CHAPTER XIV
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.”