IV
SO Fräulein—she soon came to be called just “Fräulein”—was not at my dinner-party; but two or three weeks later I had a little talk with her. I went up to the Manor one afternoon in October, seeking a game of croquet with Bessie Thistleton—such are our mild delights at Southam Parva—but found the whole family gone off to a Primrose League bazaar at Beechington. Only Fräulein was at home, said the parlour-maid; and Fräulein was visible in the garden, sitting under a tree, turning over the leaves of a big book. I used the privilege of a friend of the house, strolled out on to the lawn, and raised my hat to the—I mean to Fräulein. She smiled brightly and beckoned to me to come and sit by her; her words were beyond reproach, but her gestures were sometimes obstinately un-Fräuleinish, if I may so express myself. I sat down in the other deck-chair and said that it was very fine for so late in the year.
She made no reply and, raising my eyes to her face, I found her looking at me with an unmistakable gleam of amusement.
“Do you think this very funny?” she asked.
“I think it’s deplorable,” I answered promptly.
“It’s very simple. I owe Mr Thistleton two hundred pounds. I do this till I have worked it off.”
“How many years?”
“Several, monsieur.”
“And after that?”
“The children will grow up.”
“Yes. And then?”
“Mrs Thistleton will give Fräulein Friedenburg a good character.”
“Meanwhile you work for nothing?”
“No. For clothes, for food, to pay my debt.”
“And how do you like it?”
That question of mine, which sounds brutal, was inspired and, as I still believe, excused by the satirical amusement in her eyes; our previous meetings had shown me no such expression. Her answer to the question had its irony too. She turned over a dozen pages of the big book and came on a picture. She held the book out to me, saying—
“That’s my home.”
I looked at the picture of her home, the great grim castle towering aloft on the river bank. A few centuries ago the Turks had fallen back beaten from before these giant walls. Then I glanced round Mrs Thistleton’s gentle trim old garden.
“I think you’ve answered my question,” I said.
She closed the book, with a shrug of her thin little shoulders, and sat silent for a moment. The oval of her face was certainly beautiful, and the thick masses of her hair were dark as night, or the inside of a dungeon in her castle of Friedenburg. (I liked to think of her having dungeons, though I really don’t know whether she had.)
“And is it for ever?” I asked.
She leant over towards me and whispered: “They know where I am.” An intense excitement seemed to be fighting against the calm she imposed on herself; but it lasted only a moment. The next instant she fell back in her chair with a sigh of dejection; a listless despair spread over her face; the satirical gleam illuminated no more the depths of her eyes. The veil had fallen over the Princess again. Only Fräulein sat beside me.
Then I made a fool of myself.
“Are there no men in Boravia?” I asked in a low voice.
This at Southam Parva, in the twentieth century, and to the governess! Moreover, from me, who have always been an advanced Liberal in politics, and hold that the Boravians are at entire liberty to change the line of succession, or to set up a republic if they be so disposed! None the less, in the Thistletons’ garden that afternoon, I did ask Fräulein whether there were men in Boravia.
She answered the question in the words she had used before.
“They know where I am,” she said, but now languidly, with half-closed eyes.
That I might be saved from further folly, from offering my strong right arm and all my worldly goods (I was at the moment overdrawn at the bank) as a contribution towards a Legitimist crusade in Boravia—Fortune sent interruption. The family came back from the bazaar, and most of them trooped into the garden. Charley Miles was with them, having joined the party at the fête on his way back from town. As they all came up Fräulein put the big book—with its picture of her home—behind her back; I rose and walked forward to greet Mrs Thistleton. In an instant Charley, passing me with a careless “Hallo, Treg!” had seated himself by Fräulein and begun to talk to her with great vivacity and every appearance of pleasure—indeed of admiration.
I joined Mrs Thistleton—and Bessie, who stood beside her mother. Bessie was frowning; that frown was to me the first announcement of a new situation. Bessie was grown up now, or so held herself, and she and Charley were great friends. Charley was doing remarkably well on the Stock Exchange, making his three or four thousand a year; I remembered that Thistleton had thrown out a conjecture to that effect in conversation with me once. As the father of a family of eight, Thistleton could not neglect such a circumstance. And Charley was a good-looking fellow. The frown on Miss Bessie’s brow set all this train of thought moving in my mind. The fact that, the next moment, Miss Bessie swung round and marched off into the house served to accelerate its progress.
Mrs Thistleton cast a glance at the couple under the tree—Charley Miles and Fräulein—and then suggested that I should go with her and see the chrysanthemums. We went to see the chrysanthemums accordingly, but I think we were both too preoccupied to appreciate them properly.
“It’s a very difficult position in some ways,” said Mrs Thistleton suddenly.
It was so difficult as to be almost impossible. I paid my compliment with absolute sincerity. “You’ve overcome the difficulties wonderfully,” I remarked. “I never admired your tact more. Nobody thinks of her at all now, except just as Fräulein.”
“I have been anxious to do the right thing, and she has improved the children’s French.” She did not add that the liquidation of Thistleton’s bill by services rendered was a further benefit. We cannot be expected always to remember every aspect of our conduct.
“But it is difficult,” Mrs Thistleton went on. “And the worst of it is that Bessie and she aren’t very congenial. With an ordinary governess—— Well, the only thing is to treat her like one, isn’t it?”
“Does she object?”
“Oh no, never. But I can’t quite make her out. After all, she’s not English, you see, and one can’t be sure of her moral influence. I sometimes think I must make a change. Oh, I shouldn’t do anything unkind. I should ask her to stay till she was suited, and, of course, do all I could to recommend her. But Bessie doesn’t like her, I’m sorry to say.”
By this time we had walked past all the chrysanthemums twice, and I said that it was time for me to go. Mrs Thistleton gave me her hand.
“You don’t think me unkind?”
“Honestly, I think you have been kind all through, and I don’t think you’ll be unkind now. The situation is so very——”
“Difficult? Yes,” she sighed.
I had been going to say “absurd,” but I accepted “difficult.” I would have accepted anything, because I wanted to end the conversation and get away. I was surfeited with incongruities—Mrs Thistleton, Bessie, Charley Miles, and, above all, Fräulein—set in contrast with the picture in the big book—with the castle of Friedenburg frowning above the great river, waiting for its mistress, Princess Vera; the mistress who came not because—I couldn’t get away from my own folly—because there were no men in Boravia! “Absurd” was the right word, however.