Suddenly Ranulph broke the silence with the startling question, “How far is it from here to Fairyland?”
The little boys nudged one another and again began to snigger behind their hands.
“For shame, Master Ranulph!” cried Luke indignantly, “talking like that before youngsters!”
“But I want to know!” said Ranulph petulantly.
“Tell what your old granny used to say, Dorian,” giggled Toby.
And Dorian was finally persuaded to repeat the old saying: “A thousand leagues by the great West Road and ten by the Milky Way.”
Ranulph sprang to his feet, and with rather a wild laugh, he cried, “Let’s have a race to Fairyland. I bet it will be me that gets there first. One, two, three—and away!”
And he would actually have plunged off into the darkness, had not the little boys, half shocked, half admiring, flung themselves on him and dragged him back.
“There’s an imp of mischief got into you tonight, Master Ranulph,” growled Luke.
“You shouldn’t joke about things like that … specially tonight, Master Chanticleer,” said Toby gravely.
“You’re right there, young Toby,” said Luke, “I only wish he had half your sense.”
“It was just a bit of fun, wasn’t it, Master Chanticleer? You didn’t really want us to race to … yonder?” asked little Peter, peering through the darkness at Ranulph with scared eyes.
“Of course it was only fun,” said Luke.
But Ranulph said nothing.
Again they lapsed into silence. And all round them, subject to blind taciturn laws, and heedless of man, myriads of things were happening, in the grass, in the trees, in the sky.
Luke yawned and stretched himself. “It must be getting near dawn,” he said.
They had successfully doubled the dangerous cape of midnight, and he began to feel secure of safely weathering what remained of their dark voyage.
It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed, and, with Sancho Panza, to bless the man who invented it. They shuddered, and drew their cloaks closer round their shoulders.
Then, something happened. It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density … ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death.
At first the spot was merely a degree less black than the rest of the sky. Then it turned grey, then yellow, then red. And the earth was undergoing the same transformation. Here and there patches of greyness broke out in the blackness of the grass, and after a few seconds one saw that they were clumps of flowers. Then the greyness became filtered with a delicate sea-green; and next, one realized that the grey-green belonged to the foliage, against which the petals were beginning to show white—and then pink, or yellow, or blue; but a yellow like that of primroses, a blue like that of certain wild periwinkles, colours so elusive that one suspects them to be due to some passing accident of light, and that, were one to pick the flower, it would prove to be pure white.
Ah, there can be no doubt of it now! The blues and yellows are real and perdurable. Colour is steadily flowing through the veins of the earth, and we may take heart, for she will soon be restored to life again. But had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed that a star was quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth.
And now the valley is again red and gold with vineyards, the hills are clothed with pines, and the Dapple is rosy.
Then a cock crowed, and another answered it, and then another—a ghostly sound, which, surely, did not belong to the smiling, triumphant earth, but rather to one of those distant dying stars.
But what had taken Ranulph? He had sprung to his feet and was standing motionless, a strange light in his eyes.
And then again, from a still more distant star, it seemed, another cock crowed, and another answered it.
“The piper! the piper!” cried Ranulph in a loud triumphant voice. And, before his astonished companions could get to their feet, he was dashing up one of the bridle-paths towards the Debatable Hills.
XXI
The Old Goatherd
For a few seconds they stood petrified, and then Luke was seized with panic, and, calling to the little boys to stay where they were, dashed off in pursuit.
Up the path he pounded, from time to time shouting angrily to Ranulph to come back, but the distance between them grew ever wider.
Luke’s ears began to sing and his brain to turn to fire, and he seemed to lose all sense of reality—it was not on the earth that he was running, but through the airless deserts of space.
He could not have said how long he struggled on, for he who runs hard leaves time behind as well as space. But finally his strength gave way, and he fell, breathless and exhausted, to the ground.
When he had sufficiently recovered to think of starting again the diminishing speck that had been Ranulph had completely vanished.
Poor Luke began to swear—at both Ranulph and himself.
Just then he heard a tinkle of bells, and down the bridle-path came a herd of goats and a very ancient herdsman—to judge, at least, from his bowed walk, for his face was hidden by a hood.
When he had got up to Luke, he stood still, leaning heavily on his stick, and peered down at him from underneath the overhanging flap of his hood with a pair of very bright eyes.
“You’ve been running hard, young master, by the looks of ye,” he said, in a quavering voice. “You be the second young fellow as what I’ve seen running this morning.”
“The second?” cried Luke eagerly. “Was the other a little lad of about twelve years old with red hair, in a green leathern jerkin embroidered in gold?”
“Well, his hair was red and no mistake, though as to the jerkin …” And here
