How the fruit got across the border remained a mystery, and all the efforts of the magistrates to stop it were useless. In vain they invented a legal fiction (as we have seen, the law took no cognisance of fairy things) that turned fairy fruit into a form of woven silk and, hence, contraband in Dorimare; in vain they fulminated in the Senate against all smugglers and all men of depraved minds and filthy habits—silently, surely, the supply of fairy fruit continued to meet the demand. Then, with the first rain, both began to decrease. But the inefficiency of the magistrates in this national crisis was never forgotten, and "feckless as a magistrate in the great drought" became a proverb in Dorimare.
As a matter of fact, the ruling class of Dorimare had become incapable of handling any serious business. The wealthy merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist, the descendants of the men of the revolution and the hereditary rulers of Dorimare had, by this time, turned into a set of indolent, self-indulgent, humorous gentlemen, with hearts as little touched to tragic issues as those of their forefathers, but with none of their forefathers' sterling qualities.
A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be. For one thing, wealth had ceased to be a delicate, exotic blossom. It had become naturalised in Dorimare, and was now a hardy perennial, docilely renewing itself year after year, and needing no tending from the gardeners.
Hence sprang leisure, that fissure in the solid masonry of works and days in which take seed a myriad curious little flowers—good cookery, and shining mahogany, and a fashion in dress, that, like a baroque bust, is fantastic through sheer wittiness, and porcelain shepherdesses, and the humours, and endless jokes—in fact, the toys, material and spiritual, of civilisation. But they were as different as possible from the toys of that older civilisation that littered the attics of the Chanticleers. About these there had been something tragic and a little sinister; while all the manifestations of the modern civilisation were like fire-light—fantastic, but homely.
Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.
For instance, they were unaware that in the country Duke Aubrey's memory was still green. It was not only that natural children still went by the name of "Duke Aubrey's brats"; that when they saw a falling star old women would say, "Duke Aubrey has shot a roe"; and that on the anniversary of his expulsion, maidens would fling into the Dapple, for luck, garlands woven out of the two plants that had formed the badge of the Dukes—ivy and squills. He was a living reality to the country people; so much so that, when leakages were found in the vats, or when a horse was discovered in the morning with his coat stained and furrowed with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the culprit. And there was not a farm or village that had not at least one inhabitant who swore that he had seen him, on some midsummer's eve, or some night of the winter solstice, galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with harlequin ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable bells.
But of Fairyland and its inhabitants the country people knew no more than did the merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist. Between the two countries stood the barrier of the Debatable Hills, the foothills of which were called the Elfin Marches, and were fraught, tradition said, with every kind of danger, both physical and moral. No one in the memory of man had crossed these hills, and to do so was considered tantamount to death.