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.