Rewards and Fairies Part 32

Then, doubt not, ye fearful-- The Eternal is King-- Up, heart, and be cheerful, And l.u.s.tily sing:-- _What chariots, what horses, Against us shall bide While the Stars in their courses Do fight on our side?_

A Doctor of Medicine

They were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the h.e.l.lebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds.

'All right,' Una shouted across the asparagus; 'we aren't hurting your old beds, Phippsey!'

She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about _rooms_ in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.

'You've a bit of a cold yourself, haven't you?' said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.

'Child,' the man answered, 'if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity----'

'Nay, nay,' Puck struck in, 'the maid spoke out of kindness. _I_ know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that's a pity. There's honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.'

'Good people'--the man shrugged his lean shoulders--'the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or--ahem!--their ear.'

'And what d'you think of _that_?' said Puck solemnly to Dan.

'I don't know,' he answered. 'It sounds like lessons.'

'Ah--well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that's not indoors?'

'In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,' Dan suggested. '_He_ doesn't mind.'

'Eh?' Mr. Culpeper was stooping over the pale h.e.l.lebore blooms by the light of Una's lamp. 'Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?'

'Save him, no!' said Puck. 'He is but a horse--next door to an a.s.s, as you'll see presently. Come!'

Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens'

drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr. Culpeper stooped at the door.

'Mind where you lie,' said Dan. 'This hay's full of hedge-bris.h.i.+ngs.'

'In! in!' said Puck. 'You've lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah!

Let us keep touch with the stars!' He kicked open the top of the half door, and pointed to the clear sky. 'There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?'

The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane.

'Where?' Mr. Culpeper leaned forward quickly. 'That? Some countryman's lantern.'

'Wrong, Nick,' said Puck. ''Tis a singular bright star in Virgo, declining towards the house of Aquarius the water-carrier, who hath lately been afflicted by Gemini. Aren't I right, Una?'

Mr. Culpeper snorted contemptuously.

'No. It's the village nurse going down to the Mill about some fresh twins that came there last week. Nurse,' Una called, as the light stopped on the flat, 'when can I see the Morris twins? And how are they?'

'Next Sunday, perhaps. Doing beautifully,' the Nurse called back, and with a _ping-ping-ping_ of the bell brushed round the corner.

'Her Uncle's a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,' Una explained, 'and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed--not downstairs at all. Then she jumps up--she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know--and goes anywhere she's wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully.

She told us so herself.'

'I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,' said Mr. Culpeper quietly. 'Twins at the Mill!' he muttered half aloud. '"And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men."'

'Are you a doctor or a rector?' Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr. Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer--a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses--he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger--and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things.

He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr. Culpeper talked about 'trines' and 'oppositions' and 'conjunctions' and 'sympathies' and 'antipathies' in a tone that just matched things.

A rat ran between Middenboro's feet, and the old pony stamped.

'Mid hates rats,' said Dan, and pa.s.sed him over a lock of hay. 'I wonder why.'

'Divine Astrology tells us,' said Mr. Culpeper. 'The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars--the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he's too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t'other white, the one hot, t'other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the pa.s.sages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!'

Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr. Culpeper sat up stiffly.

'I myself,' said he, 'have saved men's lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time--there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun--by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.' He swept his hand across the sky. 'Yet there are those,' he went on sourly, 'who have years without knowledge.'

'Right,' said Puck. 'No fool like an old fool.'

Mr. Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hill-top.

'Give him time,' Puck whispered behind his hand. 'He turns like a timber-tug--all of a piece.'

'Ahem!' Mr. Culpeper said suddenly. 'I'll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye's Horse, and fought the King--or rather the man Charles Stuart--in Oxfords.h.i.+re (I had _my_ learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.'

'We grant it,' said Puck solemnly. 'But why talk of the plague this rare night?'

'To prove my argument. This Oxfords.h.i.+re plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature.

Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.'

'Mark also, Nick,' said Puck, 'that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a la.s.s and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!'

'To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King's men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Suss.e.x man like myself.'

'Who was that?' said Puck suddenly. 'Zack Tutshom?'

'No, Jack Marget,' said Mr. Culpeper.

'Jack Marget of New College? The little merry man that stammered so? Why a plague was stuttering Jack at Oxford then?' said Puck.

'He had come out of Suss.e.x in hope of being made a Bishop when the King should have conquered the rebels, as he styled us Parliament men. His College had lent the King some monies too, which they never got again, no more than simple Jack got his bishopric. When we met he had had a bitter bellyful of King's promises, and wished to return to his wife and babes. This came about beyond expectation, for, so soon as I could stand of my wound the man Blagge made excuse that I had been among the plague, and Jack had been tending me, to thrust us both out from their camp. The King had done with Jack now that Jack's College had lent the money, and Blagge's physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.'

'Ha! Called _you_ pragmatical, Nick?' Puck started up. 'High time Oliver came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?'