The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (19 page)

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.

XV

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. "It
does
look 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.
Dreadfully
hungry. 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 this
is
nice," said Robin, all smiles.