Lud-in-the-Mist (26 page)

I
n view of the disturbance caused among the populace by the arrest of Endymion Leer, the Senate deemed it advisable that his trial, and that of the widow Gibberty, should take precedence of all other legal business; so as soon as the two important witnesses, Peter Pease and Marjory Beach, reached Lud-in-the-Mist, it was fixed for an early date.

Never, in all the annals of Dorimare, had a trial been looked forward to with such eager curiosity. It was to begin at nine o’clock in the morning, and by seven o’clock the hall of justice was already packed, while a seething crowd thronged the courtyard and overflowed into the High Street beyond.

On the front seats sat Dame Marigold, Dame Jessamine, Dame Dreamsweet and the other wives of magistrates; the main body of the hall was occupied by tradesmen and their wives, and other quiet, well-to-do members of the community, and behind them seethed the noisy, impudent, hawking, cat-calling riff-raff — ‘prentices, sailors, peddlers, strumpets; showing clearly on what side were their sympathies by such ribald remarks as, “My old granny’s pet cockatoo is terrible fond of cherries, I think we should tell the Town Yeomanry, and have it locked up as a smuggler,” or, “Where’s Mumchance! Send for Mumchance and the Mayor! Two hundred years ago an old gaffer ate a gallon of crab soup and died the same night — arrest Dr. Leer and hang him for it.”

But as the clocks struck nine and Master Polydore Vigil, in his priestly-looking purple robes of office embroidered in gold with the sun and the moon and the stars, and the other ten judges clad in scarlet and ermine filed slowly in and, bowing gravely to the assembly, took their seats on the dais, silence descended on the hall; for the fear of the Law was inbred in every Dorimarite, even the most disreputable.

Nevertheless, there was a low hum of excitement when Mumchance in his green uniform, carrying an axe, and two or three others of the Town Yeomanry, marched in with the two prisoners, who took their places in the dock.

Though Endymion Leer had for long been one of the most familiar figures in Lud, all eyes were turned on him with as eager a curiosity as if he had been some savage from the Amber Desert, the first of his kind to be seen in Dorimare; and such curious tricks can the limelight of the Law play on reality that many there thought that they could see his evil sinister life writ in clear characters on his familiar features.

To the less impressionable of the spectators, however, he looked very much as usual, though perhaps a little pale and flabby about the gills. And he swept the hall with his usual impudent appraising glance, as if to say, “Linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey! But one must make the best of a poor material.”

“He’s going to give the judges a run for their money!”

“If he’s got to die, he’ll die game!” gleefully whispered various of his partisans.

As for the widow, her handsome passionate face was deadly pale and emptied of all expression; this gave her a sort of tragic sinister beauty, reminiscent of the faces of the funereal statues in the Fields of Grammary.

“Not the sort of woman I’d like to meet in a lonely lane at night,” was the general comment she aroused.

Then the Clerk of Arraigns called out “Silence!” and in a solemn voice, Master Polydore said, “Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty, hold up your hands.” They did so. Whereupon, Master Polydore read the indictment, as follows: “Endymion Leer, and Clementina Gibberty, you are accused of having poisoned the late Jeremiah Gibberty, farmer, and law-man of the district of Swan-on-the-Dapple, thirty-six years ago, with a fruit known as the berries of merciful death.”

Then the plaintiff, a fresh-faced young girl (none other, of course, than our old friend, Hazel) knelt at the foot of the dais and was given the great seal to kiss; upon which the Clerk of Arraigns led her up into a sort of carved pulpit, whence in a voice, low, but so clear as to penetrate to the furthest corners of the hall she told, with admirable lucidity, the story of the murder of her grandfather.

Next, Mistress Ivy, flustered and timid, told the Judges, in somewhat rambling fashion, what she had already told Master Nathaniel.

Then came the testimony of Peter Pease and Marjory Beach, and, finally, the document of the late farmer was handed round among the Judges.

“Endymion Leer!” called out Master Polydore, “the Law bids you speak, or be silent, as your conscience prompts you.”

And as Endymion Leer rose to make his defense, the silence of the hall seemed to be trebled in intensity.

“My Lords Judges!” he began, “I take my stand, not high enough, perhaps, to be out of reach of the gibbet, but well above the heads, I fancy, of everybody here today. And, first of all, I would have you bear in mind that my life has been spent in the service of Dorimare.” (Here there was a disturbance at the back of the hall and shouts of “Down with the Senators!” “Long live the good Doctor!” But the would-be rioters were cowed by the thunder of the Law, rumbling in the “Silence!” of the Clerk of Arraigns.)

“I have healed and preserved your bodies — I have tried to do the same for your souls. First, by writing a book — published anonymously some years ago — in which I tried to show the strange seeds that are sleeping in each of you. But the book hardly aroused the enthusiasm that it so justly deserved” (and he gave his old dry chuckle). “In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the copies were burned by the common hangman — and could you have found the author you would gladly have burned him too. I can tell you since writing it I have gone in fear of my life, and have hardly dared to look a red-haired man in the face — still less a blue cow!” and here some of his partisans at the back of the hall laughed uproariously.

He paused, and then went on in a graver voice, “Why have I taken all this trouble with you? Why have I spent my erudition and my skill on you thus? To speak truth, I hardly know myself … perhaps because I like playing with fire; perhaps because I am relentlessly compassionate.

“My friends, you are outcasts, though you do not know it, and you have forfeited your place on earth. For there are two races — trees and man; and for each there is a different dispensation. Trees are silent, motionless, serene. They live and die, but do not know the taste of either life or death; to them a secret has been entrusted but not revealed.

“But the other tribe — the passionate, tragic, rootless tree — man? Alas! he is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries. And some walk among their fellows with the pitying, slightly scornful smile, of an adept among catechumens. And some are confiding and garrulous, and would so willingly communicate their own unique secret — in vain! For though they shout it in the market-place, or whisper it in music and poetry, what they say is never the same as what they know, and they are like ghosts charged with a message of tremendous import who can only trail their chains and gibber.

“Such then are the two tribes. Citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist, to which do you belong? To neither; for you are not serene, majestic, and silent, nor are you restless, passionate, and tragic.

“I could not turn you into trees; but I had hoped to turn you into men.

“I have fed and healed your bodies; and I would fain have done the same for your souls.” (He paused to mop his brow; clearly it was more of an effort for him to speak than one would have guessed. Then he went on, and his voice had in it a strange new thrill.) “There is a land where the sun and the moon do not shine; where the birds are dreams, the stars are visions, and the immortal flowers spring from the thoughts of death. In that land grow fruit, the juices of which sometimes cause madness, and sometimes manliness; for that fruit is flavored with life and death, and it is the proper nourishment for the souls of man. You have recently discovered that for some years I have helped to smuggle that fruit into Dorimare. The farmer Gibberty would have deprived you of it — and so I prescribed for him the berries of merciful death.” (This admission of guilt caused another disturbance at the back of the hall, and there were shouts of “Don’t you believe him!” “Never say die, Doctor!” and so on. The Yeomanry had to put out various rough-looking men, and Master Ambrose, sitting up on the dais, recognized among them the sailor, Sebastian Thug, whom he and Master Nathaniel had seen in the Fields of Grammary. When silence and order had been restored Endymion Leer went on.) “Yes, I prescribed for him the berries of merciful death. What could it matter to the world whether he reaped the corn-fields of Dorimare, or the fields of gillyflowers beyond the hills?

“And now, my Lords Judges, I will forestall your sentence. I have pleaded guilty, and you will send me for a ride on what the common people call Duke Aubrey’s wooden horse; and you will think that you are sending me there because I helped to murder the farmer Gibberty. But, my Lords Judges, you are purblind, and, even in spectacles, you can only read a big coarse script. It is not
you
that are punishing me, but others for a spiritual sin. During these days of my imprisonment I have pondered much on my own life, and I have come to see that I have sinned. But how? I have prided myself on being a good chemist, and in my crucibles I can make the most subtle sauces yield up their secret — whether it be white arsenic, rosalgar, mercury sublimate, or cantharides. But where is the crucible or the chemist that can analyze a spiritual sin?

“But I have not lived in vain. You will send me to ride on Duke Aubrey’s wooden horse, and, in time, the double-faced Doctor will be forgotten; and so will you, my Lords Judges. But Lud-in-the-Mist will stand, and the country of Dorimare, and the dreaded country beyond the hills. And the trees will continue to suck life from the earth and the clouds, and the winds will howl o’ nights, and men will dream dreams. And who knows? Some day, perhaps, my fickle bitter-sweet master, the lord of life and death, of laughter and tears, will come dancing at the head of his silent battalions to make wild music in Dorimare.

“This then, my Lords Judges, is my defense,” and he gave a little bow towards the dais.

While he had been speaking, the Judges had shown increasing symptoms of irritation and impatience. This was not the language of the Law.

As for the public — it was divided. One part had sat taut with attention — lips slightly parted, eyes dreamy, as if they were listening to music. But the majority — even though many of them were partisans of the Doctor — felt that they were being cheated. They had expected that their hero, whether guilty or not, would in his defense quite bamboozle the Judges by his juggling with the evidence and brilliant casuistry. Instead of which his speech had been obscure, and, they dimly felt, indecent; so the girls tittered, and the young men screwed their mouths into those grimaces which are the comment of the vulgar on anything they consider both ridiculous and obscene.

“Terribly bad taste, I call it,” whispered Dame Dreamsweet to Dame Marigold (the sisters-in-law had agreed to bury the hatchet), “you always said that little man was a low vulgar fellow.” But Dame Marigold’s only answer was a little shrug, and a tiny sigh.

Then came the turn of the widow Gibberty to mount the pulpit and make her defense.

Before she began to speak, she fixed in turn the judges, plaintiff, and public, with an insolent scornful stare. Then, in her deep, almost masculine voice, she began: “You’ve asked me a question to which you know the answer well enough, else I shouldn’t be standing here now. Yes, I murdered Gibberty — and a good riddance too. I was for killing him with the sap of osiers, but the fellow you call Endymion Leer, who was always a squeamish, tenderhearted, sort of chap (if there was nothing to lose by it, that’s to say) got me the death-berries and made me give them to him in a jelly, instead of the osiers.” (It was a pity Master Nathaniel was not there to glory in his own acumen!) “And it was not only because they caused a painless death that he preferred the berries. He had never before seen them at their work, and he was always a death-fancier — tasting, and smelling, and fingering death, like a farmer does samples of grain at market. Though, to give him his due, if it hadn’t been for him, that girl over there who has just been standing up to denounce him and me” (and she nodded in the direction of the pale, trembling, Hazel) “and her father before her would long ago have gone the way of the farmer. And this I say in the hope that the wench’s conscience may keep her awake sometimes in the nights to come, remembering how she dealt with the man who had saved her life. It will be but a small prick, doubtless; but it is the last that I can give her.

“And now, good people, here’s a word of advice to you, before I go my last ride, a pillion to my old friend Endymion Leer. Never you make a pet of a dead man. For the dead are dirty curs and bite the hand that has fed them”; and with an evil smile she climbed down from the pulpit, while more than one person in the audience felt faint with horror and would willingly have left the hall.

There was nothing left but for Master Polydore to pronounce the sentence; and though the accused had stolen some of his thunder, nevertheless the solemn time-honored words did not fail to produce their wonted thrill:

“Endymion Leer and Clementina Gibberty, I find you guilty of murder, and I consign your bodies to the birds, and your souls to whence they came. And may all here present take example from your fate, correcting their conduct if it needs correction, or, if it be impeccable, keeping it so. For every tree can be a gallows, and every man has a neck to hang.”

The widow received her sentence with complete stolidity; Endymion Leer with a scornful smile. But as it was pronounced there was a stir and confusion at the back of the hall, and a grotesque frenzied figure broke loose from the detaining grip of her neighbors, and, struggling up to the dais, flung herself at the feet of Master Polydore. It was Miss Primrose Crabapple.