Lud-in-the-Mist (11 page)

And he and Portunus dug each other in the ribs and laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks.

At last, pulling himself together, the Professor bade Portunus tune up his fiddle, and requested that the young ladies should form up into two lines for the first dance.

“We’ll begin with ‘Columbine,’” he said.

“But that’s nothing but a country dance for farm servants,” pouted Moonlove Honeysuckle.

And Prunella Chanticleer boldly went up to Miss Primrose, and said, “Please, mayn’t we go on with the jigs and quadrilles we’ve always learned? I don’t think mother would like me learning new things. And ‘Columbine’s so vulgar.”

“Vulgar! New!” cried Professor Wisp, shrilly. “Why, my pretty Miss, ‘Columbine’ was danced in the moonlight when Lud-in-the-Mist was nothing but a beech wood between two rivers. It is the dance that the Silent People dance along the Milky Way. It’s the dance of laughter and tears.”

“Professor Wisp is going to teach you very old and aristocratic dances, my dear,” said Miss Primrose reprovingly. “Dances such as were danced at the court of Duke Aubrey — were they not, Professor Wisp?”

But the queer old fiddler had begun to tune up, and Professor Wisp, evidently thinking that they had, already, wasted enough time, ordered his pupils to stand up and be in readiness to begin.

Very sulkily it was that the Crabapple Blossoms obeyed, for they were all feeling as cross as two sticks at having such a vulgar buffoon for their master, and at being forced to learn silly old-fashioned dances that would be of no use to them when they were grown-up.

But, surely, there was magic in the bow of that old fiddler! And, surely, no other tune in the world was so lonely, so light-footed, so beckoning! Do what one would one must needs up and follow it.

Without quite knowing how it came about, they were soon all tripping and bobbing and gliding and tossing, with their minds on fire, while Miss Primrose wagged her head in time to the measure, and Professor Wisp, shouting directions the while, wound himself in and out among them, as if they were so many beads, and he the string on which they were threaded.

Suddenly the music stopped, and flushed, laughing, and fanning themselves with their pocket handkerchiefs, the Crabapple Blossoms flung themselves down on the floor, against a pile of bulging sacks in one of the corners, indifferent for probably the first time in their lives to possible damage to their frocks.

But Miss Primrose cried out sharply, “Not there, dears! Not there!”

In some surprise they were about to move, when Professor Wisp whispered something in her ear, and, with a little meaning nod to him, she said, “Very well, dears, stay where you are. It was only that I thought the floor would be dirty for you.”

“Well, it wasn’t such bad fun after all,” said Moonlove Honeysuckle.

“No,” admitted Prunella Chanticleer reluctantly. “That old man
can
play!”

“I wonder what’s in these sacks; it feels too soft for apples,” said Ambrosine Pyepowders, prodding in idle curiosity the one against which she was leaning.

“There’s rather a queer smell coming from them,” said Moonlove.

“Horrid!” said Prunella, wrinkling up her little nose.

And then, with a giggle, she whispered, “We’ve had the goose and the sage, so perhaps these are the onions!”

At that moment Portunus began to tune his fiddle again, and Professor Wisp called out to them to form up again in two rows.

“This time, my little misses,” he said, “it’s to be a sad solemn dance, so Miss Primrose must foot it with you — ‘a very aristocratic dance, such as was danced at the court of Duke Aubrey’!” and he gave them a roguish wink.

So admirable had been his imitation of Miss Primrose’s voice that, for all he was such a vulgar buffoon, the Crabapple Blossoms could not help giggling.

“But I’ll ask you to listen to the tune before you begin to dance it,” he went on. “Now then, Portunus!”

“Why! It’s just ‘Columbine’ over again …” began Prunella scornfully.

But the words froze on her lips, and she stood spellbound and frightened.

It was ‘Columbine,’ but with a difference. For, since they had last heard it, the tune might have died, and wandered in strange places, to come back to earth, an angry ghost.

“Now, then,
dance!”
cried Professor Wisp, in harsh, peremptory tones.

And it was in sheer self-defense that they obeyed — as if by dancing they somehow or other escaped from that tune, which seemed to be themselves.

sang Professor Wisp. And in and out, in and out of a labyrinth of dreams wound the Crabapple Blossoms.

But now the tune had changed its key. It was getting gay once more — gay, but strange, and very terrifying.

sang Professor Wisp, and in and out he wound between his pupils — or, rather, not
wound
, but dived, darted, flashed, while every moment his singing grew shriller, his laughter more wild.

And then — whence and how they could not say — a new person had joined the dance.

He was dressed in green and he wore a black mask. And the curious thing was that, in spite of all the crossings and recrossings and runs down the middle, and the endless shuffling in the positions of the dancers, demanded by the intricate figures of this dance, the newcomer was never beside you — it was always with somebody else that he was dancing.
You
never felt the touch of his hand. This was the experience of each individual Crabapple Blossom.

But Moonlove Honeysuckle caught a glimpse of his back; and on it there was a hump.

M
aster Ambrose Honeysuckle had finished his midday meal, and was smoking his churchwarden on his daisy-powdered lawn, under the branches of a great, cool, yellowing lime; and beside him sat his stout comfortable wife, Dame Jessamine, placidly fanning herself to sleep, with her pink-tongued mushroom-colored pug snoring and choking in her lap.

Master Ambrose was ruminating on the consignment he was daily expecting of flowers-in-amber — a golden eastern wine, for the import of which his house had the monopoly in Dorimare.

But he was suddenly roused from his pleasant reverie by the sound of loud excited voices proceeding from the house, and turning heavily in his chair, he saw his daughter, Moonlove, wild-eyed and disheveled, rushing towards him across the lawn, followed by a crowd of servants with scared faces and all chattering at once.

“My dear child, what’s this? What’s this?” he cried testily.

But her only answer was to look at him in agonized terror, and then to moan, “The horror of midday!”

Dame Jessamine sat up with a start and rubbing her eyes exclaimed, “Dear me, I believe I was napping. But … Moonlove! Ambrose! What’s happening?”

But before Master Ambrose could answer, Moonlove gave three blood-curdling screams, and shrieked out, “Horror! Horror! The tune that never stops!
Break
the fiddle!
Break
the fiddle! Oh, Father, quietly, on tiptoe behind him, cut the strings. Cut the strings and let me out, I want the dark.”

For an instant, she stood quite still, head thrown back, eyes alert and frightened, like a beast at bay. Then, swift as a hare, she tore across the lawn, with glances over her shoulder as if something were pursuing her, and, rushing through the garden gate, vanished from their astonished view.

The servants, who till now had kept at a respectful distance, came crowding up, their talk a jumble of such exclamations and statements as “Poor young lady!” “It’s a sunstroke, sure as my name’s Fishbones!” “Oh, my! it quite gave me the palpitations to hear her shriek!”

And the pug yapped with such energy that he nearly burst his mushroom sides, and Dame Jessamine began to have hysterics.

For a few seconds Master Ambrose stood bewildered, then, setting his jaw, he pounded across the lawn, with as much speed as was left him by nearly fifty years of very soft living, out at the garden gate, down the lane, and into the High Street.

Here he joined the tail of a running crowd that, in obedience to the law that compels man to give chase to a fugitive, was trying hard to catch up with Moonlove.

The blood was throbbing violently in Master Ambrose’s temples, and his brains seemed congested. All that he was conscious of, on the surface of his mind, was a sense of great irritation against Master Nathaniel Chanticleer for not having had the cobbles on the High Street recently renewed — they were so damnably slippery.

But, underneath this surface irritation, a nameless anxiety was buzzing like a hornet.

On he pounded at the tail end of the hunt, blowing, puffing, panting, slipping on the cobbles, stumbling across the old bridge that spanned the Dapple. Vaguely, as in delirium, he knew that windows were flung open, heads stuck out, shrill voices enquiring what was the matter, and that from mouth to mouth were bandied the words, “It’s little Miss Honeysuckle running away from her papa.”

But when they reached the town walls and the west gate, they had to call a sudden halt, for a funeral procession, that of a neighboring farmer, to judge from the appearance of the mourners, was winding its way into the town, bound for the Fields of Grammary, and the pursuers had perforce to stand in respectful silence while it passed, and allow their quarry to disappear down a bend of the high road.

Master Ambrose was too impatient and too much out of breath consciously to register impressions of what was going on round him. But in the automatic unquestioning way in which at such moments the senses do their work, he saw through the windows of the hearse that a red liquid was trickling from the coffin.

This enforced delay broke the spell of blind purpose that had hitherto united the pursuers into one. They now ceased to be a pack, and broke up again into separate individuals, each with his own business to attend to.

“The little lass is too nimble-heeled for us,” they said, grinning ruefully.

“Yes, she’s a wild goose, that’s what she is, and I fear she has led us a wild goose chase,” said Master Ambrose with a short embarrassed laugh.

He was beginning to be acutely conscious of the unseemliness of the situation — he, an ex-Mayor, a Senator and judge, and, what was more, head of the ancient and honorable family of Honeysuckle, to be pounding through the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist at the tail end of a crowd of’prentices and artisans, in pursuit of his naughty, crazy wild goose of a little daughter!

“Pity it isn’t Nat instead of me!” he thought to himself. “I believe
he’d
rather enjoy it.”

Just then, a farmer came along in his gig, and seeing the hot breathless company standing puffing and mopping their brows, he asked them if they were seeking a little lass, for, if so, he had passed her a quarter of an hour ago beyond the turnpike, running like a hare, and he’d called out to her to stop, but she would not heed him.

By this time Master Ambrose was once more in complete possession of his wits and his breath.

He noticed one of his own clerks among the late pursuers, and bade him run back to his stables and order three of his grooms to ride off instantly in pursuit of his daughter.

Then he himself, his face very stern, started off for the Academy.

It was just as well that he did not hear the remarks of his late companions as they made their way back to town; for he would have found them neither sympathetic nor respectful. The Senators were certainly not loved by the rabble. However, not having heard Moonlove’s eldritch shrieks nor her wild remarks, they supposed that her father had been bullying her for some mild offence, and that, in consequence, she had taken to her heels.

“And if all these fat pigs of Senators,” they said, “were set running like that a little oftener, why, then, they’d make better bacon!”

Master Ambrose had to work the knocker of the Academy door very hard before it was finally opened by Miss Primrose herself.

She looked flustered, and, as it seemed to Master Ambrose, a little dissipated, her face was so pasty and her eyelids so very red.

“Now, Miss Crabapple!” he cried in a voice of thunder, “What, by the Harvest of Souls, have you been doing to my daughter, Moonlove? And if she’s been ill, why have we not been told, I should like to know? I’ve come here for an explanation, and I mean to get it.”

Miss Primrose, mopping and mowing, and garrulously inarticulate, took the fuming gentleman into the parlor. But he could get nothing out of her further than disjointed murmurs about the need for cooling draughts, and the child’s being rather headstrong, and a possible touch of the sun. It was clear that she was scared out of her wits, and, moreover, there was something she wished to conceal.

Master Ambrose, from his experience on the Bench, soon realized that this was a type of witness upon whom it was useless to waste his time; so he said sternly, “You are evidently unable to talk sense yourself, but perhaps some of your pupils possess that useful accomplishment. But I warn you if … if anything happens to my daughter it is you that will be held responsible. And now, send … let me see … send me down Prunella Chanticleer, she’s always been a sensible girl with a head on her shoulders. She’ll be able to tell me what exactly is the matter with Moonlove — which is more than
you
seem able to do.”

Miss Primrose, now almost gibbering with terror, stammered out something about “study hours,” and “regularity being so desirable,” and “dear Prunella’s having been a little out of sorts herself recently.”

But Master Ambrose repeated in a voice of thunder, “Send me Prunella Chanticleer, at
once.”

And standing there, stern and square, he was a rather formidable figure.