CHAPTER XII
DAME MARIGOLD HEARS THE TAP OF A WOODPECKER
Miss Primrose Crabapple's trial was still dragging on, clogged by all the foolish complications arising from the legal fiction that had permitted her arrest. If you remember, in the eye of the law fairy fruit was regarded as woven silk, and many days were wasted in a learned discussion of the various characteristics of gold tissues, stick tuftaffities, figured satins, wrought grograines, silk mohair and ferret ribbons.
Urged partly by curiosity and, perhaps, also by a subconscious hope that in the comic light of Miss Primrose's personality recent events might lose something of their sinister horror, one morning Dame Marigold set out to visit her old schoolmistress in her captivity.
It was the first time she had left the house since the tragedy, and, as she walked down the High Street she held her head high and smiled a little scornful smile—just to show the vulgar herd that even the worst disgrace could not break the spirit of a Vigil.
Now, Dame Marigold had very acute senses. Many a time she had astonished Master Nathaniel by her quickness in detecting the faintest whiff of any of the odours she disliked—shag, for instance, or onions.
She was equally quick in psychological matters, and would detect the existence of a quarrel or love affair long before they were known to anyone except the parties concerned. And as she made her way that morning to the Guildhall she became conscious in everything that was going on round her of what one can only call a change of key.
She could have sworn that the baker's boy with the tray of loaves on his head was not whistling, that the maid-servant, leaning out of a window to tend her mistress's pot-flowers, was not humming the same tune that they would have been some months ago.
This, perhaps, was natural enough. Tunes, like fruit, have their seasons, and are, besides, ever forming new species. But even the voices of the hawkers chanting "Yellow Sand!" or "Knives and Scissors!" sounded disconcertingly different.
Instinctively, Dame Marigold's delicate nostrils expanded, and the corners of her mouth turned down in an expression of disgust, as if she had caught a whiff of a disagreeable smell.
On reaching the Guildhall, she carried matters with a high hand. No, no, there was no need whatever to disturb his Worship. He had given her permission to visit the prisoner, so would the guardian take her up immediately to her room.
Dame Marigold was one of those women who, though they walk blindfold through the fields and woods, if you place them between four walls have eyes as sharp as a naturalist's for the objects that surround them. So, in spite of her depression, her eyes were very busy as she followed the guardian up the splendid spiral staircase, and along the panelled corridors, hung, here and there, with beautiful bits of tapestry. She made a mental note to tell Master Nathaniel that the caretaker had not swept the staircase, and that some of the panelling was worm-eaten and should be attended to. And she would pause to finger a corner of the tapestry and wonder if she could find some silk just that powder blue, or just that old rose, for her own embroidery.
"Why, I do declare, this panel is beginning to go too!" she murmured, pausing to tap on the wall.
Then she cried in a voice of surprise, "I do believe it's hollow here!"
The guardian smiled indulgently—"You are just like the doctor, ma'am—Doctor Leer. We used to call him the Woodpecker, when he was studying the Guildhall for his book, for he was for ever hopping about and tapping on the walls. It was almost as if he were looking for something, we used to say. And I'd never be surprised myself to come on a sliding panel. They do say as what those old Dukes were a wild crew, and it might have suited their book very well to have a secret way out of their place!" and he gave a knowing wink.
"Yes, yes, it certainly might," said Dame Marigold, thoughtfully.
They had now come to a door padlocked and bolted. "This is where we have put the prisoner, ma'am," said the guardian, unlocking it. And then he ushered her into the presence of her old schoolmistress.
Miss Primrose was sitting bolt upright in a straight backed old fashioned chair, against a background of fine old tapestries, faded to the softest loveliest pastel tints—as incongruous with her grotesque ugliness as had been the fresh prettiness of the Crabapple Blossoms.
Dame Marigold stood staring at her for a few seconds in silent indignation. Then she sank slowly on to a chair, and said sternly, "Well, Miss Primrose? I wonder how you dare sit there so calmly after the appalling thing you have brought about."
But Miss Primrose was in one of her most exalted moods—"On her high hobby-horse," as the Crabapple Blossoms used to call it. So she merely glittered at Dame Marigold contemptuously out of her little eyes, and, with a lordly wave of her hand, as if to sweep away from her all mundane trivialities, she exclaimed pityingly, "My poor blind Marigold! Perhaps of all the pupils who have passed through my hands you are the one who are the least worthy of your noble birthright."
Dame Marigold bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and said in a low voice of intense irritation, "What do you mean, Miss Primrose?"
Miss Primrose cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and, in her most treacly voice she answered, "The great privilege of having been born a woooman!"
Her pupils always maintained that "woman," as pronounced by Miss Primrose, was the most indecent word in the language.
Dame Marigold's eyes flashed: "I may not be a woman, but, at any rate, I am a mother—which is more than you are!" she retorted.
Then, in a voice that at each word grew more indignant, she said, "And, Miss Primrose, do you consider that you yourself have been 'worthy of your noble birthright' in betraying the trust that has been placed in you? Are vice and horror and disgrace and breaking the hearts of parents 'true womanliness' I should like to know? You are worse than a murderer—ten times worse. And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor—as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats! I do really believe...."
But Miss Primrose's shrillness screamed down her low-toned indignation: "Shake me! Stick pins in me! Fling me into the Dapple!" she shrieked. "I will bear it all with a smile, and wear my shame like a flower given by him!"
Dame Marigold groaned in exasperation: "Who, on earth, do you mean by 'him', Miss Primrose?"
Then her irrepressible sense of humour broke out in a dimple, and she added: "Duke Aubrey or Endymion Leer?"
For, of course, Prunella had told her all the jokes about the goose and the sage.
At this question Miss Primrose gave an unmistakable start; "Duke Aubrey, of course!" she answered, but the look in her eyes was sly, suspicious, and distinctly scared.
None of this was lost upon Dame Marigold. She looked her slowly up and down with a little mocking smile; and Miss Primrose began to writhe and to gibber.
"Hum!" said Dame Marigold, meditatively.
She had never liked the smell of Endymion Leer's personality.
The recent crisis had certainly done him no harm. It had doubled his practice, and trebled his influence.
Besides, it cannot have been Miss Primrose's beauty and charms that had caused him to pay her recently such marked attentions.
At any rate, it could do no harm to draw a bow at a venture.
"I am beginning to understand, Miss Primrose," she said slowly. "Two ... outsiders, have put their heads together to see if they could find a plan for humiliating the stupid, stuck-up, 'so-called old families of Lud!' Oh! don't protest, Miss Primrose. You have never taken any pains to hide your contempt for us. And I have always realized that yours was not a forgiving nature. Nor do I blame you. We have laughed at you unmercifully for years—and you have resented it. All the same I think your revenge has been an unnecessarily violent one; though, I suppose, to 'a true woooman,' nothing is too mean, too spiteful, too base, if it serves the interests of 'him'!"
But Miss Primrose had gone as green as grass, and was gibbering with terror: "Marigold! Marigold!" she cried, wringing her hands, "How can you think such things? The dear, devoted Doctor! The best and kindest man in Lud-in-the-Mist! Nobody was angrier with me over what he called my 'criminal carelessness' in allowing that horrible stuff to be smuggled into my loft, I assure you he is quite rabid on the subject of ... er ... fruit. Why, when he was a young man at the time of the great drought he was working day and night trying to stop it, he...."
But not for nothing was Dame Marigold descended from generations of judges. Quick as lightning, she turned on her: "The great drought? But that must be forty years ago ... long before Endymion Leer came to Dorimare."
"Yes, yes, dear ... of course ... quite so ... I was thinking of what another doctor had told me ... since all this trouble my poor head gets quite muddled," gibbered Miss Primrose. And she was shaking from head to foot.
Dame Marigold rose from her chair, and stood looking down on her in silence for a few seconds, under half-closed lids, with a rather cruel little smile.
Then she said, "Good-bye, Miss Primrose. You have provided me with most interesting food for thought."
And then she left her, sitting there with frightened face against the faded tapestry.
That same day, Master Nathaniel received a letter from Luke Hempen that both perplexed and alarmed him.
It was as follows:
Your Worship,—I'd be glad if you'd take Master Ranulph away from this farm, because the widow's up to mischief, I'm sure of that, and some of the folks about here say as what in years gone by she murdered her husband, and she and somebody else, though I don't know who, seem to have a grudge against Master Ranulph, and, if I might take the liberty, I'll just tell your Worship what I heard.
It was this way—one night, I don't know how it was, but I couldn't get to sleep, and thinking that a bite, may be, of something would send me off, towards midnight I got up from my bed to go and look in the kitchen for a bit of bread. And half-way down the stairs I heard the sound of low voices, and someone said, "I fear the Chanticleers," so I stood still where I was, and listened. And I peeped down and the kitchen fire was nearly out, but there was enough left for me to see the widow, and a man wrapped up in a cloak, sitting opposite to her with his back to the stairs, so I couldn't see his face. Their talk was low and at first I could only hear words here and there, but they kept making mention of the Chanticleers, and the man said something like keeping the Chanticleers and Master Ambrose Honeysuckle apart, because Master Ambrose had had a vision of Duke Aubrey. And if I hadn't known the widow and how she was a deep one and as fly as you make them, I'd have thought they were two poor daft old gossips, whose talk had turned wild and nasty with old age. And then the man laid his hand on her knee, and his voice was low, but this time it was so clear that I could hear it all, and I think I can remember every word of it, so I'll write it down for your Worship: "I fear counter orders. You know the Chief and his ways—at any moment he might betray his agents. Willy Wisp gave young Chanticleer fruit without my knowledge. And I told you how he and that doitered old weaver of yours have been putting their heads together, and that's what has frightened me most."
And then his voice became too low for me to hear, till he said, "Those who go by the Milky Way often leave footprints. So let him go by the other."
And then he got up to go, and I crept back to my room. But not a wink of sleep did I get that night for thinking over what I had heard. For though it seemed gibberish, it gave me the shivers, and that's a fact. And mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones, so I hope your Worship will excuse me writing like this, and that you'll favour me with an answer by return, and take Master Ranulph away, for I don't like the look in the widow's eye when she looks at him, that I don't.
And hoping this finds your Worship well as it leaves me,—I am, Your Worship's humble obedient servant,
LUKE HEMPEN.
How Master Nathaniel longed to jump on to his horse and ride post-haste to the farm! But that was impossible. Instead, he immediately despatched a groom with orders to ride day and night and deliver a letter to Luke Hempen, which bade him instantly take Ranulph to the farm near Moongrass (a village that lay some fifteen miles north of Swan-on-the-Dapple) from which for years he had got his cheeses.
Then he sat down and tried to find some meaning in the mysterious conversation Luke had overheard.
Ambrose seeing a vision! An unknown Chief! Footprints on the Milky Way!
Reality was beginning to become very shadowy and menacing.
He must find out something about this widow. Had she not once appeared in the law-courts? He decided he must look her up without a moment's delay.
He had inherited from his father a fine legal library, and the bookshelves in his pipe-room were packed with volumes bound in vellum and old calf of edicts, codes, and trials. Some of them belonged to the days before printing had been introduced into Dorimare, and were written in the crabbed hand of old town-clerks.
It made the past very real, and threw a friendly, humourous light upon the dead, to come upon, when turning those yellow parchment pages, some personal touch of the old scribe's, such as a sententious or facetious insertion of his own—for instance, "The Law bides her Time, but my Dinner doesn't!" or the caricature in the margin of some forgotten judge. It was just as if one of the grotesque plaster heads on the old houses were to give you, suddenly, a sly wink.
But it was the criminal trials that, in the past, had given Master Nathaniel the keenest pleasure. The dry style of the Law was such a magnificent medium for narrative. And the little details of every-day life, the humble objects of daily use, became so startlingly vivid, when, like scarlet geraniums breaking through a thick autumn mist, they blazed out from that grey style ... so vivid, and, often, fraught with such tragic consequences.
Great was his astonishment when he discovered from the index that it was among the criminal trials that he must look for the widow Gibberty's. What was more, it was a trial for murder.
Surely Endymion Leer had told him, when he was urging him to send Ranulph to the farm, that it had been a quite trivial case, concerning an arrear of wages, or something, due to a discharged servant?
As a matter of fact, the plaintiff, a labourer of the name of Diggory Carp, had been discharged from the service of the late Farmer Gibberty. But the accusation he brought against the widow was that she had poisoned her husband with the sap of osiers.
However, when he had finished the trial, Master Nathaniel found himself in complete sympathy with the judge's pronouncement that the widow was innocent, and with his severe reprimand to the plaintiff, for having brought such a serious charge against a worthy woman on such slender grounds.
But he could not get Luke's letter out of his head, and he felt that he would not have a moment's peace till the groom returned with news from the farm.
As he sat that evening by the parlour fire, wondering for the hundredth time who the mysterious cloaked stranger could have been whose back had been seen by Luke, Dame Marigold suddenly broke the silence by saying, "What do you know about Endymion Leer, Nat?"
"What do I know of Endymion Leer?" he repeated absently. "Why, that he's a very good leach, with very poor taste in cravats, and, if possible, worse taste in jokes. And that, for some unknown reason, he has a spite against me...."
He broke off in the middle of his sentence, and muttered beneath his breath, "By the Sun, Moon and Stars! Supposing it should be...."
Luke's stranger had said he feared the Chanticleers.
A strange fellow, Leer! The Note had once sounded in his voice. Where did he come from? Who was he? Nobody knew in Lud-in-the-Mist.
And, then, there were his antiquarian tastes. They were generally regarded as a harmless, unprofitable hobby. And yet ... the past was dim and evil, a heap of rotting leaves. The past was silent and belonged to the Silent People.... But Dame Marigold was asking another question, a question that had no apparent connection with the previous one: "What was the year of the great drought?"
Master Nathaniel answered that it was exactly forty years ago, and added quizzically, "Why this sudden interest in history, Marigold?"
Again she answered by asking him a question. "And when did Endymion Leer first arrive in Dorimare?"
Master Nathaniel began to be interested. "Let me see," he said thoughtfully. "It was certainly long before we married. Yes, I remember, we called him in to a consultation when my mother had pleurisy, and that was shortly after his arrival, for he could still only speak broken Dorimarite ... it must be thirty years ago."
"I see," said Dame Marigold drily. "But I happen to know that he was already in Dorimare at the time of the drought." And she proceeded to repeat to him her conversation that morning with Miss Primrose.
"And," she added, "I've got another idea," and she told him about the panel in the Guildhall that sounded hollow and what the guardian had said about the woodpecker ways of Endymion Leer. "And if, partly for revenge for our coldness to him, and partly from a love of power," she went on, "it is he who has been behind this terrible affair, a secret passage would be very useful in smuggling, and would explain how all your precautions have been useless. And who would be more likely to know about a secret passage in the Guildhall than Endymion Leer!"
"By the Sun, Moon and Stars!" exclaimed Master Nathaniel excitedly, "I shouldn't be surprised if you were right, Marigold. You've got a head on your shoulders with something in it more useful than porridge!"
And Dame Marigold gave a little complacent smile.
Then he sprang from his chair, "I'm off to tell Ambrose!" he cried eagerly.
But would he be able to convince the slow and obstinate mind of Master Ambrose? Mere suspicions are hard to communicate. They are rather like the wines that will not travel, and have to be drunk on the spot.
At any rate, he could but try.
"Have you ever had a vision of Duke Aubrey, Ambrose?" he cried, bursting into his friend's pipe-room.
Master Ambrose frowned with annoyance. "What are you driving at, Nat?" he said, huffily.
"Answer my question. I'm not chaffing you, I'm in deadly earnest. Have you ever had a vision of Duke Aubrey?"
Master Ambrose moved uneasily in his chair. He was far from proud of that vision of his. "Well," he said, gruffly, "I suppose one might call it that. It was at the Academy—the day that wretched girl of mine ran away. And I was so upset that there was some excuse for what you call visions."
"And did you tell anyone about it?"
"Not I!" said Master Ambrose emphatically; then he caught himself up and added, "Oh! yes I believe I did though. I mentioned it to that spiteful little quack, Endymion Leer. I'm sure I wish I hadn't. Toasted Cheese! What's the matter now, Nat?"
For Master Nathaniel was actually cutting a caper of triumph and glee.
"I was right! I was right!" he cried joyfully, so elated by his own acumen that for the moment his anxiety was forgotten.
"Read that, Ambrose," and he eagerly thrust into his hands Luke Hempen's letter.
"Humph!" said Master Ambrose when he had finished it. "Well, what are you so pleased about?"
"Don't you see, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently. "That mysterious fellow in the cloak must be Endymion Leer ... nobody else knows about your vision."
"Oh, yes, Nat, blunt though my wits may be I see that. But I fail to see how the knowledge helps us in any way." Then Master Nathaniel told him about Dame Marigold's theories and discoveries.
Master Ambrose hummed and hawed, and talked about women's reasoning, and rash conclusions. But perhaps he was more impressed, really, than he chose to let Master Nathaniel see. At any rate he grudgingly agreed to go with him by night to the Guildhall and investigate the hollow panel. And, from Master Ambrose, this was a great concession; for it was not the sort of escapade that suited his dignity.
"Hurrah, Ambrose!" shouted Master Nathaniel. "And I'm ready to bet a Moongrass cheese against a flask of your best flower-in-amber that we'll find that rascally quack at the bottom of it all!"
"You'd always a wonderful eye for a bargain, Nat," said Master Ambrose with a grim chuckle. "Do you remember, when we were youngsters, how you got my pedigree pup out of me for a stuffed pheasant, so moth-eaten that it had scarcely a feather to its name, and, let me see, what else? I think there was a half a packet of mouldy sugar-candy...."
"And I threw in a broken musical-box whose works used to go queer in the middle of 'To War, Bold Sons of Dorimare,' and burr and buzz like a drunk cockchafer," put in Master Nathaniel proudly. "It was quite fair—quantity for quality.”