Lud-in-the-Mist (15 page)

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:

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.

M
aster 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 forever 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 somber, 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 quarreled — 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 zigzagging 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.

T
hat 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 forever 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 wagon 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 past 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 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 colored juices.

One of them was a pigmy peddler 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.

M
iss 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 odors 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 paneled 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 paneling 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 forever 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 humor 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:

How Master Nathaniel longed to jump on to his horse and ride post-haste to the farm! But that was impossible. Instead, he immediately dispatched 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 book-shelves 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, humorous 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 everyday 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.