The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (26 page)

"How wearing for the vicar," thought Priscilla, "to have a wife who is angry at ten o'clock in the morning."

"I've come in the interests--" began Mrs. Morrison, whose voice was quite as angry as her face.

"I'm just going out," said Priscilla.

"--Of religion and morality."

"Are they distinct?" asked Priscilla, drawing on her gloves.

"You can imagine that nothing would make me pay you a visit but the strongest sense of the duty I owe to my position in the parish."

"Why should I imagine it?"

"Of course I expect impertinence."

"I'm afraid you've come here to be rude."

"I shall not be daunted by anything you may say from doing my duty."

"Will you please do it, then, and get it over?"

"The duties of a clergyman's wife are often very disagreeable."

"Probably you've got hold of a perfectly wrong idea of what yours really are."

"It is a new experience for me to be told so by a girl of your age."

"I am not telling you. I only suggest."

"I was prepared for rudeness."

"Then why did you come?"

"How long are you going to stay in this parish?"

"You don't expect me to answer that?"

"You've not been in it a fortnight, and you have done more harm than most people in a lifetime."

"I'm afraid you exaggerate."

"You have taught it to drink."

"I gave a dying old woman what she most longed for."

"You've taught it to break the Sabbath."

"I made a great many little children very happy."

"You have ruined the habits of thrift we have been at such pains to teach and encourage for twenty-five years."

"I helped the poor when they asked me to."

"And now what I want to know is, what has become of the Hancock girl?"

"Pray who, exactly, is the Hancock girl?"

"That unfortunate creature who worked here for you on Wednesday."

Priscilla's face changed. "Emma?" she asked.

"Emma. At this hour the day before yesterday she was as good a girl as any in the village. She was good, and dutiful, and honest. Now what is she and where is she?"

"Has she--isn't she in her home?"

"She never went home."

"Then she did lose the money?"

"Lose it? She has stolen it. Do you not see you have deliberately made a thief out of an honest girl?"

Priscilla gazed in dismay at the avenging vicar's wife. It was true then, and she had the fatal gift of spoiling all she touched.

"And worse than that--you have brought a good girl to ruin. He'll never marry her now."

"He?"

"Do you not know the person she was engaged to has gone with her?"

"I don't know anything."

"They walked from here to Ullerton and went to London. Her father came round to us yesterday after your uncle had been to him making inquiries, and it is all as clear as day. Till your uncle told him, he did not know about the money, and had been too--not well enough that day to notice Emma's not having come home. Your uncle's visit sobered him. We telegraphed to the police. They've been traced to London. That's all. Except," and she glared at Priscilla with all the wrath of a prophet whose denunciations have been justified, "except that one more life is ruined."

"I'm very sorry--very, very sorry," said Priscilla, so earnestly, so abjectly even, that her eyes filled with tears. "I see now how thoughtless it was of me."

"Thoughtless!"

"It was inexcusably thoughtless."

"Thoughtless!" cried Mrs. Morrison again.

"If you like, it was criminally thoughtless."

"Thoughtless!" cried Mrs. Morrison a third time.

"But it wasn't more than thoughtless. I'd give anything to be able to set it right. I am most truly grieved. But isn't it a little hard to make me responsible?"

Mrs. Morrison stared at her as one who eyes some strange new monster. "How amazingly selfish you are," she said at last, in tones almost of awe.

"Selfish?" faltered Priscilla, who began to wonder what she was not.

"In the face of such total ruin, such utter shipwreck, to be thinking of what is hard on you. You! Why, here you are with a safe skin, free from the bitter anxieties and temptations poor people have to fight with, with so much time unoccupied that you fill it up with mischief, with more money than you know what to do with"--Priscilla pressed her hands together--"sheltered, free from every care"--Priscilla opened her lips but shut them again--"and there is that miserable Emma, hopeless, branded, for ever an outcast because of you,--only because of you, and you think of yourself and talk of its being hard."

Priscilla looked at Mrs. Morrison, opened her mouth to say something, shut it, opened it again, and remarked very lamely that the heart alone knows its own bitterness.

"Psha," said Mrs. Morrison, greatly incensed at having the Scriptures, her own speciality, quoted at her. "I'd like to know what bitterness yours has known, unless it's the bitterness of a bad conscience. Now I've come here to-day"--she raised her voice to a note of warning--"to give you a chance. To make you think, by pointing out the path you are treading. You are young, and it is my duty to let no young person go downhill without one warning word. You have brought much evil on our village--why you, a stranger, should be bent on making us all unhappy I can't imagine. You hypocritically try to pretend that what plain people call evil is really good. But your last action, forcing Emma Hancock to be a thief and worse, even you cannot possibly defend. You have much on your conscience--far, far more than I should care to have on mine. How wicked to give all that money to Mrs. Jones. Don't you see you are tempting people who know she is defenceless to steal it from her? Perhaps even murder her? I saved her from that--you did not reckon with me, you see. Take my advice--leave Symford, and go back to where you came from"--Priscilla started--"and get something to do that will keep you fully occupied. If you don't, you'll be laying up a wretched, perhaps a degraded future for yourself. Don't suppose,"--her voice grew very loud--"don't suppose we are fools here and are not all of us aware of the way you have tried to lure young men on"--Priscilla started again--"in the hope, of course, of getting one of them to marry you. But your intentions have been frustrated luckily, in the one case by Providence flinging your victim on a bed of sickness and in the other by your having altogether mistaken the sort of young fellow you were dealing with."

Mrs. Morrison paused for breath. This last part of her speech had been made with an ever accumulating rage. Priscilla stood looking at her, her eyebrows drawn down very level over her eyes.

"My son is much too steady and conscientious, besides being too much accustomed to first-rate society, to stoop to anything so vulgar--"

"As myself?" inquired Priscilla.

"As a love-affair with the first stray girl he picks up."

"Do you mean me?"

"He saw through your intentions, laughed at them, and calmly returned to his studies at Cambridge."

"I boxed his ears."

"What?"

"I boxed his ears."

"You?"

"I boxed his ears. That's why he went. He didn't go calmly. It wasn't his studies."

"How dare you box--oh, this is too horrible--and you stand there and tell me so to my face?"

"I'm afraid I must. The tone of your remarks positively demands it. Your son's conduct positively demanded that I should box his ears. So I did."

"Of all the shameless--"

"I'm afraid you're becoming like him--altogether impossible."

"You first lure him on, and then--oh, it is shameful!"

"Have you finished what you came for?"

"You are the most brazen--"

"Hush. Do be careful. Suppose my uncle were to hear you? If you've finished won't you go?"

"Go? I shall not go till I have said my say. I shall send the vicar to you about Robin--such conduct is so--so infamous that I can't--I can't--I can't--"

"I'm sorry if it has distressed you."

"Distressed me? You are the most--"

"Really I think we've done, haven't we?" said Priscilla hurriedly, dreadfully afraid lest Fritzing should come in and hear her being called names.

"To think that you dared--to think that my--my noble boy--"

"He wasn't very noble. Mothers don't ever really know their sons, I think."

"Shameless girl!" cried Mrs. Morrison, so loud, so completely beside herself, that Priscilla hastily rang her bell, certain that Fritzing must hear and would plunge in to her rescue; and of all things she had learned to dread Fritzing's plunging to her rescue. "Open the door for this lady," she said to Annalise, who appeared with a marvellous promptitude; and as Mrs. Morrison still stood her ground and refused to see either Annalise or the door Priscilla ended the interview by walking out herself, with great dignity, into the bathroom.

XXI

And now I have come to a part of my story that I would much rather not write. Always my inclination if left alone is to sit in the sun and sing of things like crocuses, of nothing less fresh and clean than crocuses. The engaging sprightliness of crocuses; their dear little smell, not to be smelled except by the privileged few; their luminous transparency--I am thinking of the white and the purple; their kind way of not keeping hearts sick for Spring waiting longer than they can just bear; how pleasant to sit with a friend in the sun, a friend who like myself likes to babble of green fields, and talk together about all things flowery. But Priscilla's story has taken such a hold on me, it seemed when first I heard it to be so full of lessons, that I feel bound to set it down from beginning to end for the use and warning of all persons, princesses and others, who think that by searching, by going far afield, they will find happiness, and do not see that it is lying all the while at their feet. They do not see it because it is so close. It is so close that there is a danger of its being trodden on or kicked away. And it is shy, and waits to be picked up. Priscilla, we know, went very far afield in search of hers, and having undertaken to tell of what befell her I must not now, only because I would rather, suppress any portion of the story. Besides, it is a portion vital to the catastrophe.

In Minehead, then, there lived at this time a murderer. He had not been found out yet and he was not a murderer by profession, for he was a bricklayer; but in his heart he was, and that is just as bad. He had had a varied career into the details of which I do not propose to go, had come three or four years before to live in the West of England because it was so far from all the other places he had lived in, had got work in Minehead, settled there respectably, married, and was a friend of that carrier who brought the bread and other parcels every day to the Symford store. At this time he was in money difficulties and his wife, of whom he was fond, was in an expensive state of health. The accounts of Priscilla's generosity and wealth had reached Minehead as I said some time ago, and had got even into the local papers. The carrier was the chief transmitter of news, for he saw Mrs. Vickerton every day and she was a woman who loved to talk; but those of the Shuttleworth servants who were often in Minehead on divers errands ratified and added to all he said, and embellished the tale besides with what was to them the most interesting part, the unmistakable signs their Augustus showed of intending to marry the young woman. This did not interest the murderer. Sir Augustus and the lady he meant to marry were outside his sphere altogether; too well protected, too powerful. What he liked to hear about was the money Priscilla had scattered among the cottagers, how much each woman had got, whether it had been spent or not, whether she had a husband, or grown-up children; and best of all he liked to hear about the money Mrs. Jones had got. All the village, and therefore Mrs. Vickerton and the carrier, knew of it, knew even the exact spot beneath the bolster where it was kept, knew it was kept there for safety from the depredations of the vicar's wife, knew the vicar's wife had taken away Priscilla's first present. The carrier knew too of Mrs. Jones's age, her weakness, her nearness to death. He remarked that such a sum wasn't of much use to an old woman certain to die in a few days, and that it might just as well not be hers at all for all the spending it got. The murderer, whose reputation in Minehead was so immaculate that not a single fly had ever dared blow on it, said kindly that no doubt just to have it in her possession was cheering and that one should not grudge the old their little bits of comfort; and he walked over to Symford that night, and getting there about one o'clock murdered Mrs. Jones. I will not enter into details. I believe it was quite simple. He was back by six next morning with the five pounds in his pocket, and his wife that day had meat for dinner.

That is all I shall say about the murderer, except that he was never found out; and nothing shall induce me to dwell upon the murder. But what about the effect it had on Priscilla? Well, it absolutely crushed her.

The day before, after Mrs. Morrison's visit, she had been wretched enough, spending most of it walking very fast, as driven spirits do, with Fritzing for miles across the bleak and blowy moor, by turns contrite and rebellious, one moment ready to admit she was a miserable sinner, the next indignantly repudiating Mrs. Morrison's and her own conscience's accusations, her soul much beaten and bent by winds of misgiving but still on its feet, still defiant, still sheltering itself when it could behind plain common sense which whispered at intervals that all that had happened was only bad luck. They walked miles that day; often in silence, sometimes in gusty talk--talk gusty with the swift changes of Priscilla's mood scudding across the leaden background of Fritzing's steadier despair--and they got back tired, hungry, their clothes splashed with mud, their minds no nearer light than when they started. She had, I say, been wretched enough; but what was this wretchedness to that which followed? In her ignorance she thought it the worst day she had ever had, the most tormented; and when she went to bed she sought comfort in its very badness by telling herself that it was over and could never come again. It could not. But Time is prolific of surprises; and on Saturday morning Symford woke with a shudder to the murder of Mrs. Jones.