But when Dame Marigold tried to find out what she thought was the matter with him, she would only shake her head mysteriously, and mutter that it was no use crying over spilt milk, and least said soonest mended.
When finally the baffled Dame Marigold got up to go, the old woman cried shrilly: “Now, ma’am, remember, not a word of this to the master! He was never one that could stand being worried. He’s like his father in that. My old mistress used often to say to me, ‘Now, Polly, we won’t tell the master. He can’t stand worry.’ Aye, all the Chanticleers are wonderful sensitive.” And the unexpressed converse of the last statement was, “All the Vigils, on the other hand, have the hides of buffaloes.”
Dame Marigold, however, had no intention of mentioning the matter as yet to Master Nathaniel. Whether or not it was due to the Chanticleers’ superior sensitiveness of soul, the slightest worry, as she knew to her cost, made him unbearably irritable.
He had evidently, as yet, noticed nothing himself. Most of his day was spent in the Senate and his countinghouse; besides, his interest in other people’s lives was not extended to those of his own household.
As to his feelings for Ranulph, it must be confessed that he looked upon him more as an heirloom than as a son. In fact, unconsciously, he placed him in the same category as the crystal goblet with which Duke Aubrey’s father had baptized the first ship owned by a Chanticleer, or the sword with which his ancestor had helped to turn Duke Aubrey off the throne—objects that he very rarely either looked at or thought about, though the loss of them would have caused him to go half mad with rage and chagrin.
However, one evening, early in April, the matter was forced upon his attention in a very painful manner.
By this time spring had come to all the world, and the citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist were beginning to organise their life for summer—copper vessels were being cleaned and polished for the coming labours of the still-room, arbours in the gardens swept out and cleaned, and fishing-tackle overhauled; and people began to profit by the longer days by giving supper-parties to their friends.
Nobody in Lud-in-the-Mist loved parties more than Master Nathaniel. They were a temporary release. It was as if the tune of his life were suddenly set to a different and gayer key; so that, while nothing was substantially changed, and the same chairs stood in the same places, with people sitting in them that he met every day, and there was even the same small, dull ache in one of his teeth, nevertheless the sting, or rather the staleness, was taken out of it all. So it was very gleefully that he sent invitations to all his cronies to come “and meet a Moongrass cheese”—as he had done every April for the last twenty-five years.
Moongrass was a village of Dorimare famous for its cheeses—and rightly so, for to look at they were as beautiful as Parian marble veined with jade, and they had to perfection the flavour of all good cheeses—that blending of the perfume of meadows with the cleanly stench of the byre. It was the Moongrass cheeses that were the subject of the comic advertisement described in a previous chapter.
By seven o’clock the Chanticleers’ parlour was filled with a crowd of stout, rosy, gaily-dressed guests, chattering and laughing like a flock of parakeets. Only Ranulph was silent; but that was to be expected from a little boy of twelve years old in the presence of his elders. However, he need not have sulked in a corner, nor responded quite so surlily to the jocular remarks addressed him by his father’s guests.
Master Nathaniel, of course, had a well-stored cellar, and the evening began with glasses of delicious wild-thyme gin, a cordial for which that cellar was famous. But, as well, he had a share in a common cellar, owned jointly by all the families of the ruling class—a cellar of old, mellow jokes that, unlike bottles of wine, never ran dry. Whatever there was of ridiculous or lovable in each member of the group was distilled into one of these jokes, so that at will one could intoxicate oneself with one’s friends’ personalities—swallow, as it were, the whole comic draught of them. And, seeing that in these old jokes the accumulated irritation that inevitably results from intimacy evaporated and turned to sweetness, like the juice of the grape they promoted friendship and cordiality—between the members of the group, that is to say. For each variety of humour is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world. Perhaps the chief reason for the lack of sympathy between the rulers and the ruled in Dorimare was that, in humour, they belonged to different totems.
Anyhow, everyone there tonight shared the same totem, and each one of them was the hero of one of the old jokes. Master Nathaniel was asked if his crimson velvet breeches were a blackish crimson because, many years ago, he had forgotten to go into mourning for his father-in-law; and when Dame Marigold had, finally, tentatively pointed out to him his omission, he had replied angrily, “I am in mourning!” Then, when with upraised eyebrows she had looked at the canary-coloured stockings that he had just purchased, he had said sheepishly, “Anyhow, it’s a blackish canary.”
Few wines have as strong a flavour of the grape as this old joke had of Master Nathaniel. His absentmindedness was in it, his power of seeing things as he wanted them to be (he had genuinely believed himself to be in mourning) and, finally, in the “blackish canary” there was the tendency, which he had inherited, perhaps, from his legal ancestors, to believe that one could play with reality and give it
