THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE
The social life of Lud-in-the-Mist began in spring and ended in autumn.
In winter the citizens preferred their own fire-sides; they had an
unreasoning dislike of being out after nightfall, a dislike due not so
much to fear as to habit. Though the habit may have sprung from some
forgotten danger that, long ago, had made their ancestors shun the dark.
So it was always with relief as well as with joy that they welcomed the
first appearance of spring--scarcely crediting at first that it was a
reality shared by all the world, and not merely an optical delusion
confined to their own eyes in their own garden. There, the lawn was
certainly green, the larches and thorns even startlingly so, and the
almonds had rose-coloured blossoms; but the fields and trees in the
hazy distance beyond their own walls were still grey and black. Yes,
the colours in their own garden must be due merely to some gracious
accident of light, and when that light shifted the colours would vanish.
But everywhere, steadily, invisibly, the trees' winter foliage of white
sky or amethyst grey dusk was turning to green and gold.
All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring,
and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is
becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught
in a spider's web, and how little lemon-coloured buds are studding the
thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts--they
come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is
hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves--and all the other trees in
turn.
And at first we delight in the diversity of the colours and shapes of
the various young leaves--noting how those of the birch are like a
swarm of green bees, and those of the lime so transparent that they are
stained black with the shadow of those above and beneath them, and how
those of the elm diaper the sky with the prettiest pattern, and are the
ones that grow the most slowly.
Then we cease to note their idiosyncrasies, and they merge, till
autumn, into one solid, unobtrusive green curtain for throwing into
relief brighter and sharper things. There is nothing so dumb as a tree
in full leaf.
It was in the spring of his fiftieth year that Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer had his first real anxiety. It concerned his only son
Ranulph, a little boy of twelve years old.
Master Nathaniel had been elected that year to the highest office in
the state--that of Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of
Dorimare. Ex officio, he was president of the Senate and chief justice
on the Bench. According to the constitution, as drawn up by the men of
the revolution, he was responsible for the safety and defence of the
country in case of attack by sea or land; it was for him to see that
both justice and the country's revenues were properly administered; and
his time was held to be at the disposal of the most obscure citizen
with a grievance.
Actually--apart from presiding on the Bench--his duties had come to
consist of nothing more onerous than being a genial and dignified
chairman of a comfortable and select club, for that was what in reality
the Senate had now become. Nevertheless, though it was open to question
whether his official duties were of the slightest use to anyone, they
were numerous enough to occupy most of his time and to cause him to be
unconscious of the under-currents in his home.
Ranulph had always been a dreamy, rather delicate child, and backward
for his years. Up to the age of seven, or thereabouts, he had caused
his mother much anxiety by his habit, when playing in the garden, of
shouting out remarks to an imaginary companion. And he was fond of
talking nonsense (according to the ideas of Lud-in-the-Mist, slightly
obscene nonsense) about golden cups, and snow-white ladies milking
azure cows, and the sound of tinkling bridles at midnight. But children
are apt, all the world over, to have nasty little minds; and this type
of talk was not uncommon among the children of Lud-in-the-Mist, and, as
they nearly always grew out of it, little attention was paid to it.
Then, when he was a few years older, the sudden death of a young
scullery maid affected him so strongly that for two days he would not
touch food, but lay with frightened eyes tossing and trembling in bed,
like a newly-caught bird in a cage. When his shocked and alarmed mother
(his father was at the seaport town on business at the time) tried to
comfort him by reminding him that he had not been particularly fond of
the scullery-maid while she was alive, he had cried out irritably, "No,
no, it isn't her ... it's the thing that has happened to her!"
But all that was when he was still quite a little boy, and, as he grew
older, he had seemed to become much more normal.
But that spring his tutor had come to Dame Marigold to complain of
his inattention at his studies, and sudden unreasonable outbreaks of
passion. "To tell the you truth, ma'am, I think the little fellow can't
be well," the tutor had said.
So Dame Marigold sent for the good old family doctor, who said there
was nothing the matter with him but a little overheating of the blood,
a thing very common in the spring; and prescribed sprigs of borage in
wine: "the best cordial for lazy scholars," and he winked and pinched
Ranulph's ear, adding that in June he might be given an infusion of
damask roses to complete the cure.
But the sprigs of borage did not make Ranulph any more attentive to his
lessons; while Dame Marigold had no longer need of the tutor's hints
to realise that the little boy was not himself. What alarmed her most
in his condition was the violent effort that he had evidently to make
in order to react in the least to his surroundings. For instance, if
she offered him a second helping at dinner, he would clench his fists,
and beads of perspiration would break out on his forehead, so great an
effort did it require to answer Yes or No.
There had never been any real sympathy between Ranulph and his mother
(she had always preferred her daughter, Prunella), and she knew that if
she were to ask him what ailed him he would not tell her; so, instead,
she asked Ranulph's great ally and confidant, Master Nathaniel's old
nurse, Mistress Hempen.
Hempie, as they called her, had served the family of Chanticleer for
nearly fifty years, in fact ever since the birth of Master Nathaniel.
And now she was called the housekeeper, though her duties were of the
lightest, and consisted mainly of keeping the store-room keys and
mending the linen.
She was a fine, hale old country-woman, with a wonderful gift for
amusing children. Not only did she know all the comic nursery stories
of Dorimare (Ranulph's favourite was about a pair of spectacles whose
ambition was to ride on the nose of the Man-in-the-Moon, and who, in
vain attempts to reach their goal, were always leaping off the nose of
their unfortunate possessor), but she was, as well, an incomparable
though sedentary playfellow, and from her arm-chair would direct,
with seemingly unflagging interest, the manoeuvres of lead soldiers
or the movements of marionettes. Indeed, her cosy room at the top of
the house seemed to Ranulph to have the power of turning every object
that crossed its threshold into a toy: the ostrich egg hanging from
the ceiling by a crimson cord, the little painted wax effigies of his
grandparents on the chimney-piece, the old spinning-wheel, even the
empty bobbins, which made excellent wooden soldiers, and the pots
of jam standing in rows to be labelled--they all presented infinite
possibilities of being played with; while her fire seemed to purr more
contentedly than other fires and to carry prettier pictures in its red,
glowing heart.
Well, rather timidly (for Hempie had a rough edge to her tongue, and
had never ceased to look upon her mistress as a young and foolish
interloper), Dame Marigold told her that she was beginning to be a
little anxious about Ranulph. Hempie shot her a sharp look over her
spectacles, and, pursing her lips, drily remarked, "Well, ma'am, it's
taken you a long time to see it."
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 counting-house; 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 paroquets. 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 absent-mindedness 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 what shape one
chose.
Then, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle was asked whether the Honeysuckles
considered a Moongrass cheese to be a cheese; the point being that
Master Ambrose had an exaggerated sense of the importance of his own
family, and once in the law-courts, when the question arose as to
whether a dragon (there were still a few harmless, effete dragons
lurking in caves in out-of-the-way parts of Dorimare) were a bird or a
reptile, he had said, with an air of finality, "The Honeysuckles have
always considered them to be reptiles." And his wife, Dame Jessamine,
was asked if she wanted her supper "on paper," owing to her habit of
pinning her husband down to any rash promise, such as that of a new
barouche, by saying, "I'd like that on paper, Ambrose."
And then there was Dame Marigold's brother, Master Polydore Vigil, and
his wife, Dame Dreamsweet, and old Mat Pyepowders and his preposterous,
chattering dame, and the Peregrine Laquers and the Goceline Flacks and
the Hyacinth Baldbreeches--in fact, all the cream of the society of
Lud-in-the-Mist, and each of them labelled with his or her appropriate
joke. And the old jokes went round and round, like bottles of port, and
with each round the company grew more hilarious.
The anonymous antiquary could have found in the culinary language
of Dorimare another example to support his thesis; for the menu
of the supper provided by Dame Marigold for her guests sounded
like a series of tragic sonnets. The first dish was called "The
Bitter-Sweet Mystery"--it was a soup of herbs on the successful
blending of which the cooks of Lud-in-the-Mist based their reputation.
This was followed by "The Lottery of Dreams," which consisted of
such delicacies as quail, snails, chicken's liver, plovers' eggs,
peacocks' hearts, concealed under a mountain of boiled rice. Then came
"True-Love-in-Ashes," a special way of preparing pigeons; and last,
"Death's Violets," an extremely indigestible pudding decorated with
sugared violets.
"And now!" cried Master Nathaniel gleefully, "here comes the turn of
our old friend! Fill your glasses, and drink to the King of Moongrass
Cheeses!"
"To the King of Moongrass Cheeses!" echoed the guests, stamping with
their feet and banging on the table. Whereupon Master Nathaniel seized
a knife, and was about to plunge it into the magnificent cheese, when
suddenly Ranulph rushed round to his side and, with tears in his eyes,
implored him, in a shrill terrified voice, not to cut the cheese. The
guests, thinking it must be some obscure joke, tittered encouragingly,
and Master Nathaniel, after staring at him in amazement for a few
seconds, said testily, "What's taken the boy? Hands off, Ranulph, I
say! Have you gone mad?" But Ranulph's eyes were now starting out of
his head in fury, and, hanging on to his father's arm, he screamed in
his shrill, childish voice, "No, you won't! you won't, you won't! I
won't let you!"
"That's right, Ranulph!" laughed one of the guests. "You stand up to
your father!"
"By the Milky Way! Marigold," roared Master Nathaniel, beginning to
lose his temper, "what's taken the boy, I ask?"
Dame Marigold was looking nervous. "Ranulph! Ranulph!" she cried
reproachfully, "go back to your place, and don't tease your father."
"No! No! No!" shrieked Ranulph still more shrilly, "he shall not kill
the moon ... he shall not, I say. If he does, all the flowers will
wither in Fairyland."
How am I to convey to you the effect that these words produced on
the company? It would not be adequate to ask you to imagine your own
feelings were your host's small son suddenly, in a mixed company, to
pour forth a stream of obscene language; for Ranulph's words were
not merely a shock to good taste--they aroused, as well, some of the
superstitious terror caused by the violation of a taboo.
The ladies all blushed crimson, the gentlemen looked stern, while
Master Nathaniel, his face purple, yelled in a voice of thunder, "Go
to bed this instant, Ranulph ... and I'll come and deal with you later
on"; and Ranulph, who suddenly seemed to have lost all interest in the
fate of the cheese, meekly left the room.
There were no more jokes that evening, and on most of the plates the
cheese lay neglected; and in spite of the efforts of some of the
guests, conversation flagged sadly, so that it was scarcely nine
o'clock when the party broke up.
When Master Nathaniel was left alone with Dame Marigold he fiercely
demanded an explanation of Ranulph's behaviour. But she merely shrugged
her shoulders wearily, and said she thought the boy must have gone mad,
and told him how for some weeks he had seemed to her unlike himself.
"Then why wasn't I told? Why wasn't I told?" stormed Master Nathaniel.
Again Dame Marigold shrugged her shoulders, and, as she looked at him,
there was a gleam of delicate, humourous contempt in her heavily-lidded
eyes. Dame Marigold's eyes, by the way, had a characteristic, which
was to be found often enough among the Ludites--you would have called
them dreamy and languorous, had it not been for the expression of the
mouth, which with its long satirical upper lip, like that of an old
judge, and the whimsical twist to its corners, reacted on the eyes,
and made them mocking and almost too humourous--never more so than when
she looked at Master Nathaniel. In her own way she was fond of him. But
her attitude was not unlike that of an indulgent mistress to a shaggy,
uncertain-tempered, performing dog.
Master Nathaniel began to pace up and down the room, his fists
clenched, muttering imprecations against inefficient women and the
overwhelming worries of a family man--in his need for a victim on whom
to vent his rage, actually feeling angry with Dame Marigold for having
married him and let him in for all this fuss and to-do. And his shadowy
fears were more than usually clamorous. Dame Marigold, as she sat
watching him, felt that he was rather like a cockchafer that had just
flounced in through the open window, and, with a small, smacking sound,
was bouncing itself backwards and forwards against its own shadow on
the ceiling--a shadow that looked like a big, black velvety moth. But
it was its clumsiness, and blundering ineffectualness that reminded her
of Master Nathaniel; not the fact that it was banging itself against
the shadow.
Up and down marched Master Nathaniel, backwards and forwards bounced
the cockchafer, hither and thither flitted its soft, dainty shadow.
Then, suddenly, straight as a die, the cockchafer came tumbling down
from the ceiling and, at the same time, Master Nathaniel--calling over
his shoulder, "I must go up and see that boy"--dashed from the room.
He found Ranulph in bed, sobbing his heart out, and as he looked at
the piteous little figure he felt his anger evaporating. He laid his
hand on the boy's shoulder and said not unkindly: "Come, my son; crying
won't mend matters. You'll write an apology to Cousin Ambrose, and
Uncle Polydore, and all the rest of them, tomorrow; and then--well,
we'll try to forget about it. We're none of us quite responsible for
what we say when we're out of sorts ... and I gather from your mother
you've not been feeling quite the thing these past weeks."
"It was something made me say it!" sobbed Ranulph.
"Well, that's a nice, easy way of getting out of it," said Master
Nathaniel more sternly. "No, no, Ranulph, there's no excuse for
behaviour like that, none whatever. By the Harvest of Souls!" and his
voice became indignant, "Where did you pick up such ideas and such
expressions?"
"But they're true! They're true!" screamed Ranulph.
"I'm not going into the question of whether they're true or not. All
I know is that they're not the things talked about by ladies and
gentlemen. Such language has never before been heard under my roof, and
I trust it never will be again ... you understand?"
Ranulph groaned, and Master Nathaniel added in a kinder voice, "Well,
we'll say no more about it. And now what's all this I hear from your
mother about your being out of sorts, eh?"
But Ranulph's sobs redoubled. "I want to get away! to get away!" he
moaned.
"Away? Away from where?" and there was a touch of impatience in Master
Nathaniel's voice.
"From ... from things happening," sobbed Ranulph.
Master Nathaniel's heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to
understand. "Things happening?" he said in a voice that he endeavoured
to make jocular. "I don't think anything very much happens in Lud, does
it?"
"All the things," moaned Ranulph, "summer and winter, and days and
nights. All the things!"
Master Nathaniel had a sudden vision of Lud and the surrounding
country, motionless and soundless, as it appeared from the Fields
of Grammary. Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person,
a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he
himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For
Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness,
alarm.
Ranulph had now stopped sobbing, and was lying there quite still. "The
whole of me seems to have got inside my head, and to hurt ... just like
it all gets inside a tooth when one has toothache," he said wearily.
Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open
mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound
for restlessness--how well he knew the state of mind these things
expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to
mould the body's attitude to its own shape.
He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well
both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like
the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but
there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once
swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth
part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering
without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase,
when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its
hunters--like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.
But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of
one's pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able
to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!
It was in a slightly husky voice that, laying his hand on Ranulph's,
he said, "Come, my son, this won't do." And then, with a twinkle, he
added, "Chivvy the black rooks away from the corn."
Ranulph gave a little shrill laugh. "There are no black rooks--all the
birds are golden," he cried.
Master Nathaniel frowned--with that sort of thing he had no patience.
But he determined to ignore it, and to keep to the aspect of the case
for which he had real sympathy. "Come, my son!" he said, in a tenderly
rallying voice. "Tell yourself that tomorrow it will all be gone. Why,
you don't think you're the only one, do you? We all feel like that at
times, but we don't let ourselves be beaten by it, and mope and pine
and hang our heads. We stick a smile on our faces and go about our
business."
Master Nathaniel, as he spoke, swelled with complacency. He had never
realised it before, but really it was rather fine the way he had
suffered in silence, all these years!
But Ranulph had sat up in bed, and was looking at him with a strange
little smile.
"I'm not the same as you, father," he said quietly. And then once more
he was shaken by great sobs, and screamed out in a voice of anguish, "I
have eaten fairy fruit!"
At these terrible words Master Nathaniel stood for a moment dizzy with
horror; then he lost his head. He rushed out on to the landing, calling
for Dame Marigold at the top of his voice.
"Marigold! Marigold! Marigold!"
Dame Marigold came hurrying up the stairs, calling out in a frightened
voice, "What is it, Nat? Oh, dear! What is it?"
"By the Harvest of Souls, hurry! Hurry! Here's the boy saying he's been
eating ... the stuff we don't mention. Suffering cats! I'll go mad!"
Dame Marigold fluttered down on Ranulph like a plump dove.
But her voice had none of the husky tenderness of a dove as she cried,
"Oh, Ranulph! You naughty boy! Oh, dear, this is frightful! Nat! Nat!
What are we to do?"
Ranulph shrank away from her, and cast an imploring look towards his
father. Whereupon Master Nathaniel took her roughly by the shoulders
and pushed her out of the room, saying, "If that is all you can say,
you'd better leave the boy to me."
And Dame Marigold, as she went down the stairs, terrified,
contemptuous, sick at heart, was feeling every inch a Vigil, and
muttering angrily to herself, "Oh, these Chanticleers!"
We are not yet civilised enough for exogamy; and, when anything
seriously goes wrong, married couples are apt to lay all the blame at
its door.
Well, it would seem that the worst disgrace that could befall a family
of Dorimare had come to the Chanticleers. But Master Nathaniel was no
longer angry with Ranulph. What would it serve to be angry? Besides,
there was this new tenderness flooding his heart, and he could not but
yield to it.
Bit by bit he got the whole story from the boy. It would seem that some
months ago a wild, mischievous lad called Willy Wisp who, for a short
time, had worked in Master Nathaniel's stables, had given Ranulph one
sherd of a fruit he had never seen before. When Ranulph had eaten it,
Willy Wisp had gone off into peal upon peal of mocking laughter, crying
out, "Ah, little master, what you've just eaten is FAIRY FRUIT, and
you'll never be the same again ... ho, ho, hoh!"
At these words Ranulph had been overwhelmed with horror and shame: "But
now I nearly always forget to be ashamed," he said. "All that seems to
matter now is to get away ... where there are shadows and quiet ... and
where I can get ... more fruit."
Master Nathaniel sighed heavily. But he said nothing; he only stroked
the small, hot hand he was holding in his own.
"And once," went on Ranulph, sitting up in bed, his cheeks flushed,
his eyes bright and feverish, "in the garden in full daylight I saw
them dancing--the Silent People, I mean--and their leader was a man in
green, and he called out to me, 'Hail, young Chanticleer! Some day I'll
send my piper for you, and you will up and follow him!' And I often see
his shadow in the garden, but it's not like our shadows, it's a bright
light that flickers over the lawn. And I'll go, I'll go, I'll go, I'll
go, some day, I know I shall!" and his voice was frightened and, at the
same time, triumphant.
"Hush, hush, my son!" said Master Nathaniel soothingly, "I don't think
we'll let you go." But his heart felt like lead.
"And ever since ... since I ate ... the fruit," went on Ranulph,
"everything has frightened me ... at least, not only since then,
because it did before too, but it's much worse now. Like that cheese
tonight ... anything can suddenly seem queer or terrible. But
since ... since I ate that fruit I sometimes seem to see the reason why
they're terrible. Just as I did tonight over the cheese, and I was so
frightened that I simply couldn't keep quiet another minute."
Master Nathaniel groaned. He too had felt frightened of homely things.
"Father," said Ranulph suddenly, "What does the cock say to you?"
Master Nathaniel gave a start. It was as if his own soul were speaking
to him.
"What does he say to me?"
He hesitated. Never before had he spoken to anyone about his inner
life. In a voice that trembled a little, for it was a great effort to
him to speak, he went on, "He says to me, Ranulph, he says ... that the
past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is
made of the present, and that the present is always here. And he says
that the dead long to be back again on the earth, and that...."
"No! No!" cried Ranulph fretfully, "he doesn't say that to me. He tells
me to come away ... away from real things ... that bite one. That's
what he says to me."
"No, my son. No," said Master Nathaniel firmly. "He doesn't say that.
You have misunderstood."
Then Ranulph again began to sob. "Oh, father! father!" he moaned, "they
hunt me so--the days and nights. Hold me! Hold me!"
Master Nathaniel, with a passion of tenderness such as he had never
thought himself capable of, lay down beside him, and took the little,
trembling body into his arms, and murmured loving, reassuring words.
Gradually Ranulph stopped sobbing, and before long he fell into a
peaceful sleep.