“Terribly bad taste, I call it,” whispered Dame Dreamsweet to Dame Marigold (the sisters-in-law had agreed to bury the hatchet) “you always said that little man was a low vulgar fellow.” But Dame Marigold’s only answer was a little shrug, and a tiny sigh.
Then came the turn of the widow Gibberty to mount the pulpit and make her defence.
Before she began to speak, she fixed in turn the judges, plaintiff, and public, with an insolent scornful stare. Then, in her deep, almost masculine voice, she began: “You’ve asked me a question to which you know the answer well enough, else I shouldn’t be standing here now. Yes, I murdered Gibberty—and a good riddance too. I was for killing him with the sap of osiers, but the fellow you call Endymion Leer, who was always a squeamish, tenderhearted, sort of chap (if there was nothing to lose by it, that’s to say) got me the death-berries and made me give them to him in a jelly, instead of the osiers.” (It was a pity Master Nathaniel was not there to glory in his own acumen!) “And it was not only because they caused a painless death that he preferred the berries. He had never before seen them at their work, and he was always a death-fancier—tasting, and smelling, and fingering death, like a farmer does samples of grain at market. Though, to give him his due, if it hadn’t been for him, that girl over there who has just been standing up to denounce him and me” (and she nodded in the direction of the pale, trembling, Hazel) “and her father before her would long ago have gone the way of the farmer. And this I say in the hope that the wench’s conscience may keep her awake sometimes in the nights to come, remembering how she dealt with the man who had saved her life. It will be but a small prick, doubtless; but it is the last that I can give her.
“And now, good people, here’s a word of advice to you, before I go my last ride, a pillion to my old friend Endymion Leer. Never you make a pet of a dead man. For the dead are dirty curs and bite the hand that has fed them;” and with an evil smile she climbed down from the pulpit, while more than one person in the audience felt faint with horror and would willingly have left the hall.
There was nothing left but for Master Polydore to pronounce the sentence; and though the accused had stolen some of his thunder, nevertheless the solemn time-honoured words did not fail to produce their wonted thrill:
“Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty, I find you guilty of murder, and I consign your bodies to the birds, and your souls to whence they came. And may all here present take example from your fate, correcting their conduct if it needs correction, or, if it be impeccable, keeping it so. For every tree can be a gallows, and every man has a neck to hang.”
The widow received her sentence with complete stolidity; Endymion Leer with a scornful smile. But as it was pronounced there was a stir and confusion at the back of the hall, and a grotesque frenzied figure broke loose from the detaining grip of her neighbours, and, struggling up to the dais, flung herself at the feet of Master Polydore. It was Miss Primrose Crabapple.
“Your Worship! Your Worship!” she cried, shrilly, “Hang me instead of him! My life for his! Was it not I who gave your daughters fairy fruit, with my eyes open! And I glory in the knowledge that I was made a humble instrument of the same master whom he has served so well. Dear Master Polydore, have mercy on your country, spare your country’s benefactor, and if the law must have a victim let it be me—a foolish useless woman, whose only merit was that she believed in loveliness though she had never seen it.”
Weeping and struggling, her face twisted into a grotesque tragic mask, they dragged her from the hall, amid the laughter and ironical cheers of the public.
That afternoon Mumchance came to Master Polydore to inform him that a young maidservant from the Academy had just been to the guardroom to say that Miss Primrose Crabapple had killed herself.
Master Polydore at once hurried off to the scene of the tragedy, and there in the pleasant old garden where so many generations of Crabapple Blossoms had romped, and giggled, and exchanged their naughty little secrets, he found Miss Primrose, hanging stone-dead from one of her own apple-trees.
“Well, as the old song has it, Mumchance,” said Master Polydore—“Here hangs a maid who died for love.
”
Master Polydore was noted for his dry humour.
A gibbet had been set up in the great court of the Guildhall, and the next day, at dawn, Endymion Leer and the widow Gibberty were hanged by the neck till they died.
Rumour said that as the Doctor’s face was contorted in its last grimace strange silvery peals of laughter were heard proceeding from the room where long ago Duke Aubrey’s jester had killed himself.
XXVII
The Fair in the Elfin Marches
About two hours after he had set out from the farm, Master Nathaniel reached a snug little hollow at the foot of the hills, chosen for their camp by the consignment
