There was another silence. He was standing on the hearthrug, she on the other side of the table; but the room was so small that by putting out his hand he could have touched her. A queer expression was in his eyes as he looked at her, an expression entirely at variance with his calm and good-natured talk, the exceedingly anxious expression of a man who knows his whole happiness is quivering in the balance. She did not see it, for she preferred to look at the table-cloth.
“Dreadful things have happened here,” she said in a low voice.
“What sort?”
“Horrid sorts. Appalling sorts.”
“Tell me.”
“I couldn’t bear to.”
“But I think I know.”
She looked at him astonished.
“Mrs. Pearce—”
“She told you?”
“What she knew she told me. Perhaps there’s something she doesn’t know.”
Priscilla remembered Robin, and blushed.
“Yes, she told me about that,” said the Prince nodding.
“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 assure 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 Æschylus, 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 goddess laughed, the goddess 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 snob, 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 kne
w.
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.
As for Fritzing, he is Hofbibliothekar of the Prince’s father’s court library; a court more brilliant than and a library vastly inferior to the one he had fled from at Kunitz. He keeps much in his rooms, and communes almost exclusively with the dead. He finds the dead alone truly satisfactory. Priscilla loves him still and will always love him, but she is very busy and has little time to think. She does not let him give her children lessons; instead he plays with them, and grows old and patient apace.
And now having finished my story, there is nothing left for me to do but stand aside and watch Priscilla and her husband walking hand-in-hand farther and farther away from me up a path which I suppose is the path of glory, into something apparently golden and rosy, something very glowing and full of promise, that turns out on closer scrutiny to be their future. It certainly seems radiant enough to the superficial observer. Even I, who have looked into her soul and known its hungers, am a little dazzled. Let it not however be imagined that a person who has been truthful so long as myself is going to lapse into easy lies at the last, and pretend that she was uninterruptedly satisfied and happy for the rest of her days. She was not; but then who is?
FRÄULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR ANSTRUTHER
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV.
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
L
LI
LII
LIII
LIV
LV
LVI
LVII
LVIII
LIX
LX
LXI
LXII
LXIII
LXIV
LXV
LXVI
LXVII
LXVIII
LXIX
LXX
LXXI
LXXII
LXXIII
LXXIV
LXXV
LXXVI
LXXVII
LXXVIII
LXXIX
LXXX
LXXXI
The first edition’s title page
I
Jena, Nov. 6th.
Dear Roger, — This is only to tell you that I love you, supposing you should have forgotten it by the time you get to London. The letter will follow you by the train after the one you left by, and you will have it with your breakfast the day after to-morrow. Then you will be eating the marmalade Jena could not produce, and you’ll say, ‘What a very indiscreet young woman to write first.’ But look at the Dear Roger, and you’ll see I’m not so indiscreet after all. What could be more sober? And you’ve no idea of all the nice things I could have put instead of that, only I wouldn’t. It is a most extraordinary thing that this time yesterday we were on the polite-conversation footing, you, in your beautiful new German, carefully calling me gnädiges Fräulein at every second breath, and I making appropriate answers to the Mr. Anstruther who in one bewildering hour turned for me into Dear Roger. Did you always like me so much? — I mean, love me so much? My spirit is rather unbendable as yet to the softnesses of these strange words, stiff for want of use, so forgive a tendency to go round them. Don’t you think it is very wonderful that you should have been here a whole year, living with us, seeing me every day, practising your German on me — oh, wasn’t I patient? — and never have shown the least sign, that I could see, of thinking of me or of caring for me at all except as a dim sort of young lady who assisted her step-mother in the work of properly mending and feeding you? And then an hour ago, just one hour by that absurd cuckoo-clock here in this room where we said good-by, you suddenly turned into
something marvellous, splendid, soul-thrilling — well, into Dear Roger. It is so funny that I’ve been laughing, and so sweet that I’ve been crying. I’m so happy that I can’t help writing, though I do think it rather gushing — loathsome word — to write first. But then you strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet, and how can I keep altogether quiet? You, then, my poor Roger, must be the one to listen. Do you know what Jena looks like to-night? It is the most dazzling place in the world, radiant with promise, shining and dancing with all sorts of little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps being lit in people’s rooms down the street, but that look to me extraordinarily like stars of hope come out, in defiance of nature and fog, to give me a glorious welcome. You see, I’m new, and they know it. I’m not the Rose-Marie they’ve twinkled down on from the day I was born till to-night. She was a dull person: a mere ordinary, dull person, climbing doggedly up the rows of hours each day set before her, doggedly doing certain things she was told were her daily duties, equally doggedly circumventing certain others, and actually supposing she was happy. Happy? She was not. She was most wretched. She was blind and deaf. She was asleep. She was only half a woman. What is the good or the beauty of anything, alive or dead, in the world, that has not fulfilled its destiny? And I never saw that before. I never saw a great many things before. I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. Love passed through this house today, this house that other people think is just the same dull place it was yesterday, and behold — well, I won’t grow magnificent, and it is what you do if you begin a sentence with Behold. But really there’s a splendor — oh well. And as for this room where you — where I — where we — well, I won’t grow sentimental either, though now I know, I who always scoffed at it, how fatally easy a thing it is to be. That is, supposing one has had great provocation; and haven’t I? Oh, haven’t I?
I had got as far as that when your beloved Professor Martens came in, very much agitated because he had missed you at the station, where he had been to give you a send-off. And what do you think he said? He said, why did I sit in this dreary hole without a lamp, and why didn’t I draw the curtains, and shut out the fog and drizzle. Fog and drizzle? It really seemed too funny. Why, the whole sky is shining. And as for the dreary hole — gracious heavens, is it possible that just being old made him not able to feel how the air of the room was still quivering with all you said to me, with all the sweet, wonderful, precious things you said to me? The place was full of you. And there was your darling coffee-cup still where you had put it down, and the very rug we stood on still all ruffled up.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 84