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 hellebore 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 hellebore 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 ass, 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-brishings.
'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 'umps 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 passed him over a lock of hay. 'I wonder why.'
