But Master Nathaniel was indifferent to these manifestations of unpopularity. Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.
When the news first reached him of the flight of the Crabapple Blossoms he very nearly went off his head. Facts suddenly seemed to be becoming real.
For the first time in his life his secret shadowy fears began to solidify—to find a real focus; and the focus was Ranulph.
His first instinct was to fling municipal obligations to the winds and ride post-haste to the farm. But what would that serve after all? It would be merely playing into the hands of his enemies, and by his flight giving the public reason to think that the things that were said about him were true.
It would be madness, too, to bring Ranulph back to Lud. Surely there was no place in Dorimare more fraught with danger for the boy these days than was the fairy fruit-stained town of Lud. He felt like a rat in a trap.
He continued to receive cheerful letters from Ranulph himself and good accounts of him from Luke Hempen, and gradually his panic turned into a sort of lethargic nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him from the necessity of taking action. It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.
He found no comfort in his own home. Dame Marigold, who had always cared for Prunella much more than for Ranulph, was in a condition of nervous prostration.
Each time the realization swept over her that Prunella had eaten fairy fruit and was either lost in the Elfin Marches or in Fairyland itself, she would be seized by nausea and violent attacks of vomiting.
Indeed, the only moments of relief he knew were in pacing up and down his own pleached alley, or wandering in the Fields of Grammary. For the Fields of Grammary gave him a foretaste of death—the state that will turn one into a sort of object of art (that is to say if one is remembered by posterity) with all one's deeds and passions simplified, frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people gaze at, and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them.
And the pleached alley brought him the peace of still life—life that neither moves nor suffers, but only grows in silence and slowly matures in secret.