The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight Part 31

"I admit I permitted the immediate, the pa.s.sing, 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, flus.h.i.+ng. "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."

XX

The only inhabitant of Creeper Cottage who slept that night was Annalise. Priscilla spent it walking up and down her bedroom, and Fritzing on the other side of the wall spent it walking up and down his. They could hear each other doing it; it was a melancholy sound.

Once Priscilla was seized with laughter--a not very genial mirth, but still laughter--and had to fling herself on her bed and bury her face in the pillows lest Fritzing should hear so blood-curdling a noise. It was when their steps had fallen steadily together for several turns and the church clock, just as she was noticing this, had struck three.

Not for this, to tramp up and down their rooms all night, not for this had they left Kunitz. The thought of all they had dreamed life in Creeper Cottage was going to be, of all they had never doubted it was going to be, of peaceful nights pa.s.sed in wholesome slumber, of days laden with fruitful works, of evenings with the poets, came into her head and made this tormented marching suddenly seem intensely droll.

She laughed into her pillow till the tears rolled down her face, and the pains she had to take to keep all sounds from reaching Fritzing only made her laugh more.

It was a windy night, and the wind sighed round the cottage and rattled the cas.e.m.e.nts and rose every now and then to a howl very dreary to hear. While Priscilla was laughing a great gust shook the house, and involuntarily she raised her head to listen. It died away, and her head dropped back on to her arms again, but the laughter was gone. She lay solemn enough, listening to Fritzing's creakings, and thought of the past day and of the days to come till her soul grew cold. Surely she was a sort of poisonous weed, fatal to every one about her? Fritzing, Tussie, the poor girl Emma--oh, it could not be true about Emma. She had lost the money, and was trying to gather courage to come and say so; or she had simply not been able to change it yet. Fritzing had jumped to the conclusion, because nothing had been heard of her all day at home, that she had run away with it.

Priscilla twisted herself about uneasily. It was not the loss of the five pounds that made her twist, bad though that loss was in their utter poverty; it was the thought that if Emma had really run away she, by her careless folly, had driven the girl to ruin. And then Tussie. How dreadful that was. At three in the morning, with the wailing wind rising and falling and the room black with the inky blackness of a moonless October night, the Tussie complication seemed to be gigantic, of a quite appalling size, threatening to choke her, to crush all the spring and youth out of her. If Tussie got well she was going to break his heart; if Tussie died it would be her fault.

No one but herself was responsible for his illness, her own selfish, hateful self. Yes, she was a poisonous weed; a baleful, fatal thing, not fit for great undertakings, not fit for a n.o.ble life, too foolish to depart successfully from the lines laid down for her by other people; wickedly careless; shamefully shortsighted; spoiling, ruining, everything she touched. Priscilla writhed. n.o.body likes being forced to recognize that they are poisonous weeds. Even to be a plain weed is grievous to one's vanity, but to be a weed and poisonous as well is a very desperate thing to be. She pa.s.sed a dreadful night. It was the worst she could remember.

And the evening too--how bad it had been; though contrary to her expectations Fritzing showed no desire to fight Tussie. He was not so unreasonable as she had supposed; and besides, he was too completely beaten down by the ever-increasing weight and number of his responsibilities to do anything in regard to that unfortunate youth but be sorry for him. More than once that evening he looked at Priscilla in silent wonder at the amount of trouble one young woman could give. How necessary, he thought, and how wise was that plan at which he used in his ignorance to rail, of setting an elderly female like the Disthal to control the actions and dog the footsteps of the Priscillas of this world. He hated the Disthal and all women like her, women with mountainous bodies and minimal brains--bodies self-indulged into shapelessness, brains neglected into disappearance; but the n.o.bler and simpler and the more generous the girl the more did she need some such mixture of fleshliness and cunning constantly with her.

It seemed absurd, and it seemed all wrong; yet surely it was so. He pondered over it long in dejected musings, the fighting tendency gone out of him completely for the time, so dark was his spirit with the shadows of the future.

They had borrowed the wages--it was a dreadful moment--for that day's cook from Annalise. For their food they decided to run up a bill at the store; but every day each fresh cook would have to be paid, and every day her wages would have to be lent by Annalise. Annalise lent superbly; with an air as of giving freely, with joy. All she required was the Princess's signature to a memorandum drawn up by herself by which she was promised the money back, doubled, within three months.

Priscilla read this, flushed to her hair, signed, and ordered her out of the room. Annalise, who was beginning to enjoy herself, went upstairs singing. In the parlour Priscilla broke the pen she had signed with into quite small pieces and flung them on to the fire,--a useless demonstration, but then she was a quick-tempered young lady.

In the attic Annalise sat down and wrote a letter breathing lofty sentiments to the Countess Disthal in Kunitz, telling her she could no longer keep silence in the face of a royal parent's anxieties and she was willing to reveal the address of the Princess Priscilla and so staunch the bleeding of a n.o.ble heart if the Grand Duke would forward her or forward to her parents on her behalf the sum of twenty thousand marks. Gladly would she render this service, which was at the same time her duty, for nothing, if she had not the future to consider and an infirm father. Meanwhile she gave the Symford post-office as an address, a.s.suring the Countess that it was at least fifty miles from the Princess's present hiding-place, the address of which would only be sent on the conditions named. Then, immensely proud of her cleverness, she trotted down to the post-office, bought stamps, and put the letter herself in the box.

That evening she sang in the kitchen, she sang in the bath-room, she sang in the attic and on the stairs to the attic. What she sang, persistently, over and over again, and loudest outside Fritzing's door, was a German song about how beautiful it is at evening when the bells ring one to rest, and the refrain at the end of each verse was ding-dong twice repeated. Priscilla rang her own bell, unable to endure it, but Annalise did not consider this to be one of those that are beautiful and did not answer it till it had been rung three times.

"Do not sing," said Priscilla, when she appeared.

"Your Grand Ducal Highness objects?"

Priscilla turned red. "I'll give no reasons," she said icily. "Do not sing."

"Yet it is a sign of a light heart. Your Grand Ducal Highness did not like to see me weep--she should the more like to hear me rejoice."

"You can go."

"My heart to-night is light, because I am the means of being of use to your Grand Ducal Highness, of showing my devotion, of being of service."

"Do me the service of being quiet."

Annalise curtseyed and withdrew, and spent the rest of the evening bursting into spasmodic and immediately interrupted song,--breaking off after a few bars with a cough of remembrance and apology. When this happened Fritzing and Priscilla looked at each other with grave and meditative eyes; they knew how completely they were in her power.

Fritzing wrote that night to the friend in London who had engaged the rooms for him at Baker's Farm, and asked him to lend him fifty pounds for a week,--preferably three hundred (this would cover the furnisher's bill), but if he could lend neither five would do. The friend, a teacher of German, could as easily have lent the three hundred as the five, so poor was he, so fit an object for a loan himself; but long before his letter explaining this in words eloquent of regret (for he was a loyal friend) reached Fritzing, many things had happened to that bewildered man to whom so many things had happened already, and caused him to forget both his friend and his request.

This, then, was how the afternoon and evening of Thursday were pa.s.sed; and on Friday morning, quite unstrung by their sleepless night, Priscilla and Fritzing were proposing to go up together on to the moor, there to seek width and freshness, be blown upon by moist winds, and forget for a little the crus.h.i.+ng narrowness and perplexities of Creeper Cottage, when Mrs. Morrison walked in. She opened the door first and then, when half of her was inside, knocked with her knuckles, which were the only things to knock with on Priscilla's simple door.

Priscilla was standing by the fire dressed to go out, waiting for Fritzing, and she stared at this apparition in great and unconcealed surprise. What business, said Priscilla's look more plainly than any words, what business had people to walk into other people's cottages in such a manner? She stood quite still, and scrutinized Mrs. Morrison with the questioning expression she used to find so effective in Kunitz days when confronted by a person inclined to forget which, exactly, was his proper place. But Mrs. Morrison knew nothing of Kunitz, and the look lost half its potency without its impressive background. Besides, the lady was not one to notice things so slight as looks; to keep her in her proper place you would have needed sledge-hammers. She came in without thinking it necessary to wait to be asked to, nodded something that might perhaps have represented a greeting and of which Priscilla took no notice, and her face was the face of somebody who is angry.

"How wearing for the vicar," thought Priscilla, "to have a wife who is angry at ten o'clock in the morning."

"I've come in the interests--" began Mrs. Morrison, whose voice was quite as angry as her face.

"I'm just going out," said Priscilla.

"--Of religion and morality."

"Are they distinct?" asked Priscilla, drawing on her gloves.

"You can imagine that nothing would make me pay you a visit but the strongest sense of the duty I owe to my position in the parish."

"Why should I imagine it?"

"Of course I expect impertinence."

"I'm afraid you've come here to be rude."

"I shall not be daunted by anything you may say from doing my duty."

"Will you please do it, then, and get it over?"

"The duties of a clergyman's wife are often very disagreeable."

"Probably you've got hold of a perfectly wrong idea of what yours really are."

"It is a new experience for me to be told so by a girl of your age."

"I am not telling you. I only suggest."

"I was prepared for rudeness."

"Then why did you come?"

"How long are you going to stay in this parish?"