Chapter III
                              
                  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
firesides; 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 scullerymaid 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 scullerymaid 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 to-night 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, to-morrow; 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 to-night... 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 to-night 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.