And he flung back his head and laughed heartily at his own joke, while Master Nathaniel glared at him, speechless with rage.
“Now, your Worship,” he went on in a more serious voice. “If I have been indiscreet you must forgive me … as I forgave you in the parlour. You see, a doctor is obliged to keep his eyes open … it is not from what his patients tell him that he prescribes for them, but from what he notices himself. To a doctor everything is a symptom … the way a man lights his pipe even. For instance, I once had the honour of having your Worship as my partner at a game of cards. You’ve forgotten probably—it was years ago at the Pyepowders. We lost that game. Why? Because each time that you held the most valuable card in the pack—the Lyre of Bones—you discarded it as if it had burnt your fingers. Things like that set a doctor wondering, Master Nathaniel. You are a man who is frightened about something.”
Master Nathaniel slowly turned crimson. Now that the doctor mentioned it, he remembered quite well that at one time he objected to holding the Lyre of Bones. Its name caused him to connect it with the Note. As we have seen, he was apt to regard innocent things as taboo. But to think that somebody should have noticed it!
“This is a necessary preface to what I have got to say with regard to your son,” went on Endymion Leer. “You see, I want to make it clear that, though one has never come within a mile of fairy fruit, one can have all the symptoms of being an habitual consumer of it. Wait! Wait! Hear me out!”
For Master Nathaniel, with a smothered exclamation, had sprung from his chair.
“I am not saying that you have all these symptoms … far from it. But you know that there are spurious imitations of many diseases of the body—conditions that imitate exactly all the symptoms of the disease, and the doctors themselves are often taken in by them. You wish me to confine my remarks to your son … well, I consider that he is suffering from a spurious surfeit of fairy fruit.”
Though still angry, Master Nathaniel was feeling wonderfully relieved. This explanation of his own condition that robbed it of all mystery and, somehow, made it rational, seemed almost as good as a cure. So he let the doctor go on with his disquisition without any further interruption except the purely rhetorical ones of an occasional protesting grunt.
“Now, I have studied somewhat closely the effects of fairy fruit,” the doctor was saying. “These effects we regard as a malady. But, in reality, they are more like a melody—a tune that one can’t get out of one’s head,” and he shot a very sly little look at Master Nathaniel, out of his bright birdlike eyes.
“Yes,” he went on in a thoughtful voice, “its effects, I think, can best be described as a changing of the inner rhythm by which we live. Have you ever noticed a little child of three or four walking hand in hand with its father through the streets? It is almost as if the two were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they hold each other’s hand, they might be walking on different planets … each seeing and hearing entirely different things. And while the father marches steadily on towards some predetermined goal, the child pulls against his hand, laughs without cause, makes little birdlike swoops at invisible objects. Now, anyone who has tasted fairy fruit (your Worship will excuse my calling a spade a spade in this way, but in my profession one can’t be mealymouthed)—anyone, then, who has tasted fairy fruit walks through life beside other people to a different tune from theirs … just like the little child beside its father. But one can be born to a different tune … and that, I believe, is the case with Master Ranulph. Now, if he is ever to become a useful citizen, though he need not lose his own tune, he must learn to walk in time to other people’s. He will not learn to do that here—at present. Master Nathaniel, you are not good for your son.”
Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and in a stifled voice he said, “What then do you recommend?”
“I should recommend his being taught another tune,” said the doctor briskly. “A different one from any he has heard before … but one to which other people walk as well as he. You must have captains and mates, Master Nathaniel, with little houses down at the seaport town. Is there no honest fellow among them with a sensible wife with whom the lad could lodge for a month or two? Or stay,” he went on, without giving Master Nathaniel time to answer, “life on a farm would do as well—better, perhaps. Sowing and reaping, quiet days, smells and noises that are like old tunes, healing nights … slow-time gin! By the Harvest of Souls, Master Nathaniel, I’d rather any day, be a farmer than a merchant … waving corn is better than the sea, and wagons are better than ships, and freighted with sweeter and more wholesome merchandise than all your silks and spices; for in their cargo are peace and a quiet mind. Yes. Master Ranulph must spend some months on a farm, and I know the very place for him.”
Master Nathaniel was more moved than he cared to show by the doctor’s words. They were like the cry of the cock, without its melancholy. But he tried to make his voice dry and matter of fact, as he asked where this marvellous farm might be.
“Oh, it’s to the west,” the doctor answered vaguely. “It belongs to an old acquaintance of mine—the widow Gibberty. She’s a fine, fresh, bustling woman and knows everything a woman ought to know, and her granddaughter, Hazel, is a nice, sensible, hardworking girl. I’m sure …”
“Gibberty, did
