“Yes. You may remember having heard her name in the law-courts—it isn’t a common one. She had a case many years ago. I think it was a thieving labourer her late husband had thrashed and dismissed who sued her for damages.”
“And where exactly is this farm?”
“Well, it’s about sixty miles away from Lud, just out of a village called Swan-on-the-Dapple.”
“Swan-on-the-Dapple? Then it’s quite close to the Elfin Marches!” cried Master Nathaniel indignantly.
“About ten miles away,” replied Endymion Leer imperturbably. “But what of that? Ten miles on a busy self-supporting farm is as great a distance as a hundred would be at Lud. Still, under the circumstances, I can understand your fighting shy of the west. I must think of some other plan.”
“I should think so indeed!” growled Master Nathaniel.
“However,” continued the doctor, “you have really nothing to fear from that quarter. He would, in reality, be much further moved from temptation there than here. The smugglers, whoever they are, run great risks to get the fruit into Lud, and they’re not going to waste it on rustics and farmhands.”
“All the same,” said Master Nathaniel doggedly, “I’m not going to have him going so damnably near to … a certain place.”
“The place that does not exist in the eyes of the law, eh?” said Endymion Leer with a smile.
Then he leaned forward in his chair, and gazed steadily at Master Nathaniel. This time, his eyes were kind as well as piercing. “Master Nathaniel, I’d like to reason with you a little,” he said. “Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”
He sat silent for a few seconds, as if choosing in advance the words he meant to use. Then he began, “We have the misfortune of living in a country that marches with the unknown; and that is apt to make the fancy sick. Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.”
He paused for a second to chuckle over his own pun, and then went on, “But, for once, let us look things straight in the face, and call them by their proper names. Fairyland, for instance … no one has been there within the memory of man. For generations it has been a forbidden land. In consequence, curiosity, ignorance, and unbridled fancy have put their heads together and concocted a country of golden trees hanging with pearls and rubies, the inhabitants of which are immortal and terrible through unearthly gifts—and so on. But—and in this I am in no way subscribing to a certain antiquary of ill odour—there is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Think of the Dapple, or the Dawl, when they roll the sunset towards the east. Think of an autumn wood, or a hawthorn in May. A hawthorn in May—there’s a miracle for you! Who would ever have dreamed that that gnarled stumpy old tree had the power to do that? Well, all these things are familiar sights, but what should we think if never having seen them we read a description of them, or saw them for the first time? A golden river! Flaming trees! Trees that suddenly break into flower! For all we know, it may be Dorimare that is Fairyland to the people across the Debatable Hills.”
Master Nathaniel was drinking in every word as if it was nectar. A sense of safety was tingling in his veins like a generous wine … mounting to his head, even, a little bit, so unused was he to that particular intoxicant.
Endymion Leer eyed him, with a little smile. “And now,” he said, “perhaps your Worship will let me talk a little of your own case. The malady you suffer from should, I think, be called ‘life-sickness.’ You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brainsick. There, beneath you, all round you, there surges and swells, and ebbs and flows, that great, ungovernable, ruthless element that we call life. And its motion gets into your blood, turns your head dizzy. Get your sea legs, Master Nathaniel! By which I do not mean you must cease feeling the motion … go on feeling it, but learn to like it; or if not to like it, at any rate to bear it with firm legs and a steady head.”
There were tears in Master Nathaniel’s eyes and he smiled a little sheepishly. At that moment his feet were certainly on terra firma; and so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent temper of our soul that for the moment he felt that he would never feel “life-sickness” again.
“Thank you, Leer, thank you,” he murmured. “I’d do a good deal for you, in return for what you’ve just said.”
“Very well, then,” said the doctor briskly, “give me the pleasure of curing your son. It’s the greatest pleasure I have in life, curing people. Let me arrange for him to go to this farm.”
Master Nathaniel, in his present mood, was incapable of gainsaying him. So it was arranged that Ranulph should shortly leave for Swan-on-the-Dapple.
It was with a curious solemnity that, just before he took his leave, Endymion Leer said, “Master Nathaniel, there is one thing I want you to bear in mind—I have never in my life made a mistake in a prescription.”
As Endymion Leer trotted away from the Chanticleers he chuckled to himself and softly rubbed his hands. “I can’t help being a physician and giving balm,” he muttered. “But it was monstrous good policy as well. He would never have allowed the boy to go, otherwise.”
Then he started, and stood stock-still, listening. From far away there came a ghostly sound. It might have been the cry of a very distant cock, or else
