Priscilla was shaken and stricken as she had never yet been; shaken with pity, stricken with remorse. She looked down at him in dismay while he kissed her hands with desperate, overwhelming love. What was she to do? Lady Shuttleworth tried to draw her away. What was she to do? If Tussie was overwhelmed with love, she was overwhelmed with pity.
"Ethel--Ethel--" gasped Tussie, kissing her hands, looking up at her, kissing them again.
Pity overcame her, engulfed her. She bent her head down to his and laid her cheek an instant on the absurd flannel nightingale, tenderly, apologetically.
"Ethel--Ethel," choked Tussie, "will you marry me?"
"Dear Tussie," she whispered in a shaky whisper, "I promise to answer you when you are well. Not yet. Not now. Get quite well, and then if you still want an answer I promise to give you one. Now let me go."
"Ethel," implored Tussie, looking at her with a wild entreaty in his eyes, "will you kiss me? Just once--to help me to live--"
And in her desire to comfort him she stooped down again and did kiss him, soberly, almost gingerly, on the forehead.
He let her hands slide away from between his and lay back on his pillows in a state for the moment of absolute beat.i.tude. He shut his eyes, and did not move while she crept softly out of the room.
"What have you done?" asked Lady Shuttleworth trembling, when they were safely in the pa.s.sage and the door shut behind them.
"I can"t think--I can"t think," groaned Priscilla, wringing her hands.
And, leaning against the bal.u.s.ters, then and there in that most public situation she began very bitterly to cry.
XIX
Priscilla went home dazed. All her suitors. .h.i.therto had approached her ceremoniously, timidly, through the Grand Duke; and we know they had not approached very near. But here was one, timid enough in health, who was positively reckless under circ.u.mstances that made most people meek. He had proposed to her arrayed in a blue flannel nightingale, and Priscilla felt that headlong self-effacement could go no further.
"He must have a great soul," she said to herself over and over again during the drive home, "a great, _great_ soul." And it seemed of little use wiping her tears away, so many fresh ones immediately took their place.
She ached over Tussie and Tussie"s mother. What had she done? She felt she had done wrong; yet how, except by just existing? and she did feel she couldn"t help doing that. Certainly she had made two kind hearts extremely miserable,--one was miserable now, and the other didn"t yet know how miserable it was going to be. She ought to have known, she ought to have thought, she ought to have foreseen. She of all persons in the world ought to have been careful with young men who believed her to be of their own cla.s.s. Contrition and woe took possession of Priscilla"s soul. She knew it was true that she could not help existing, but she knew besides, far back in a remote and seldom investigated corner of her mind, a corner on which she did not care to turn the light of careful criticism, that she ought not to be existing in Symford. It was because she was there, out of her proper sphere, in a place she had no business to be in at all, that these strange and heart-wringing scenes with young men occurred. And Fritzing would notice her red eyes and ask what had happened; and here within two days was a second story to be told of a young man unintentionally hurried to his doom. Would Fritzing be angry? She never knew beforehand. Would he, only remembering she was grand ducal, regard it as an insult and want to fight Tussie? The vision of poor Tussie, weak, fevered, embedded in pillows, swathed in flannel, receiving bloodthirsty messages of defiance from Fritzing upset her into more tears. Fritzing, she felt at that moment, was a trial. He burdened her with his gigantic efforts to keep her from burdens. He burdened her with his inflated notions of how burdenless she ought to be. He was admirable, unselfish, devoted; but she felt it was possible to be too admirable, too unselfish, too devoted. In a word Priscilla"s mind was in a state of upheaval, and the only ray of light she saw anywhere--and never was ray more watery--was that Tussie, for the moment at least, was content. The att.i.tude of his mother, on the other hand, was distressing and disturbing. There had been no more My dears and other kind ways. She had watched her crying on the stairs in stony silence, had gone down with her to the door in stony silence, and just at the last had said in an unmistakably stony voice, "All this is very cruel."
Priscilla was overwhelmed by the difficulties of life. The world was too much with her, she felt, a very great deal too much. She sent the Shuttleworth carriage away at the entrance to the village and went in to sit with Mrs. Jones a little, so that her eyes might lose their redness before she faced Fritzing; and Mrs. Jones was so glad to see her, so full of praises of her unselfish goodness in coming in, that once again Priscilla was forced to be ashamed of herself and of everything she did.
"I"m not unselfish, and I"m not good," she said, smoothing the old lady"s coverlet.
Mrs. Jones chuckled faintly. "Pretty dear," was her only comment.
"I don"t think I"m pretty and I know I"m not a dear," said Priscilla, quite vexed.
"Ain"t you then, deary," murmured Mrs. Jones soothingly.
Priscilla saw it was no use arguing, and taking up the Bible that always lay on the table by the bed began to read aloud. She read and read till both were quieted,--Mrs. Jones into an evidently sweet sleep, she herself into peace. Then she left off and sat for some time watching the old lady, the open Bible in-her lap, her soul filled with calm words and consolations, wondering what it could be like being so near death. Must it not be beautiful, thought Priscilla, to slip away so quietly in that sunny room, with no sound to break the peace but the ticking of the clock that marked off the last minutes, and outside the occasional footstep of a pa.s.ser-by still hurrying on life"s business? Wonderful to have done with everything, to have it all behind one, settled, lived through, endured. The troublous joys as well as the pains, all finished; the griefs and the stinging happinesses, all alike lived down; and now evening, and sleep. In the few days Priscilla had known her the old lady had drawn visibly nearer death. Lying there on the pillow, so little and light that she hardly pressed it down at all, she looked very near it indeed. And how kind Death was, rubbing away the traces of what must have been a sordid existence, set about years back with the usual coa.r.s.e pleasures and selfish hopes,--how kind Death was, letting all there was of spirit shine out so sweetly at the end. There was an enlarged photograph of Mrs. Jones and her husband over the fireplace, a photograph taken for their silver wedding; she must have been about forty-five; how kind Death was, thought Priscilla, looking from the picture to the figure on the bed. She sighed a little, and got up. Life lay before her, an endless ladder up each of whose steep rungs she would have to clamber; in every sort of weather she would have to clamber, getting more battered, more blistered with every rung.... She looked wistfully at the figure on the bed, and sighed a little. Then she crept out, and softly shut the door.
She walked home lost in thought. As she was going up the hill to her cottage Fritzing suddenly emerged from it and indulged in movements so strange and complicated that they looked like nothing less than a desperate dancing on the doorstep. Priscilla walked faster, staring in astonishment. He made strange gestures, his face was pale, his hair rubbed up into a kind of infuriated mop.
"Why, what in the world--" began the amazed Priscilla, as soon as she was near enough.
"Ma"am, I"ve been robbed," shouted Fritzing; and all Symford might have heard if it had happened to be listening.
"Robbed?" repeated Priscilla. "What of?"
"Of all my money, ma"am. Of all I had--of all we had--to live on."
"Nonsense, Fritzi," said Priscilla; but she did turn a little paler.
"Don"t let us stand out here," she added; and she got him in and shut the street door.
He would have left it open and would have shouted his woes through it as through a trumpet down the street, oblivious of all things under heaven but his misfortune. He tore open the drawer of the writing-table. "In this drawer--in the pocket-book you see in this drawer--in this now empty pocket-book, did I leave it. It was there yesterday. It was there last night. Now it is gone. Miscreants from without have visited us. Or perhaps, viler still, miscreants from within. A miscreant, I do believe, capable of anything--Annalise--"
"Fritzi, I took a five-pound note out of that last night, if that"s what you miss."
"You, ma"am?"
"To pay the girl who worked here her wages. You weren"t here. I couldn"t find anything smaller."
"_Gott sei Dank! Gott sei Dank_!" cried Fritzing, going back to German in his joy. "Oh ma"am, if you had told me earlier you would have spared me great anguish. Have you the change?"
"Didn"t she bring it?"
"Bring it, ma"am?"
"I gave it to her last night to change. She was to bring it round this morning. Didn"t she?"
Fritzing stared aghast. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. In a moment he was back again. "She has not been here," he said, in a voice packed once more with torment.
"Perhaps she has forgotten."
"Ma"am, how came you--"
"Now you"re going to scold me."
"No, no--but how is it possible that you should have trusted--"
"Fritzi, you _are_ going to scold me, and I"m so tired. What else has been taken? You said all your money--"
He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat. "Nothing else, ma"am, nothing else. I will go and seek the girl." And he clapped it down over his eyes as he always did in moments of great mental stress.
"What a fuss," thought Priscilla wearily. Aloud she said, "The girl here to-day will tell you where she lives. Of course she has forgotten, or not been able to change it yet." And she left him, and went out to get into her own half of the house.
Yes, Fritzi really was a trial. Why such a fuss and such big words about five pounds? If it were lost and the girl afraid to come and say so, it didn"t matter much; anyhow nothing like so much as having one"s peace upset. How foolish to be so agitated and talk of having been robbed of everything. Fritzing"s mind, she feared, that large, enlightened mind on whose breadth and serenity she had gazed admiringly ever since she could remember gazing at all, was shrinking to dimensions that would presently exactly match the dimensions of Creeper Cottage. She went upstairs disheartened and tired, and dropping down full length on her sofa desired Annalise to wash her face.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness has been weeping," said Annalise, whisking the sponge in and out of corners with a skill surprising in one who had only practised the process during the last ten days.
Priscilla opened her eyes to stare at her in frankest surprise, for never yet had Annalise dared make a remark unrequested. Annalise, by beginning to wash them, forced her to shut them again.
Priscilla then opened her mouth to tell her what she thought of her.
Immediately Annalise"s swift sponge stopped it up.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness," said Annalise, washing Priscilla"s mouth with a thoroughness and an amount of water suggestive of its not having been washed for months, "told me only yesterday that weeping was a terrible--_schreckliche_--waste of time. Therefore, since your Grand Ducal Highness knows that and yet herself weeps, it is easy to see that there exists a reason for weeping which makes weeping inevitable."