Lud-in-the-Mist (8 page)

Hempie, oddly enough, was in favor 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 Yuletide. 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 its 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 your 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 neighborhood, 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.

N
othing 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 color 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 travelers 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 forever 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.

I
t 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 colors 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 vine-yards 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 smoldering in the sun.

Then a couple of men came up and led away the horses, and the travelers 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 farmhouse, 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.