Lud-In-The-Mist

Chapter XXIV
Belling the Cat

When they had finished reading, Hazel burst into hysterical sobs, crying alternately, "Poor grandfather!" and "Will they hang her for it?" Master Nathaniel soothed her as best he could, and, when she had dried her eyes, she said, "Poor Marjory Beach! She must have that ham and that buck rabbit."

"She's still alive, then?" asked Master Nathaniel eagerly. Hazel nodded: "She is poor, and still a maid, and lives in Swan."

"And what about Peter Pease, the tinker's smart little lad? Is there nothing for him, Miss Hazel?" cried the blacksmith with a twinkle.

Hazels stared at him in bewilderment, and Master Nathaniel cried gleefully, "Why, it's the same name, by the Harvest of Souls! Were you, then, the little chap who saw Pugwalker picking the berries?"

And Hazel said in slow amazement, "You were the little boy who spoke to my grandfather… that night? I never thought…"

"That I'd begun so humbly, eh? Yes, I was the son of a tinker, or, as they liked to be called, of a whitesmith. And now I'm a blacksmith, and as white is better than black I suppose I've come down in the world." And he winked merrily.

"And you remember the circumstances alluded to by the late farmer?" asked Master Nathaniel eagerly.

"That I do, my lord Seneschal. As well if they had happened yesterday. I won't easily forget the farmer's face that night when I offered him my basketful - but though the death-berries are rare enough I found them in those days commoner to pick up than ha'pence. And I won't easily forget Master Pugwalker's face, either, while he was plucking them. And little did he know there was a squirrel watching him with a good Dorimare tongue in his head!"

"Have you ever seen him since?"

The blacksmith winked.

"Come, come!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently. "Have you seen him since? This is no time for beating about the bush."

"Well, perhaps I have," said the blacksmith slowly, "trotting about Swan, as brisk and as pleased with himself as a fox with a goose in his mouth. And I've often wondered whether it wasn't my duty as law-man to speak out… but, after all, it was very long ago, and his life seemed to be of better value than his death, for he was a wonderfully clever doctor and did a powerful lot of good."

"It - it was Dr. Leer, then?" asked Hazel in a low voice; and the blacksmith winked.

"Well, I think we should be getting back to the house," said Master Nathaniel, "there's still some business before us." And, lowering his voice, he added, "Not very pleasant business, I fear."

"I suppose your Honour means belling the cat?" said the blacksmith, adding with a rueful laugh, "I can't imagine a nastier job. She's a cat with claws."

As the walked up to the house, the labourer whispered to Hazel, "Please, missy, does it mean that the mistress killed her husband? They always say so in the village, but…"

"Don't, Ben; don't! I can't bear talking about it," cried Hazel with a shudder. And when they reached the house, she ran up to her own bedroom and locked herself in.

Ben was despatched to get a stout coil of rope, and Master Nathaniel and the blacksmith, whom the recent excitement had made hungry, began to forage around for something to eat.

Suddenly a voice at the door said, "And what, may I ask, are you looking for in my larder, gentlemen?"

It was the widow. First she scrutinized Master Nathaniel - a little pale and hollow-eyed, perhaps, but alive and kicking, for all that. Then her eyes travelled to Peter Pease. At that moment, Ben entered with the rope, and Master Nathaniel nudged the law-man, who, clearing his throat, cried in the expressionless falsetto of the Law, "Clementina Gibberty! In the name of the country of Dorimare, and to the end that the dead, the living, and those not yet born, may rest quietly in their graves, their bed, and the womb, I arrest you for the murder of your late husband, Jeremiah Gibberty."

She turned deadly pale, and, for a few seconds, stood glaring at him in deadly silence. Then she gave a scornful laugh. "What new joke of yours is this, Peter Pease? I was accused of this before, as you know well, and acquitted with the judge's compliments, and as good as an apology. Law business must be very slack in Swan that you've nothing better to do than to come and frighten a poor woman in her own house with old spiteful tales that were silenced once and for all nearly forty years ago. My late husband died quietly in his bed, and I only hope you may have as peaceful an end. And you must know very little of the law, Peter Pease, if you don't know that a person can't be tried twice for the same crime."

Then Master Nathaniel stepped forward. "You were tried before," he said quietly, "for poisoning your husband with the sap of osiers. This time it will be for poisoning him with the berries of merciful death. To-night the dead have found their tongues."

She gave a wild shriek, which reached upstairs to Hazel's room and caused her to spring into bed and pull the blankets over her ears, as if it had been a thunderstorm.

Master Nathaniel signed to Ben, who, grinning from ear to ear, as is the way of rustics when witnessing a painful and embarrassing scene, came up to his mistress with the coil of rope. But to bind her, he needed the aid of both the blacksmith and Master Nathaniel, for, like a veritable wild cat, she struggled and scratched and bit.

When her arms were tightly bound, Master Nathaniel said, "And now I will read you the words of the dead."

She was, for the time, worn out by her struggles, and her only answer was an insolent stare, and he produced the farmer's document and read it through to her.

"And now," he said, eyeing her curiously, "shall I tell you who gave me the clue without which I should never have found that letter? It was a certain old man, whom I think you know, by name Portunus."

Her face turned as pale as death, and in a low voice of horror she cried, "Long ago I guessed who he was, and feared that he might prove my undoing." Then her voice grew shrill with terror and her eyes became fixed, as if seeing some hideous vision, "The Silent People!" she screamed. "The dumb who speak! The bound who strike! I cherished and fed old Portunus like a tame bird. But what do the dead know of kindness?"

"If old Portunus is he whom you take him to be, I fail to see that he has much cause for gratitude," said Master Nathaniel drily. "Well, he has taken his revenge, on you -and your accomplice."

"My accomplice?"

"Aye, on Endymion Leer."

"Oh, Leer!" And she laughed scornfully. "It was a greater than Endymion Leer who ordered the death of farmer Gibberty."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. One who cares not for good and evil, and sows his commands like grain."

"Whom do you mean?"

Again she laughed scornfully. "Not one whom I would name to you. But set your mind at rest, he cannot be summoned in a court of law."

She gave him a searching look, and said abruptly, "Who are you?"

"My name is Nathaniel Chanticleer."

"I thought as much!" she cried triumphantly. "I wasn't sure, but I thought I'd take no risks. However, you seem to bear a charmed life."

"I suppose you are alluding to your kind thought for my comfort - putting that nice little death-box in my room to keep me warm, eh?"

"Yes, that's it," she answered brazenly.

Then a look of indescribable malice came into her face, and, with an evil smile, she said, "You see, you gave yourself away - without knowing it - at dinner."

"Indeed? And how, may I ask?"

At first she did not answer, but eyed him gloatingly as a cat might eye a mouse. And then she said slowly, "It was that pack of lies you told me about the doings of the lads at Moongrass. Your son isn't at Moongrass - nor ever has been, nor ever will be."

"What do you mean?" he cried hoarsely.

"Mean?" she said with a shrill, triumphant laugh. "I mean this - on the night of the thirty-first of October, when the Silent People are abroad, he heard Duke Aubrey's summons, and followed it across the hills."

"Woman… what…what… speak… or…" and the veins in Master Nathaniel's temples were swelling, and a fire seemed to have been lighted in his brain.

Her laughter redoubled. "You'll never see your son again!" she jeered. "Young Ranulph Chanticleer has gone to the land whence none returns."

Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the ceiling, just before losing consciousness - Ranulph weeping among the fields of gillyflowers.

A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface of his mind, he supposed that this was IT springing out at him at last. And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense of relief - the relaxing of tension, when one can say, "Well, it has come at last."

He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, "The land from which no one returns… but I can go there, too."

"Follow him across the hills?" she cried scornfully. "No; you are not made of that sort of stuff."

He beckoned to Peter Pease, and they went out together to the front of the house. The cocks were crowing, and there was a feeling of dawn in the air.

"I want my horse," he said dully. "And can you find Miss Hazel for me?"

But as he spoke she joined them - pale and wild-eyed.

"From my room I heard you coming out," she said. "Is it - is it over?"

Master Nathaniel nodded. And then, in a quiet voice emptied of all emotion, he told her what he had just learned from the widow. She went still paler than before, and her eyes filled with tears.

Then, turning to Peter Pease, he said, "You will immediately get out a warrant for the apprehension of Endymion Leer and sent it into Lud to the new Mayor, Master Polydore Vigil. And you, Miss Hazel, you'd better leave this place at once - you will have to be plaintiff in the trial. Go to your aunt, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, who keeps the village shop at Mothgreen. And remember, you must say nothing whatever about the part I've played in this business - that is essential. I am not popular at present in Lud. And, now, would you kindly order my horse saddled and brought round."

There was something so colourless, so dead, in his voice, that both Hazel and the smith stood, for a few seconds, in awed and sympathetic silence, and then Hazel went off slowly to order his horse.

"You… you didn't mean what you said to the widow, sir, about… about going… yonder?" asked Peter Pease in an awed voice.

Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel's eyes, and he cried fiercely, "Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be… till I find my son."

It did not take long for his horse to be saddled and led to the door.

"Good-bye, my child," he said to Hazel, taking her hand, and then he added, with a smile, "You dragged me back last night from the Milky Way… and now I am going by the earthly one."

She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the distance.

"Well, well," said Peter Pease, "I warrant it'll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him yonder."