The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 9

out a third hundred mark note, but added
words in his extremity of so strong and final a nature, that she, quailing,
did keep within this limit, and the box was packed. Thus Priscilla's
outfit cost almost exactly fifteen pounds. It will readily be imagined
that it was neat.

Painfully the two fugitives rode through the cobbled streets of Kunitz.
Priscilla was very shaky on a bicycle, and so was Fritzing. Some years
before this, when it had been the fashion, she had bicycled every day in
the grand ducal park on the other side of the town. Then, tired of it, she
had given it up; and now for the last week or two, ever since Fritzing
had told her that if they fled it would have to be on bicycles, she had
pretended a renewed passion for it, riding every day round and round a
circle of which the chilled and astonished Countess Disthal, whose duty
it was to stand and watch, had been the disgusted central point. But the
cobbles of Kunitz are very different from those smooth places in the
park. All who bicycle round Kunitz know them as trying to the most
skilful. Naturally, then, the fugitives advanced very slowly, Fritzing's
heart in his mouth each time they passed a brightly-lit shop or a person
who looked at them. Conceive how nearly this poor heart must have
jumped right out of his mouth, leaving him dead, when a policeman
who had been watching them strode suddenly into the middle of the
street, put up his hand, and said, "Halt."
Fritzing, unstrung man, received a shock so awful that he obeyed by
falling off. Priscilla, wholly unused to being told to halt and absorbed
by the difficulties of the way, did not grasp that the order was meant for
her and rode painfully on. Seeing this, the policeman very gallantly
removed her from her bicycle by putting his arms round her and lifting
her off. He set her quite gently on her feet, and was altogether a
charming policeman, as unlike those grim and ghastly eyes of the law
that glare up and down the streets of, say, Berlin, as it is possible to
imagine.
But Priscilla was perfectly molten with rage, insulted as she had never
been in her life. "How dare you--how dare you," she stammered,
suffocating; and forgetting everything but an overwhelming desire to
box the giant's ears she had actually raised her hand to do it, which
would of course have been the ruin of her plan and the end of my tale,
when Fritzing, recovering his presence of mind, cried out in tones of
unmistakable agony, "Niece, be calm."
She calmed at once to a calm of frozen horror.

"Now, sir," said Fritzing, assuming an air of brisk bravery and
guiltlessness, "what can we do for you?"
"Light your lamps," said the policeman, laconically.
They did; or rather Fritzing did, while Priscilla stood passive.
"I too have a niece," said the policeman, watching Fritzing at work;
"but I light no lamps for her. One should not wait on one's niece. One's
niece should wait on one."
Fritzing did not answer. He finished lighting the lamps, and then held
Priscilla's bicycle and started her.
"I never did that for my niece," said the policeman.
"Confound your niece, sir," was on the tip of Fritzing's tongue; but he
gulped it down, and remarking instead as pleasantly as he could that
being an uncle did not necessarily prevent your being a gentleman,
picked up his bicycle and followed Priscilla.
The policeman shook his head as they disappeared round the corner.
"One does not light lamps for one's niece," he repeated to himself. "It's
against nature. Consequently, though the peppery Fräulein may well be
somebody's niece she is not his."
"Oh," murmured Priscilla, after they had ridden some way without
speaking, "I'm deteriorating already. For the first time in my life I've
wanted to box people's ears."
"The provocation was great, ma'am," said Fritzing, himself shattered by
the spectacle of his Princess being lifted about by a policeman.
"Do you think--" Priscilla hesitated, and looked at him. Her bicycle
immediately hesitated too, and swerving across the road taught her it
would have nothing looked at except its handles. "Do you think," she
went on, after she had got herself straight again, "that the way I'm
going to live now will make me want to do it often?"

"Heaven forbid, ma'am. You are now going to live a most noble
life--the only fitting life for the thoughtful and the earnest. It will be,
once you are settled, far more sheltered from contact with that which
stirs ignoble impulses than anything your Grand Ducal Highness has
hitherto known."
"If you mean policemen by things that stir ignoble impulses," said
Priscilla,