myself,"
said Hazel haughtily. And then an anxious look came into her eyes. "I
hope--oh! I hope that you'll find Master Ranulph safe and sound at
Moongrass! It's all so ... well, so very strange. That old goatherd,
who do you suppose he was? One meets strange people near the Elfin
Marches. You'll let me know if all is well ... won't you?"

Luke promised. Hazel's words had dampened his spirits and brought back
all his anxiety, and the fifteen miles to Moongrass, in spite of a good
horse, seemed interminable.

Alas! there was no Ranulph at the Jellygreens' farm; but, to Luke's
bewilderment, it turned out that the farmer had been expecting him, as
he had, a few days previously, received a letter from Master Nathaniel,
from which it was clear that he imagined his son was already at
Moongrass. So there was nothing for Luke but, with a heavy heart, to
start off the next morning for Lud, where, as we have seen, he arrived
a few hours after Master Nathaniel had left it.




                             CHAPTER XXII

                           WHO IS PORTUNUS?


About half-way to Swan, Master Nathaniel, having tethered his horse
to a tree, was reclining drowsily under the shade of another. It was
midday, and the further west he rode the warmer it grew; it was rather
as if he were riding backward through the months.

Suddenly he was aroused by a dry little laugh, and looking round, he
saw crouching beside him, an odd-looking old man, with very bright eyes.

"By my Great-aunt's rump, and who may you be?" enquired Master
Nathaniel testily.

The old man shut his eyes, gulped several times, and replied:

    "Who are you? Who is me?
    Answer my riddle and come and see,"

and then he stamped impatiently, as if that had not been what he had
wished to say.

"Some cracked old rustic, I suppose," thought Master Nathaniel, and
closed his eyes; in the hopes that when the old fellow saw he was not
inclined for conversation he would go away.

But the unwelcome visitor continued to crouch beside him, now and then
giving him little jogs in the elbow, which was very irritating when one
happened to be hot and tired and longing for forty winks.

"What are you doing?" cried Master Nathaniel irritably.

    "I milk blue ewes; I reap red flowers,
    I weave the story of dead hours,"

answered the old man.

"Oh, do you? Well, I wish you'd go now, this moment, and milk your red
ewes ... I want to go to sleep," and he pulled his hat further down
over his eyes and pretended to snore.

But suddenly he sprang to his feet with a yap of pain. The old man had
prodded him in his belly, and was standing looking at him out of his
startlingly bright eyes, with his head slightly on one side.

"Don't you try that on, old fellow!" cried Master Nathaniel angrily.
"You're a nuisance, that's what you are. Why can't you leave me alone?"

The old man pointed eagerly at the tree, making little inarticulate
sounds; it was as if a squirrel or a bird had been charged with some
message that they could not deliver.

Then he crept up to him, put his mouth to his ear, and whispered, "What
is it that's a tree, and yet not a tree, a man and yet not a man, who
is dumb and yet can tell secrets, who has no arms and yet can strike?"

Then he stepped back a few paces as if he wished to observe the
impression his words had produced, and stood rubbing his hands and
cackling gleefully.

"I suppose I must humour him," thought Master Nathaniel; so he said
good-naturedly, "Well, and what's the answer to your riddle, eh?"

But the old man seemed to have lost the power of articulate speech, and
could only reiterate eagerly, "Dig ... dig ... dig."

"'Dig, dig, dig.' ... so that's the answer, is it? Well, I'm afraid I
can't stay here the whole afternoon trying to guess your riddles. If
you've got anything to tell me, can't you say it any plainer?"

Suddenly he remembered the old superstition that when the Silent People
returned to Dorimare they could only speak in riddles and snatches of
rhyme. He looked at the old man searchingly. "Who are you?" he said.

But the answer was the same as before. "Dig ... dig ... dig."

"Try again. Perhaps after a bit the words will come more easily," said
Master Nathaniel. "You are trying to tell me your name."

The old man shut his eyes tight, took a long breath, and,
evidently making a tremendous effort, brought out very slowly,
"Seize--your--op-por-tun-us. Dig ... dig. Por-tun-us is my name."

"Well, you've got it out at last. So your name is Portunus, is it?"

But the old man stamped his foot impatiently. "Hand! hand!" he cried.

"Is it that you want to shake hands with me, old fellow?" asked Master
Nathaniel.

But the old man shook his head peevishly. "Farm hand," he managed to
bring out. "Dig ... dig."

And then he lapsed into doggerel:

    "Dig and delve, delve and dig,
    Harness the mare to the farmer's gig."

Finally Master Nathaniel gave up trying to get any sense out of him and
untethered his horse. But when he tried to mount, the old man seized
the stirrup and looking up at him imploringly, repeated, "Dig ...
dig ... dig." And Master Nathaniel was obliged to shake him off with
some roughness. And even after he had left him out of sight he could
hear his voice in the distance, shouting, "Dig ... dig."

"I wonder what the old fellow was trying to tell me," said Master
Nathaniel to himself.

On the morning of the following day he arrived at the village of
Swan-on-the-Dapple.

Here the drama of autumn had only just reached its gorgeous climax, and
the yellow and scarlet trees were flaming out their silent stationary
action against the changeless chorus of pines, dark green against the
distant hills.

"By the Golden Apples of the West!" muttered Master Nathaniel, "I'd no
idea those accursed hills were so near. I'm glad Ranulph's safe away."

Having inquired his way to the Gibbertys' farm, he struck off the high
road into the valley--and very lovely it was looking in its autumn
colouring. The vintage was over, and the vines were now golden and red.
Some of the narrow oblong leaves of the wild cherry had kept their
bottle-green, while others, growing on the same twig, had turned to
salmon-pink, and the mulberries alternated between canary-yellow and
grass-green. The mountain ash had turned a fiery rose (more lovely,
even, than had been its scarlet berries) and often an olive grew beside
it, as if ready, lovingly, to quench its fire in its own tender grey.
The birches twinkled and quivered, as if each branch were a golden
divining rod trembling to secret water; and the path was strewn with
olives, looking like black oblong dung. It was one of those mysterious
autumn days that are intensely bright though the sun is hidden; and
when one looked at these lambent trees one could almost fancy them the
source of the light flooding the valley.

From time to time a tiny yellow butterfly would flit past, like a
little yellow leaf shed by one of the birches; and now and then one of
the bleeding, tortured looking liege-oaks would drop an acorn, with a
little flop--just to remind you, as it were, that it was leading its
own serene, vegetable life, oblivious to the agony ascribed to it by
the fevered fancy of man.

Not a soul did Master Nathaniel pass after he had left the village,
though from time to time he saw in the distance labourers following the
plough through the vineyards, and their smocks provided the touch of
blue that turns a picture into a story; there was blue smoke, too, to
tell of human habitations; and an occasional cock strutting up and down
in front of one of the red vines, like a salesman before his wares,
flaunting, by way of advertisement, a crest of the same material as
the vine leaves, but of a more brilliant hue; and in the distance were
rushes, stuck up in sheaves to dry, and glimmering with the faint,
whitish, pinky-grey of far-away fruit trees in blossom.

While, as if the eye had not enough to feed on in her own domain, the
sounds, even, of the valley were pictorial--a tinkling of distant
bells, conjuring up herds of goats; the ominous, melancholy roar which
tells that somewhere a waggoner is goading on his oxen; and the distant
bark of dogs that paints a picture of homesteads and sunny porches.

As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along, his thoughts turned to the
farmer Gibberty, who many a time must have jogged along this path, in
just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things that he was
seeing and hearing now.

Yes, the farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself.
And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one
day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other
people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become
nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he
wondered.

A sudden longing seized him to hold Ranulph again in his arms. How
pleasant would have been the thought that he was waiting to receive him
at the farm!

But he must be nearing his journey's end, for in the distance he could
discern the figure of a woman, leisurely scrubbing her washing on one
of the sides of a stone trough.

"I wonder if that's the widow," thought Master Nathaniel. And a slight
shiver went down his spine.

But as he came nearer the washerwoman proved to be quite a young girl.

He decided she must be the granddaughter, Hazel; and so she was.

He drew up his horse beside her and asked if this were the widow
Gibberty's farm.

"Yes, sir," she answered shortly, with that half-frightened,
half-defiant look that was so characteristic of her.

"Why, then, I've not been misdirected. But though they told me I'd find
a thriving farm and a fine herd of cows, the fools forgot to mention
that the farmer was a rose in petticoats," and he winked jovially.

Now this was not Master Nathaniel's ordinary manner with young ladies,
which, as a matter of fact, was remarkably free from flirtatious
facetiousness. But he had invented a role to play at the farm, and was
already beginning to identify himself with it.

As it turned out, this opening compliment was a stroke of luck. For
Hazel bitterly resented that she was not recognized as the lawful owner
of the farm, and Master Nathaniel's greeting of her as the farmer
thawed her coldness into dimples.

"If you've come to see over the farm, I'm sure we'll be very pleased to
show you everything," she said graciously.

"Thank'ee, thank'ee kindly. I'm a cheesemonger from Lud-in-the-Mist.
And there's no going to sleep quietly behind one's counter these
days in trade, if one's to keep one's head above the water. It's
competition, missy, competition that keeps old fellows like me awake.
Why, I can remember when there weren't more than six cheesemongers in
the whole of Lud; and now there are as many in my street alone. So I
thought I'd come myself and have a look round and see where I could get
the best dairy produce. There's nothing like seeing for oneself."

And here he launched into an elaborate and gratuitous account of all
the other farms he had visited on his tour of inspection. But the one
that had pleased him best, he said, had been that of a very old friend
of his--and he named the farmer near Moongrass with whom, presumably,
Ranulph and Luke were now staying.

Here Hazel looked up eagerly, and, in rather an unsteady voice, asked
if he'd seen two lads there--a big one, and a little one who was the
son of the Seneschal.

"Do you mean little Master Ranulph Chanticleer and Luke Hempen? Why,
of course I saw them! It was they who told me to come along here ...
and very grateful I am to them, for I have found something well worth
looking at."

A look of indescribable relief flitted over Hazel's face.

"Oh ... oh! I'm so glad you saw them," she faltered.

"Aha! My friend Luke has evidently been making good use of his
time--the young dog!" thought Master Nathaniel; and he proceeded to
retail a great many imaginary sayings and doings of Luke at his new
abode.

Hazel was soon quite at home with the jovial, facetious old
cheesemonger. She always preferred elderly men to young ones, and was
soon chatting away with the abandon sometimes observable when naturally
confiding people, whom circumstances have made suspicious, find someone
whom they think they can trust; and Master Nathaniel was, of course,
drinking in every word and longing to be in her shoes.

"But, missy, it seems all work and no play!" he cried at last. "Do you
get no frolics and junketings?"

"Sometimes we dance of an evening, when old Portunus is here," she
answered.

"Portunus?" he cried sharply, "Who's he?"

But this question froze her back into reserve. "An old weaver with a
fiddle," she answered stiffly.

"A bit doited?"

Her only answer was to look at him suspiciously and say, "Do you know
Portunus, sir?"

"Well, I believe I met him--about half-way between here and Lud. The
old fellow seemed to have something on his mind, but couldn't get it
out--I've known many a parrot that talked better than he."

"Oh, I've often thought that, too! That he'd something on his mind, I
mean," cried Hazel on another wave of confidence. "It's as if he were
trying hard to tell one something. And he often follows me as if he
wanted me to do something for him. And I sometimes think I should try
and help him and not be so harsh with him--but he just gives me the
creeps, and I can't help it."

"He gives you the creeps, does he?"

"That he does!" she cried with a little shiver. "To see him gorging
himself with green fruit! It isn't like a human being the way he does
it--it's like an insect or a bird. And he's like a cat, too, in the way
he always follows about the folk that don't like him. Oh, he's nasty!
And he's spiteful, too, and mischievous. But perhaps that's not to be
wondered at, if ..." and she broke off abruptly.

Master Nathaniel gave her a keen look. "If what?" he said.

"Oh, well--just silly talk of the country people," said Hazel evasively.

"That he's--er, for instance, one of what you call the Silent People?"

"How did you know?" And Hazel looked at him suspiciously.

"Oh, I guessed. You see, I've heard a lot of that sort of talk since
I've been in the west. Well, the old fellow certainly seemed to have
something he wanted to tell me, but I can't say he was very explicit.
He kept saying, over and over again, 'Dig, dig.'"

"Oh, that's his great word," cried Hazel. "The old women round about
say that he's trying to tell one his name. You see, they think that ...
well, that he's a dead man come back and that when he was on earth he
was a labourer, by name Diggory Carp."

"Diggory Carp?" cried Master Nathaniel sharply.

Hazel looked at him in surprise. "Did you know him, sir?" she asked.

"No, no; not exactly. But I seem to have heard the name somewhere.
Though I dare say in these parts it's a common enough one. Well, and
what do they say about this Diggory Carp?"

Hazel looked a little uneasy. "They don't say much, sir--to me. I
sometimes think there must have been some mystery about him. But I know
that he was a merry, kind sort of man, well liked all round, and a rare
fiddler. But he came to a sad end, though I never heard what happened
exactly. And they say," and here she lowered her voice mysteriously,
"that once a man joins the Silent People he becomes mischievous and
spiteful, however good-natured he may have been when he was alive. And
if he'd been unfairly treated, as they say he was, it would make him
all the more spiteful, I should think. I often think he's got something
he wants to tell us, and I sometimes wonder if it's got anything to
do with the old stone herm in our orchard ... he's so fond of dancing
round it."

"Really? And where is this old herm? I want to see all the sights of
the country, you know; get my money's worth of travel!" And Master
Nathaniel donned again the character of the cheerful cheesemonger,
which, in the excitement of the last few minutes, he had, unwittingly,
sloughed.

As they walked to the orchard, which was some distance from the washing
trough, Hazel said, nervously:

"Perhaps you hadn't heard, sir, but I live here with my granny; at
least, she isn't my real granny, though I call her so. And ... and ...
well, she seems fond of old Portunus, and perhaps it would be as well
not to mention to her that you had met him."

"Very well; I won't mention him to her ... at present." And he gave her
rather a grim little smile.

Though the orchard had been stripped of its fruit, what with the red
and yellow leaves, and the marvelous ruby-red of the lateral branches
of the peach trees there was colour enough in the background of the old
grey herm, and, in addition, there twisted around him the scarlet and
gold of a vine.

"I often think he's the spirit of the farm," said Hazel shyly, looking
to see if Master Nathaniel was admiring her old stone friend. To her
amazement, however, as soon as his eyes fell on it he clapped his hand
against his thigh, and burst out laughing.

"By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" he cried, "here's the answer to
Portunus's riddle: 'the tree yet not a tree, the man yet not a man,'"
and he repeated to Hazel the one consecutive sentence that Portunus had
managed to enunciate.

"'Who has no arms and yet can strike, who is dumb and yet can tell
secrets,'" she repeated after him. "Can you strike and tell secrets,
old friend?" she asked whimsically, stroking the grey lichened stone.
And then she blushed and laughed as if to apologize for this exhibition
of childishness.

       *       *       *       *       *

With country hospitality Hazel presumed that their uninvited guest had
come to spend several days at the farm, and accordingly she had his
horse taken to the stables and ordered the best room to be prepared for
his use.

The widow, too, gave him a hearty welcome, when he came down to the
midday meal in the big kitchen.

When they had been a few minutes at table, Hazel said, "Oh, granny,
this gentleman has just come from the farm near Moongrass, where little
Master Chanticleer and young Hempen have gone. And he says they were
both of them blooming, and sent us kind messages."

"Yes," said Master Nathaniel cheerfully, ever ready to start romancing,
"my old friend the farmer is delighted with them. The talk in Lud
was that little Chanticleer had been ill, but all I can say is, you
must have done wonders for him--his face is as round and plump as a
Moongrass cheese."

"Well, I'm glad you're pleased with the young gentleman's looks, sir,"
said the widow in a gratified voice. But in her eyes there was the
gleam of a rather disquieting smile.

Dinner over, the widow and Hazel had to go and attend to their various
occupations, and Master Nathaniel went and paced up and down in front
of the old house, thinking. Over and over again his thoughts returned
to the odd old man, Portunus.

Was it possible that he had really once been Diggory Carp, and that he
had returned to his old haunts to try and give a message?

It was characteristic of Master Nathaniel that the metaphysical
possibilities of the situation occupied him before the practical ones.
If Portunus were, indeed, Diggory Carp, then these stubble-fields
and vineyards, these red and golden trees, would be robbed of their
peace and stability. For he realized at last that the spiritual balm
he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that
the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or
duration--no more part of the permanent background of the world than
the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted through the
valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish, and that he could
see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the foliage of the trees.

Yes, their message, though he had never till now heard it distinctly,
had always been that Fairyland was nothing but delusion--there was
life and death, and that was all. And yet, had their message always
comforted him? There had been times when he had shuddered in the
company of the silent things.

"Aye, aye," he murmured dreamily to himself, and then he sighed.

But he had yielded long enough to vain speculations--there were things
to be done. Whether Portunus were the ghost of Diggory Carp or merely
a doited old weaver, he evidently knew something that he wanted to
communicate--and it was connected with the orchard herm. Of course, it
might have nothing whatever to do with the murder of the late farmer
Gibberty, but with the memory of the embroidered slipper fresh in
his mind, Master Nathaniel felt it would be rank folly to neglect a
possible clue.

He went over in his mind all the old man's words. "Dig, dig," ... that
word had been the ever recurring burden.

Then he had a sudden flash of inspiration--why should not the word
be taken in its primary meaning? Why, instead of the first syllable
of Diggory Carp, should it not be merely and order to dig ... with a
spade or a shovel? In that case it was clear that the place to dig in
was under the herm. And he decided that he would do so as soon as an
opportunity presented itself.




                             CHAPTER XXIII

              THE NORTHERN FIRE-BOX AND DEAD MEN'S TALES


That night Hazel could not get to sleep. Perhaps this was due to having
noticed something that afternoon that made her vaguely uneasy. The
evenings were beginning to be chilly, and, shortly before supper, she
had gone up to Master Nathaniel's room to light his fire. She found
the widow and one of the maidservants there before her, and, to her
surprise, they had brought down from the attic an old charcoal stove
that had lain there unused for years, for Dorimare was a land of open
fires, and stoves were practically unknown. The widow had brought the
stove to the farm on her marriage, for, on her mother's side, she had
belonged to a race from the far North.

On Hazel's look of surprise, she had said casually, "The logs are
dampish today, and I thought this would make our guest cozier."

Now Hazel knew that the wood was not in the least damp; how could it
be, as it had not rained for days? But that this should have made her
uneasy was a sign of her deep instinctive distrust of her grandfather's
widow.

Perhaps the strongest instinct in Hazel was that of hospitality--that
all should be well, physically and morally, with the guests under
the roof that she never forgot was hers, was a need in her much more
pressing than any welfare of her own.

Meanwhile, Master Nathaniel, somewhat puzzled by the outlandish
apparatus that was warming his room, had got into bed. He did not
immediately put out his candle; he wished to think. For being much
given to reverie, when he wanted to follow the sterner path of
consecutive thought, he liked to have some tangible object on which
to focus his eye, a visible goal, as it were, to keep his feet from
straying down the shadowy paths that he so much preferred.

Tonight it was the fine embossed ceiling on which he fixed his eye--the
same ceiling at which Ranulph used to gaze when he had slept in
this room. On a ground of a rich claret colour patterned with azure
arabesques, knobs of a dull gold were embossed, and at the four corners
clustered bunches of grapes and scarlet berries in stucco. And though
time had dulled their colour and robbed the clusters of many of their
berries, they remained, nevertheless, pretty and realistic objects.

But, in spite of the light, the focus, and his desire for hard
thinking, Master Nathaniel found his thoughts drifting down the most
fantastic paths. And, besides, he was so drowsy and his limbs felt so
strangely heavy. The colours on the ceiling were getting all blurred,
and the old knobs were detaching themselves from their background
and shining in space like suns, moons, and stars--or was it like
apples--the golden apples of the West? And now the claret-coloured
background was turning into a red field--a field of red flowers, from
which leered Portunus, and among which wept Ranulph. But the straight
road, which for the last few months had been the projection of his
unknown, buried purpose, even through this confused landscape glimmered
white ... yet, it looked different from usual ... why, of course, it
was the Milky Way! And then he knew no more.

In the meantime Hazel had been growing more and more restless, and,
though she scolded herself for foolishness, more and more anxious.
Finally, she could stand it no more: "I think I'll just creep up to the
gentleman's door and listen if I can hear him snoring," she said to
herself. Hazel believed that it was a masculine peculiarity not to be
able to sleep without snoring.

But though she kept her ear to the keyhole for a full two minutes, not
a sound proceeded from Master Nathaniel's room. Then she softly opened
the door. A lighted candle was guttering to its end, and her guest
was lying, to all appearance, dead, whilst a suffocating atmosphere
pervaded the room. Hazel felt almost sick with terror, but she flung
open the casement window as wide as it would go, poured half the water
from the ewer into the stove to extinguish its fire, and the remainder
over Master Nathaniel himself. To her unspeakable relief he opened his
eyes, groaned, and muttered something inaudible.

"Oh, sir, you're not dead then!" almost sobbed Hazel. "I'll just go and
fetch you a cup of cordial and get you some hartshorn."

When she returned with the two restoratives, she found Master Nathaniel
sitting up in bed, and, though he looked a little fuddled, his natural
colour was creeping back, and the cordial restored him to almost his
normal condition.

When Hazel saw that he was really himself again, she sank down on the
floor and, spent with terror, began to sob bitterly.

"Come, my child!" said Master Nathaniel kindly, "there's nothing to
cry about. I'm feeling as well as ever I did in my life ... though, by
the Harvest of Souls, I can't imagine what can have taken me. I never
remember to have swooned before in all my born days."

But Hazel would not be comforted: "That it should have happened, here,
in my house," she sobbed. "We who have always stood by the laws of
hospitality ... and not a young gentleman, either ... oh, dearie me;
oh, dearie me!"

"What do you blame to yourself, my child?" asked Master Nathaniel.
"Your hospitality is in no sense to blame if, owing perhaps to recent
fatigues and anxieties, I should have turned faint. No, it is not you
that are the bad host, but I that am the bad guest to have given so
much trouble."

But Hazel's sobs only grew wilder. "I didn't like her bringing in that
fire-box--no I didn't! An evil outlandish thing that it is! That it
should have happened under my roof! For it is my roof ... and she'll
not pass another night under it!" and she sprang to her feet, with
clenched fists and blazing eyes.

Master Nathaniel was becoming interested. "Are you alluding to your
grandfather's widow?" he asked quietly.

"Yes, I am!" cried Hazel indignantly. "Oh! she's up to strange tricks,
always ... and none of her ways are those of honest farmers--no fennel
over our doors, unholy fodder in our granary ... and in her heart,
thoughts as unholy. I saw the smile with which she looked at you at
dinner."

"Are you accusing this woman of actually having made an attempt on my
life?" he asked slowly.

But Hazel flinched before this point-blank question, and her only
answer was to begin again to cry. For a few minutes Master Nathaniel
allowed her to do so unmolested, and then he said gently, "I think you
have cried enough for tonight, my child. You have been kindness itself,
but it is evident that I am not very welcome to your grandfather's
widow, so I must not inflict myself longer upon her. But before I leave
her roof there is something I want to do, and I shall need your help."

Then he told her who he was and how he wanted to prove something
against a certain enemy of his, and had come here hoping to find a
missing clue.

He paused, and looked at her meditatively. "I think I ought to tell
you, my child," he went on, "that if I can prove what I want, your
grandmother may also be involved. Did you know she had once been tried
for the murder of your grandfather?"

"Yes," she faltered. "I've heard that there was a trial. But I thought
she was proved innocent."

"Yes. But there is such a thing as a miscarriage of justice. I believe
that your grandfather was murdered, and that my enemy--whose name
I don't care to mention till I have more to go upon--had a hand in
the matter. And I have a shrewd suspicion that the widow was his
accomplice. Under these circumstances, will you still be willing to
help me?"

Hazel first turned red, and then she turned white, and her lower lip
began to tremble. She disliked the widow, but had to admit that she had
never been unkindly treated by her, and, though not her own kith and
kin, she was the nearest approach to a relative she could remember.
But, on the other hand, Hazel belonged by tradition and breed to the
votaries of the grim cult of the Law. Crime must not go unpunished;
moreover (and here Hazel subscribed to a still more venerable code)
one's own kith and kin must not go unavenged.

But the very vehemence with which she longed to be rid of the widow's
control had bred a curious irrational sense of guilt with regard to
her; and, into the bargain, she was terrified of her.

Supposing this clue should lead to nothing, and the widow discover that
they had been imagining? How, in that case, should she dare to face
her, to go on living under the same roof with her?

And yet ... she was certain she had tried to murder their guest that
night. How dared she? How dared she?

Hazel clenched her fists, and in a little gasping voice said, "Yes,
sir, I'll help you."

"Good!" said Master Nathaniel briskly. "I want to take old Portunus's
advice--and dig under that herm in the orchard, this very night.
Though, mind you, it's just as likely as not to prove nothing but the
ravings of a crazy mind; or else it may concern some buried treasure,
or something else that has nothing to do with your grandfather's
murder. But, in the case of our finding a valuable bit of evidence,
we must have witnesses. And I think we should have the law-man of the
district with us; who is he?"

"It's the Swan blacksmith, Peter Pease."

"Is there any servant you trust whom you could send for him? Someone
more attached to you than to the widow?"

"I can trust them all, and they all like me best," she answered.

"Good. Go and wake a servant and send him off at once for the
blacksmith. Tell him not to bring him up to the house, but to take him
straight to the orchard ... we don't want to wake the widow before
need be. And the servant can stay and help us with the job--the more
witnesses the better."

Hazel felt as if she was in a strange, rather terrible dream. But she
crept up to the attic and aroused one of the unmarried labourers--who,
according to the old custom, slept in their master's house--and bade
him ride into Swan and bring the blacksmith back with him on important
business concerning the law.

Hazel calculated that he should get to Swan and back in less than an
hour, and she and Master Nathaniel crept out of the house to wait for
them in the orchard, each provided with a spade.

The moon was on the wane, but still sufficiently full to give a good
light. She was, indeed, an orchard thief, for no fruit being left to
rob, she had robbed the leaves of all their colour.

"Poor old moon!" chuckled Master Nathaniel, who was now in the highest
of spirits, "always filching colours with which to paint her own pale
face, and all in vain! But just look at your friend, at Master Herm. He
does look knowing!"

For in the moonlight the old herm had found his element, and under her
rays his stone flickered and glimmered into living silver flesh, while
his archaic smile had gained a new significance.

"Excuse, me, sir," said Hazel timidly, "but I couldn't help wondering
if the gentleman you suspected was ... Dr. Leer."

"What makes you think so?" asked Master Nathaniel sharply.

"I don't quite know," faltered Hazel. "I just--wondered."

Before long they were joined by the labourer and the law-man
blacksmith--a burly, jovial, red-haired rustic of about fifty.

"Good evening," cried Master Nathaniel briskly, "I am Nathaniel
Chanticleer" (he was sure that the news of his deposition could not
yet have had time to travel to Swan) "and if my business were not
very pressing and secret I would not, you may be sure, have had you
roused from your bed at this ungodly hour. I have reason to think
that something of great importance may be hidden under this herm,
and I wanted you to be there to see that our proceedings are all in
order," and he laughed genially. "And here's the guarantee that I'm no
masquerader," and he removed his signet ring and held it out to the
blacksmith. It was engraved with his well-known crest, and with six
chevrons, in token that six of his ancestors had been High Seneschals
of Dorimare.

Both the blacksmith and the labourer were at first quite overwhelmed by
learning his identity, but he pressed a spade into the hand of each and
begged them to begin digging without further delay.

For some time they toiled away in silence, and then one of the spades
came against something hard.

It proved to be a small iron box with a key attached to it.

"Out with it! out with it!" cried Master Nathaniel excitedly. "I wonder
if it contains a halter! By the Sun, Moon and Stars, I wonder!"

But he was sobered by a glimpse of poor Hazel's scared face.

"Forgive me, my child," he said gently, "my thirst for revenge has made
me forget both decency and manners. And, as like as not, there will be
nothing in it but a handful of Duke Aubrey crowns--the nest-egg of one
of your ancestors."

They unlocked the box and found that it contained nothing but a sealed
parchment package, addressed thus:

                     "To the First Who Finds Me."

"I think, Miss Hazel, it should be you who opens it. Don't you agree,
Master Law-man?" said Master Nathaniel. So, with trembling fingers,
Hazel broke the seal, tore open the wrapper, and drew out a sheet of
writing.

By the light of the blacksmith's lanthorn they read as follows:

    I, Jeremiah Gibberty, farmer and law-man of the district of
    Swan-on-the-Dapple, having ever been a merry man who loved his
    joke, do herein crack my last, this side of the Debatable Hills,
    in the hopes that it will not lie so long in the damp earth as to
    prove but a lame rocket when the time comes to fire it off. And
    this is my last joke, and may all who hear it hold their sides,
    and may the tears run down their cheeks. I, Jeremiah Gibberty,
    was wilfully murdered by my second wife, Clementina, daughter of
    Ralph Baldbreeches, sailor, and an outlandish woman from the far
    North. In the which crime she was aided by her lover, Christopher
    Pugwalker, a foreigner who called himself an herbalist. And I know
    by sundry itchings of my skin which torment me as I write and by my
    spotted tongue that I have been given what the folks who know them
    call death-berries. And they were boiled down to look like mulberry
    jelly, offered to me by my dear wife, and of which I ate in my
    innocence. And I bid him who finds this writing to search for a
    little lad, by name Peter Pease, the son of a tipsy tinker. For
    this little lad, having an empty stomach and being greedy for
    pence, came to me but an hour ago with a basket full of these same
    death-berries and asked me if I should like to buy them. And I, to
    test him, asked him if he thought there was a blight in my orchard
    that I should be so hard put to it for fruit. And he said he
    thought we must like them up at Gibberty's for he had seen the
    gentleman who lived with us (Christopher Pugwalker) but a week
    since, gathering them. And if Christopher Pugwalker should leave
    these parts, then let the law search for a dumpy fellow, with
    nut-brown hair, a pug-nose freckled like a robin's egg, and one eye
    brown, the other blue. And in order that my last joke may be a
    well-built one, I have tested the berries I bought from the little
    lad, though it wrung my heart to do so, on one of the rabbits of a
    certain little maid, by name, Marjory Beach, the daughter of my
    carter. And I have done so because she, being seven years old and a
    healthy lass, runs a good chance of being still this side of the
    hills when someone digs up this buried jest. And if she be alive
    she will not have forgotten how one of her rabbits took to
    scratching itself, and how its tongue was spotted like a snake, and
    how she found it lying dead. And I humbly beg her pardon for having
    played such a cruel trick on a little maid, and I ask my heirs (if
    so be any of them still alive) to send her a fine buck rabbit, a
    ham, and ten gold pieces. And, though I am law-man and could put
    them under arrest before I die, yet, for a time, I hold my hand.
    Partly because I have been a hunter all my life, and as the hare
    and deer are given their chance to escape, so shall they have
    theirs; and partly because I should like to be very far on my
    wanderings down the Milky Way before Clementina mounts Duke
    Aubrey's wooden horse; because I think the sound of her strangling
    would hurt my ears; and, last of all, because I am very weary. And
    here I sign my name for the last time.




                             CHAPTER XXIV

                            BELLING THE CAT


When they had finished reading, Hazel burst into hysterical sobs,
crying alternately, "Poor grandfather!" and "Will they hang her for
it?" Master Nathaniel soothed her as best he could, and, when she had
dried her eyes, she said, "Poor Marjory Beach! She must have that ham
and that buck rabbit."

"She's still alive, then?" asked Master Nathaniel eagerly. Hazel
nodded: "She is poor, and still a maid, and lives in Swan."

"And what about Peter Pease, the tinker's smart little lad? Is there
nothing for him, Miss Hazel?" cried the blacksmith with a twinkle.

Hazel stared at him in bewilderment, and Master Nathaniel cried
gleefully, "Why, it's the same name, by the Harvest of Souls! Were you,
then, the little chap who saw Pugwalker picking the berries?"

And Hazel said in slow amazement, "You were the little boy who spoke to
my grandfather ... that night? I never thought...."

"That I'd begun so humbly, eh? Yes, I was the son of a tinker, or, as
they liked to be called, of a whitesmith. And now I'm a blacksmith, and
as white is better than black I suppose I've come down in the world."
And he winked merrily.

"And you remember the circumstances alluded to by the late farmer?"
asked Master Nathaniel eagerly.

"That I do, my lord Seneschal. As well if they had happened yesterday.
I won't easily forget the farmer's face that night when I offered him
my basketful--but though the death-berries are rare enough I found them
in those days commoner to pick up than ha'pence. And I won't easily
forget Master Pugwalker's face, either, while he was plucking them.
And little did he know there was a squirrel watching him with a good
Dorimare tongue in his head!"

"Have you ever seen him since?"

The blacksmith winked.

"Come, come!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently. "Have you seen him
since? This is no time for beating about the bush."

"Well, perhaps I have," said the blacksmith slowly, "trotting about
Swan, as brisk and as pleased with himself as a fox with a goose in his
mouth. And I've often wondered whether it wasn't my duty as law-man to
speak out ... but, after all, it was very long ago, and his life seemed
to be of better value than his death, for he was a wonderfully clever
doctor and did a powerful lot of good."

"It--it was Dr. Leer, then?" asked Hazel in a low voice; and the
blacksmith winked.

"Well, I think we should be getting back to the house," said Master
Nathaniel, "there's still some business before us." And, lowering his
voice, he added, "Not very pleasant business, I fear."

"I suppose your Honour means belling the cat?" said the blacksmith,
adding with a rueful laugh, "I can't imagine a nastier job. She's a cat
with claws."

As they walked up to the house, the labourer whispered to Hazel,
"Please, missy, does it mean that the mistress killed her husband? They
always say so in the village, but...."

"Don't, Ben; don't! I can't bear talking about it," cried Hazel with a
shudder. And when they reached the house, she ran up to her own bedroom
and locked herself in.

Ben was despatched to get a stout coil of rope, and Master Nathaniel
and the blacksmith, whom the recent excitement had made hungry, began
to forage around for something to eat.

Suddenly a voice at the door said, "And what, may I ask, are you
looking for in my larder, gentlemen?"

It was the widow. First she scrutinized Master Nathaniel--a little pale
and hollow-eyed, perhaps, but alive and kicking, for all that. Then
her eyes travelled to Peter Pease. At that moment, Ben entered with
the rope, and Master Nathaniel nudged the law-man, who, clearing his
throat, cried in the expressionless falsetto of the Law, "Clementina
Gibberty! In the name of the country of Dorimare, and to the end that
the dead, the living, and those not yet born, may rest quietly in their
graves, their bed, and the womb, I arrest you for the murder of your
late husband, Jeremiah Gibberty."

She turned deadly pale, and, for a few seconds, stood glaring at him in
deadly silence. Then she gave a scornful laugh. "What new joke of yours
is this, Peter Pease? I was accused of this before, as you know well,
and acquitted with the judge's compliments, and as good as an apology.
Law business must be very slack in Swan that you've nothing better to
do than to come and frighten a poor woman in her own house with old
spiteful tales that were silenced once and for all nearly forty years
ago. My late husband died quietly in his bed, and I only hope you may
have as peaceful an end. And you must know very little of the law,
Peter Pease, if you don't know that a person can't be tried twice for
the same crime."

Then Master Nathaniel stepped forward. "You were tried before," he said
quietly, "for poisoning your husband with the sap of osiers. This
time it will be for poisoning him with the berries of merciful death.
Tonight the dead have found their tongues."

She gave a wild shriek, which reached upstairs to Hazel's room and
caused her to spring into bed and pull the blankets over her ears, as
if it had been a thunderstorm.

Master Nathaniel signed to Ben, who, grinning from ear to ear, as is
the way of rustics when witnessing a painful and embarrassing scene,
came up to his mistress with the coil of rope. But to bind her, he
needed the aid of both the blacksmith and Master Nathaniel, for, like a
veritable wild cat, she struggled and scratched and bit.

When her arms were tightly bound, Master Nathaniel said, "And now I
will read you the words of the dead."

She was, for the time, worn out by her struggles, and her only answer
was an insolent stare, and he produced the farmer's document and read
it through to her.

"And now," he said, eyeing her curiously, "shall I tell you who gave me
the clue without which I should never have found that letter? It was a
certain old man, whom I think you know, by name Portunus."

Her face turned as pale as death, and in a low voice of horror she
cried, "Long ago I guessed who he was, and feared that he might prove
my undoing." Then her voice grew shrill with terror and her eyes
became fixed, as if seeing some hideous vision, "The Silent People!"
she screamed. "The dumb who speak! The bound who strike! I cherished
and fed old Portunus like a tame bird. But what do the dead know of
kindness?"

"If old Portunus is he whom you take him to be, I fail to see that he
has much cause for gratitude," said Master Nathaniel drily. "Well, he
has taken his revenge, on you--and your accomplice."

"My accomplice?"

"Aye, on Endymion Leer."

"Oh, Leer!" And she laughed scornfully. "It was a greater than Endymion
Leer who ordered the death of farmer Gibberty."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. One who cares not for good and evil, and sows his commands like
grain."

"Whom do you mean?"

Again she laughed scornfully. "Not one whom I would name to you. But
set your mind at rest, he cannot be summoned in a court of law."

She gave him a searching look, and said abruptly, "Who are you?"

"My name is Nathaniel Chanticleer."

"I thought as much!" she cried triumphantly. "I wasn't sure, but I
thought I'd take no risks. However, you seem to bear a charmed life."

"I suppose you are alluding to your kind thought for my
comfort--putting that nice little death-box in my room to keep me warm,
eh?"

"Yes, that's it," she answered brazenly.

Then a look of indescribable malice came into her face, and, with an
evil smile, she said, "You see, you gave yourself away--without knowing
it--at dinner."

"Indeed? And how, may I ask?"

At first she did not answer, but eyed him gloatingly as a cat might
eye a mouse. And then she said slowly, "It was that pack of lies you
told me about the doings of the lads at Moongrass. Your son isn't at
Moongrass--nor ever has been, nor ever will be."

"What do you mean?" he cried hoarsely.

"Mean?" she said with a shrill, triumphant laugh. "I mean this--on
the night of the thirty-first of October, when the Silent People are
abroad, he heard Duke Aubrey's summons, and followed it across the
hills."

"Woman ... what ... what ... speak ... or ..." and the veins in Master
Nathaniel's temples were swelling, and a fire seemed to have been
lighted in his brain.

Her laughter redoubled. "You'll never see your son again!" she jeered.
"Young Ranulph Chanticleer has gone to the land whence none returns."

Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his
inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the
ceiling, just before losing consciousness--Ranulph weeping among the
fields of gillyflowers.

A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface
of his mind, he supposed that this was IT springing out at him at last.
And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense
of relief--the relaxing of tension, when one can say, "Well, it has
come at last."

He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, "The
land from which no one returns ... but I can go there, too."

"Follow him across the hills?" she cried scornfully. "No; you are not
made of that sort of stuff."

He beckoned to Peter Pease, and they went out together to the front of
the house. The cocks were crowing, and there was a feeling of dawn in
the air.

"I want my horse," he said dully. "And can you find Miss Hazel for me?"

But as he spoke she joined them--pale and wild-eyed.

"From my room I heard you coming out," she said. "Is it--is it over?"

Master Nathaniel nodded. And then, in a quiet voice emptied of all
emotion, he told her what he had just learned from the widow. She went
still paler than before, and her eyes filled with tears.

Then, turning to Peter Pease, he said, "You will immediately get out a
warrant for the apprehension of Endymion Leer and send it into Lud to
the new Mayor, Master Polydore Vigil. And you, Miss Hazel, you'd better
leave this place at once--you will have to be plaintiff in the trial.
Go to your aunt, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, who keeps the village shop at
Mothgreen. And remember, you must say nothing whatever about the part
I've played in this business--that is essential. I am not popular at
present in Lud. And, now, would you kindly order my horse saddled and
brought round."

There was something so colourless, so dead, in his voice, that both
Hazel and the smith stood, for a few seconds, in awed and sympathetic
silence, and then Hazel went off slowly to order his horse.

"You ... you didn't mean what you said to the widow, sir, about ...
about going ... yonder?" asked Peter Pease in an awed voice.

Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel's eyes, and he
cried fiercely, "Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be ... till I
find my son."

It did not take long for his horse to be saddled and led to the door.

"Good-bye, my child," he said to Hazel, taking her hand, and then he
added, with a smile, "You dragged me back last night from the Milky
Way ... and now I am going by the earthly one."

She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards
the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the
distance.

"Well, well," said Peter Pease, "I warrant it'll be the first time in
the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to
follow him yonder."




                              CHAPTER XXV

                     THE LAW CROUCHES AND SPRINGS


Literally, Master Polydore Vigil received the severest shock of his
life, when a few days after the events recorded in the last chapter
there reached him the warrant against Endymion Leer, duly signed and
sealed by the law-man of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple.

Dame Marigold had been right in saying that her brother was now
completely under the dominion of the doctor. Master Polydore was
a weak, idle man, who, nevertheless, dearly loved the insignia of
authority. Hence, his present position was for him an ideal one--he had
all the glory due to the first citizen, who has, moreover, effected a
coup d'etat, and none of the real responsibility that such a situation
entails.

And now, this terrible document had arrived--it was like an attempt to
cut off his right hand. His first instinct on receiving it was to rush
off and take counsel with Endymion Leer himself--surely the omniscient
resourceful doctor would be able to reduce to wind and thistledown
even a thing as solid as a warrant. But respect for the Law, and the
belief that though everything else may turn out vanity and delusion,
the Law has the terrifying solidity of Reality itself, were deep-rooted
in Master Polydore. If there was a warrant out against Endymion
Leer--well, then, he must bend his neck to the yoke like any other
citizen and stand his trial.

Again he read through the warrant, in the hopes that on a second it
would lose its reality--prove to be a forgery, or a hoax. Alas! Its
genuineness was but too unmistakable--the Law had spoken.

Master Polydore let his hands fall to his sides in an attitude of limp
dismay; then he sighed heavily; then he rose slowly to his feet--there
was nothing for it but to summon Mumchance, and let the warrant
instantly be put into effect. As it was possible, nay, almost certain,
that the Doctor would be able to clear himself triumphantly in Court,
the quicker the business was put through, the sooner Master Polydore
would recover his right hand.

When Mumchance arrived, Master Polydore said, in a voice as casual
as he could make it, "Oh! yes, Mumchance, yes ... I asked you to
come, because," and he gave a little laugh, "a warrant has actually
arrived--of course, there must be some gross misunderstanding behind
it, and there will be no difficulty in getting it cleared up in
Court--but, as a matter of fact, a warrant has arrived from the law-man
of Swan-on-the-Dapple, against ... well, against none other than Dr.
Endymion Leer!" and again he laughed.

"Yes, your Worship," said Mumchance; and, not only did his face express
no surprise, but into the bargain it looked distinctly grim.

"Absurd, isn't it?" said Master Polydore, "and most inconvenient."

Mumchance cleared his throat: "A murderer's a murderer, your
Worship," he said. "Me and my wife, we were spending last evening
at Mothgreen--my wife's cousin keeps the tavern there, and he was
celebrating his silver wedding--if your Worship will excuse me
mentioning such things--and among the friends he'd asked in was the
plaintiff and her aunt ... and, well ... there be some things that be
just too big for any defendant to dodge. But I'll say no more, your
Worship."

"I should hope not, Mumchance; you have already strangely forgotten
yourself," and Master Polydore glared fiercely at the unrepentant
Mumchance. All the same, he could not help feeling a little disquieted
by the attitude adopted by that worthy.

Two hours later after a busy morning devoted to professional
visits--and, perhaps, some unprofessional ones too--Endymion Leer sat
down to his midday dinner. There was not a happier man in Lud than
he--he was the most influential man in the town, deep in the counsels
of the magistrates; and as for the dreaded Chanticleers--well, he
had successively robbed them of their sting. Life being one and
indivisible, when one has a sense that it is good its humblest
manifestations are transfigured, and that morning the Doctor would have
found a meal of baked haws sweet to his palate--how much more so the
succulent meal that was actually awaiting him. But it was not fated
that Endymion Leer should eat that dinner. There came a loud double
knock at the door, and then the voice of Captain Mumchance, demanding
instantly to be shown in to the Doctor. It was in vain that the
housekeeper protested, saying that the Doctor had given strict orders
that he was never to be disturbed at his meals, for the Captain roughly
brushed her aside with an aphorism worthy of that eminent jurist, the
late Master Josiah Chanticleer. "The Law, my good lady, is no respector
of a gentleman's stomach, so I'll trouble you to stand out of the way,"
and he stumped resolutely into the parlour.

"Morning, Mumchance!" cried the Doctor cheerily, "come to share this
excellent-looking pigeon-pie?"

For a second or two the Captain surveyed him rather ghoulishly. It must
be remembered that not only had the Captain identified himself with the
Law to such a degree that he looked upon any breach of it as a personal
insult, but that also he had been deeply wounded in his professional
pride in that he had not immediately recognised a murderer by his
smell.

Captain Mumchance was not exactly an imaginative man, but as he
stood there contemplating the Doctor he could almost have believed
that his features and expression had suffered a subtle and most
unbecoming change since he had last seen them. It was as if he was
sitting in a ghastly green light--the most disfiguring and sinister
of all the effects of light with which the Law cunningly plays with
appearances--the light that emanates from the word murder.

"No, thank you," he said gruffly, "I don't sit down to table with the
likes of you."

The Doctor gave him a very sharp look, and then he raised his eyebrows
and said drily, "It seems to me that recently you have more than once
honoured my humble board."

The Captain snorted, and then in a stentorian and unnatural voice, he
shouted, "Endymion Leer! I arrest you in the name of the country of
Dorimare, and to the end that the dead, the living, and those not yet
born, may rest quietly in their graves, their bed, and the womb."

"Gammon and spinnage!" cried the Doctor, testily, "what's your little
game, Mumchance?"

"Is murder, game?" said the Captain; and at that word the Doctor
blanched, and then Mumchance added, "You're accused of the murder of
the late Farmer Gibberty."

The words acted like a spell. It was as if Endymion Leer's previous
sly, ironical, bird-like personality slipped from him like a mask,
revealing another soul, at once more formidable and more tragic. For
a few seconds he stood white and silent, and then he cried out in a
terrible voice: "Treachery! Treachery! The Silent People have betrayed
me! It is ill serving a perfidious master!"

The news of the arrest of Endymion Leer on a charge of murder flew like
wildfire through Lud.

At all the street corners, little groups of tradesmen, 'prentices,
sailors, were to be seen engaged in excited conversation, and from one
to the other group flitted the deaf-mute harlot, Bawdy Bess, inciting
them in her strange uncontrolled speech, while dogging her footsteps
with her dance-like tread went old Mother Tibbs, alternately laughing
in crazy glee and weeping and wringing her hands and crying out that
she had not yet brought back the Doctor's last washing, and it was a
sad thing that he should go for his last ride in foul linen. "For he'll
mount Duke Aubrey's wooden horse--the Gentlemen have told me so," she
added with mysterious nods.

In the meantime, Luke Hempen had reported to Mumchance what he had
learned from the little herdsmen about the "fish" caught by the widow
and the Doctor. The Yeomanry stationed on the border were instantly
notified and ordered to drag the Dapple near the spot where it bubbled
out after its subterranean passage through the Debatable Hills. They
did so, and discovered wicker frails of fairy fruit, so cunningly
weighted that they were able to float under the surface of the water.

This discovery considerably altered Master Polydore's attitude to
Endymion Leer.




                             CHAPTER XXVI

                        "NEITHER TREES NOR MEN"


In view of the disturbance caused among the populace by the arrest
of Endymion Leer, the Senate deemed it advisable that his trial, and
that of the widow Gibberty, should take precedence of all other legal
business; so as soon as the two important witnesses, Peter Pease and
Marjory Beach, reached Lud-in-the-Mist, it was fixed for an early date.

Never, in all the annals of Dorimare, had a trial been looked forward
to with such eager curiosity. It was to begin at nine o'clock in the
morning, and by seven o'clock the hall of justice was already packed,
while a seething crowd thronged the courtyard and overflowed into the
High Street beyond.

On the front seats sat Dame Marigold, Dame Jessamine, Dame Dreamsweet
and the other wives of magistrates; the main body of the hall was
occupied by tradesmen and their wives, and other quiet, well-to-do
members of the community, and behind them seethed the noisy, impudent,
hawking, cat-calling riff-raff--'prentices, sailors, pedlars,
strumpets; showing clearly on what side were their sympathies by such
ribald remarks as, "My old granny's pet cockatoo is terrible fond of
cherries, I think we should tell the Town Yeomanry, and have it locked
up as a smuggler," or, "Where's Mumchance! Send for Mumchance and the
Mayor! Two hundred years ago an old gaffer ate a gallon of crab soup
and died the same night--arrest Dr. Leer and hang him for it."

But as the clocks struck nine and Master Polydore Vigil, in his
priestly-looking purple robes of office embroidered in gold with
the sun and the moon and the stars, and the other ten judges clad
in scarlet and ermine filed slowly in and, bowing gravely to the
assembly, took their seats on the dais, silence descended on the hall;
for the fear of the Law was inbred in every Dorimarite, even the most
disreputable.

Nevertheless, there was a low hum of excitement when Mumchance in his
green uniform, carrying an axe, and two or three others of the Town
Yeomanry, marched in with the two prisoners, who took their places in
the dock.

Though Endymion Leer had for long been one of the most familiar figures
in Lud, all eyes were turned on him with as eager a curiosity as if he
had been some savage from the Amber Desert, the first of his kind to be
seen in Dorimare; and such curious tricks can the limelight of the Law
play on reality that many there thought that they could see his evil
sinister life writ in clear characters on his familiar features.

To the less impressionable of the spectators, however, he looked very
much as usual, though perhaps a little pale and flabby about the gills.
And he swept the hall with his usual impudent appraising glance, as if
to say, "Linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey! But one must make the best of
a poor material."

"He's going to give the judges a run for their money!"

"If he's got to die, he'll die game!" gleefully whispered various of
his partisans.

As for the widow, her handsome passionate face was deadly pale and
emptied of all expression; this gave her a sort of tragic sinister
beauty, reminiscent of the faces of the funereal statues in the Fields
of Grammary.

"Not the sort of woman I'd like to meet in a lonely lane at night," was
the general comment she aroused.

Then the Clerk of Arraigns called out "Silence!" and in a solemn
voice, Master Polydore said, "Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty,
hold up your hands." They did so. Whereupon, Master Polydore read the
indictment, as follows: "Endymion Leer, and Clementina Gibberty, you
are accused of having poisoned the late Jeremiah Gibberty, farmer, and
law-man of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple, thirty-six years ago,
with a fruit known as the berries of merciful death."

Then the plaintiff, a fresh-faced young girl (none other, of course,
than our old friend, Hazel) knelt at the foot of the dais and was given
the great seal to kiss; upon which the Clerk of Arraigns led her up
into a sort of carved pulpit, whence in a voice, low, but so clear
as to penetrate to the furthest corners of the hall she told, with
admirable lucidity, the story of the murder of her grandfather.

Next, Mistress Ivy, flustered and timid, told the Judges, in somewhat
rambling fashion, what she had already told Master Nathaniel.

Then came the testimony of Peter Pease and Marjory Beach, and, finally,
the document of the late farmer was handed round among the Judges.

"Endymion Leer!" called out Master Polydore, "the Law bids you speak,
or be silent, as your conscience prompts you."

And as Endymion Leer rose to make his defence, the silence of the hall
seemed to be trebled in intensity.

"My Lords Judges!" he began, "I take my stand, not high enough,
perhaps, to be out of reach of the gibbet, but well above the heads,
I fancy, of everybody here today. And, first of all, I would have you
bear in mind that my life has been spent in the service of Dorimare."
(Here there was a disturbance at the back of the hall and shouts
of "Down with the Senators!" "Long live the good Doctor!" But the
would-be rioters were cowed by the thunder of the Law, rumbling in the
"Silence!" of the Clerk of Arraigns.)

"I have healed and preserved your bodies--I have tried to do the same
for your souls. First, by writing a book--published anonymously some
years ago--in which I tried to show the strange seeds that are sleeping
in each of you. But the book hardly aroused the enthusiasm that it
so justly deserved" (and he gave his old dry chuckle). "In fact, not
to put too fine a point on it, the copies were burned by the common
hangman--and could you have found the author you would gladly have
burned him too. I can tell you since writing it I have gone in fear
of my life, and have hardly dared to look a red-haired man in the
face--still less a blue cow!" and here some of his partizans at the
back of the hall laughed uproariously.

He paused, and then went on in a graver voice, "Why have I taken all
this trouble with you? Why have I spent my erudition and my skill on
you thus? To speak truth, I hardly know myself ... perhaps because I
like playing with fire; perhaps because I am relentlessly compassionate.

"My friends, you are outcasts, though you do not know it, and you
have forfeited your place on earth. For there are two races--trees
and man; and for each there is a different dispensation. Trees are
silent, motionless, serene. They live and die, but do not know the
taste of either life or death; to them a secret has been entrusted but
not revealed. But the other tribe--the passionate, tragic, rootless
tree--man? Alas! he is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse.
In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown
to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses,
memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never
tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one
into different Mysteries. And some walk among their fellows with the
pitying, slightly scornful smile, of an adept among catechumens. And
some are confiding and garrulous, and would so willingly communicate
their own unique secret--in vain! For though they shout it in the
market-place, or whisper it in music and poetry, what they say is never
the same as what they know, and they are like ghosts charged with a
message of tremendous import who can only trail their chains and gibber.

"Such then are the two tribes. Citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist, to which do
you belong? To neither; for you are not serene, majestic, and silent,
nor are you restless, passionate, and tragic.

"I could not turn you into trees; but I had hoped to turn you into men.

"I have fed and healed your bodies; and I would fain have done the same
for your souls." (He paused to mop his brow; clearly it was more of an
effort for him to speak than one would have guessed. Then he went on,
and his voice had in it a strange new thrill.) "There is a land where
the sun and the moon do not shine; where the birds are dreams, the
stars are visions, and the immortal flowers spring from the thoughts
of death. In that land grow fruit, the juices of which sometimes cause
madness, and sometimes manliness; for that fruit is flavoured with life
and death, and it is the proper nourishment for the souls of man. You
have recently discovered that for some years I have helped to smuggle
that fruit into Dorimare. The farmer Gibberty would have deprived you
of it--and so I prescribed for him the berries of merciful death."
(This admission of guilt caused another disturbance at the back of the
hall, and there were shouts of "Don't you believe him!" "Never say die,
Doctor!" and so on. The Yeomanry had to put out various rough-looking
men, and Master Ambrose, sitting up on the dais, recognised among them
the sailor, Sebastian Thug, whom he and Master Nathaniel had seen
in the Fields of Grammary. When silence and order had been restored
Endymion Leer went on.) "Yes, I prescribed for him the berries of
merciful death. What could it matter to the world whether he reaped the
corn-fields of Dorimare, or the fields of gillyflowers beyond the hills?

"And now, my Lords Judges, I will forestall your sentence. I have
pleaded guilty, and you will send me for a ride on what the common
people call Duke Aubrey's wooden horse; and you will think that you
are sending me there because I helped to murder the farmer Gibberty.
But, my Lords Judges, you are purblind, and, even in spectacles, you
can only read a big coarse script. It is not you that are punishing me,
but others for a spiritual sin. During these days of my imprisonment
I have pondered much on my own life, and I have come to see that I
have sinned. But how? I have prided myself on being a good chemist,
and in my crucibles I can make the most subtle sauces yield up their
secret--whether it be white arsenic, rosalgar, mercury sublimate, or
cantharides. But where is the crucible or the chemist that can analyse
a spiritual sin?

"But I have not lived in vain. You will send me to ride on Duke
Aubrey's wooden horse, and, in time, the double-faced Doctor will be
forgotten; and so will you, my Lords Judges. But Lud-in-the-Mist will
stand, and the country of Dorimare, and the dreaded country beyond the
hills. And the trees will continue to suck life from the earth and the
clouds, and the winds will howl o' nights, and men will dream dreams.
And who knows? Some day, perhaps, my fickle bitter-sweet master, the
lord of life and death, of laughter and tears, will come dancing at the
head of his silent battalions to make wild music in Dorimare.

"This then, my Lords Judges, is my defence," and he gave a little bow
towards the dais.

While he had been speaking, the Judges had shown increasing symptoms of
irritation and impatience. This was not the language of the Law.

As for the public--it was divided. One part had sat taut with
attention--lips slightly parted, eyes dreamy, as if they were listening
to music. But the majority--even though many of them were partisans of
the Doctor--felt that they were being cheated. They had expected that
their hero, whether guilty or not, would in his defence quite bamboozle
the Judges by his juggling with the evidence and brilliant casuistry.
Instead of which his speech had been obscure, and, they dimly felt,
indecent; so the girls tittered, and the young men screwed their mouths
into those grimaces which are the comment of the vulgar on anything
they consider both ridiculous and obscene.

"Terribly bad taste, I call it," whispered Dame Dreamsweet to Dame
Marigold (the sisters-in-law had agreed to bury the hatchet) "you
always said that little man was a low vulgar fellow." But Dame
Marigold's only answer was a little shrug, and a tiny sigh.

Then came the turn of the widow Gibberty to mount the pulpit and make
her defence.

Before she began to speak, she fixed in turn the judges, plaintiff,
and public, with an insolent scornful stare. Then, in her deep, almost
masculine voice, she began: "You've asked me a question to which you
know the answer well enough, else I shouldn't be standing here now.
Yes, I murdered Gibberty--and a good riddance too. I was for killing
him with the sap of osiers, but the fellow you call Endymion Leer,
who was always a squeamish, tenderhearted, sort of chap (if there was
nothing to lose by it, that's to say) got me the death-berries and
made me give them to him in a jelly, instead of the osiers." (It was a
pity Master Nathaniel was not there to glory in his own acumen!) "And
it was not only because they caused a painless death that he preferred
the berries. He had never before seen them at their work, and he was
always a death-fancier--tasting, and smelling, and fingering death,
like a farmer does samples of grain at market. Though, to give him his
due, if it hadn't been for him, that girl over there who has just been
standing up to denounce him and me" (and she nodded in the direction of
the pale, trembling, Hazel) "and her father before her would long ago
have gone the way of the farmer. And this I say in the hope that the
wench's conscience may keep her awake sometimes in the nights to come,
remembering how she dealt with the man who had saved her life. It will
be but a small prick, doubtless; but it is the last that I can give her.

"And now, good people, here's a word of advice to you, before I go my
last ride, a pillion to my old friend Endymion Leer. Never you make
a pet of a dead man. For the dead are dirty curs and bite the hand
that has fed them;" and with an evil smile she climbed down from the
pulpit, while more than one person in the audience felt faint with
horror and would willingly have left the hall.

There was nothing left but for Master Polydore to pronounce the
sentence; and though the accused had stolen some of his thunder,
nevertheless the solemn time-honoured words did not fail to produce
their wonted thrill:

"Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty, I find you guilty of murder,
and I consign your bodies to the birds, and your souls to whence they
came. And may all here present take example from your fate, correcting
their conduct if it needs correction, or, if it be impeccable, keeping
it so. For every tree can be a gallows, and every man has a neck to
hang."

The widow received her sentence with complete stolidity; Endymion Leer
with a scornful smile. But as it was pronounced there was a stir and
confusion at the back of the hall, and a grotesque frenzied figure
broke loose from the detaining grip of her neighbours, and, struggling
up to the dais, flung herself at the feet of Master Polydore. It was
Miss Primrose Crabapple.

"Your Worship! Your Worship!" she cried, shrilly, "Hang me instead
of him! My life for his! Was it not I who gave your daughters fairy
fruit, with my eyes open! And I glory in the knowledge that I was made
a humble instrument of the same master whom he has served so well.
Dear Master Polydore, have mercy on your country, spare your country's
benefactor, and if the law must have a victim let it be me--a foolish
useless woman, whose only merit was that she believed in loveliness
though she had never seen it."

Weeping and struggling, her face twisted into a grotesque tragic mask,
they dragged her from the hall, amid the laughter and ironical cheers
of the public.

That afternoon Mumchance came to Master Polydore to inform him that a
young maid-servant from the Academy had just been to the guard-room to
say that Miss Primrose Crabapple had killed herself.

Master Polydore at once hurried off to the scene of the tragedy, and
there in the pleasant old garden where so many generations of Crabapple
Blossoms had romped, and giggled, and exchanged their naughty little
secrets, he found Miss Primrose, hanging stone-dead from one of her own
apple-trees.

"Well, as the old song has it, Mumchance," said Master Polydore--"'Here
hangs a maid who died for love.'"

Master Polydore was noted for his dry humour.

A gibbet had been set up in the great court of the Guildhall, and the
next day, at dawn, Endymion Leer and the widow Gibberty were hanged by
the neck till they died.

Rumour said that as the Doctor's face was contorted in its last grimace
strange silvery peals of laughter were heard proceeding from the room
where long ago Duke Aubrey's jester had killed himself.




                             CHAPTER XXVII

                     THE FAIR IN THE ELFIN MARCHES


About two hours after he had set out from the farm, Master Nathaniel
reached a snug little hollow at the foot of the hills, chosen for their
camp by the consignment of the Lud Yeomanry stationed, by his own
orders, at the foot of the Debatable Hills.

"Halt!" cried the sentry. And then he dropped his musket in amazement.
"Well, I'm blessed if it ain't his Worship!" he cried. Some six or
seven of his mates, who were lounging about the camp, some playing
cards, some lying on their backs and staring up at the sky, came
hurrying up at the sound of the challenge, and, speechless with
astonishment, they stared at Master Nathaniel.

"I have come to look for my son," he said. "I have been told that ...
er ... he came this way some two or three nights ago. If so, you must
have seen him."

The Yeomen shook their heads. "No, your Worship, we've seen no little
boy. In fact, all the weeks we've been here we've not seen a living
soul. And if there are any folks about they must be as swift as
swallows and as silent-footed as cats, and as hard to see--well, as the
dead themselves. No, your Worship, little Master Chanticleer has not
passed this way."

Master Nathaniel sighed wearily. "I had a feeling that you would not
have seen him," he said; adding dreamily more to himself than to them:
"Who knows? He may have gone by the Milky Way."

And then it struck him that this was probably the last normal encounter
he would ever have with ordinary human beings, and he smiled at them
wistfully.

"Well, well," he said, "you're having a pleasant holiday, I
expect ... nothing to do and plenty to eat and drink, eh? Here's a
couple of crowns for you. Send to one of the farms for a pigskin of red
wine and drink my health ... and my son's. I'm off on what may prove a
very long journey; I suppose this bridle-path will be as good a route
as any?"

They stared at him in amazement.

"Please, your Worship, if you'll excuse me mentioning it, you must
be making a mistake," said the sentry, in a shocked voice. "All the
bridle-paths about here lead to nowhere but the Elfin Marches ... and
beyond."

"It is for beyond that I am bound," answered Master Nathaniel curtly.
And digging his spurs into his horse's flanks, he dashed past the
horrified Yeomen, and up one of the bridle-paths, as if he would take
the Debatable Hills by storm.

For a few seconds they stood staring at one another, with scared,
astonished eyes. Then the sentry gave a low whistle.

"He must be powerful fond of that little chap," he said.

"If the little chap really slipped past without our seeing him, that
will be the third Chanticleer to cross the hills. First there was the
little missy at the Academy, then the young chap, then the Mayor."

"Aye, but they didn't do it on an empty stomach--leastways, we know the
Crabapple Blossoms didn't, and if the talk in Lud be true, the little
chap had had a taste too of what he oughtn't," said another. "But it's
another story to go when you're in your right mind. Doctor Leer can't
have been in the right when he said all them Magistrates were played
out, for it's the bravest thing has ever been done in Dorimare."

Master Nathaniel, for how long he could not have said, went riding up
and up the bridle-path that wound in and out among the foothills, which
gradually grew higher and higher. Not a living creature did he meet
with--not a goat, not so much as a bird. He began to feel curiously
drowsy, as if he were riding in a dream.

Suddenly his consciousness seemed to have gone out of gear, to have
missed one of the notches in time or space, for he found himself riding
along a high-road, in the midst of a crowd of peasants in holiday
attire. Nor did this surprise him--his passive uncritical mood was
impervious to surprise.

And yet ... what were these people with whom he had mingled? An
ordinary troop of holiday-making peasants? At first sight, so they
seemed. There were pretty girls, with sunny hair escaping from under
red and blue handkerchiefs, and rustic dandies cross-gartered with
gay ribands, and old women with quiet, nobly-lined faces--a village
community bound for some fair or merry-making.

But why were their eyes so fixed and strange, and why did they walk in
absolute silence?

And then the invisible cicerone of dreams, who is one's other self,
whispered in his ear, These are they whom men call dead.

And, like everything else said by that cicerone, these words seemed to
throw a flood of light on the situation, to make it immediately normal,
even prosaic.

Then the road took a sudden turn, and before them stretched a sort of
heath, dotted with the white booths of a fair.

"That is the market of souls," whispered the invisible cicerone. "Of
course, of course," muttered Master Nathaniel, as if all his life he
had known of its existence. And, indeed, he had forgotten all about
Ranulph, and thought that to visit this fair had been the one object of
his journey.

They crossed the heath, and then they paid their gate-money to a silent
old man. And though Master Nathaniel paid with a coin of a metal and
design he had never seen before, it was with no sense of a link missing
in the chain of cause and effect that he produced it from his pocket.

Outwardly, there was nothing different in this fair from those in
Dorimare. Pewterers, shoemakers, silversmiths were displaying their
wares; there were cows and sheep and pigs, and refreshment booths and
raree-shows. But instead of the cheerful, variegated din that is part
of the fun of the every-day fair, over this one there reigned complete
silence; for the beasts were as silent as the people. Dead silence, and
blazing sun.

Master Nathaniel started off to investigate the booths. In one of them
they were flinging darts at a pasteboard target, on which were painted
various of the heavenly bodies, with the moon in the centre. Anyone
whose dart struck the moon was allowed to choose a prize from a heap of
glittering miscellaneous objects--golden feathers, shells painted with
curious designs, brilliantly-coloured pots, fans, silver sheep-bells.

"They're like Hempie's new ornaments," thought Master Nathaniel.

In another booth there was a merry-go-round of silver horses and
gilded chariots--both sadly tarnished. It was a primitive affair
that moved not by machinery, but by the ceaseless trudging of a live
pony--a patient, dingy little beast--tied to it with a rope. And the
motion generated a thin, cracked music--tunes that had been popular in
Lud-in-the-Mist when Master Nathaniel had been a little boy.

There was "Oh, you Little Charmer with your pretty Puce Bow," there was
"Old Daddy Popinjay fell down upon his Rump," there was "Why did she
cock her Pretty Blue Eye at the Lad with the Silver Buckles?"

But, except for one solitary little boy, the tarnished horses and
chariots whirled round without riders; and the pert tunes sounded so
thin and wan as to accentuate rather than destroy the silence and
atmosphere of melancholy.

In a hopeless, resigned sort of way, the little boy was sobbing. It was
as if he felt that he was doomed by some inexorable fate to whirl round
for ever and ever with the tarnished horses and chariots, the dingy,
patient pony, and the old cracked tunes.

"It is not long," said the invisible cicerone, "since that little boy
was stolen from the mortals. He still can weep."

Master Nathaniel felt a sudden tightening in his throat. Poor little
boy! Poor little lonely boy! What was it he reminded him of? Something
painful, and very near his heart.

Round and round trudged the pony, round and round went the hidden
musical-box, grinding out its thin, blurred tunes.

    Why did she cock her pretty blue eye
    At the lad with the silver buckles,
    When the penniless lad who was handsome and spry
    Got nought but a rap on his knuckles?

These vulgar songs, though faded, were not really old. Nevertheless,
to Master Nathaniel, they were the oldest songs in existence--sung by
the Morning Stars when all the world was young. For they were freighted
with his childhood, and brought the memory, or, rather, the tang, the
scent, of the solemn innocent world of children, a world sans archness,
sans humour, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery
as a shepherd's pipe. Where the little charmer with her puce bow, and
the scheming hussy who had cocked her blue eye had been own sisters to
the pretty fantastic ladies of the nursery rhymes, like them walking
always to the accompaniment of tinkling bells and living on frangipane
and sillabubs of peaches and cream; and whose gestures were stylised
and actions preposterous--nonsense actions that needed no explanation.
While mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, falling in love--they were just
pretty words like brightly-coloured beads, strung together without
meaning.

As Master Nathaniel listened, he knew that other people would have
heard other tunes--whatever tunes through the milkman's whistle, or
the cracked fiddle of a street musician, or the voices of young sparks
returning from the tavern at midnight, the Morning Stars may have
happened to sing in their own particular infancy.

    Oh, you little charmer with your pretty puce bow,
    I'll tell mamma if you carry on so!

Round and round whirled the tarnished horses and chariots with their
one pathetic little rider; round and round trudged the pony--the little
dusty, prosaic pony.

Master Nathaniel rubbed his eyes and looked round; he felt as if after
a dive he were slowly rising to the surface of the water. The fair
seemed to be coming alive--the silence had changed into a low murmur.
And now it was swelling into the mingled din of chattering voices,
lowing cows, grunting pigs, blasts from tin trumpets, hoarse voices of
cheap-jacks praising their wares--all the noises, in short, that one
connects with an ordinary fair.

He sauntered away from the merry-go-round and mingled with the crowd.
All the stall-keepers were doing a brisk trade, but, above all, the
market gardeners--their stalls were simply thronged.

But, lo and behold! the fruit that they were selling was of the kind
he had seen in the mysterious room of the Guildhall, and concealed
inside the case of his grandfather's clock--it was fairy fruit; but the
knowledge brought no sense of moral condemnation.

Suddenly he realized that his throat was parched with thirst and that
nothing would slake it but one of these translucent globes.

The wizened old woman who was selling them cried out to him coaxingly,
"Three for a penny, sir! Or, for you, I'll make it four for a
penny--for the sake of your hazel eyes, lovey! You'll find them as
grateful as dew to the flowers--four for a penny, pretty master. Don't
say no!"

But he had the curious feeling that one sometimes has in dreams,
namely, that he himself was inventing what was happening to him, and
could make it end as he chose.

"Yes," he said to himself, "I am telling myself one of Hempie's old
stories, about a youngest son who has been warned against eating
anything offered to him by strangers, so, of course, I shall not touch
it."

So with a curt "No thank'ee, nothing doing today," he contemptuously
turned his back on the old woman and her fruit.

But whose was that shrill voice? Probably that of some cheapjack whose
patter or whose wares, to judge from the closely-packed throng hiding
him from view, had some particularly attractive quality. The voice
sounded vaguely familiar, and, his curiosity aroused, Master Nathaniel
joined the crowd of spectators.

He could discern nothing but the top of a red head, but the patter was
audible: "Now's your chance, gentlemen! Beauty doesn't keep, but rots
like apples. Apple-shies! Four points if you hit her on the breast, six
if you hit her on the mouth, and he who first gets twenty points wins
the maid. Don't fight shy of the apple-shies! Apples and beauty do not
keep--there's a worm in both. Step up, step up, gentlemen!"

Yes, he had heard that voice before. He began to shoulder his way
through the crowd. It proved curiously yielding, and he had no
difficulty in reaching the centre of attraction, a wooden platform on
which gesticulated, grimaced and pirouetted ... who but his rascally
groom Willy Wisp, dressed as a harlequin. But Willy Wisp was not the
strangest part of the spectacle. Out of the platform grew an apple
tree, and tied to it was his own daughter, Prunella, while grouped
around her in various attitudes of woe were the other Crabapple
Blossoms.

Suddenly Master Nathaniel felt convinced that this was not merely
a story he was inventing himself, but, as well, it was a dream--a
grotesque, illogical, synthesis of scraps of reality, to which he
could add what elements he chose.

"What's happening?" he asked his neighbour.

But he knew the answer--Willy Wisp was selling the girls to the highest
bidder, to labour in the fields of gillyflowers.

"But you have no right to do this!" he cried out in a loud angry
voice, "no right whatever. This is not Fairyland--it is only the
Elfin Marches. They cannot be sold until they have crossed over into
Fairyland--I say they cannot be sold."

All round him he heard awed whispers, "It is Chanticleer--Chanticleer
the dreamer, who has never tasted fruit." Then he found himself giving
a learned dissertation on the law of property, as observed in the
Elfin Marches. The crowd listened to him in respectful silence. Even
Willy Wisp was listening, and the Crabapple Blossoms gazed at him with
inexpressible gratitude.

With what seemed to him a superbly eloquent peroration he brought his
discourse to an end. Prunella stretched out her arms to him, crying,
"Father, you have saved us! You and the Law."

"You and the Law! You and the Law!" echoed the other Crabapple Blossoms.

"Chanticleer and the Law! Chanticleer and the Law!" shouted the crowd.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fair had vanished. He was in a strange town, and was one of a great
crowd of people all hurrying in the same direction.

"They are looking for the bleeding corpse," whispered the invisible
cicerone, and the words filled Master Nathaniel with an unspeakable
horror.

Then the crowd vanished, leaving him alone in a street as silent as
the grave. He pressed forward, for he knew that he was looking for
something; but what it was he had forgotten. At every street corner he
came on a dead man, guarded by a stone beggar with a face like the herm
in the Gibberty's orchard. He was almost choked by the horror of it.
The terror became articulate: "Supposing one of the corpses should turn
out to be that little lonely boy on the merry-go-round!"

This possibility filled him with an indescribable anguish.

Suddenly he remembered about Ranulph. Ranulph had gone to the country
from which there is no return.

But he was going to follow him there and fetch him back. Nothing would
stop him--he would push, if necessary, through fold after fold of
dreams until he reached their heart.

He bent down and touched one of the corpses. It was warm, and it
moved. As he touched it he realized that he had incurred the danger of
contamination from some mysterious disease.

"But it isn't real, it isn't real," he muttered. "I'm inventing it all
myself. And so, whatever happens, I shan't mind, because it isn't real."

It was growing dark. He knew that he was being followed by one of
the stone beggars, who had turned into a four-footed animal called
Portunus. In one sense the animal was a protection, in another a
menace, and he knew that in summoning him he must be very careful to
use the correct ritual formulary.

He had reached a square, on one side of which was a huge building
with a domed roof. Light streamed from it through a great window of
stained glass, on which was depicted a blue warrior fighting with a
red dragon ... no, it was not a stained glass window but merely the
reflection on the white walls of the building from a house in complete
darkness in the opposite side of the square, inhabited by creatures
made of red lacquer. He knew that they were expecting him to call,
because they believed that he was courting one of them.

"What else could bring him here save all this lovely spawn?" said a
voice at his elbow.

He looked round--suddenly the streets were pullulating with strange
semi-human fauna: tiny green men, the wax figures of his parents from
Hempie's chimney-piece, grimacing greybeards with lovely children
gamboling round them dressed in beetles' shards.

Now they were dancing, some slow old-fashioned dance ... in and out, in
and out. Why, they were only figures on a piece of tapestry flapping in
the wind!

Once more he felt his horse beneath him. But what were these little
pattering footsteps behind him? He turned uneasily in his saddle, to
discover that it was nothing but a gust of wind rustling a little eddy
of dead leaves.

The town and its strange fauna had vanished, and once more he was
riding up the bridle-path; but now it was night.




                            CHAPTER XXVIII

                    "BY THE SUN, MOON AND STARS AND
                    THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE WEST"


Though it was a relief to have returned to the fresh air of reality,
Master Nathaniel was frightened. He realized that he was alone at dead
of night in the Elfin Marches. And the moon kept playing tricks on him,
turning trees and boulders into goblins and wild beasts; cracking her
jokes, true humourist that she was, with a solemn impassive face. But,
how was this? She was a waxing moon, and almost full, while the night
before--or what he supposed was the night before--she had been a half
moon on the wane.

Had he left time behind him in Dorimare?

Then suddenly, like some winged monster rushing from its lair, there
sprang up a mighty wind. The pines creaked and rustled and bent beneath
its onslaught, the grasses whistled, the clouds flocked together and
covered the face of the moon.

Several times he was nearly lifted from his saddle. He drew his cloak
closely round him, and longed, with an unspeakable longing, for his
warm bed in Lud; and it flashed into his mind that what he had so often
imagined in that bed, to enhance his sense of well-being, was now
actually occurring--he was tired, he was cold, and the wind was finding
the fissures in his doublet.

Suddenly, as if some hero had slain the monster, the wind died down,
the moon sailed clear of the clouds, and the pines straightened
themselves and once more stood at attention, silent and motionless. In
spite of this, his horse grew strangely restive, rearing and jibbing,
as if something was standing before it in the path that frightened it;
and in vain Master Nathaniel tried to quiet and sooth it.

Then it shuddered all over and fell heavily to the ground.

Fortunately, Master Nathaniel was thrown clear, and was not hurt,
beyond the inevitable bruises entailed by the fall of a man of his
weight. He struggled to his feet and hurried to his horse. It was stone
dead.

For some time he sat beside it ... his last link with Lud and familiar
things; as yet too depressed in mind and aching in body to continue his
journey on foot.

But what were those sudden strains of piercingly sweet music, and from
what strange instrument did they proceed? They were too impersonal for
a fiddle, too passionate for a flute, and much too sweet for any pipes
or timbrels. It must be a human--or superhuman--voice, for now he was
beginning to distinguish the words.

    "There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
    And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier,
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine."

The voice stopped, and Master Nathaniel buried his face in his hands
and sobbed as if his heart would break.

In this magically sweet music once more he had heard the Note. It held,
this time, no menace as to things to come; but it aroused in his breast
an agonizing tumult of remorse for having allowed something to escape
that he would never, never recapture. It was as if he had left his
beloved with harsh words, and had returned to find her dead.

Through his agony he was conscious of a hand laid on his shoulder:
"Why, Chanticleer! Old John o' Dreams! What ails you? Has the cock's
crow become too bitter-sweet for Chanticleer?" said a voice, half
tender and half mocking, in his ear.

He turned round, and by the light of the moon saw standing behind
him--Duke Aubrey.

The Duke smiled. "Well, Chanticleer," he said, "so we meet at last!
Your family has been dodging me down the centuries, but some day you
were bound to fall into my snares. And, though you did not know it,
you have been working for some time past as one of my secret agents.
How I laughed when you and Ambrose Honeysuckle pledged each other in
words taken from my Mysteries! And little did you think, when you stood
cursing and swearing at the door of my tapestry-room, that you had
pronounced the most potent charm in Faerie," and he threw back his head
and broke into peal upon peal of silvery laughter.

Suddenly his laughter stopped, and his eyes, as he looked at Master
Nathaniel, became wonderfully compassionate.

"Poor Chanticleer! Poor John o' Dreams!" he said gently. "I have
often wished my honey were not so bitter to the taste. Believe me,
Chanticleer, I fain would find an antidote to the bitter herb of life,
but none grows this side of the hills--or the other."

"And yet ... I have never tasted fairy fruit," said Master Nathaniel in
a low broken voice.

"There are many trees in my orchard, and many and various are the fruit
they bear--music and dreams and grief and, sometimes, joy. All your
life, Chanticleer, you have eaten fairy fruit, and some day, it may be,
you will hear the Note again--but that I cannot promise. And now I will
grant you a vision--they are sometimes sweet to the taste."

He paused. And then he said, "Do you know why it was that your horse
fell down dead? It was because you had reached the brink of Fairyland.
The winds of Faerie slew him. Come with me, Chanticleer."

He took Master Nathaniel's hand and dragged him to his feet, and they
scrambled a few yards further up the bridle-path and stepped on to
a broad plateau. Beneath them lay what, in the uncertain moonlight,
looked like a stretch of desolate uplands.

Then Duke Aubrey raised his arms high above his head and cried out in
a loud voice, "By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the
West!"

At these words the uplands became bathed in a gentle light and proved
to be fair and fertile--the perpetual seat of Spring; for there
were vivid green patches of young corn, and pillars of pink and
white smoke, which were fruit trees in blossom, and pillars of blue
blossom, which was the smoke of distant hamlets, and a vast meadow of
cornflowers and daisies, which was the great inland sea of Faerie. And
everything--ships, spires, houses--was small and bright and delicate,
yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or rather, the transfigured
Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. And as he gazed
he knew that in that land no winds ever howled at night, and that
everything within its borders had the serenity and stability of trees,
the unchanging peace of pictures.

Then, suddenly, it all vanished. Duke Aubrey had vanished too, and he
was standing alone on the edge of a black abyss, while wafted on the
wind came the echo of light, mocking laughter.

Was Fairyland, then, a delusion? Had Ranulph vanished into nothingness?

For a second or two he hesitated, and then--he leaped down into the
abyss.




                             CHAPTER XXIX

                   A MESSAGE COMES TO HAZEL AND THE
                    FIRST SWALLOW TO DAME MARIGOLD


The information given by Luke Hempen had enabled the authorities in Lud
finally to put a stop to the import of fairy fruit. As we have seen,
the Dapple had been dragged near its source, and wicker frails had been
brought up, so cunningly weighted that they could float beneath the
surface of the water, and closely packed with what was unmistakably
fairy fruit. After that no further cases of fruit-eating came to
Mumchance's notice. But, for all that, his anxieties were by no means
at an end, for the execution of Endymion Leer came near to causing a
popular rising. An angry mob, armed with cudgels and led by Bawdy Bess,
stormed the court of the Guildhall, cut down the body--which had been
left hanging on the gibbet as an example to evildoers--and bore it off
in triumph; and the longest funeral procession that had been seen for
years was shortly following it to the Fields of Grammary.

The cautious Mumchance considered it would be imprudent to interfere
with the obsequies.

"After all, your Worship," he said to Master Polydore, "the Law has
had his blood, and if it will mean a little peace and quiet she can do
without his corpse."

The next day many of the 'prentices and artizans went on strike, and
several captains of merchant vessels reported that their crews showed
signs of getting out of hand.

Master Polydore was terrified out of his wits, and Mumchance was
inclined to take a very gloomy view of the situation: "If the town
chooses to rise the Yeomanry can do nothing against them," he said
dejectedly. "We ain't organized (if your Worship will pardon the
expression) for trouble--no, we ain't."

Then, as if by a miracle, everything quieted down. The strikers,
as meek as lambs, returned to their work, the sailors ceased to be
turbulent, and Mumchance declared that it was years since the Yeomanry
had had so little to do.

"There's nothing like taking strong measures at once," Master Polydore
remarked complacently to Master Ambrose (whom he had taken as his
mentor in the place of Endymion Leer). "Once let them feel that there
is a strong man at the helm, and you can do anything with them. And, of
course, they never felt that with poor old Nat."

Master Ambrose's only answer was a grunt--and a rather sardonic smile.
For Master Ambrose happened to be one of the few people who knew what
had really happened.

The sudden calm was due neither to a miracle, nor to the strong
hand of Master Polydore. It had been brought about by two humble
agents--Mistress Ivy Peppercorn and Hazel Gibberty.

One evening they had been sitting in the little parlour behind the
grocer's shop over the first fire of the season.

As plaintiff and principal witness in the unpopular trial, their
situation was not without danger. In fact, Mumchance had advised them
to move into Lud till the storm had blown over. But, to Hazel, Lud was
the place where the widow was buried, and, full as she was of western
superstitions, she felt that she could not bear to sleep enclosed by
the same town walls as the angry corpse. Nor would she return to the
farm. Her aunt had told her of Master Nathaniel's half-joking plan to
communicate with her, and Hazel insisted that even though he had gone
behind the Debatable Hills it was their clear duty to remain within
reach of a message.

That evening Mistress Ivy was waxing a little plaintive over her
obstinacy. "I sometimes think, Hazel, your wits have been turned,
living so long with that bad bold woman ... and I don't wonder, I'm
sure, poor child; and if my poor Peppercorn hadn't come along, I don't
know what would have happened to me. But there's no sense, I tell you,
in waiting on here--with the hams and bacon at home not cured yet, nor
the fish salted for winter, nor your fruit pickled or preserved. You're
a farmer on your own now, and you shouldn't forget it. And I wish to
goodness you'd get all that silly nonsense out of your head. A message
from the Mayor, indeed! Though I can't get over its being him that came
to see me, and me never knowing, but giving him sauce, as if he'd been
nothing but a shipmate of my poor Peppercorn's! No, no, poor gentleman,
we'll never hear from him! Leastways, not this side of the Debatable
Hills."

Hazel said nothing. But her obstinate little chin looked even more
obstinate than usual.

Then suddenly she looked up with startled eyes.

"Hark, auntie!" she cried. "Didn't you hear someone knocking?"

"What a girl you are for fancying things! It's only the wind," said
Mistress Ivy querulously.

"Why, auntie, there it is again! No, no, I'm sure it's someone
knocking. I'll just go and see," and she took a candle from the table;
but her hand was trembling.

The knocking was audible now to Mistress Ivy as well.

"You just stay where you are, my girl!" she cried shrilly. "It'll be
one of these rough chaps from the town, and I won't have you opening
the door--no, I won't."

But Hazel paid no attention, and, though her face was white and her
eyes very scared, she marched boldly into the shop and called, "Who's
there?" through the door.

"By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!" came
the answer.

"Auntie! Auntie!" she cried shrilly, "it's from the Mayor. He has sent
a messenger, and you must come."

This brought Mistress Ivy hurrying to her side. Though she was not of
an heroic character, she came of good sturdy stock, and she was not
going to leave her dead brother's child to face the dangers of the
unseen alone, but her teeth were chattering with terror. Evidently the
messenger was growing impatient, for he began beating a tattoo on the
door and singing in a shrill sweet voice:

    "Maids in your smocks
    Look well to your locks
    And beware of the fox
    When the bellman knocks."

Hazel (not without some fumbling, for her hands were still trembling)
drew the bolts, lifted the latch, and flung the door wide open. A
sudden gust of wind extinguished her candle, so they could not see the
face of the messenger.

He began speaking in a shrill, expressionless voice, like that of a
child repeating a lesson: "I have given the pass-word, so you know from
whom I come. I am to bid you go at once to Lud-in-the-Mist, and find
a sailor, by name Sebastian Thug--he will probably be drinking at the
tavern of the Unicorn--also a deaf-mute, commonly known as Bawdy Bess,
whom you will probably find in the same place. You will have need of
no other introduction than the words, By the Sun, Moon and Stars and
the Golden Apples of the West. You are to tell them that there is to
be no more rioting, and that they are to keep the people quiet, for
the Duke will send his deputy. And next you will go to Master Ambrose
Honeysuckle and bid him remember the oath which he and Master Nathaniel
pledged each other over wild-thyme gin, swearing to ride the wind
with a loose rein, and to be hospitable to visions. And tell him that
Lud-in-the-Mist must throw wide its gates to receive its destiny. Can
you remember this?"

"Yes," said Hazel in a low puzzled voice.

"And now just a trifle to the messenger for his pains!" and his voice
became gay and challenging. "I am an orchard thief and the citizen of
a green world. Buss me, green maid!" and before Hazel had time to
protest he gave her a smacking kiss on the lips and then plunged into
the night, leaving the echoes of his "Ho, ho, hoh!" like a silvery
trail in his wake.

"Well, I never did!" exclaimed Mistress Ivy in amazement, adding with a
fat chuckle, "It would seem that it isn't only this side of the hills
that saucy young fellows are to be found. But I don't quite know what
to make of it, my girl. How are we to know he really comes from the
Mayor?"

"Well, auntie, we can't know, of course, for certain--though, for my
part, I don't think he was a Dorimarite. But he gave the pass-word, so
I think we must deliver the messages--there's nothing in them, after
all, that could do any harm."

"That's true," said Mistress Ivy. "Though I'm sure I don't want to go
trudging into Lud at this time of night on a fool's errand. But, after
all, a promise is a promise--and doubly so when it's been given to
somebody as good as dead."

So they put on their pattens and cloaks, lighted a lanthorn, and
started off to walk into Lud, as briskly as Mistress Ivy's age and
weight would allow, so as to get there before the gates were shut.
Master Ambrose, as a Senator, would give them a pass to let them
through on the way back.

The Unicorn was a low little tavern down by the wharf, of a not very
savoury reputation. And as they peeped in at the foul noisy little den,
Hazel had considerable difficulty in persuading Mistress Ivy to enter.

"And to think of the words we have to use too!" the poor woman
whispered disconsolately; "they're not at the best of times the sort of
words I like to hear on a woman's lips, but in a place like this you
can't be too careful of your speech ... it's never safe to swear at
folks in liquor."

But the effect produced by the words was the exact opposite of what
she had feared. On first crossing the threshold they had been greeted
by hostile glances and coarse jests, which, on one of the revellers
recognizing them as two of the protagonists in the trial, threatened to
turn into something more serious. Whereupon, to the terror of Mistress
Ivy, Hazel had made a trumpet of her hands and shouted with all the
force of her strong young lungs, "Sebastian Thug and Mistress Bess! By
the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!"

The words must indeed have contained a charm, for they instantly
calmed the angry company. A tall young sailor, with very light eyes
and a very sunburned face, sprang to his feet, and so did a bold-eyed,
painted woman, and they hurried to Hazel's side. The young man said in
a respectful voice, "You must excuse our rough and ready ways when we
first saw you, missie; we didn't know you were one of us." And then
he grinned, showing some very white teeth, and said, "You see, pretty
fresh things don't often come our way, and sea-dogs are like other
dogs and bark at what they're not used to."

Bawdy Bess's eyes had been fixed on his lips, and his last words caused
her to scowl and toss her head; but from Hazel they brought forth a
little, not unfriendly, smile. Evidently, like her aunt, she was not
averse to seafaring men. And, after all, sailors are apt to have a
charm of their own. When on dry land, like ghosts when they walk, there
is a tang about them of an alien element. And Sebastian Thug was a
thorough sailor.

Then in a low voice Hazel gave the message, which Thug repeated on his
fingers for the benefit of Bawdy Bess. He insisted on conducting them
to Master Ambrose's, and said he would wait outside for them and see
them home.

Master Ambrose made them repeat the words several times, and questioned
them closely about the messenger.

Then he took two or three paces up and down the room, muttering to
himself, "Delusion! Delusion!"

Then he turned suddenly to Hazel and said sharply, "What reason have
you to believe, young woman, that this fellow really came from Master
Nathaniel?"

"None, sir," answered Hazel. "But there was nothing for us to do but to
act as if he did."

"I see, I see. You, too, ride the wind--that's the expression, isn't
it? Well, well, we are living in strange times."

And then he sank into a brown study, evidently forgetful of their
presence; so they thought it best quietly to steal away.

From that evening the rabble of Lud-in-the-Mist ceased to give any
trouble.

When the Yeomen stationed on the border were recalled to Lud and spread
the news that they had seen Master Nathaniel riding alone towards the
Elfin Marches, Dame Marigold was condoled with as a widow, and went
into complete retirement, refusing even to see her oldest friends,
although they had all come to regret their unjust suspicions of Master
Nathaniel, and were, in consequence, filled with contrition, and eager
to prove it in services to his wife.

Occasionally she made an exception for Master Ambrose; but her real
support and stay was old Hempie. Nothing could shake the woman's
conviction that all was well with the Chanticleers. And the real anchor
is not hope but faith--even if it be only somebody else's faith. So the
gay snug little room at the top of the house, where Master Nathaniel
had played when he was a little boy, became Dame Marigold's only haven,
and there she would spend the most of her day.

Though Hempie never forgot that she was only a Vigil, nevertheless,
in her own way, she was growing fond of her. Indeed, she had
almost forgiven her for having spilled her cup of chocolate over
her sheets, when, after her betrothal, she had come on a visit to
Master Nathaniel's parents--almost, but not quite, for to Hempie the
Chanticleers' linen was sacrosanct.

One night, at the beginning of December, when the first snow was lying
on the ground, Dame Marigold, who had almost lost the power of sleep,
was tossing wakefully in her bed. Her bedroom ran the whole length of
the house, so one of its windows looked out on the lane, and suddenly
she heard what sounded like low knocking on the front door. She sat up
and listened--there it was again. Yes, someone was knocking at the door.

She sprang from bed, flung on a cloak and hurried downstairs, her heart
beating violently.

With trembling fingers she drew the bolts and flung wide the door. A
small, slight figure was cowering outside.

"Prunella!" she gasped. And with a sort of sob Prunella flung herself
into her mother's arms.

For some minutes they stood crying and hugging each other, too
profoundly moved for questions or explanations.

But they were roused by a scolding voice from the stairs: "Dame
Marigold, I'm ashamed of you, that I am, not having more sense at your
age than to keep her standing there when she must be half frozen,
poor child! Come up to your room this minute, Miss Prunella, and no
nonsense! I'll have your fire lighted and a warming-pan put in your
bed."

It was Hempie, candle in hand, frowning severely from under the frills
of an enormous nightcap. Prunella rushed at her, half laughing, half
crying, and flung her arms round her neck.

For a few seconds Hempie allowed herself to be hugged, and then,
scolding hard all the time, she chivvied her up to her room. And,
when Prunella was finally settled in her warm bed, with an inexorable
expression she strode in carrying a cup of some steaming infusion.

It was black currant tea, for the brewing of which Hempie was famous.
And it had always been one of her grievances against Dame Marigold and
Prunella that they detested the stuff, and refused to drink it, even
when they had a bad cold. For it had always been loved by all true
Chanticleers, from old Master Josiah downwards.

"Now, miss, you just drink that down, every drop of it," she said
severely.

Prunella was too exhausted that night to tell them her adventures. But
the next morning she gave a confused account of wanderings at the
bottom of the sea, and how they had lost their way in a terrible marine
jungle, out of which they had been guided by Master Nathaniel. It was
evident that she had no very clear recollection of what had happened to
her since her flight from Lud; or, rather, since "Professor Wisp" had
given his first dancing lesson.

The other Crabapple Blossoms returned to their respective homes the
same night as Prunella; and each gave a different account of their
adventures. Moonlove Honeysuckle said they had danced wildly down the
waste places of the sky, and then had been imprisoned in a castle in
the moon; Viola Vigil said they had been chased by angry trees into
the Dapple, where they had got entangled in the weeds, and could not
extricate themselves--and so on. But on one point all the accounts
agreed, namely, that it had been Master Nathaniel Chanticleer who had
delivered them.




                              CHAPTER XXX

                     MASTER AMBROSE KEEPS HIS VOW


At first the Crabapple Blossoms felt as if they had awakened from an
evil dream, but they soon found that it was a dream that had profoundly
influenced their souls. Though they showed no further desire to run
away and roam the hills, they were moody, silent, prone to attacks of
violent weeping, and haunted by some nameless fear--strange melancholy
denizens, in fact, of the comfortable, placid homes of their parents.

One would not have imagined that a daughter in this condition
would have met with much sympathy from Master Ambrose Honeysuckle.
Nevertheless, his tenderness and patience with Moonlove proved
boundless. Night after night he sat by her holding her hand till she
fell asleep, and by day he soothed her ravings, and in her quieter
moments they would have long intimate talks together, such as they had
never had before she ran away. And the result of these talks was that
his stiff but fundamentally honest mind was beginning to creak on its
hinges. And he would actually listen without protest when Moonlove
expressed her conviction that although fairy fruit had robbed her of
her peace of mind, nevertheless nothing but fairy fruit could restore
it to her, and that at Miss Primrose Crabapple's she had either been
given the wrong kind or not enough.

The reign of winter was now established, and Lud-in-the-Mist seemed at
last to have settled down into its old peaceful rut.

Master Nathaniel had turned into "poor old Nat," and was to most people
no more than a lovable ghost of the past. Indeed, Master Polydore was
thinking of suggesting to Dame Marigold that two empty coffins should
be placed in the Chanticleers' chapel bearing respectively the names of
Nathaniel and Ranulph.

As for the Senate, it was very busy preparing for its annual banquet,
which was celebrated every December in the Guildhall, to commemorate
the expulsion of the Dukes; and it was kept fully occupied by such
important questions as how many turkeys should be ordered and from
what poulterers; which Senator was to have the privilege of providing
the wine, and which the marzipan and ginger; and whether they would be
justified in expending on goose liver and peacocks' hearts the sum left
them in the will of a late linen-draper, to be devoted to the general
welfare of the inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist.

But one morning a polished conceit of Master Polydore's concerning
"that sweet and pungent root commonly known as ginger, a kindly snake
who stings us that we may better enjoy the fragrant juice of the
grape," was rudely interrupted by the sudden entry of Mumchance, his
eyes almost starting out of his head with terror, with the appalling
tidings that an army of Fairies had crossed the Debatable Hills, and
that crowds of terrified peasants were pouring into Lud.

The news produced something like pandemonium in the Senate. Everyone
began talking at once, and a dozen different schemes of defence were
mooted, each one more senseless than the last.

Then Master Ambrose Honeysuckle rose to his feet. He was the man that
carried most weight among his colleagues, and all eyes were turned to
him expectantly.

In a calm, matter of fact voice, he began thus: "Senators of Dorimare!
Before the entry of the Captain of the Yeomanry we were discussing what
desert we should have at our annual feast. It seems unnecessary to
start a fresh subject of discussion before the previous one has been
settled to our satisfaction. So, with your permission, I will return
to the sweet and pungent (I think these were his Worship's well-chosen
words) subject of dessert; for there is one item I should like to add
to those that have already been suggested."

He paused, and then he said in a loud challenging voice, "Senators of
Dorimare! I propose that for the first time since the foundation of our
annual feast, we should partake at it of ... fairy fruit!"

His colleagues stared at him in open-mouthed amazement. Was this some
ill-timed jest? But Ambrose was not given to jesting ... especially on
serious occasions.

Then, with a certain rough poetry breaking through the artificial
diction of the Senate, he began to speak of the events of the year that
was nearly over, and the lessons to be learned from them. And the chief
lessons, he said, were those of humility and faith.

He ended thus: "One of our proverbs says, 'Remember that the Dapple
flows into the Dawl.' I have sometimes wondered, recently, whether
we have ever really understood the true meaning of that proverb.
Our ancestors built the town of Lud-in-the-Mist between these two
rivers, and both have brought us their tribute. The tribute of the
Dawl has been gold, and we have gladly accepted it. But the tribute of
the Dapple we have ever spurned. The Dapple--our placid old friend,
in whose waters we learned as lads the gentle art of angling--has
silently, through the centuries, been bringing fairy fruit into
Dorimare ... a fact that, to my mind, at least, proves that fairy
fruit is as wholesome and necessary for man as the various other gifts
brought for our welfare by our silent friends--the Dawl's gift of gold,
the earth's gift of corn, the hills' gift of shelter and pasturage, and
the trees' gift of grapes and apples and shade.

"And if all the gifts of Life are good, perhaps, too, are all the
shapes she chooses to take, and which we cannot alter. The shape she
has taken now for Dorimare is that of an invasion by our ancient foes.
Why should we not make a virtue of necessity and throw our gates wide
to them as friends?"

His colleagues, at first, expressed themselves as horrified. But
perhaps they, too, though unknown to themselves, had been altered by
recent events.

At any rate, this was one of the crises when the strongest man
inevitably finds himself at the helm. And there could be no doubt that
the strongest man in the Senate was Master Ambrose Honeysuckle.

When the Senate rose, he addressed the terrified populace from the
market-place, with the result that before nightfall he had quieted
the panic-stricken crowds and had persuaded the citizens, with the
exception of such models of old-fashioned respectability as Ebeneezor
Prim, to accept with calm passivity whatever the future might hold in
store.

His two most ardent supporters were Sebastian Thug and the disreputable
Bawdy Bess.

Only a few months ago what would he have said if someone had told him
the day would come when he, Ambrose Honeysuckle, would turn demagogue,
and, assisted by a rough sailor and a woman of the town, would be
exhorting the citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist to throw wide their gates and
welcome in the Fairies!

       *       *       *       *       *

So, instead of repairing its walls and testing its cannon and laying
in provision against a siege, Lud-in-the-Mist hoisted its flags and
festooned its windows with wreaths of Duke Aubrey's ivy, and flung the
west gate wide open; and a throng of silent, expectant people lined the
streets and waited.

First came the sounds of wild sweet music, then the tramp of a myriad
feet, and then, like hosts of leaves blown on the wind, the invading
army came pouring into the town.

As he watched, Master Ambrose remembered the transfigured tapestry in
the Guildhall, and the sense they had had of noisy, gaudy, dominant
dreams flooding the streets and scattering reality in their wake.

Behind the battalions of mail-clad dead marched three gigantic old men,
with long white beards reaching below their girdles. Their long stiff
robes were embroidered in gold and jewels with strange emblems, and
behind them were led sumpter mules laden with coffers of wrought gold.
And the rumour passed through the waiting crowd that these were none
other than the balsam-eating priests of the sun and moon.

And bringing up the rear on a great white charger was--Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer, with Ranulph riding by his side.

       *       *       *       *       *

The accounts of what took place immediately after the entry of the
fairy army read more like legends than history. It would seem that the
trees broke into leaf and the masts of all the ships in the bay into
blossom; that day and night the cocks crowed without ceasing; that
violets and anemones sprang up through the snow in the streets, and
that mothers embraced their dead sons, and maids their sweethearts
drowned at sea.

But one thing seems certain, and that is that the gold-wrought coffers
contained the ancient offering of fairy fruit to Dorimare. And the
coffers were of such miraculous capacity that there was enough and to
spare, not only for the dessert of the Senate, but for that of every
household in Lud-in-the-Mist.




                             CHAPTER XXXI

                             THE INITIATE


You may, perhaps, have wondered why a man so full of human failings,
and set in so unheroic a mould as Master Nathaniel Chanticleer should
have been cast for so great a role. Yet the highest spiritual destinies
are not always reserved for the strongest men, nor for the most
virtuous ones.

But though he had been chosen as Duke Aubrey's deputy and initiated
into the Ancient Mysteries, he had not ceased to be in many ways the
same Master Nathaniel as of old--whimsical, child-like, and, often,
unreasonable. Nor, I fear, did he cease to be the prey of melancholy.
I doubt whether initiation ever brings happiness. It may be that the
final secret revealed is a very bitter one ... or it may be that the
final secret had not yet been revealed to Master Nathaniel.

And, strange to say, far from being set up by his new honours, he felt
oddly ashamed of them--it was almost as if he was for the first time
running the gauntlet of his friends' eyes after having been afflicted
by some physical disfigurement.

       *       *       *       *       *

When things had returned again to their usual rut, Master Ambrose came
to spend a quiet evening with Master Nathaniel.

They sat for some time in silence puffing at their pipes, and then
Master Ambrose said, "Tell me what your theory is about Endymion Leer,
Nat. He was a double-dyed villain, all right, I suppose?"

Master Nathaniel did not answer at once, and then he said thoughtfully,
"I suppose so. I read the report of his defence, however, and his words
seemed to me to ring true. But I think there was some evil lurking in
his soul, and everything he touched was contaminated by it, even fairy
fruit--even Duke Aubrey."

"And that spiritual sin he accused himself of ... what do you suppose
it was?"

"I think," said Master Nathaniel slowly, "he may have mishandled the
sacred objects of the Mysteries."

"What are these sacred objects, Nat?"

Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and said, with an
embarrassed little laugh, "Life and death, I suppose." He hated being
asked about these sorts of things.

Master Ambrose sat for a few moments pondering, and then he said, "It
was curious how in all his attacks on you he defeated his own ends."

"Yes," cried Master Nathaniel, with much more animation than he had
hitherto shown, "that was really very curious. Everything he did
produced exactly the opposite effect he had intended it should. He
feared the Chanticleers, and wanted to be rid of them, so he gets
Ranulph off to Fairyland, whence nobody had ever before returned. And
he manages to get me so discredited that I have to leave Lud, and he
thinks me safely out of the way. But, in reality, he was only bringing
about his own downfall. I have to leave Lud, and so I go to the farm,
and there I find old Gibberty's incriminating document. While the fact
of Ranulph's having gone off yonder sends me after him, and that is
why, I suppose, I come back as Duke Aubrey's deputy," and again he gave
an embarrassed laugh; and then added dreamily, "It is useless to try
and circumvent the Duke."

"He who rides the wind needs must go where his steed carries him,"
quoted Master Ambrose.

Master Nathaniel smiled, and for some minutes they puffed at their
pipes in silence.

Then Master Nathaniel gave a reminiscent chuckle: "Those were queer
months that we lived through, Ambrose!" he cried. "All of us, that's
to say those of us who had parts to play, seemed to be living each
others' dreams or dreaming each others' lives, whichever way you choose
to put it, and the most incongruous things began to rhyme--apples
and bleeding corpses and trees and ghosts. Yes, all our dreams got
entangled. Leer makes a speech about men and trees, and I find the
solution of the situation under a herm, which is half a man and half
a tree, and you see the juice of fairy fruit and think that it is the
dead bleeding--and so on. Yes, my adventures went on getting more and
more like a dream till ... the climax," and he paused abruptly.

A long silence followed, broken at last by Master Ambrose. "Well, Nat,"
he said, "I think I've had a lesson in humility. I used to have as good
an opinion of myself as most men, I think, but now I've learned that
I'm a very ordinary sort of fellow, made of very inferior clay to you
and my Moonlove--all the things that you know at first hand and I can
only take on faith."

"Suppose, Ambrose, that what we know at first hand is only this--that
there is nothing to know?" said Master Nathaniel a little sadly. Then
he sank into a brown study, and Master Ambrose, thinking he wanted to
be alone, stole quietly from the room.

Master Nathaniel sat gazing moodily into the fire; and his pipe went
out without his noticing it. Then the door opened softly, and someone
stole in and stood behind his chair. It was Dame Marigold. All she said
was, "Funny old Nat!" but her voice had a husky tenderness. And then
she knelt down beside him and took him into her soft warm arms. And a
new hope was borne in upon Master Nathaniel that someday he would hear
the Note again, and all would be clear.




                             CHAPTER XXXII

                              CONCLUSION


I should like to conclude with a few words as to the fate of the
various people who have appeared in these pages.

Hazel Gibberty married Sebastian Thug--and an excellent husband he made
her. He gave up the sea and settled on his wife's farm. Mistress Ivy
Peppercorn came and lived with them and every summer they had a visit
from Master Nathaniel and Ranulph. Bawdy Bess left Lud at the time of
Sebastian's marriage--out of pique, said the malicious.

Luke Hempen entered the Lud Yeomanry, where he did so well that when
Mumchance retired he was elected Captain in his place.

Hempie lived to a ripe old age--long enough to tell her stories to
Ranulph's children; nor had she any scruples about telling them her
views on "neighbourliness." And when she died, as a tribute to her
long and loving service, she was buried in the family chapel of the
Chanticleers.

Mother Tibbs, after taking a conspicuous part in the wild revels which
followed on the arrival of the fairy army, vanished for ever from
Dorimare. Nor did anyone ever again see Portunus. But, from time to
time, a wild red-haired youth would arrive uninvited, and having turned
everything topsy-turvy with his pranks, would rush from the house,
shouting "Ho! Ho! Hoh!"

By degrees the Crabapple Blossoms recovered their spirits. But they
certainly did not grow up into the sort of young ladies their mothers
had imagined they would when they first sent them to Miss Primrose
Crabapple's Academy. They were never stinted of fairy fruit, for the
Dapple continued to bring its tribute to Dorimare, adding thereby
considerably to the wealth of the country. For, thanks to the sound
practical sense of Master Ambrose, a new industry was started--that
of candying fairy fruit, and exporting it to all the countries with
which they trafficked, in pretty fancy boxes, the painted lids of which
showed that art was creeping back to Dorimare.

As for Ranulph, when he grew up he wrote the loveliest songs that had
been heard since the days of Duke Aubrey--songs that crossed the sea
and were sung by lonely fishermen in the far North, and by indigo
mothers crooning to their babies by the doors of their huts in the
Cinnamon Isles.

Dame Marigold continued to smile, and to nibble marzipan with her
cronies. But she used sometimes sadly to wonder whether Master
Nathaniel had ever really come back from beyond the Debatable Hills;
sometimes, but not always.

And Master Nathaniel himself? Whether he ever heard the Note again
I cannot say. But in time he went, either to reap the fields of
gillyflowers, or to moulder in the Fields of Grammary. And below his
coffin in the family chapel a brass tablet was put up with this epitaph:


                         NATHANIEL CHANTICLEER

                  PRESIDENT OF THE GUILD OF MERCHANTS
                 THREE TIMES MAYOR OF LUD-IN-THE-MIST
                 TO WHOM WAS GRANTED NO SMALL SHARE OF
                       THE PEACE AND PROSPERITY
                        HE HELPED TO BESTOW ON
                         HIS TOWN AND COUNTRY.

An epitaph not unlike those he used to con so wistfully in his visits
to the Fields of Grammary.

And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as
mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a
feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning! And with this
final exhortation this book shall close.

                               Columbine

    "And can the physician make sick men well,
    And can the magician a fortune divine
    Without lily, germander, and sops in wine?
    With sweet-brier,
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine.

    "Within and out, in and out, round as a ball,
    With hither and thither, as straight as a line,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier
    And bon-fire
    And strawberry-wire
    And columbine.

    "Any lass for a Duke, a Duke who wears green,
    In lands where the sun and the moon do not shine,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier
    And bon-fire
    And strawberry-wire
    And columbine."

    "When Aubrey did live there lived no poor,
    The lord and the beggar on roots did dine
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine."

    "There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
    And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
    With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
    With sweet-brier,
    And bon-fire,
    And strawberry-wire,
    And columbine."