Early in this story I pointed out what to the intelligent must have been from the beginning apparent, that Annalise held Priscilla and Fritzing in the hollow of her hand. In the first excitement of the start she had not noticed it, but during those woeful days of disillusionment at Baker's she saw it with an ever-growing clearness; and since Sunday, since the day she found a smiling young gentleman ready to talk German to her and answer questions, she was perfectly aware that she had only to close her hand and her victims would squeeze into any shape she liked. She proposed to do this closing at the first moment of sheer intolerableness, and that moment seemed well reached when she entered Creeper Cottage and realized what the attic, the kitchen, and the pump really meant.
It is always a shock to find one's self in the company of a worm that turns, always a shock and an amazement; a spectacle one never, somehow, gets used to. But how dreadful does it become when one is in the power of the worm, and the worm is resentful, and ready to squeeze to any extent. Fritzing reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite well have been left at home. Quite well? A thousand times better. What had she done but whine during her passive period? And now that she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the base-born, the empty-brained, was actually going to be able to ruin the plans of the noblest woman on earth.
Thus thought Fritzing, mopping his forehead. Annalise had rushed away to her attic after flinging her defiance at him, her spirit ready to dare anything but her body too small, she felt, to risk staying within reach of a man who looked more like somebody who meant to shake her than any one she had ever seen. Fritzing mopped his forehead, and mopped and mopped again. He stood where she had left him, his eyes fixed on the ground, his distress so extreme that he was quite near crying. What was he to do? What was he to say to his Princess? How was he to stop the girl's going back to Kunitz? How was he to stop her going even so far as young Morrison? That she should tell young Morrison who Priscilla was would indeed be a terrible thing. It would end their being able to live in Symford. It would end their being able to live in England. The Grand Duke would be after them, and there would have to be another flight to another country, another start there, another search for a home, another set of explanations, pretences, fears, lies,—things of which he was so weary. But there was something else, something worse than any of these things, that made Fritzing mop his forehead with so extreme a desperation: Annalise had demanded the money due to her, and Fritzing had no money.
I am afraid Fritzing was never meant for a conspirator. Nature never meant him to be a plotter, an arranger of unpleasant surprises for parents. She never meant him to run away. She meant him, probably, to spend his days communing with the past in a lofty room with distempered walls and busts round them. That he should be forced to act, to decide, to be artful, to wrangle with maids, to make ends meet, to squeeze his long frame and explosive disposition into a Creeper Cottage where only an ill-fitting door separated him from the noise and fumes of the kitchen, was surely a cruel trick of Fate, and not less cruel because he had brought it on himself. That he should have thought he could run away as well as any man is merely a proof of his singleness of soul. A man who does that successfully is always, among a great many other things, a man who takes plenty of money with him and knows exactly where to put his hand on more when it is wanted. Fritzing had thought it better to get away quickly with little money than to wait and get away with more. He had seized all he could of his own that was not invested, and Priscilla had drawn her loose cash from the Kunitz bank; but what he took hidden in his gaiters after paying for Priscilla's outfit and bribing Annalise was not more than three hundred pounds; and what is three hundred pounds to a person who buys and furnishes cottages and scatters five-pound notes among the poor? The cottages were paid for. He had insisted on doing that at once, chiefly in order to close his dealings with Mr. Dawson; but Mr. Dawson had not let them go for less than a hundred and fifty for the two, in spite of Tussie's having said a hundred was enough. When Fritzing told Mr. Dawson what Tussie had said Mr. Dawson soon proved that Tussie could not possibly have meant it; and Fritzing, knowing how rich Priscilla really was and what vast savings he had himself lying over in Germany in comfortable securities, paid him without arguing and hastened from the hated presence. Then the journey for the three from Kunitz had been expensive; the stay at Baker's Farm had been, strange to say, expensive; Mrs. Jones's comforting had been expensive; the village mothers had twice emptied Priscilla's purse of ten pounds; and the treat to the Symford children had not been cheap. After paying for this—the Minehead confectioner turned out to be a man of little faith in unknown foreigners, and insisted on being paid at once—Fritzing had about forty pounds left. This, he had thought, would do for food and lights and things for a long while,—certainly till he had hit on a plan by which he would be able to get hold of the Princess's money and his own without betraying where they were; and here on his table, the second unpleasant surprise that greeted him on entering his new home (the first had been his late master's dreadful smile) was the bill for the furnishing of it. To a man possessed of only forty pounds any bill will seem tremendous. This one was for nearly two hundred; and at the end of the long list of items, the biggest of which was that bathroom without water that had sent Annalise out on strike, was the information that a remittance would oblige. A remittance! Poor Fritzing. He crushed the paper in his hand and made caustic mental comments on the indecency of these people, clamouring for their money almost before the last workman was out of the place, certainly before the smell of paint was out of it, and clamouring, too, in the face of the Shuttleworth countenance and support. He had not been a week yet in Symford, and had been so busy, so rushed, that he had put off thinking out a plan for getting his money over from Germany until he should be settled. Never had he imagined people would demand payment in this manner. Never, either, had he imagined the Princess would want so much money for the poor; and never, of course, had he imagined that there would be a children's treat within three days of their arrival. Least of all had he dreamed that Annalise would so soon need more bribing; for that was clearly the only thing to do. He saw it was the only thing, after he had stood for some time thinking and wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. She must be bribed, silenced, given in to. He must part with as much as he possibly could of that last forty pounds; as much, also, as he possibly could of his pride, and submit to have the hussy's foot on his neck. Some day, some day, thought Fritzing grinding his teeth, he would be even with her; and when that day came he promised himself that it should certainly begin with a sound shaking. "Truly," he reflected, "the foolish things of the world confound the wise, and the weak things of the world confound the things that are mighty." And he went out, and standing in the back yard beneath Annalise's window softly called to her. "Fräulein," called Fritzing, softly as a dove wooing its mate.
"Aha," thought Annalise, sitting on her bed, quick to mark the change; but she did not move.
"Fräulein," called Fritzing again; and it was hardly a call so much as a melodious murmur.
Annalise did not move, but she grinned.
"Fräulein, come down one moment," cooed Fritzing, whose head was quite near the attic window so low was Creeper Cottage. "I wish to speak to you. I wish to give you something."
Annalise did not move, but she stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth; for the first time since she left Calais she was enjoying herself.
"If," went on Fritzing after an anxious pause, "I was sharp with you just now—and I fear I may have been hasty—you should not take it amiss from one who, like Brutus, is sick of many griefs. Come down, Fräulein, and let me make amends."
The Princess's bell rang. At once habit impelled Annalise to that which Fritzing's pleadings would never have effected; she scrambled down the ladder, and leaving him still under her window presented herself before her mistress with her usual face of meek respect.
"I said tea," said Priscilla very distinctly, looking at her with slightly lifted eyebrows.
Annalise curtseyed and disappeared.
"How fearfully polite German maids are," remarked Tussie.
"In what way?" asked Priscilla.
"Those curtseys. They're magnificent."
"Don't English maids curtsey?"
"None that I've ever seen. Perhaps they do to royalties."
"Oh?" said Priscilla with a little jump. She was still so much unnerved by the unexpected meeting with her father on the wall of Creeper Cottage that she could not prevent the little jump.
"What would German maids do, I wonder, in dealing with royalties," said Tussie, "if they curtsey so beautifully to ordinary mistresses? They'd have to go down on their knees to a princess, wouldn't they?"
"How should I know?" said Priscilla, irritably, alarmed to feel she was turning red; and with great determination she began to talk literature.
Fritzing was lying in wait for Annalise, and caught her as she came into the bathroom.
"Fräulein," said the miserable man trying to screw his face into persuasiveness, "you cannot let the Princess go without tea."
"Yes I can," said Annalise.
He thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them off her shoulders.
"Make it this once, Fräulein, and I will hire a woman of the village to make it in future. And see, you must not leave the Princess's service, a service of such great honour to yourself, because I chanced to be perhaps a little—hasty. I will give you two hundred marks to console you for the slight though undoubted difference in the mode of living, and I will, as I said, hire a woman to come each day and cook. Will it not be well so?"
"No," said Annalise.
"No?"
Annalise put her hands on her hips, and swaying lightly from side to side began to sing softly. Fritzing gazed at this fresh development in her manners in silent astonishment. "Jedermann macht mir die Cour, c'est l'amour, c'est l'amour," sang Annalise, her head one side, her eyes on the ceiling.
"Liebes Kind, are your promises of no value? Did you not promise to keep your mouth shut, and not betray the Princess's confidence? Did she not seek you out from all the others for the honour of keeping her secrets? And you will, after one week, divulge them to a stranger? You will leave her service? You will return to Kunitz? Is it well so?"
"C'est l'amour, c'est l'amour," sang Annalise, swaying.
"Is it well so, Fräulein?" repeated Fritzing, strangling a furious desire to slap her.
"Did you speak?" inquired Annalise, pausing in her song.
"I am speaking all the time. I asked if it were well to betray the secrets of your royal mistress."
"I have been starved," said Annalise.
"You have had the same fare as ourselves."
"I have been called names."
"Have I not expressed—regret?"
"I have been treated as dirt."
"Well, well, I have apologized."
"If you had behaved to me as a maid of a royal lady should be behaved to, I would have faithfully done my part and kept silence. Now give me my money and I will go."
"I will give you your money—certainly,liebes Kind. It is what I am most desirous of doing. But only on condition that you stay. If you go, you go without it. If you stay, I will do as I said about the cook and will—" Fritzing paused—"I will endeavour to refrain from calling you anything hasty."
"Two hundred marks," said Annalise gazing at the ceiling, "is nothing."
"Nothing?" cried Fritzing. "You know very well that it is, for you, a great sum."
"It is nothing. I require a thousand."
"A thousand? What, fifty English sovereigns? Nay, then, but there is no reasoning with you," cried Fritzing in tones of real despair.
She caught the conviction in them and hesitated. "Eight hundred, then," she said.
"Impossible. And besides it would be a sin. I will give you twenty."
"Twenty? Twenty marks?" Annalise stared at him a moment then resumed her swaying and her song—"Jedermann macht mir die Cour"—sang Annalise with redoubled conviction.
"No, no, not marks—twenty pounds," said Fritzing, interrupting what was to him a most maddening music. "Four hundred marks. As much as many a German girl can only earn by labouring two years you will receive for doing nothing but hold your tongue."
Annalise closed her lips tightly and shook her head. "My tongue cannot be held for that," she said, beginning to sway again and hum.
Adjectives foamed on Fritzing's own, but he kept them back. "Mädchen," he said with the gentleness of a pastor in a confirmation class, "do you not remember that the love of money is the root of all evil? I do not recognize you. Since when have you become thus greedy for it?"
"Give me eight hundred and I will stop."
"I will give you six hundred," said Fritzing, fighting for each of his last precious pounds.
"Eight."
"Six."
"I said eight," said Annalise, stopping and looking at him with lifted eye-brows and exactly imitating the distinctness with which the Princess had just said "I said tea."
"Six is an enormous sum. Why, what would you do with it?"
"That is my affair. Perhaps buy food," she said with a malicious side-glance.
"I tell you there shall be a cook."
"A cook," said Annalise counting on her fingers,—"and a good cook, observe—not a cook like the Frau Pearce—a cook, then, no more rude names, and eight hundred marks. Then I stop. I suffer. I am silent."
"It cannot be done. I cannot give you eight."
"C'est l'amour, c'est l'amour.... The Princess waits for her tea. I will prepare it for her this once. I am good, you see, at heart. But I must have eight hundred marks.Cest l'amo-o-o-o-o-our."
"I will give you seven," said Fritzing, doing rapid sums in his head. Seven hundred was something under thirty-five pounds. He would still have five pounds left for housekeeping. How long that would last he admitted to himself that probably only heaven knew, but he hoped that with economy it might be made to carry them over a fortnight; and surely by the end of a fortnight he would have hit on a way of getting fresh supplies from Germany? "I will give you seven hundred. That is the utter-most. I can give no more till I have written home for money. I have only a little more than that here altogether. See, I treat you like a reasonable being—I set the truth plainly before you. More than seven hundred I could not give if I would."
"Good," said Annalise, breaking off her music suddenly. "I will take that now and guarantee to be silent for fourteen days. At the end of that time the Herr Geheimrath will have plenty more money and will, if he still desires my services and my silence, give me the three hundred still due to me on the thousand I demand. If the Herr Geheimrath prefers not to, then I depart to my native country. While the fortnight lasts I will suffer all there is to suffer in silence. Is the Herr Geheimrath agreed?"
"Shameless one!" mentally shrieked Fritzing, "Wait and see what will happen to thee when my turn comes!" But aloud he only agreed. "It is well, Fräulein," he said. "Take in the Princess's tea, and then come to my sitting-room and I will give you the money. The fire burns in the kitchen. Utensils, I believe, are ready to hand. It should not prove a task too difficult."
"Perhaps the Herr Geheimrath will show me where the tea and milk is? And also the sugar, and the bread and butter if any?" suggested Annalise in a small meek voice as she tripped before him into the kitchen.
What could he do but follow? Her foot was well on his neck; and it occurred to him as he rummaged miserably among canisters that if the creature should take it into her head to marry him he might conceivably have to let her do it. As it was it was he and not Annalise who took the kettle out to the pump to fill it, and her face while he was doing it would have rejoiced her parents or other persons to whom she was presumably dear, it was wide with so enormous a satisfaction. Thus terrible is it to be in the power of an Annalise.
The first evening in Creeper Cottage was unpleasant. There was a blazing wood fire, the curtains were drawn, the lamp shone rosily through its red shade, and when Priscilla stood up her hair dusted the oak beams of the ceiling, it was so low. The background, you see, was perfectly satisfactory; exactly what a cottage background should be on an autumn night when outside a wet mist is hanging like a grey curtain across the window panes; and Tussie arriving at nine o'clock to help consecrate the new life with Shakespeare felt, as he opened the door and walked out of the darkness into the rosy, cosy little room, that he need not after all worry himself with doubts as to the divine girl's being comfortable. Never did place appear more comfortable. It did not occur to him that a lamp with a red shade and the blaze of a wood fire will make any place appear comfortable so long as they go on shining, and he looked up at Priscilla—I am afraid he had to look up at her when they were both standing—with the broadest smile of genuine pleasure. "Itdoeslook jolly," he said heartily.
His pleasure was doomed to an immediate wiping out. Priscilla smiled, but with a reservation behind her smile that his sensitive spirit felt at once. She was alone, and there was no sign whatever either of her uncle or of preparations for the reading of Shakespeare.
"Is anything not quite right?" Tussie asked, his face falling at once to an anxious pucker.
Priscilla looked at him and smiled again, but this time the smile was real, in her eyes as well as on her lips, dancing in them together with the flickering firelight. "It's rather funny," she said. "It has never happened to me before. What do you think? I'm hungry."
"Hungry?"
"Hungry."
Tussie stared, arrested in the unwinding of his comforter.
"Really hungry.Dreadfullyhungry. So hungry that I hate Shakespeare."
"But—"
"I know. You're going to say why not eat? It does seem simple. But you've no idea how difficult it really is. I'm afraid my uncle and I have rather heaps to learn. We forgot to get a cook."
"A cook? But I thought—I understood that curtseying maid of yours was going to do all that?"
"So did I. So did he. But she won't."
Priscilla flushed, for since Tussie left after tea she had had grievous surprises, of a kind that made her first indignant and then inclined to wince. Fritzing had not been able to hide from her that Annalise had rebelled and refused to cook, and Priscilla had not been able to follow her immediate impulse and dismiss her. It was at this point, when she realized this, that the wincing began. She felt perfectly sick at the thought, flashed upon her for the first time, that she was in the power of a servant.
"Do you mean to say," said Tussie in a voice hollow with consternation, "that you've had no dinner?"
"Dinner? In a cottage? Why of course there was no dinner. There never will be any dinner—at night, at least. But the tragic thing is there was no supper. We didn't think of it till we began to get hungry. Annalise began first. She got hungry at six o'clock, and said something to Fritz—my uncle about it, but he wasn't hungry himself then and so he snubbed her. Now he is hungry himself, and he's gone out to see if he can't find a cook. It's very stupid. There's nothing in the house. Annalise ate the bread and things she found. She's upstairs now, crying." And Priscilla's lips twitched as she looked at Tussie's concerned face, and she began to laugh.
He seized his hat. "I'll go and get you something," he said, dashing at the door.
"I can't think what, at this time of the night. The only shop shuts at seven."
"I'll make them open it."
"They go to bed at nine."
"I'll get them out of bed if I have to shie stones at their windows all night."
"Don't go without your coat—you'll catch a most frightful cold."
He put his arm through the door to take it, and vanished in the fog. He did not put on the coat in his agitation, but kept it over his arm. His comforter stayed in Priscilla's parlour, on the chair where he had flung it. He was in evening dress, and his throat was sore already with the cold that was coming on and that he had caught, as he expected, running races on the Sunday at Priscilla's children's party.
Priscilla went back to her seat by the fire, and thought very hard about things like bread. It would of course be impossible that she should have reached this state of famine only because one meal had been missed; but she had eaten nothing all day,—disliked the Baker's Farm breakfast too much even to look at it, forgotten the Baker's Farm dinner because she was just moving into her cottage, and at tea had been too greatly upset by the unexpected appearance of her father on the wall to care to eat the bread and butter Annalise brought in. Now she was in that state when you tremble and feel cold. She had told Annalise, about half-past seven, to bring her the bread left from tea, but Annalise had eaten it. At half-past eight she had told Annalise to bring her the sugar, for she had read somewhere that if you eat enough sugar it takes away the desire even of the hungriest for other food, but Annalise, who had eaten the sugar as well, said that the Herr Geheimrath must have eaten it. It certainly was not there, and neither was the Herr Geheimrath to defend himself; since half-past seven he had been out looking for a cook, his mind pervaded by the idea that if only he could get a cook food would follow in her wake as naturally as flowers follow after rain. Priscilla fretting in her chair that he should stay away so long saw very clearly that no cook could help them. What is the use of a cook in a house where there is nothing to cook? If only Fritzing would come back quickly with a great many loaves of bread! The door was opened a little way and somebody's knuckles knocked. She thought it was Tussie, quick and clever as ever, and in a voice full of welcome told him to come in; upon which in stepped Robin Morrison very briskly, delighted by the warmth of the invitation. "Why now thisisnice," said Robin, all smiles.
Priscilla did not move and did not offer to shake hands, so he stood on the hearthrug and spread out his own to the blaze, looking down at her with bright, audacious eyes. He thought he had not yet seen her so beautiful. There was an extraordinary depth and mystery in her look, he thought, as it rested for a moment on his face, and she had never yet dropped her eyelashes as she now did when her eyes met his. We know she was very hungry, and there was no strength in her at all. Not only did her eyelashes drop, but her head as well, and her hands hung helplessly, like drooping white flowers, one over each arm of the chair.
"I came in to ask Mr. Neumann-Schultz if there's anything I can do for you," said Robin.
"Did you? He lives next door."
"I know. I knocked there first, but he didn't answer so I thought he must be here."
Priscilla said nothing. At any other time she would have snubbed Robin and got rid of him. Now she merely sat and drooped.
"Has he gone out?"
"Yes."
Her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper. Those who know the faintness of hunger at this stage will also know the pathos that steals into the voice of the sufferer when he is unwillingly made to speak; it becomes plaintive, melodious with yearning, the yearning for food. But if you do not know this, if you have yourself just come from dinner, if you are half in love and want the other person to be quite in love, if you are full of faith in your own fascinations, you are apt to fall into Robin's error and mistake the nature of the yearning. Tussie in Robin's place would have doubted the evidence of his senses, but then Tussie was very modest. Robin doubted nothing. He saw, he heard, and he thrilled; and underneath his thrilling, which was real enough to make him flush to the roots of his hair, far down underneath it was the swift contemptuous comment, "They're all alike."
Priscilla shut her eyes. She was listening for the first sound of Tussie's or Fritzing's footfall, the glad sound heralding the approach of something to eat, and wishing Robin would go away. He was kind at times and obliging, but on the whole a nuisance. It was a great pity there were so many people in the world who were nuisances and did not know it. Somebody ought to tell them,—their mothers, or other useful persons of that sort. She vaguely decided that the next time she met Robin and was strengthened properly by food she would say a few things to him from which recovery would take a long while.
"Are you—not well?" Robin asked, after a silence during which his eyes never left her and hers were shut; and even to himself his voice sounded deeper, more intense than usual.
"Oh yes," murmured Priscilla with a little sigh.
"Are you—happy?"
Happy? Can anybody who is supperless, dinnerless, breakfastless, be happy, Priscilla wondered? But the question struck her as funny, and the vibrating tones in which it was asked struck her as rather funny too, and she opened her eyes for a moment to look up at Robin with a smile of amusement—a smile that she could not guess was turned by the hunger within her into something wistful and tremulous. "Yes," said Priscilla in that strange pathetic voice, "I—think so." And after a brief glance at him down went her weary eyelids again.
The next thing that happened was that Robin, who was trembling, kissed her hand. This she let him do with perfect placidity. Every German woman is used to having her hand kissed. It is kissed on meeting, it is kissed on parting, it is kissed at a great many odd times in between; she holds it up mechanically when she comes across a male acquaintance; she is never surprised at the ceremony; the only thing that surprises her is if it is left out. Priscilla then simply thought Robin was going. "What a mercy," she said to herself, glancing at him a moment through her eyelashes. But Robin was not used to hand-kissing and saw things in a very different light. He felt she made no attempt to draw her hand away, he heard her murmuring something inarticulate—it was merely Good-bye—he was hurled along to his doom; and stooping over her the unfortunate young man kissed her hair.
Priscilla opened her eyes suddenly and very wide. I don't know what folly he would have perpetrated next, or what sillinesses were on the tip of his tongue, or what meaning he still chose to read in her look, but an instant afterwards he was brought down for ever from the giddy heights of his illusions: Priscilla boxed his ears.
I am sorry to have to record it. It is always sweeter if a woman does not box ears. The action is shrewish, benighted, mediæval, nay, barbarous; and this box was a very hard one indeed, extraordinarily hard for so little a hand and so fasting a girl. But we know she had twice already been on the verge of doing it; and the pent-up vigour of what the policeman had not got and what the mother in the train had not got was added I imagine to what Robin got. Anyhow it was efficacious. There was an exclamation—I think of surprise, for surely a young man would not have minded the pain?—and he put his hand up quickly to his face. Priscilla got up just as quickly out of her chair and rang the handbell furiously, her eyes on his, her face ablaze. Annalise must have thrown herself down the ladder, for they hardly seemed to have been standing there an instant face to face, their eyes on a level, he scarlet, she white, both deadly silent, before the maid was in the room.
"This person has insulted me," said Priscilla, turning to her and pointing at Robin. "He never comes here again. Don't let me find you forgetting that," she added, frowning at the girl; for she remembered they had been seen talking eagerly together at the children's treat.
"I never"—began Robin.
"Will you go?"
Annalise opened the door for him. He went out, and she shut it behind him. Then she walked sedately across the room again, looking sideways at the Princess, who took no notice of her but stood motionless by the table gazing straight before her, her lips compressed, her face set in a kind of frozen white rage, and having got into the bathroom Annalise began to run. She ran out at the back door, in again at Fritzing's back door, out at his front door into the street, and caught up Robin as he was turning down the lane to the vicarage. "What have you done?" she asked him breathlessly, in German.
"Done?" Robin threw back his head and laughed quite loud.
"Sh—sh," said Annalise, glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.
"Done?" said Robin, subduing his bitter mirth. "What do you suppose I've done? I've done what any man would have in my place—encouraged, almost asked to do it. I kissed your young lady,liebes Fräulein, and she pretended not to like it. Now isn't that what a sensible girl like you would call absurd?"
But Annalise started back from the hand he held out to her in genuine horror. "What?" she cried, "What?"
"What? What?" mocked Robin. "Well then, what? Are you all such prudes in Germany? Even you pretending, you little hypocrite?"
"Oh," cried Annalise hysterically, pushing him away with both her hands, "what have you done?Elender Junge, what have you done?"
"I think you must all be mad," said Robin angrily. "You can't persuade me that nobody ever kisses anybody over in Germany."
"Oh yes they do—oh yes they do," cried Annalise, wringing her hands, "but neither there nor anywhere else—in England, anywhere in the world—do the sons of pastors—the sons of pastors—" She seemed to struggle for breath, and twisted and untwisted her apron round her hands in a storm of agitation while Robin, utterly astonished, stared at her—"Neither there nor anywhere else do they—the sons of pastors—kiss—kiss royal princesses."
It was now Robin's turn to say "What?"
He went up to Cambridge the next morning. Term had not begun, but he went; a Robin with all the briskness gone out of him, and if still with something of the bird left only of a bird that is moulting. His father was mildly surprised, but applauded the apparent desire for solitary study. His mother was violently surprised, and tried hard to get at his true reasons. She saw with the piercing eye of a relation—that eye from which hardly anything can ever be hidden—that something had happened and that the something was sobering and unpleasant. She could not imagine what it was, for she did not know he had been to Creeper Cottage the night before and all the afternoon and at dinner he had talked and behaved as usual. Now he did not talk at all, and his behaviour was limited to a hasty packing of portmanteaus. Determined to question him she called him into the study just before he started, and shut the door.
"I must go mater," he said, pulling out his watch; he had carefully avoided her since breakfast though she had laid many traps for him.
"Robin, I want to tell you that I think you splendid."
"Splendid? What on earth for? You were telling me a very different sort of thing a day or two ago."
"I am sorry now for what I said on Sunday."
"I don't think a mother ought ever to say she's sorry," said Robin gloomily.
"Not if she is?"
"She oughtn't to say so."
"Well dear let us be friends. Don't go away angry with me. I do appreciate you so much for going. You are my own dear boy." And she put her hands on his shoulders.
He took out his watch again. "I say, I must be off."
"Don't suppose a mother doesn't see and understand."
"Oh I don't suppose anything. Good-bye mater."
"I think it so splendid of you to go, to turn your back on temptation, to unwind yourself from that wretched girl's coils."
"Coils?"
"My Robin"—she stroked his cheek, the same cheek, as it happened, Priscilla had smitten—"my Robin must not throw himself away. I am ambitious where you are concerned, my darling. It would have broken my heart for you to have married a nobody—perhaps a worse than nobody."
Robin, who was staring at her with an indescribable expression on his face, took her hands off his shoulders. "Look here mater," he said—and he was seized by a desire to laugh terrifically—"there is nothing in the world quite so amusing as the way people will talk wisely of things they don't in the faintest degree understand. They seem to feel wise in proportion to their ignorance. I expect you think that's a funny speech for me to make. I can tell you I don't think it half as funny as yours was. Good-bye. I shall miss my train you know if you keep me, and then I'd be exposed again to those—what was the word? ah, yes—coils. Coils!" He burst into loud laughter. "Good-bye mater."
She was staring at him blankly. He hastily brushed her forehead with his moustache and hurried to the door, his face full of strange mirth. "I say," he said, putting in his head again, "there's just one thing I'd like to say."
She made an eager step towards him. "Do say it my darling—say all that is in your heart."
"Oh it's not much—it's only God help poor Tuss." And that was the last of him. She heard him chuckling all down the passage; but long before his fly had reached Ullerton he had left off doing that and was moulting again.
It rained that day in Somersetshire, a steady, hopeless rain that soaked many a leaf off the trees before its time and made the year look suddenly quite old. From the windows of Creeper Cottage you could see the water running in rivulets down the hill into the deserted village, and wreaths of mist hanging about the downs beyond. The dripping tombstone that blocked Priscilla's window grew danker and blacker as the day went by. The fires in the cottage burnt badly, for the wood had somehow got wet. The oilcloth and the wall-papers looked very dismal in the grey daylight. Rain came in underneath the two front doors and made puddles that nobody wiped away.
Priscilla had got up very late, after a night spent staring into the darkness, and then had sent for Fritzing and told him what Robin had done. The unhappy man's horror will be easily imagined. She was in bed the night before when he came in, quite cured of her hunger and only wanting to be alone with her wrath. Fritzing had found no one in the parlour but Tussie clasping an immense biscuit-tin in his arms, with a face so tragic that Fritzing thought something terrible must have happened. Tussie had returned joyfully, laden with biscuits and sardines, to find the girl standing straight and speechless by the table, her face rigid, her eyes ablaze. She had not so much as glanced at the biscuits; she had not said a single word; her look rested on him a moment as though she did not see him and then she went into the next room and upstairs to bed. He knew she went upstairs to bed for in Creeper Cottage you could hear everything.
Fritzing coming in a few minutes later without the cook he had hoped to find, was glad enough of Tussie's sardines and biscuits—they were ginger biscuits—and while he ate them, abstractedly and together, Tussie looked on and wondered in spite of his wretchedness what the combination could possibly taste like. Then, after a late breakfast on the Wednesday morning, Priscilla sent for Fritzing and told him what Robin had done. The burdened man, so full already of anxieties and worries, was shattered by the blow. "I have always held duelling in extreme contempt," he said when at last he could speak, "but now I shall certainly fight."
"Fight? You? Fritzi, I've only told you because I—I feel so unprotected here and you must keep him off if he ever tries to come again. But you shall not fight. What, first he is to insult me and then hurt or kill my Fritzi? Besides, nobody ever fights duels in England."
"That remains to be seen. I shall now go to his house and insult him steadily for half an hour. At the expiration of that time he will probably be himself anxious to fight. We might go to France—"
"Oh Fritzi don't be so dreadful. Don't go to him—leave him alone—nobody must ever know—"
"I shall now go and insult him," repeated Fritzing with an inflexibility that silenced her.
And she saw him a minute later pass her window under his umbrella, splashing indifferently through all the puddles, battle and destruction in his face.
Robin, however, was at Ullerton by the time Fritzing got to the vicarage. He waved the servant aside when she told him he had gone, and insisted on penetrating into the presence of the young man's father. He waved Mrs. Morrison aside too when she tried to substitute herself for the vicar, and did at last by his stony persistency get into the good man's presence. Not until the vicar himself told him that Robin had gone would Fritzing believe it. "The villain has fled," he told Priscilla, coming back drenched in body but unquenchable in spirit. "Your chastisement, ma'am, was very effectual."
"If he's gone, then don't let us think about him any more."
"Nay, ma'am, I now set out for Cambridge. If I may not meet him fairly in duel and have my chance of honourably removing him from a world that has had enough of him, I would fain in my turn box his ears."
But Priscilla caught him by both arms. "Why, Fritzi," she cried, "he might remove you and not you him—and from a world that hasn't had nearly enough of you. Fritzi, you cannot leave me. I won't let you go. I wish I had never told you. Don't let us talk of it ever again. It is hateful to me. I—I can't bear it." And she looked into his face with something very like tears in her eyes.
Of course Fritzing stayed. How could he go away even for one hour, even in search of a cook, when such dreadful things happened? He was bowed down by the burden of his responsibilities. He went into his sitting-room and spent the morning striding up and down it between the street door and the door into the kitchen,—a stride and a half one way, and a stride and a half back back again,—doing what all evildoers have to do sooner or later, cudgelling his brains for a way out of life's complications: and every now and then the terribleness of what had happened to his Princess, his guarded Princess, his unapproachable one, came over him with a fresh wave of horror and he groaned aloud.
In the kitchen sat the Shuttleworth kitchenmaid, a most accomplished young person, listening to the groans and wondering what next. Tussie had sent her, with fearful threats of what sort of character she would get if she refused to go. She had at once given notice, but had been forced all the same to go, being driven over in a dog-cart in the early morning rain by a groom who made laboured pleasantries at her expense. She could cook very well, almost as well as that great personage the Shuttleworth cook, but she could only cook if there were things to be cooked; and what she found at Creeper Cottage was the rest of the ginger biscuits and sardines. Well, I will not linger over that. Priscilla did get breakfast somehow, the girl, after trying vainly to strike sparks of helpfulness out of Annalise, going to the store and ordering what was necessary. Then she washed up, while Annalise tripped in and out for the express purpose, so it seemed, of turning up her nose; then she sat and waited and wondered what next. For a long time she supposed somebody would send for her to come and talk about luncheon; but nobody did. She heard the ceaseless stridings in the next room, and every now and then the groans. The rain on the kitchen window did not patter more ceaselessly than the footsteps strode up and down, and the groans got very much on to the girl's nerves. At last she decided that no person who was groaning like that would ever want to order luncheon, and she had better go to the young lady. She went out accordingly and knocked at Priscilla's door. Priscilla was in her chair by the fire, lost in troublous thought. She looked vaguely at the kitchenmaid for a moment, and then asked her to go away. "I'm busy," explained Priscilla, whose hands were folded in her lap.
"Please miss, what do you wish for luncheon?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm the—assistant cook at the 'All, miss. Lady Shuttleworth's assistant cook. Sir Augustus desired me to cook for you to-day."
"Then please do it."
"Yes miss. What do you wish for luncheon?"
"Nothing."
"Yes miss. And the gentleman—don't he want nothing neither?"
"He'll probably tell you when he does."
"Yes miss. It's as well to know a little beforehand, ain't it, miss. There's nothing in the—a-hem—'ouse, and I suppose I'd have to buy something."
"Please do."
"Yes miss. Perhaps if you'd tell me what the gentleman likes I could go out and get it."
"But I don't know what he likes. And wouldn't you get wet? Send somebody."
"Yes miss. Who?"
Priscilla gazed at her a moment. "Ah yes—" she said, "I forgot. I'm afraid there isn't anybody. I think you had better ask my uncle what he wants, and then if you would—I'm very sorry you should have such bad weather—but if you don't mind, would you go and buy the things?"
"Yes miss."
The girl went away, and Priscilla began for the first time to consider the probability of her having in the near future to think of and order three meals every day of her life; and not only three meals, but she dimly perceived there would be a multitude of other dreary things to think of and order,—their linen, for instance, must be washed, and how did one set about that? And would not Fritzing's buttons presently come off and have to be sewn on again? His socks, when they went into holes, could be thrown out of the window and new ones bought, but even Priscilla saw that you could not throw a whole coat out of a window because its buttons had come off. There would, then, have to be some mending done for Fritzing, and Annalise would certainly not be the one to do it. Was the simple life a sordid life as well? Did it only look simple from outside and far away? And was it, close, mere drudging? A fear came over her that her soul, her precious soul, for whose sake she had dared everything, instead of being able to spread its wings in the light of a glorious clear life was going to be choked out of existence by weeds just as completely as at Kunitz.
The Shuttleworth kitchenmaid meanwhile, who was not hindered at every turn by a regard for her soul, made her way to Fritzing as she had been told and inquired of him what she should cook for his dinner. No man likes to be interrupted in his groanings; and Fritzing, who was not hungry and was startled by the sudden appearance of a stranger in his room asking him intimate questions, a person of whose presence in the cottage he had been unaware, flew at her. "Woman, what have I to do with you?" he cried, stopping in his walk and confronting her with surprising fierceness. "Is it seemly to burst in on a man like this? Have you no decency? No respect for another's privacy? Begone, I command you—begone! Begone!" And he made the same movements with his hands that persons do when they shoo away fowls or other animals in flocks.
This was too much for the Shuttleworth kitchenmaid. The obligations, she considered, were all on the side of Creeper Cottage, and she retreated in amazement and anger to the kitchen, put on her hat and mackintosh, and at once departed, regardless of the rain and the consequences, through two miles of dripping lanes to Symford Hall. What would have happened to her there if she had been discovered by Tussie I do not know, but I imagine it would have been something bad. She was saved, however, by his being in bed, clutched by the throat by a violent cold; and there he lay helpless, burning and shivering and throbbing, the pains of his body increased a hundredfold by the distraction of his mind about Priscilla. Why, Tussie asked himself over and over again, had she looked so strange the night before? Why had she gone starving to bed? What was she doing to-day? Was the kitchenmaid taking proper care of her? Was she keeping warm and dry this shocking weather? Had she slept comfortably the first night in her little home? Poor Tussie. It is a grievous thing to love any one too much; a grievous, wasteful, paralyzing thing; a tumbling of the universe out of focus, a bringing of the whole world down to the mean level of one desire, a shutting out of wider, more beautiful feelings, a wrapping of one's self in a thick garment of selfishness, outside which all the dear, tender, modest, everyday affections and friendships, the wholesome, ordinary loves, the precious loves of use and wont, are left to shiver and grow cold. Tussie's mother sat outside growing very cold indeed. Her heart was stricken within her. She, most orderly of women, did not in the least mind, so occupied was she with deeper cares, that her household was in rebellion, her cook who had been with her practically all her life leaving because she had been commanded by Tussie, before he had to fall back on the kitchenmaid, to proceed forthwith to Creeper Cottage and stay there indefinitely; her kitchenmaid, also a valued functionary, leaving; Bryce, Tussie's servant who took such care of him and was so clever in sickness, gone suddenly in his indignation at having to go at all,—all these things no longer mattered. Nor did it matter that the coming of age festivities were thrown into hopeless confusion by Tussie's illness, that the guests must all be telegraphed to and put off, that the whole village would be aghast at such a disappointment, that all her plans and preparations had been wasted. As the first day and night of illness dragged slowly past she grew to be nothing but one great ache of yearning over her sick boy, a most soul-rending yearning to do what she knew was for ever impossible, to put her arms so close round him, so close, so carefully, so tenderly, that nothing, no evil, no pain, could get through that clasp of love to hurt him any more.
"Why don't you take better care of your only son?" said the doctor grimly after he had seen Tussie that evening, who by that time was in a very pitiable condition.
Lady Shuttleworth stared at him, wide-eyed and speechless.
"It's absurd, you know, to let him get into this state. I've often warned you. He can't be allowed to play ducks and drakes with himself like other young men. He's got no strength to fall back upon. I consider you are directly responsible for this illness. Why do you let him go out at night this time of year? Why do you let him over-exert himself? I suppose," said the doctor, who had brought Tussie into the world and was as brutal as he was clever, besides being at that moment extremely angry, "I suppose you want to lose him, eh?"
How could she explain to him what she knew to be true, that the one person responsible for Tussie's illness was Priscilla? She therefore only stared, wide-eyed and speechless; and indeed her heart was very nearly broken.