DEAD IN THE EYE OF THE LAW
The following morning Master Nathaniel woke late, and got up on
the wrong side of his bed, which, in view of the humiliation and
disappointment of the previous night, was, perhaps, pardonable.
His temper was not improved by Dame Marigold's coming in while he was
dressing to complain of his having smoked green shag elsewhere than in
the pipe-room: "And you know how it always upsets me, Nat. I'm feeling
quite squeamish this morning, the whole house reeks of it ... Nat! you
know you are an old blackguard!" and she dimpled and shook her finger
at him, as an emollient to the slight shrewishness of her tone.
"Well, you're wrong for once," snapped Master Nathaniel; "I haven't
smoked shag even in the pipe-room for at least a week--so there! Upon
my word, Marigold, your nose is a nuisance--you should keep it in a
bag, like a horse!"
But though Master Nathaniel might be in a bad temper he was far from
being daunted by what had happened the night before.
He shut himself into the pipe-room and wrote busily for about a quarter
of an hour; then he paced up and down committing what he had written
to memory. Then he set out for the daily meeting of the Senate. And
so absorbed was he with the speech he had been preparing that he was
impervious, in the Senators' tiring-room, to the peculiar glances cast
at him by his colleagues.
Once the Senators had donned their robes of office and taken their
places in the magnificent room reserved for their councils, their
whole personality was wont suddenly to alter, and they would cease to
be genial, easy-going merchants who had known each other all their
lives and become grave, formal--even hierophantic, in manner; while
abandoning the careless colloquial diction of every day, they would
adopt the language of their forefathers, forged in more strenuous and
poetic days than the present.
In consequence, the stern look in Master Nathaniel's eye that morning,
when he rose to address his colleagues, the stern tone in which he said
"Senators of Dorimare!" might have heralded nothing more serious than a
suggestion that they should, that year, have geese instead of turkeys
at their public dinner.
But his opening words showed that this was to be no usual speech.
"Senators of Dorimare!" he began, "I am going to ask you this morning
to awake. We have been asleep for many centuries, and the Law has sung
us lullabies. But many of us here have received the accolade of a very
heavy affliction. Has that wakened us? I fear not. The time has come
when it behooves us to look facts in the face--even if those facts bear
a strange likeness to dreams and fancies.
"My friends, the ancient foes of our country are abroad. Tradition says
that the Fairies" (he brought out boldly the horrid word) "fear iron;
and we, the descendants of the merchant-heroes, must still have left in
us some veins of that metal. The time has come to prove it. We stand to
lose everything that makes life pleasant and secure--laughter, sound
sleep, the merriment of fire-sides, the peacefulness of gardens. And if
we cannot bequeath the certainty of these things to our children, what
will boot them their inheritance? It is for us, then, as fathers as
well as citizens, once and for all to uproot this menace, the roots of
which are in the past, the branches of which cast their shadow on the
future.
"I and another of your colleagues have discovered at last who it was
that brought this recent grief and shame upon so many of us. It will
be hard, I fear, to prove his guilt, for he is subtle, stealthy, and
mocking, and, like his invisible allies, his chief weapon is delusion.
I ask you all, then, to parry that weapon with faith and loyalty,
which will make you take the word of old and trusty friends as the
only touchstone of truth. And, after that--I have sometimes thought
that less blame attaches to deluding others than to deluding oneself.
Away, then, with flimsy legal fictions! Let us call things by their
names--not grograine or tuftaffity, but fairy fruit. And if it be
proved that any man has brought such merchandise into Dorimare, let him
hang by his neck till he be dead."
Then Master Nathaniel sat down.
But where was the storm of applause he had expected would greet his
words? Where were the tears, the eager questions, the tokens of deeply
stirred feelings?
Except for Master Ambrose's defiant "Bravos!" his speech was received
in profound silence. The faces all round him were grim and frigid,
with compressed lips and frowning brows--except the portrait of Duke
Aubrey--he, as usual, was faintly smiling.
Then Master Polydore Vigil rose to his feet, and broke the grim silence.
"Senators of Dorimare!" he began, "the eloquent words we have just
listened to from his Worship the Mayor can, strangely enough, serve as
a prelude--a golden prelude to my poor, leaden words. I, too, came here
this morning resolved to bring your attention to legal fictions--which,
sometimes, it may be, have their uses. But perhaps before I say my say,
his Worship will allow the clerk to read us the oldest legal fiction
in our Code. It is to be found in the first volume of the Acts of the
twenty-fifth year of the Republic, Statute 5, chapter 9."
Master Polydore Vigil sat down, and a slow grim smile circulated round
the hall, and then seemed to vanish and subside in the mocking eyes of
Duke Aubrey's portrait.
Master Nathaniel exchanged puzzled glances with Master Ambrose; but
there was nothing for it but to order the clerk to comply with the
wishes of Master Polydore.
So, in a small, high, expressionless voice, which might have been the
voice of the Law herself, the clerk read as follows:
"Further, we ordain that nothing but death alone shall have power to
dismiss the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare
before the five years of his term of office shall fully have expired.
But, the dead, being dumb, feeble, treacherous and given to vanities,
if any Mayor at a time of menace to the safety of the Dorimarites be
held by his colleagues to be any of these things, then let him be
accounted dead in the eye of the Law, and let another be elected in his
stead."