XV

The first evening in Creeper Cottage was unpleasant.  There was a blazing wood fire, the curtains were drawn, the lamp shone rosily through its red shade, and when Priscilla stood up her hair dusted the oak beams of the ceiling, it was so low.  The background, you see, was perfectly satisfactory; exactly what a cottage background should be on an autumn night when outside a wet mist is hanging like a grey curtain across the window panes; and Tussie arriving at nine o’clock to help consecrate the new life with Shakespeare felt, as he opened the door and walked out of the darkness into the rosy, cosy little room, that he need not after all worry himself with doubts as to the divine girl’s being comfortable.  Never did place appear more comfortable.  It did not occur to him that a lamp with a red shade and the blaze of a wood fire will make any place appear comfortable so long as they go on shining, and he looked up at Priscilla—­I am afraid he had to look up at her when they were both standing—­with the broadest smile of genuine pleasure.  “It does look jolly,” he said heartily.

His pleasure was doomed to an immediate wiping out.  Priscilla smiled, but with a reservation behind her smile that his sensitive spirit felt at once.  She was alone, and there was no sign whatever either of her uncle or of preparations for the reading of Shakespeare.

“Is anything not quite right?” Tussie asked, his face falling at once to an anxious pucker.

Priscilla looked at him and smiled again, but this time the smile was real, in her eyes as well as on her lips, dancing in them together with the flickering firelight.  “It’s rather funny,” she said.  “It has never happened to me before.  What do you think?  I’m hungry.”

“Hungry?”

“Hungry.”

Tussie stared, arrested in the unwinding of his comforter.

“Really hungry. Dreadfully hungry.  So hungry that I hate Shakespeare.”

“But—­”

“I know.  You’re going to say why not eat?  It does seem simple.  But you’ve no idea how difficult it really is.  I’m afraid my uncle and I have rather heaps to learn.  We forgot to get a cook.”

“A cook?  But I thought—­I understood that curtseying maid of yours was going to do all that?”

“So did I. So did he.  But she won’t.”

Priscilla flushed, for since Tussie left after tea she had had grievous surprises, of a kind that made her first indignant and then inclined to wince.  Fritzing had not been able to hide from her that Annalise had rebelled and refused to cook, and Priscilla had not been able to follow her immediate impulse and dismiss her.  It was at this point, when she realized this, that the wincing began.  She felt perfectly sick at the thought, flashed upon her for the first time, that she was in the power of a servant.

“Do you mean to say,” said Tussie in a voice hollow with consternation, “that you’ve had no dinner?”