CONCLUSION

So that was the end of Priscilla’s fortnight,—­according to the way you look at it glorious or inglorious.  I shall not say which I think it was; whether it is better to marry a prince, become in course of time a queen, be at the head of a great nation, be surfeited with honour, wealth, power and magnificence till the day when Death with calm, indifferent fingers strips everything away and leaves you at last to the meek simplicity of a shroud; or whether toilsome paths, stern resistances, buffetings bravely taken, battles fought inch by inch, an ideal desperately clung to even though in clinging you are slain, is not rather the part to be chosen of him whose soul would sit attired with stars.  Anyhow the goddess laughed, the goddess who had left Priscilla in the lurch, when she heard the end of the adventure; and her unpleasant sister, having nothing more to do in Creeper Cottage, gathered up her rags and grinned too as she left it.  At least her claws had lacerated much over-tender flesh during her stay; and though the Prince had interrupted the operation and forced her for the moment to inactivity, she was not dissatisfied with what had been accomplished.

Priscilla, it will readily be imagined, made no farewell calls.  She disappeared from Symford as suddenly as she had appeared; and Mrs. Morrison, coming into Creeper Cottage on Monday afternoon to unload her conscience yet more, found only a pleasant gentleman, a stranger of mellifluous manners, writing out cheques.  She had ten minutes talk with him, and went home very sad and wise.  Indeed from that day, her spirit being the spirit of the true snob, the hectorer of the humble, the devout groveller in the courtyards of the great, she was a much-changed woman.  Even her hair felt it, and settled down unchecked to greyness.  She no longer cared to put on a pink tulle bow in the afternoons, which may or may not be a sign of grace.  She ceased to suppose that she was pretty.  When the accounts of Priscilla’s wedding filled all the papers she became so ill that she had to go to bed and be nursed.  Sometimes to the vicar’s mild surprise she hesitated before expressing an opinion.  Once at least she of her own accord said she had been wrong.  And although she never told any one of the conversation with the gentleman writing cheques, when Robin came home for Christmas and looked at her he knew at once what she knew.

As for Lady Shuttleworth, she got a letter from Priscilla; quite a long one, enclosing a little one for Tussie to be given him if and when his mother thought expedient.  Lady Shuttleworth was not surprised by what she read.  She had suspected it from the moment Priscilla rose up the day she called on her at Baker’s Farm and dismissed her.  Till her marriage with the late Sir Augustus she had been lady-in-waiting to one of the English princesses, and she could not be mistaken on such points.  She knew the sort of thing too well.  But she never forgave Priscilla.  How could she?  Was the day of Tussie’s coming of age, that dreadful day when he was nearest death, a day a mother could ever forget?  It had all been most wanton, most cruel.  We know she was full of the milk of human kindness:  on the subject of Priscilla it was unmixed gall.