The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

"And pray, Emma, what is to prevent you?"

"I—I'm going to Baker's, mum."

"Going to Baker's? Why are you going to Baker's, Emma?"

So it all came out.

The bells were just stopping, and Mrs. Morrison, who played the organ, was forced to hurry in without having told Emma her whole opinion of those who gave and those who attended Sunday parties, but the prelude she played that day expressed the tumult of her mind very well, and struck Tussie Shuttleworth, who had sensitive ears, quite cold. He was the only person in the church acutely sensitive to sound, and it was very afflicting to him, this plunging among the pedals, this angry shrieking of stops no man ever yet had heard together. The very blower seemed frightened, and blew in gasps; and the startled Tussie, comparing the sounds to the clamourings of a fiend in pain, could not possibly guess they were merely the musical expression of the state of a just woman's soul.

Mrs. Morrison's anger was perfectly proper. It had been the conscientious endeavour of twenty-five solid years of her life to make of Symford a model parish, and working under Lady Shuttleworth, whose power was great since all the cottages were her son's and were lived in by his own labourers, it had been kept in a state of order so nearly perfect as to raise it to the position of an example to the adjoining parishes. The church was full, the Sunday-school well attended, the Sabbath was kept holy, the women were one and all sober and thrifty, the men were fairly satisfactory except on Saturday nights, there was no want, little sickness, and very seldom downright sin. The expression downright sin is Mrs. Morrison's own,—heaven forbid that I should have anything to do with such an expression—and I suppose she meant by it thieving, murder, and other grossnesses that would bring the sinner, as she often told her awe-struck Dorcas class, to infallible gallows, and the sinner's parents' grey hairs to sorrowful graves. "Please mum, will the parents go too?" asked a girl one day who had listened breathlessly, an inquiring-minded girl who liked to get to the root of things.

"Go where, Bessie?"

"With the grey hairs, mum."

Mrs. Morrison paused a moment and fixed a searching gaze on Bessie's face. Then she said with much dignity, "The parents, Bessie, will naturally follow the hairs." And to a girl bred in the near neighbourhood of Exmoor it sounded very sporting.

Into this innocent, frugal, well-managed hamlet Priscilla dropped suddenly from nowhere, trailing with her thunder-clouds of impulsive and childish ideas about doing good, and holding in her hands the dangerous weapon of wealth. It is hard to stand by and see one's life-work broken up before one's eyes by an irresponsible stranger, a foreigner, a girl, a young girl, a pretty girl; especially hard if one was born with an unbending character, tough and determined, ambitious and vain. These are not reproaches being piled up on the vicar's wife; who shall dare reproach another? And how could she help being born so? We would all if we could be born good and amiable and beautiful, and remain so perpetually during our lives; and she too was one of God's children, and inside her soul, behind the crust of failings that hindered it during these years from coming out, sat her bright angel, waiting. Meanwhile she was not a person to watch the destruction of her hopes without making violent efforts to stop it; and immediately she had played the vicar into the vestry after service that Sunday she left the congregation organless and hurried away into the churchyard. There she stood and waited for the villagers to question them about this unheard of thing; and it was bad to see how they melted away in other directions,—out at unused gates, making detours over the grass, visiting the long-neglected graves of relatives, anywhere rather than along the ordinary way, which was the path where the vicar's wife stood. At last came Mrs. Vickerton the postmistress. She was deep in conversation with the innkeeper's wife, and did not see the figure on the path in time to melt away herself. If she had she certainly would have melted, for though she had no children but her grown-up son she felt very guilty; for it was her son who had been sent the afternoon before to Minehead by Priscilla with a list as long as his arm of the cakes and things to be ordered for the party. "Oh Mrs. Morrison, I didn't see you," she exclaimed, starting and smiling and turning red. She was a genteel woman who called no one mum.