Where the moor met the woodland beyond the Fairies' Hill, old Izan went painfully searching for the herbs she had been wont to find there. The woodcutters had opened clearings that gave an unaccustomed look to the place. Fumiter, mercury, gilt-cups, four-leaved grass and the delicate blossoms of herb-robert came out to meet the sun with a half-scared look, and wished they had stayed underground. The old wife was in a bad humor, and she was not the better pleased when her donkey, moved by some eccentric donkeyish idea, gave a loud bray and went trotting gleefully off down the hill.
“Saints save us!” muttered the old woman, shaking a vain crutch after him. “I can never walk all that distance.”
But the donkey was not to get his holiday so easily. There came a shout from the forest, and a boy on a brown moor pony went racing off after the truant beast, while a lady and a young girl looked on laughing. It was a very pretty chase, but at last Roger came back in triumph and tethered the donkey, repentant and lop-eared, to a wind-warped oak.
“O Mother Izan!” cried Eleanor, “we've found a great parcel of herbs. I never saw this before, but mother thinks it's what they called polygonec in France and used for bruises and wounds.”
The old woman seized eagerly on the plant. It was a long curved stalk with a knotted root and oval leaves almost concealing the narrow greenish bells that hung from the joints of the stem. “Aye,” she said, “that's Solomon's Seal, and 'tis master good for ointment. The women,” she added dryly, “mostly comes for it after their men ha' made holiday.”
Eleanor was already off her pony, and Roger followed her. “We'll get you all you want, Mother Izan,” she called back; “there's ever so much of it up here among the rocks.”
“I should like to know,” queried Roger as they pulled and pried at the queer twisted roots, “why they call this Solomon's Seal. I don't believe Solomon ever came here.”
“Maybe it was because he was so wise,” said Eleanor sagely. “Mother said it was good to seal wounds. We'll ask David.”
In those days a knowledge of herbs and medicines was part of a lady's education. Physicians were few, and in remote places the ladies of the castle were called upon not only to nurse but to prescribe for cases of accident, fever, wounds or pestilence. Rarely did a week go by without Lady Philippa being consulted about some illness among her husband's people. She had begun to teach Eleanor the use of herbs, especially the nature of those to be found in the neighborhood, and here Mother Izan was of great service. In her younger days she had ranged the country for miles in every direction, in search of healing plants, and she knew what grew in every swamp, glen, meadow and thicket.
“Mother Izan must have been uncommonly anxious to get that Solomon's Seal,” said Roger as they rode home in the purple dusk. “I believe Howel has been beating Gwillym again.”
Almost as well-informed as Mother Izan was David Saumond, the stone-mason, who was rebuilding the village church. He had come to the castle one day with news of Sir Stephen Giffard, Eleanor's uncle, who had been a prisoner among the infidels but had now been ransomed and was on his way home. Finding that David understood his business, the lord and lady of the castle had decided to give into his hands the work to be done on the church. Masons were scarce in England at that time, and most of those who had skill were at work on half-built cathedrals. David was a wise and thorough builder, but he had the reputation of being rather crotchety. Sir Walter Giffard suspected that this was due to his absolute honesty. He would rather pick up a job here and there which he could do as it should be done, than to have steady employment where scamped building was winked at. This suited the knight very well. He wanted a man whom he need not watch.
“An unfaithful mason's like a broken tooth or a foot out of joint,” observed the Scot when he saw some haphazard masonry he was to replace with proper stonework. “That wall's a bit o' baith.”
David would take all the pains in the world with a well-meaning but slow workman, but he disposed of shirkers and double-dealers without needless words. Neither did he encourage discussion and idle talk about the work.
“A true mason's no sae glib-gabbet,” he observed one day. “There's no need o' speechmaking to make an adder bite or a gude man work.”
David confirmed Mother Izan's opinion of the virtues of Solomon's Seal. The Turks, he said, used to eat the young shoots, cooked. The children already knew that Solomon was the Grand Worshipful Master of all the masons of the world. About his majestic and mystical figure centered legends and traditions innumerable. Solomon's Knot was a curious intricate combination of curving lines. Solomon's signet was a stone of magical virtues. The temple of Solomon was the most wonderful building ever seen, and the secrets of its masonry were still treasured by master masons everywhere. No sound of building was heard within its walls; the stones were so perfectly cut and fitted that they slid into their places without noise. And Solomon himself was the wisest man who ever lived. He could understand the talk of the martins under the eaves, the mice in the meal-tub and the beasts of burden in the stables, when they conversed among themselves.
“Aiblins that's what gar'd him grow sae unco wise,” David ended. “You bear in mind, Master Roger, that every leevin' thing ye see, frae baukie-bird tae blackfish, kens some bit cantrip he doesna tell, and ye'll be a Solomon—if ye live.”
David was eating his bread and cheese on the lee side of the wall when Eleanor came by with a gray lump of clay in her hands.
“See what Gwillym has made,” she said.
David stopped with the cheese half way to his mouth. “Who's Gwillym?” he asked.
“He's a boy we've known ever since he was very little—he's only eight now—and he does make the most alive looking things out of clay. He heard you telling about Solomon talking with the birds and beasts, and he made this.”
The clay group was really an unusual piece of modelling for an untrained hand. That a child should have made it was more than remarkable. The thin bent figure of the wise King was seated on a throne formed of gnarled tree-roots. On his wrist a raven perched; on his shoulder crouched a squirrel, with tail alert for flight; two rabbits sat upright at his feet; a lamb huddled against his knee on one side and a goat on the other. The figures all had a curiously lifelike appearance. As Eleanor said, one felt that if they heard a noise they would go away. Moreover she saw with wonder that the head of King Solomon and his lifted hand made him a fair portrait of David.
David took the clay group in his hand, turned it about, whistled softly. “Wha owns this bairn?” he inquired.
“Howel's his father,” said Roger. “He's quite good to him—unless he's drunk. Then he pounds him. He hates to have Gwillym make images; he thinks it's witch-craft. Gwillym made an image of him once and the leg broke off, and that very same day Howel's donkey kicked him and made him lame for a week.”
“There's ower mony gowks in the land for a' the mills to grind,” said David, and that was all they could get out of him. They knew he was interested or he would not have been so Scotch. David could speak very good English, and did as a rule, but with Eleanor and Roger he often returned to the speech of his boyhood because they liked it so much.
They liked David exceedingly. He had seen more interesting things than any one else they knew. He showed Roger how to make a fish-pond, and he told Eleanor how the Saracen city in her tapestry ought to look. He had himself been a slave among the infidels, and the children heard his adventures with awe and delight. Eleanor loved the story of the bath-pavilion like a tiny palace, built by the emir for the lady Halima, and the turning of the course of a river to fill her baths and her fountains, and water her gardens. Roger's hero was the young English merchant who had escaped by swimming, under his master's very nose. If one could have such exciting experiences it seemed almost worth while to be a captive of the Moslems. But when Roger said so, David smiled a dry smile and said nothing.
But it was of King Solomon that he spoke most, and he seemed to have the sayings of the wise king all by heart. A Hebrew physician whom he had once known used, he said, to write one of Solomon's proverbs on the lid of every box of salve he sent out.
“You follow his wisdom, Master Roger,” David said one day, “and you'll see how to build ye a house or a kingdom. 'Envy thou not the oppressor and choose none of his ways,' he says. 'Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of man to do it,' he says. 'God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.'
“I tell ye,” David added, glancing from the trim gray wall of the lychgate up to the castle on the hill, “every day's judgment day wi' a builder—or the head of a house.”
Thus the stonemason was touched more deeply perhaps than he would have owned, by the likening of his face to that of Solomon in the clay figures of little Gwillym ap Howel.
As the work on the church progressed three friends of David's journeyed from Salisbury to see him. They had come from Lombardy a long time ago, when they were Piero, Andrea and Gianbattista. At Avignon they were known as Pierre, Jean-Baptiste and Andre, and in Spain they were rechristened Pedro, Juan and Andres. Now they were called Peter, Andrew and John,—and sometimes the Apostles. Peter understood vaulting; Andrew could carve a stone image of anything he saw, and John had great skill in the laying of pavements. They talked of cathedrals and palaces with a familiarity that took one's breath away.
The building of a cathedral seemed to be full of a kind of fairy lore. The plan was that of a crucifix, the chancel being the head, the transept the arms and the nave representing body and legs. The two western towers stood for Adam and Eve. There was a magic in numbers; three, seven and nine were better than six, eleven or thirteen. Certain flowers were marked for use in sacred sculpture as they were for other purposes. Euphrasy or eyebright with its little bright eye was a medicine for sore eyes. The four-petaled flowers,—the cross-bearers,—were never poisonous, and many of them, as mustard and cabbage, were valuable for food or medicine. But when Roger took this lore to Mother Izan for her opinion she remarked that if that was doctors' learning it was no wonder they killed more folk than they cured.
In fact the three Lombard builders, while each man was a master of his own especial art, had done most of their work in cities, and when it came to matters of the fields and woods they were not to be trusted. But when David found Roger a little inclined to vaunt his superior woodcraft he set him a riddle to answer:
“The baldmouse and the chauve-souri,
The baukie-bird and bat,
The barbastel and flittermouse,—
How many birds be that?”
And the masons were all grinning at him before Roger found out that these were half a dozen names for the bat, from as many different places.
The vaulting of the roof of the church was now under consideration. For so small a building the “barrel vault,” a row of round arches, was often used; but David's voice was for the pointed arch throughout. “The soarin' curve lifts the eye,” he said, “like the mountains yonder.” He drew with a bit of charcoal a line so beautiful that it was like music. It was not merely the meeting of two arcs of a circle, but the meeting of two mysteriously curved perfect lines. Sir Walter Giffard saw at a glance that here was the arch he had dreamed of.
He saw more than that. David was that rare builder, a man who can work with his hands and see all the time inside his soul the completed work. He could no more endure slipshod work or graceless lines in his building than the knight himself could do a cowardly or dishonest thing. David would have done his task faithfully in any case, but it rejoiced his soul to find that the knight and his lady would know not only that their village church was beautiful, but why it was so.
Andrew was at work upon the decorative carving of the arches of the doorway. The outer was done in broad severe lines heavily undercut; the next inner arch in a simple pattern of alternating bosses and short lines—Andrew called it the egg and dart pattern—and the inner arch in a delicate vine rather like the ivy that grew over the keep. Andrew said it was a vine found in the ruins of the Coliseum at Rome.
When it came to the carving of the animals and birds and figures for the inside of the church, Andrew's designs did not quite suit Lady Philippa. They were either too classical or too grotesque; they were better fitted to the elaborate richness of a great cathedral than to a little stone church in the mountains. She would have liked figures which would seem familiar to the people, of the birds and beasts they knew, but Andrew did not know anything about this countryside.
“Mother,” said Eleanor one night after this had been talked over, “what if Roger and I were to ask Andrew to go with us to Mother Izan's and see her tame birds and animals, and Gwillym's squirrel? And we could explain what he wants of them.”
Like many children in such remote places, Eleanor and Roger had picked up dialects as they did rhymes or games, and often interpreted for a peasant who knew neither Norman nor Saxon and wished to make himself understood at the castle.
The idea met with approval, and the next day Lady Philippa, Eleanor, Roger and Andrew went to the cottage by the Fairies' Well. They found that David had been there before them.
“He's a knowledgeable man, that,” the old woman said with a shrewd smile. “He's even talked Howel into letting the clay images alone, he has. Gwillym's down by the claybank now, a-making Saint Blaise and little Merlin.”
The cottage evidently was a new sort of place to Andrew, and his dark eyes were full of kindly interest as he looked about. The old dame sat humped in her doorway among her chirping, fluttering, barking and squeaking pets. An ancient raven cocked his eye wisely at the visitors, a tame hare hopped about the floor, a cat with three kittens, all as black as soot, occupied a basket, and there were also a fox cub rescued from a trap, a cosset lamb and a tiny hedgehog. Birds nested in the thatch; a squirrel barked from the lintel, and all the four-footed things of the neighborhood seemed at home there,
The stone-carver readily made friends with Gwillym, who seemed to understand by some instinct his broken talk and lively gestures. When Andrew wished to know what some bird or animal was like, the boy would mold it in clay, or perhaps take him to some haunt of the woodlands where they could lie motionless for a half-hour watching the live creature itself.
But there was one among Gwillym's clay figures which they never saw in the forest, and to which the boy never would give a name. It was a shaggy half-human imp with stubby horns, goat-legs and little hoofed feet. He modeled it, bent under a huge bundle, perched on a point of rock, dancing, playing on an oaten pipe. Andrew was so taken with the seated figure that he copied it in stone to hold up the font.
“What's that for?” asked David when he saw it. “Are ye askin' Auld Hornie ben the kirk, man?”
Andrew laughed and dusted his pointed brown fingers. “One of Pan's people, David. They will not stay away from us. If you sprinkle the threshold with holy water they come through the window.”
That figure puzzled David, but Gwillym would say nothing. At last the church was finished, and the village girls went gathering fresh rushes, fragrant herbs and flowers to strew the floor. David went fishing with Roger in Roger's own particular trout-stream. Coming back in the twilight they beheld Gwillym dancing upon the moss, to the piping of a strange little hairy man sitting on a rock. An instant later the stranger vanished, and the boy came toward them searching their faces with his solemn black eyes.
“That was my playfellow,” he said. “I have not seen him for a long time. He and his people lived here once, but they ran away when there came to be so many houses. I used to hide in the woods when father came seeking me at Mother Izan's, and my playfellow gave me nuts and berries and wild honey. He said that if father beat me I was to go and live with his people. I think I should if you had not come.”
Howel, the mason, was a bewildered man that night. He agreed, before he fairly knew what he was about, to David's adopting Gwillym as his own son, to go with him to the house of a good woman in London and be taught all that a lad should learn. In time he might be able to carve stone saints and angels, kings and queens, gargoyles and griffins, for great cathedrals. And all this had come of the forbidden clay toys.
“I beat him week after week,” he muttered, “for melling wi' mud images and running away to the forest to play wi' devils. 'Twas no good to him, being reared by an old witch.”
David's mouth set in a grim line and he rubbed the little black head with his crooked, skillful, weatherworn hand.
“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his heart be pure, and whether it be right,” he said half aloud as he led Gwillym away toward his own lodgings. “But the fool hates knowledge. The hearing ear and the seeing eye are the gifts of the Lord—and if a man was meant to be a bat or a donkey he'd ha' been made so. When Solomon said that a wise son maketh a glad father he didna reckon on a father being a fule. Ye'll say yer farewells to Auld Hornie, laddie, and then we'll gang awa' to London and leave Solomon's Seal i' the wilderness.”
And that was how the little wild cave-man of the forest came to be inside a village church, under the font for the christening.
THE LEPRECHAUN
Terence he was a harper tall, and served the King o' Kildare, And lords and lodies free-handed all gave largesse to him there, And once when he followed the crescent moon to the rose of a summer dawn, Wandering down the mountain-side, he met the Leprechaun.
And a wondrous power of heart and voice came over Terence then, For a secret in his harp-strings lay, to call to the hearts of men, That he could make magic of common songs, and none might understand The words he said nor the dreams they bred—for he had them of Fairyland.
Eily she was a colleen fair, the light of the harper's eyes, And he won by the aid of the Leprechaun his long-desired prize. The wedding-feast was but just begun,—when 'twixt the dark and the day, Quick as the water that runs to earth the Leprechaun slipped away!
So the daylight came, and the dreams were past, and the wild harp
sang no more,
And Terence looked at the cold black hearth and the silent open door,
And he cried, “I have sold my life this night, ye have my heart in
Take wife and gold, but come ye back, ye little Leprechaun!”
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