









                         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 emolient 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 behoves 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.  The time has come to prove it.  We stand to
lose everything that makes life pleasant and secure --
laughter, sound sleep, the merriment of fire-sides, the
peacefulness of gardens.  And if we cannot bequeath the
certainty of these things to our children, what will boot
them their inheritance?  It is for us, then, as fathers as
well as citizens, once and for all to uproot this menace,
the roots of which are in the past, the branches of which
cast their shadow on the future.
   "I and another of your colleagues have discovered at last
who it was that brought this recent grief and shame upon so
many of us.  It will be hard, I fear, to prove his guilt,
for he is subtle, stealthy, and mocking, and, like his
invisible allies, his chief weapon is delusion.  I ask you
all, then, to parry that weapon with faith and loyalty,
which will make you take the word of old and trusty friends
as the only touchstone of truth.  And, after that -- I have
sometimes thought that less blame attaches to deluding
others than to deluding oneself.  Away, then, with flimsy
legal fictions!  Let us call things by their names -- not
grograine or tuftaffity, but *fairy fruit*.  And if it be
proved that any man has brought such merchandise into
Dorimare, let him hang by his neck till he be dead."
   Then Master Nathaniel sat down.
   But where was the storm of applause he had expected would
greet his words?  Where were the tears, the eager questions,
the tokens of deeply stirred feelings?
   Except for Master Ambrose's defiant "Bravos!" his speech
was received in profound silence.  The faces all round him
were grim and frigid, with compressed lips and frowning
brows -- except the portrait of Duke Aubrey -- he, as usual,
was faintly smiling.
   Then Master Polydore Vigil rose to his feet, and broke
the grim silence.
   "Senators of Dorimare!" he began, "the eloquent words we
have just listened to from his Worship the Mayor can,
strangely enough, serve as a prelude -- a golden prelude to
my poor, leaden words.  I, too, came here this morning
resolved to bring your attention to legal fictions -- which,
sometimes, it may be, have their uses.  But perhaps before I
say my say, his Worship will allow the clerk to read us the
oldest legal fiction in our Code.  It is to be found in the
first volume of the Acts of the twenty-fifth year of the
Republic, Statute 5, chapter 9." 
   Master Polydore Vigil sat down, and a slow grim smile
circulated round the hall, and then seemed to vanish and
subside in the mocking eyes of Duke Aubrey's portrait.
   Master Nathaniel exchanged puzzled glances with Master
Ambrose; but there was nothing for it but to order the clerk
to comply with the wishes of Master Polydore.
   So, in a small, high, expressionless voice, which might
have been the voice of the Law herself, the clerk read as
follows:
   "Further, we ordain that nothing but death alone shall
have power to dismiss the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High
Seneschal of Dorimare before the five years of his term of
office shall fully have expired.  But, the dead, being dumb,
feeble, treacherous and given to vanities, if any Mayor at a
time of menace to the safety of the Dorimarites be held by
his colleagues to be any of these things, then let him be
accounted dead in the eye of the Law, and let another be
elected in his stead."
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