Sir John Constantine Part 26

"Fate, Prosper, has landed you on this very spot where your kinsmen found refuge for awhile, and broke the ground, and planted orchards, hoping for a fair continuance of peace and peaceful tillage.

"'Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum Tendimus in Latium--'

"How will you read the omen?"

"You say," said I, "that had we found our kinsmen here we had found them in league against freedom, and friends of the tyranny we are here to fight?"

"a.s.suredly."

"Then, sir, let me read the omen as a lesson, and avoid my kinsmen's mistake."

My father smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. "You say little, as a rule, Prosper. It is a good fault in kings."

We walked back to the churchyard, where Mr. Fett sat up, rubbing his eyes in the dawn, and hailed us.

"Good morning, signors! I have been dreaming that I came to a kingdom which, indeed, seemed to be an island, but on inspection proved to be a mushroom. What interpretation have you when a man dreams of mushrooms?"

"Why, this," said I, "that we pa.s.sed some score of them in the meadow below. I saw them plain by the moonlight, and kicked at them to make sure."

"I did better," said Mr. Fett; I gathered a dozen or two in my cap, foreseeing breakfast. Faith, and while you have been gadding I might have had added a rasher of bacon. Did you meet any hogs on your way?

But no; they turned back and took the path that appears to run up to the woods yonder."

"Hogs?" queried my father.

"They woke me, nosing and grunting among the nettles by the wall-- lean, brown beasts, with Homeric chines, and two or three of them huge as the Boar of Calydon. I was minded to let off my gun at 'em, but refrained upon two considerations--the first, that if they were tame, to shoot them might compromise our welcome here, and perhaps painfully, since the dimensions of the pigs appeared to argue considerable physical strength in their masters; the second, that if wild they might be savage enough to defend themselves when attacked."

"Doubtless," said my father, "they belong to some herdsman in the forest above us, and have strayed down in search of acorns.

They cannot belong to this village."

"And why, pray?"

"Because it contains not a single inhabitant. Moreover, gentlemen, while you were sleeping I have taken a pretty extensive stroll.

The vineyards lie unkempt, the vines themselves unthinned, up to the edge of the forest. The olive-trees have not been tended, but have shed their fruit for years with no man to gather. Many even have cracked and fallen under the weight of their crops. But no trace of beast, wild or tame, did I discover; no dung, no signs of trampling.

The valley is utterly desolate."

"It grows mushrooms," said Mr. Fett, cheerfully, piling a heap of dry twigs; "and we have ship's b.u.t.ter and a frying-pan."

"Are you sure," asked Mr. Badc.o.c.k, examining one, "that these are true mushrooms?"

"They were grown in Corsica, and have not subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles; still, _mutatis mutandis_, in my belief they are good mushrooms. If you doubt, we can easily make sure by stewing them awhile in a saucepan and stirring them with a silver spoon, or boiling them gently with Mr. Badc.o.c.k's watch, as was advised by Mr.

Locke, author of the famous 'Essay on the Human Understanding.'"

"Indeed?" said my father. "The pa.s.sage must have escaped me."

"It does not occur in the 'Essay.' He gave the advice at Montpellier to an English family of the name of Robinson; and had they listened to him it would have robbed Micklethwaite's 'Botany of Pewsey and Devizes' of some fascinating pages."

MR. FETT'S STORY OF THE FUNGI OF MONTPELLIER.

"About the year 1677, when Mr. Locke resided at Montpellier for the benefit of his health, and while his famous 'Essay' lay as yet in the womb of futurity, there happened to be staying in the same _pension_ an English family--"

"Excuse me," put in my father, "I do not quite gather where these people lodged."

"The sentence was faultily constructed, I admit. They were lodging in the same _pension_ as Mr. Locke. The family consisted of a Mrs.

Robinson, a widow; her son Eustace, aged seventeen; her daughter Laet.i.tia, a child of fourteen, suffering from a slight pulmonary complaint; her son's tutor, whose name I forget for the moment, but he was a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and an ardent botanist; and a good-natured English female named Maria Wilkins, an old servant whom Mrs. Robinson had brought from home--Pewsey, in Wiltshire--to attend upon this Laet.i.tia. The Robinsons, you gather, were well-to-do; they were even well connected; albeit their social position did not quite warrant their story being included in the late Mr. D'Arcy Smith's 'Tragedies and Vicissitudes of Our County Families.'

"It appears that the lad Eustace, perceiving that his sister's delicate health procured her some indulgences, complained of headaches, which he attributed to a too intense application upon the 'Memorabilia' of Xenophon, and cajoled his mother into packing him off with the tutor on a holiday expedition to the neighbouring mountains of Garrigues. From this they returned two days later about the time of _dejeuner_, with a quant.i.ty of mushrooms, which the tutor, who had discovered them, handed around for inspection, a.s.serting them to be edible.

"The opinion of Mr. Locke being invited, that philosopher took up the position he afterwards elaborated so ingeniously, declaring that knowledge concerning these mushrooms could only be the result of experience, and suggesting that the tutor should first make proof of their innocuousness on his own person. Upon this the tutor, a priggish youth, retorted hotly that he should hope his Cambridge studies, for which his parents had pinched themselves by many small economies, had at least taught him to discriminate between the _agarici_. Mr. Locke in vain endeavoured to divert the conversation upon the scope and objects of a university education, and fell back on suggesting that the alleged mushrooms should be stewed, and the stew stirred with a silver spoon, when, if the spoon showed no discolouration, he would take back his opinion that they contained phosphorus in appreciable quant.i.ties. He was called an empiricist for his pains; and Mrs. Robinson (who hated a dispute and invariably melted at any allusion to the tutor's _res angusta domi_) weakly gave way. The mushrooms were cooked and p.r.o.nounced excellent by the entire family, of whom Mrs. Robinson expired at 8.30 that evening, the tutor at 9 o'clock, the faithful domestic Wilkins and Master Eustace shortly after midnight, and an Alsatian cook, attached to the establishment, some time in the small hours. The poor child, who had partaken but sparingly, lingered until the next noon before succ.u.mbing."

"A strange fatality!" commented Mr. Badc.o.c.k.

Mr. Fett paused, and eyed him awhile in frank admiration before continuing.

"The wonder to me is you didn't call it a coincidence," he murmured.

"Well, and so it was," said Mr. Badc.o.c.k, "only the word didn't occur to me."

"The bodies," resumed Mr. Fett, "in accordance with the by-laws of Montpellier, were conveyed to the town mortuary, and there bestowed for the time in open coffins, connected by means of wire attachments with a bell in the roof--a munic.i.p.al device against premature interment. The wires also carried a number of small bells very sensitively hung, so that the smallest movement of reviving animation would at once alarm the night-watchman in an adjoining chamber.

"This watchman, an honest fellow with literary tastes above his calling, was engaged towards midnight in reading M. de la Fontaine's 'Elegie aux Nymphes de Vaux,' when a sudden violent jangling fetched him to his feet, with every hair of his head erect and separate.

Before he could collect his senses the jangling broke into a series of terrific detonations, in the midst of which the bell in the roof tolled one awful stroke and ceased.

"I leave to your imagination the sight that met his eyes when, lantern in hand, he reached the mortuary door. The collected remains, promiscuously interred next day by the munic.i.p.ality of Montpellier, were, at the request of a brother-in-law of Mrs.

Robinson, and through the good offices of Mr. Locke, subsequently exhumed and despatched to Pewsey, where they rest under a suitable inscription, locally attributed to the pen of Mr. Locke. His admirers will recognize in the concluding lines that conscientious exact.i.tude which ever distinguished the philosopher. They run--

"'And to the Memory of one FRITZ (? Sempach) a Humble Native of Alsace whose remains, by Destiny commingled with the foregoing, are for convenience here deposited.

II. Kings iv. 39.'

"But the extraordinary part of my story, gentlemen, remains to be told. Some six weeks ago, happening, in search of a theatrical engagement, to find myself in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge, I fell in with a pedestrian whose affability of accost invited me to a closer acquaintance. He introduced himself as the Reverend Josias Micklethwaite, a student of Nature, and more particularly of the mosses and lichens of Wilts. Our liking (I have reason to believe) was mutual, and we spent a delightful ten days in tracking up together the course of the Wiltshire Avon, and afterwards in perambulating the famous forest of Savernake. Here, I regret to say, a trifling request--for the loan of five shillings, a temporary accommodation--led to a misunderstanding, and put a period to our companionship, and I remain his debtor but for some hours of profitable intercourse.

"Coming at the close of a day's ramble to Pewsey, a small town near the source of the Avon, we visited its parish churchyard and happened upon the memorial to the unfortunate Robinsons. An old man was stooping over the turf beside it, engaged in gathering mushrooms, numbers of which grew in the gra.s.s around this stone, _but nowhere else in the whole enclosure_. The old man, who proved to be the s.e.xton, a.s.sured us not only of this, but also that previous to the interment of the Robinsons no mushrooms had grown within a mile of the spot. He added that, albeit regarded with abhorrence by the more superst.i.tious inhabitants of Pewsey, the fungi were edible, and gave no trouble to ordinary digestions (his own, for example); nor upon close examination could Mr. Micklethwaite detect that they differed at all from the common _agaricus campestris_. So, sirs, concludes my tale."

Mr. Fett ended amid impressive silence.

"I don't feel altogether so keen-set as I did five minutes back,"

muttered Billy Priske.

"For my part," said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship's b.u.t.ter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat ba.n.a.l one by which we have all been antic.i.p.ated by Hamlet. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio--'."

"Faith, and so there are," broke in Nat Fiennes, catching me on a sudden by the arm. "Listen!"

High on the forest ridge, far and faint, yet clear over the pine-tops, a voice was singing.

The voice was a girl's--a girl's, or else some spirit's; for it fell to us out of the very dawn, pausing and anon dropping again in little cadences, as though upon the waft of wing; and wafted with it, wave upon wave, came also the morning scent of the _macchia_.

We could distinguish no words, intently though we listened, or no more than one, which sounded like _Mortu, mortu, mortu_, many times repeated in slow refrain before the voice lifted again to the air.

But the air itself was voluble between its cadences, and the voice, though a woman's, seemed to challenge us on a high martial note, half menacing, half triumphant.