Authors: Hope Mirrlees
So Miss Primrose could only gibber and blink her acquiescence and promise him that “dear Prunella” should instantly be sent to him.
When she had left him, Master Ambrose paced impatiently up and down, frowning heavily, and occasionally shaking his head.
Then he stood stock-still, in deep thought. Absently, he picked up from the work-table a canvas shoe, in process of being embroidered with wools of various brilliant shades.
At first, he stared at it with unseeing eyes.
Then, the surface of his mind began to take stock of the object. Its half finished design consisted of what looked like wild strawberries, only the berries were purple instead of red.
It was certainly very well done. There was no doubt but that Miss Primrose was a most accomplished needle-woman.
“But what’s the good of needlework? It doesn’t teach one common sense,” he muttered impatiently.
“And how like a woman!” he added with a contemptuous little snort, “Aren’t
red
strawberries good enough for her? Trying to improve on nature with her stupid fancies and her purple strawberries!”
But he was in no mood for wasting his time and attention on a half-embroidered slipper, and tossing it impatiently away he was about to march out of the room and call loudly for Prunella Chanticleer, when the door opened and in she came.
Had a stranger wanted to see an upper class maiden of Lud-in-the-Mist, he would have found a typical specimen in Prunella Chanticleer.
She was fair, and plump, and dimpled; and, as in the case of her mother, the ruthless common sense of her ancestors of the revolution had been trivialized, though not softened, into an equally ruthless sense of humor.
Such
had
been Prunella Chanticleer.
But, as she now walked into the room, Master Ambrose exclaimed to himself, “Toasted cheese! How plain the girl has grown!”
But that was a mere matter of taste; some people might have thought her much prettier than she had ever been before. She was certainly less plump than she used to be, and paler. But it was the change in the expression of her eyes that was most noticeable.
Hitherto, they had been as busy and restless (and, in justice to the charms of Prunella let it be added, as golden brown) as a couple of bees in summer — darting incessantly from one small object to another, and distilling from each what it held of least essential, so that in time they would have fashioned from a thousand trivialities that inferior honey that is apt to be labeled “feminine wisdom.”
But, now, these eyes were idle.
Or, rather, her memory seemed to be providing them with a vision so absorbing that nothing else could arrest their gaze.
In spite of himself, Master Ambrose felt a little uneasy in her presence. However, he tried to greet her in the tone of patronizing banter that he always used when addressing his daughter or her friends. But his voice had an unnatural sound as he cried, “Well, Prunella, and what have you all been doing to my Moonlove, eh? She came running home after dinner, and if it hadn’t been broad daylight, I should have said that she had seen a ghost. And then off she dashed, up hill and down dale, like a paper chaser without any paper. What have you all been doing to her, eh?”
“I don’t think we’ve been doing anything to her, Cousin Ambrose,” Prunella answered in a low, curiously toneless voice.
Ever since the scene with Moonlove that afternoon, Master Ambrose had had an odd feeling that facts were losing their solidity; and he had entered this house with the express purpose of bullying and hectoring that solidity back to them. Instead of which they were rapidly vanishing, becoming attenuated to a sort of nebulous atmosphere.
But Master Ambrose had stronger nerves and a more decided mind than Master Nathaniel. Two facts remained solid, namely that his daughter had run away, and that for this Miss Crabapple’s establishment was responsible. These he grasped firmly as if they had been dumb-bells that, by their weight, kept him from floating up to the ceiling.
“Now, Prunella,” he said sternly, “there’s something very queer about all this, and I believe you can explain it. Well? I’m waiting.”
Prunella gave a little enigmatical smile.
“What did she say when you saw her?” she asked.
“Say? Why, she was evidently scared out of her wits, and didn’t know
what
she was saying. She babbled something about the sun being too hot — though it seems to me very ordinary autumn weather that we’re having. And then she went on about cutting somebody’s fiddle strings … oh, I don’t know what!”
Prunella gave a low cry of horror.
“Cut the fiddle strings!”
she repeated incredulously. And then she added with a triumphant laugh, “she
can’t do that!”
“Now, young lady,” he cried roughly, “no more of this rubbish! Do you or do you
not
know what has taken Moonlove?”
For a second or two she gazed at him in silence, and then she said slowly, “Nobody ever knows what happens to other people. But, supposing … supposing she has eaten fairy fruit?” and she gave a little mocking smile.
Silent with horror, Master Ambrose stared at her.
Then he burst out furiously, “You foul-mouthed little hussy! Do your
dare
to insinuate …”
But Prunella’s eyes were fixed on the window that opened on to the garden, and instinctively he looked in that direction too.
For a second he supposed that the portrait of Duke Aubrey that hung in the Senate Room of the Guildhall had been moved to the wall of Miss Primrose’s parlor. Framed in the window, against the leafy background of the garden stood, quite motionless, a young man in antique dress. The face, the auburn ringlets, the suit of green, the rustic background — everything, down to the hunting horn entwined with flowers that he held in one hand, and the human skull that he held in the other, were identical with those depicted in the famous portrait.
“By the White Ladies of the Fields!” muttered Master Ambrose, rubbing his eyes.
But when he looked again the figure had vanished.
For a few seconds he stood gaping and bewildered, and Prunella seized the opportunity of slipping unnoticed from the room.
Then he came to his senses, on a wave of berserk rage. They had been playing tricks, foul, vulgar tricks, on him, on Ambrose Honeysuckle, Senator and ex-Mayor. But they should pay for it, by the Sun, Moon and Stars, they should pay for it! And he shook his fist at the ivy and squill bedecked walls.
But, in the meantime, it was he himself who was paying for it. An appalling accusation had been made against his only child; and, perhaps, the accusation was true.
Well, things must be faced. He was now quite calm, and, with his stern set face, a much more formidable person than the raging spluttering creature of a few seconds ago. He was determined to get to the bottom of this affair, and either to vindicate his daughter from the foul insinuation made by Prunella Chanticleer, or else, if the horrible thing were true (and a voice inside him that would not be silenced kept saying that it
was
true) to face the situation squarely, and, for the good of the town, find out who was responsible for what had happened and bring them to the punishment they merited.
There was probably no one in all Lud-in-the-Mist who would suffer in the same degree from such a scandal in his family as Master Ambrose Honeysuckle. And there was something fine in the way he thus unflinchingly faced the possibility. Not for a moment did he think of hushing the matter up to shield his daughter’s reputation.
No, justice should run its course even if the whole town had to know that Ambrose Honeysuckle’s only child — and she a girl, which seemed, somehow, to make it more horrible — had eaten fairy fruit.
As to his vision of Duke Aubrey,
that
he dismissed as an hallucination due to his excited condition and perhaps, as well, to the hysterical atmosphere that seemed to lie like a thick fog over the Academy.
Before he left Miss Primrose’s parlor his eyes fell on the half embroidered slipper he had impatiently tossed away on the entrance of Prunella Chanticleer.
He smiled grimly; perhaps, after all, it had not been due to mere foolish feminine fancy that the strawberries were purple instead of red. She may have had real models for her embroidery.
He put the slipper in his pocket. It might prove of value in the law courts.
But Master Ambrose was mistaken in supposing that the berries embroidered on the slipper were fairy fruit.
M
aster Ambrose fully expected on reaching home to find that one of the grooms he had dispatched after Moonlove had returned with her in safe custody.
This, however, was not the case, and he was confronted with another frightful contingency. Moonlove had last been seen running, at a speed so great and so unflagging as to hint at some sustaining force that was more than human,
due West
. What if she were making for the Debatable Hills? Once across those hills she would never again be seen in Dorimare.
He must go to Mumchance at once, and give the alarm. Search parties must immediately be sent to ransack the country from one end to the other.
On his way out he was stopped by Dame Jessamine in the fretful complaining condition that he always found so irritating.
“Where
have
you been, Ambrose?” she cried querulously. “First Moonlove screaming like a mad cockatoo! And then you rushing off, just after your dinner too, and leaving me like that in the lurch when I was so upset that I was on the verge of swooning! Where did you
go
to Ambrose?” and her voice grew shrill. “I do wish you would go to Miss Primrose and tell her she must
not
let Moonlove be such a tom-boy and play practical jokes on her parents … rushing home in the middle of the day like that and talking such silly nonsense. She really is a very naughty girl to give us such a fright. I feel half inclined to go straight off to the Academy and give her a good scolding.”
“Stop chattering, Jessamine, and let me go,” cried Master Ambrose. “Moonlove is
not
at the Academy.”
And he found a sort of savage satisfaction in calling back over his shoulder as he hurried from the room, “I very much fear you will never see your daughter again, Jessamine.”
About half an hour later, he returned home even more depressed than when he had set out, owing to what he had learned from Mumchance as to the recent alarming spread in the town of the consumption of fairy fruit. He found Endymion Leer sitting in the parlor with his wife.
Her husband’s parting words had brought on an attack of violent hysterics and the alarmed servants, fearing a seizure, had, on their own responsibility, summoned the only doctor of Lud in whom they had any faith, Endymion Leer. And, judging from Dame Jessamine’s serene and smiling face, he had succeeded in removing completely the terrible impression produced by her husband’s parting words, and in restoring to what she was pleased to call her mind its normal condition, namely that of a kettle that contains just enough water to simmer comfortably over a low fire.
She greeted Master Ambrose with a smile that for her was quite eager.
“Oh, Ambrose!” she cried, “I have been having such a pleasant talk with Dr. Leer. He says girls of her age often get silly and excited, though I’m sure I never did, and that she’s sure to be brought home before night. But I do think we’d better take her away from Miss Primrose’s. For one thing she has really learned quite enough now — I know no one who can make prettier groups in butter. So I think we had better give a ball for her before the winter, so if you will excuse me, Dr. Leer, I have just a few things to see to …” and off she bustled to overhaul Moonlove’s bridal chest, which, according to the custom of Dorimarite mothers, she had been storing, ever since her daughter’s birth, with lace and velvets and brocade.
Not without reason, Dame Jessamine was considered the stupidest woman in Lud-in-the-Mist. And, in addition, the Ludite’s lack of imagination and inability to feel serious emotions, amounted in her to a sort of affective idiocy.
So Master Ambrose found himself alone with Endymion Leer; and, though he had never liked the man, he was very glad to have the chance of consulting him. For, socially, however great his shortcomings might be, Master Ambrose knew him to be undeniably the best doctor in the country, and a very clever fellow into the bargain.
“Leer,” he said solemnly, when Dame Jessamine had left the room, “there are very queer things happening at that Academy …
very
queer things.”
“Indeed?” said Endymion Leer, in a tone of surprise. “What sort of things?”
Master Ambrose gave a short laugh: “Not the sort of things, if my suspicions are correct, that one cares to talk about — even between men. But I can tell you, Leer, though I’m not what one could call a fanciful man, I believe if I’d stayed much longer in that house I should have gone off my head, the whole place stinks with … well, with pernicious nonsense, and I actually found myself, I, Ambrose Honeysuckle,
seeing
things — ridiculous things.”
Endymion Leer looked interested.
“What sort of things, Master Ambrose?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s not worth repeating — except in so far as it shows that the fancies of silly overwrought women can sometimes be infectious. I actually imagined that I saw the Senate room portrait of Duke Aubrey reflected on the window. And if I take to fancying things — well, there must be something very fishy in the offing.”
Endymion Leer’s expression was inscrutable.
“Optical delusions
have
been known before, Master Ambrose,” he said calmly. “Even the eyes of Senators may sometimes play them tricks. Optical delusions, legal fictions — and so the world wags on.”
Master Ambrose grunted. He loathed the fellow’s offensive way of putting things.
But he was sore at heart and terribly anxious, and he felt the need of having his fears either confirmed or dispelled, so, ignoring the sneer, he said with a weary sigh: “However, that’s a mere trifle. I have grave reasons for fearing that my daughter has … has … well, not to put too fine a point on things, I’m afraid that my daughter
has eaten fairy fruit.”
Endymion Leer flung up his hands in horror, and then he laughed incredulously.
“Impossible, my dear sir, impossible! Your good lady told me you were sadly anxious about her, but let me assure you such an idea is mere morbidness on your part. The thing’s impossible.”
“Is it?” said Master Ambrose grimly; and producing the slipper from his pocket he held it out, saying, “What do you say to that? I found it in Miss Crabapple’s parlor. I’m not much of a botanist, but I’ve never seen purple strawberries in Dorimare … Toasted cheese! What’s taken the man?”
For Endymion Leer had turned livid, and was staring at the design on the shoe with eyes as full of horror as if it had been some hideous goblin.
Master Ambrose interpreted this as corroboration of his own theory.
He gave a sort of groan: “Not so impossible after all, eh?” he said gloomily. “Yes,
that
I very much fear is the sort of stuff my poor little girl has been given to eat.”
Then his eyes flashed, and clenching his fist he cried, “But it’s not her I blame. Before I’m many days older I’ll smoke out that nest of wasps! I’ll hang that simpering old woman from her own doorpost. By the Golden Apples of the West I’ll …”
Endymion Leer had by this time, at any rate externally, recovered his equanimity.
“Are you referring to Miss Primrose Crabapple?” he asked in his usual voice.
“Yes,
Miss Primrose Crabapple!”
boomed Master Ambrose, “nonsensical, foul-minded, obscene old …”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Endymion Leer with good-humored impatience, “I daresay she’s all of that and a great deal more, but, all the same, I don’t believe her capable of having given your daughter what you think she has. I admit, when you first showed me that slipper I was frightened. Unlike you, I
am
a bit of a botanist, and I certainly have never seen a berry like that in Dorimare. But after all that does not prove that it grows … across the hills. There’s many a curious fruit to be found in the Cinnamon Isles, or in the oases of the Amber Desert … why, your own ships, Master Ambrose, sometimes bring such fruit. The ladies of Lud have no lack of exotic fruit and flowers to copy in their embroidery. No, no, you’re a bit unhinged this evening, Master Ambrose, else you would not allow so much as the shadow of foul suspicions like these to cross your mind.”
Master Ambrose groaned.
And then he said a little stiffly, “I am not given, Dr. Leer, to harboring foul suspicions without cause. But a great deal of mischief is sometimes done by not facing facts. How is one to explain my daughter’s running away, due west, like one possessed? Besides, Prunella Chanticleer as much as told me she had … eaten a certain thing … and … and … I’m old enough to remember the great drought, so I know the smell, so to speak, of evil, and there is something very strange going on in that Academy.”
“Prunella
Chanticleer
, did you say?” queried Endymion Leer with an emphasis on the last word, and with a rather odd expression in his eyes.
Master Ambrose looked surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “Prunella Chanticleer, her school fellow and intimate friend.”
Endymion Leer gave a short laugh.
“The Chanticleers are … rather curious people,” he said dryly, “Are you aware that Ranulph Chanticleer has done the very thing you suspect your daughter of having done?”
Master Ambrose gaped at him.
Ranulph had certainly always been an odd and rather disagreeable boy, and there had been that horrid little incident at the Moongrass cheese supper-party … but that he actually should have eaten fairy fruit!
“Do you mean? Do you mean …?” he gasped.
Endymion Leer nodded his head significantly: “One of the worst cases I have ever known.”
“And Nathaniel knows?”
Again Endymion Leer nodded.
A wave of righteous indignation swept over Master Ambrose. The Honeysuckles were every bit as ancient and honorable a family as the Chanticleers, and yet here was he, ready to tarnish his escutcheon forever, ready if need be to make the town crier trumpet his disgrace from the market-place, to sacrifice money, position, family pride, everything, for the good of the community. While the only though of Nathaniel, and he the Mayor, was to keep his skeleton safely hidden in the cupboard.
“Master Ambrose,” continued Endymion Leer, in a grave impressive voice, “if what you fear about your daughter be true, then it is Master Nathaniel who is to blame. No, no, hear me out,” as Master Ambrose raised a protesting hand. “I happen to know that some months ago Mumchance warned him of the alarming increase there has been recently in Lud in the consumption of … a certain commodity. And I know that this is true from my practice in the less genteel parts of the town. Take it from me, Master Ambrose, you Senators make a great mistake in ignoring what takes place in those low haunts. Nasty things have a way of not always staying at the bottom, you know — stir the pond and they rise to the top. Anyway, Master Nathaniel was warned, yet he took no steps.”
He paused for a few seconds, and then, fixing his eyes searchingly on Master Ambrose, he said, “Did it never strike you that Master Nathaniel Chanticleer was a rather … curious man?”
“Never,” said Master Ambrose coldly. “What are you insinuating, Leer?”
Endymion Leer gave a little shrug: “Well, it is you who have set the example in insinuations. Master Nathaniel is a haunted man, and a bad conscience makes a very good ghost. If a man has once tasted fairy fruit he is never the same again. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps, long ago, when he was a young man …”
“Hold your tongue, Leer!” cried Master Ambrose angrily. “Chanticleer is a very old friend of mine, and, what’s more, he’s my second cousin. There’s nothing wrong about Nathaniel.”
But was this true? A few hours ago he would have laughed to scorn any suggestion to the contrary. But since then, his own daughter … ugh!
Yes, Nathaniel had certainly always been a very queer fellow — touchy, irascible, whimsical.
A swarm of little memories, not noticed at the time, buzzed in Master Ambrose’s head … irrational actions, equivocal remarks. And, in particular, one evening, years and years ago, when they had been boys … Nat’s face at the eerie sound produced by an old lute. The look in his eyes had been like that in Moonlove’s today.
No, no. It would never do to start suspecting everyone — above all his oldest friend.
So he let the subject of Master Nathaniel drop and questioned Endymion Leer as to the effects on the system of fairy fruit, and whether there was really no hope of finding an antidote.
Then Endymion Leer started applying his famous balm — a balm that varied with each patient that required it.
In most cases, certainly, there was no cure. But when the eater was a Honeysuckle, and hence, born with a healthy mind in a healthy body there was every reason to hope that no poison could be powerful enough to undermine such a constitution.
“Yes, but suppose she is already across the border?” said Master Ambrose. Endymion Leer gave a little shrug.
“In that case, of course, there is nothing more one can do,” he replied.
Master Ambrose gave a deep sigh and leant back wearily in his chair, and for a few minutes they sat in silence.
Drearily and hopelessly Master Ambrose’s mind wandered over the events of the day and finally settled, as is the way with a tired mind, on the least important — the red juice he had noticed oozing out of the coffin, when they had been checked at the west gate by the funeral procession.
“Do the dead bleed, Leer?” he said suddenly.
Endymion Leer sprang from his chair as if he had been shot. First he turned white, then he turned crimson.
“What the … what the …” he stuttered, “what do you mean by that question, Master Ambrose?”
He was evidently in the grip of some violent emotion.
“Busty Bridget!” exclaimed Master Ambrose, testily, “what, by the Harvest of Souls, has taken you now, Leer? It may have been a silly question, but it was quite a harmless one. We were stopped by a funeral this afternoon at the west gate, and I thought I saw a red liquid oozing from the coffin. But, by the White Ladies of the Fields, I’ve seen so many queer things today that I’ve ceased to trust my own eyes.”
These words completely restored Endymion Leer’s good humor. He flung back his head and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks.