Malvina of Brittany | Page 4

if he didn't say
anything in actually so many words, there was the way he went about.
That of itself was enough to have started the whole thing, to say
nothing of that loony old Irish housekeeper of his, with her head stuffed
full of elves and banshees and the Lord knows what."
Again the Doctor lapsed into silence. One by one the lights of the
village peeped upward out of the depths. A long, low line of light,
creeping like some luminous dragon across the horizon, showed the
track of the Great Western express moving stealthily towards Swindon.
"It was altogether out of the common," continued the Doctor, "quite out
of the common, the whole thing. But if you are going to accept old
Littlecherry's explanation of it--"
The Doctor struck his foot against a long grey stone, half hidden in the
grass, and only just saved himself from falling.
"Remains of some old cromlech," explained the Doctor. "Somewhere
about here, if we were to dig down, we should find a withered bundle
of bones crouching over the dust of a prehistoric luncheon-basket.
Interesting neighbourhood!"
The descent was rough. The Doctor did not talk again until we had
reached the outskirts of the village.
"I wonder what's become of them?" mused the Doctor. "A rum go, the
whole thing. I should like to have got to the bottom of it."
We had reached the Doctor's gate. The Doctor pushed it open and

passed in. He seemed to have forgotten me.
"A taking little minx," I heard him muttering to himself as he fumbled
with the door. "And no doubt meant well. But as for that cock-and-bull
story--"
I pieced it together from the utterly divergent versions furnished me by
the Professor and the Doctor, assisted, so far as later incidents are
concerned, by knowledge common to the village.

I. THE STORY.

It commenced, so I calculate, about the year 2OOO B.C., or, to be more
precise--for figures are not the strong point of the old
chroniclers--when King Heremon ruled over Ireland and Harbundia
was Queen of the White Ladies of Brittany, the fairy Malvina being her
favourite attendant. It is with Malvina that this story is chiefly
concerned. Various quite pleasant happenings are recorded to her credit.
The White Ladies belonged to the "good people," and, on the whole,
lived up to their reputation. But in Malvina, side by side with much that
is commendable, there appears to have existed a most reprehensible
spirit of mischief, displaying itself in pranks that, excusable, or at all
events understandable, in, say, a pixy or a pigwidgeon, strike one as
altogether unworthy of a well-principled White Lady, posing as the
friend and benefactress of mankind. For merely refusing to dance with
her--at midnight, by the shores of a mountain lake; neither the time nor
the place calculated to appeal to an elderly gentleman, suffering
possibly from rheumatism--she on one occasion transformed an
eminently respectable proprietor of tin mines into a nightingale,
necessitating a change of habits that to a business man must have been
singularly irritating. On another occasion a quite important queen,
having had the misfortune to quarrel with Malvina over some absurd
point of etiquette in connection with a lizard, seems, on waking the
next morning, to have found herself changed into what one judges,
from the somewhat vague description afforded by the ancient
chroniclers, to have been a sort of vegetable marrow.
Such changes, according to the Professor, who is prepared to maintain
that evidence of an historical nature exists sufficient to prove that the
White Ladies formed at one time an actual living community, must be

taken in an allegorical sense. Just as modern lunatics believe
themselves to be china vases or poll-parrots, and think and behave as
such, so it must have been easy, the Professor argues, for beings of
superior intelligence to have exerted hypnotic influence upon the
superstitious savages by whom they were surrounded, and who,
intellectually considered, could have been little more than children.
"Take Nebuchadnezzar." I am still quoting the Professor. "Nowadays
we should put him into a strait-waistcoat. Had he lived in Northern
Europe instead of Southern Asia, legend would have told us how some
Kobold or Stromkarl had turned him into a composite amalgamation of
a serpent, a cat and a kangaroo." Be that as it may, this passion for
change--in other people--seems to have grown upon Malvina until she
must have become little short of a public nuisance, and eventually it
landed her in trouble.
The incident is unique in the annals of the White Ladies, and the
chroniclers dwell upon it with evident satisfaction. It came about
through the betrothal of King Heremon's only son, Prince Gerbot, to the
Princess Berchta of Normandy. Malvina seems to have said nothing,