The Princess Priscilla's FortnightVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
Germans -- England -- Fiction; Princesses -- Fiction
That evening she sang in the kitchen, she sang in the bath-room, she
sang in the attic and on the stairs to the attic. What she sang,
persistently, over and over again, and loudest outside Fritzing's
door, was a German song about how beautiful it is at evening when the
bells ring one to rest, and the refrain at the end of each verse was
ding-dong twice repeated. Priscilla rang her own bell, unable to
endure it, but Annalise did not consider this to be one of those that
are beautiful and did not answer it till it had been rung three times.
"Do not sing," said Priscilla, when she appeared.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness objects?"
Priscilla turned red. "I'll give no reasons," she said icily. "Do not
sing."
"Yet it is a sign of a light heart. Your Grand Ducal Highness did not
like to see me weep--she should the more like to hear me rejoice."
"You can go."
"My heart to-night is light, because I am the means of being of use
to your Grand Ducal Highness, of showing my devotion, of being of
service."
"Do me the service of being quiet."
Annalise curtseyed and withdrew, and spent the rest of the evening
bursting into spasmodic and immediately interrupted song,--breaking
off after a few bars with a cough of remembrance and apology. When
this happened Fritzing and Priscilla looked at each other with grave
and meditative eyes; they knew how completely they were in her power.
Fritzing wrote that night to the friend in London who had engaged the
rooms for him at Baker's Farm, and asked him to lend him fifty pounds
for a week,--preferably three hundred (this would cover the
furnisher's bill), but if he could lend neither five would do. The
friend, a teacher of German, could as easily have lent the three
hundred as the five, so poor was he, so fit an object for a loan
himself; but long before his letter explaining this in words eloquent
of regret (for he was a loyal friend) reached Fritzing, many things
had happened to that bewildered man to whom so many things had
happened already, and caused him to forget both his friend and his
request.
This, then, was how the afternoon and evening of Thursday were
passed; and on Friday morning, quite unstrung by their sleepless
night, Priscilla and Fritzing were proposing to go up together on
to the moor, there to seek width and freshness, be blown upon by
moist winds, and forget for a little the crushing narrowness and
perplexities of Creeper Cottage, when Mrs. Morrison walked in. She
opened the door first and then, when half of her was inside, knocked
with her knuckles, which were the only things to knock with on
Priscilla's simple door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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