“I suppose you are alluding to your kind thought for my comfort—putting that nice little death-box in my room to keep me warm, eh?”
“Yes, that’s it,” she answered brazenly.
Then a look of indescribable malice came into her face, and, with an evil smile, she said, “You see, you gave yourself away—without knowing it—at dinner.”
“Indeed? And how, may I ask?”
At first she did not answer, but eyed him gloatingly as a cat might eye a mouse. And then she said slowly, “It was that pack of lies you told me about the doings of the lads at Moongrass. Your son isn’t at Moongrass—nor ever has been, nor ever will be.”
“What do you mean?” he cried hoarsely.
“Mean?” she said with a shrill, triumphant laugh. “I mean this—on the night of the thirty-first of October, when the Silent People are abroad, he heard Duke Aubrey’s summons, and followed it across the hills.”
“Woman … what … what … speak … or …” and the veins in Master Nathaniel’s temples were swelling, and a fire seemed to have been lighted in his brain.
Her laughter redoubled. “You’ll never see your son again!” she jeered. “Young Ranulph Chanticleer has gone to the land whence none returns.”
Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the ceiling, just before losing consciousness—Ranulph weeping among the fields of gillyflowers.
A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface of his mind, he supposed that this was It springing out at him at last. And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense of relief—the relaxing of tension, when one can say, “Well, it has come at last.”
He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, “The land from which no one returns … but I can go there, too.”
“Follow him across the hills?” she cried scornfully. “No; you are not made of that sort of stuff.”
He beckoned to Peter Pease, and they went out together to the front of the house. The cocks were crowing, and there was a feeling of dawn in the air.
“I want my horse,” he said dully. “And can you find Miss Hazel for me?”
But as he spoke she joined them—pale and wild-eyed.
“From my room I heard you coming out,” she said. “Is it—is it over?”
Master Nathaniel nodded. And then, in a quiet voice emptied of all emotion, he told her what he had just learned from the widow. She went still paler than before, and her eyes filled with tears.
Then, turning to Peter Pease, he said, “You will immediately get out a warrant for the apprehension of Endymion Leer and send it into Lud to the new Mayor, Master Polydore Vigil. And you, Miss Hazel, you’d better leave this place at once—you will have to be plaintiff in the trial. Go to your aunt, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, who keeps the village shop at Mothgreen. And remember, you must say nothing whatever about the part I’ve played in this business—that is essential. I am not popular at present in Lud. And, now, would you kindly order my horse saddled and brought round.”
There was something so colourless, so dead, in his voice, that both Hazel and the smith stood, for a few seconds, in awed and sympathetic silence, and then Hazel went off slowly to order his horse.
“You … you didn’t mean what you said to the widow, sir, about … about going … yonder?” asked Peter Pease in an awed voice.
Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel’s eyes, and he cried fiercely, “Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be … till I find my son.”
It did not take long for his horse to be saddled and led to the door.
“Goodbye, my child,” he said to Hazel, taking her hand, and then he added, with a smile, “You dragged me back last night from the Milky Way … and now I am going by the earthly one.”
She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the distance.
“Well, well,” said Peter Pease, “I warrant it’ll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him yonder.”
XXV
The Law Crouches and Springs
Literally, Master Polydore Vigil received the severest shock of his life, when a few days after the events recorded in the last chapter there reached him the warrant against Endymion Leer, duly signed and sealed by the lawman of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple.
Dame Marigold had been right in saying that her brother was now completely under the dominion of the doctor. Master Polydore was a weak, idle man, who, nevertheless, dearly loved the insignia of authority. Hence, his present position was for him an ideal one—he had all the glory due to the first citizen, who has, moreover, effected a coup d’état, and none of the real responsibility that such a situation entails.
And now, this terrible document had arrived—it was like an attempt to cut off his right hand. His first instinct on receiving it was to rush off and take counsel with Endymion Leer himself—surely the omniscient resourceful doctor would be able to reduce to wind and thistledown even a thing as solid as a warrant. But respect for the Law, and the belief that though everything else may turn out vanity and delusion, the Law has the terrifying solidity of Reality itself, were deep-rooted in Master Polydore. If there was a warrant out against Endymion Leer—well, then, he must bend his neck to the yoke like any other citizen and stand his trial.
Again he read through the warrant, in the hopes that on a second it would lose its reality—prove to be a forgery, or a hoax. Alas! Its genuineness was but too unmistakable—the Law had spoken.
Master Polydore let
