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His much-tried mother had to listen to many a cross and cryptic remark flung across the table from the dear boy who had always been so gentle; and more than that, he put his foot down once and for all and refused with a flatness that silenced her to eat any more patent foods. "Absurd," cried Tussie. "No wonder I'm such an idiot. Who could be anything else with his stomach full of starch?
"You can be happy in any place whatever," she remarked to Tussie on the Monday, when he was expressing fears as to her future comfort; "absolutely any place will do a tub, a dingle, the top of a pillar any place at all, if only your soul is on fire." "Of course you can," cried Tussie, ready to kiss her feet.
"I I don't understand," faltered Lady Shuttleworth. "There mustn't be any fuss, mother." "Do you mean no one is to come?" "No one at all, except the tenants and people. Of course they are to have their fun I'll see that they have a jolly good time. But I won't have our own set and the relations." "Tussie, they've all accepted." "Send round circulars."
And she gathered up her letters and went out she never kept people waiting and as she passed Tussie she laid her hand tenderly for a moment on his shoulder. "If I find I can't understand him I'll send for you," she said. Tussie folded up his sonnet and put it in his pocket.
Fritzing felt this, and seized him and flung him with a desperate energy under the table, where he went on smiling, as Priscilla remembered with a guilty shudder, at nothing but oilcloth. "I don't believe I'll sleep if I know he he's got nothing he'd like better than oilcloth to look at," she whispered with an awestruck face to Fritzing as Tussie came in.
She, most orderly of women, did not in the least mind, so occupied was she with deeper cares, that her household was in rebellion, her cook who had been with her practically all her life leaving because she had been commanded by Tussie, before he had to fall back on the kitchenmaid, to proceed forthwith to Creeper Cottage and stay there indefinitely; her kitchenmaid, also a valued functionary, leaving; Bryce, Tussie's servant who took such care of him and was so clever in sickness, gone suddenly in his indignation at having to go at all, all these things no longer mattered.
It was so tiny that it got done, after a great deal of urging from Tussie, by the Tuesday at midday, and Tussie himself had superintended the storing of wood in the coal-hole and the lighting of the fire that was to warm his divine lady and that Ill Luck found so comforting to her toes.
He held them in a clutch that seemed like hot iron in both his, and dragging himself nearer to them covered them with wild kisses. Lady Shuttleworth was appalled. "Tussie," she said in a very even voice, "you must let Miss Neumann-Schultz go now. You must be quiet again now. Let her go, dear. Perhaps she'll come again."
At three in the morning, with the wailing wind rising and falling and the room black with the inky blackness of a moonless October night, the Tussie complication seemed to be gigantic, of a quite appalling size, threatening to choke her, to crush all the spring and youth out of her. If Tussie got well she was going to break his heart; if Tussie died it would be her fault.
Was ever a man interrupted like this in the act of asking a girl to marry him?" "Tussie!" cried Lady Shuttleworth. "Ethel, will you marry me? Because I love you so? It's an absurd reason the most magnificently absurd reason, but I know there's no other why you should " Priscilla was shaken and stricken as she had never yet been; shaken with pity, stricken with remorse.
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