The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 6

home. Even the presence of the Countess Disthal had not
been wanting. She therefore regarded this as not seeing England at all,
and said so. Fritzing remarked tartly that it was a way of seeing it most
English people would envy her; and she was so unable to believe him
that she said Nonsense.
But lately her desires had taken definite shape so rapidly that he had
come to dread the very word hill and turn cold at the name of England.
He was being torn in different directions; for he was, you see, still
trying to do what other people had decided was his duty, and till a man
gives up doing that he will certainly be torn. How great would be the
temptation to pause here and consider the mangled state of such a man,
the wounds and weakness he will suffer from, and how his soul will
have to limp through life, if it were not that I must get on with Priscilla.

One day, after many weeks of edging nearer to it, of going all round it
yet never quite touching it, she took a deep breath and told him she had
determined to run away. She added an order that he was to help her.
With her most grand ducal air she merely informed, ordered, and
forbade. What she forbade, of course, was the betrayal of her plans.
"You may choose," she said, "between the Grand Duke and myself. If
you tell him, I have done with you for ever."
Of course he chose Priscilla.
His agonies now were very great. Those last lacerations of conscience
were terrific. Then, after nights spent striding, a sudden calm fell upon
him. At length he could feel what he had always seen, that there could
not be two duties for a man, that no man can serve two masters, that a
man's one clear duty is to be in the possession of his soul and live the
life it approves: in other and shorter words, instead of leading Priscilla,
Priscilla was now leading him.
She did more than lead him; she drove him. The soul he had so
carefully tended and helped to grow was now grown stronger than his
own; for there was added to its natural strength the tremendous daring
of absolute inexperience. What can be more inexperienced than a
carefully guarded young princess? Priscilla's ignorance of the outside
world was pathetic. He groaned over her plans--for it was she who
planned and he who listened--and yet he loved them. She was a divine
woman, he said to himself; the sweetest and noblest, he was certain,
that the world would ever see.
Her plans were these:
First, that having had twenty-one years of life at the top of the social
ladder she was now going to get down and spend the next twenty-one
at the bottom of it. (Here she gave her reasons, and I will not stop to
describe Fritzing's writhings as his own past teachings grinned at him
through every word she said.)
Secondly, that the only way to get to the bottom being to run away
from Kunitz, she was going to run.

Thirdly, that the best and nicest place for living at the bottom would be
England. (Here she explained her conviction that beautiful things grow
quite naturally round the bottom of ladders that cannot easily reach the
top; flowers of self-sacrifice and love, of temperance, charity,
godliness--delicate things, with roots that find their nourishment in
common soil. You could not, said Priscilla, expect soil at the top of
ladders, could you? And as she felt that she too had roots full of
potentialities, she must take them down to where their natural
sustenance lay waiting.)
Fourthly, they were to live somewhere in the country in England, in the
humblest way.
Fifthly, she was to be his daughter.
"Daughter?" cried Fritzing, bounding in his chair. "Your Grand Ducal
Highness forgets I have friends in England, every one of whom is
aware that I never had a wife."
"Niece, then," said Priscilla.
He gazed at her in silence, trying to imagine her his niece. He had two
sisters, and they had stopped exactly at the point they were at when
they helped him, barefoot, to watch Westphalian pigs. I do not mean
that they had not ultimately left the little farm, gone into stockings, and
married. It is their minds I am thinking of, and these had never budged.
They were like their father, a doomed dullard; while Fritzing's mother,
whom he resembled, had been a rather extraordinary woman in a rough
and barbarous way. He found himself wholly unable to imagine either
of his sisters the mother of this exquisite young lady.
These, then, baldly, were Priscilla's plans. The carrying of them out
was