“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.
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
