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 parlour. 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 parlour 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.
Chapter VIII
Endymion Leer Looks Frightened, and a Breach Is Made In an Old Friendship
Master Ambrose fully expected on reaching home to find that one of the grooms he had despatched 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 parlour with his wife.