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The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight

by Elizabeth Von Arnim · English · Gutenberg #13141 · 452,368 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim


        
Release date: August 8, 2004 [eBook #13141]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13141

Credits: E-text prepared by Cally Soukup, Janet Kegg, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCESS PRISCILLA'S FORTNIGHT ***

Editorial note: We now know that "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" was
                written by Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941). Born Mary
                Annette Beauchamp in Australia, she grew up in England
                and married a German, Count Henning August von
                Arnim-Schlagenthin. After the couple moved to his country
                estate she began writing children's books. Many of her
                early books were published "By the Author of 'Elizabeth
                and Her German Garden'," and later she published as
                simply "Elizabeth."





THE PRINCESS PRISCILLA'S FORTNIGHT

BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"

1905







     "Oft habe ich die Welt durchwandert, und habe immer
   gesehen, wie das Grosse am Kleinlichen scheitert, und das
   Edle von dem ätzenden Gift des Alltäglichen zerfressen wird."
                          FRITZING, "Erlebtes und Erlittenes."






I


Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz was
up to the age of twenty-one a most promising young lady. She was not
only poetic in appearance beyond the habit of princesses but she was
also of graceful and appropriate behaviour. She did what she was told;
or, more valuable, she did what was expected of her without being
told. Her father, in his youth and middle age a fiery man, now an
irritable old gentleman who liked good food and insisted on strictest
etiquette, was proud of her on those occasions when she happened to
cross his mind. Her mother, by birth an English princess of an
originality uncomfortable and unexpected in a royal lady that
continued to the end of her life to crop up at disconcerting moments,
died when Priscilla was sixteen. Her sisters, one older and one
younger than herself, were both far less pleasing to look upon than
she was, and much more difficult to manage; yet each married a
suitable prince and each became a credit to her House, while as for
Priscilla,--well, as for Priscilla, I propose to describe her dreadful
conduct.

But first her appearance. She was well above the average height of
woman; a desirable thing in a princess, who, before everything, must
impress the public with her dignity. She had a long pointed chin, and
a sweet mouth with full lips that looked most kind. Her nose was not
quite straight, one side of it being the least bit different from the
other,--a slight crookedness that gave her face a charm absolutely
beyond the reach of those whose features are what is known as
chiselled. Her skin was of that fairness that freckles readily in hot
summers or on winter days when the sun shines brightly on the snow, a
delicate soft skin that is seen sometimes with golden eyelashes and
eyebrows, and hair that is more red than gold. Priscilla had these
eyelashes and eyebrows and this hair, and she had besides beautiful
grey-blue eyes--calm pools of thought, the court poet called them,
when her having a birthday compelled him to official raptures; and
because everybody felt sure they were not really anything of the kind
the poet's utterance was received with acclamations. Indeed, a
princess who should possess such pools would be most undesirable--in
Lothen-Kunitz nothing short of a calamity; for had they not had one
already? It was what had been the matter with the deceased Grand
Duchess; she would think, and no one could stop her, and her life in
consequence was a burden to herself and to everybody else at her
court. Priscilla, however, was very silent. She had never expressed an
opinion, and the inference was that she had no opinion to express. She
had not criticized, she had not argued, she had been tractable,
obedient, meek. Yet her sisters, who had often criticized and argued,
and who had rarely been obedient and never meek, became as I have said
the wives of appropriate princes, while Priscilla,--well, he who runs
may read what it was that Priscilla became.

But first as to where she lived. The Grand Duchy of Lothen-Kunitz lies
in the south of Europe; that smiling region of fruitful plains,
forest-clothed hills, and broad rivers. It is one of the first places
Spring stops at on her way up from Italy; and Autumn, coming down from
the north sunburnt, fruit-laden, and blest, goes slowly when she
reaches it, lingering there with her serenity and ripeness, her calm
skies and her windless days long after the Saxons and Prussians have
lit their stoves and got out their furs. There figs can be eaten off
the trees in one's garden, and vineyards glow on the hillsides. There
the people are Catholics, and the Protestant pastor casts no shadow of
a black gown across life. There as you walk along the white roads, you
pass the image of the dead Christ by the wayside; mute reminder to
those who would otherwise forget of the beauty of pitifulness and
love. And there, so near is Kunitz to the soul of things, you may any
morning get into the train after breakfast and in the afternoon find
yourself drinking coffee in the cool colonnades of the Piazza San
Marco at Venice.

Kunitz is the capital of the duchy, and the palace is built on a hill.
It is one of those piled-up buildings of many windows and turrets and
battlements on which the tourist gazes from below as at the
realization of a childhood's dream. A branch of the river Loth winds
round the base of the hill, separating the ducal family from the
red-roofed town along its other bank. Kunitz stretches right round the
hill, lying clasped about its castle like a necklet of ancient stones.
At the foot of the castle walls the ducal orchards and kitchen gardens
begin, continuing down to the water's edge and clothing the base of
the hill in a garment of blossom and fruit. No fairer sight is to be
seen than the glimpse of these grey walls and turrets rising out of a
cloud of blossom to be had by him who shall stand in the market place
of Kunitz and look eastward up the narrow street on a May morning; and
if he who gazes is a dreamer he could easily imagine that where the
setting of life is so lovely its days must of necessity be each like a
jewel, of perfect brightness and beauty.

The Princess Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the
life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by
lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too
many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a
hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a
perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to
the conduct to be expected of princesses, a perpetual pretending not
to see that the service offered was sheerest lip-service, a perpetual
shutting of the eyes to hypocrisy and grasping selfishness. Conceive,
you tourist full of illusions standing free down there in the market
place, the frightfulness of never being alone a moment from the time
you get out of bed to the time you get into it again. Conceive the
deadly patience needed to stand passive and be talked to, amused,
taken care of, all day long for years. Conceive the intolerableness,
if you are at all sensitive, of being watched by eyes so sharp and
prying, so eager to note the least change of expression and to use the
conclusions drawn for personal ends that nothing, absolutely nothing,
escapes them. Priscilla's sisters took all these things as a matter of
course, did not care in the least how keenly they were watched and
talked over, never wanted to be alone, liked being fussed over by
their ladies-in-waiting. They, happy girls, had thick skins. But
Priscilla was a dreamer of dreams, a poet who never wrote poems, but
whose soul though inarticulate was none the less saturated with the
desires and loves from which poems are born. She, like her sisters,
had actually known no other states; but then she dreamed of them
continuously, she desired them continuously, she read of them
continuously; and though there was only one person who knew she did
these things I suppose one person is enough in the way of
encouragement if your mind is bent on rebellion. This old person,
cause of all the mischief that followed, for without his help
I do not see what Priscilla could have done, was the ducal
librarian--_Hofbibliothekar_, head, and practically master of the
wonderful collection of books and manuscripts whose mere catalogue
made learned mouths in distant parts of Europe water and learned lungs
sigh in hopeless envy. He too had officials under him, but they were
unlike the others: meek youths, studious and short-sighted, whose
business as far as Priscilla could see was to bow themselves out
silently whenever she and her lady-in-waiting came in. The librarian's
name was Fritzing; plain Herr Fritzing originally, but gradually by
various stages at last arrived at the dignity and sonorousness of Herr
Geheimarchivrath Fritzing. The Grand Duke indeed had proposed to
ennoble him after he had successfully taught Priscilla English
grammar, but Fritzing, whose spirit dwelt among the Greeks, could not
be brought to see any desirability in such a step. Priscilla called
him Fritzi when her lady-in-waiting dozed; dearest Fritzi sometimes
even, in the heat of protest or persuasion. But afterwards, leaving
the room as solemnly as she had come in, followed by her wide-awake
attendant, she would nod a formally gracious "Good afternoon, Herr
Geheimrath," for all the world as though she had been talking that way
the whole time. The Countess (her lady-in-waiting was the Countess
Irmgard von Disthal, an ample slow lady, the unmarried daughter of a
noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily--or unluckily--for
Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers)
would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted,
and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in
shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular
completeness a sniff of scorn. Her frigidity was perfectly justified.
Was she not a _hochgeboren_, a member of an ancient house, of luminous
pedigree as far back as one could possibly see? And was he not the son
of an obscure Westphalian farmer, a person who in his youth had sat
barefoot watching pigs? It is true he had learning, and culture, and a
big head with plenty of brains in it, and the Countess Disthal had a
small head, hardly any brains, no soul to speak of, and no education.
This, I say, is true; but it is also neither here nor there. The
Countess was the Countess, and Fritzing was a nobody, and the
condescension she showed him was far more grand ducal than anything in
that way that Priscilla could or ever did produce.

Fritzing, unusually gifted, and enterprising from the first--which
explains the gulf between pig-watching and _Hofbibliothekar_--had
spent ten years in Paris and twenty in England in various capacities,
but always climbing higher in the world of intellect, and had come
during this climbing to speak English quite as well as most
Englishmen, if in a statelier, Johnsonian manner. At fifty he began
his career in Kunitz, and being a lover of children took over the
English education of the three princesses; and now that they had long
since learned all they cared to know, and in Priscilla's case all of
grammar at least that he had to teach, he invented a talent for
drawing in Priscilla, who could not draw a straight line, much less a
curved one, so that she should still be able to come to the library as
often as she chose on the pretext of taking a drawing-lesson. The
Grand Duke's idea about his daughters was that they should know a
little of everything and nothing too well; and if Priscilla had said
she wanted to study Shakespeare with the librarian he would have
angrily forbidden it. Had she not had ten years for studying
Shakespeare? To go on longer than that would mean that she was eager,
and the Grand Duke loathed an eager woman.

But he had nothing to say against a little drawing; and it was during
the drawing-lessons of the summer Priscilla was twenty-one that the
Countess Disthal slept so peacefully. The summer was hot, and the vast
room cool and quiet. The time was three o'clock--immediately, that is,
after luncheon. Through the narrow open windows sweet airs and scents
came in from the bright world outside. Sometimes a bee would wander up
from the fruit-gardens below, and lazily drone round shady corners.
Sometimes a flock of pigeons rose swiftly in front of the windows,
with a flash of shining wings. Every quarter of an hour the cathedral
clock down in the town sent up its slow chime. Voices of people
boating on the river floated up too, softened to melodiousness. Down
at the foot of the hill the red roofs of the town glistened in the
sun. Beyond them lay the sweltering cornfields. Beyond them forests
and villages. Beyond them a blue line of hills. Beyond them, said
Priscilla to herself, freedom. She sat in her white dress at a table
in one of the deep windows, her head on its long slender neck, where
the little rings of red-gold hair curled so prettily, bent over the
drawing-board, her voice murmuring ceaselessly, for time was short and
she had a great many things to say. At her side sat Fritzing,
listening and answering. Far away in the coolest, shadiest corner of
the room slumbered the Countess. She was lulled by the murmured talk
as sweetly as by the drone of the bee.

"Your Grand Ducal Highness receives many criticisms and much advice on
the subject of drawing from the Herr Geheimrath?" she said one day,
after a lesson during which she had been drowsily aware of much talk.

"The Herr Geheimrath is most conscientious," said Priscilla in the
stately, it-has-nothing-to-do-with-you sort of tone she found most
effectual with the Countess; but she added a request under her breath
that the _lieber Gott_ might forgive her, for she knew she had told a
fib.

Indeed, the last thing that Fritzing was at this convulsed period of
his life was what his master would have called conscientious. Was he
not encouraging the strangest, wickedest, wildest ideas in the
Princess? Strange and wicked and wild that is from the grand ducal
point of view, for to Priscilla they seemed all sweetness and light.
Fritzing had a perfect horror of the Grand Duke. He was everything
that Fritzing, lean man of learning, most detested. The pleasantest
fashion of describing the Grand Duke will be simply to say that he was
in all things, both of mind and body, the exact opposite of Fritzing.
Fritzing was a man who spent his time ignoring his body and digging
away at his mind. You know the bony aspect of such men. Hardly ever is
there much flesh on them; and though they are often ugly enough, their
spirit blazes at you out of wonderful eyes. I call him old Fritzing,
for he was sixty. To me he seemed old; to Priscilla at twenty he
seemed coeval with pyramids and kindred hoarinesses; while to all
those persons who were sixty-one he did not seem old at all. Only two
things could have kept this restless soul chained to the service of
the Grand Duke, and those two things were the unique library and
Priscilla. For the rest, his life at Kunitz revolted him. He loathed
the etiquette and the fuss and the intrigues of the castle. He loathed
each separate lady-in-waiting, and every one of the male officials. He
loathed the vulgar abundance and inordinate length and frequency of
the meals, when down in the town he knew there were people a-hungered.
He loathed the lacqueys with a quite peculiar loathing, scowling at
them from under angry eyebrows as he passed from his apartment to the
library; yet such is the power of an independent and scornful spirit
that though they had heard all about Westphalia and the pig-days never
once had they, who made insolence their study, dared be rude to him.

Priscilla wanted to run away. This, I believe, is considered an awful
thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody's wife. If it
were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of
Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would
not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she would
surely have gone. So bad is it held to be that even a housemaid who
runs is unfailingly pursued by maledictions more or less definite
according to the education of those she has run from; and a wife who
runs is pursued by social ruin, it being taken for granted that she
did not run alone. I know at least two wives who did run alone. Far
from wanting yet another burden added to them by adding to their lives
yet another man, they were anxiously endeavouring to get as far as
might be from the man they had got already. The world, foul hag with
the downcast eyes and lascivious lips, could not believe it possible,
and was quick to draw its dark mantle of disgrace over their shrinking
heads. One of them, unable to bear this, asked her husband's pardon.
She was a weak spirit, and now lives prostrate days, crushed beneath
the unchanging horror of a husband's free forgiveness. The other took
a cottage and laughed at the world. Was she not happy at last, and
happy in the right way? I go to see her sometimes, and we eat the
cabbages she has grown herself. Strange how the disillusioned find
their peace in cabbages.

Priscilla, then, wanted to run away. What is awful in a housemaid and
in anybody's wife became in her case stupendous. The spirit that could
resolve it, decide to do it without being dragged to it by such things
as love or passion, calmly looking the risks and losses in the face,
and daring everything to free itself, was, it must be conceded, at
least worthy of respect. Fritzing thought it worthy of adoration; the
divinest spirit that had ever burned within a woman. He did not
say so. On the contrary, he was frightened, and tried angrily,
passionately, to dissuade. Yet he knew that if she wavered he would
never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into
those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes
sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps. Priscilla never dreamed of
wavering. She, most poetic of princesses, made apparently of ivory and
amber, outwardly so cool and serene and gentle, was inwardly on fire.
The fire, I should add, burnt with a very white flame. Nothing in
the shape of a young man had ever had the stoking of it. It was
that whitest of flames that leaps highest at the thought of
abstractions--freedom, beauty of life, simplicity, and the rest. This,
I would remark, is a most rare light to find burning in a woman's
breast. What she was, however, Fritzing had made her. True the
material had been extraordinarily good, and for ten years he had
done as he liked with it. Beginning with the simpler poems of
Wordsworth--he detested them, but they were better than soiling her
soul with Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans--those lessons in English
literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to
her sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done
to the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz. With that good
teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the
splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages,
communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they lived,
and none, not one, lived and talked as they lived and talked at
Kunitz.

Imagine a girl influenced for ten years, ten of her softest most
wax-like years, by a Fritzing, taught to love freedom, to see the
beauty of plain things, of quietness, of the things appertaining to
the spirit, taught to see how ignoble it is, how intensely, hopelessly
vulgar to spend on one's own bodily comforts more than is exactly
necessary, taught to see a vision of happiness possible only to those
who look to their minds for their joys and not to their bodies,
imagine how such a girl, hearing these things every afternoon almost
of her life, would be likely to regard the palace mornings and
evenings, the ceremonies and publicity, all those hours spent as
though she were a celebrated picture, forced everlastingly to stand in
an attitude considered appropriate and smile while she was being
looked at.

"No one," she said one day to Fritzing, "who hasn't himself been a
princess can have the least idea of what it is like."

"Ma'am, it would be more correct to say herself in place of himself."

"Well, they can't," said Priscilla.

"Ma'am, to begin a sentence with the singular and continue it with the
plural is an infraction of all known rules."

"But the sentiments, Fritzi--what do you think of the sentiments?"

"Alas, ma'am, they too are an infraction of rules."

"What is not in this place, I should like to know?" sighed Priscilla,
her chin on her hand, her eyes on that distant line of hills beyond
which, she told herself, lay freedom.

She had long ago left off saying it only to herself. I think she must
have been about eighteen when she took to saying it aloud to Fritzing.
At first, before he realized to what extent she was sick for freedom,
he had painted in glowing colours the delights that lay on the other
side of the hills, or for that matter on this side of them if you were
alone and not a princess. Especially had he dwelt on the glories of
life in England, glories attainable indeed only by the obscure such as
he himself had been, and for ever impossible to those whom Fate
obliges to travel in state carriages and special trains. Then he had
come to scent danger and had grown wary; trying to put her off with
generalities, such as the inability of human beings to fly from their
own selves, and irrelevancies such as the amount of poverty and
wretchedness to be observed in the east of London; refusing to discuss
France, which she was always getting to as the first step towards
England, except in as far as it was a rebellious country that didn't
like kings; pointing out with no little temper that she had already
seen England; and finishing by inquiring very snappily when her Grand
Ducal Highness intended to go on with her drawing.

Now what Priscilla had seen of England had been the insides of
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; of all insides surely the most
august. To and from these she had been conveyed in closed carriages
and royal trains, and there was so close a family likeness between
them and Kunitz that to her extreme discomfort she had felt herself
completely at home. Even the presence of the Countess Disthal had not
been wanting. She therefore regarded this as not seeing England at
all, and said so. Fritzing remarked tartly that it was a way of seeing
it most English people would envy her; and she was so unable to
believe him that she said Nonsense.

But lately her desires had taken definite shape so rapidly that he had
come to dread the very word hill and turn cold at the name of England.
He was being torn in different directions; for he was, you see, still
trying to do what other people had decided was his duty, and till a
man gives up doing that he will certainly be torn. How great would be
the temptation to pause here and consider the mangled state of such a
man, the wounds and weakness he will suffer from, and how his soul
will have to limp through life, if it were not that I must get on with
Priscilla.

One day, after many weeks of edging nearer to it, of going all round
it yet never quite touching it, she took a deep breath and told him
she had determined to run away. She added an order that he was to help
her. With her most grand ducal air she merely informed, ordered, and
forbade. What she forbade, of course, was the betrayal of her plans.
"You may choose," she said, "between the Grand Duke and myself. If you
tell him, I have done with you for ever."

Of course he chose Priscilla.

His agonies now were very great. Those last lacerations of conscience
were terrific. Then, after nights spent striding, a sudden calm fell
upon him. At length he could feel what he had always seen, that there
could not be two duties for a man, that no man can serve two masters,
that a man's one clear duty is to be in the possession of his soul and
live the life it approves: in other and shorter words, instead of
leading Priscilla, Priscilla was now leading him.

She did more than lead him; she drove him. The soul he had so
carefully tended and helped to grow was now grown stronger than his
own; for there was added to its natural strength the tremendous daring
of absolute inexperience. What can be more inexperienced than a
carefully guarded young princess? Priscilla's ignorance of the outside
world was pathetic. He groaned over her plans--for it was she who
planned and he who listened--and yet he loved them. She was a divine
woman, he said to himself; the sweetest and noblest, he was certain,
that the world would ever see.

Her plans were these:

First, that having had twenty-one years of life at the top of the
social ladder she was now going to get down and spend the next
twenty-one at the bottom of it. (Here she gave her reasons, and I will
not stop to describe Fritzing's writhings as his own past teachings
grinned at him through every word she said.)

Secondly, that the only way to get to the bottom being to run away
from Kunitz, she was going to run.

Thirdly, that the best and nicest place for living at the bottom would
be England. (Here she explained her conviction that beautiful things
grow quite naturally round the bottom of ladders that cannot easily
reach the top; flowers of self-sacrifice and love, of temperance,
charity, godliness--delicate things, with roots that find their
nourishment in common soil. You could not, said Priscilla, expect soil
at the top of ladders, could you? And as she felt that she too had
roots full of potentialities, she must take them down to where their
natural sustenance lay waiting.)

Fourthly, they were to live somewhere in the country in England, in
the humblest way.

Fifthly, she was to be his daughter.

"Daughter?" cried Fritzing, bounding in his chair. "Your Grand Ducal
Highness forgets I have friends in England, every one of whom is aware
that I never had a wife."

"Niece, then," said Priscilla.

He gazed at her in silence, trying to imagine her his niece. He had
two sisters, and they had stopped exactly at the point they were at
when they helped him, barefoot, to watch Westphalian pigs. I do not
mean that they had not ultimately left the little farm, gone into
stockings, and married. It is their minds I am thinking of, and these
had never budged. They were like their father, a doomed dullard; while
Fritzing's mother, whom he resembled, had been a rather extraordinary
woman in a rough and barbarous way. He found himself wholly unable to
imagine either of his sisters the mother of this exquisite young lady.

These, then, baldly, were Priscilla's plans. The carrying of them out
was left, she informed him, altogether to Fritzing. After having spent
several anxious days, she told him, considering whether she ought to
dye her hair black in order to escape recognition, or stay her own
colour but disguise herself as a man and buy a golden beard, she had
decided that these were questions Fritzing would settle better than
she could. "I'd dye my hair at once," she said, "but what about my
wretched eyelashes? Can one dye eyelashes?"

Fritzing thought not, and anyhow was decidedly of opinion that her
eyelashes should not be tampered with; I think I have said that they
were very lovely. He also entirely discouraged the idea of dressing as
a man. "Your Grand Ducal Highness would only look like an extremely
conspicuous boy," he assured her.

"I could wear a beard," said Priscilla.

But Fritzing was absolutely opposed to the beard.

As for the money part, she never thought of it. Money was a thing she
never did think about. It also, then, was to be Fritzing's business.
Possibly things might have gone on much longer as they were, with a
great deal of planning and talking, and no doing, if an exceedingly
desirable prince had not signified his intention of marrying
Priscilla. This had been done before by quite a number of princes.
They had, that is, not signified, but implored. On their knees would
they have implored if their knees could have helped them. They were
however all poor, and Priscilla and her sisters were rich; and how
foolish, said the Grand Duke, to marry poor men unless you are poor
yourself. The Grand Duke, therefore, took these young men aside and
crushed them, while Priscilla, indifferent, went on with her drawing.
But now came this one who was so eminently desirable that he had no
need to do more than merely signify. There had been much trouble and a
great deal of delay in finding him a wife, for he had insisted on
having a princess who should be both pretty and not his cousin. Europe
did not seem to contain such a thing. Everybody was his cousin, except
two or three young women whom he was rude enough to call ugly. The
Kunitz princesses had been considered in their turn and set aside, for
they too were cousins; and it seemed as if one of the most splendid
thrones in Europe would either have to go queen-less or be sat upon by
somebody plain, when fate brought the Prince to a great public
ceremony in Kunitz, and he saw Priscilla and fell so violently in love
with her that if she had been fifty times his cousin he would still
have married her.

That same evening he signified his intention to the delighted Grand
Duke, who immediately fell to an irrelevant praising of God.

"Bosh," said the Prince, in the nearest equivalent his mother-tongue
provided.

This was very bad. Not, I mean, that the Prince should have said Bosh,
for he was so great that there was not a Grand Duke in Europe to whom
he might not have said it if he wanted to; but that Priscilla should
have been in imminent danger of marriage. Among Fritzing's many
preachings there had been one, often repeated in the strongest
possible language, that of all existing contemptibilities the very
most contemptible was for a woman to marry any one she did not love;
and the peroration, also extremely forcible, had been an announcement
that the prince did not exist who was fit to tie her shoestrings. This
Priscilla took to be an exaggeration, for she had no very great notion
of her shoestrings; but she did agree with the rest. The subject
however was an indifferent one, her father never yet having asked her
to marry anybody; and so long as he did not do so she need not, she
thought, waste time thinking about it. Now the peril was upon her,
suddenly, most unexpectedly, very menacingly. She knew there was no
hope from the moment she saw her father's face quite distorted by
delight. He took her hand and kissed it. To him she was already a
queen. As usual she gave him the impression of behaving exactly as he
could have wished. She certainly said very little, for she had long
ago learned the art of being silent; but her very silences were
somehow exquisite, and the Grand Duke thought her perfect. She gave
him to understand almost without words that it was a great surprise,
an immense honour, a huge compliment, but so sudden that she would be
grateful to both himself and the Prince if nothing more need be said
about it for a week or two--nothing, at least, till formal
negotiations had been opened. "I saw him yesterday for the first
time," she pleaded, "so naturally I am rather overwhelmed."

Privately she had thought, his eyes, which he had never taken off her,
kind and pleasant; and if she had known of his having said Bosh who
knows but that he might have had a chance? As it was, the moment she
was alone she sent flying for Fritzing. "What," she said, "do you say
to my marrying this man?"

"If you do, ma'am," said Fritzing, and his face seemed one blaze of
white conviction, "you will undoubtedly be eternally lost."




II


They fled on bicycles in the dusk. The goddess Good Luck, who seems to
have a predilection for sinners, helped them in a hundred ways.
Without her they would certainly not have got far, for both were very
ignorant of the art of running away. Once flight was decided on
Fritzing planned elaborately and feverishly, got things thought out
and arranged as well as he, poor harassed man, possibly could. But
what in this law-bound world can sinners do without the help of Luck?
She, amused and smiling dame, walked into the castle and smote the
Countess Disthal with influenza, crushing her down helpless into her
bed, and holding her there for days by the throat. While one hand was
doing this, with the other she gaily swept the Grand Duke into East
Prussia, a terrific distance, whither, all unaware of how he was being
trifled with, he thought he was being swept by an irresistible desire
to go, before the business of Priscilla's public betrothal should
begin, and shoot the roebucks of a friend.

The Countess was thrust into her bed at noon of a Monday in October.
At three the Grand Duke started for East Prussia, incognito in a
motor--you know the difficulty news has in reaching persons in
motors. At four one of Priscilla's maids, an obscure damsel who had
been at the mercy of the others and was chosen because she hated them,
tripped out of the castle with shining eyes and pockets heavy with
bribes, and caused herself to be whisked away by the afternoon express
to Cologne. At six, just as the castle guard was being relieved, two
persons led their bicycles through the archway and down across the
bridge. It was dark, and nobody recognized them. Fritzing was got up
sportingly, almost waggishly--heaven knows his soul was not feeling
waggish--as differently as possible from his usual sober clothes.
Somehow he reminded Priscilla of a circus, and she found it extremely
hard not to laugh. On his head he had a cap with ear-pieces that hid
his grey hair; round his neck a gaudy handkerchief muffled well about
his face; immense goggles cloaked the familiar overhanging eyebrows
and deep-set eyes, goggles curiously at variance with the dapper
briskness of his gaitered legs. The Princess was in ordinary blue
serge, short and rather shabby, it having been subjected for hours
daily during the past week to rough treatment by the maid now
travelling to Cologne. As for her face and hair, they were completely
hidden in the swathings of a motor-veil.

The sentinels stared rather as these two figures pushed their bicycles
through the gates, and undoubtedly did for some time afterwards wonder
who they could have been. The same thing happened down below on the
bridge; but once over that and in the town all they had to do was to
ride straight ahead. They were going to bicycle fifteen miles to Rühl,
a small town with a railway station on the main line between Kunitz
and Cologne. Express trains do not stop at Rühl, but there was a slow
train at eight which would get them to Gerstein, the capital of the
next duchy, by midnight. Here they would change into the Cologne
express; here they would join the bribed maid; here luggage had been
sent by Fritzing,--a neat bag for himself, and a neat box for his
niece. The neat box was filled with neat garments suggested to him by
the young lady in the shop in Gerstein where he had been two days
before to buy them. She told him of many other articles which, she
said, no lady's wardrobe could be considered complete without; and the
distracted man, fearing the whole shop would presently be put into
trunks and sent to the station to meet them, had ended by flinging
down two notes for a hundred marks each and bidding her keep strictly
within that limit. The young lady became very scornful. She told him
that she had never heard of any one being clothed from head to foot
inside and out, even to brushes, soap, and an umbrella, for two
hundred marks. Fritzing, in dread of conspicuous masses of luggage,
yet staggered by the girl's conviction, pulled out a third hundred
mark note, but added words in his extremity of so strong and final a
nature, that she, quailing, did keep within this limit, and the box
was packed. Thus Priscilla's outfit cost almost exactly fifteen
pounds. It will readily be imagined that it was neat.

Painfully the two fugitives rode through the cobbled streets of
Kunitz. Priscilla was very shaky on a bicycle, and so was Fritzing.
Some years before this, when it had been the fashion, she had bicycled
every day in the grand ducal park on the other side of the town. Then,
tired of it, she had given it up; and now for the last week or two,
ever since Fritzing had told her that if they fled it would have to be
on bicycles, she had pretended a renewed passion for it, riding every
day round and round a circle of which the chilled and astonished
Countess Disthal, whose duty it was to stand and watch, had been the
disgusted central point. But the cobbles of Kunitz are very different
from those smooth places in the park. All who bicycle round Kunitz
know them as trying to the most skilful. Naturally, then, the
fugitives advanced very slowly, Fritzing's heart in his mouth each
time they passed a brightly-lit shop or a person who looked at them.
Conceive how nearly this poor heart must have jumped right out of his
mouth, leaving him dead, when a policeman who had been watching them
strode suddenly into the middle of the street, put up his hand, and
said, "Halt."

Fritzing, unstrung man, received a shock so awful that he obeyed by
falling off. Priscilla, wholly unused to being told to halt and
absorbed by the difficulties of the way, did not grasp that the order
was meant for her and rode painfully on. Seeing this, the policeman
very gallantly removed her from her bicycle by putting his arms round
her and lifting her off. He set her quite gently on her feet, and was
altogether a charming policeman, as unlike those grim and ghastly eyes
of the law that glare up and down the streets of, say, Berlin, as it
is possible to imagine.

But Priscilla was perfectly molten with rage, insulted as she had
never been in her life. "How dare you--how dare you," she stammered,
suffocating; and forgetting everything but an overwhelming desire to
box the giant's ears she had actually raised her hand to do it, which
would of course have been the ruin of her plan and the end of my tale,
when Fritzing, recovering his presence of mind, cried out in tones of
unmistakable agony, "Niece, be calm."

She calmed at once to a calm of frozen horror.

"Now, sir," said Fritzing, assuming an air of brisk bravery and
guiltlessness, "what can we do for you?"

"Light your lamps," said the policeman, laconically.

They did; or rather Fritzing did, while Priscilla stood passive.

"I too have a niece," said the policeman, watching Fritzing at work;
"but I light no lamps for her. One should not wait on one's niece.
One's niece should wait on one."

Fritzing did not answer. He finished lighting the lamps, and then
held Priscilla's bicycle and started her.

"I never did that for my niece," said the policeman.

"Confound your niece, sir," was on the tip of Fritzing's tongue; but
he gulped it down, and remarking instead as pleasantly as he could
that being an uncle did not necessarily prevent your being a
gentleman, picked up his bicycle and followed Priscilla.

The policeman shook his head as they disappeared round the corner.
"One does not light lamps for one's niece," he repeated to himself.
"It's against nature. Consequently, though the peppery Fräulein may
well be somebody's niece she is not his."

"Oh," murmured Priscilla, after they had ridden some way without
speaking, "I'm deteriorating already. For the first time in my life
I've wanted to box people's ears."

"The provocation was great, ma'am," said Fritzing, himself shattered
by the spectacle of his Princess being lifted about by a policeman.

"Do you think--" Priscilla hesitated, and looked at him. Her bicycle
immediately hesitated too, and swerving across the road taught her it
would have nothing looked at except its handles. "Do you think," she
went on, after she had got herself straight again, "that the way I'm
going to live now will make me want to do it often?"

"Heaven forbid, ma'am. You are now going to live a most noble
life--the only fitting life for the thoughtful and the earnest. It
will be, once you are settled, far more sheltered from contact with
that which stirs ignoble impulses than anything your Grand Ducal
Highness has hitherto known."

"If you mean policemen by things that stir ignoble impulses," said
Priscilla, "I was sheltered enough from them before. Why, I never
spoke to one. Much less"--she shuddered--"much less ever touched one."

"Ma'am, you do not repent?"

"Heavens, no," said Priscilla, pressing onward.

Outside Rühl, about a hundred yards before its houses begin, there is
a pond by the wayside. Into this, after waiting a moment peering up
and down the dark road to see whether anybody was looking, Fritzing
hurled the bicycles. He knew the pond was deep, for he had studied it
the day he bought Priscilla's outfit; and the two bicycles one after
the other were hurled remorsely into the middle of it, disappearing
each in its turn with a tremendous splash and gurgle. Then they walked
on quickly towards the railway station, infinitely relieved to be on
their own feet again, and between them, all unsuspected, walked the
radiant One with the smiling eyes, she who was half-minded to see this
game through, giving the players just so many frights as would keep
her amused, the fickle, laughing goddess Good Luck.

They caught the train neatly at Rühl. They only had to wait about the
station for ten minutes before it came in. Hardly any one was there,
and nobody took the least notice of them. Fritzing, after a careful
look round to see if it contained people he knew, put the Princess
into a second-class carriage labelled _Frauen_, and then respectfully
withdrew to another part of the train. He had decided that
second-class was safest. People in that country nearly always travel
second-class, especially women,--at all times in such matters more
economical than men; and a woman by herself in a first-class carriage
would have been an object of surmise and curiosity at every station.
Therefore Priscilla was put into the carriage labelled _Frauen_, and
found herself for the first time in her life alone with what she had
hitherto only heard alluded to vaguely as the public.

She sat down in a corner with an odd feeling of surprise at being
included in the category _Frauen_, and giving a swift timid glance
through her veil at the public confronting her was relieved to find it
consisted only of a comfortable mother and her child.

I know not why the adjective comfortable should so invariably be
descriptive of mothers in Germany. In England and France though you
may be a mother, you yet, I believe, may be so without being
comfortable. In Germany, somehow, you can't. Perhaps it is the
climate; perhaps it is the food; perhaps it is simply want of soul, or
that your soul does not burn with a fire sufficiently consuming.
Anyhow it is so. This mother had all the good-nature that goes with
amplitude. Being engaged in feeding her child with _belegte
Brödchen_--that immensely satisfying form of sandwich--she at once
offered Priscilla one.

"No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking into her corner.

"Do take one, Fräulein," said the mother, persuasively.

"No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking.

"On a journey it passes the time. Even if one is not hungry, thank God
one can always eat. Do take one."

"No thank you," said Priscilla.

"Why does she wear that black thing over her face?" inquired the
child. "Is she a witch?"

"Silence, silence, little worthless one," cried the mother,
delightedly stroking his face with half a _Brödchen_. "You see he is
clever, Fräulein. He resembles his dear father as one egg does
another."

"Does he?" said Priscilla, immediately conceiving a prejudice against
the father.

"Why don't she take that black thing off?" said the child.

"Hush, hush, small impudence. The Fräulein will take it off in a
minute. The Fräulein has only just got in."

"Mutti, is she a witch? Mutti, Mutti, is she a witch, Mutti?"

The child, his eyes fixed anxiously on Priscilla's swathed head, began
to whimper.

"That child should be in bed," said Priscilla, with a severity born
of her anxiety lest, to calm him, humanity should force her to put up
her veil. "Persons who are as intelligent as that should never be in
trains at night. Their brains cannot bear it. Would he not be happier
if he lay down and went to sleep?"

"Yes, yes; that is what I have been telling him ever since we left
Kunitz"--Priscilla shivered--"but he will not go. Dost thou hear what
the Fräulein says, Hans-Joachim?"

"Why don't she take that black thing off?" whimpered the child.

But how could the poor Princess, however anxious to be kind, take off
her veil and show her well-known face to this probable inhabitant of
Kunitz?

"Do take it off, Fräulein," begged the mother, seeing she made no
preparations to do so. "When he gets ideas into his head there is
never peace till he has what he wants. He does remind me so much of
his father."

"Did you ever," said Priscilla, temporizing, "try him with a
little--just a little slap? Only a little one," she added hastily, for
the mother looked at her oddly, "only as a sort of counter-irritant.
And it needn't be really hard, you know--"

"_Ach_, she's a witch--Mutti, she's a witch!" shrieked the child,
flinging his face, butter and all, at these portentous words, into his
mother's lap.

"There, there, poor tiny one," soothed the mother, with an indignant
side-glance at Priscilla. "Poor tiny man, no one shall slap thee. The
Fräulein does not allude to thee, little son. The Fräulein is thinking
of bad children such as the sons of Schultz and thy cousin Meyer.
Fräulein, if you do not remove your veil I fear he will have
convulsions."

"Oh," said the unhappy Priscilla, getting as far into her corner as
she could, "I'm so sorry--but I--but I really can't."

"She's a witch, Mutti!" roared the child, "I tell it to thee
again--therefore is she so black, and must not show her face!"

"Hush, hush, shut thy little eyes," soothed the mother, putting her
hand over them. To Priscilla she said, with an obvious dawning of
distrust, "But Fräulein, what reason can you have for hiding
yourself?"

"Hiding myself?" echoed Priscilla, now very unhappy indeed, "I'm not
hiding myself. I've got--I've got--I'm afraid I've got a--an affection
of the skin. That's why I wear a veil."

"_Ach_, poor Fräulein," said the mother, brightening at once into
lively interest. "Hans-Joachim, sleep," she added sharply to her son,
who tried to raise his head to interrupt with fresh doubts a
conversation grown thrilling. "That is indeed a misfortune. It is a
rash?"

"Oh, it's dreadful," said Priscilla, faintly.

"_Ach_, poor Fräulein. When one is married, rashes no longer matter.
One's husband has to love one in spite of rashes. But for a Fräulein
every spot is of importance. There is a young lady of my acquaintance
whose life-happiness was shipwrecked only by spots. She came out in
them at the wrong moment."

"Did she?" murmured Priscilla.

"You are going to a doctor?"

"Yes--that is, no--I've been."

"Ah, you have been to Kunitz to Dr. Kraus?"

"Y--es. I've been there."

"What does he say?"

"That I must always wear a veil."

"Because it looks so bad?"

"I suppose so."

There was a silence. Priscilla lay back in her corner exhausted, and
shut her eyes. The mother stared fixedly at her, one hand mechanically
stroking Hans-Joachim, the other holding him down.

"When I was a girl," said the mother, so suddenly that Priscilla
started, "I had a good deal of trouble with my skin. Therefore my
experience on the subject is great. Show me your face, Fräulein--I
might be able to tell you what to do to cure it."

"Oh, on no account--on no account whatever," cried Priscilla, sitting
up very straight and speaking with extraordinary emphasis. "I couldn't
think of it--I really positively couldn't."

"But my dear Fräulein, why mind a woman seeing it?"

"But what do you want to see it for?"

"I wish to help you."

"I don't want to be helped. I'll show it to nobody--to nobody at all.
It's much too--too dreadful."

"Well, well, do not be agitated. Girls, I know, are vain. If any one
can help you it will be Dr. Kraus. He is an excellent physician, is he
not?"

"Yes," said Priscilla, dropping back into her corner.

"The Grand Duke is a great admirer of his. He is going to ennoble
him."

"Really?"

"They say--no doubt it is gossip, but still, you know, he is a very
handsome man--that the Countess von Disthal will marry him."

"Gracious!" cried Priscilla, startled, "what, whether he wants to or
not?"

"No doubt he will want to. It would be a brilliant match for him."

"But she's at least a hundred. Why, she looks like his mother. And he
is a person of no birth at all."

"Birth? He is of course not noble yet, but his family is excellent.
And since it is not possible to have as many ailments as she has and
still be alive, some at least must be feigned. Why, then, should she
feign if it is not in order to see the doctor? They were saying in
Kunitz that she sent for him this very day."

"Yes, she did. But she's really ill this time. I'm afraid the poor
thing caught cold watching--dear me, only see how sweetly your little
boy sleeps. You should make Levallier paint him in that position."

"Ah, he looks truly lovely, does he not. Exactly thus does his dear
father look when asleep. Sometimes I cannot sleep myself for joy over
the splendid picture. What is the matter with the Countess Disthal?
Did Dr. Kraus tell you?"

"No, no. I--I heard something--a rumour."

"Ah, something feigned again, no doubt. Well, it will be a great match
for him. You know she is lady-in-waiting to the Princess Priscilla,
the one who is so popular and has such red hair? The Countess has an
easy life. The other two Princesses have given their ladies a world of
trouble, but Priscilla--oh, she is a model. Kunitz is indeed proud of
her. They say in all things she is exactly what a Princess should be,
and may be trusted never to say or do anything not entirely fitting
her station. You have seen her? She often drives through the town, and
then the people all run and look as pleased as if it were a holiday.
We in Gerstein are quite jealous. Our duchy has no such princess to
show. Do you think she is so beautiful? I have often seen her, and I
do not think she is. People exaggerate everything so about a princess.
My husband does not admire her at all. He says it is not what he calls
classic. Her hair, for instance--but that one might get over. And
people who are really beautiful always have dark eyelashes. Then her
nose--my husband often laughs, and says her nose--"

"Oh," said Priscilla, faintly, "I've got a dreadful headache. I think
I'll try to sleep a little if you would not mind not talking."

"Yes, that hot thing round your face must be very trying. Now if you
were not so vain--what does a rash matter when only women are present?
Well, well, I will not tease you. Do you know many of the Kunitzers?
Do you know the Levisohns well?"

"Oh," sighed Priscilla, laying her distracted head against the
cushions and shutting her eyes, "who are they?"

"Who are they? Who are the Levisohns? But dearest Fräulein if you know
Kunitz you must know the Levisohns. Why, the Levisohns _are_ Kunitz.
They are more important far than the Grand Duke. They lend to it, and
they lead it. You must know their magnificent shop at the corner of
the Heiligengeiststrasse? Perhaps," she added, with a glance at the
Princess's shabby serge gown, "you have not met them socially, but you
must know the magnificent shop. We visit."

"Do you?" said Priscilla wearily, as the mother paused.

"And you know her story, of course?"

"Oh, oh," sighed Priscilla, turning her head from side to side on the
cushions, vainly seeking peace.

"It is hardly a story for the ears of Fräuleins."

"Please don't tell it, then."

"No, I will not. It is not for Fräuleins. But one still sees she must
have been a handsome woman. And he, Levisohn, was clever enough to see
his way to Court favour. The Grand Duke--"

"I don't think I care to hear about the Levisohns," said Priscilla,
sitting up suddenly and speaking with great distinctness. "Gossip is a
thing I detest. None shall be talked in my presence."

"Hoity-toity," said the astonished mother; and it will easily be
believed that no one had ever said hoity-toity to Priscilla before.

She turned scarlet under her veil. For a moment she sat with flashing
eyes, and the hand lying in her lap twitched convulsively. Is it
possible she was thinking of giving the comfortable mother that
admonition which the policeman had so narrowly escaped? I know not
what would have happened if the merry goddess, seeing things rushing
to this dreadful climax, had not stopped the train in the nick of time
at a wayside station and caused a breathless lady, pushing parcels
before her, to clamber in. The mother's surprised stare was of
necessity diverted to the new-comer. A parcel thrust into Priscilla's
hands brought her back of necessity to her senses.

"_Danke, Danke_," cried the breathless lady, though no help had been
offered; and hoisting herself in she wished both her fellow-passengers
a boisterous good evening. The lady, evidently an able person,
arranged her parcels swiftly and neatly in the racks, pulled up the
windows, slammed the ventilators, stripped off her cloak, flung back
her veil, and sitting down with a sigh of vast depth and length stared
steadily for five minutes without wavering at the other two. At the
end of that time she and the mother began, as with a common impulse,
to talk. And at the end of five minutes more they had told each other
where they were going, where they had been, what their husbands
were, the number, age, and girth of their children, and all the
adjectives that might most conveniently be used to describe their
servants. The adjectives, very lurid ones, took some time.
Priscilla shut her eyes while they were going on, thankful to be
left quiet, feeling unstrung to the last degree; and she gradually
dropped into an uneasy doze whose chief feature was the distressful
repetition, like hammer-strokes on her brain, of the words, "You're
deteriorating--deteriorating--deteriorating."

"_Lieber Gott_," she whispered at last, folding her hands in her lap,
"don't let me deteriorate too much. Please keep me from wanting to box
people's ears. _Lieber Gott_, it's so barbarous of me. I never used to
want to. Please stop me wanting to now."

And after that she dropped off quite, into a placid little slumber.




III


They crossed from Calais in the turbine. Their quickest route would
have been Cologne-Ostend-Dover, and every moment being infinitely
valuable Fritzing wanted to go that way, but Priscilla was determined
to try whether turbines are really as steady as she had heard they
were. The turbine was so steady that no one could have told it was
doing anything but being quiescent on solid earth; but that was
because, as Fritzing explained, there was a dead calm, and in dead
calms--briefly, he explained the conduct of boats in dead calms with
much patience, and Priscilla remarked when he had done that they might
then, after all, have crossed by Ostend.

"We might, ma'am, and we would be in London now if we had," said
Fritzing.

They had, indeed, lost several hours and some money coming by Calais,
and Fritzing had lost his temper as well.

Fritzing, you remember, was sixty, and had not closed his eyes all
night. He had not, so far as that goes, closed his eyes for nights
without number; and what his soul had gone through during those nights
was more than any soul no longer in its first youth should be called
upon to bear. In the train between Cologne and Calais he had even,
writhing in his seat, cursed every single one of his long-cherished
ideals, called them fools, shaken his fist at them; a dreadful state
of mind to get to. He did not reveal anything of this to his dear
Princess, and talking to her on the turbine wore the clear brow of the
philosopher; but he did feel that he was a much-tried man, and he
behaved to the maid Annalise exactly in the way much-tried men do
behave when they have found some one they think defenceless.
Unfortunately Annalise was only apparently defenceless. Fritzing would
have known it if he had been more used to running away. He did, in his
calmer moments, dimly opine it. The plain fact was that Annalise held
both him and Priscilla in the hollow of her hand.

At this point she had not realized it. She still was awestruck by her
promotion, and looked so small and black and uncertain among her new
surroundings on the turbine that if not clever of him it was at least
natural that he should address her in a manner familiar to those who
have had to do with men when they are being tried. He behaved, that
is, to Annalise, as he had behaved to his ideals in the night; he
shook his fist at her, and called her fool. It was because she had
broken the Princess's umbrella. This was the new umbrella bought by
him with so much trouble in Gerstein two days before, and therefore
presumably of a sufficient toughness to stand any reasonable treatment
for a time. There was a mist and a drizzle at Calais, and Priscilla,
refusing to go under shelter, had sent Fritzing to fetch her umbrella,
and when he demanded it of Annalise, she offered it him in two pieces.
This alone was enough to upset a wise man, because wise men are easily
upset; but Annalise declared besides that the umbrella had broken
itself. It probably had. What may not one expect of anything so cheap?
Fritzing, however, was maddened by this explanation, and wasted quite
a long time pointing out to her in passionate language that it was an
inanimate object, and that inanimate objects have no initiative and
never therefore break themselves. To which Annalise, with a stoutness
ominous as a revelation of character, replied by repeating her
declaration that the umbrella had certainly broken itself. Then it was
that he shook his fist at her and called her fool. So greatly was he
moved that, after walking away and thinking it over, he went to her a
second time and shook his fist at her and called her knave.

I will not linger over this of the umbrella; it teems with lessons.

While it was going on the Princess was being very happy. She was
sitting unnoticed in a deck-chair and feeling she was really off at
last into the Ideal. Some of us know the fascination of that feeling,
and all of us know the fascination of new things; and to be unnoticed
was for her of a most thrilling newness. Nobody looked at her. People
walked up and down the deck in front of her as though she were not
there. One hurried passenger actually tripped over her feet, and
passed on with the briefest apology. Everywhere she saw indifferent
faces, indifferent, oblivious faces. It was simply glorious. And she
had had no trials since leaving Gerstein. There Fritzing had removed
her beyond the range of the mother's eyes, grown at last extremely
cold and piercing; Annalise, all meek anxiety to please, had put her
to bed in the sleeping-car of the Brussels express; and in the morning
her joy had been childish at having a little tray with bad coffee on
it thrust in by a busy attendant, who slammed it down on the table and
hurried out without so much as glancing at her. How delicious that
was. The Princess laughed with delight and drank the coffee, grits and
all. Oh, the blessed freedom of being insignificant. It was as good,
she thought, as getting rid of your body altogether and going about an
invisible spirit. She sat on the deck of the apparently motionless
turbine and thought gleefully of past journeys, now for ever done
with; of the grand ducal train, of herself drooping inside it as
wearily as the inevitable bouquets drooping on the tables, of the
crowds of starers on every platform, of the bowing officials wherever
your eye chanced to turn. The Countess Disthal, of course, had been
always at her elbow, and when she had to go to the window and do the
gracious her anxiety lest she should bestow one smile too few had only
been surpassed by the Countess's anxiety lest she should bestow one
smile too many. Well, that was done with now; as much done with as a
nightmare, grisly staleness, is done with when you wake to a fair
spring morning and the smell of dew. And she had no fears. She was
sure, knowing him as she did, that when the Grand Duke found out she
had run away he would make no attempt to fetch her back, but would
simply draw a line through his remembrance of her, rub her out of his
mind, (his heart, she knew, would need no rubbing, because she had
never been in it,) and after the first fury was over, fury solely on
account of the scandal, he would be as he had been before, while
she--oh wonderful new life!--she would be born again to all the
charities.

Now how can I, weak vessel whose only ballast is a cargo of
interrogations past which life swirls with a thunder of derisively
contradictory replies, pretend to say whether Priscilla ought to have
had conscience-qualms or not? Am I not deafened by the roar of
answers, all seemingly so right yet all so different, that the
simplest question brings? And would not the answering roar to anything
so complicated as a question about conscience-qualms deafen me for
ever? I shall leave the Princess, then, to run away from her home and
her parent if she chooses, and make no effort to whitewash any part of
her conduct that may seem black. I shall chronicle, and not comment. I
shall try to, that is, for comments are very dear to me. Indeed I see
I cannot move on even now till I have pointed out that though
Priscilla was getting as far as she could from the Grand Duke she was
also getting as near as she could to the possession of her soul; and
there are many persons who believe this to be a thing so precious that
it is absolutely the one thing worth living for.

The crossing to Dover, then, was accomplished quite peacefully by
Priscilla. Not so, however, by Fritzing. He, tormented man, chief
target for the goddess's darts, spent his time holding on to the rail
along the turbine's side in order to steady himself; and as there was
a dead calm that day the reader will at once perceive that the tempest
must have been inside Fritzing himself. It was; and it had been raised
to hurricane pitch by some snatches of the talk of two Englishmen he
had heard as they paced up and down past where he was standing.

The first time they passed, one was saying to the other, "I never
heard of anything so infamous."

This ought not to have made Fritzing, a person of stainless life and
noble principles, start, but it did. He started; and he listened
anxiously for more.

"Yes," said the other, who had a newspaper under his arm, "they
deserve about as bad as they'll--"

He was out of ear-shot; but Fritzing mechanically finished the
sentence himself. Who had been infamous? And what were they going to
get? It was at this point that he laid hold of the handrail to steady
himself till the two men should pass again.

"You can tell, of course, what steps our Government will take," was
the next snatch.

"I shall be curious to see the attitude of the foreign papers," was
the next.

"Anything more wanton I never heard of," was the next.

"Of all the harmless, innocent creatures--" was the next.

And the last snatch of all--for though they went on walking Fritzing
heard no more after it--was the brief and singular expression
"Devils."

Devils? _What_ were they talking about? Devils? Was that, then, how
the public stigmatized blameless persons in search of peace? Devils?
What, himself and--no, never Priscilla. She was clearly the harmless
innocent creature, and he must be the other thing. But why plural? He
could only suppose that he and Annalise together formed a sulphurous
plural. He clung very hard to the rail. Who could have dreamed it
would get so quickly into the papers? Who could have dreamed the news
of it would call forth such blazing words? They would be confronted at
Dover by horrified authorities. His Princess was going to be put in a
most impossible position. What had he done? Heavens and earth, what
had he done?

He clung to the rail, staring miserably over the side into the oily
water. Some of the passengers lingered to watch him, at first because
they thought he was going to be seasick with so little provocation
that it amounted to genius, and afterwards because they were sure he
must want to commit suicide. When they found that time passed and he
did neither, he became unpopular, and they went away and left him
altogether and contemptuously alone.

"Fritzi, are you worried about anything?" asked Priscilla, coming to
where he still stood staring, although they had got to Dover.

Worried! When all Europe was going to be about their ears? When he was
in the eyes of the world a criminal--an aider, abettor, lurer-away of
youth and impulsiveness? He loved the Princess so much that he cared
nothing for his own risks, but what about hers? In an agony of haste
he rushed to his ideals and principles for justification and comfort,
tumbling them over, searching feverishly among them. They had forsaken
him. They were so much lifeless rubbish. Nowhere in his mind could he
find a rag of either comfort or justification with which to stop up
his ears against the words of the two Englishmen and his eyes against
the dreadful sight he felt sure awaited them on the quay at Dover--the
sight of incensed authorities ready to pounce on him and drag him away
for ever from his Princess.

Priscilla gazed at him in astonishment. He was taking no notice of
her, and was looking fearfully up and down the row of faces that were
watching the turbine's arrival.

"Fritzi, if you are worried it must be because you've not slept,"
said Priscilla, laying her hand with a stroking little movement on his
sleeve; for what but overwrought nerves could make him look so odd? It
was after all Fritzing who had behaved with the braveness of a lion
the night before in that matter of the policeman; and it was he who
had asked in stern tones of rebuke, when her courage seemed aflicker,
whether she repented. "You do not repent?" she asked, imitating that
sternness.

"Ma'am--" he began in a low and dreadful voice, his eyes ceaselessly
ranging up and down the figures on the quay.

"Sh--sh--Niece," interrupted Priscilla, smiling.

He turned and looked at her as a man may look for the last time at the
thing in life that has been most dear to him, and said nothing.




IV


But nobody was waiting for them at Dover. Fritzing's agonies might all
have been spared. They passed quite unnoticed through the crowd of
idlers to the train, and putting Priscilla and her maid into it he
rushed at the nearest newspaper-boy, pouncing on him, tearing a
handful of his papers from him, and was devouring their contents
before the astonished boy had well finished his request that he should
hold hard. The boy, who had been brought up in the simple faith that
one should pay one's pennies first and read next, said a few things
under his breath about Germans--crude short things not worth
repeating--and jerking his thumb towards the intent Fritzing, winked
at a detective who was standing near. The detective did not need the
wink. His bland, abstracted eyes were already on Fritzing, and he was
making rapid mental notes of the goggles, the muffler, the cap pulled
down over the ears. Truly it is a great art, that of running away, and
needs incessant practice.

And after all there was not a word about the Princess in the papers.
They were full, as the Englishmen on the turbine had been full, of
something the Russians, who at that time were always doing something,
had just done--something that had struck England from end to end into
a blaze of indignation and that has nothing to do with my story.
Fritzing dropped the papers on the platform, and had so little public
spirit that he groaned aloud with relief.

"Shilling and a penny 'alfpenny, please, sir," said the newspaper-boy
glibly. "_Westminster Gazette_, sir, _Daily Mail_, _Sporting and
Dramatic_, one _Lady_, and two _Standards_." From which it will be
seen that Fritzing had seized his handful very much at random.

He paid the boy without heeding his earnest suggestions that he should
try _Tit-Bits_, the _Saturday Review_, and _Mother_, to complete, said
the boy, in substance if not in words, his bird's-eye view over the
field of representative English journalism, and went back to the
Princess with a lighter heart than he had had for months. The
detective, apparently one of Nature's gentlemen, picked up the
scattered papers, and following Fritzing offered them him in the
politest way imaginable just as Priscilla was saying she wanted to see
what tea-baskets were like.

"Sir," said the detective, taking off his hat, "I believe these are
yours."

"Sir," said Fritzing, taking off his cap in his turn and bowing with
all the ceremony of foreigners, "I am much obliged to you."

"Pray don't mention it, sir," said the detective, on whose brain the
three were in that instant photographed--the veiled Priscilla, the
maid sitting on the edge of the seat as though hardly daring to sit
at all, and Fritzing's fine head and mop of grey hair.

Priscilla, as she caught his departing eye, bowed and smiled
graciously. He withdrew to a little distance, and fell into a
reverie: where had he seen just that mechanically gracious bow and
smile? They were very familiar to him.

As the train slowly left the station he saw the lady in the veil once
more. She was alone with her maid, and was looking out of the window
at nothing in particular, and the station-master, who was watching the
train go, chanced to meet her glance. Again there was the same smile
and bow, quite mechanical, quite absent-minded, distinctly gracious.
The station-master stared in astonishment after the receding carriage.
The detective roused himself from his reverie sufficiently to step
forward and neatly swing himself into the guard's van: there being
nothing to do in Dover he thought he would go to London.

I believe I have forgotten, in the heat of narration, to say that the
fugitives were bound for Somersetshire. Fritzing had been a great
walker in the days when he lived in England, and among other places
had walked about Somersetshire. It is a pleasant county; fruitful,
leafy, and mild. Down in the valleys myrtles and rhododendrons have
been known to flower all through the winter. Devonshire junkets and
Devonshire cider are made there with the same skill precisely as in
Devonshire; and the parts of it that lie round Exmoor are esteemed by
those who hunt.

Fritzing quite well remembered certain villages buried among the
hills, miles from the nearest railway, and he also remembered the
farmhouses round about these villages where he had lodged. To one of
these he had caused a friend in London to write engaging rooms for
himself and his niece, and there he proposed to stay till they should
have found the cottage the Princess had set her heart on.

This cottage, as far as he could gather from the descriptions she
gave him from time to time, was going to be rather difficult to
find. He feared also that it would be a very insect-ridden place,
and that their calm pursuits would often be interrupted by things
like earwigs. It was to be ancient, and much thatched and latticed
and rose-overgrown. It was, too, to be very small; the smallest of
labourers' cottages. Yet though so small and so ancient it was to
have several bathrooms--one for each of them, so he understood;
"For," said the Princess, "if Annalise hasn't a bathroom how can
she have a bath? And if she hasn't had a bath how can I let her
touch me?"

"Perhaps," said Fritzing, bold in his ignorance of Annalise's real
nature, "she could wash at the pump. People do, I believe, in the
country. I remember there were always pumps."

"But do pumps make you clean enough?" inquired the Princess,
doubtfully.

"We can try her with one. I fancy, ma'am, it will be less difficult
to find a cottage that has only two bathrooms than one that has three.
And I know there are invariably pumps."

Searching his memory he could recollect no bathrooms at all, but he
did not say so, and silently hoped the best.

To the Somerset village of Symford and to the farm about a mile
outside it known as Baker's, no longer, however, belonging to Baker,
but rented by a Mr. Pearce, they journeyed down from Dover without a
break. Nothing alarming happened on the way. They were at Victoria by
five, and the Princess sat joyfully making the acquaintance of a
four-wheeler's inside for twenty minutes during which Fritzing and
Annalise got the luggage through the customs. Fritzing's goggles and
other accessories of flight inspired so much interest in the customs
that they could hardly bear to let him go and it seemed as if they
would never tire of feeling about in the harmless depths of
Priscilla's neat box. They had however ultimately to part from him,
for never was luggage more innocent; and rattling past Buckingham
Palace on the way to Paddington Priscilla blew it a cheerful kiss,
symbolic of a happiness too great to bear ill-will. Later on Windsor
Castle would have got one too, if it had not been so dark that she
could not see it. The detective, who felt himself oddly drawn towards
the trio, went down into Somersetshire by the same train as they did,
but parted from them at Ullerton, the station you get out at when you
go to Symford. He did not consider it necessary to go further; and
taking a bedroom at Ullerton in the same little hotel from which
Fritzing had ordered the conveyance that was to drive them their last
seven miles he went to bed, it being close on midnight, with Mr.
Pearce's address neatly written in his notebook.

This, at present, is the last of the detective. I will leave him
sleeping with a smile on his face, and follow the dog-cart as it drove
along that beautiful road between wooded hills that joins Ullerton to
Symford, on its way to Baker's Farm.

At the risk of exhausting Priscilla Fritzing had urged pushing on
without a stop, and Priscilla made no objection. This is how it came
about that the ostler attached to the Ullerton Arms found himself
driving to Symford in the middle of the night. He could not recollect
ever having done such a thing before, and the memory of it would be
quite unlikely to do anything but remain fixed in his mind till his
dying day. Fritzing was a curiously conspicuous fugitive.

It was a clear and beautiful night, and the stars twinkled brightly
over the black tree-tops. Down in the narrow gorge through which the
road runs they could not feel the keen wind that was blowing up on
Exmoor. The waters of the Sym, whose windings they followed, gurgled
over their stones almost as quietly as in summer. There was a fresh
wet smell, consoling and delicious after the train, the smell of
country puddles and country mud and dank dead leaves that had been
rained upon all day. Fritzing sat with the Princess on the back seat
of the dog-cart, and busied himself keeping the rug well round her,
the while his soul was full of thankfulness that their journey should
after all have been so easy. He was weary in body, but very jubilant
in mind. The Princess was so weary in body that she had no mind at
all, and dozed and nodded and threatened to fall out, and would have
fallen out a dozen times but for Fritzing's watchfulness. As for
Annalise, who can guess what thoughts were hers while she was being
jogged along to Baker's? That they were dark I have not a doubt. No
one had told her this was to be a journey into the Ideal; no one had
told her anything but that she was promoted to travelling with the
Princess and that she would be well paid so long as she held her
tongue. She had never travelled before, yet there were some
circumstances of the journey that could not fail to strike the most
inexperienced. This midnight jogging in the dog-cart, for instance. It
was the second night spent out of bed, and all day long she had
expected every moment would end the journey, and the end, she had
naturally supposed, would be a palace. There would be a palace, and
warmth, and light, and food, and welcome, and honour, and appreciative
lacqueys with beautiful white silk calves--alas, Annalise's ideal, her
one ideal, was to be for ever where there were beautiful white silk
calves. The road between Ullerton and Symford conveyed to her mind no
assurance whatever of the near neighbourhood of such things; and as
for the dog-cart--"_Himmel_," said Annalise to herself, whenever she
thought of the dog-cart.

Their journey ended at two in the morning. Almost exactly at that hour
they stopped at the garden gate of Baker's Farm, and a woman came out
with a lantern and helped them down and lighted them up the path to
the porch. The Princess, who could hardly make her eyes open
themselves, leaned on Fritzing's arm in a sort of confused dream, got
somehow up a little staircase that seemed extraordinarily steep and
curly, and was sound asleep in a knobbly bed before Annalise realized
she had done with her. Priscilla had forgotten all about the Ideal,
all about her eager aspirations. Sleep, dear Mother with the cool
hand, had smoothed them all away, the whole rubbish of those daylight
toys, and for the next twelve hours sat tenderly by her pillow, her
finger on her lips.




V


No better place than Symford can be imagined for those in search of a
spot, picturesque and with creepers, where they may spend quiet years
guiding their feet along the way of peace. It is one of the prettiest
of English villages. It does and has and is everything the ideal
village ought to. It nestles, for instance, in the folds of hills; it
is very small, and far away from other places; its cottages are old
and thatched; its little inn is the inn of a story-book, with a quaint
signboard and an apparently genial landlord; its church stands
beautifully on rising ground among ancient trees, besides being hoary;
its vicarage is so charming that to see it makes you long to marry a
vicar; its vicar is venerable, with an eye so mild that to catch it is
to receive a blessing; pleasant little children with happy morning
faces pick butter-cups and go a-nutting at the proper seasons and
curtsey to you as you pass; old women with clean caps and suitable
faces read their Bibles behind latticed windows; hearths are scrubbed
and snowy; appropriate kettles simmer on hobs; climbing roses and trim
gardens are abundant; and it has a lady bountiful of so untiring a
kindness that each of its female inhabitants gets a new flannel
petticoat every Christmas and nothing is asked of her in return but
that she shall, during the ensuing year, be warm and happy and good.
The same thing was asked, I believe, of the male inhabitants, who get
comforters, and also that they should drink seltzer-water whenever
their lower natures urged them to drink rum; but comforters are so
much smaller than petticoats that the men of Symford's sense of
justice rebelled, and since the only time they ever felt really warm
and happy and good was when they were drinking rum they decided that
on the whole it would be more in accordance with their benefactress's
wishes to go on doing it.

Lady Shuttleworth, the lady from whom these comforters and petticoats
proceeded, was a just woman who required no more of others than she
required of herself, and who was busy and kind, and, I am sure happy
and good, on cold water. But then she did not like rum; and I suppose
there are few things quite so easy as not to drink rum if you don't
like it. She lived at Symford Hall, two miles away in another fold of
the hills, and managed the estate of her son who was a minor--at this
time on the very verge of ceasing to be one--with great precision and
skill. All the old cottages in Symford were his, and so were the farms
dotted about the hills. Any one, therefore, seeking a cottage would
have to address himself to the Shuttleworth agent, Mr. Dawson, who too
lived in a house so picturesque that merely to see it made you long
either to poison or to marry Mr. Dawson--preferably, I think, to
poison him.

These facts, stripped of the redundances with which I have
garnished them, were told Fritzing on the day after his arrival
at Baker's Farm by Mrs. Pearce the younger, old Mr. Pearce's
daughter-in-law, a dreary woman with a rent in her apron, who
brought in the bacon for Fritzing's solitary breakfast and the chop
for his solitary luncheon. She also brought in a junket so liquid
that the innocent Fritzing told her politely that he always drank
his milk out of a glass when he did drink milk, but that, as he
never did drink milk, she need not trouble to bring him any.

"Sir," said Mrs. Pearce in her slow sad voice, after a glance at his
face in search of sarcasm, "'tisn't milk. 'Tis a junket that hasn't
junked."

"Indeed?" said Fritzing, bland because ignorant.

Mrs. Pearce fidgeted a little, wrestling perhaps with her conscience,
before she added defiantly, "It wouldn't."

"Indeed?" said Fritzing once more; and he looked at the junket through
his spectacles with that air of extreme and intelligent interest with
which persons who wish to please look at other people's babies.

He was desirous of being on good terms with Symford, and had been very
pleasant all the morning to Mrs. Pearce. That mood in which, shaken
himself to his foundations by anxiety, he had shaken his fist to
Annalise, was gone as completely as yesterday's wet mist. The golden
sunshine of October lay beautifully among the gentle hills and seemed
to lie as well in Fritzing's heart. He had gone through so much for so
many weeks that merely to be free from worries for the moment filled
him with thankfulness. So may he feel who has lived through days of
bodily torture in that first hour when his pain has gone: beaten,
crushed, and cowed by suffering, he melts with gratitude because he is
being left alone, he gasps with a relief so utter that it is almost
abject praise of the Cruelty that has for a little loosened its hold.
In this abjectly thankful mood was Fritzing when he found his worst
agonies were done. What was to come after he really for the moment did
not care. It was sufficient to exist untormented and to let his soul
stretch itself in the privacy and peace of Baker's. He and his
Princess had made a great and noble effort towards the realization of
dreams that he felt were lofty, and the gods so far had been with
them. All that first morning in Symford he had an oddly restful,
unburdened feeling, as of having been born again and born aged
twenty-five; and those persons who used to be twenty-five themselves
will perhaps agree that this must have been rather nice. He did not
stir from the parlour lest the Princess should come down and want him,
and he spent the waiting hours getting information from Mrs. Pearce
and informing her mind in his turn with just that amount of knowledge
about himself and his niece that he wished Symford to possess. With
impressive earnestness he told her his name was Neumann, repeating it
three times, almost as if in defiance of contradiction; that his niece
was his deceased brother's child; that her Christian name--here he was
swept away by inspiration--was Maria-Theresa; that he had saved enough
as a teacher of German in London to retire into the country; and that
he was looking for a cottage in which to spend his few remaining
years.

It all sounded very innocent. Mrs. Pearce listened with her head on
one side and with something of the air of a sparrow who doesn't feel
well. She complimented him sadly on the fluency of his English, and
told him with a sigh that in no cottage would he ever again find the
comforts with which Baker's was now surrounding him.

Fritzing was surprised to hear her say so, for his impressions had
all been the other way. As far as he, inexperienced man, could
tell, Baker's was a singularly draughty and unscrubbed place. He
smelt that its fires smoked, he heard that its windows rattled, he
knew that its mattresses had lumps in them, and he saw that its
food was inextricably mixed up with objects of a black and gritty
nature. But her calm face and sorrowful assurance shook the
evidence of his senses, and gazing at her in silence over his
spectacles a feeling crept dimly across his brain that if the
future held many dealings with women like Mrs. Pearce he was going
to be very helpless.

Priscilla appeared while he was gazing. She was dressed for going out
and came in buttoning her gloves, and I suppose it was a long time
since Baker's had seen anything quite so radiant in the way of nieces
within its dusty walls. She had on the clothes she had travelled in,
for a search among the garments bought by Fritzing had resulted in
nothing but a sitting on the side of the bed and laughing tears, so it
was clearly not the clothes that made her seem all of a sparkle with
lovely youth and blitheness. Kunitz would not have recognized its
ivory Princess in this bright being. She was the statue come to life,
the cool perfection kissed by expectation into a bewitching living
woman. I doubt whether Fritzing had ever noticed her beauty while at
Kunitz. He had seen her every day from childhood on, and it is
probable that his attention being always riveted on her soul he had
never really known when her body left off being lanky and freckled. He
saw it now, however; he would have been blind if he had not; and it
set him vibrating with the throb of a new responsibility. Mrs. Pearce
saw it too, and stared astonished at this oddly inappropriate niece.
She stared still more when Fritzing, jumping up from his chair, bent
over the hand Priscilla held out and kissed it with a devotion and
respect wholly absent from the manner of Mrs. Pearce's own uncles.
She, therefore, withdrew into her kitchen, and being a person of
little culture crudely expressed her wonder by thinking "Lor." To
which, after an interval of vague meanderings among saucepans, she
added the elucidation, "Foreigners."

Half an hour later Lady Shuttleworth's agent, Mr. Dawson, was
disturbed at his tea by the announcement that a gentleman wished to
speak to him. Mr. Dawson was a bluff person, and something of a
tyrant, for he reigned supreme in Symford after Lady Shuttleworth, and
to reign supreme over anybody, even over a handful of cottagers, does
bring out what a man may have in him of tyrant. Another circumstance
that brings this out is the possession of a meek wife; and Mr.
Dawson's wife was really so very meek that I fear when the Day of
Reckoning comes much of this tyranny will be forgiven him and laid to
her account. Mr. Dawson, in fact, represented an unending series of
pitfalls set along his wife's path by Fate, into every one of which
she fell; and since we are not supposed, on pain of punishment, to do
anything but keep very upright on our feet as we trudge along the
dusty road of life, no doubt all those amiable stumblings will be
imputed to her in the end for sin. "This man was handed over to you
quite nice and kind," one can imagine Justice saying in an awful
voice; "his intentions to start with were beyond reproach. Do you not
remember, on the eve of your wedding, how he swore with tears he would
be good to you? Look, now, what you have made of him. You have
prevented his being good to you by your own excessive goodness to
him. You have spent your time nourishing his bad qualities. Though he
still swears, he never does it with tears. Do you not know the
enormous, the almost insurmountable difficulty there is in not
bullying meekness, in not responding to the cringer with a kick? Weak
and unteachable woman, away with you."

Certainly it is a great responsibility taking a man into one's life.
It is also an astonishment to me that I write thus in detail of Mrs.
Dawson, for she has nothing whatever to do with the story.

"Who is it?" asked Mr. Dawson; immediately adding, "Say I'm engaged."

"He gave no name, sir. He says he wishes to see you on business."

"Business! I don't do business at tea time. Send him away."

But Fritzing, for he it was, would not be sent away. Priscilla had
seen the cottage of her dreams, seen it almost at once on entering the
village, fallen instantly and very violently in love with it
regardless of what its inside might be, and had sent him to buy it.
She was waiting while he bought it in the adjoining churchyard sitting
on a tombstone, and he could neither let her sit there indefinitely
nor dare, so great was her eagerness to have the thing, go back
without at least a hope of it. Therefore he would not be sent away.
"Your master's in," he retorted, when the maid suggested he should
depart, "and I must see him. Tell him my business is pressing."

"Will you give me your card, sir?" said the maid, wavering before
this determination.

Fritzing, of course, had no card, so he wrote his new name in pencil
on a leaf of his notebook, adding his temporary address.

"Tell Mr. Dawson," he said, tearing it out and giving it to her, "that
if he is so much engaged as to be unable to see me I shall go direct
to Lady Shuttleworth. My business will not wait."

"Show him in, then," growled Mr. Dawson on receiving this message; for
he feared Lady Shuttleworth every bit as much as Mrs. Dawson feared
him.

Fritzing was accordingly shown into the room used as an office, and
was allowed to cool himself there while Mr. Dawson finished his tea.
The thought of his Princess waiting on a tombstone that must be
growing colder every moment, for the sun was setting, made him at last
so impatient that he rang the bell.

"Tell your master," he said when the maid appeared, "that I am now
going to Lady Shuttleworth." And he seized his hat and was making
indignantly for the door when Mr. Dawson appeared.

Mr. Dawson was wiping his mouth. "You seem to be in a great hurry," he
said; and glancing at the slip of paper in his hand added, "Mr.
Newman."

"Sir," said Fritzing, bowing with a freezing dignity, "I am."

"Well, so am I. Sit down. What can I do for you? Time's money, you
know, and I'm a busy man. You're German, ain't you?"

"I am, sir. My name is Neumann. I am here--"

"Oh, Noyman, is it? I thought it was Newman." And he glanced again at
the paper.

"Sir," said Fritzing, with a wave of his hand, "I am here to buy a
cottage, and the sooner we come to terms the better. I will not waste
valuable moments considering niceties of pronunciation."

Mr. Dawson stared. Then he said, "Buy a cottage?"

"Buy a cottage, sir. I understand that practically the whole of
Symford is the property of the Shuttleworth family, and that you are
that family's accredited agent. I therefore address myself in the
first instance to you. Now, sir, if you are unable, either through
disinclination or disability, to do business with me, kindly state the
fact at once, and I will straightway proceed to Lady Shuttleworth
herself. I have no time to lose."

"I'm blessed if I have either, Mr."--he glanced again at the
paper--"Newman."

"Neumann, sir," corrected Fritzing irritably.

"All right--Noyman. But why don't you write it then? You've written
Newman as plain as a doorpost."

"Sir, I am not here to exercise you in the proper pronunciation of
foreign tongues. These matters, of an immense elementariness I must
add, should be and generally are acquired by all persons of any
education in their childhood at school."

Mr. Dawson stared. "You're a long-winded chap," he said, "but I'm
blessed if I know what you're driving at. Suppose you tell me what
you've come for, Mr."--he referred as if from habit to the
paper--"Newman."

"_Neu_mann, sir," said Fritzing very loud, for he was greatly
irritated by Mr. Dawson's manner and appearance.

"_Noy_mann, then," said Mr. Dawson, equally loudly; indeed it was
almost a shout. And he became possessed at the same instant of what
was known to Fritzing as a red head, which is the graphic German way
of describing the glow that accompanies wrath. "Look here," he said,
"if you don't say what you've got to say and have done with it you'd
better go. I'm not the chap for the fine-worded game, and I'm hanged
if I'll be preached to in my own house. I'll be hanged if I will, do
you hear?" And he brought his fist down on the table in a fashion very
familiar to Mrs. Dawson and the Symford cottagers.

"Sir, your manners--" said Fritzing, rising and taking up his hat.

"Never mind my manners, Mr. Newman."

"_Neu_mann, sir!" roared Fritzing.

"Confound you, sir," was Mr. Dawson's irrelevant reply.

"Sir, confound _you_," said Fritzing, clapping on his hat. "And let me
tell you that I am going at once to Lady Shuttleworth and shall
recommend to her most serious consideration the extreme desirability
of removing you, sir."

"Removing me! Where the deuce to?"

"Sir, I care not whither so long as it is hence," cried Fritzing,
passionately striding to the door.

Mr. Dawson lay back in his chair and gasped. The man was plainly mad;
but still Lady Shuttleworth might--you never know with women--"Look
here--hie, you! Mr. Newman!" he called, for Fritzing had torn open the
door and was through it.

"_Neu_mann, sir," Fritzing hurled back at him over his shoulder.

"Lady Shuttleworth won't see you, Mr. Noyman. She won't on principle."

Fritzing wavered.

"Everything goes through my hands. You'll only have your walk for
nothing. Come back and tell me what it is you want."

"Sir, I will only negotiate with you," said Fritzing down the
passage--and Mrs. Dawson hearing him from the drawing-room folded her
hands in fear and wonder--"if you will undertake at least to imitate
the manners of a gentleman."

"Come, come, you musn't misunderstand me," said Mr. Dawson getting up
and going to the door. "I'm a plain man, you know--"

"Then, sir, all I can say is that I object to plain men."

"I say, who are you? One would think you were a duke or somebody,
you're so peppery. Dressed up"--Mr. Dawson glanced at the suit of
pedagogic black into which Fritzing had once more relapsed--"dressed
up as a street preacher."

"I am not dressed up as anything, sir," said Fritzing coming in rather
hurriedly. "I am a retired teacher of the German tongue, and have come
down from London in search of a cottage in which to spend my remaining
years. That cottage I have now found here in your village, and I have
come to inquire its price. I wish to buy it as quickly as possible."

"That's all very well, Mr.--oh all right, all right, I won't say it.
But why on earth don't you write it properly, then? It's this paper's
set me wrong. I was going to say we've got no cottages here for sale.
And look here, if that's all you are, a retired teacher, I'll trouble
you not to get schoolmastering me again."

"I really think, sir," said Fritzing stretching his hand towards his
hat, "that it is better I should try to obtain an interview with Lady
Shuttleworth, for I fear you are constitutionally incapable of
carrying on a business conversation with the requisite decent
self-command."

"Pooh--you'll get nothing out of her. She'll send you back to me. Why,
you'd drive her mad in five minutes with that tongue of yours. If you
want anything I'm your man. Only let's get at what you do want,
without all these confounded dictionary words. Which cottage is it?"

"It is the small cottage," said Fritzing mastering his anger,
"adjoining the churchyard. It stands by itself, and is separated from
the road by an extremely miniature garden. It is entirely covered by
creeping plants which I believe to be roses."

"That's a couple."

"So much the better."

"And they're let. One to the shoemaker, and the other to old mother
Shaw."

"Accommodation could no doubt be found for the present tenants in some
other house, and I am prepared to indemnify them handsomely. Might I
inquire the number of rooms the cottages contain?"

"Two apiece, and a kitchen and attic. Coal-hole and pig-stye in the
back yard. Also a pump. But they're not for sale, so what's the use--"

"Sir, do they also contain bathrooms?"

"Bathrooms?" Mr. Dawson stared with so excessively stupid a stare that
Fritzing, who heaver could stand stupidity, got angry again.

"I said bathrooms, sir," he said, raising his voice, "and I believe
with perfect distinctness."

"Oh, I heard you right enough. I was only wondering if you were trying
to be funny."

"Is this a business conversation or is it not?" cried Fritzing, in his
turn bringing his fist down on the table.

"Look here, what do you suppose people who live in such places want?"

"I imagine cleanliness and decency as much as anybody else."

"Well, I've never been asked for one with a bathroom in my life."

"You are being asked now," said Fritzing, glaring at him, "but you
wilfully refuse to reply. From your manner, however, I conclude that
they contain none. If so, no doubt I could quickly have some built."

"Some? Why, how many do you want?"

"I have a niece, sir, and she must have her own."

Mr. Dawson again stared with what seemed to Fritzing so deplorably
foolish a stare. "I never heard of such a thing," he said.

"What did you never hear of, sir?"

"I never heard of one niece and one uncle in a labourer's cottage
wanting a bathroom apiece."

"Apparently you have never heard of very many things," retorted
Fritzing angrily. "My niece desires to have her own bathroom, and it
is no one's business but hers."

"She must be a queer sort of girl."

"Sir," cried Fritzing, "leave my niece out of the conversation."

"Oh all right--all right. I'm sure I don't want to talk about your
niece. But as for the cottages, it's no good wanting those or any
others, for you won't get 'em."

"And pray why not, if I offer a good price?"

"Lady Shuttleworth won't sell. Why should she? She'd only have to
build more to replace them. Her people must live somewhere. And she'll
never turn out old Shaw and the shoemaker to make room for a couple of
strangers."

Fritzing was silent, for his heart was sinking. "Suppose, sir," he
said after a pause, during which his eyes had been fixed thoughtfully
on the carpet and Mr. Dawson had been staring at him and whistling
softly but very offensively, "suppose I informed Lady Shuttleworth of
my willingness to build two new cottages--excellent new cottages--for
the tenants of these old ones, and pay her a good price as well for
these, do you think she would listen to me?"

"I say, the schoolmastering business must be a rattling good one. I'm
blessed if I know what you want to live in 'em for if money's so
little object with you. They're shabby and uncomfortable, and an old
chap like you--I mean, a man of your age, who's made his little pile,
and wants luxuries like plenty of bathrooms--ought to buy something
tight and snug. Good roof and electric light. Place for horse and
trap. And settle down and be a gentleman."

"My niece," said Fritzing, brushing aside these suggestions with an
angrily contemptuous wave of his hand, "has taken a fancy--I may say
an exceedingly violent fancy--to these two cottages. What is all this
talk of traps and horses? My niece wishes for these cottages. I shall
do my utmost to secure them for her."

"Well, all I can say is she must be a--"

"Silence, sir!" cried Fritzing.

Mr. Dawson got up and opened the door very wide.

"Look here," he said, "there's no use going on talking. I've stood
more from you than I've stood from any one for years. Take my advice
and get back home and keep quiet for a bit. I've got no cottages, and
Lady Shuttleworth would shut the door in your face when you got to the
bathroom part. Where are you staying? At the Cock and Hens?
Oh--ah--yes--at Baker's. Well, ask Mrs. Pearce to take great care of
you. Tell her I said so. And good afternoon to you, Mr. Noyman. You
see I've got the name right now--just as we're going to part."

"Before I go," said Fritzing, glaring down at Mr. Dawson, "let me
tell you that I have seldom met an individual who unites in his
manner so singularly offensive a combination of facetiousness and
hectoring as yourself. I shall certainly describe your conduct to
Lady Shuttleworth, and not, I hope, in unconvincing language. Sir,
good afternoon."

"By-bye," said Mr. Dawson, grinning and waving a pleasant hand.
Several bathrooms indeed! He need have no fears of Lady Shuttleworth.
"Good luck to you with Lady S.!" he called after him cheerily. Then he
went to his wife and bade her see to it that the servant never let
Fritzing in again, explaining that he was not only a foreigner but a
lunatic, and that the mixture was so bad that it hardly bore thinking
of.




VI


While Fritzing was losing his temper in this manner at the agent's,
Priscilla sat up in the churchyard in the sun. The Symford churchyard,
its church, and the pair of coveted cottages, are on a little eminence
rising like an island out of the valley. Sitting under the trees of
this island Priscilla amused herself taking in the quiet scene at her
feet and letting her thoughts wander down happy paths. The valley was
already in shadow, but the tops of the hills on the west side of it
were golden in the late afternoon sunshine. From the cottage chimneys
smoke went up straight and blue into the soft sky, rooks came and
settled over her head in the branches of the elms, and every now and
then a yellow leaf would fall slowly at her feet. Priscilla's heart
was filled with peace. She was going to be so good, she was going to
lead such a clean and beautiful life, so quiet, so helpful to the
poor, so hidden, so cleared of all confusions. Never again would she
need to pose; never again be forced into conflict with her soul. She
had chosen the better part; she had given up everything and followed
after wisdom; and her life would be her justification. Who but knows
the inward peace that descends upon him who makes good resolutions
and abides with him till he suddenly discovers they have all been
broken? And what does the breaking of them matter, since it is their
making that is so wholesome, so bracing to the soul, bringing with it
moments of such extreme blessedness that he misses much who gives it
up for fear he will not keep them? Such blessed moments of lifting up
of the heart were Priscilla's as she sat in the churchyard waiting,
invisibly surrounded by the most beautiful resolutions it is possible
to imagine. The Rev. Edward Morrison, the vicar of whom I have spoken
as venerable, coming slowly up the path leaning on his son's arm with
the intention of going into the church in search of a mislaid
sermon-book, saw Priscilla's thoughtful back under the elm-tree and
perceived at once that it was a back unknown to him. He knew all the
Symford backs, and tourists hardly ever coming there, and never at
that time of the year, it could not, he thought, be the back of a
tourist. Nor could it belong to any one staying with the
Shuttleworths, for he had been there that very afternoon and had found
Lady Shuttleworth rejoicing over the brief period of solitude she and
her son were enjoying before the stream of guests for the coming of
age festivities began.

"Robin, what girl is that?" asked the vicar of his son.

"I'm sure I don't know," said Robin.

"She'll catch cold," said the vicar.

"I dare say," said Robin.

When they came out of the church ten minutes later Priscilla had not
moved.

"She'll certainly catch cold," said the vicar, concerned.

"I should think it very likely," said Robin, locking the door.

"She's sitting on a stone."

"Yes, on old Dawson's slab."

"Unwise," said the vicar.

"Profane," said Robin.

The vicar took his boy's arm again--the boy, head and shoulders taller
than his father, was down from Cambridge for the vacation then drawing
to its close--and moved, I fear, by the same impulse of pure curiosity
they walked together down the path that would take them right in front
of the young woman on the slab.

Priscilla was lost in the bright dreams she was weaving, and looked up
with the radiance of them still in her eyes at the two figures between
her and the sunset.

"My dear young lady," said the vicar kindly, "are you not afraid of
catching cold? The evenings are so damp now, and you have chosen a
very cold seat."

"I don't feel cold," said Priscilla, smiling at this vision of
benevolence.

"But I do think you ought not to linger here," said the vicar.

"I am waiting for my uncle. He's gone to buy a cottage, and ought to
be back, really, by now."

"Buy a cottage?" repeated the vicar. "My dear young lady, you say
that in the same voice you might use to tell me your uncle had gone to
buy a bun."

"What is a bun?" asked Priscilla.

"A bun?" repeated the vicar bewildered, for nobody had ever asked him
that before.

"Oh I know--" said Priscilla quickly, faintly flushing, "it's a thing
you eat. Is there a special voice for buns?"

"There is for a thing so--well, so momentous as the buying of a
cottage."

"Is it momentous? It seems to me so nice and natural."

She looked up at the vicar and his son, calmly scrutinizing first one
and then the other, and they stood looking down at her; and each time
her eyes rested on Robin they found his staring at her with the
frankest expression of surprise and admiration.

"Pardon me," said the vicar, "if I seem inquisitive, but is it one of
the Symford cottages your uncle wishes to buy? I did not know any were
for sale."

"It's that one by the gate," said Priscilla, slightly turning her head
in its direction.

"Is it for sale? Dear me, I never knew Lady Shuttleworth sell a
cottage yet."

"I don't know yet if she wants to," said Priscilla; "but Fr--, my
uncle, will give any price. And I must have it. I shall--I shall be
ill if I don't."

The vicar gazed at her upturned face in perplexity. "Dear me," he
said, after a slight pause.

"We must live somewhere," remarked Priscilla.

"Of course you must," said Robin, suddenly and so heartily that she
examined his eager face in more detail.

"Quite so, quite so," said the vicar. "Are you staying here at
present?"

"Never at the Cock and Hens?" broke in Robin.

"We're at Baker's Farm."

"Ah yes--poor Mrs. Pearce will be glad of lodgers. Poor soul, poor
soul."

"She's a very dirty soul," said Robin; and Priscilla's eyes flashed
over him with a sudden sparkle.

"Is she the soul with the holes in its apron?" she asked.

"I expect there are some there. There generally are," said Robin.

They both laughed; but the vicar gently shook his head. "Ah well, poor
thing," he said, "she has an uphill life of it. They don't seem
able--they don't seem to understand the art of making both ends meet."

"It's a great art," said Robin.

"Perhaps they could be helped," said Priscilla, already arranging in
her mind to go and do it.

"They do not belong to the class one can help. And Lady Shuttleworth,
I am afraid, disapproves of shiftless people too much to do anything
in the way of reducing the rent."

"Lady Shuttleworth can't stand people who don't look happy and don't
mend their apron," said Robin.

"But it's her own apron," objected Priscilla.

"Exactly," said Robin.

"Well, well, I hope they'll make you comfortable," said the vicar; and
having nothing more that he could well say without having to confess
to himself that he was inquisitive, he began to draw Robin away. "We
shall see you and your uncle on Sunday in church, I hope," he said
benevolently, and took off his hat and showed his snow-white hair.

Priscilla hesitated. She was, it is true, a Protestant, it having been
arranged on her mother's marriage with the Catholic Grand Duke that
every alternate princess born to them was to belong to the Protestant
faith, and Priscilla being the alternate princess it came about that
of the Grand Duke's three children she alone was not a Catholic.
Therefore she could go to church in Symford as often as she chose; but
it was Fritzing's going that made her hesitate, for Fritzing was what
the vicar would have called a godless man, and never went to church.

"You are a member of the Church of England?" inquired the vicar,
seeing her hesitate.

"Why, pater, she's not English," burst out Robin.

"Not English?" echoed the vicar.

"Is my English so bad?" asked Priscilla, smiling.

"It's frightfully good," said Robin; "but the 'r's,' you know--"

"Ah, yes. No, I'm not English. I'm German."

"Indeed?" said the vicar, with all the interest that attaches to any
unusual phenomenon, and a German in Symford was of all phenomena the
most unusual. "My dear young lady, how remarkable. I don't remember
ever having met a German before in these parts. Your English is really
surprising. I should never have noticed--my boy's ears are quicker
than my old ones. Will you think me unpardonably curious if I ask what
made you pitch on Symford as a place to live in?"

"My uncle passed through it years ago and thought it so pretty that he
determined to spend his old age here."

"And you, I suppose, are going to take care of him."

"Yes," said Priscilla, "for we only"--she looked from one to the other
and thought herself extremely clever--"we only have each other in the
whole wide world."

"Ah, poor child--you are an orphan."

"I didn't say so," said Priscilla quickly, turning red; she who had
always been too proud to lie, how was she going to lie now to this
aged saint with the snow-white hair?

"Ah well, well," said the vicar, vaguely soothing. "We shall see you
on Sunday perhaps. There is no reason that I know of why a member of
the German Church should not assist at the services of the Church of
England." And he took off his hat again, and tried to draw Robin away.

But Robin lingered, and Priscilla saw so much bright curiosity in his
eyes that she felt she was giving an impression of mysteriousness; and
this being the last thing she wanted to do she thought she had better
explain a little--always a dangerous course to take--and she said, "My
uncle taught languages for years, and is old now and tired, and we
both long for the country and to be quiet. He taught me
English--that's why it's as good as it is. His name"--She was carried
away by the desire to blow out that questioning light in Robin's
eyes--"his name is Schultz."

The vicar bowed slightly, and Robin asked with an air of great
politeness but still with that light in his eyes if he were to address
her, then, as Miss Schultz.

"I'm afraid so," said Priscilla, regretfully. It really sounded gross.
Miss Schultz? She might just as well have chosen something romantic
while she was about it, for Fritzing in the hurry of many cares had
settled nothing yet with her about a name.

Robin stared at her very hard, her answer seemed to him so odd. He
stared still more when she looked up with the air of one who has a
happy thought and informed him that her Christian name was Ethel.

"Ethel?" echoed Robin.

"It's a very pretty name, I think," said Priscilla, looking pleased.

"Our housemaid's called Ethel, and so is the little girl that wheels
the gardener's baby's perambulator," was Robin's impetuous comment.

"That doesn't make it less pretty," said Priscilla, frowning.

"Surely," interrupted the vicar mildly, "Ethel is not a German name?"

"I was christened after my mother," said Priscilla gently; and this
was strictly true, for the deceased Grand Duchess had also been
Priscilla. Then a feeling came over her that she was getting into
those depths where persons with secrets begin to flounder as a
preliminary to letting them out, and seized with panic she got up off
the slab.

"You are half English, then," said Robin triumphantly, his bright eyes
snapping. He looked very bold and masterful staring straight at her,
his head thrown back, his handsome face twinkling with interest. But a
person of Priscilla's training could not possibly be discomposed by
the stare of any Robin, however masterful; had it not been up to now
her chief function in life to endure being stared at with graceful
indifference? "I did not say so," she said, glancing briefly at him;
and including both father and son in a small smile composed
indescribably of graciousness and chill she added, "It really is damp
here--I don't think I'll wait for my uncle," and slightly bowing
walked away without more ado.

She walked very slowly, her skirts gathered loosely in one hand, every
line of her body speaking of the most absolute self-possession and
unapproachableness. Never had the two men seen any one quite so calm.
They watched her in silence as she went up the path and out at the
gate; then Robin looked down at his father and drew his hand more
firmly through his arm and said with a slight laugh, "Come on, pater,
let's go home. We're dismissed."

"By a most charming young lady," said the vicar, smiling.

"By a very cool one," said Robin, shrugging his shoulders, for he did
not like being dismissed.

"Yes--oddly self-possessed for her age," agreed the vicar.

"I wonder if all German teacher's nieces are like that," said Robin
with another laugh.

"Few can be so blest by nature, I imagine."

"Oh, I don't mean faces. She is certainly prettier by a good bit than
most girls."

"She is quite unusually lovely, young man. Don't quibble."

"Miss Schultz--Ethel Schultz," murmured Robin; adding under his
breath, "Good Lord."

"She can't help her name. These things are thrust upon one."

"It's a beastly common name. Macgrigor, who was a year in Dresden,
told me everybody in Germany is called Schultz."

"Except those who are not."

"Now, pater, you're being clever again," said Robin, smiling down at
his father.

"Here comes some one in a hurry," said the vicar, his attention
arrested by the rapidly approaching figure of a man; and, looking up,
Robin beheld Fritzing striding through the churchyard, his hat well
down over his eyes as if clapped on with unusual vigour, both hands
thrust deep in his pockets, the umbrella, without which he never, even
on the fairest of days, went out, pressed close to his side under his
arm, and his long legs taking short and profane cuts over graves and
tombstones with the indifference to decency of one immersed in
unpleasant thought. It was not the custom in Symford to leap in this
manner over its tombs; and Fritzing arriving at a point a few yards
from the vicar, and being about to continue his headlong career across
the remaining graves to the tree under which he had left Priscilla,
the vicar raised his voice and exhorted him to keep to the path.

"Quaint-looking person," remarked Robin. "Another stranger. I say, it
can't be--no, it can't possibly be the uncle?" For he saw he was a
foreigner, yet on the other hand never was there an uncle and a niece
who had less of family likeness.

Fritzing was the last man wilfully to break local rules or wound
susceptibilities; and pulled out of his unpleasant abstraction by the
vicar's voice he immediately desisted from continuing his short cut,
and coming onto the path removed his hat and apologized with the
politeness that was always his so long as nobody was annoying him.

"My name is Neumann, sir," he said, introducing himself after the
German fashion, "and I sincerely beg your pardon. I was looking for a
lady, and"--he gave his spectacles a little adjusting shove as though
they were in fault, and gazing across to the elm where he had left
Priscilla sitting added with sudden anxiety--"I fear I do not see
her."

"Do you mean Miss Schultz?" asked the vicar, looking puzzled.

"No, sir, I do not mean Miss Schultz," said Fritzing, peering about
him at all the other trees in evident surprise and distress.

"A lady left about five minutes ago," said Robin.

"A tall young lady in a blue costume?"

"Yes. Miss Schultz."

Fritzing looked at him with some sternness. "Sir, what have I to do
with Miss Schultz?" he inquired.

"Oh come now," said the cheerful Robin, "aren't you looking for her?"

"I am in search of my niece, sir."

"Yes. Miss Schultz."

"No sir," said Fritzing, controlling himself with an effort, "not
Miss Schultz. I neither know Miss Schultz nor do I care a--"

"Sir, sir," interposed the vicar, hastily.

"I do not care a _pfenning_ for any Miss Schultz."

The vicar looked much puzzled. "There was a young lady," he said,
"waiting under that tree over there for her uncle who had gone, she
said, to see Lady Shuttleworth's agent about the cottage by the gate.
She said her uncle's name was Schultz."

"She said she was Miss Ethel Schultz," said Robin.

"She said she was staying at Baker's Farm," said the vicar.

Fritzing stared for a moment from one to the other, then clutching his
hat mechanically half an inch into the air turned on his heel without
another word and went with great haste out of the churchyard and down
the hill and away up the road to the farm.

"Quaint, isn't he," said Robin as they slowly followed this flying
figure to the gate.

"I don't understand it," said the vicar.

"It does seem a bit mixed."

"Did he not say his name was Neumann?"

"He did. And he looked as if he'd fight any one who said it wasn't."

"It is hardly credible that there should be two sets of German uncles
and nieces in Symford at one and the same time," mused the vicar.
"Even one pair is a most unusual occurrence."

"If there are," said Robin very earnestly, "pray let us cultivate the
Schultz set and not the other."

"I don't understand it," repeated the vicar, helplessly.




VII


Symford, innocent village, went to bed very early; but early as it
went long before it had got there on this evening it contained no
family that had not heard of the arrivals at Baker's Farm. From the
vicarage the news had filtered that a pretty young lady called Schultz
was staying there with her uncle; from the agent's house the news that
a lunatic called Neumann was staying there with his niece; and about
supper-time, while it was still wondering at this sudden influx of
related Germans, came the postmistress and said that the boy from
Baker's who fetched the letters knew nothing whatever of any one
called Schultz. He had, said the postmistress, grown quite angry and
forgotten the greater and by far the better part of his manners when
she asked him how he could stand there and say such things after all
the years he had attended Sunday-school and if he were not afraid the
earth would open and swallow him up, and he had stuck to it with an
obstinacy that had at length convinced her that only one uncle and
niece were at Baker's, and their name was Neumann. He added that there
was another young lady there whose name he couldn't catch, but who sat
on the edge of her bed all day crying and refusing sustenance.
Appeased by the postmistress's apologies for her first unbelief he
ended by being anxious to give all the information in his power, and
came back quite a long way to tell her that he had forgotten to say
that his mother had said that the niece's Christian name was
Maria-Theresa.

"But what, then," said the vicar's wife to the vicar when this news
had filtered through the vicarage walls to the very sofa where she
sat, "has become of the niece called Ethel?"

"I don't know," said the vicar, helplessly.

"Perhaps she is the one who cried all day."

"My dear, we met her in the churchyard."

"Perhaps they are forgers," suggested the vicar's wife.

"My dear?"

"Or anarchists."

"Kate?"

The vicar's wife said no more, but silently made up her mind to go the
very next day and call at Baker's. It would be terrible if a bad
influence got into Symford, her parish that she had kept in such good
order for so long. Besides, she had an official position as the wife
of the vicar and could and ought to call on everybody. Her call would
not bind her, any more than the call of a district visitor would, to
invite the called-upon to her house. Perhaps they were quite decent,
and she could ask the girl up to the Tuesday evenings in the
parish-room; hardly to the vicarage, because of her daughter Netta. On
the other hand, if they looked like what she imagined anarchists or
forgers look like, she would merely leave leaflets and be out when
they returned her call.

Robin, all unaware of his mother's thoughts, was longing to ask her to
go to Baker's and take him with her as a first step towards the
acquaintance after which his soul thirsted, but he refrained for
various discreet reasons based on an intimate knowledge of his
mother's character; and he spent the evening perfecting a plan that
should introduce him into the interior of Baker's without her help.
The plan was of a barbarous simplicity: he was going to choose an
umbrella from the collection that years had brought together in the
stand in the hall, and go boldly and ask the man Neumann if he had
dropped it in the churchyard. The man Neumann would repudiate the
umbrella, perhaps with secret indignation, but he would be forced to
pretend he was grateful, and who knew what luck might not do for him
after that?

While Robin was plotting, and his mother was plotting, that the next
day would certainly see them inside Baker's, a third person was trying
to do exactly the same thing at Symford Hall; and this third person
was no other than Augustus, the hope of all the Shuttleworths.
Augustus--he was known to his friends briefly as Tussie--had been
riding homewards late that afternoon, very slowly, for he was an
anxious young man who spent much of his time dodging things like being
overheated, when he saw a female figure walking towards him along the
lonely road. He was up on the heath above Symford, a solitary place of
heather, and gorse bushes, and winding roads that lead with many
hesitations and delays to different parts of Exmoor, and he himself
with his back to that wild region and the sunset was going, as every
sensible person would be going at that time of the evening, in the
direction of the village and home. But where could the girl be going?
For he now saw it was a girl, and in a minute or two more that it was
a beautiful girl. With the golden glow of the sky the sun had just
left on her face Priscilla came towards him out of the gathering dusk
of approaching evening, and Tussie, who had a poetic soul, gazed at
the vision openmouthed. Seeing him, she quickened her steps, and he
took off his cap eagerly when she asked him to tell her where Symford
was. "I've lost it," she said, looking up at him.

"I'm going through it myself," he answered. "Will you let me show you
the way?"

"Thank you," said Priscilla; and he got off his horse and she turned
and walked beside him with the same unruffled indifference with which
she would have walked beside the Countess Disthal or in front of an
attending lacquey. Nor did she speak, for she was busy thinking of
Fritzing and hoping he was not being too anxious about her, and Tussie
(God defend his innocence) thought she was shy. So sure was he as the
minutes past that her silence was an embarrassed one that he put an
end to it by remarking on the beauty of the evening, and Priscilla who
had entirely forgotten Miss Schultz gave him the iciest look as a
reminder that it was not his place to speak first. It was lost on
Tussie as a reminder, for naturally it did not remind him of anything,
and he put it down at first to the girl's being ill at ease alone up
there with a strange man, and perhaps to her feeling she had better
keep him at arm's length. A glance at her profile however dispelled
this illusion once and for ever, for never was profile of a profounder
calm. She was walking now with her face in shadow, and the glow behind
her played strange and glorious tricks with her hair. He looked at
her, and looked, and not by the quiver of an eyelash did she show she
was aware of anybody's presence. Her eyes were fixed on the ground,
and she was deep in thought tinged with remorsefulness that she should
have come up here instead of going straight home to the farm, and by
losing her way and staying out so long have given Fritzing's careful
heart an unnecessary pang of anxiety. He had had so many, and all
because of her. But then it had been the very first time in her life
that she had ever walked alone, and if words cannot describe the joy
and triumph of it how was it likely that she should have been able to
resist the temptation to stray aside up a lovely little lane that
lured her on and on from one bend to another till it left her at last
high up, breathless and dazzled, on the edge of the heath, with
Exmoor rolling far away in purple waves to the sunset and all the
splendour of the evening sky in her face? She had gone on, fascinated
by the beauty of the place, and when she wanted to turn back found she
had lost herself. Then appeared Sir Augustus to set her right, and
with a brief thought of him as a useful person on a nice horse she
fell into sober meditations as to the probable amount of torture her
poor Fritzi was going through, and Augustus ceased to exist for her as
completely as a sign-post ceases to exist for him who has taken its
advice and passed on.

He looked at her, and looked, and looked again. He had never seen any
one quite so beautiful, and certainly never any one with such an air
of extreme detachment. He was twenty-one and much inclined to poetry,
and he thought as she walked beside him so tall and straight and
aloof, with the nimbus of flaming hair and the noble little head and
slightly stern brow that she looked like nothing less than a young
saint of God.

Tussie was not bold like Robin. He was a gentle youth who loved quiet
things, quiet places, placid people, kind dogs, books, canaries even,
if they did not sing too loud. He was sensitive about himself, being
small and weakly, and took, as I have said, great care of what he had
of health, such care indeed that some of his robust friends called him
Fussie. He hated the idea of coming of age and of having a great deal
of money and a great many active duties and responsibilities. His
dream was to be left in peace to write his verses; to get away into
some sweet impossible wilderness, and sit there singing with as much
of the spirit of Omar Kayyam as could reasonably be expected to
descend on a youth who only drank water. He was not bold, I say; and
after that one quelling glance from the young saint's eyes did not
dare speak again for a long while. But they were getting near Symford;
they were halfway down the hill; he could not let her slip away
perhaps suddenly from his side into the shadows without at least
trying to find out where she was staying. He looked at her soft kind
mouth and opened his own to speak. He looked at her stern level brows
and shut it again. At last, keeping his eyes on her mouth he blurted
out, growing red, "I know every soul in Symford, and every soul for
miles round, but I don't know--" He stopped. He was going to say
"you," but he stopped.

Priscilla's thoughts were so far away that she turned her head and
gazed vaguely at him for a moment while she collected them again. Then
she frowned at him. I do not know why Robin should have had at least
several smiles and poor Tussie only frowns, unless it was that during
this walk the young person Ethel Schultz had completely faded from
Priscilla's mind and the Royal Highness was well to the fore. She
certainly frowned at Tussie and asked herself what could possess the
man to keep on speaking to her. Keep on speaking! Poor Tussie. Aloud
she said freezingly, "Did you say something?"

"Yes," said Tussie, his eyes on her mouth--surely a mouth only made
for kindness and gentle words. "I was wondering whether you were
staying at the vicarage."

"No," said Priscilla, "we're staying at Baker's Farm." And at the
mention of that decayed lodging the friendly Schultz expression crept
back, smiling into her eyes.

Tussie stopped short. "Baker's Farm?" he said. "Why, then this is the
way; down here, to the right. It's only a few yards from here."

"Were you going that way too?"

"I live on the other side of Symford."

"Then good-bye and thank you."

"Please let me go with you as far as the high-road--it's almost dark."

"Oh no--I can't lose myself again if it's only a few yards."

She nodded, and was turning down the lane.

"Are you--are you comfortable there?" he asked hurriedly, blushing.
"The Pearces are tenants of ours. I hope they make you comfortable?"

"Oh, we're only going to be there a few days. My uncle is buying a
cottage, and we shall leave almost directly."

The girl Ethel nodded and smiled and went away quickly into the dusk;
and Tussie rode home thoughtfully, planning elaborate plans for a
descent the next day upon Baker's Farm that should have the necessary
air of inevitableness.

Fritzing was raging up and down the road in front of the gate when
Priscilla emerged, five minutes later, from the shadows of the lane.
She ran up to him and put her arm through his, and looked up at him
with a face of great penitence. "Dear Fritzi," she said, "I'm so
sorry. I've been making you anxious, haven't I? Forgive me--it was the
first taste of liberty, and it got into my feet and set them off
exploring, and then I lost myself. Have you been worrying?"

He was immensely agitated, and administered something very like a
scolding, and he urged the extreme desirability of taking Annalise
with her in future wherever she went--("Oh nonsense, Fritzi,"
interjected Priscilla, drawing away her arm)--and he declared in a
voice that trembled that it was a most intolerable thought for him
that two strange men should have dared address her in the churchyard,
that he would never forgive himself for having left her there
alone--("Oh, Fritzi, how silly," interjected Priscilla)--and he begged
her almost with tears to tell him exactly what she had said to them,
for her Grand Ducal Highness must see that it was of the first
importance they should both say the same things to people.

Priscilla declared she had said nothing at all but what was quite
diplomatic, in fact quite clever; indeed, she had been surprised at
the way ideas had seemed to flow.

"So please," she finished, "don't look at me with such lamentable
eyes."

"Ma'am, did you not tell them our name is Schultz?"

"But so it is."

"It is not, ma'am. Our name is Neumann."

Priscilla stared astonished. "Neumann?" she said. "Nonsense, Fritzi.
Why should it be Neumann? We're Schultz. I told these people we were.
It's all settled."

"Settled, ma'am? I told the woman here as well as the estate agent
that you are my brother's child and that we are Neumann."

Priscilla was aghast. Then she said severely, "It was your duty to ask
me first. What right have you to christen me?"

"I intended to discuss it during our walk to the village this
afternoon. I admit I forgot it. On the other hand I could not suppose
your Grand Ducal Highness, left for a moment unprotected, would inform
two strange gentlemen that our name was Schultz."

"You should certainly have asked me first," repeated Priscilla with
knitted brows. "Why should I have to be Neumann?"

"I might inquire with equal reason why I should have to be Schultz,"
retorted Fritzing.

"But why Neumann?" persisted Priscilla, greatly upset.

"Ma'am, why not?" said Fritzing, still more upset. Then he added,
"Your Grand Ducal Highness might have known that at the agent's I
would be obliged to give some name."

"I didn't think any more than you did," said Priscilla stopping in
front of the gate as a sign he was to open it for her. He did, and
they walked through the garden and into the house in silence. Then she
went into the parlour and dropped into a horsehair armchair, and
leaning her head against its prickliness she sighed a doleful sigh.

"Shall I send Annalise to you, ma'am?" asked Fritzing, standing in the
doorway.

"What can we do?" asked Priscilla, her eyes fixed on the tips of her
shoes in earnest thought. "Come in, Fritzi, and shut the door," she
added. "You don't behave a bit like an uncle." Then an idea struck
her, and looking up at him with sudden gaiety she said, "Can't we have
a hyphen?"

"A hyphen?"

"Yes, and be Neumann-Schultz?"

"Certainly we can," said Fritzing, his face clearing; how muddled he
must be getting not to have thought of it himself! "I will cause cards
to be printed at once, and we will be Neumann-Schultz. Ma'am, your
woman's wit--"

"Fritzi, you're deteriorating--you never flattered me at Kunitz. Let
us have tea. I invite you to tea with me. If you'll order it, I'll
pour it out for you and practice being a niece."

So the evening was spent in harmony; a harmony clouded at intervals,
it is true, first by Priscilla's disappointment about the cottage,
then by a certain restiveness she showed before the more blatant
inefficiencies of the Baker housekeeping, then by a marked and ever
recurring incapacity to adapt herself to her new environment, and
lastly and very heavily when Fritzing in the course of conversation
let drop the fact that he had said she was Maria-Theresa. This was a
very black cloud and hung about for a long while; but it too passed
away ultimately in a compromise reached after much discussion that
Ethel should be prefixed to Maria-Theresa; and before Priscilla went
to bed it had been arranged that Fritzing should go next morning
directly after a very early breakfast to Lady Shuttleworth and not
leave that lady's side and house till he had secured the cottage, and
the Princess for her part faithfully promised to remain within the
Baker boundaries during his absence.




VIII


Lady Shuttleworth then, busiest and most unsuspecting of women, was
whisking through her breakfast and her correspondence next morning
with her customary celerity and method, when a servant appeared and
offered her one of those leaves from Fritzing's note-book which we
know did duty as his cards.

Tussie was sitting at the other end of the table very limp and sad
after a night of tiresome tossing that was neither wholly sleep nor
wholly wakefulness, and sheltered by various dishes with spirit-lamps
burning beneath them worked gloomily at a sonnet inspired by the girl
he had met the day before while his mother thought he was eating his
patent food. The girl, it seemed, could not inspire much, for beyond
the fourth line his muse refused to go; and he was beginning to be
unable to stop himself from an angry railing at the restrictions the
sonnet form forces upon poets who love to be vague, which would
immediately have concentrated his mother's attention on himself and
resulted in his having to read her what he had written--for she
sturdily kept up the fiction of a lively interest in his poetic
tricklings--when the servant came in with Fritzing's leaf.

"A gentleman wishes to see you on business, my lady," said the
servant.

"Mr. Neumann-Schultz?" read out Lady Shuttleworth in an inquiring
voice. "Never heard of him. Where's he from?"

"Baker's Farm, my lady."

At that magic name Tussie's head went up with a jerk.

"Tell him to go to Mr. Dawson," said Lady Shuttleworth.

The servant disappeared.

"Why do you send him away, mother?" asked Tussie.

"Why, you know things must go through Dawson," said Lady Shuttleworth
pouncing on her letters again. "I'd be plagued to death if they
didn't."

"But apparently this is the stranger within our gates. Isn't he
German?"

"His name is. Dawson will be quite kind to him."

"Dawson's rather a brute I fancy, when you're not looking."

"Dearest, I always am looking."

"He must be one of Pearce's lodgers."

"Poor man, I'm sorry for him if he is. Of all the shiftless women--"

"The gentleman says, my lady," said the servant reappearing with
rather an awestruck face, "that he wishes to speak to you most
particular."

"James, did I not tell you to send him to Mr. Dawson?"

"I delivered the message, my lady. But the gentleman says he's seen
Mr. Dawson, and that he"--the footman coughed slightly--"he don't want
to see any more of him, my lady."

Lady Shuttleworth put on her glasses and stared at the servant. "Upon
my word he seems to be very cool," she said; and the servant, his gaze
fixed on a respectful point just above his mistress's head, reflected
on the extreme inapplicability of the adjective to anything so warm as
the gentleman at the door.

"Shall I see him for you, mother?" volunteered Tussie briskly.

"You?" said his mother surprised.

"I'm rather a dab at German, you know. Perhaps he can't talk much
English"--the footman started--"evidently he wasn't able to say much
to Dawson. Probably he wants you to protect him from the onslaughts of
old Pearce's cockroaches. Anyhow as he's a foreigner I think it would
be kinder to see him."

Lady Shuttleworth was astonished. Was Tussie going to turn over a new
leaf after all, now that he was coming of age, and interest himself in
more profitable things than verse-making?

"Dearest," she said, quite touched, "he shall be seen if you think it
kinder. I'll see him--you haven't done breakfast yet. Show him into
the library, James." And she gathered up her letters and went out--she
never kept people waiting--and as she passed Tussie she laid her hand
tenderly for a moment on his shoulder. "If I find I can't understand
him I'll send for you," she said.

Tussie folded up his sonnet and put it in his pocket. Then he ate a
few spoonfuls of the stuff warranted to give him pure blood, huge
muscles, and a vast intelligence; then he opened a newspaper and
stared vacantly at its contents; then he went to the fire and warmed
his feet; then he strolled round the table aimlessly for a little; and
then, when half an hour had passed and his mother had not returned, he
could bear it no longer and marched straight into the library.

"I think the cigarettes must be here," said Tussie, going over to the
mantelpiece and throwing a look of eager interest at Fritzing.

Fritzing rose and bowed ceremoniously. Lady Shuttleworth was sitting
in a straight-backed chair, her elbows on its arms, the tips of her
ten fingers nicely fitted together. She looked very angry, and yet
there was a sparkle of something like amusement in her eyes. Having
bowed to Tussie Fritzing sat down again with the elaboration of one
who means to stay a long while. During his walk from the farm he had
made up his mind to be of a most winning amiability and patience,
blended with a determination that nothing should shake. At the door,
it is true, he had been stirred to petulance by the foolish face and
utterances of the footman James, but during the whole of the time he
had been alone with Lady Shuttleworth he had behaved, he considered,
with the utmost restraint and tact.

Tussie offered him a cigarette.

"My dear Tussie," said his mother quickly, "we will not keep Mr.
Neumann-Schultz. I'm sure his time must be quite as valuable as mine
is."

"Oh madam," said Fritzing with a vast politeness, settling himself yet
more firmly in his chair, "nothing of mine can possibly be of the same
value as anything of yours."

Lady Shuttleworth stared--she had stared a good deal during the last
halfhour--then began to laugh, and got up. "If you see its value so
clearly," she said, "I'm sure you won't care to take up any more of
it."

"Nay, madam," said Fritzing, forced to get up too, "I am here, as I
explained, in your own interests--or rather in those of your son, who
I hear is shortly to attain his majority. This young gentleman is, I
take it, your son?"

Tussie assented.

"And therefore the owner of the cottages?"

"What cottages?" asked Tussie, eagerly. He was manifestly so violently
interested in Mr. Neumann-Schultz that his mother could only gaze at
him in wonder. He actually seemed to hang on that odd person's lips.

"My dear Tussie, Mr. Neumann-Schultz has been trying to persuade me to
sell him the pair of cottages up by the church, and I have been trying
to persuade him to believe me when I tell him I won't."

"But why won't you, mother?" asked Tussie.

Lady Shuttleworth stared at him in astonishment. "Why won't I? Do I
ever sell cottages?"

"Your esteemed parent's reasons for refusing," said Fritzing, "reasons
which she has given me with a brevity altogether unusual in one of her
sex and which I cannot sufficiently commend, do more credit, as was to
be expected in a lady, to her heart than to her head. I have offered
to build two new houses for the disturbed inhabitants of these. I have
offered to give her any price--any price at all, within the limits of
reason. Your interests, young gentleman, are what will suffer if this
business is not concluded between us."

"Do you want them for yourself?" asked Tussie.

"Yes, sir, for myself and for my niece."

"Mother, why do you refuse to do a little business?"

"Tussie, are we so poor?"

"As far as I'm concerned," said Tussie airily to Fritzing, "you may
have the things and welcome."

"Tussie?"

"But they are not worth more than about fifty pounds apiece, and I
advise you not to give more for them than they're worth. Aren't they
very small, though? Isn't there any other place here you'd rather
have?"

"Tussie?"

"Do you mind telling me why you want them?"

"Young man, to live in them."

"And where are the people to live who are in them now?" asked Lady
Shuttleworth, greatly incensed.

"Madam, I promised you to build."

"Oh nonsense. I won't have new red-brick horrors about the place.
There's that nice good old Mrs. Shaw in one, so clean and tidy always,
and the shoemaker, a very good man except for his enormous family, in
the other. I will not turn them out."

"Put 'em in the empty lodge at the north gate," suggested Tussie.
"They'd be delighted."

Lady Shuttleworth turned angrily on Fritzing--she was indeed greatly
irritated by Tussie's unaccountable behaviour. "Why don't you build
for yourself?" she asked.

"My niece has set her heart on these cottages in such a manner that I
actually fear the consequences to her health if she does not get
them."

"Now, mother, you really can't make Mr. Neumann-Schultz's niece ill."

"Dearest boy, have you suddenly lost your senses?"

"Not unless it's losing them to be ready to do a kindness."

"Well said, well said, young man," said Fritzing approvingly.

"Tussie, have I ever shirked doing a kindness?" asked Lady
Shuttleworth, touched on her tenderest point.

"Never. And that's why I can't let you begin now," said Tussie,
smiling at her.

"Well said, well said, young man," approved Fritzing. "The woman up to
a certain age should lead the youth, and he should in all things
follow her counsels with respect and obedience. But she for her part
should know at what moment to lay down her authority, and begin, with
a fitting modesty, to follow him whom she has hitherto led."

"Is that what your niece does?" asked Lady Shuttleworth quickly.

"Madam?"

"Is she following you into these cottages, or are you following her?"

"You must pardon me, madam, if I decline to discuss my niece."

"Do have a cigarette," said Tussie, delighted.

"I never smoke, young man."

"Something to drink, then?"

"I never drink, young man."

"If I decide to let you have these cottages--_if_ I do," said Lady
Shuttleworth, divided between astonishment at everything about
Fritzing and blankest amazement at her son's behaviour, "you will
understand that I only do it because my son seems to wish it."

"Madam, provided I get the cottages I will understand anything you
like."

"First that. Then I'd want some information about yourself. I
couldn't let a stranger come and live in the very middle of my son's
estate unless I knew all about him."

"Why, mother--" began Tussie.

"Is not the willingness to give you your own price sufficient?"
inquired Fritzing anxiously.

"Not in the least sufficient," snapped Lady Shuttleworth.

"What do you wish to know, madam?" said Fritzing stiffly.

"I assure you a great deal."

"Come, mother," said Tussie, to whom this was painful, for was not the
man, apart from his strange clothes and speeches, of a distinctly
refined and intellectual appearance? And even if he wasn't, was he not
still the uncle of that divine niece?--"these are things for Dawson to
arrange."

Fritzing started at the hated name, and began to frown dreadfully. His
frown was always very impressive because of his bushy eyebrows and
deep-set eyes. "Dawson, as you call him," he said, "and he certainly
has no claim to any prefix of politeness, is not a person with whom I
will consent to arrange anything. Dawson is the most offensive
creature who ever walked this earth clad in the outer semblance of one
of God's creatures."

This was too much for Lady Shuttleworth. "Really--" she said,
stretching out her hand to the bell.

"Didn't I tell you so, mother?" cried Tussie triumphantly; and that
Tussie, her own dear boy, should in all things second this madman
completely overwhelmed her. "I knew he was a brute behind your back.
Let's sack him."

"James, show this gentleman out."

"Pardon me, madam, we have not yet arranged--"

"Oh," interrupted Tussie, "the business part can be arranged between
you and me without bothering my mother. I'll come part of the way with
you and we'll talk it over. You're absolutely right about Dawson. He's
an outrageous mixture of bully and brute." And he hurried into the
hall to fetch his cap, humming _O dear unknown One with the stern
sweet face_, which was the first line of his sonnet in praise of
Priscilla, to a cheerful little tune of his own.

"Tussie, it's so damp," cried his anxious mother after him--"you're
not really going out in this nasty Scotch mist? Stay in, and I'll
leave you to settle anything you like."

"Oh, it's a jolly morning for a walk," called back Tussie gaily,
searching about for his cap--"_And eyes all beautiful with strenuous
thought_--Come on, sir."

But Fritzing would not skimp any part of his farewell ceremonies.

"Permit me, madam," he said, deeply bowing, "to thank you for your
extremely kind reception."

"Kind?" echoed Lady Shuttleworth, unable to stop herself from
smiling.

"Yes, madam, kind, and before all things patient."

"Yes, I do think I've been rather patient," agreed Lady Shuttleworth,
smiling again.

"And let me," proceeded Fritzing, "join to my thanks my
congratulations on your possession of so unusually amiable and
promising a son."

"Come on, sir--you'll make me vain," said Tussie, in the
doorway--"'_Hair like a web divine wherein is caught_,'"--he hummed,
getting more and more shrill and happy.

Lady Shuttleworth put out her hand impulsively. Fritzing took it, bent
over it, and kissed it with much respect.

"A most unusually promising young man," he repeated; "and, madam, I
can tell you it is not my habit to say a thing I do not mean."

"'_The last reflection of God's daily grace_'"--chirped Tussie,
looking on much amused.

"No, that I'm quite certain you don't," said Lady Shuttleworth with
conviction.

"Don't say too many nice things about me," advised Tussie. "My mother
will swallow positively anything."

But nevertheless he was delighted; for here were his mother and the
uncle--the valuable and highly to be cherished uncle--looking as
pleased as possible with each other, and apparently in the fairest way
to becoming fast friends.




IX


The cheerful goddess who had brought Fritzing and his Princess safely
over from Kunitz was certainly standing by them well. She it was who
had driven Priscilla up on to the heath and into the acquaintance of
Augustus Shuttleworth, without whom a cottage in Symford would have
been for ever unattainable. She it was who had sent the Morrisons,
father and son, to drive Priscilla from the churchyard before Fritzing
had joined her, without which driving she would never have met
Augustus. She it was who had used the trifling circumstance of a
mislaid sermon-book to take the vicar and Robin into the church at an
unaccustomed time, without which sermon-book they would never have met
Priscilla in the churchyard and driven her out of it. Thus are all our
doings ruled by Chance; and it is a pleasant pastime for an idle hour
to trace back big events to their original and sometimes absurd
beginnings. For myself I know that the larger lines of my life were
laid down once for all by--but what has this to do with Priscilla?
Thus, I say, are all our doings ruled by Chance, who loves to use
small means for the working of great wonders. And as for the gay
goddess's ugly sister, the lady of the shifty eye and lowering brow
called variously Misfortune and Ill Luck, she uses the same tools
exactly in her hammering out of lives, meanly taking little follies
and little weaknesses, so little and so amiable at first as hardly to
be distinguished from little virtues, and with them building up a
mighty mass that shall at last come down and crush our souls. Of the
crushing of souls, however, my story does not yet treat, and I will
not linger round subjects so awful. We who are nestling for the moment
like Priscilla beneath the warm wing of Good Fortune can dare to make
what the children call a face at her grey sister as she limps scowling
past. Shall we not too one day in our turn feel her claws? Let us when
we do at least not wince; and he who feeling them can still make a
face and laugh, shall be as the prince of the fairy tales,
transforming the sour hag by his courage into a bright reward,
striking his very griefs into a shining shower of blessing.

From this brief excursion into the realm of barren musings, whither I
love above all things to wander and whence I have continually to fetch
myself back again by force, I will return to the story.

At Tussie's suggestion when the business part of their talk was
over--and it took exactly five minutes for Tussie to sell and Fritzing
to buy the cottages, five minutes of the frothiest business talk ever
talked, so profound was the ignorance of both parties as to what most
people demand of cottages--Fritzing drove to Minehead in the
postmistress's son's two-wheeled cart in order to purchase suitable
furniture and bring back persons who would paper and paint. Minehead
lies about twenty miles to the north of Symford, so Fritzing could not
be back before evening. By the time he was back, promised Tussie, the
shoemaker and Mrs. Shaw should be cleared out and put into a place so
much better according to their views that they would probably make it
vocal with their praises.

Fritzing quite loved Tussie. Here was a young man full of the noblest
spirit of helpfulness, and who had besides the invaluable gift of
seeing no difficulties anywhere. Even Fritzing, airy optimist, saw
more than Tussie, and whenever he expressed a doubt it was at once
brushed aside by the cheerfullest "Oh, that'll be all right." He was
the most practical, businesslike, unaffected, energetic young man,
thought Fritzing, that he had even seen. Tussie was surprised himself
at his own briskness, and putting the wonderful girl on the heath as
much as possible out of his thoughts, told himself that it was the
patent food beginning at last to keep its promises.

He took Fritzing to the post-office and ordered the trap for him,
cautioned the postmistress's son, who was going to drive, against
going too fast down the many hills, for the bare idea of the priceless
uncle being brought back in bits or in any state but absolutely whole
and happy turned him cold, told Fritzing which shops to go to and
where to lunch, begged him to be careful what he ate, since hotel
luncheons were good for neither body nor soul, ordered rugs and a
mackintosh covering to be put in, and behaved generally with the
forethought of a mother. "I'd go with you myself," he said,--and the
postmistress, listening with both her ears, recognized that the
Baker's Farm lodgers were no longer persons to be criticised--"but I
can be of more use to you here. I must see Dawson about clearing out
the cottages. Of course it is very important you shouldn't stay a
moment longer than can be helped in uncomfortable lodgings."

Here was a young man! Sensible, practical, overflowing with kindness.
Fritzing had not met any one he esteemed so much for years. They went
down the village street together, for Tussie was bound for Mr. Dawson
who was to be set to work at once, and Fritzing for the farm whither
the trap was to follow him as soon as ready, and all Symford,
curtseying to Tussie, recognized, as the postmistress had recognized,
that Fritzing was now raised far above their questionings, seated
firmly on the Shuttleworth rock.

They parted at Mr. Dawson's gate, Mrs. Dawson mildly watching their
warmth over a wire blind. "When we are settled, young man," said
Fritzing, after eloquent words of thanks and appreciation, "you must
come in the evenings, and together we will roam across the splendid
fields of English literature."

"Oh _thanks_" exclaimed Tussie, flushing with pleasure. He longed to
ask if the divine niece would roam too, but even if she did not, to
roam at all would be a delight, and he would besides be doing it under
the very roof that sheltered that bright and beautiful head. "Oh
_thanks_," cried Tussie, then, flushing.

His extreme joy surprised Fritzing. "Are you so great a friend of
literature?" he inquired.

"I believe," said Tussie, "that without it I'd have drowned myself
long ago. And as for the poets--"

He stopped. No one knew what poetry had been to him in his sickly
existence--the one supreme interest, the one thing he really cared to
live for.

Fritzing now loved him with all his heart. "_Ach Gott, ja_," he
ejaculated, clapping him on the shoulder, "the poets--_ja,
ja_--'Blessings be with them and eternal praise,' what? Young man," he
added enthusiastically, "I could wish that you had been my son. I
could indeed." And as he said it Robin Morrison coming down the street
and seeing the two together and the expression on Tussie's face
instantly knew that Tussie had met the niece.

"Hullo, Tuss," he called across, hurrying past, for it would rather
upset his umbrella plan to be stopped and have to talk to the man
Neumann thus prematurely. But Tussie neither saw nor heard him, and
"By Jove, hasn't he just seen the niece though," said Robin to
himself, his eyes dancing as he strode nimbly along on long and
bird-like legs. The conviction seized him that when he and his
umbrella should descend upon Baker's that afternoon Tussie would
either be there already or would come in immediately afterwards. "Who
would have thought old Fuss would be so enterprising?" he wondered,
thinking of the extreme cordiality of Fritzing's face. "He's given
them those cottages, I'll swear."

So Fritzing went to Minehead. I will not follow his painful footsteps
as they ranged about that dreary place, nor will I dwell upon his
purchases, which resolved themselves at last, after an infinite and
soul-killing amount of walking and bewilderment, into a sofa, a
revolving bookstand, and two beds. He forgot a bed for Annalise
because he forgot Annalise; and he didn't buy things like sheets
because he forgot that beds want them. On the other hand he spent
quite two hours in a delightful second-hand bookshop on his way to the
place where you buy crockery, and then forgot the crockery. He did,
reminded and directed by Mr. Vickerton, the postmistress's son, get to
a paperhanger's and order him and his men to come out in shoals to
Symford the next morning at daybreak, making the paperhanger vow, who
had never seen them, that the cottages should be done by nightfall.
Then, happening to come to the seashore, he stood for a moment
refreshing his nostrils with saltness, for he was desperately worn
out, and what he did after that heaven knows. Anyhow young Vickerton
found him hours afterwards walking up and down the shingle in the
dark, waving his arms about and crying--

                "O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
     Sistat et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!"

"Talking German out loud to himself," said young Vickerton to his
mother that night; and it is possible that he had been doing it all
the time.

And while he was doing these things Priscilla was having calls paid
her. Nothing could exceed her astonishment when about four o'clock, as
she was sitting deep in thought and bored on the arm of a horsehair
chair, Mrs. Pearce opened the door and without the least warning let
in Mrs. Morrison. Priscilla had promised Fritzing for that one day to
stay quietly at the farm, and for the last two hours, finding the farm
of an intolerable dulness, she had been engaged in reflections of an
extremely complex nature on subjects such as Duty, Will, and
Personality. Her morning in the Baker fields and by the banks of that
part of the Sym that meanders through them had tuned her mind to
meditation. The food at one o'clock and the manner of its bringing in
by Annalise--Priscilla had relieved Mrs. Pearce of that office--tuned
it still more. The blended slipperiness and prickliness of all the
things she tried to sit on helped surprisingly; and if I knew how far
it is allowable to write of linen I could explain much of her state of
mind by a description of the garments in which she was clothed that
day. They were new garments taken straight from the Gerstein box.
They were not even linen,--how could they be for Fritzing's three
hundred marks? And their newness had not yet been exposed to the
softening influence of any wash-tub. Straight did they come, in all
their crackling stiffness, out of the shop and on to the Princess.
Annalise had been supposed to wash them or cause them to be washed the
day before, but Annalise had been far too busy crying to do anything
of the sort; and by four o'clock Priscilla was goaded by them into a
condition of mind so unworthy that she was thinking quite hard about
the Kunitz fine linen and other flesh-pots and actually finding the
recollection sweet. It was a place, Priscilla mused, where her body
had been exquisitely cared for. Those delicate meals, served in
spotlessness, surely they had been rather of the nature of poems?
Those web-like garments, soft as a kiss, how beautiful they had been
to touch and wear. True her soul had starved; yes, it had cruelly
starved. But was it then--she started at her own thought--was it then
being fed at Baker's?

And into the middle of this question, a tremendous one to be asked on
the very threshold of the new life, walked Mrs. Morrison.

"How d'y do," said Mrs. Morrison. "The vicar asked me to come and see
you. I hope the Pearces make you comfortable."

"Well I never," thought Mrs. Pearce, lingering as was her custom on
the door-mat, and shaking her head in sorrow rather than in anger.

Priscilla sat for a moment staring at her visitor.

"You are Miss Schultz, are you not?" asked Mrs. Morrison rather
nervously.

Priscilla said she was,--her name, that is, was Neumann-Schultz--and
got up. She had the vaguest notion as to how Miss Schultz would behave
under these trying circumstances, but imagined she would begin by
getting up. So she got up, and the sofa being a low one and her
movements leisurely, Mrs. Morrison told her husband afterwards there
seemed to be no end to the girl. The girl certainly was long, and when
at last unfolded and quite straightened out she towered over Mrs.
Morrison, who looked up uneasily at the grave young face. Why, Mrs.
Morrison asked herself, didn't the girl smile? It was the duty of a
Miss Schultz called upon by the vicar's wife to smile; so profound a
gravity on such an occasion was surely almost rude. Priscilla offered
her hand and hoped it was all right to do so, but still she did not
smile. "Are you Mrs. Morrison?" she asked.

"Yes," said Mrs. Morrison with an immense reserve in her voice.

Then Priscilla suggested she should sit down. Mrs. Morrison was
already doing it; and Priscilla sank on to her sofa again and wondered
what she had better say next. She wondered so much that she became
lost in mazes of wonder, and there was so long a silence that Mrs.
Pearce outside the door deplored an inconsiderateness that could keep
her there for nothing.

"I didn't know you had a double name," said Mrs. Morrison, staring at
Priscilla and trying to decide whether this was not a case for the
application of leaflets and instant departure. The girl was really
quite offensively pretty. She herself had been pretty--she thanked
heaven that she still was so--but never, never pretty--she thanked
heaven again--in this glaringly conspicuous fashion.

"My name is Ethel Maria-Theresa Neumann-Schultz," said Priscilla, very
clearly and slowly; and though she was, as we know, absolutely
impervious to the steadiest staring, she did wonder whether this good
lady could have seen her photograph anywhere in some paper, her stare
was so very round and bright and piercing.

"What a long name," said Mrs. Morrison.

"Yes," said Priscilla; and as another silence seemed imminent she
added, "I have two hyphens."

"Two what?" said Mrs. Morrison, startled; and so full was her head of
doubt and distrust that for one dreadful moment she thought the girl
had said two husbands. "Oh, hyphens. Yes. Germans have them a good
deal, I believe."

"That sounds as if we were talking about diseases," said Priscilla, a
faint smile dawning far away somewhere in the depths of her eyes.

"Yes," said Mrs. Morrison, fidgeting.

Odd that Robin should have said nothing about the girl's face. Anyhow
she should be kept off Netta. Better keep her off the parish-room
Tuesdays as well. What in the world was she doing in Symford? She was
quite the sort of girl to turn the heads of silly boys. And so
unfortunate, just as Augustus Shuttleworth had taken to giving Netta
little volumes of Browning.

"Is your uncle out?" she asked, some of the sharpness of her thoughts
getting into her voice.

"He's gone to Minehead, to see about things for my cottage."

"Your cottage? Have you got Mrs. Shaw's, then?"

"Yes. She is being moved out to-day."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Morrison, greatly struck.

"Is it surprising?"

"Most. So unlike Lady Shuttleworth."

"She has been very kind."

"Do you know her?"

"No; but my uncle was there this morning."

"And managed to persuade her?"

"He is very eloquent," said Priscilla, with a demure downward sweep of
her eyelashes.

"Just a little more," thought Mrs. Morrison, watching their dusky
golden curve, "and the girl would have had scarlet hair and
white-eyebrows and masses of freckles and been frightful." And she
sighed an impatient sigh, which, if translated into verse, would
undoubtedly have come out--

     "Oh the little more and how much it is,
      And the little less and what worlds away!"

"And poor old Mrs. Shaw--how does she like being turned out?"

"I believe she is being put into something that will seem to her a
palace."

"Dear me, your uncle must really be very eloquent."

"I assure you that he is," said Priscilla earnestly.

There was a short pause, during which Mrs. Morrison staring straight
into those unfathomable pools, Priscilla's eyes, was very angry with
them for being so evidently lovely. "You are very young," she said,
"so you will not mind my questions--"

"Don't the young mind questions?" asked Priscilla, for a moment
supposing it to be a characteristic of the young of England.

"Not, surely, from experienced and--and married ladies," said Mrs.
Morrison tartly.

"Please go on then."

"Oh, I haven't anything particular to go on about," said Mrs.
Morrison, offended. "I assure you curiosity is not one of my faults."

"No?" said Priscilla, whose attention had begun to wander.

"Being human I have no doubt many failings, but I'm thankful to say
curiosity isn't one of them."

"My uncle says that's just the difference between men and women. He
says women might achieve just as much as men if only they were curious
about things. But they're not. A man will ask a thousand questions,
and never rest till he's found out as much as he can about anything he
sees, and a woman is content hardly even to see it."

"I hope your uncle is a Churchman," was Mrs. Morrison's unexpected
reply.

Priscilla's mind could not leap like this, and she hesitated a moment
and smiled. ("It's the first time she's looked pleasant," thought Mrs.
Morrison, "and now it's in the wrong place.")

"He was born, of course, in the Lutheran faith," said Priscilla.

"Oh, a horrid faith. Excuse me, but it really is. I hope he isn't
going to upset Symford?"

"Upset Symford?"

"New people holding wrong tenets coming to such a small place do
sometimes, you know, and you say he is eloquent. And we are such a
simple and God-fearing little community. A few years ago we had a
great bother with a Dissenting family that came here. The cottagers
quite lost their heads."

"I think I can promise that my uncle will not try to convert anybody,"
said Priscilla.

"Of course you mean pervert. It would be a pity if he did. It wouldn't
last, but it would give us a lot of trouble. We are very good
Churchmen here. The vicar, and my son too when he's at home, set
beautiful examples. My son is going into the Church himself. It has
been his dearest wish from a child. He thinks of nothing else--of
nothing else at all," she repeated, fixing her eyes on Priscilla with
a look of defiance.

"Really?" said Priscilla, very willing to believe it.

"I assure you it's wonderful how absorbed he is in his studies for it.
He reads Church history every spare moment, and he's got it so
completely on his mind that I've noticed even when he whistles it's
'The Church's One Foundation.'"

"What is that?" inquired Priscilla.

"Mr. Robin Morrison," announced Mrs. Pearce.

The sitting-room at Baker's was a small, straightforward place, with
no screens, no big furniture, no plants in pots, nothing that could
for a moment conceal the persons already in it from the persons coming
in, and Robin entering jauntily with the umbrella under his arm fell
straight as it were into his mother's angry gaze. "Hullo mater, you
here?" he exclaimed genially, his face broadening with apparent
satisfaction.

"Yes, Robin, I am here," she said, drawing herself up.

"How do you do, Miss Schultz. I seem to have got shown into the wrong
room. It's a Mr. Neumann I've come to see; doesn't he live here?"

Priscilla looked at him from her sofa seat and wondered what she had
done that she should be scourged in this manner by Morrisons.

"You know my son, I believe?" said Mrs. Morrison in the stiffest
voice; for the girl's face showed neither recognition nor pleasure,
and though she would have been angry if she had looked unduly pleased
she was still angrier that she should look indifferent.

"Yes. I met him yesterday. Did you want my uncle? His name is Neumann.
Neumann-Schultz. He's out."

"I only wanted to give him this umbrella," said Robin, with a swift
glance at his mother as he drew it from under his arm. Would she
recognize it? He had chosen one of the most ancient; the one most
appropriate, as he thought, to the general appearance of the man
Neumann.

"What umbrella is that, Robin?" asked his mother suspiciously. Really,
it was more than odd that Robin, whom she had left immersed in study,
should have got into Baker's Farm so quickly. Could he have been
expected? And had Providence, in its care for the righteous cause of
mothers, brought her here just in time to save him from this girl's
toils? The girl's indifference could not be real; and if it was not,
her good acting only betrayed the depths of her experience and
balefulness. "What umbrella is that?" asked Mrs. Morrison.

"It's his," said Robin, throwing his head back and looking at his
mother as he laid it with elaborate care on the table.

"My uncle's?" said Priscilla. "Had he lost it? Oh thank you--he would
have been dreadfully unhappy. Sit down." And she indicated with her
head the chair she would allow him to sit on.

"The way she tells us to sit down!" thought Mrs. Morrison indignantly.
"As though she were a queen." Aloud she said, "You could have sent
Joyce round with it"--Joyce being that gardener whose baby's
perambulator was wheeled by another Ethel--"and need not have
interrupted your work."

"So I could," said Robin, as though much struck by the suggestion.
"But it was a pleasure," he added to Priscilla, "to be able to return
it myself. It's a frightful bore losing one's umbrella--especially if
it's an old friend."

"Uncle Fritzi's looks as if it were a very old friend," said
Priscilla, smiling at it.

Mrs. Morrison glanced at it too, and then glanced again. When she
glanced a third time and her glance turned into a look that lingered
Robin jumped up and inquired if he should not put it in the passage.
"It's in the way here," he explained; though in whose way it could be
was not apparent, the table being perfectly empty.

Priscilla made no objection, and he at once removed it beyond the
reach of his mother's eye, propping it up in a dark corner of the
passage and telling Mrs. Pearce, whom he found there that it was Mr.
Neumann's umbrella.

"No it ain't," said Mrs. Pearce.

"Yes it is," said Robin.

"No it ain't. He's took his to Minehead," said Mrs. Pearce.

"It is, and he has not," said Robin.

"I see him take it," said Mrs. Pearce.

"You did not," said Robin.

This would have been the moment, Mrs. Morrison felt, for her to go and
to carry off Robin with her, but she was held in her seat by the
certainty that Robin would not let himself be carried off; and sooner
than say good-bye and then find he was staying on alone she would sit
there all night. Thus do mothers sacrifice themselves for their
children, thought Mrs. Morrison, for their all too frequently
thankless children. But though she would do it to any extent in order
to guard her boy she need not, she said to herself, be pleasant
besides,--she need not, so to speak, be the primroses on his path of
dalliance. Accordingly she behaved as little like a primrose as
possible, sitting in stony silence while he skirmished in the passage
with Mrs. Pearce, and the instant he came in again asked him where he
had found the umbrella.

"I found it--not far from the church," said Robin, desiring to be
truthful as long as he could. "But mater, bother the umbrella. It
isn't so very noble to bring a man back his own. Did you get your
cottages?" he asked, turning quickly to Priscilla.

"Robin, are you sure it is his own?" said his mother.

"My dear mother, I'm never sure of anything. Nor are you. Nor is Miss
Schultz. Nor is anybody who is really intelligent. But I found the
thing, and Mr. Neumann--"

"The name to-day is Neumann-Schultz," said Mrs. Morrison, in a voice
heavy with implications.

"Mr. Neumann-Schultz, then, had been that way just before, and so I
felt somehow it must be his."

"Your Uncle Cox had one just like it when he stayed with us last
time," remarked Mrs. Morrison.

"Had he? I say, mater, what an eye you must have for an umbrella. That
must be five years ago."

"Oh, he left it behind, and I see it in the stand every time I go
through the hall."

"No! Do you?" said Robin, who was hurled by this statement into the
corner where his wits ended and where he probably would have stayed
ignominiously, for Miss Schultz seemed hardly to be listening and
really almost looked--he couldn't believe it, no girl had ever done it
in his presence yet, but she did undoubtedly almost look--bored, if
Mrs. Pearce had not flung open the door, and holding the torn portions
of her apron bunched together in her hands, nervously announced Lady
Shuttleworth.

"Oh," thought Priscilla, "what a day I'm having." But she got up and
was gracious, for Fritzing had praised this lady as kind and
sensible; and the moment Lady Shuttleworth set her eyes on her the
mystery of her son's behaviour flashed into clearness. "Tussie's seen
her!" she exclaimed inwardly; instantly adding "Upon my word I can't
blame the boy."

"My dear," she said, holding Priscilla's hand, "I've come to make
friends with you. See what a wise old woman I am. Frankly, I didn't
want you in those cottages, but now that my son has sold them I lose
no time in making friends. Isn't that true wisdom?"

"It's true niceness," said Priscilla, smiling down at the little old
lady whose eyes were twinkling all over her. "I don't think you'll
find us in any way a nuisance. All we want is to be quiet."

Mrs. Morrison sniffed.

"Do you really?" said Lady Shuttleworth. "Then we shall get on
capitally. It's what I like best myself. And you've come too," she
went on, turning to Mrs. Morrison, "to make friends with your new
parishioner? Why, Robin, and you too?"

"Oh, I'm only accidental," said Robin quickly. "Only a restorer of
lost property. And I'm just going," he added, beginning to make hasty
adieux; for Lady Shuttleworth invariably produced a conviction in him
that his clothes didn't fit and wanted brushing badly, and no young
man so attentive to his appearance as Robin could be expected to enjoy
that. He fled therefore, feeling that even Miss Schultz's loveliness
would not make up for Lady Shuttleworth's eyes; and in the passage,
from whence Mrs. Pearce had retreated, removing herself as far as
might be from the awful lady to whom her father-in-law owed rent and
who saw every hole, Robin pounced on his Uncle Cox's umbrella, tucked
is once more beneath his arm, and bore it swiftly back to the stand
where it had spent five peaceful years. "Really old women are rather
terrible things," he thought as he dropped it in again. "I wonder what
they're here for."

"Ah, it's there, I see," remarked his mother that night as she passed
through the hall on her way to dinner.

"What is?" inquired Robin who was just behind her.

"Your Uncle Cox's umbrella."

"Dear mater, why this extreme interest in my Uncle Cox's umbrella?"

"I'm glad to see it back again, that's all. One gets so used to
things."

Lady Shuttleworth and his mother--I shudder to think that it is
possible Robin included his mother in the reflection about old women,
but on the other hand one never can tell--had stayed on at the farm
for another twenty minutes after he left. They would have stayed
longer, for Lady Shuttleworth was more interested in Priscilla than
she had ever been in any girl before, and Mrs. Morrison, who saw this
interest and heard the kind speeches, had changed altogether from ice
to amiability, crushing her leaflets in her hand and more than once
expressing hopes that Miss Neumann-Schultz would soon come up to tea
and learn to know and like Netta--I repeat, they would have stayed
much longer, but that an extremely odd thing happened.

Priscilla had been charming; chatting with what seemed absolute
frankness about her future life in the cottages, answering little
questionings of Lady Shuttleworth's with a discretion and plausibility
that would have warmed Fritzing's anxious heart, dwelling most, for
here the ground was safest, on her uncle, his work, his gifts and
character, and Lady Shuttleworth, completely fascinated, had offered
her help of every sort, help in the arranging of her little home, in
the planting of its garden, even in the building of those bathrooms
about which Tussie had been told by Mr. Dawson. She thought the desire
for many bathrooms entirely praiseworthy, and only a sign of lunacy in
persons of small means. Fritzing had assured Tussie that he had money
enough for the bathrooms; and if his poetic niece liked everybody
about her to be nicely washed was not that a taste to be applauded?
Perhaps Lady Shuttleworth expatiated on plans and probable
building-costs longer than Priscilla was able to be interested;
perhaps she was over-explanatory of practical details; anyhow
Priscilla's attention began to wander, and she gradually became very
tired of her callers. She answered in monosyllables, and her smile
grew vague. Then suddenly, at the first full stop Lady Shuttleworth
reached in a sentence about sanitation--the entire paragraph was never
finished--she got up with her usual deliberate grace, and held out her
hand.

"It has been very kind of you to come and see me," she said to the
astounded lady, with a little gracious smile. "I hope you will both
come again another time."

For an instant Lady Shuttleworth thought she was mad. Then to her own
amazement she found her body rising obediently and letting its hand be
taken.

Mrs. Morrison did the same. Both had their hands slightly pressed,
both were smiled upon, and both went out at once and speechless.
Priscilla stood calmly while they walked to the door, with the little
smile fixed on her face.

"Is it possible we've been insulted?" burst out Mrs. Morrison when
they got outside.

"I don't know," said Lady Shuttleworth, who looked extremely
thoughtful.

"Do you think it can possibly be the barbarous German custom?"

"I don't know," said Lady Shuttleworth again.

And all the way to the vicarage, whither she drove Mrs. Morrison, she
was very silent, and no exclamations and conjectures of that indignant
lady's could get a word out of her.




X


Kunitz meanwhile was keeping strangely quiet. Not a breath, not a
whisper, had reached the newspapers from that afflicted little town of
the dreadful thing that had happened to it. It will be remembered that
the Princess ran away on a Monday, arrived at Baker's in the small
hours of Wednesday morning, and had now spent both Wednesday and
Thursday in Symford. There had, then, been ample time for Europe to
receive in its startled ears the news of her flight; yet Europe,
judging from its silence, knew nothing at all about it. In Minehead on
the Thursday evening Fritzing bought papers, no longer it is true with
the frenzy he had displayed at Dover when every moment seemed packed
with peril, but still with eagerness; and not a paper mentioned
Kunitz. On the Saturday he did find the laconic information in the
London paper he had ordered to be sent him every day that the Grand
Duke of Lothen-Kunitz who was shooting in East Prussia had been joined
there by that Prince--I will not reveal his august name--who had so
badly wanted to marry Priscilla. And on the Sunday--it was of course
the paper published in London on Saturday--he read that the Princess
Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz, the second and only unmarried daughter of
the Grand Duke, was confined to her bed by a sharp attack of
influenza. After that there was utter silence. Fritzing showed
Priscilla the paragraph about her influenza, and she was at first very
merry over it. The ease with which a princess can shake off her
fetters the moment she seriously tries to surprised her, and amused
her too, for a little. It surprised Fritzing, but without amusing him,
for he was a man who was never amused. Indeed, I am unable to recall
any single occasion on which I saw him smile. Other emotions shook him
vigorously as we know, but laughter never visited him with its
pleasant ticklings under the ribs; it slunk away abashed before a task
so awful, and left him at his happiest to a mood of mild contentment.
"Your Royal Parent," he remarked to Priscilla, "has chosen that which
is ever the better part of valour, and is hushing the incident up."

"He never loved me," said Priscilla, wistfully. On thinking it over
she was not quite sure that she liked being allowed to run away so
easily. Did nobody care, then, what became of her? Was she of
positively no value at all? Running away is all very well, but your
pride demands that those runned from shall at least show some sign of
not liking it, make some effort, however humble, to fetch you back. If
they do not, if they remain perfectly quiescent and resigned, not even
sending forth a wail that shall be audible, you are naturally
extremely crushed. "My father," said Priscilla bitterly, "doesn't
care a bit. He'll give out I'm dangerously ill, and then you'll see,
Fritzi--I shall either die, or be sent away for an interminable
yachting cruise with the Countess. And so dust will be thrown in
people's eyes. My father is very good at that, and the Countess is a
perfect genius. You'll see."

But Fritzing never saw, for there was no more mention at all either of
Kunitz or of influenza. And just then he was so much taken up by his
efforts to get into the cottages as quickly as possible that after a
passing feeling of thankfulness that the Grand Duke should be of such
a convenient indifference to his daughter's fate it dropped from his
mind in the easy fashion in which matters of importance always did
drop from it. What was the use, briefly reflected this philosopher, of
worrying about what they were or were not thinking at Kunitz? There
would be time enough for that when they actually began to do
something. He felt very safe from Kunitz in the folds of the Somerset
hills, and as the days passed calmly by he felt still safer. But
though no dangers seemed to threaten from without there were certain
dangers within that made it most desirable for them to get away from
Baker's and into their own little home without a moment's unnecessary
delay. He could not always be watching his tongue, and he found for
instance that it positively refused to call the Princess Ethel. It had
an almost equal objection to addressing her as niece; and it had a
most fatal habit of slipping out Grand Ducal Highnesses. True, at
first they mostly talked German together, but the tendency to talk
English grew more marked every day; it was in the air they breathed,
and they both could talk it so fatally well. Up at the cottages among
the workmen, or when they were joined by Mr. Dawson, grown zealous to
help, or by either of the young men Robin and Tussie, who seemed
constantly to be passing, the danger too was great. Fritzing was so
conscious of it that he used to break out into perspirations whenever
Priscilla was with him in public, and his very perspirations were
conspicuous. The strain made his manner oddly nervous when speaking to
or of his niece, and he became the subject of much conjecture to the
observant Robin. Robin thought that in spite of her caressing ways
with her uncle the girl must be privately a dreadful tyrant. It seemed
difficult to believe, but Robin prided himself on being ready to
believe anything at a moment's notice, especially if it was the worst,
and he called it having an open mind. The girl was obviously the most
spoilt of girls. No one could help seeing that. Her least wish seemed
to be for the uncle a command that was not even to be talked about.
Yet the uncle was never openly affectionate to her. It almost seemed
as though she must have some secret hold over him, be in possession,
perhaps, of some fact connected with a guilty past. But then this girl
and guilty pasts! Why, from the look in her eyes she could never even
have heard of such things. Robin thought himself fairly experienced
in knowledge of human nature, but he had to admit that he had never
yet met so incomprehensible a pair. He wanted to talk to Tussie
Shuttleworth about them, but Tussie would not talk. To Tussie it
seemed impossible to talk about Priscilla because she was sacred to
him, and she was sacred to him because he adored her so. He adored her
to an extent that amazes me to think of, worshipping her beauty with
all the headlong self-abasement of a very young man who is also a
poet. His soul was as wax within him, softest wax punched all over
with little pictures of Priscilla. No mother is happy while her
child's soul is in this state, and though he was extremely decent, and
hid it and smothered it and choked it with all the energy he
possessed, Lady Shuttleworth knew very well what was going on inside
him and spent her spare time trying to decide whether to laugh or to
cry over her poor Tussie. "When does Robin go back to Cambridge?" she
asked Mrs. Morrison the next time she met her, which was in the front
garden of a sick old woman's cottage.

Mrs. Morrison was going in with a leaflet; Lady Shuttleworth was going
in with a pound of tea. From this place they could see Priscilla's
cottage, and Robin was nailing up its creepers in the sight of all
Symford.

"Ah--I know what you mean," said Mrs. Morrison quickly.

"It is always such a pity to see emotions wasted," said Lady
Shuttleworth slowly, as if weighing each word.

"Wasted? You do think she's an adventuress, then?" said Mrs. Morrison
eagerly.

"Sh-sh. My dear, how could I think anything so unkind? But we who are
old"--Mrs. Morrison jerked up her chin--"and can look on calmly, do
see the pity of it when beautiful emotions are lavished and wasted. So
much force, so much time frittered away in dreams. And all so useless,
so barren. Nothing I think is so sad as waste, and nothing is so
wasteful as a one-sided love."

Mrs. Morrison gave the pink tulle bow she liked to wear in the
afternoons at her throat an agitated pat, and tried to conceal her
misery that Augustus Shuttleworth should also have succumbed to Miss
Neumann-Schultz. That he had done so was very clear from Lady
Shuttleworth's portentous remarks, for it was not in human nature for
a woman to be thus solemn about the wasted emotions of other people's
sons. His doing so might save Robin's future, but it would ruin
Netta's. We all have our little plans for the future--dear rosy things
that we dote on and hug to our bosoms with more tenderness even than
we hug the babies of our bodies, and the very rosiest and best
developed of Mrs. Morrison's darling plans was the marriage of her
daughter Netta with the rich young man Augustus. It was receiving a
rude knock on its hopeful little head at this moment in old Mrs.
Jones's front garden, and naturally the author of its being winced.
Augustus, she feared, must be extremely far gone in love, and it was
not likely that the girl would let such a chance go. It was a
consolation that the marriage would be a scandal,--this person from
nowhere, this niece of a German teacher, carrying off the wealthiest
young man in the county. The ways of so-called Providence were quite
criminally inscrutable, she thought, in stark defiance of what a
vicar's wife should think; but then she was greatly goaded.

Priscilla herself came out of Mrs. Jones's door at that moment with a
very happy face. She had succeeded in comforting the sick woman to an
extent that surprised her. The sick woman had cheered up so suddenly
and so much that Priscilla, delighted, had at once concluded that work
among the sick poor was her true vocation. And how easy it had been! A
few smiles, a few kind words, a five-pound note put gently into the
withered old hands, and behold the thing was done. Never was sick
woman so much comforted as Mrs. Jones. She who had been disinclined to
speak above a whisper when Priscilla went in was able at the end of
the visit to pour forth conversation in streams, and quite loud
conversation, and even interspersed with chuckles. All Friday
Priscilla had tried to help in the arranging of her cottage, and had
made herself and Fritzing so tired over it that on Saturday she let
him go up alone and decided that she would, for her part, now begin to
do good to the people in the village. It was what she intended to do
in future. It was to be the chief work of her new life. She was going
to live like the poor and among them, smooth away their sorrows and
increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the
rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the
clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary
facts of life. And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the
farm. It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead
that sillinesses assailed her soul--shrinkings of the flesh from
honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience at Annalise's
swollen eyes. Priscilla could have cried that night when she went to
bed, if she had not held tears in scorn, at the sickliness of her
spirit, her spirit that she had thought more than able to keep her
body in subjection, that she had hoped was unalterably firm and brave.
But see the uses of foolishness,--the reaction from it is so great
that it sends us with a bound twice as far again along the right road
as we were while we were wise and picking our way with clean shoes
slowly among the puddles. Who does not know that fresh impulse, so
strong and gracious, towards good that surges up in us after a period
of sitting still in mud? What an experience it is, that vigorous shake
and eager turning of our soiled face once more towards the blessed
light. "I will arise and go to my Father"--of all the experiences of
the spirit surely this is the most glorious; and behold the prudent,
the virtuous, the steadfast--dogged workers in the vineyard in the
heat of the day--are shut out from it for ever.

Priscilla had not backslided much; but short as her tarrying had been
among the puddles she too sprang forward after it with renewed
strength along the path she had chosen as the best, and having
completed the second of her good works--the first had been performed
just previously, and had been a warm invitation made personally from
door to door to all the Symford mothers to send their children to tea
and games at Baker's Farm the next day, which was Sunday--she came
away very happy from the comforted Mrs. Jones, and met the two
arriving comforters in the front garden.

Now Priscilla's and Mrs. Jones's last words together had been these:

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" Priscilla had asked,
leaning over the old lady and patting her arm in farewell.

"No, deary--you've done enough already, God bless your pretty face,"
said Mrs. Jones, squeezing the five-pound note ecstatically in her
hands.

"But isn't there anything you'd like? Can't I get you anything? See, I
can run about and you are here in bed. Tell me what I can do."

Mrs. Jones blinked and worked her mouth and blinked again and wheezed
and cleared her throat. "Well, I do know of something would comfort
me," she said at last, amid much embarrassed coughing.

"Tell me," said Priscilla.

"I don't like," coughed Mrs. Jones.

"Tell me," said Priscilla.

"I'll whisper it, deary."

Priscilla bent down her head, and the old lady put her twitching mouth
to her ear.

"Why, of course," said Priscilla smiling, "I'll go and get you some at
once."

"Now God for ever bless your beautiful face, darlin'!" shrilled Mrs.
Jones, quite beside herself with delight. "The Cock and 'Ens,
deary--that's the place. And the quart bottles are the best; one gets
more comfort out of them, and they're the cheapest in the end."

And Priscilla issuing forth on this errand met the arriving visitors
in the garden.

"How do you do," she said in a happy voice, smiling gaily at both of
them. She had seen neither since she had dismissed them, but naturally
she had never given that strange proceeding a thought.

"Oh--how do you do," said Lady Shuttleworth, surprised to see her
there, and with a slight and very unusual confusion of manner.

Mrs. Morrison said nothing but stood stiffly in the background,
answering Priscilla's smile with a stern, reluctant nod.

"I've been talking to poor old Mrs. Jones. Your son"--she looked at
Mrs. Morrison--"told me how ill she was."

"Did he?" said Mrs. Morrison, hardly raising her eyes a moment from
the ground. This girl was her double enemy: bound, whatever she did,
to make either a fool of her son or of her daughter.

"So I went in and tried to cheer her up. And I really believe I did."

"Well that was very kind of you," said Lady Shuttleworth, smiling in
spite of herself, unable to withstand the charm of Priscilla's
personality. How supremely ridiculous of Mrs. Morrison to think that
this girl was an adventuress. Such are the depths of ignorance one can
descend to if one is buried long enough in the country.

"Now," said Priscilla cheerfully, "she wants rum, and I'm just going
to buy her some."

"Rum?" cried Lady Shuttleworth in a voice of horror; and Mrs. Morrison
started violently.

"Is it bad for her?" said Priscilla, surprised.

"Bad!" cried Lady Shuttleworth.

"It is," said Mrs. Morrison with her eyes on the ground, "poison for
both body and soul."

"Dear me," said Priscilla, her face falling. "Why, she said it would
comfort her."

"It will poison both her body and her soul," repeated Mrs. Morrison
grimly.

"My dear," said Lady Shuttleworth, "our efforts are all directed
towards training our people to keep from drinking."

"But she doesn't want to drink," said Priscilla. "She only wants to
taste it now and then. I'm afraid she's dying. Mustn't she die
happy?"

"It is our duty," said Mrs. Morrison, "to see that our parishioners
die sober."

"But I've promised," said Priscilla.

"Did she--did she ask for it herself?" asked Lady Shuttleworth, a
great anxiety in her voice.

"Yes, and I promised."

Both the women looked very grave. Mrs. Jones, who was extremely old
and certainly dying--not from any special disease but from mere
inability to go on living--had been up to this a shining example to
Symford of the manner in which Christian old ladies ought to die. As
such she was continually quoted by the vicar's wife, and Lady
Shuttleworth had felt an honest pride in this ordered and seemly
death-bed. The vicar went every day and sat with her and said that he
came away refreshed. Mrs. Morrison read her all those of her leaflets
that described the enthusiasm with which other good persons behave in
a like case. Lady Shuttleworth never drove through the village without
taking her some pleasant gift--tea, or fruit, or eggs, or even little
pots of jam, to be eaten discreetly and in spoonfuls. She also paid a
woman to look in at short intervals during the day and shake up her
pillow. Kindness and attention and even affection could not, it will
be admitted, go further; all three had been heaped on Mrs. Jones with
generous hands; and in return she had expressed no sentiments that
were not appropriate, and never, never had breathed the faintest
suggestion to any of her benefactors that what she really wanted most
was rum. It shocked both the women inexpressibly, and positively
pained Lady Shuttleworth. Mrs. Morrison privately believed Priscilla
had put the idea into the old lady's head, and began to regard her in
something of the light of a fiend.

"Suppose," said Priscilla, "we look upon it as medicine."

"But my dear, it is not medicine," said Lady Shuttleworth.

"It is poison," repeated Mrs. Morrison.

"How can it be if it does her so much good? I must keep my promise. I
wouldn't disappoint her for the world. If only you'd seen her
delight"--they quivered--"you'd agree that she mustn't be
disappointed, poor old dying thing. Why, it might kill her. But
suppose we treat it as a medicine, and I lock up the bottle and go
round and give her a little myself three or four times a day--wouldn't
that be a good plan? Surely it couldn't hurt?"

"There is no law to stop you," said Mrs. Morrison; and Lady
Shuttleworth stared at the girl in silent dismay.

"I can try it at least," said Priscilla; "and if I find it's really
doing her harm I'll leave off. But I promised, and she's expecting it
now every minute. I can't break my promise. Do tell me--is the Cock
and Hens that inn round the corner? She told me it was best there."

"But you cannot go yourself to the Cock and Hens and buy rum,"
exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth, roused to energy; and her voice was full
of so determined a protest that the vicar's wife, who thought it
didn't matter at all where such a young woman went, received a fresh
shock.

"Why not?" inquired Priscilla.

"My dear, sooner than you should do that I'll--I'll go and buy it
myself," cried Lady Shuttleworth.

"Gracious heavens," thought Mrs. Morrison, perfectly staggered by this
speech. Had Lady Shuttleworth suddenly lost her reason? Or was she
already accepting the girl as her son's wife? Priscilla looked at her
a moment with grave eyes. "Is it because I'm a girl that I mustn't?"
she asked.

"Yes. For one thing. But--" Lady Shuttleworth shut her mouth.

"But what?" asked Priscilla.

"Oh, nothing."

"If it's not the custom of the country for a girl to go I'll send Mr.
Morrison," said Priscilla.

"Send Mr. Morrison?" gasped the vicar's wife.

"What, the vicar?" exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth.

"No, no," said Priscilla smiling, "young Mr. Morrison. I see him over
there tying up my creepers. He's so kind. He'll go. I'll ask him."

And nodding good-bye she hurried out of the garden and over to her
cottage, almost running in her desire not to keep Mrs. Jones any
longer in suspense.

The two women, rooted to the ground, watched her as if fascinated, saw
her speak to Robin on his ladder, saw how he started and dropped his
nails, saw how nimbly he clambered down, and how after the shortest
parley the infatuated youth rushed away at once in the direction of
the Cock and Hens. The only thing they did not see from where they
stood was the twinkle in his eye.

"I don't think," murmured Lady Shuttleworth, "I don't think, my dear,
that I quite care to go in to Mrs. Jones to-day. I--I think I'll go
home."

"So shall I," said Mrs. Morrison, biting her lips to keep them steady.
"I shall go and speak to the vicar."




XI


What she meant by speaking to the vicar was a vigorous stirring of him
up to wrath; but you cannot stir up vicars if they are truly good. The
vicar was a pious and patient old man, practiced in forgiveness, in
overlooking, in waiting, in trying again. Always slow to anger, as the
years drew him more and more apart into the shadows of old age and he
watched from their clear coolness with an ever larger comprehension
the younger generations striving together in the heat, he grew at last
unable to be angered at all. The scriptural injunction not to let the
sun go down upon your wrath had no uses for him, for he possessed no
wrath for the sun to go down upon. He had that lovable nature that
sees the best in everything first, and then prefers to look no
further. He took for granted that people were at bottom good and
noble, and the assumption went a long way towards making them so.
Robin, for instance, was probably saved by his father's unclouded
faith in him. Mrs. Morrison, a woman who had much trouble with
herself, having come into the world with the wings of the angel in her
well glued down and prevented from spreading by a multitude of little
defects, had been helped without her knowing it by his example out of
many a pit of peevishness and passion. Who shall measure the influence
of one kind and blameless life? His wife, in her gustier moments,
thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil,
this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle.
The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of
one's self to go on being calm in the face of it. With the blindness
of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness
of the object--the same remark exactly applies to husbands--she did
not see that the vicar was the candle shining in a naughty world, that
he was the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. And just as leaven
leavens by its mere presence in the lump, by merely passively being
there, and will go on doing it so long as there is a lump to leaven,
so had the vicar, more than his hardworking wife, more than the
untiring Lady Shuttleworth, more than any district visitor, parish
nurse, or other holy person, influenced Symf

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