But, that afternoon, even his favourite epitaph, the one about the old baker, Ebeneezor Spike, who had provided the citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist with fresh sweet loaves for sixty years, was powerless to comfort Master Nathaniel.
Indeed, so strangled was he in the coils of his melancholy that the curious fact of the door of his family chapel being ajar caused in him nothing but a momentary, muffled surprise.
The chapel of the Chanticleers was one of the loveliest monuments of Lud. It was built of rose-coloured marble, with delicately fluted pillars, and worked in low relief with the flowers and panic stricken fugitives, so common in the old art of Dorimare. Indeed, it looked like an exquisite little pleasure-house; and tradition said that this it had originally been—one of Duke Aubrey’s, in fact. And it certainly was in accordance with his legend to make a graveyard the scene of his revels.
No one ever entered except Master Nathaniel and his household to fill it with flowers on the anniversaries of his parents’ death. Nevertheless, the door was certainly ajar.
The only comment he made to himself was to suppose that the pious Hempie had been up that day to commemorate some anniversary, remembered only by herself, in the lives of her dead master and mistress, and had forgotten to lock it up again.
Drearily he wandered to the western wall and gazed down upon Lud-in-the-Mist, and so drugged was he with despair that at first he was incapable of reacting in the slightest degree to what his eyes were seeing.
Then, just as sometimes the flowing of the Dapple was reflected in the trunks of the beeches that grew on its banks, so that an element that looked as if it were half water, half light, seemed rippling down them in ceaseless zones—so did the objects he saw beneath him begin to be reflected in fancies, rippling down the hard, unyielding fabric of his woe; the red-roofed houses scattered about the side of the hill looked as if they were crowding helter-skelter to the harbour, eager to turn ships themselves and sail away—a flock of clumsy ducks on a lake of swans; the houses beyond the harbour seemed to be preening themselves preparatory to having their portrait taken. The chimneys were casting becoming velvet shadows on the high-pitched slanting roofs. The belfries seemed to be standing on tiptoe behind the houses—like tall serving lads, who, unbeknown to their masters, have succeeded in squeezing themselves into the family group.
Or, perhaps, the houses were more like a flock of barn-door fowls, of different shapes and sizes, crowding up at the hen wife’s “Chick! chick! chick!” to be fed at sunset.
Anyhow, however innocent they might look, they were the repositories of whatever dark secrets Lud might contain. Houses counted among the Silent People. Walls have ears, but no tongue. Houses, trees, the dead—they tell no tales.
His eye travelled beyond the town to the country that lay beyond, and rested on the fields of poppies and golden stubble, the smoke of distant hamlets, the great blue ribbon of the Dawl, the narrow one of the Dapple—one coming from the north, one from the west, but, for some miles beyond Lud-in-the-Mist, seeming to flow in parallel lines, so that their convergence at the harbour struck one as a geometrical miracle.
Once more he began to feel the balm of silent things, and seemed to catch a glimpse of that still, quiet landscape the future, after he himself had died.
And yet … there was that old superstition of the thraldom in Fairyland, the labour in the fields of gillyflowers.
No, no. Old Ebeneezor Spike was not a thrall in Fairyland.
He left the Fields of Grammary in a gentler mood of melancholy than the frost-bound despair in which he had gone there.
When he got home he found Dame Marigold sitting dejectedly in the parlour, her hands lying limply on her lap, and she had had the fire already lighted although evening had not yet set in.
She was very white, and there were violet shadows under her eyes.
Master Nathaniel stood silently at the door for a few seconds watching her.
There came into his head the lines of an old song of Dorimare:—
I’ll weave her a wreath of the flowers of grief
That her beauty may show the brighter.
And suddenly he saw her with the glamour on her that used to madden him in the days of his courtship, the glamour of something that is delicate, and shadowy, and faraway—the glamour that lets loose the lust of the body of a man for the soul of a woman.
“Marigold,” he said in a low voice.
Her lips curled in a little contemptuous smile: “Well, Nat, have you been out baying the moon, and chasing your own shadow?”
“Marigold!” and he came and leaned over the back of her chair.
She started violently. Then she cried in a voice, half petulant, half apologetic, “I’m sorry! But, you know, I can’t bear having the back of my neck touched! Oh, Nat, what a sentimental old thing you are!”
And then it all began over again—the vain repinings, the veiled reproaches; while the desire to make him wince struggled for the ascendancy with the habit of mercy, engendered by years of a mild, slightly contemptuous tenderness.
Her attitude to the calamity was one of physical disgust, mingled with petulance, a sense of ill-usage, and, incredible though it may seem, a sense of its ridiculous aspect.
Occasionally she would stop shuddering, to make some such remark as: “Oh, dear! I can’t help wishing that old Primrose herself had gone off with them, and that I could have seen her prancing to the fiddle and screeching like an old lovesick tabby cat.”
Finally Master Nathaniel could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet, exclaiming violently: “Marigold, you madden me! You’re … you’re not a woman. I believe what you need is some of that fruit yourself. I’ve a good mind to get some, and force it down your throat!”
But it
