Lud-in-the-Mist (25 page)

W
hen they had finished reading, Hazel burst into hysterical sobs, crying alternately, “Poor grandfather!” and “Will they hang her for it?” Master Nathaniel soothed her as best he could, and, when she had dried her eyes, she said, “Poor Marjory Beach! She must have that ham and that buck rabbit.”

“She’s still alive, then?” asked Master Nathaniel eagerly. Hazel nodded: “She is poor, and still a maid, and lives in Swan.”

“And what about Peter Pease, the tinker’s smart little lad? Is there nothing for
him
, Miss Hazel?” cried the blacksmith with a twinkle.

Hazels stared at him in bewilderment, and Master Nathaniel cried gleefully, “Why, it’s the same name, by the Harvest of Souls! Were you, then, the little chap who saw Pugwalker picking the berries?”

And Hazel said in slow amazement,
“You
were the little boy who spoke to my grandfather …
that night?
I never thought …”

“That I’d begun so humbly, eh? Yes, I was the son of a tinker, or, as they liked to be called, of a whitesmith. And now I’m a blacksmith, and as white is better than black I suppose I’ve come down in the world.” And he winked merrily.

“And you remember the circumstances alluded to by the late farmer?” asked Master Nathaniel eagerly.

“That I do, my lord Seneschal. As well if they had happened yesterday. I won’t easily forget the farmer’s face that night when I offered him my basketful — but though the death-berries are rare enough I found them in those days commoner to pick up than ha’pence. And I won’t easily forget Master Pugwalker’s face, either, while he was plucking them. And little did he know there was a squirrel watching him with a good Dorimare tongue in his head!”

“Have you ever seen him since?”

The blacksmith winked.

“Come, come!” cried Master Nathaniel impatiently. “Have you seen him since? This is no time for beating about the bush.”

“Well, perhaps I have,” said the blacksmith slowly, “trotting about Swan, as brisk and as pleased with himself as a fox with a goose in his mouth. And I’ve often wondered whether it wasn’t my duty as law-man to speak out … but, after all, it was very long ago, and his life seemed to be of better value than his death, for he was a wonderfully clever doctor and did a powerful lot of good.”

“It — it was Dr. Leer, then?” asked Hazel in a low voice; and the blacksmith winked.

“Well, I think we should be getting back to the house,” said Master Nathaniel, “there’s still some business before us.” And, lowering his voice, he added, “Not very pleasant business, I fear.”

“I suppose your Honor means belling the cat?” said the blacksmith, adding with a rueful laugh, “I can’t imagine a nastier job. She’s a cat with claws.”

As the walked up to the house, the laborer whispered to Hazel, “Please, missy, does it mean that the mistress killed her husband? They always say so in the village, but …”

“Don’t, Ben; don’t! I can’t bear talking about it,” cried Hazel with a shudder. And when they reached the house, she ran up to her own bedroom and locked herself in.

Ben was dispatched to get a stout coil of rope, and Master Nathaniel and the blacksmith, whom the recent excitement had made hungry, began to forage around for something to eat.

Suddenly a voice at the door said, “And what, may I ask, are you looking for in my larder, gentlemen?”

It was the widow. First she scrutinized Master Nathaniel — a little pale and hollow-eyed, perhaps, but alive and kicking, for all that. Then her eyes traveled to Peter Pease. At that moment, Ben entered with the rope, and Master Nathaniel nudged the law-man, who, clearing his throat, cried in the expressionless falsetto of the Law, “Clementina Gibberty! In the name of the country of Dorimare, and to the end that the dead, the living, and those not yet born, may rest quietly in their graves, their bed, and the womb, I arrest you for the murder of your late husband, Jeremiah Gibberty.”

She turned deadly pale, and, for a few seconds, stood glaring at him in deadly silence. Then she gave a scornful laugh. “What new joke of yours is this, Peter Pease? I was accused of this before, as you know well, and acquitted with the judge’s compliments, and as good as an apology. Law business must be very slack in Swan that you’ve nothing better to do than to come and frighten a poor woman in her own house with old spiteful tales that were silenced once and for all nearly forty years ago. My late husband died quietly in his bed, and I only hope you may have as peaceful an end. And you must know very little of the law, Peter Pease, if you don’t know that a person can’t be tried twice for the same crime.”

Then Master Nathaniel stepped forward. “You were tried before,” he said quietly, “for poisoning your husband with the sap of osiers. This time it will be for poisoning him with the berries of merciful death. Tonight the dead have found their tongues.”

She gave a wild shriek, which reached upstairs to Hazel’s room and caused her to spring into bed and pull the blankets over her ears, as if it had been a thunderstorm.

Master Nathaniel signed to Ben, who, grinning from ear to ear, as is the way of rustics when witnessing a painful and embarrassing scene, came up to his mistress with the coil of rope. But to bind her, he needed the aid of both the blacksmith and Master Nathaniel, for, like a veritable wild cat, she struggled and scratched and bit.

When her arms were tightly bound, Master Nathaniel said, “And now I will read you the words of the dead.”

She was, for the time, worn out by her struggles, and her only answer was an insolent stare, and he produced the farmer’s document and read it through to her.

“And now,” he said, eyeing her curiously, “shall I tell you who gave me the clue without which I should never have found that letter? It was a certain old man, whom I think you know, by name Portunus.”

Her face turned as pale as death, and in a low voice of horror she cried, “Long ago I guessed who he was, and feared that he might prove my undoing.” Then her voice grew shrill with terror and her eyes became fixed, as if seeing some hideous vision, “The Silent People!” she screamed. “The dumb who speak! The bound who strike! I cherished and fed old Portunus like a tame bird. But what do the dead know of kindness?”

“If old Portunus is he whom you take him to be, I fail to see that he has much cause for gratitude,” said Master Nathaniel dryly. “Well, he has taken his revenge, on you — and your accomplice.”

“My accomplice?”

“Aye, on Endymion Leer.”

“Oh, Leer!” And she laughed scornfully. “It was a greater than Endymion Leer who ordered the death of farmer Gibberty.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. One who cares not for good and evil, and sows his commands like grain.”

“Whom do you mean?”

Again she laughed scornfully. “Not one whom I would name to
you
. But set your mind at rest, he cannot be summoned in a court of law.”

She gave him a searching look, and said abruptly, “Who are you?”

“My name is Nathaniel Chanticleer.”

“I thought as much!” she cried triumphantly. “I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d take no risks. However, you seem to bear a charmed life.”

“I suppose you are alluding to your kind thought for my comfort — putting that nice little death-box in my room to keep me warm, eh?”

“Yes, that’s it,” she answered brazenly.

Then a look of indescribable malice came into her face, and, with an evil smile, she said, “You see, you gave yourself away — without knowing it — at dinner.”

“Indeed? And how, may I ask?”

At first she did not answer, but eyed him gloatingly as a cat might eye a mouse. And then she said slowly, “It was that pack of lies you told me about the doings of the lads at Moongrass. Your son isn’t at Moongrass — nor ever has been, nor ever will be.”

“What do you mean?” he cried hoarsely.

“Mean?” she said with a shrill, triumphant laugh. “I mean this — on the night of the thirty-first of October, when the Silent People are abroad, he heard Duke Aubrey’s summons, and followed it across the hills.”

“Woman … what … what … speak … or …” and the veins in Master Nathaniel’s temples were swelling, and a fire seemed to have been lighted in his brain.

Her laughter redoubled. “You’ll never see your son again!” she jeered. “Young Ranulph Chanticleer has gone to the land whence none returns.”

Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the ceiling, just before losing consciousness — Ranulph weeping among the fields of gillyflowers.

A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface of his mind, he supposed that this was IT springing out at him at last. And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense of relief — the relaxing of tension, when one can say, “Well, it has come at last.”

He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, “The land from which no one returns … but I can go there, too.”

“Follow him across the hills?” she cried scornfully. “No; you are not made of
that
sort of stuff.”

He beckoned to Peter Pease, and they went out together to the front of the house. The cocks were crowing, and there was a feeling of dawn in the air.

“I want my horse,” he said dully. “And can you find Miss Hazel for me?”

But as he spoke she joined them — pale and wild-eyed.

“From my room I heard you coming out,” she said. “Is it — is it over?”

Master Nathaniel nodded. And then, in a quiet voice emptied of all emotion, he told her what he had just learned from the widow. She went still paler than before, and her eyes filled with tears.

Then, turning to Peter Pease, he said, “You will immediately get out a warrant for the apprehension of Endymion Leer and sent it into Lud to the new Mayor, Master Polydore Vigil. And you, Miss Hazel, you’d better leave this place at once — you will have to be plaintiff in the trial. Go to your aunt, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, who keeps the village shop at Mothgreen. And remember, you must say nothing whatever about the part I’ve played in this business — that is essential. I am not popular at present in Lud. And, now, would you kindly order my horse saddled and brought round.”

There was something so colorless, so dead, in his voice, that both Hazel and the smith stood, for a few seconds, in awed and sympathetic silence, and then Hazel went off slowly to order his horse.

“You … you didn’t mean what you said to the widow, sir, about … about going …
yonder
?” asked Peter Pease in an awed voice.

Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel’s eyes, and he cried fiercely, “Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be … till I find my son.”

It did not take long for his horse to be saddled and led to the door.

“Good-bye, my child,” he said to Hazel, taking her hand, and then he added, with a smile, “You dragged me back last night from the Milky Way … and now I am going by the earthly one.”

She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the distance.

“Well, well,” said Peter Pease, “I warrant it’ll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him
yonder.”

L
iterally, Master Polydore Vigil received the severest shock of his life, when a few days after the events recorded in the last chapter there reached him the warrant against Endymion Leer, duly signed and sealed by the law-man of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple.

Dame Marigold had been right in saying that her brother was now completely under the dominion of the doctor. Master Polydore was a weak, idle man, who, nevertheless, dearly loved the insignia of authority. Hence, his present position was for him an ideal one — he had all the glory due to the first citizen, who has, moreover, effected a coup d’etat, and none of the real responsibility that such a situation entails.

And now, this terrible document had arrived — it was like an attempt to cut off his right hand. His first instinct on receiving it was to rush off and take counsel with Endymion Leer himself — surely the omniscient resourceful doctor would be able to reduce to wind and thistledown even a thing as solid as a warrant. But respect for the Law, and the belief that though everything else may turn out vanity and delusion, the Law has the terrifying solidity of Reality itself, were deep-rooted in Master Polydore. If there was a warrant out against Endymion Leer — well, then, he must bend his neck to the yoke like any other citizen and stand his trial.

Again he read through the warrant, in the hopes that on a second it would lose its reality — prove to be a forgery, or a hoax. Alas! Its genuineness was but too unmistakable — the Law had spoken.

Master Polydore let his hands fall to his sides in an attitude of limp dismay; then he sighed heavily; then he rose slowly to his feet — there was nothing for it but to summon Mumchance, and let the warrant instantly be put into effect. As it was possible, nay, almost certain, that the Doctor would be able to clear himself triumphantly in Court, the quicker the business was put through, the sooner Master Polydore would recover his right hand.

When Mumchance arrived, Master Polydore said, in a voice as casual as he could make it, “Oh! yes, Mumchance, yes … I asked you to come, because,” and he gave a little laugh, “a warrant has actually arrived — of course, there must be some gross misunderstanding behind it, and there will be no difficulty in getting it cleared up in Court — but, as a matter of fact, a warrant has arrived from the law-man of Swan-on-the-Dapple, against … well, against none other than Dr. Endymion Leer!” and again he laughed.

“Yes, your Worship,” said Mumchance; and, not only did his face express no surprise, but into the bargain it looked distinctly grim.

“Absurd, isn’t it?” said Master Polydore, “and
most
inconvenient.”

Mumchance cleared his throat: “A murderer’s a murderer, your Worship,” he said. “Me and my wife, we were spending last evening at Mothgreen — my wife’s cousin keeps the tavern there, and he was celebrating his silver wedding — if your Worship will excuse me mentioning such things — and among the friends he’d asked in was the plaintiff and her aunt … and, well … there be some things that be just too big for any defendant to dodge. But I’ll say no more, your Worship.”

“I should hope not, Mumchance; you have already strangely forgotten yourself,” and Master Polydore glared fiercely at the unrepentant Mumchance. All the same, he could not help feeling a little disquieted by the attitude adopted by that worthy.

Two hours later after a busy morning devoted to professional visits — and, perhaps, some unprofessional one too — Endymion Leer sat down to his midday dinner. There was not a happier man in Lud than he — he was the most influential man in the town, deep in the counsels of the magistrates; and as for the dreaded Chanticleers — well, he had successively robbed them of their sting. Life being one and indivisible, when one has a sense that it is good its humblest manifestations are transfigured, and that morning the Doctor would have found a meal of baked haws sweet to his palate — how much more so the succulent meal that was actually awaiting him. But it was not fated that Endymion Leer should eat that dinner. There came a loud double knock at the door, and then the voice of Captain Mumchance, demanding instantly to be shown in to the Doctor. It was in vain that the housekeeper protested, saying that the Doctor had given strict orders that he was never to be disturbed at his meals, for the Captain roughly brushed her aside with an aphorism worthy of that eminent jurist, the late Master Josiah Chanticleer. “The Law, my good lady, is no respector of a gentleman’s stomach, so I’ll trouble you to stand out of the way,” and he stumped resolutely into the parlor.

“Morning, Mumchance!” cried the Doctor cheerily, “come to share this excellent-looking pigeon-pie?”

For a second or two the Captain surveyed him rather ghoulishly. It must be remembered that not only had the Captain identified himself with the Law to such a degree that he looked upon any breach of it as a personal insult, but that also he had been deeply wounded in his professional pride in that he had not immediately recognized a murderer by his smell.

Captain Mumchance was not exactly an imaginative man, but as he stood there contemplating the Doctor he could almost have believed that his features and expression had suffered a subtle and most unbecoming change since he had last seen them. It was as if he was sitting in a ghastly green light — the most disfiguring and sinister of all the effects of light with which the Law cunningly plays with appearances — the light that emanates from the word
murder
.

“No, thank you,” he said gruffly, “I don’t sit down to table with the likes of you.”

The Doctor gave him a very sharp look, and then he raised his eyebrows and said dryly, “It seems to me that recently you have more than once honored my humble board.”

The Captain snorted, and then in a stentorian and unnatural voice, he shouted, “Endymion Leer! I arrest you in the name of the country of Dorimare, and to the end that the dead, the living, and those not yet born, may rest quietly in their graves, their bed, and the womb.”

“Gammon and spinnage!” cried the Doctor, testily, “what’s your little game, Mumchance?”

“Is murder, game?” said the Captain; and at that word the Doctor blanched, and then Mumchance added, “You’re accused of the murder of the late Farmer Gibberty.”

The words acted like a spell. It was as if Endymion Leer’s previous sly, ironical, bird-like personality slipped from him like a mask, revealing another soul, at once more formidable and more tragic. For a few seconds he stood white and silent, and then he cried out in a terrible voice: “Treachery! Treachery! The Silent People have betrayed me! It is ill serving a perfidious master!”

T
he news of the arrest of Endymion Leer on a charge of murder flew like wildfire through Lud.

At all the street corners, little groups of tradesmen, ‘prentices, sailors, were to be seen engaged in excited conversation, and from one to the other group flitted the deaf-mute harlot, Bawdy Bess, inciting them in her strange uncontrolled speech, while dogging her footsteps with her dance-like tread went old Mother Tibbs, alternately laughing in crazy glee and weeping and wringing her hands and crying out that she had not yet brought back the Doctor’s last washing, and it was a sad thing that he should go for his last ride in foul linen. “For he’ll mount Duke Aubrey’s wooden horse — the Gentlemen have told me so,” she added with mysterious nods.

I
n the meantime, Luke Hempen had reported to Mumchance what he had learned from the little herdsmen about the “fish” caught by the widow and the Doctor. The Yeomanry stationed on the border were instantly notified and ordered to drag the Dapple near the spot where it bubbled out after its subterranean passage through the Debatable Hills. They did so, and discovered wicker frails of fairy fruit, so cunningly weighted that they were able to float under the surface of the water.

This discovery considerably altered Master Polydore’s attitude to Endymion Leer.