Priscilla went home dazed. All her suitors hitherto had approached her
ceremoniously, timidly, through the Grand Duke; and we know they had
not approached very near. But here was one, timid enough in health,
who was positively reckless under circumstances that made most people
meek. He had proposed to her arrayed in a blue flannel nightingale,
and Priscilla felt that headlong self-effacement could go no further.
"He must have a great soul," she said to herself over and over again
during the drive home, "a great, _great_ soul." And it seemed of
little use wiping her tears away, so many fresh ones immediately took
their place.
She ached over Tussie and Tussie's mother. What had she done? She felt
she had done wrong; yet how, except by just existing? and she did feel
she couldn't help doing that. Certainly she had made two kind hearts
extremely miserable,--one was miserable now, and the other didn't yet
know how miserable it was going to be. She ought to have known, she
ought to have thought, she ought to have foreseen. She of all persons
in the world ought to have been careful with young men who believed
her to be of their own class. Contrition and woe took possession of
Priscilla's soul. She knew it was true that she could not help
existing, but she knew besides, far back in a remote and seldom
investigated corner of her mind, a corner on which she did not care to
turn the light of careful criticism, that she ought not to be existing
in Symford. It was because she was there, out of her proper sphere, in
a place she had no business to be in at all, that these strange and
heart-wringing scenes with young men occurred. And Fritzing would
notice her red eyes and ask what had happened; and here within two
days was a second story to be told of a young man unintentionally
hurried to his doom. Would Fritzing be angry? She never knew
beforehand. Would he, only remembering she was grand ducal, regard it
as an insult and want to fight Tussie? The vision of poor Tussie,
weak, fevered, embedded in pillows, swathed in flannel, receiving
bloodthirsty messages of defiance from Fritzing upset her into more
tears. Fritzing, she felt at that moment, was a trial. He burdened her
with his gigantic efforts to keep her from burdens. He burdened her
with his inflated notions of how burdenless she ought to be. He was
admirable, unselfish, devoted; but she felt it was possible to be too
admirable, too unselfish, too devoted. In a word Priscilla's mind
was in a state of upheaval, and the only ray of light she saw
anywhere--and never was ray more watery--was that Tussie, for the
moment at least, was content. The attitude of his mother, on the
other hand, was distressing and disturbing. There had been no more My
dears and other kind ways. She had watched her crying on the stairs in
stony silence, had gone down with her to the door in stony silence,
and just at the last had said in an unmistakably stony voice, "All
this is very cruel."
Priscilla was overwhelmed by the difficulties of life. The world was
too much with her, she felt, a very great deal too much. She sent the
Shuttleworth carriage away at the entrance to the village and went in
to sit with Mrs. Jones a little, so that her eyes might lose their
redness before she faced Fritzing; and Mrs. Jones was so glad to see
her, so full of praises of her unselfish goodness in coming in, that
once again Priscilla was forced to be ashamed of herself and of
everything she did.
"I'm not unselfish, and I'm not good," she said, smoothing the old
lady's coverlet.
Mrs. Jones chuckled faintly. "Pretty dear," was her only comment.
"I don't think I'm pretty and I know I'm not a dear," said Priscilla,
quite vexed.
"Ain't you then, deary," murmured Mrs. Jones soothingly.
Priscilla saw it was no use arguing, and taking up the Bible that
always lay on the table by the bed began to read aloud. She read and
read till both were quieted,--Mrs. Jones into an evidently sweet
sleep, she herself into peace. Then she left off and sat for some time
watching the old lady, the open Bible in-her lap, her soul filled
with calm words and consolations, wondering what it could be like
being so near death. Must it not be beautiful, thought Priscilla, to
slip away so quietly in that sunny room, with no sound to break the
peace but the ticking of the clock that marked off the last minutes,
and outside the occasional footstep of a passer-by still hurrying on
life's business? Wonderful to have done with everything, to have it
all behind one, settled, lived through, endured. The troublous joys
as well as the pains, all finished; the griefs and the stinging
happinesses, all alike lived down; and now evening, and sleep. In the
few days Priscilla had known her the old lady had drawn visibly nearer
death. Lying there on the pillow, so little and light that she hardly
pressed it down at all, she looked very near it indeed. And how kind
Death was, rubbing away the traces of what must have been a sordid
existence, set about years back with the usual coarse pleasures and
selfish hopes,--how kind Death was, letting all there was of spirit
shine out so sweetly at the end. There was an enlarged photograph of
Mrs. Jones and her husband over the fireplace, a photograph taken for
their silver wedding; she must have been about forty-five; how kind
Death was, thought Priscilla, looking from the picture to the figure
on the bed. She sighed a little, and got up. Life lay before her, an
endless ladder up each of whose steep rungs she would have to clamber;
in every sort of weather she would have to clamber, getting more
battered, more blistered with every rung.... She looked wistfully at
the figure on the bed, and sighed a little. Then she crept out, and
softly shut the door.
She walked home lost in thought. As she was going up the hill to her
cottage Fritzing suddenly emerged from it and indulged in movements so
strange and complicated that they looked like nothing less than a
desperate dancing on the doorstep. Priscilla walked faster, staring in
astonishment. He made strange gestures, his face was pale, his hair
rubbed up into a kind of infuriated mop.
"Why, what in the world--" began the amazed Priscilla, as soon as she
was near enough.
"Ma'am, I've been robbed," shouted Fritzing; and all Symford might
have heard if it had happened to be listening.
"Robbed?" repeated Priscilla. "What of?"
"Of all my money, ma'am. Of all I had--of all we had--to live on."
"Nonsense, Fritzi," said Priscilla; but she did turn a little paler.
"Don't let us stand out here," she added; and she got him in and shut
the street door.
He would have left it open and would have shouted his woes through
it as through a trumpet down the street, oblivious of all things
under heaven but his misfortune. He tore open the drawer of the
writing-table. "In this drawer--in the pocket-book you see in this
drawer--in this now empty pocket-book, did I leave it. It was there
yesterday. It was there last night. Now it is gone. Miscreants from
without have visited us. Or perhaps, viler still, miscreants from
within. A miscreant, I do believe, capable of anything--Annalise--"
"Fritzi, I took a five-pound note out of that last night, if that's
what you miss."
"You, ma'am?"
"To pay the girl who worked here her wages. You weren't here. I
couldn't find anything smaller."
"_Gott sei Dank! Gott sei Dank_!" cried Fritzing, going back to German
in his joy. "Oh ma'am, if you had told me earlier you would have
spared me great anguish. Have you the change?"
"Didn't she bring it?"
"Bring it, ma'am?"
"I gave it to her last night to change. She was to bring it round this
morning. Didn't she?"
Fritzing stared aghast. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. In a
moment he was back again. "She has not been here," he said, in a voice
packed once more with torment.
"Perhaps she has forgotten."
"Ma'am, how came you--"
"Now you're going to scold me."
"No, no--but how is it possible that you should have trusted--"
"Fritzi, you _are_ going to scold me, and I'm so tired. What else has
been taken? You said all your money--"
He snatched up his hat. "Nothing else, ma'am, nothing else. I will go
and seek the girl." And he clapped it down over his eyes as he always
did in moments of great mental stress.
"What a fuss," thought Priscilla wearily. Aloud she said, "The girl
here to-day will tell you where she lives. Of course she has
forgotten, or not been able to change it yet." And she left him, and
went out to get into her own half of the house.
Yes, Fritzi really was a trial. Why such a fuss and such big words
about five pounds? If it were lost and the girl afraid to come and say
so, it didn't matter much; anyhow nothing like so much as having one's
peace upset. How foolish to be so agitated and talk of having been
robbed of everything. Fritzing's mind, she feared, that large,
enlightened mind on whose breadth and serenity she had gazed
admiringly ever since she could remember gazing at all, was shrinking
to dimensions that would presently exactly match the dimensions of
Creeper Cottage. She went upstairs disheartened and tired, and
dropping down full length on her sofa desired Annalise to wash her
face.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness has been weeping," said Annalise, whisking
the sponge in and out of corners with a skill surprising in one who
had only practised the process during the last ten days.
Priscilla opened her eyes to stare at her in frankest surprise, for
never yet had Annalise dared make a remark unrequested. Annalise, by
beginning to wash them, forced her to shut them again.
Priscilla then opened her mouth to tell her what she thought of her.
Immediately Annalise's swift sponge stopped it up.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness," said Annalise, washing Priscilla's mouth
with a thoroughness and an amount of water suggestive of its not
having been washed for months, "told me only yesterday that weeping
was a terrible--_schreckliche_--waste of time. Therefore, since your
Grand Ducal Highness knows that and yet herself weeps, it is easy to
see that there exists a reason for weeping which makes weeping
inevitable."
"Will you--" began Priscilla, only to be stopped instantly by the
ready sponge.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness is unhappy. 'Tis not to be wondered at.
Trust a faithful servant, one whose life-blood is at your Grand Ducal
Highness's disposal, and tell her if it is not then true that the Herr
Geheimrath has decoyed you from your home and your Grossherzoglicher
Herr Papa?"
"Will you--"
Again the pouncing sponge.
"My heart bleeds--indeed it bleeds--to think of the Herr Papa's
sufferings, his fears, his anxieties. It is a picture on which I
cannot calmly look. Day and night--for at night I lie sleepless on my
bed--I am inquiring of myself what it can be, the spell that the Herr
Geheimrath has cast over your Grand Ducal--"
"Will you--"
Again the pouncing sponge; but this time Priscilla caught the girl's
hand, and holding it at arm's length sat up. "Are you mad?" she asked,
looking at Annalise as though she saw her for the first time.
Annalise dropped the sponge and clasped her hands. "Not mad," she
said, "only very, very devoted."
"No. Mad. Give me a towel."
Priscilla was so angry that she did not dare say more. If she had said
a part even of what she wanted to say all would have been over between
herself and Annalise; so she dried her face in silence, declining to
allow it to be touched. "You can go," she said, glancing at the door,
her face pale with suppressed wrath but also, it must be confessed,
very clean; and when she was alone she dropped once again on to the
sofa and buried her head in the cushion. How dared Annalise? How dared
she? How dared she? Priscilla asked herself over and over again,
wincing, furious. Why had she not thought of this, known that she
would be in the power of any servant they chose to bring? Surely there
was no limit, positively none, to what the girl might do or say? How
was she going to bear her about her, endure the sight and sound of
that veiled impertinence? She buried her head very deep in the
cushion, vainly striving to blot out the world and Annalise in its
feathers, but even there there was no peace, for suddenly a great
noise of doors going and legs striding penetrated through its
stuffiness and she heard Fritzing's voice very loud and near--all
sounds in Creeper Cottage were loud and near--ordering Annalise to ask
her Grand Ducal Highness to descend.
"I won't," thought Priscilla, burying her head deeper. "That poor Emma
has lost the note and he's going to fuss. I won't descend."
Then came Annalise's tap at her door. Priscilla did not answer.
Annalise tapped again. Priscilla did not answer, but turning her head
face upwards composed herself to an appearance of sleep.
Annalise tapped a third time. "The Herr Geheimrath wishes to speak to
your Grand Ducal Highness," she called through the door; and after a
pause opened it and peeped in. "Her Grand Ducal Highness sleeps," she
informed Fritzing down the stairs, her nose at the angle in the air it
always took when she spoke to him.
"Then wake her! Wake her!" cried Fritzing.
"Is it possible something has happened?" thought Annalise joyfully,
her eyes gleaming as she willingly flew back to Priscilla's
door,--anything, anything, she thought, sooner than the life she was
leading.
Priscilla heard Fritzing's order and sat up at once, surprised at such
an unprecedented indifference to her comfort. Her heart began to beat
faster; a swift fear that Kunitz was at her heels seized her; she
jumped up and ran out.
Fritzing was standing at the foot of the stairs.
"Come down, ma'am," he said; "I must speak to you at once."
"What's the matter?" asked Priscilla, getting down the steep little
stairs as quickly as was possible without tumbling.
"Hateful English tongue," thought Annalise, to whom the habit the
Princess and Fritzing had got into of talking English together was a
constant annoyance and disappointment.
Fritzing preceded Priscilla into her parlour, and when she was in he
shut the door behind her. Then he leaned his hands on the table to
steady himself and confronted her with a twitching face. Priscilla
looked at him appalled. Was the Grand Duke round the corner?
Lingering, perhaps, among the very tombs just outside her window?
"What is it?" she asked faintly.
"Ma'am, the five pounds has disappeared for ever."
"Really Fritzi, you are too absurd about that wretched five pounds,"
cried Priscilla, blazing into anger.
"But it was all we had."
"All we--?"
"Ma'am, it was positively our last penny."
"I--don't understand."
He made her understand. With paper and pencil, with the bills and his
own calculations, he made her understand. His hands shook, but he
went through with it item by item, through everything they had spent
from the moment they left Kunitz. They were in such a corner, so
tightly jammed, that all efforts to hide it and pretend there was no
corner seemed to him folly. He now saw that such efforts always had
been folly, and that he ought to have seen to it that her mind on this
important point was from the first perfectly clear; then nothing would
have happened. "You have had the misfortune, ma'am, to choose a fool
for your protector in this adventure," he said bitterly, pushing the
papers from him as though he loathed the sight of them.
Priscilla sat dumfoundered. She was looking quite straight for the
first time at certain pitiless aspects of life. For the first time she
was face to face with the sternness, the hardness, the relentlessness
of everything that has to do with money so soon as one has not got
any. It seemed almost incredible to her that she who had given so
lavishly to anybody and everybody, who had been so glad to give, who
had thought of money when she thought of it at all as a thing to be
passed on, as a thing that soiled one unless it was passed on, but
that, passed on, became strangely glorified and powerful for good--it
seemed incredible that she should be in need of it herself, and unable
to think of a single person who would give her some. And what a little
she needed: just to tide them over the next week or two till they had
got theirs from home; yet even that little, the merest nothing
compared to what she had flung about in the village, was as
unattainable as though it had been a fortune. "Can we--can we not
borrow?" she said at last.
"Yes ma'am, we can and we must. I will proceed this evening to Symford
Hall and borrow of Augustus."
"No," said Priscilla; so suddenly and so energetically that Fritzing
started.
"No, ma'am?" he repeated, astonished. "Why, he is the very person. In
fact he is our only hope. He must and shall help us."
"No," repeated Priscilla, still more energetically.
"Pray ma'am," said Fritzing, shrugging his shoulders, "are these
women's whims--I never comprehended them rightly and doubt if I ever
shall--are they to be allowed to lead us even in dangerous crises? To
lead us to certain shipwreck, ma'am? The alternatives in this case are
three. Permit me to point them out. Either we return to Kunitz--"
"Oh," shivered Priscilla, shrinking as from a blow.
"Or, after a brief period of starvation and other violent discomfort,
we are cast into gaol for debt--"
"Oh?" shivered Priscilla, in tones of terrified inquiry.
"Or, I borrow of Augustus."
"No," said Priscilla, just as energetically as before.
"Augustus is wealthy. Augustus is willing. Ma'am, I would stake my
soul that he is willing."
"You shall not borrow of him," said Priscilla. "He--he's too ill."
"Well then, ma'am," said Fritzing with a gesture of extreme
exasperation, "since you cannot be allowed to be cast into gaol there
remains but Kunitz. Like the dogs of the Scriptures we will return--"
"Why not borrow of the vicar?" interrupted Priscilla. "Surely he would
be glad to help any one in difficulties?"
"Of the vicar? What, of the father of the young man who insulted your
Grand Ducal Highness and whom I propose to kill in duel my first
leisure moment? Ma'am, there are depths of infamy to which even a
desperate man will not descend."
Priscilla dug holes in the tablecloth with the point of the pencil. "I
can't conceive," she said, "why you gave Annalise all that money. So
_much_."
"Why, ma'am, she refused, unless I did, to prepare your Grand Ducal
Highness's tea."
"Oh Fritzi!" Priscilla looked up at him, shaking her head and smiling
through all her troubles. Was ever so much love and so much folly
united in one wise old man? Was ever, for that matter, so expensive a
tea?
"I admit I permitted the immediate, the passing, moment to blot out
the future from my clearer vision on that occasion."
"On that occasion? Oh Fritzi. What about all the other occasions?
When you gave me all I asked for--for the poor people, for my party.
You must have suffered tortures of anxiety. And all by yourself. Oh
Fritzi. It was dear of you--perfectly, wonderfully, dear. But you
ought to have been different with me from the beginning--treated me
exactly as you would have treated a real niece--"
"Ma'am," cried Fritzing, jumping up, "this is waste of time. Our case
is very urgent. Money must be obtained. You must allow me to judge in
this matter, however ill I have acquitted myself up to now. I shall
start at once for Symford Hall and obtain a loan of Augustus."
Priscilla pushed back her chair and got up too. "My dear Fritzi,
please leave that unfortunate young man out of the question," she
said, flushing. "How can you worry a person who is ill in bed with
such things?"
"His mother is not ill in bed and will do quite as well. I am
certainly going."
"You are not going. I won't have you ask his mother. I--forbid you to
do anything of the sort. Oh Fritzi," she added in despair, for he had
picked up the hat and stick he had flung down on coming in and was
evidently not going to take the least notice of her commands--"oh
Fritzi, you can't ask Tussie for money. It would kill him to know we
were in difficulties."
"Kill him, ma'am? Why should it kill him?" shouted Fritzing,
exasperated by such a picture of softness.
"It wouldn't only kill him--it would be simply too dreadful besides,"
said Priscilla, greatly distressed. "Why, he asked me this
afternoon--wasn't going to tell you, but you force me to--he asked me
this very afternoon to marry him, and the dreadful part is that I'm
afraid he thinks--he hopes--that I'm going to."