What had taken his tongue! It was as if an old trusty watchdog had suddenly gone mad and bitten him.
But he could stay no longer in the parlour, and face her cold, disgusted stare. So, sheepishly mumbling an apology, he left the room.
Where should he go? Not to the pipe-room. He could not face the prospect of his own company. So he went upstairs and knocked at Hempie’s door.
However much in childhood a man may have loved his nurse, it is seldom that, after he has grown up, he does not feel ill at ease and rather bored when he is with her. A relationship that has become artificial, and connected, on one side, with a sense of duty rather than with spontaneous affection, is always an uncomfortable one.
And, for the nurse, it is particularly bitter when it is the magnanimous enemy—the wife—who has to keep her “boy” up to his duty.
For years Dame Marigold had had to say at intervals, “Nat, have you been up to see Hempie lately?” or “Nat, Hempie has lost one of her brothers. Do go and tell her you’re sorry.”
So, when Master Nathaniel found himself in the gay little room, he felt awkward and tongue-tied, and was too depressed to have recourse to the somewhat laboured facetiousness with which he was in the habit of greeting the old woman.
She was engaged in darning his stockings, and she indignantly showed him a particularly big hole, shaking her head, and exclaiming, “There never was a man so hard on his stockings as you, Master Nat! I’d very much like to find out before I die what you do to them; and Master Ranulph is every bit as bad.”
“Well, Hempie, as I always say, you’ve no right to blame me if my stockings go into holes, seeing that it’s you who knitted them,” retorted Master Nathaniel automatically.
For years Hempie’s scolding about the condition in which she found his stockings had elicited this reply. But, after these days of nightmare, there was something reassuring in discovering that there were still people in the world sane enough, and with quiet enough minds, to be put out by the holes in a pair of worsted stockings.
Hempie had, indeed, taken the news of the Crabapple Blossoms very calmly. It was true she had never cared very much for Prunella, maintaining always that “she was just her mother over again.” All the same, Prunella remained Master Nathaniel’s daughter and Ranulph’s sister, and hence had a certain borrowed preciousness in the eyes of Hempie. Nevertheless she had refused to indulge in lamentations, and had preserved on the subject a rather grim silence.
His eye roved restlessly over the familiar room. It was certainly a pleasant one—fantastic and exquisitely neat. “Neat as a Fairy’s parlour”—the old Dorimarite expression came unbidden to his mind.
There was a bowl of autumn roses on the table, faintly scenting the air with the hospitable, poetic perfume that is like a welcome to a little house with green shutters and gay chintzes and lavender-scented sheets. But the host who welcomes you is dead, the house itself no longer stands except in your memory—it is the cry of the cock turned into perfume. Are there bowls of roses in the Fairies’ parlours?
“I say, Hempie, these are new, aren’t they?” he said, pointing to a case of shells on the chimneypiece—very strange shells, as thin as butterfly’s wings and as brightly coloured. And, as well, there were porcelain pots, which looked as if they had been made out of the petals of poppies and orchids, nor could their strange shapes ever have been turned on a potter’s wheel in Dorimare.
Then he gave a low whistle, and, pointing to a horseshoe of pure gold, nailed on to the wall, he added, “And that, too! I’ll swear I’ve never seen it before. Has your ship come in, Hempie?”
The old woman looked up placidly from her darning: “Oh! these came when my poor brother died and the old home was broken up. I’m glad to have them, as I never remember a time when they weren’t in the old kitchen at home. I often think it’s strange how bits of chiney and brittle stuff like that lives on, long after solid flesh and bone has turned to dust. And it’s a queer thing, Master Nat, as one gets old, how one lives among the dumb. Bits of chiney … and the Silent People,” and she wiped a couple of tears from her eyes.
Then she added, “Where these old bits of things came from I never rightly knew. I suppose the horseshoe’s valuable, but even in bad harvests my poor father would never turn it into money. He used to say that it had been above our door in his father’s time, and in his grandfather’s time, and it had best stay there. I shouldn’t wonder if he thought it had been dropped by Duke Aubrey’s horse. And as for the shells and pots … when we were children, we used always to whisper that they came from beyond the hills.”
Master Nathaniel gave a start, and stared at her in amazement.
“From beyond the hills?” he repeated, in a low, horrified voice.
“Aye, and why not?” cried Hempie, undaunted. “I was country-bred, Master Nat, and I learned not to mind the smell of a fox or of a civet cat … or of a Fairy. They’re mischievous creatures, I daresay, and best left alone. But though we can’t always pick and choose our neighbours, neighbourliness is a virtue all the same. For my part, I’d never have chosen the Fairies for my neighbours—but they were chosen for me. And we must just make the best of them.”
“By the Sun, Moon, and Stars, Hempie!” cried Master Nathaniel in a horrified voice, “you don’t know what you’re talking about, you …”
“Now, Master Nat, don’t you try on
