"No! No! No!" shrieked Ranulph still more shrilly, "he shall not kill the moon ... he shall not, I say. If he does, all the flowers will wither in Fairyland."
How am I to convey to you the effect that these words produced on the company? It would not be adequate to ask you to imagine your own feelings were your host's small son suddenly, in a mixed company, to pour forth a stream of obscene language; for Ranulph's words were not merely a shock to good taste—they aroused, as well, some of the superstitious terror caused by the violation of a taboo.
The ladies all blushed crimson, the gentlemen looked stern, while Master Nathaniel, his face purple, yelled in a voice of thunder, "Go to bed this instant, Ranulph ... and I'll come and deal with you later on"; and Ranulph, who suddenly seemed to have lost all interest in the fate of the cheese, meekly left the room.
There were no more jokes that evening, and on most of the plates the cheese lay neglected; and in spite of the efforts of some of the guests, conversation flagged sadly, so that it was scarcely nine o'clock when the party broke up.
When Master Nathaniel was left alone with Dame Marigold he fiercely demanded an explanation of Ranulph's behaviour. But she merely shrugged her shoulders wearily, and said she thought the boy must have gone mad, and told him how for some weeks he had seemed to her unlike himself.
"Then why wasn't I told? Why wasn't I told?" stormed Master Nathaniel. Again Dame Marigold shrugged her shoulders, and, as she looked at him, there was a gleam of delicate, humourous contempt in her heavily-lidded eyes. Dame Marigold's eyes, by the way, had a characteristic, which was to be found often enough among the Ludites—you would have called them dreamy and languorous, had it not been for the expression of the mouth, which with its long satirical upper lip, like that of an old judge, and the whimsical twist to its corners, reacted on the eyes, and made them mocking and almost too humourous—never more so than when she looked at Master Nathaniel. In her own way she was fond of him. But her attitude was not unlike that of an indulgent mistress to a shaggy, uncertain-tempered, performing dog.
Master Nathaniel began to pace up and down the room, his fists clenched, muttering imprecations against inefficient women and the overwhelming worries of a family man—in his need for a victim on whom to vent his rage, actually feeling angry with Dame Marigold for having married him and let him in for all this fuss and to-do. And his shadowy fears were more than usually clamorous. Dame Marigold, as she sat watching him, felt that he was rather like a cockchafer that had just flounced in through the open window, and, with a small, smacking sound, was bouncing itself backwards and forwards against its own shadow on the ceiling—a shadow that looked like a big, black velvety moth. But it was its clumsiness, and blundering ineffectualness that reminded her of Master Nathaniel; not the fact that it was banging itself against the shadow.
Up and down marched Master Nathaniel, backwards and forwards bounced the cockchafer, hither and thither flitted its soft, dainty shadow. Then, suddenly, straight as a die, the cockchafer came tumbling down from the ceiling and, at the same time, Master Nathaniel—calling over his shoulder, "I must go up and see that boy"—dashed from the room.
He found Ranulph in bed, sobbing his heart out, and as he looked at the piteous little figure he felt his anger evaporating. He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder and said not unkindly: "Come, my son; crying won't mend matters. You'll write an apology to Cousin Ambrose, and Uncle Polydore, and all the rest of them, tomorrow; and then—well, we'll try to forget about it. We're none of us quite responsible for what we say when we're out of sorts ... and I gather from your mother you've not been feeling quite the thing these past weeks."
"It was something made me say it!" sobbed Ranulph.