"About what?" asked Priscilla, startled.
"About the squire intending to marry you."
"Oh," said Priscilla.
"It seems hard on him, don"t it? Has it struck you that such things are likely to occur pretty often to Miss Maria-Theresa Ethel Neumann-Schultz?"
"I"m afraid you really have come only to laugh," said Priscilla, her lips quivering.
"I swear it"s only to see if you are happy."
"Well, see then." And throwing back her head with a great defiance she looked at him while her eyes filled with tears; and though they presently brimmed over, and began to drop down pitifully one by one, she would not flinch but went on looking.
"I see," said the Prince quietly. "And I"m convinced. Of course, then, I shall suggest your leaving this."
"I want to."
"And putting yourself in the care of the Disthal."
Priscilla winced.
"Only her temporary care. Quite temporary. And letting her take you back to Kunitz."
Priscilla winced again.
"Only temporarily," said the Prince.
"But my father would never--"
"Yes my dear, he will. He"ll be delighted to see you. He"ll rejoice."
"Rejoice?"
"I a.s.sure you he will. You"ve only got to do what I tell you."
"Shall you--come too?"
"If you"ll let me."
"But then--but then--"
"Then what, my dear?"
She looked at him, and her face changed slowly from white to red and red to white again. Fritzing"s words crossed her mind--"If you marry him you will be undoubtedly eternally lost," and her very soul cried out that they were folly. Why should she be eternally lost? What cobwebs were these, cobwebs of an old brain preoccupied with shadows, dusty things to be swept away at the first touch of Nature"s vigorous broom? Indeed she thought it far more likely that she would be eternally found. But she was ashamed of herself, ashamed of all she had done, ashamed of the disgraceful way she had treated this man, terribly disillusioned, terribly out of conceit with herself, and she stood there changing colour, hanging her head, humbled, penitent, every shred of the dignity she had been trained to gone, simply somebody who has been very silly and is very sorry.
The Prince put out his hand.
She pretended not to see it.
The Prince came round the table. "You know," he said, "our engagement hasn"t been broken off yet?"
Her instinct was to edge away, but she would not stoop to edging. "Was it ever made?" she asked, not able to induce her voice to rise above a whisper.
"Practically."
There was another silence.
"Why, then--" began Priscilla, for the silence had come to be more throbbing, more intolerably expressive than any speech.
"Yes?" encouraged the Prince, coming very close.
She turned her head slowly. "Why, then--" said Priscilla again, her face breaking into a smile, half touched, half mischievous, wholly adorable.
"I think so too," said the Prince; and he shut her mouth with a kiss.
"And now," said the Prince some time afterwards, "let us go to that old sinner Fritzing."
Priscilla hung back, reluctant to deal this final blow to the heart that had endured so many. "He"ll be terribly shocked," she said.
But the Prince declared it had to be done; and hand in hand they went out into the street, and opening Fritzing"s door stood before him.
He was still absorbed in his aeschylus, had been sitting absorbed in the deeds of the dead and departed, of the long dead Xerxes, the long dead Darius, the very fish, voiceless but voracious, long since as dead as the most shredded of the sailors,--he had been sitting absorbed in these various corpses all the while that in the next room, on the other side of a few inches of plaster and paper, so close you would have thought his heart must have burned within him, so close you would have thought he must be scorched, the living present had been pulsing and glowing, beating against the bright bars of the future, stirring up into alertness a whole row of little red-headed souls till then asleep, souls with golden eyelashes, souls eager to come and be princes and princesses of--I had almost revealed the mighty nation"s name. A shadow fell across his book, and looking up he saw the two standing before him hand in hand.
Priscilla caught her breath: what white anguish was going to flash into his face when he grasped the situation? Judge then of her amazement, her hesitation whether to be pleased or vexed, to laugh or cry, when, grasping it, he leaped to his feet and in tones of a most limitless, a most unutterable relief, shouted three times running "_Gott sei Dank_!"
CONCLUSION
So that was the end of Priscilla"s fortnight,--according to the way you look at it glorious or inglorious. I shall not say which I think it was; whether it is better to marry a prince, become in course of time a queen, be at the head of a great nation, be surfeited with honour, wealth, power and magnificence till the day when Death with calm, indifferent fingers strips everything away and leaves you at last to the meek simplicity of a shroud; or whether toilsome paths, stern resistances, buffetings bravely taken, battles fought inch by inch, an ideal desperately clung to even though in clinging you are slain, is not rather the part to be chosen of him whose soul would sit attired with stars. Anyhow the G.o.ddess laughed, the G.o.ddess who had left Priscilla in the lurch, when she heard the end of the adventure; and her unpleasant sister, having nothing more to do in Creeper Cottage, gathered up her rags and grinned too as she left it. At least her claws had lacerated much over-tender flesh during her stay; and though the Prince had interrupted the operation and forced her for the moment to inactivity, she was not dissatisfied with what had been accomplished.
Priscilla, it will readily be imagined, made no farewell calls. She disappeared from Symford as suddenly as she had appeared; and Mrs.
Morrison, coming into Creeper Cottage on Monday afternoon to unload her conscience yet more, found only a pleasant gentleman, a stranger of mellifluous manners, writing out cheques. She had ten minutes talk with him, and went home very sad and wise. Indeed from that day, her spirit being the spirit of the true sn.o.b, the hectorer of the humble, the devout groveller in the courtyards of the great, she was a much-changed woman. Even her hair felt it, and settled down unchecked to greyness. She no longer cared to put on a pink tulle bow in the afternoons, which may or may not be a sign of grace. She ceased to suppose that she was pretty. When the accounts of Priscilla"s wedding filled all the papers she became so ill that she had to go to bed and be nursed. Sometimes to the vicar"s mild surprise she hesitated before expressing an opinion. Once at least she of her own accord said she had been wrong. And although she never told any one of the conversation with the gentleman writing cheques, when Robin came home for Christmas and looked at her he knew at once what she knew.
As for Lady Shuttleworth, she got a letter from Priscilla; quite a long one, enclosing a little one for Tussie to be given him if and when his mother thought expedient. Lady Shuttleworth was not surprised by what she read. She had suspected it from the moment Priscilla rose up the day she called on her at Baker"s Farm and dismissed her. Till her marriage with the late Sir Augustus she had been lady-in-waiting to one of the English princesses, and she could not be mistaken on such points. She knew the sort of thing too well. But she never forgave Priscilla. How could she? Was the day of Tussie"s coming of age, that dreadful day when he was nearest death, a day a mother could ever forget? It had all been most wanton, most cruel. We know she was full of the milk of human kindness: on the subject of Priscilla it was unmixed gall.
As for Tussie,--well, you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs, and Tussie on this occasion was the eggs. It is a painful part to play. He found it exquisitely painful, and vainly sought comfort in the consolation that it had been Priscilla"s omelette. The consolation proved empty, and for a long while he suffered every sort of torment known to the sensitive. But he got over it. People do. They will get over anything if you give them time, and he being young had plenty of it. He lived it down as one lives down every sorrow and every joy; and when in the fulness of time, after a series of years in which he went about listlessly in a soft felt hat and an unsatisfactory collar, he married, it was to Priscilla"s capital that he went for his honeymoon.
She, hearing he was there, sent for them both and was kind.
As for Annalise, she never got her twenty thousand marks. On the contrary, the vindictive Grand Duke caused her to be prosecuted for blackmailing, and she would undoubtedly have languished in prison if Priscilla had not interfered and sent her back to her parents. Like Mrs. Morrison, she is chastened. She does not turn up her nose so much. She does not sing. Indeed her songs ceased from the moment she caught sight through a crack in the kitchen door of the Prince"s broad shoulders filling up Fritzing"s sitting-room. From that moment Annalise swooned from one depth of respect and awe to the other. She became breathlessly willing, meek to vanishing point. But Priscilla could not forget all she had made her suffer; and the Prince, who had thought of everything, suddenly producing her head woman from some recess in Baker"s Farm, where she too had spent the night, Annalise was superseded, her further bitter fate being to be left behind at Creeper Cottage in the charge of the gentleman with the cheque-book--who as it chanced was a faddist in food and would allow nothing more comforting than dried fruits and nuts to darken the doors--till he should have leisure to pack her up and send her home.
As for Emma, she was hunted out by that detective who travelled down into Somersetshire with the fugitives and who had already been so useful to the Prince; and Priscilla, desperately anxious to make amends wherever she could, took her into her own household, watching over her herself, seeing to it that no word of what she had done was ever blown about among the crowd of idle tongues, and she ended, I believe, by marrying a lacquey,--one of those splendid persons with white silk calves who were so precious in the sight of Annalise.
Indeed I am not sure that it was not the very lacquey Annalise had loved most and had intended to marry herself. In this story at least, the claims of poetic justice shall be strictly attended to; and Annalise had sniffed outrageously at Emma.
As for the Countess Disthal, she married the doctor and was sorry ever afterwards; but her sorrow was as nothing compared with his.