So that was the end of Priscilla's fortnight,--according to the way
you look at it glorious or inglorious. I shall not say which I think
it was; whether it is better to marry a prince, become in course of
time a queen, be at the head of a great nation, be surfeited with
honour, wealth, power and magnificence till the day when Death with
calm, indifferent fingers strips everything away and leaves you at
last to the meek simplicity of a shroud; or whether toilsome paths,
stern resistances, buffetings bravely taken, battles fought inch by
inch, an ideal desperately clung to even though in clinging you are
slain, is not rather the part to be chosen of him whose soul would sit
attired with stars. Anyhow the goddess laughed, the goddess who had
left Priscilla in the lurch, when she heard the end of the adventure;
and her unpleasant sister, having nothing more to do in Creeper
Cottage, gathered up her rags and grinned too as she left it. At least
her claws had lacerated much over-tender flesh during her stay; and
though the Prince had interrupted the operation and forced her for the
moment to inactivity, she was not dissatisfied with what had been
accomplished.
Priscilla, it will readily be imagined, made no farewell calls. She
disappeared from Symford as suddenly as she had appeared; and Mrs.
Morrison, coming into Creeper Cottage on Monday afternoon to unload
her conscience yet more, found only a pleasant gentleman, a stranger
of mellifluous manners, writing out cheques. She had ten minutes talk
with him, and went home very sad and wise. Indeed from that day, her
spirit being the spirit of the true snob, the hectorer of the humble,
the devout groveller in the courtyards of the great, she was a
much-changed woman. Even her hair felt it, and settled down unchecked
to greyness. She no longer cared to put on a pink tulle bow in the
afternoons, which may or may not be a sign of grace. She ceased to
suppose that she was pretty. When the accounts of Priscilla's wedding
filled all the papers she became so ill that she had to go to bed and
be nursed. Sometimes to the vicar's mild surprise she hesitated before
expressing an opinion. Once at least she of her own accord said
she had been wrong. And although she never told any one of the
conversation with the gentleman writing cheques, when Robin came home
for Christmas and looked at her he knew at once what she knew.
As for Lady Shuttleworth, she got a letter from Priscilla; quite a
long one, enclosing a little one for Tussie to be given him if and
when his mother thought expedient. Lady Shuttleworth was not surprised
by what she read. She had suspected it from the moment Priscilla rose
up the day she called on her at Baker's Farm and dismissed her. Till
her marriage with the late Sir Augustus she had been lady-in-waiting
to one of the English princesses, and she could not be mistaken on
such points. She knew the sort of thing too well. But she never
forgave Priscilla. How could she? Was the day of Tussie's coming of
age, that dreadful day when he was nearest death, a day a mother could
ever forget? It had all been most wanton, most cruel. We know she was
full of the milk of human kindness: on the subject of Priscilla it was
unmixed gall.
As for Tussie,--well, you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs,
and Tussie on this occasion was the eggs. It is a painful part to
play. He found it exquisitely painful, and vainly sought comfort in
the consolation that it had been Priscilla's omelette. The consolation
proved empty, and for a long while he suffered every sort of torment
known to the sensitive. But he got over it. People do. They will get
over anything if you give them time, and he being young had plenty of
it. He lived it down as one lives down every sorrow and every joy; and
when in the fulness of time, after a series of years in which he went
about listlessly in a soft felt hat and an unsatisfactory collar, he
married, it was to Priscilla's capital that he went for his honeymoon.
She, hearing he was there, sent for them both and was kind.
As for Annalise, she never got her twenty thousand marks. On the
contrary, the vindictive Grand Duke caused her to be prosecuted for
blackmailing, and she would undoubtedly have languished in prison if
Priscilla had not interfered and sent her back to her parents. Like
Mrs. Morrison, she is chastened. She does not turn up her nose so
much. She does not sing. Indeed her songs ceased from the moment she
caught sight through a crack in the kitchen door of the Prince's broad
shoulders filling up Fritzing's sitting-room. From that moment
Annalise swooned from one depth of respect and awe to the other. She
became breathlessly willing, meek to vanishing point. But Priscilla
could not forget all she had made her suffer; and the Prince, who had
thought of everything, suddenly producing her head woman from some
recess in Baker's Farm, where she too had spent the night, Annalise
was superseded, her further bitter fate being to be left behind
at Creeper Cottage in the charge of the gentleman with the
cheque-book--who as it chanced was a faddist in food and would allow
nothing more comforting than dried fruits and nuts to darken the
doors--till he should have leisure to pack her up and send her home.
As for Emma, she was hunted out by that detective who travelled down
into Somersetshire with the fugitives and who had already been so
useful to the Prince; and Priscilla, desperately anxious to make
amends wherever she could, took her into her own household, watching
over her herself, seeing to it that no word of what she had done was
ever blown about among the crowd of idle tongues, and she ended, I
believe, by marrying a lacquey,--one of those splendid persons with
white silk calves who were so precious in the sight of Annalise.
Indeed I am not sure that it was not the very lacquey Annalise had
loved most and had intended to marry herself. In this story at least,
the claims of poetic justice shall be strictly attended to; and
Annalise had sniffed outrageously at Emma.
As for the Countess Disthal, she married the doctor and was sorry ever
afterwards; but her sorrow was as nothing compared with his.
As for Fritzing, he is _Hofbibliothekar_ of the Prince's father's
court library; a court more brilliant than and a library vastly
inferior to the one he had fled from at Kunitz. He keeps much in his
rooms, and communes almost exclusively with the dead. He finds the
dead alone truly satisfactory. Priscilla loves him still and will
always love him, but she is very busy and has little time to think.
She does not let him give her children lessons; instead he plays with
them, and grows old and patient apace.
And now having finished my story, there is nothing left for me to
do but stand aside and watch Priscilla and her husband walking
hand-in-hand farther and farther away from me up a path which I
suppose is the path of glory, into something apparently golden and
rosy, something very glowing and full of promise, that turns out on
closer scrutiny to be their future. It certainly seems radiant enough
to the superficial observer. Even I, who have looked into her soul
and known its hungers, am a little dazzled. Let it not however be
imagined that a person who has been truthful so long as myself is
going to lapse into easy lies at the last, and pretend that she was
uninterruptedly satisfied and happy for the rest of her days. She was
not; but then who is?