"d.i.c.k, do you want to drive me frantic!"
"I can"t conceive any domestic occurrence which would be more distressing or generally inconvenient, mother dear. You do interrupt a fellow so! I forgot where I was now--oh, the manager, ah yes! Well, the manager said, "We shall be very happy to have the stones made in any design you may select"--jewellery, by the way, seems to exercise a most refining influence upon the manners: this man had the deportment of a duke--"you may select," he said; "but of course I need not tell you that none of these stones are genuine.""
"Not genuine!" cried Aunt Margarine excitedly. "They must be--he was lying!"
"West-end jewellers never lie," said d.i.c.k; "but naturally, when he said that, I told him I should like to have some proof of his a.s.sertion.
"Will you take the risk of testing?" said he. "Test away, my dear man!"
said I. So he brought a little wheel near the emerald--"whizz!" and away went the emerald! Then he let a drop of something fall on the ruby--and it fizzled up for all the world like pink champagne. "Go on, don"t mind _me_!" I told him, so he touched the diamond with an electric wire--"phit!" and there was only something that looked like the ash of a shocking bad cigar. Then the pearls--and they popped like so many air-balloons. "Are you satisfied?" he asked.
""Oh, perfectly,"" said I, "you needn"t trouble about the horse-shoe pin now. Good evening," and so I came away, after thanking him for his very amusing scientific experiments."
"And do you believe that the jewels are all shams, d.i.c.k?--do you really?"
"I think it so probable that nothing on earth will induce me to offer a single one for sale. I should never hear the last of it at the bank. No, mater, dear little Priscilla"s sparkling conversation may be unspeakably precious from a moral point of view, but it has no commercial value.
Those jewels are bogus--shams every stone of them!"
Now, all this time our heroine had been sitting unperceived in a corner behind a window-curtain, reading "The Wide, Wide World," a work which she was never weary of perusing. Some children would have come forward earlier, but Priscilla was never a forward child, and she remained as quiet as a little mouse up to the moment when she could control her feelings no longer.
"It isn"t true!" she cried pa.s.sionately, bursting out of her retreat and confronting her cousin; "it"s cruel and unkind to say my jewels are shams! They are real--they are, they _are_!"
"Hullo, Prissie!" said her abandoned cousin; "so you combine jewel-dropping with eaves-dropping, eh?"
"How dare you!" cried Aunt Margarine, almost beside herself, "you odious little prying minx, setting up to teach your elders and your betters with your cut and dried priggish maxims! When I think how I have petted and indulged you all this time, and borne with the abominable litter you left in every room you entered--and now to find you are only a little, conceited, hypocritical impostor--oh, _why_ haven"t I words to express my contempt for such conduct--why am I dumb at such a moment as this?"
"Come, mother," said her son soothingly, "that"s not such a bad beginning; I should call it fairly fluent and expressive, myself."
"Be quiet, d.i.c.k! I"m speaking to this wicked child, who has obtained our love and sympathy and attention on false pretences, for which she ought to be put in prison--yes, in _prison_, for such a heartless trick on relatives who can ill afford to be so cruelly disappointed!"
"But, aunt!" expostulated poor Priscilla, "you always said you only kept the jewels as souvenirs, and that it did you so much good to hear me talk!"
"Don"t argue with _me_, miss! If I had known the stones were wretched tawdry imitations, do you imagine for an instant----?"
"Now, mother," said d.i.c.k, "be fair--they were uncommonly good imitations, you must admit that!"
"Indeed, indeed I thought they were real, the fairy never told me!"
"After all," said d.i.c.k, "it"s not Priscilla"s fault. She can"t help it if the stones aren"t real, and she made up for quality by quant.i.ty anyhow; didn"t you, Prissie?"
"Hold your tongue, Richard; she _could_ help it, she knew it all the time, and she"s a hateful, sanctimonious little stuck-up viper, and so I tell her to her face!"
Priscilla could scarcely believe that kind, indulgent, smooth-spoken Aunt Margarine could be addressing such words to her; it frightened her so much that she did not dare to answer, and just then Cathie and Belle came into the room.
"Oh, mother," they began penitently, "we"re _so_ sorry, but we couldn"t find dear Prissie anywhere, so we haven"t picked up anything the whole afternoon!"
"Ah, my poor darlings, you shall never be your cousin"s slaves any more.
Don"t go near her, she"s a naughty, deceitful wretch; her jewels are false, my sweet loves, false! She has imposed upon us all, she does not deserve to a.s.sociate with you!"
"I always said Prissie"s jewels looked like the things you get on crackers!" said Belle, tossing her head.
"Now we shall have a little rest, I hope," chimed in Cathie.
"I shall send her home to her parents this very night," declared Aunt Margarine; "she shall not stay here to pervert our happy household with her miserable _gewgaws_!"
Here Priscilla found her tongue. "Do you think I _want_ to stay?" she said proudly; "I see now that you only wanted to have me here because--because of the horrid jewels, and I never knew they were false, and I let you have them all, every one, you know I did; and I wanted you to mind what I said and not trouble about picking them up, but you _would_ do it! And now you all turn round upon me like this! What have I done to be treated so? What have I done?"
"Bravo, Prissie!" cried d.i.c.k. "Mother, if you ask me, I think it serves us all jolly well right, and it"s a downright shame to bullyrag poor Prissie in this way!"
"I _don"t_ ask you," retorted his mother, sharply; "so you will kindly keep your opinions to yourself."
"Tra-la-la!" sang rude d.i.c.k, "we are a united family--we are, we are, we _are_!"--a vulgar refrain he had picked up at one of the burlesque theatres he was only too fond of frequenting.
But Priscilla came to him and held out her hand quite gratefully and humbly. "Thank you, d.i.c.k," she said; "_you_ are kind, at all events. And I am sorry you couldn"t have your horse-shoe pin!"
"Oh, _hang_ the horse-shoe pin!" exclaimed d.i.c.k, and poor Priscilla was so thoroughly cast down that she quite forgot to reprove him.
She was not sent home that night after all, for d.i.c.k protested against it in such strong terms that even Aunt Margarine saw that she must give way; but early on the following morning Priscilla quitted her aunt"s house, leaving her belongings to be sent on after her.
She had not far to walk, and it so happened that her way led through the identical lane in which she had met the fairy. Wonderful to relate, there, on the very same stone and in precisely the same att.i.tude, sat the old lady, peering out from under her poke-bonnet, and resting her knotty old hands on her crutch-handled stick!
Priscilla walked past with her head in the air, pretending not to notice her, for she considered that the fairy had played her a most malicious and ill-natured trick.
"Heyday!" said the old lady (it is only fairies who can permit themselves such old-fashioned expressions nowadays). "Heyday, why, here"s my good little girl again! Isn"t she going to speak to me?"
"No, she"s not," said Priscilla--but she found herself compelled to stop, notwithstanding.
"Why, what"s all this about? You"re not going to sulk with me, my dear, are you?"
"I think you"re a very cruel, bad, unkind old woman for deceiving me like this!"
"Goodness me! Why, didn"t the jewels come, after all?"
"Yes--they came, only they were all horrid artificial ones--and it is a shame, it _is_!" cried poor Priscilla from her bursting heart.
"Artificial, were they? that really is very odd! Can you account for that at all, now?"
"Of course I can"t! You told me that they would drop out whenever I said anything to improve people--and I was _always_ saying _something_ improving! Aunt had a bandbox in her room quite full of them."
"Ah, you"ve been very industrious, evidently; it"s unfortunate your jewels should all have been artificial--most unfortunate. I don"t know how to explain it, unless"--(and here the old lady looked up queerly from under her white eyelashes), "unless your goodness was artificial too?"
"How do you mean?" asked Priscilla, feeling strangely uncomfortable.
"I"m sure I"ve never done anything the least bit naughty--how can my goodness possibly be artificial?"
"Ah, that I can"t explain; but I know this--that people who are really good are generally the last persons to suspect it, and the moment they become aware of it and begin to think how good they are, and how bad everybody else is, why, somehow or other, their goodness crumbles away and leaves only a sort of outside sh.e.l.l behind it. And--I"m very old, and of course I may be mistaken--but I think (I only say I _think_, mind) that a little girl so young as you must have some faults hidden about her somewhere, and that perhaps on the whole she would be better employed in trying to find them out and cure them before she attempted to correct those of other people. And I"m sure it can"t be good for any child to be always seeing herself in a little picture, just as she likes to fancy other people see her. Very many pretty books are written about good little girls, and it is quite true that children may exercise a great influence for good--more than they can ever tell, perhaps--but only just so long as they remain natural and unconscious, and not unwholesome little pragmatical prigesses; for then they make themselves and other people worse than they might have been. But of course, my dear, you never made such a mistake as that!"
Priscilla turned very red, and began to sc.r.a.pe one of her feet against the other; she was thinking, and her thoughts were not at all pleasant ones.
"Oh, fairy," she said at last, "I"m afraid that"s just what I _did_ do.
I was always thinking how good I was and putting everybody--papa, mamma, Alick, Betty, Aunt Margarine, Cathie, Belle, and even poor cousin d.i.c.k--right! I have been a horrid little hateful prig, and that"s why all the jewels were rubbish. But, oh, shall I have to go on talking sham diamonds and things all the rest of my life?"