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
