“She is but lately married,” said Ransom. “The child may yet be born.”
“Sir,” said Merlin, “be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again.”
“Enough said,” answered Ransom. “The woman perceives that we are speaking of her.”
“It would be great charity,” said Merlin, “if you gave order that her head should be cut from her shoulders; for it is a weariness to look at her.”
Jane, though she had a smattering of Latin, had not understood their conversation. The accent was unfamiliar, and the old Druid used a vocabulary that was far beyond her reading—the Latin of a man to whom Apuleius and Martianus Capella were the primary classics and whose elegances resembled those of the Hisperica Famina. But Dimble had followed it. He thrust Jane behind him and called out:
“Ransom! What in heaven’s name is the meaning of this?”
Merlin spoke again in Latin, and Ransom was just turning to answer him when Dimble interrupted:
“Answer us,” he said. “What has happened? Why are you dressed up like that? What are you doing with that bloodthirsty old man?”
MacPhee, who had followed the Latin even less than Jane, but who had been staring at Merlin as an angry terrier stares at a Newfoundland dog which has invaded its own garden, broke into the conversation.
“Dr. Ransom,” he said. “I don’t know who the big man is and I’m no Latinist. But I know well that you’ve kept me under your eye all this night against my own expressed will, and allowed me to be drugged and hypnotised. It gives me little pleasure, I assure you, to see yourself dressed up like something out of a pantomime and standing there hand-in-glove with that yogi, or shaman, or priest, or whatever he is. And you can tell him he need not look at me the way he’s doing. I’m not afraid of him. And as for my own life and limb—if you, Dr. Ransom, have changed sides after all that’s come and gone, I don’t know that I’ve much more use for either. But though I may be killed, I’m not going to be made a fool of. We’re waiting for an explanation.”
The Director looked down on them in silence for a few seconds.
“Has it really come to this?” he said. “Does not one of you trust me?”
“I do, sir,” said Jane suddenly.
“These appeals to the passions and emotions,” said MacPhee, “are nothing to the purpose. I could cry as well as anyone this moment if I gave my mind to it.”
“Well,” said the Director, after a pause, “there is some excuse for you all, for we have all been mistaken. So has the enemy. This man is Merlinus Ambrosius. They thought that if he came back he would be on their side. I find he is on ours. You, Dimble, ought to realise that this was always a possibility.”
“That is true,” said Dimble. “I suppose it was—well, the look of the thing—you and he standing there together: like that. And his appalling bloodthirstiness.”
“I have been startled by it myself,” said Ransom. “But after all we had no right to expect that his penal code would be that of the nineteenth century. I find it difficult, too, to make him understand that I am not an absolute monarch.”
“Is—is he a Christian?” asked Dimble.
“Yes,” said Ransom. “As for my clothes, I have for once put on the dress of my office to do him honour, and because I was ashamed. He mistook MacPhee and me for scullions or stable-boys. In his days, you see, men did not, except for necessity, go about in shapeless sacks of cloth, and drab was not a favourite colour.”
At this point Merlin spoke again. Dimble and the Director, who alone could follow his speech, heard him say, “Who are these people? If they are your slaves, why do they do you no reverence? If they are enemies, why do we not destroy them?”
“They are my friends,” began Ransom in Latin, but MacPhee interrupted.
“Do I understand, Dr. Ransom,” he said, “that you are asking us to accept this person as a member of our organisation?”
“I am afraid,” said the Director, “I cannot put it that way. He is a member of the organisation. And I must command you all to accept him.”
“And secondly,” continued MacPhee, “I must ask what enquiries have been made into his credentials.”
“I am fully satisfied,” answered the Director. “I am as sure of his good faith as of yours.”
“But the grounds of your confidence?” persisted MacPhee. “Are we not to hear them?”
“It would be hard,” said the Director, “to explain to you my reasons for trusting Merlinus Ambrosius: but no harder than to explain to him why, despite many appearances which might be misunderstood, I trust you.” There was just the ghost of a smile about his mouth as he said this. Then Merlin spoke to him again in Latin and he replied. After that Merlin addressed Dimble.
“The Pendragon tells me,” he said in his unmoved voice, “that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons. As for the woman, she may live for me. I am not master in this house. But would it be such a great matter if her head were struck off? Do not queens and ladies who would disdain her as their tire-woman go to the fire for less? Even that gallows bird (cruciarius) beside you—I mean you, fellow, though you speak nothing but your own barbarous tongue; you with the face like sour milk and the voice like a saw in a hard log and the legs like a crane’s—even that cutpurse (sector zonarius), though I would have him to the gatehouse, yet the rope should be used on his back, not his throat.”
MacPhee who realised, though without understanding the words, that he was the subject of some unfavourable comment, stood listening with that expression of entirely suspended judgement which is commoner in Northern Ireland and the Scotch lowlands than in England.
“Mr. Director,” he said, when Merlin had finished, “I would be very greatly obliged if——”
“Come,” said the Director suddenly, “we have none of us slept to-night. Arthur, will you come and light a fire for our guest in the big room at the north end of this passage? And would someone wake the women? Ask them to bring him up refreshments. A bottle of Burgundy and whatever you have cold. And then, all to bed. We need not stir early in the morning. All is going to be very well.”
IV
“We’re going to have difficulties with that new colleague of ours,” said Dimble. He was alone with his wife in their room at St. Anne’s late on the following day.
“Yes,” he repeated after a pause. “What you’d call a strong colleague.”
“You look very tired, Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble.
“Well, it’s been rather a gruelling conference,” said he. “He’s—he’s a tiring man. Oh, I know we’ve all been fools. I mean, we’ve all been imagining that because he came back in the twentieth century he’d be a twentieth-century man. Time is more important than we thought, that’s all.”
“I felt that at lunch, you know,” said his wife, “it was so silly not to have realised that he wouldn’t know about forks. But what surprised me even more (after the first shock) was how—well, how elegant he was without them. I mean you could see it wasn’t a case of having no manners