“Ah well, well,” said the vicar, vaguely soothing. “We shall see you on Sunday perhaps. There is no reason that I know of why a member of the German Church should not assist at the services of the Church of England.” And he took off his hat again, and tried to draw Robin away.
But Robin lingered, and Priscilla saw so much bright curiosity in his eyes that she felt she was giving an impression of mysteriousness; and this being the last thing she wanted to do she thought she had better explain a little — always a dangerous course to take — and she said, “My uncle taught languages for years, and is old now and tired, and we both long for the country and to be quiet. He taught me English — that’s why it’s as good as it is. His name” — She was carried away by the desire to blow out that questioning light in Robin’s eyes— “his name is Schultz.”
The vicar bowed slightly, and Robin asked with an air of great politeness but still with that light in his eyes if he were to address her, then, as Miss Schultz.
“I’m afraid so,” said Priscilla, regretfully. It really sounded gross. Miss Schultz? She might just as well have chosen something romantic while she was about it, for Fritzing in the hurry of many cares had settled nothing yet with her about a name.
Robin stared at her very hard, her answer seemed to him so odd. He stared still more when she looked up with the air of one who has a happy thought and informed him that her Christian name was Ethel.
“Ethel?” echoed Robin.
“It’s a very pretty name, I think,” said Priscilla, looking pleased.
“Our housemaid’s called Ethel, and so is the little girl that wheels the gardener’s baby’s perambulator,” was Robin’s impetuous comment.
“That doesn’t make it less pretty,” said Priscilla, frowning.
“Surely,” interrupted the vicar mildly, “Ethel is not a German name?”
“I was christened after my mother,” said Priscilla gently; and this was strictly true, for the deceased Grand Duchess had also been Priscilla. Then a feeling came over her that she was getting into those depths where persons with secrets begin to flounder as a preliminary to letting them out, and seized with panic she got up off the slab.
“You are half English, then,” said Robin triumphantly, his bright eyes snapping. He looked very bold and masterful staring straight at her, his head thrown back, his handsome face twinkling with interest. But a person of Priscilla’s training could not possibly be discomposed by the stare of any Robin, however masterful; had it not been up to now her chief function in life to endure being stared at with graceful indifference? “I did not say so,” she said, glancing briefly at him; and including both father and son in a small smile composed indescribably of graciousness and chill she added, “It really is damp here — I don’t think I’ll wait for my uncle,” and slightly bowing walked away without more ado.
She walked very slowly, her skirts gathered loosely in one hand, every line of her body speaking of the most absolute self-possession and unapproachableness. Never had the two men seen any one quite so calm. They watched her in silence as she went up the path and out at the gate; then Robin looked down at his father and drew his hand more firmly through his arm and said with a slight laugh, “Come on, pater, let’s go home. We’re dismissed.”
“By a most charming young lady,” said the vicar, smiling.
“By a very cool one,” said Robin, shrugging his shoulders, for he did not like being dismissed.
“Yes — oddly self-possessed for her age,” agreed the vicar.
“I wonder if all German teacher’s nieces are like that,” said Robin with another laugh.
“Few can be so blest by nature, I imagine.”
“Oh, I don’t mean faces. She is certainly prettier by a good bit than most girls.”
“She is quite unusually lovely, young man. Don’t quibble.”
“Miss Schultz — Ethel Schultz,” murmured Robin; adding under his breath, “Good Lord.”
“She can’t help her name. These things are thrust upon one.”
“It’s a beastly common name. Macgrigor, who was a year in Dresden, told me everybody in Germany is called Schultz.”
“Except those who are not.”
“Now, pater, you’re being clever again,” said Robin, smiling down at his father.
“Here comes some one in a hurry,” said the vicar, his attention arrested by the rapidly approaching figure of a man; and, looking up, Robin beheld Fritzing striding through the churchyard, his hat well down over his eyes as if clapped on with unusual vigour, both hands thrust deep in his pockets, the umbrella, without which he never, even on the fairest of days, went out, pressed close to his side under his arm, and his long legs taking short and profane cuts over graves and tombstones with the indifference to decency of one immersed in unpleasant thought. It was not the custom in Symford to leap in this manner over its tombs; and Fritzing arriving at a point a few yards from the vicar, and being about to continue his headlong career across the remaining graves to the tree under which he had left Priscilla, the vicar raised his voice and exhorted him to keep to the path.
“Quaint-looking person,” remarked Robin. “Another stranger. I say, it can’t be — no, it can’t possibly be the uncle?” For he saw he was a foreigner, yet on the other hand never was there an uncle and a niece who had less of family likeness.
Fritzing was the last man wilfully to break local rules or wound susceptibilities; and pulled out of his unpleasant abstraction by the vicar’s voice he immediately desisted from continuing his short cut, and coming onto the path removed his hat and apologized with the politeness that was always his so long as nobody was annoying him.
“My name is Neumann, sir,” he said, introducing himself after the German fashion, “and I sincerely beg your pardon. I was looking for a lady, and” — he gave his spectacles a little adjusting shove as though they were in fault, and gazing across to the elm where he had left Priscilla sitting added with sudden anxiety— “I fear I do not see her.”
“Do you mean Miss Schultz?” asked the vicar, looking puzzled.
“No, sir, I do not mean Miss Schultz,” said Fritzing, peering about him at all the other trees in evident surprise and distress.
“A lady left about five minutes ago,” said Robin.
“A tall young lady in a blue costume?”
“Yes. Miss Schultz.”
Fritzing looked at him with some sternness. “Sir, what have I to do with Miss Schultz?” he inquired.
“Oh come now,” said the cheerful Robin, “aren’t you looking for her?”
“I am in search of my niece, sir.”
“Yes. Miss Schultz.”
“No sir,” said Fritzing, controlling himself with an effort, “not Miss Schultz. I neither know Miss Schultz nor do I care a—”
“Sir, sir,” interposed the vicar, hastily.
“I do not care a pfenning for any Miss Schultz.”
The vicar looked much puzzled. “There was a young lady,” he said, “waiting under that tree over there for her uncle who had gone, she said, to see Lady Shuttleworth’s agent about the cottage by the gate. She said her uncle’s name was Schultz.”
“She said she was Miss Ethel Schultz,” said Robin.
“She said she was staying at Baker’s Farm,” said the vicar.
Fritzing stared for a moment from one to the other, then clutching his hat mechanically half an inch into the air turned on his heel without another word and went with great haste out of the churchyard and down the hill and away up the road to the farm.
“Quaint, isn’t he,” said Robin as they slowly followed this flying figure to the gate.
“I don’t understand it,” said the vicar.
“It does seem a bit mixed.”
“Did he not say his name was Neumann?”
“He did. And he looked as if he’d fight any one who said it wasn’t.”
“It is hardly credible that there should be two sets of German uncles and nieces in Symford at one and
the same time,” mused the vicar. “Even one pair is a most unusual occurrence.”
“If there are,” said Robin very earnestly, “pray let us cultivate the Schultz set and not the other.”
“I don’t understand it,” repeated the vicar, helplessly.
VII
Symford, innocent village, went to bed very early; but early as it went long before it had got there on this evening it contained no family that had not heard of the arrivals at Baker’s Farm. From the vicarage the news had filtered that a pretty young lady called Schultz was staying there with her uncle; from the agent’s house the news that a lunatic called Neumann was staying there with his niece; and about supper-time, while it was still wondering at this sudden influx of related Germans, came the postmistress and said that the boy from Baker’s who fetched the letters knew nothing whatever of any one called Schultz. He had, said the postmistress, grown quite angry and forgotten the greater and by far the better part of his manners when she asked him how he could stand there and say such things after all the years he had attended Sunday-school and if he were not afraid the earth would open and swallow him up, and he had stuck to it with an obstinacy that had at length convinced her that only one uncle and niece were at Baker’s, and their name was Neumann. He added that there was another young lady there whose name he couldn’t catch, but who sat on the edge of her bed all day crying and refusing sustenance. Appeased by the postmistress’s apologies for her first unbelief he ended by being anxious to give all the information in his power, and came back quite a long way to tell her that he had forgotten to say that his mother had said that the niece’s Christian name was Maria-Theresa.
“But what, then,” said the vicar’s wife to the vicar when this news had filtered through the vicarage walls to the very sofa where she sat, “has become of the niece called Ethel?”
“I don’t know,” said the vicar, helplessly.
“Perhaps she is the one who cried all day.”
“My dear, we met her in the churchyard.”
“Perhaps they are forgers,” suggested the vicar’s wife.
“My dear?”
“Or anarchists.”
“Kate?”
The vicar’s wife said no more, but silently made up her mind to go the very next day and call at Baker’s. It would be terrible if a bad influence got into Symford, her parish that she had kept in such good order for so long. Besides, she had an official position as the wife of the vicar and could and ought to call on everybody. Her call would not bind her, any more than the call of a district visitor would, to invite the called-upon to her house. Perhaps they were quite decent, and she could ask the girl up to the Tuesday evenings in the parish-room; hardly to the vicarage, because of her daughter Netta. On the other hand, if they looked like what she imagined anarchists or forgers look like, she would merely leave leaflets and be out when they returned her call.
Robin, all unaware of his mother’s thoughts, was longing to ask her to go to Baker’s and take him with her as a first step towards the acquaintance after which his soul thirsted, but he refrained for various discreet reasons based on an intimate knowledge of his mother’s character; and he spent the evening perfecting a plan that should introduce him into the interior of Baker’s without her help. The plan was of a barbarous simplicity: he was going to choose an umbrella from the collection that years had brought together in the stand in the hall, and go boldly and ask the man Neumann if he had dropped it in the churchyard. The man Neumann would repudiate the umbrella, perhaps with secret indignation, but he would be forced to pretend he was grateful, and who knew what luck might not do for him after that?
While Robin was plotting, and his mother was plotting, that the next day would certainly see them inside Baker’s, a third person was trying to do exactly the same thing at Symford Hall; and this third person was no other than Augustus, the hope of all the Shuttleworths. Augustus — he was known to his friends briefly as Tussie — had been riding homewards late that afternoon, very slowly, for he was an anxious young man who spent much of his time dodging things like being overheated, when he saw a female figure walking towards him along the lonely road. He was up on the heath above Symford, a solitary place of heather, and gorse bushes, and winding roads that lead with many hesitations and delays to different parts of Exmoor, and he himself with his back to that wild region and the sunset was going, as every sensible person would be going at that time of the evening, in the direction of the village and home. But where could the girl be going? For he now saw it was a girl, and in a minute or two more that it was a beautiful girl. With the golden glow of the sky the sun had just left on her face Priscilla came towards him out of the gathering dusk of approaching evening, and Tussie, who had a poetic soul, gazed at the vision openmouthed. Seeing him, she quickened her steps, and he took off his cap eagerly when she asked him to tell her where Symford was. “I’ve lost it,” she said, looking up at him.
“I’m going through it myself,” he answered. “Will you let me show you the way?”
“Thank you,” said Priscilla; and he got off his horse and she turned and walked beside him with the same unruffled indifference with which she would have walked beside the Countess Disthal or in front of an attending lacquey. Nor did she speak, for she was busy thinking of Fritzing and hoping he was not being too anxious about her, and Tussie (God defend his innocence) thought she was shy. So sure was he as the minutes past that her silence was an embarrassed one that he put an end to it by remarking on the beauty of the evening, and Priscilla who had entirely forgotten Miss Schultz gave him the iciest look as a reminder that it was not his place to speak first. It was lost on Tussie as a reminder, for naturally it did not remind him of anything, and he put it down at first to the girl’s being ill at ease alone up there with a strange man, and perhaps to her feeling she had better keep him at arm’s length. A glance at her profile however dispelled this illusion once and for ever, for never was profile of a profounder calm. She was walking now with her face in shadow, and the glow behind her played strange and glorious tricks with her hair. He looked at her, and looked, and not by the quiver of an eyelash did she show she was aware of anybody’s presence. Her eyes were fixed on the ground, and she was deep in thought tinged with remorsefulness that she should have come up here instead of going straight home to the farm, and by losing her way and staying out so long have given Fritzing’s careful heart an unnecessary pang of anxiety. He had had so many, and all because of her. But then it had been the very first time in her life that she had ever walked alone, and if words cannot describe the joy and triumph of it how was it likely that she should have been able to resist the temptation to stray aside up a lovely little lane that lured her on and on from one bend to another till it left her at last high up, breathless and dazzled, on the edge of the heath, with Exmoor rolling far away in purple waves to the sunset and all the splendour of the evening sky in her face? She had gone on, fascinated by the beauty of the place, and when she wanted to turn back found she had lost herself. Then appeared Sir Augustus to set her right, and with a brief thought of him as a useful person on a nice horse she fell into sober meditations as to the probable amount of torture her poor Fritzi was going through, and Augustus ceased to exist for her as completely as a sign-post ceases to exist for him who has taken its advice and passed on.
He looked at her, and looked, and looked again. He had never seen any one quite so beautiful, and certainly never any one with such an air of extreme detachment. He was twenty-one and much inclined to poetry, and he thought as she walked beside him so tall and straight and aloof, with the nimbus of flaming hair and the noble little head and slightly stern brow that she looked like nothing less than a young saint of God.
Tussie was not bold like Robin. He was a gentle youth who loved quiet things, quiet places, placid people, kind dogs, books, canaries even, if they did not sing too loud. He was sensitive about himself, being small and weakly, and took, as I have said, great care of what he had of health, su
ch care indeed that some of his robust friends called him Fussie. He hated the idea of coming of age and of having a great deal of money and a great many active duties and responsibilities. His dream was to be left in peace to write his verses; to get away into some sweet impossible wilderness, and sit there singing with as much of the spirit of Omar Kayyam as could reasonably be expected to descend on a youth who only drank water. He was not bold, I say; and after that one quelling glance from the young saint’s eyes did not dare speak again for a long while. But they were getting near Symford; they were halfway down the hill; he could not let her slip away perhaps suddenly from his side into the shadows without at least trying to find out where she was staying. He looked at her soft kind mouth and opened his own to speak. He looked at her stern level brows and shut it again. At last, keeping his eyes on her mouth he blurted out, growing red, “I know every soul in Symford, and every soul for miles round, but I don’t know—” He stopped. He was going to say “you,” but he stopped.
Priscilla’s thoughts were so far away that she turned her head and gazed vaguely at him for a moment while she collected them again. Then she frowned at him. I do not know why Robin should have had at least several smiles and poor Tussie only frowns, unless it was that during this walk the young person Ethel Schultz had completely faded from Priscilla’s mind and the Royal Highness was well to the fore. She certainly frowned at Tussie and asked herself what could possess the man to keep on speaking to her. Keep on speaking! Poor Tussie. Aloud she said freezingly, “Did you say something?”
“Yes,” said Tussie, his eyes on her mouth — surely a mouth only made for kindness and gentle words. “I was wondering whether you were staying at the vicarage.”
“No,” said Priscilla, “we’re staying at Baker’s Farm.” And at the mention of that decayed lodging the friendly Schultz expression crept back, smiling into her eyes.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 67
