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 dishevelled, 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 bloodcurdling 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 neighbouring 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 honourable 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
