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.
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 griefThat her beauty may show the brighter.
I'll weaver her a wreath of the flowers of griefThat her beauty may show the brighter.
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 dineWith 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 dineWith 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."
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.
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.
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: