The Princess Priscilla's FortnightVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
Germans -- England -- Fiction; Princesses -- Fiction
The portraits were those of all the reigning princes of Germany and
had been put up as a delicate compliment by the representative of the
Minehead furnishers, while Priscilla and Fritzing were taking leave of
Baker's Farm; and the print Priscilla's eye had lighted on was the
portrait of her august parent, smiling at her. He was splendid in
state robes and orders, and there was a charger, and an obviously
expensive looped-up curtain, and much smoke as of nations furiously
raging together in the background, and outside this magnificence
meandered the unmeaning rosebuds of Priscilla's cheap wallpaper. His
smile seemed very terrible under the circumstances. Fritzing felt
this, and seized him and flung him with a desperate energy under the
table, where he went on smiling, as Priscilla remembered with a guilty
shudder, at nothing but oilcloth. "I don't believe I'll sleep if I
know he--he's got nothing he'd like better than oilcloth to look at,"
she whispered with an awestruck face to Fritzing as Tussie came in.
"I will cause them all to be returned," Fritzing assured her.
"What, have those people sent wrong things?" asked Tussie anxiously,
who felt that the entire responsibility of this _ménage_ was on his
shoulders.
"Oh, only some cheap prints," said Priscilla hastily. "I think they're
called oleographs or something."
"What impertinence," said Tussie hotly.
"I expect it was kindly meant, but I--I like my cottage quite plain."
"I'll have them sent back, sir," Tussie said to Fritzing, who was
rubbing his hands nervously through his hair; for the sight of his
grand ducal master's face smiling at him on whom he would surely never
wish to smile again, and doing it, too, from the walls of Creeper
Cottage, had given him a shock.
"You are ever helpful, young man," he said, bowing abstractedly and
going away to put down his hat and umbrella; and Priscilla, with a
cold feeling that she had had a bad omen, rang the handbell Tussie's
thoughtfulness had placed on her table and ordered Annalise to bring
tea.
Now Annalise had been standing on the threshold of her attic staring
at it in an amazement too deep for words when the bell fetched her
down. She appeared, however, before her mistress with a composed face,
received the order with her customary respectfulness, and sought out
Fritzing to inquire of him where the servants were to be found. "Her
Grand Ducal Highness desires tea," announced Annalise, appearing in
Fritzing's sitting-room, where he was standing absorbed in the bill
from the furnishers that he had found lying on his table.
"Then take it in," said Fritzing impatiently, without looking up.
"To whom shall I give the order?" inquired Annalise.
"To whom shall you give the order?" repeated Fritzing, pausing
in his study to stare at her, the bill in one hand and his
pocket-handkerchief, with which he was mopping his forehead, in
the other.
"Where," asked Annalise, "shall I find the cook?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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