Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Author:Hope Mirrlees [Mirrlees, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4337-1
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 1926-10-31T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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