Suddenly, as if some hero had slain the monster, the wind died down, the moon sailed clear of the clouds, and the pines straightened themselves and once more stood at attention, silent and motionless. In spite of this, his horse grew strangely restive, rearing and jibbing, as if something was standing before it in the path that frightened it; and in vain Master Nathaniel tried to quiet and sooth it.
Then it shuddered all over and fell heavily to the ground.
Fortunately, Master Nathaniel was thrown clear, and was not hurt, beyond the inevitable bruises entailed by the fall of a man of his weight. He struggled to his feet and hurried to his horse. It was stone dead.
For some time he sat beside it … his last link with Lud and familiar things; as yet too depressed in mind and aching in body to continue his journey on foot.
But what were those sudden strains of piercingly sweet music, and from what strange instrument did they proceed? They were too impersonal for a fiddle, too passionate for a flute, and much too sweet for any pipes or timbrels. It must be a human—or superhuman—voice, for now he was beginning to distinguish the words.
“There are windfalls of dreams, there’s a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweetbrier,
And bonfire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine.”
The voice stopped, and Master Nathaniel buried his face in his hands and sobbed as if his heart would break.
In this magically sweet music once more he had heard the Note. It held, this time, no menace as to things to come; but it aroused in his breast an agonizing tumult of remorse for having allowed something to escape that he would never, never recapture. It was as if he had left his beloved with harsh words, and had returned to find her dead.
Through his agony he was conscious of a hand laid on his shoulder: “Why, Chanticleer! Old John o’ Dreams! What ails you? Has the cock’s crow become too bittersweet for Chanticleer?” said a voice, half tender and half mocking, in his ear.
He turned round, and by the light of the moon saw standing behind him—Duke Aubrey.
The Duke smiled. “Well, Chanticleer,” he said, “so we meet at last! Your family has been dodging me down the centuries, but some day you were bound to fall into my snares. And, though you did not know it, you have been working for some time past as one of my secret agents. How I laughed when you and Ambrose Honeysuckle pledged each other in words taken from my Mysteries! And little did you think, when you stood cursing and swearing at the door of my tapestry-room, that you had pronounced the most potent charm in Faerie,” and he threw back his head and broke into peal upon peal of silvery laughter.
Suddenly his laughter stopped, and his eyes, as he looked at Master Nathaniel, became wonderfully compassionate.
“Poor Chanticleer! Poor John o’ Dreams!” he said gently. “I have often wished my honey were not so bitter to the taste. Believe me, Chanticleer, I fain would find an antidote to the bitter herb of life, but none grows this side of the hills—or the other.”
“And yet … I have never tasted fairy fruit,” said Master Nathaniel in a low broken voice.
“There are many trees in my orchard, and many and various are the fruit they bear—music and dreams and grief and, sometimes, joy. All your life, Chanticleer, you have eaten fairy fruit, and some day, it may be, you will hear the Note again—but that I cannot promise. And now I will grant you a vision—they are sometimes sweet to the taste.”
He paused. And then he said, “Do you know why it was that your horse fell down dead? It was because you had reached the brink of Fairyland. The winds of Faerie slew him. Come with me, Chanticleer.”
He took Master Nathaniel’s hand and dragged him to his feet, and they scrambled a few yards further up the bridle-path and stepped on to a broad plateau. Beneath them lay what, in the uncertain moonlight, looked like a stretch of desolate uplands.
Then Duke Aubrey raised his arms high above his head and cried out in a loud voice, “By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!”
At these words the uplands became bathed in a gentle light and proved to be fair and fertile—the perpetual seat of Spring; for there were vivid green patches of young corn, and pillars of pink and white smoke, which were fruit trees in blossom, and pillars of blue blossom, which was the smoke of distant hamlets, and a vast meadow of cornflowers and daisies, which was the great inland sea of Faerie. And everything—ships, spires, houses—was small and bright and delicate, yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or rather, the transfigured Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. And as he gazed he knew that in that land no winds ever howled at night, and that everything within its borders had the serenity and stability of trees, the unchanging peace of pictures.
Then, suddenly, it all vanished. Duke Aubrey had vanished too, and he was standing alone on the edge of a black abyss, while wafted on the wind came the echo of light, mocking laughter.
Was Fairyland, then, a delusion? Had Ranulph vanished into nothingness?
For a second or two he hesitated, and then—he leaped down into the abyss.
XXIX
A Message Comes to Hazel and the First Swallow to Dame Marigold
The information given by Luke Hempen had enabled the
