THE PRINCESS.
[Illustration: {Drawing of the dear old lady.}]
That's the dear old lady,
In a green tabby gown
And a great lace cap,
With long lace ruffles hanging down.
There she sits
In a cushioned high-backed seat,
Covered over with crimson damask,
With a footstool at her feet.
You see what a handsome room it is,
Full of old carving and gilding;
The house is, one may be sure,
Of the Elizabethan style of building.
--_Mary Howitt._
Our interest in Mrs. Halsey and her son slumbered for a time; not that
we forgot her, or gave up our determination to do something for Jim
whenever the opportunity offered. It was soon to come, but our time and
interest were filled with other things. Just now it was a mystery--and
what so dear to a girl's imagination?
It was brought up for discussion afresh, because Miss Prillwitz had said
to Emma Jane Anton that the diadem which I wore as Guinevere was not a
suitable one for a queen, but a rather nondescript arrangement half-way
between that of a marquis and an earl.
This assumption of authoritative knowledge in regard to coronets revived
an old rumor as to the noble birth of Miss Prillwitz.
No one could tell who first circulated the report that Miss Prillwitz
was a princess. It developed little by little, I fancy, but when it
began to be whispered we received it without a shadow of doubt. Miss
Prillwitz was a prim little woman, who always came to Madame's
receptions dressed in the same brocade dress, once gaudy with a great
bouquet pattern, but now faded into faint pink and primrose on a
background of silvery-green, with the same carefully cleaned gloves and
fine old fan of the period of Marie Antoinette. She wore her perfectly
white hair a la Pompadour, and further increased her diminutive height
by French heels, but in spite of these artificial contrivances she was a
tiny woman, though she had dignity enough for a very tall one. Adelaide
said she had "the unmistakable air of a _grande dame_," and that she
would have suspected her in any disguise. Milly had once spied, half
tucked in her belt and dependent from a slender chain, a miniature, set
in brilliants, of a handsome young man in uniform, a row of decorations
on his breast, crosses and stars hanging from strips of bright ribbon.
This was a great discovery, and Milly was sure that the original was no
less a personage than Peter the Great. She had thought out a thrilling
romance of true love crossed by jealousy and heartbreak, which the rest
of the girls accepted as more than probable, until Emma Jane Anton
suggested that as Peter the Great died in 1725, it would really make the
princess much older than she appeared, to fancy that he was the hero of
her girlhood. Emma Jane Anton always had a disagreeable faculty of
remembering dates. The other girls were unanimous in the opinion that
she knew entirely too much, and each one looked and longed for an
opportunity of publicly detecting her in a mistake and correcting
her--an opportunity which never came. Milly never made herself offensive
by being certain of anything, and was loved and petted accordingly. The
myth of a royal lover was a congenial one, and gained credence, though
none of us dared to give him a name or date, at least not in the
presence of Emma Jane Anton. No one had the temerity to question
Adelaide's infallibility in detecting a great lady at first sight. It
did not ever occur to Emma Jane Anton to ask how many princesses she had
met, and what was the "unmistakable air" of distinction and nobility
which announced them like a herald's proclamation. Perhaps this was
because Adelaide herself possessed this grand air by nature, and was far
more regal in appearance and feeling than many a Guelph or Stuart. Witch
Winnie, perhaps because she was the mad-cap of the boarding-school, and
was always getting into scrapes herself, snuffed a political plot, and
suggested that the princess had been exiled on account of deep-laid
machinations against one of the reigning families, a supposition which
would account for her living in exile and disguise, and even in
comparative poverty. This explanation, as being the most ingenious, and
affording fascinating scope for the imagination, was the most popular
one, and was more or less elaborated according to the individual fancy
of the young lady. Emma Jane Anton was obliged to admit that she might
be a princess, and that there was no harm in calling her so amongst
ourselves. Madame had let fall some very singular expressions when she
announced the fact that we were to have her for our teacher in Botany.
Emma Jane had heard her, and it was she who had reported the news to the
others.
"Girls," she said, "did you ever hear anything so absurd! We are going
to recite our Botany to the princess."
"You don't mean it!"
"Honest! She lives in that funny old house across the square, that
Winnie always pretends to think is haunted. We are to parade over there
three days in the week. Madame says it's a great opportunity, for she is
really quite eminent; writes for scientific journals, has traveled in
all sorts of foreign countries, and _has moved in court circles_."
"I told you so!" exclaimed Adelaide, triumphantly. "I always said she
was a true-blue princess."
"I don't know that you have quite proved it yet," replied Emma Jane
Anton, coolly, "but Madame did say that we would have an opportunity of
learning much more from her than mere botany--etiquette, I presume--for
she went on to hint that she had been brought up in a different school
of manners from that of our own day and country, that we would find her
peculiar in some ways, and that she trusted to our native courtesy to
humor her little foibles, and a hundred more things of the same sort,
winding up with that stock expression which she always uses when she has
talked a subject to shreds and tatters--'A word to the wise is
sufficient.'"
"I wish I had heard her," said Witch Winnie; "I don't consider this
subject talked to tatters, by any means. I propose that this Botany
class constitute itself a committee of investigation to clear up the
mystery in regard to the history of the princess. We are supposed to be
devoted to the study of nature, but I consider _human_ nature a deal the
more interesting. It will almost pay for having to mind one's _p_'s and
_q_'s. I wonder what she would say if she caught me sliding down her
palace balusters! We'll all have to practice curtseying--one step to the
side, then two back. Oh! I'm ever so sorry I knocked over that stand.
Was the vase a keepsake or anything? I'll buy you another. No, I can't,
for I've spent all my allowance for this month. Well, you may have that
_bonbonniere_ of mine you liked so much." The vase was a treasure, but
no one could be vexed with Witch Winnie, and I forgave her, of course,
and would none of the _bonbonniere_.
Our first glimpse at the house in which the princess lived was as
appetizing to our imaginations as the little lady herself. It had been
built as a church-school, and straggled around the church, shaping
itself to the exterior angles of that edifice, and in so doing gained a
number of queerly shaped rooms, some long and narrow, and others with
irregular corners, but all bright with southern sunshine. The princess
rented only the upper floor and the front room in the basement. The rest
of the house had been let to other parties, but was now vacant. How
strange and lonely it must seem, we thought, to go up and down those
long staircases, and peep into the uninhabited rooms! Rather eerie at
night. "I wouldn't live that way for the world," shivered Milly. "I
should be afraid of robbers."
"Burglars don't usually choose an unoccupied house for their
operations," Emma Jane remarked, sententiously.
Later, when we were better acquainted with the princess, Milly asked her
if she was never timid. She acknowledged that she was, but assured us
that rats _were one great comfort_.
"What do you mean?" Milly asked.
"Whenevaire," said the princess (in the quaint broken English which we
always found so fascinating, English which had only the foreignness of
pronunciation and idiom, and which Adelaide insisted was rarely so
maltreated as to be really _broken_, but was only a little
dislocated)--"whenevaire I hear one cautious sawing noise which shall be
as if ze burglaire to file ze lock, I say to myself, 'Ah, ha! Monsieur
Rat have invited to himself some companie in ze pantry of ze butler.'
When zere come one _tappage_ on ze _escalier_, as zo some one make haste
to depart ze house, I turn myself upon my bed and make to myself
explanation--Rats! When ze footsteps mysterious steal so softly down ze
hall, and make pause justly at my door, then I reach for ze great cane
of my fazzer, which I keep at all times by ze canopy of my bed, and I
pound on ze floor--boom, boom, Monsieur Rat _scelerat_, and it is thus I
make my reassurance."
The princess received us in what had been the basement dining-room,
which she called her laboratory. The entire south side was one broad
window of small diamond-shaped panes. Forming a sill to this window was
a row of low, wide cases for the reception of herbaria, and the room had
a peculiar herby smell, a mixture of sweet-fern and faint aromatic
herbs.
The cushions which converted the tops of these cases into seats were
stuffed with dried beech-leaves.
The princess quoted Latin to us for her preference for the fine springy
upholstery which beech-leaves give. _Silva domus, cubilia frondes._
("The wood a house, the foliage a couch.")
The other furniture in the room was a long table placed in front of the
book-case divan, a table covered with piles of MS. books, a press for
specimens, two microscopes, and a great blue china bowl containing
pussy-willows in water--our specimens for the day's study. High
book-cases, whose contents could only be guessed at, for the glass doors
were lined with curiously shirred green silk, were ranged against the
wall opposite, and at one end of the room stood a monumental German
stove in white porcelain; at the other was Miss Prillwitz's chair, a
high-backed Gothic affair, which had once served as an episcopal
_sedilium_, but had been removed on the occasion of a new furnishing of
the church.
It formed a stately background for the little figure. I often found
myself making sketches of her on the sheets of soft paper between which
we pressed our flowers, instead of listening to the lecture. I liked to
imagine how she would look in a great ruff, not of Cynthia Vaughn's
mosquito net, but of real _point de Venise_.
And yet her talks were very interesting; she was a true lover of nature,
and made us love her. She regretted that she could not take us into the
deep woods, but she opened our eyes to the wealth of country
suggestiveness which we could find in the city. She introduced us
personally to the scanty two dozen or so of trees in the little park,
and from the intimate acquaintance formed with each of these, our
appetites were whetted for vast wildernesses of forest primeval.
She opened to us the beauty which there lies in the simple branching of
the trees in their winter nudity, the tracery of the limbs and twigs cut
clearly against a yellow sunset, or picked out with snow; how the elms
gave graceful wine-glass and Greek-vase outlines; the snakily mottled
sycamore undulated its great arms like a boa-constrictor reaching out
for prey; the birch, "the lady of the woods," displayed her white satin
dress; the gnarled hemlocks wrestled upward, each sharp angle a defiance
to the winter storms with which they had striven in heroic combat, the
bent knees clutching the rocks, while the aged arms writhed and tossed
in the grasp of the fiends of the air. She showed us the beautiful
parabolic curve of the willows, a bouquet of rockets; the military
bearing of a row of Lombardy poplars standing, in their perfect
alignment, like tall grenadiers drawn up in a hollow square. Before the
first tender blurring of the leaf-buds we knew our trees, and loved them
for their almost human qualities.
Miss Sartoris had taught me, the preceding summer, to look for the
decorative beauty to be found in common roadside weeds, and we had made
sketches together of dock, elecampane, tansy, thistles, and milkweed. I
had one rich, rare day with her in a swamp, when I ruined a pair of
stockings, and made the discovery that a skunk-cabbage was as beautiful
in its curves as a calla. I brought these sketches to the princess, and
she congratulated me on the possession of my country home with its
gold-mines of beauty all around.
"You are one heiress, my dear," she said, "to ze vast wealths which you
have only to learn how you s'all enjoy. Only t'ink of ze sousands of
poor city people who haf never had ze felicity to see a swamp!"
I grew to appreciate the country, and to feel that I was richer than I
had thought.
Milly found a branch of study which was not above the measure of her
intellect. She soon mastered the long names, and learned to think, and
teachers in other departments noted an improvement. There was need for
this, for the Hornets long kept up a tradition that at one of the
history examinations Milly had been asked, "What is the Salic Law?" and
had replied, confidently--"That no woman or _descendant of a woman_, can
ever reign in France."