“I hope your uncle is a Churchman,” was Mrs. Morrison’s unexpected reply.
Priscilla’s mind could not leap like this, and she hesitated a moment and smiled. (“It’s the first time she’s looked pleasant,” thought Mrs. Morrison, “and now it’s in the wrong place.”)
“He was born, of course, in the Lutheran faith,” said Priscilla.
“Oh, a horrid faith. Excuse me, but it really is. I hope he isn’t going to upset Symford?”
“Upset Symford?”
“New people holding wrong tenets coming to such a small place do sometimes, you know, and you say he is eloquent. And we are such a simple and God-fearing little community. A few years ago we had a great bother with a Dissenting family that came here. The cottagers quite lost their heads.”
“I think I can promise that my uncle will not try to convert anybody,” said Priscilla.
“Of course you mean pervert. It would be a pity if he did. It wouldn’t last, but it would give us a lot of trouble. We are very good Churchmen here. The vicar, and my son too when he’s at home, set beautiful examples. My son is going into the Church himself. It has been his dearest wish from a child. He thinks of nothing else — of nothing else at all,” she repeated, fixing her eyes on Priscilla with a look of defiance.
“Really?” said Priscilla, very willing to believe it.
“I assure you it’s wonderful how absorbed he is in his studies for it. He reads Church history every spare moment, and he’s got it so completely on his mind that I’ve noticed even when he whistles it’s ‘The Church’s One Foundation.’”
“What is that?” inquired Priscilla.
“Mr. Robin Morrison,” announced Mrs. Pearce.
The sitting-room at Baker’s was a small, straightforward place, with no screens, no big furniture, no plants in pots, nothing that could for a moment conceal the persons already in it from the persons coming in, and Robin entering jauntily with the umbrella under his arm fell straight as it were into his mother’s angry gaze. “Hullo mater, you here?” he exclaimed genially, his face broadening with apparent satisfaction.
“Yes, Robin, I am here,” she said, drawing herself up.
“How do you do, Miss Schultz. I seem to have got shown into the wrong room. It’s a Mr. Neumann I’ve come to see; doesn’t he live here?”
Priscilla looked at him from her sofa seat and wondered what she had done that she should be scourged in this manner by Morrisons.
“You know my son, I believe?” said Mrs. Morrison in the stiffest voice; for the girl’s face showed neither recognition nor pleasure, and though she would have been angry if she had looked unduly pleased she was still angrier that she should look indifferent.
“Yes. I met him yesterday. Did you want my uncle? His name is Neumann. Neumann-Schultz. He’s out.”
“I only wanted to give him this umbrella,” said Robin, with a swift glance at his mother as he drew it from under his arm. Would she recognize it? He had chosen one of the most ancient; the one most appropriate, as he thought, to the general appearance of the man Neumann.
“What umbrella is that, Robin?” asked his mother suspiciously. Really, it was more than odd that Robin, whom she had left immersed in study, should have got into Baker’s Farm so quickly. Could he have been expected? And had Providence, in its care for the righteous cause of mothers, brought her here just in time to save him from this girl’s toils? The girl’s indifference could not be real; and if it was not, her good acting only betrayed the depths of her experience and balefulness. “What umbrella is that?” asked Mrs. Morrison.
“It’s his,” said Robin, throwing his head back and looking at his mother as he laid it with elaborate care on the table.
“My uncle’s?” said Priscilla. “Had he lost it? Oh thank you — he would have been dreadfully unhappy. Sit down.” And she indicated with her head the chair she would allow him to sit on.
“The way she tells us to sit down!” thought Mrs. Morrison indignantly. “As though she were a queen.” Aloud she said, “You could have sent Joyce round with it” — Joyce being that gardener whose baby’s perambulator was wheeled by another Ethel— “and need not have interrupted your work.”
“So I could,” said Robin, as though much struck by the suggestion. “But it was a pleasure,” he added to Priscilla, “to be able to return it myself. It’s a frightful bore losing one’s umbrella — especially if it’s an old friend.”
“Uncle Fritzi’s looks as if it were a very old friend,” said Priscilla, smiling at it.
Mrs. Morrison glanced at it too, and then glanced again. When she glanced a third time and her glance turned into a look that lingered Robin jumped up and inquired if he should not put it in the passage. “It’s in the way here,” he explained; though in whose way it could be was not apparent, the table being perfectly empty.
Priscilla made no objection, and he at once removed it beyond the reach of his mother’s eye, propping it up in a dark corner of the passage and telling Mrs. Pearce, whom he found there that it was Mr. Neumann’s umbrella.
“No it ain’t,” said Mrs. Pearce.
“Yes it is,” said Robin.
“No it ain’t. He’s took his to Minehead,” said Mrs. Pearce.
“It is, and he has not,” said Robin.
“I see him take it,” said Mrs. Pearce.
“You did not,” said Robin.
This would have been the moment, Mrs. Morrison felt, for her to go and to carry off Robin with her, but she was held in her seat by the certainty that Robin would not let himself be carried off; and sooner than say good-bye and then find he was staying on alone she would sit there all night. Thus do mothers sacrifice themselves for their children, thought Mrs. Morrison, for their all too frequently thankless children. But though she would do it to any extent in order to guard her boy she need not, she said to herself, be pleasant besides, — she need not, so to speak, be the primroses on his path of dalliance. Accordingly she behaved as little like a primrose as possible, sitting in stony silence while he skirmished in the passage with Mrs. Pearce, and the instant he came in again asked him where he had found the umbrella.
“I found it — not far from the church,” said Robin, desiring to be truthful as long as he could. “But mater, bother the umbrella. It isn’t so very noble to bring a man back his own. Did you get your cottages?” he asked, turning quickly to Priscilla.
“Robin, are you sure it is his own?” said his mother.
“My dear mother, I’m never sure of anything. Nor are you. Nor is Miss Schultz. Nor is anybody who is really intelligent. But I found the thing, and Mr. Neumann—”
“The name to-day is Neumann-Schultz,” said Mrs. Morrison, in a voice heavy with implications.
“Mr. Neumann-Schultz, then, had been that way just before, and so I felt somehow it must be his.”
“Your Uncle Cox had one just like it when he stayed with us last time,” remarked Mrs. Morrison.
“Had he? I say, mater, what an eye you must have for an umbrella. That must be five years ago.”
“Oh, he left it behind, and I see it in the stand every time I go through the hall.”
“No! Do you?” said Robin, who was hurled by this statement into the corner where his wits ended and where he probably would have stayed ignominiously, for Miss Schultz seemed hardly to be listening and really almost looked — he couldn’t believe it, no girl had ever done it in his presence yet, but she did undoubtedly almost look — bored, if Mrs. Pearce had not flung open the door, and holding the torn portions of her apron bunched together in her hands, nervously announced Lady Shuttleworth.
“Oh,” thought Priscilla, “what a day I’m having.” But she got up and was gracious, for Fritzing had praised this lady as kind and sensible; and the moment Lady Shuttleworth set her eyes on her the mystery of her son’s behaviour flashed into clearness. “Tussie’s seen her!” she exclaimed inwardly; instantly adding “Upon my word I can’t blame the boy.”
“My dear,”
she said, holding Priscilla’s hand, “I’ve come to make friends with you. See what a wise old woman I am. Frankly, I didn’t want you in those cottages, but now that my son has sold them I lose no time in making friends. Isn’t that true wisdom?”
“It’s true niceness,” said Priscilla, smiling down at the little old lady whose eyes were twinkling all over her. “I don’t think you’ll find us in any way a nuisance. All we want is to be quiet.”
Mrs. Morrison sniffed.
“Do you really?” said Lady Shuttleworth. “Then we shall get on capitally. It’s what I like best myself. And you’ve come too,” she went on, turning to Mrs. Morrison, “to make friends with your new parishioner? Why, Robin, and you too?”
“Oh, I’m only accidental,” said Robin quickly. “Only a restorer of lost property. And I’m just going,” he added, beginning to make hasty adieux; for Lady Shuttleworth invariably produced a conviction in him that his clothes didn’t fit and wanted brushing badly, and no young man so attentive to his appearance as Robin could be expected to enjoy that. He fled therefore, feeling that even Miss Schultz’s loveliness would not make up for Lady Shuttleworth’s eyes; and in the passage, from whence Mrs. Pearce had retreated, removing herself as far as might be from the awful lady to whom her father-in-law owed rent and who saw every hole, Robin pounced on his Uncle Cox’s umbrella, tucked is once more beneath his arm, and bore it swiftly back to the stand where it had spent five peaceful years. “Really old women are rather terrible things,” he thought as he dropped it in again. “I wonder what they’re here for.”
“Ah, it’s there, I see,” remarked his mother that night as she passed through the hall on her way to dinner.
“What is?” inquired Robin who was just behind her.
“Your Uncle Cox’s umbrella.”
“Dear mater, why this extreme interest in my Uncle Cox’s umbrella?”
“I’m glad to see it back again, that’s all. One gets so used to things.”
Lady Shuttleworth and his mother — I shudder to think that it is possible Robin included his mother in the reflection about old women, but on the other hand one never can tell — had stayed on at the farm for another twenty minutes after he left. They would have stayed longer, for Lady Shuttleworth was more interested in Priscilla than she had ever been in any girl before, and Mrs. Morrison, who saw this interest and heard the kind speeches, had changed altogether from ice to amiability, crushing her leaflets in her hand and more than once expressing hopes that Miss Neumann-Schultz would soon come up to tea and learn to know and like Netta — I repeat, they would have stayed much longer, but that an extremely odd thing happened.
Priscilla had been charming; chatting with what seemed absolute frankness about her future life in the cottages, answering little questionings of Lady Shuttleworth’s with a discretion and plausibility that would have warmed Fritzing’s anxious heart, dwelling most, for here the ground was safest, on her uncle, his work, his gifts and character, and Lady Shuttleworth, completely fascinated, had offered her help of every sort, help in the arranging of her little home, in the planting of its garden, even in the building of those bathrooms about which Tussie had been told by Mr. Dawson. She thought the desire for many bathrooms entirely praiseworthy, and only a sign of lunacy in persons of small means. Fritzing had assured Tussie that he had money enough for the bathrooms; and if his poetic niece liked everybody about her to be nicely washed was not that a taste to be applauded? Perhaps Lady Shuttleworth expatiated on plans and probable building-costs longer than Priscilla was able to be interested; perhaps she was over-explanatory of practical details; anyhow Priscilla’s attention began to wander, and she gradually became very tired of her callers. She answered in monosyllables, and her smile grew vague. Then suddenly, at the first full stop Lady Shuttleworth reached in a sentence about sanitation — the entire paragraph was never finished — she got up with her usual deliberate grace, and held out her hand.
“It has been very kind of you to come and see me,” she said to the astounded lady, with a little gracious smile. “I hope you will both come again another time.”
For an instant Lady Shuttleworth thought she was mad. Then to her own amazement she found her body rising obediently and letting its hand be taken.
Mrs. Morrison did the same. Both had their hands slightly pressed, both were smiled upon, and both went out at once and speechless. Priscilla stood calmly while they walked to the door, with the little smile fixed on her face.
“Is it possible we’ve been insulted?” burst out Mrs. Morrison when they got outside.
“I don’t know,” said Lady Shuttleworth, who looked extremely thoughtful.
“Do you think it can possibly be the barbarous German custom?”
“I don’t know,” said Lady Shuttleworth again.
And all the way to the vicarage, whither she drove Mrs. Morrison, she was very silent, and no exclamations and conjectures of that indignant lady’s could get a word out of her.
X
Kunitz meanwhile was keeping strangely quiet. Not a breath, not a whisper, had reached the newspapers from that afflicted little town of the dreadful thing that had happened to it. It will be remembered that the Princess ran away on a Monday, arrived at Baker’s in the small hours of Wednesday morning, and had now spent both Wednesday and Thursday in Symford. There had, then, been ample time for Europe to receive in its startled ears the news of her flight; yet Europe, judging from its silence, knew nothing at all about it. In Minehead on the Thursday evening Fritzing bought papers, no longer it is true with the frenzy he had displayed at Dover when every moment seemed packed with peril, but still with eagerness; and not a paper mentioned Kunitz. On the Saturday he did find the laconic information in the London paper he had ordered to be sent him every day that the Grand Duke of Lothen-Kunitz who was shooting in East Prussia had been joined there by that Prince — I will not reveal his august name — who had so badly wanted to marry Priscilla. And on the Sunday — it was of course the paper published in London on Saturday — he read that the Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz, the second and only unmarried daughter of the Grand Duke, was confined to her bed by a sharp attack of influenza. After that there was utter silence. Fritzing showed Priscilla the paragraph about her influenza, and she was at first very merry over it. The ease with which a princess can shake off her fetters the moment she seriously tries to surprised her, and amused her too, for a little. It surprised Fritzing, but without amusing him, for he was a man who was never amused. Indeed, I am unable to recall any single occasion on which I saw him smile. Other emotions shook him vigorously as we know, but laughter never visited him with its pleasant ticklings under the ribs; it slunk away abashed before a task so awful, and left him at his happiest to a mood of mild contentment. “Your Royal Parent,” he remarked to Priscilla, “has chosen that which is ever the better part of valour, and is hushing the incident up.”
“He never loved me,” said Priscilla, wistfully. On thinking it over she was not quite sure that she liked being allowed to run away so easily. Did nobody care, then, what became of her? Was she of positively no value at all? Running away is all very well, but your pride demands that those runned from shall at least show some sign of not liking it, make some effort, however humble, to fetch you back. If they do not, if they remain perfectly quiescent and resigned, not even sending forth a wail that shall be audible, you are naturally extremely crushed. “My father,” said Priscilla bitterly, “doesn’t care a bit. He’ll give out I’m dangerously ill, and then you’ll see, Fritzi — I shall either die, or be sent away for an interminable yachting cruise with the Countess. And so dust will be thrown in people’s eyes. My father is very good at that, and the Countess is a perfect genius. You’ll see.”
But Fritzing never saw, for there was no more mention at all either of Kunitz or of influenza. And just then he was so much taken up by his efforts to get into the cottages as quickly as possible that after a passing feeling of thankfulness that the Grand Duke shou
ld be of such a convenient indifference to his daughter’s fate it dropped from his mind in the easy fashion in which matters of importance always did drop from it. What was the use, briefly reflected this philosopher, of worrying about what they were or were not thinking at Kunitz? There would be time enough for that when they actually began to do something. He felt very safe from Kunitz in the folds of the Somerset hills, and as the days passed calmly by he felt still safer. But though no dangers seemed to threaten from without there were certain dangers within that made it most desirable for them to get away from Baker’s and into their own little home without a moment’s unnecessary delay. He could not always be watching his tongue, and he found for instance that it positively refused to call the Princess Ethel. It had an almost equal objection to addressing her as niece; and it had a most fatal habit of slipping out Grand Ducal Highnesses. True, at first they mostly talked German together, but the tendency to talk English grew more marked every day; it was in the air they breathed, and they both could talk it so fatally well. Up at the cottages among the workmen, or when they were joined by Mr. Dawson, grown zealous to help, or by either of the young men Robin and Tussie, who seemed constantly to be passing, the danger too was great. Fritzing was so conscious of it that he used to break out into perspirations whenever Priscilla was with him in public, and his very perspirations were conspicuous. The strain made his manner oddly nervous when speaking to or of his niece, and he became the subject of much conjecture to the observant Robin. Robin thought that in spite of her caressing ways with her uncle the girl must be privately a dreadful tyrant. It seemed difficult to believe, but Robin prided himself on being ready to believe anything at a moment’s notice, especially if it was the worst, and he called it having an open mind. The girl was obviously the most spoilt of girls. No one could help seeing that. Her least wish seemed to be for the uncle a command that was not even to be talked about. Yet the uncle was never openly affectionate to her. It almost seemed as though she must have some secret hold over him, be in possession, perhaps, of some fact connected with a guilty past. But then this girl and guilty pasts! Why, from the look in her eyes she could never even have heard of such things. Robin thought himself fairly experienced in knowledge of human nature, but he had to admit that he had never yet met so incomprehensible a pair. He wanted to talk to Tussie Shuttleworth about them, but Tussie would not talk. To Tussie it seemed impossible to talk about Priscilla because she was sacred to him, and she was sacred to him because he adored her so. He adored her to an extent that amazes me to think of, worshipping her beauty with all the headlong self-abasement of a very young man who is also a poet. His soul was as wax within him, softest wax punched all over with little pictures of Priscilla. No mother is happy while her child’s soul is in this state, and though he was extremely decent, and hid it and smothered it and choked it with all the energy he possessed, Lady Shuttleworth knew very well what was going on inside him and spent her spare time trying to decide whether to laugh or to cry over her poor Tussie. “When does Robin go back to Cambridge?” she asked Mrs. Morrison the next time she met her, which was in the front garden of a sick old woman’s cottage.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 70
