Chapter Thirty Five.
The Edward Morgans left the dance early, at whose suggestion Prudence never remembered. She was quite willing to go home. The misery of meeting again Philip Steele after the lapse of years, of discovering that she loved him—that he loved her, had remained true to her memory always, was more than she could bear. The image of Steele filled her mind and so dominated her thoughts that she could not fix her attention on anything else.
She did not see him again. He left quietly soon after Edward Morgan led his wife away—disappearing as he had come, unobtrusively, without meeting his hostess, feeling unequal to facing her, and fearful of risking a further encounter with the girl whose memory he had cherished faithfully since the night he had stood under her window and caught a rose which she dropped down to him for a token at parting. The rose was in his possession still, and it was no more faded with the years, he reflected with bitterness, than his memory was in her fickle affections.
He felt angry with her, and in his anger he judged her harshly. He had thought of her so much, had imagined her pleasure at their meeting, had taken for granted that she would wait for him, confident of his return and of his love. And he came back to find her married—gone from her old place at the window, the setting in which he had pictured her during those five lonely years of work. He had sworn to take her back with him, sworn to have her in defiance of every law. He recalled the boast with a smile of grim irony. There was a suggestion of melodrama about it which struck him now as absurd. What, he wondered, had she thought of the boast—of him? She had remained so still and silent, with her half-averted face and an air of drooping sadness in her quiet pose. She loved him. In spite of his bitter resentment at her marriage, at her want of faith, deep down in his inner consciousness there remained the calm assurance that her heart was his, would remain his, no matter what the years brought forth.
The Morgans exchanged scarcely a word during the drive home. But when they reached the house Mr Morgan followed his wife into the drawing-room with the air of a man who intends having things out. It was not the time for explanations. He would have displayed greater wisdom had he deferred the discussion to a more fitting occasion. Prudence’s nerves were all jarred. She had reached a stage of misery which rendered her desperate, and her husband’s manner, conveying his sense of outraged pride and conscious authority, provoked her to a show of bitterness, which in calmer moments she deplored.
“That’s the finish of all this dancing and merrymaking,” he said rudely, and poured himself out a glass of water, which old Mrs Morgan’s thought for their comfort had provided in chill readiness on a side table. “I have always felt that this frivolity was out of keeping with the seriousness of the times. Perhaps you will give me some explanation of your extraordinary behaviour. What is Steele to you? I saw there was something between you when you met. It was not difficult to see. Your manner attracted general attention. I won’t have my wife make herself conspicuous with any man. Steele!”
He voiced the name with an oath, and banged down his glass so that the water spilled over on the polished table. Prudence watched him stonily, but without surprise, while he sopped up the water with his handkerchief. It was so characteristic of him to be careful in small matters even in a moment of great emotional strain.
“I am tired,” she said, making the only appeal that presented itself to her mind whereby to avoid the discussion. “I would rather not talk about these things now.”
“Tired!” he ejaculated angrily. “You won’t have to complain of that in future. I will see that you take more rest. And you must talk of these things. I have every right to insist upon an explanation.”
“Very well,” she said, in quiet tones that should have warned him to desist. “But I think you are unwise. Mr Steele, when he met me to-night, had no idea that I was married; and, in the surprise of seeing him again, I suppose I betrayed my gladness. I did not mean to do that. It was all so unexpected.”
“But what is he to you?” Edward Morgan demanded. “Good God! can’t you answer a plain question? What has there been between you and Steele in the past?”
Prudence turned away from him to conceal the quivering of her lips, but her voice was steady when she answered despite the wild beating of her heart.
“I loved him,” she said simply, “and he loved me. There was that between us. But he went away, and I thought—he had forgotten.”
A long silence fell between them, a heavy silence. In all his life Edward Morgan had never received such a blow to his pride as this. She had dealt him a blow before when she sought to break their engagement; but that was trifling as compared with this—this brazen confession of love for another man. She had never loved him—her husband. She had been in love with another man all these years.
“And yet you married me!” he said in a hard voice, snapping the silence abruptly.
Had she not been goaded past endurance, Prudence, would not have said what she did say; she was ashamed of it later. But his manner and his clumsy insistence irritated her into retorting.
“At least I tried to evade doing you that injury,” she said.
His face became purple with anger. Nothing she could have planned to say could have enraged him more than that cutting reminder at such a time of her reluctance to become his wife.
“You did,” he shouted, and smote the table beside which he stood so violently that the glasses on it jingled and the water was spilled again. This time he allowed it to remain; he appeared not to see it in his outburst of noisy passion. “But you weren’t honest with me even then. You concealed this thing from me deliberately. You deceived me. I believed you were a simple-hearted girl whose love I could win with kindness. And I was kind to you. I have tried to be kind always—though God knows! I received small return. Do you suppose I would have married you had you told me that you loved another man? I could feel some respect for you had you persisted in your refusal; I feel none for you now. It was an evil day for me when you married me.”
“It was the one big mistake of my life,” she answered, and turned and faced him fully, with blue eyes aflame with anger, her head lifted proudly, almost aggressively, her face expressing cold dislike. She had never loved Edward Morgan, but she had not until then actively disliked him. His blustering anger, and his ill-considered taunts repelled her. “If you care to have a separation I am quite agreeable. I think we shall be happier apart.”
“I don’t doubt you would like that,” he said brutally. “To be free to gallivant in your frivolous way at my expense, and under the protection of my name! I prefer to exercise full control over my wife. You are my wife, remember. Nothing’s going to alter that. And since you bear my name I will see that you respect it. There’s going to be no scandal in this family. Separation! So that’s what you are after! Good God! I would sooner see you lying dead in your coffin than that you should disgrace the name of Morgan by dragging it into the courts.”
She smiled coldly. His arrogant rhetoric recalled annoyingly William’s pride in the Graynor Honour. They both seemed to fear these things were in jeopardy through her. The tissue-paper wrappings in which they preserved these qualities appeared to her as consistent as they were inadequate. There was a hollow ring in all this noisy talk. Respect was to her a personal attribute, which revealed itself daily in the commonplace round of homely things. She was not in the least concerned as to its chance of safe keeping in her possession.
“I’ll go to bed,” she said. “It isn’t very profitable to stay here wrangling at this hour of night. And to-morrow I will go home. I want to get away. I am weary of everything.”
“This is your home,” he said sharply. Prudence looked at him strangely.
“This has never been home to me,” she replied. “It is your home. It is more your mother’s home than mine. I have not even authority to order the meals, or direct the household.”
“That’s your own fault,” he returned curtly. “You evinced no interest in these matters.”
“Largely, it is my own fault,” she agreed, with surprising meekness. “I am responsible for the arrangement of my life, and I have done it very badly.”
She was perilously near to weeping. She felt that if she did not escape immediately she would break down in front of him, and that was the last thing she desired to happen. But he would not let her go at once. He detained her while he put further questions to her relative to Steele. Had she made any arrangement to meet him again? That was a suspicion which had jerked itself into his mind and would not be dislodged. He was jealous of the man. It was jealousy which had lashed him to his mood of unreasonable anger; it was jealousy which prompted him to ask this question of her, though in his heart he did not believe her capable of that.
“What do you take me for?” she demanded fiercely, and shook off his detaining hand as if it stung her. “I am going away in order to avoid meeting him. Oh! let me go. I can’t stand any more to-night. If you had been wise you would have kept silent and let me bury this thing in the most secret place of my heart. There are things one ought not to speak of.”
“I have a right to your full confidence,” he said.
“Ah!” she cried, and brushed a tear away. “If you only knew how much you lose in insisting on your rights!”
With which she left him to his reflections, and went quickly from the room.
Chapter Thirty Six.
It was strange that in this bitter crisis of her life the old home, from which she had longed so impatiently to escape in the days of her impulsive girlhood, should seem to Prudence a refuge from the distresses which now overwhelmed her. She wanted to return to her childhood’s home, to her father, to the bedroom with its window facing south and the roses lifting their heads to the sunlight below the sill. These familiar pleasant things in their quiet beauty appealed to her irresistibly. There was a suggestion of peace in the homely picture, of escape from misunderstanding and worry and the near danger of a presence which she feared to face.
Edward Morgan raised no objection to her going. Relations between himself and his wife were so strained since his unusual outburst of passion that he was relieved to be spared the awkwardness of daily intercourse for a time. A brief separation might more readily effect a reconciliation between them than the present hostile conditions of life together promised. His attitude of cold courtesy towards her, her silent aloofness, threatened to widen the distances irrevocably; and Mr Morgan had no desire for an open breach. It was his intention to patch up the quarrel. Prudence had not arrived at this stage. Her thought was solely for the present. She realised the urgent need to get away, to escape from Morningside, and from her husband and this life which had grown so painful to her.
The return to her old home stuck in her memory by reason of the sense of change here as elsewhere. The influence of the times had its grip on Wortheton, on Court Heatherleigh and its inmates. William, whose manner was oddly unwelcoming towards his sister, was much occupied at the works, and troubled with labour discontent, and the threatened invasion of the Trades Union. Some of his workpeople had struck for increased wages. The increase had been granted after considerable delay; but the strikers had been compelled to apologise before they were allowed to resume their places. That was the beginning of the end of William’s autocracy. Higher wages were given elsewhere, and the workpeople spoke sullenly among themselves of going in quest of better pay and fairer treatment. The Wortheton factories were fated to come into line with the rest.
At Court Heatherleigh the family had decreased in numbers, the younger Miss Graynor being absent on war work. And Agatha had developed the knitting habit, and was never to be seen without a ball of wool and needles in her hands. Even during meals she occupied herself with knitting between the courses. The irreproachable butler was somewhere in France behind the lines, and his place had not been filled; the eminently respectable, severe-looking parlourmaid carried on unaided for the present. Eventually the war engulfed her also; and she drifted from Wortheton to a munition factory with the settled purpose of bringing the war to a close.
Prudence observed these changes with wonderment. Somehow she had not supposed that a war even could alter the course of life in Wortheton—that lichenous spot, which seemed to have detached itself from the general progress and fallen into contented slumber for all time. But the booming of the guns had effectually disturbed its repose. The booming of those guns in France penetrated everywhere and found their echo in every heart.
Old Mr Graynor alone stood apart from these things. He was too old and feeble to feel a great interest in anything beyond the personal aspect of the great upheaval. He was concerned at his daughters leaving home, and was anxious for Bobby’s safety; but the war between the nations, which he was fated never to see ended, was too amazing and too vast to hold his attention. The discussions in the home circle provided all the information he gleaned of the progress of events.
He was glad of Prudence’s company. She, as well as himself, stood outside the general activity, and conveyed by her presence something of the atmosphere of the past. He accepted her reappearance in the home without question. He was growing forgetful and, save when Edward Morgan’s name was mentioned, did not appear to remember his existence. The changes which had taken the others away had brought Prudence home; that was how he saw things; and he liked to have her there.
“I’m getting old, Prue,” he told her. “I’ve taken to falling asleep in my chair, and my memory plays me tricks. It is good to have you back. They are all so busy; the old man gets overlooked and forgotten. You’ll stay with me?”
“Yes,” Prudence answered, responding to the wistful tone in his shaky voice; “as long as you want me.”
He was the only person in all the world, she reflected, who really had need of her. His dependence on her comforted her greatly. They were both of them lonely souls, whom the rush of events left stranded beyond reach of the changing tides.
It was early spring, and the depression of those first months of war brooded like a dark cloud over everything. The garden, which in former years had blazed with bloom, seemed to have taken on an air of mourning with the rest. Only a solitary bulb here and there, left in the soil from a past season, lifted its defiant head among the empty borders. The Court was short-handed; and Agatha had deemed it unfitting to waste time and money over the planting of unnecessary flowers. But below Prudence’s window the gloire de Dijon roses were opening slowly, bringing their golden promise of warmer days to come.
In the evenings, when her father had retired early as his custom was of late, Prudence would stand at her old place and lean upon the sill and look out over the shadowy stillness upon the white riband of road beyond the walls. And her thoughts would travel back to the days when she had leaned there as a girl and watched a man go striding down the hill, whistling as he walked. She had dreamed of love in those days, and of romance: but these things too had passed her by and gone down the road of life, following the man’s destiny out of her sight. When one has voluntarily accepted the lesser gift it is vain to hunger after what might have been. There are two philosophies in life, and they both lead to definite points, and each has its followers: the one is to accept one’s lot, whatever it may be, and bear it courageously; the other is to cast off responsibility and take what offers agreeably as the opportunity presents itself. The individual can resolve for himself alone which is the better course. Temptation assails people differently. The prudent nature is not necessarily always the higher; but discretion is a wise virtue, and restraint is a proof of strength.
Not until the night of her unexpected meeting with Steele had Prudence’s fortitude been really tried. She had felt it to be unequal to battle, and had not stayed to test its strength. Safety for her lay in flight. Yet had she paused to reflect she might have realised that by her flight she betrayed her weakness to the man who had avowed in passionate terms his determination to meet and have speech with her again.
Prudence had sought only to avoid a further meeting; but while she stood at her window a few nights after her return to Court Heatherleigh a sudden conviction seized her that Steele would make inquiries, would discover her movements, might even follow her. He had been in earnest when he had said: “We’ve got to meet and talk this matter out... It’s not going to end like this. Now that I know you love me nothing else counts.”
Nothing else counts! ... So many things counted; so many conflicting interests stood between her and this reckless reasoning. It was not in his right, nor in hers, to set aside every consideration that baulked his desire.
Prudence rested her elbows on the sill and sunk her chin in her hands and remained still, lost in thought. It was late. The big clock in the hall had chimed the hour of midnight; but still she lingered there—lingered in the windy moonlight, which the dark clouds, hurrying athwart the sky, intermittently obscured. A fever of pain and unrest fired her blood, and sent the warm colour to her cheeks where it burned, two brilliant spots of crimson, that defied the cooling breath of the wind. A sense of something impending held her breathless. All that day she had felt an influence at work, an intangible something which oppressed and oddly disquieted her; the prescience of some unexpected event armed her against surprise. She stood at the window as one who watches and waits for the event to befall. She did not know what she expected, what she waited for in the silent room, that room in which she had lived through so many emotions, none more disturbing than those which swayed her now. She felt that something was about to happen. The suggestion of a presence near her was so real that she could not rest. She had no thought of going to bed. Something in the night called to her imperatively and kept her at her post.
Suddenly while she leaned there her attention was caught by a sound below her window, a sound which brought with it a rush of memories which were a part of the past. Some one moved swiftly out from the shadows of the bushes and stood under her window and called to her softly by name. The quiet authority of that voice set her pulses beating rapidly, till the thudding of her heart sounded loudly in her ears. For a long moment she remained motionless, looking down through the shadowy moonlight upon a man’s upturned face, a strong determined face with purposeful eyes raised to meet her shrinking gaze.
Prudence half drew back, and put a hand over her breast with a quick involuntary movement; at the same moment the man below drew himself a foot or so nearer to her by grasping at the trellis against which the rose-bush was trained.
“If you don’t come down, I will come up to you,” Steele said.
“Oh! wait,” she cried.
She remained for awhile irresolute; then, as if in answer to an impatient movement from below, she said quietly:
“Please be cautious. I will join you in a minute.”
And the next moment the light of the moon was eclipsed and the stars paled to insignificance—or so it seemed to Steele—as her form vanished from above him, and he was alone in the windy darkness with the clouds trailing drearily across the face of the moon.
Chapter Thirty Seven.
Prudence slipped a cloak over her evening dress and softly unlatched her bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing. There was no show of hesitation in her movements now. She was doing an unwise thing; she realised that perfectly; but something outside her volition urged her on to the course she was taking. She wanted to see Philip Steele, to talk with him once more—for the last time—talk with him uninterruptedly with no fear of being seen or overheard, with the certainty of being alone together, unsuspected, and with no explanations to be demanded by any one concerning their doings. The freedom of the thought was like a breath of fresh air in her lungs.
But there was need for caution too. She stood still for a second or so on the landing, and listened with rapidly beating heart to the sounds which disturbed the silence of the sleeping house. Every one had gone to bed hours before; the lights were all extinguished; but the moonlight shone at intervals brightly through the big windows, and illumined the staircase and the hall below.
Prudence grasped the bannister and began the descent. Carefully though she trod, the stairs creaked ominously as they never seemed to creak in the daylight. And the great clock in the hall swung its heavy pendulum noisily backwards and forwards. The familiar sound struck unfamiliarly on her excited fancy; it seemed to her that the old clock was ticking a warning, that it sought to rouse the house. Stealthily she crossed the hall towards the drawing-room; the windows were easier to unfasten than the barred and chained front door. To reach the drawing-room it was necessary to pass the library; in doing so a sound from within the room caught her attention, causing her heart to momentarily stop its beating. Some one was moving about, treading with heavy cautiousness over the carpet. She took a hurried run, heedless, in her fear of being discovered there, whether her footsteps were audible or not, and gaining the drawing-room door, slipped inside the room, and remained still, watchful and alert.
The figure of a man emerged from the library, hesitated, and then approached the hat-rack in the hall. Prudence watched the man while he divested himself of his cap and overcoat and shoes before going quietly upstairs, shoes in hand, to his room. She stood amazed and surveyed these doings through the narrow opening of the partially closed door. Intuition assured her that these mysterious proceedings were not connected in any way with herself. Whatever it was that had taken William abroad it could have no association with her concerns. William had shown as furtively anxious a desire to avoid detection as she had; he wore the air of a person engaged in nefarious practices. The hall was not sufficiently light to reveal the expression of worried annoyance on his face; she recognised only the familiar outline of his form, and noted the secretiveness of his movements, and the care with which, in his stockinged feet, he had crept upstairs.
Abruptly some words of Bobby’s, uttered half jestingly years ago, recurred in an illuminating flash across her mind: “You are taking it too much for granted that the old boy’s life is lived on the surface.” Perhaps after all William had a life apart from the factory and the home, a life which he did not choose to reveal before the world. It was strangely disconcerting to discover a person whom one had believed hitherto to have walked always circumspectly through life, stealing furtively about the house in the middle of the night like a burglar in search of plunder.
In the surprise of this amazing development in the night’s proceedings, Prudence lost sight of her own fears and became wonderfully clear-headed and reliant. The responsibility of her present action weighed less heavily with her. She unfastened the window quietly, and without haste, and stepped out on to the gravelled path. Immediately Steele was beside her. It seemed to her little short of miraculous that William should be abroad and have failed to discover his presence. Steele, as a matter of fact, was alive to William’s nocturnal prowling, and had concealed himself from sight among the shrubs. He came forward now quickly and with caution, took Prudence’s hand, and led her from the garden.
“Some one’s about,” he said.
“William,” she whispered back. “We only missed coming face to face in the hall by the fraction of a second.”
“I know.” He gripped her hand tightly. “When I saw him pass round the corner of the house I made sure you’d run into him. What’s he doing, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He was so anxious to avoid detection that it was easy to evade him.” She laughed nervously. “I wonder what would have happened if I had run into him?”
They passed through the gate side by side and came out on the moonlit road. Steele drew his companion into the shadow of the wall and caught her in his arms and kissed her.
“Oh, Prudence!” he said, and held her, scrutinising the shadowy outline of her face, with the dear eyes, misty and starlike, gazing sadly back into his.
She made a feeble effort to extricate herself from his embrace.
“I don’t think we ought,” she said, and found herself suddenly crying, with her face pressed against his shoulder.
It was altogether wrong. She knew quite well that she ought not to be there alone with him in the night. She had not allowed for his following her to Wortheton. The shock of seeing him again unnerved her. Steele soothed her and kissed the tears away. Then he started to walk again, keeping his arm about her.
“We can’t talk here,” he said. “I’ve a lot of things to say to you. We’ll cut across the fields and sit on that jolly stile where I discovered you picking primroses—was it really seven years ago? Seven years! My God! Prudence, what a fool I was to believe you would wait for me till that time.”
“I didn’t know...” she faltered.
“Never mind,” he said quickly. “We won’t speak of it. We’ll wipe the years out. You are here—with me. The other is just a dream. It was yesterday that we picked primroses together, and spent the morning mooning in the woods. You were so sweet, dear. I just loved you. I so longed to kiss you that day. What a fool I was not to kiss you. I remember so well how the sunlight played on your hair. I watched it, and loved it—and you. Oh, my dear!”
“Don’t!” Prudence urged him. “I can’t bear it. And I ought not to listen. You mustn’t say these things to me—now.”
“But I must,” he said. And added: “Now! Why not now? It’s my time. As though it matters—anything. I’m not going to consider anything but just my need of you. You are mine, by every right under the sun.”
“No,” she protested. “No! I can’t let you say these things. I ought not to have come out with you. Don’t make me regret coming.”
He was silent for a while after that; and she heard him breathing in hard deep breaths as he walked close by her side. Many emotions stirred him; passion and desire and resentment strove furiously within him, making speech difficult, and defeating his effort after control. The sense of loss, of defeat, weighed bitterly with him. He wanted her so, wanted her with an intensity that resembled hunger—wanted her urgently, savagely, with a crude, primitive, human want that was for setting aside every consideration, every civilised law and code; that was for taking the law into his own hands and making her see eye to eye with himself. And she would not see things as he wished her to. She was difficult. She was altogether too civilised.
He turned to her abruptly, and snapped the silence sharply by hurling an unexpected question at her.
“Why did you come out?” he asked. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, and drew a little away from him. “I think I wanted to talk to you just once more before—we parted.”
“Oh!” he said, with a short laugh. “So that was it? If that was your only reason you shouldn’t have come. I’m not intending to part—like that anyhow. I wanted to talk to you on quite another subject. You were stolen from me. I’m for stealing you back. I haven’t any scruples—of that kind Mine was the greater injury. I love you. You love me. You can’t deny that, Prudence.”
Prudence made no attempt to deny it. She faced him fully in the moonlight with her steady eyes lifted to his in saddened appeal. He realised the quiet strength of her nature with a sense of impotent anger in feeling it opposed to his will. There was going to be a fight in any case and the issue appeared uncertain.
“Whether we love one another or not,” she said, “we have to bear in mind that I am married.”
She was indeed more conscious of the fact at the moment than of any other. She felt the necessity of impressing it upon him. But Steele needed no reminding. The rage in his heart leapt up at her words like a flame fed by some combustible fluid. He seized her roughly in his arms and rained hot kisses upon her mouth.
“But you don’t love him?” he breathed. “You don’t love him?” He stared at her as she pushed his face back, and laughed harshly. “God! Do you suppose I’m not bearing it in mind?—every moment since I learned the truth from your lips? It’s like murder in my heart, that knowledge. I’d like to kill him. I could have struck him in the face that night when he came in and found us together, and took you away. And he knows... He knows that only the legal tie binds you to him. I saw the knowledge in his eyes. He doesn’t trust you. If he knew that you were out here, walking with me in the night, he would believe the worst. He’s that type of man. Nothing you could say would convince him otherwise. They are made like that, those narrow, strictly conventional people. They daren’t trust their own emotions; they never allow them full play. And they don’t trust any one else. They judge others by their own feeble standards. They aren’t human—it’s sawdust, not blood, in their veins.”
He helped her over the first stile and led her along the field-path and so on to the next gate. Prudence was rather silent and worried and somewhat dispirited. She left him to do the talking, and walked on like a woman only half awake, to whom everything appears hazy and a little unreal. And he unfolded his views to her on life, and love, and happiness, and the right of the individual to independent action.
“It’s not as though this business of marriage were a natural institution,” he argued; “it’s purely artificial. When a man and a woman are honestly in love they don’t bother with that aspect of the relationship. They just want one another. Marriage is merely a result attendant on the natural impulse. I came home with the idea of marrying you, and I find you no longer free. That fact maddens me; its fills me with despair. But it doesn’t alter the initial fact that I want you. That desire is no less keen than before I heard of your marriage. Prudence, dearest, be true to yourself. You love me. Come with me—now. I came down here for that purpose—to take you away with me.”
He pulled her down on the stile beside him and put his arm about her and held her close to him. She did not repulse him. She felt strangely little angry at what he said. She was too greatly moved to experience the lesser emotions which a sense of outraged virtue might have called forth at another time. She had hurt this man badly; and she felt too sorry for him to resent in indignant terms the proposal which he made. He wanted her, wanted her urgently; and they loved one another. Why had she allowed the years to separate them so irrevocably?
“You don’t answer,” he said, and brought his face nearer to here and looked her in the eyes. “You don’t answer me.”
His voice shook with hardly repressed passion; his whole form shook. She felt the shoulder which pressed against her shoulder tremble, and the hand which gripped hers trembled also, and was burning to the touch.
“You don’t answer,” he said again hoarsely.
“My dear,” she said, “what is there to say?” And broke down again and wept.
Chapter Thirty Eight.
There was a great deal which she might have said, Steele thought, as he held her sobbing in his arms, and tried to convince her that happiness for both of them lay in following the path along which he sought to direct her steps. He wanted her so; and they loved one another—two all-sufficient reasons, as he saw matters, for throwing such deterrent considerations as honour and duty to the winds. They owed a duty to themselves as well as to others, he argued; and a loveless marriage was dishonouring. She ought not to submit to the spoiling of both their lives from motives of no higher consideration than fear of the world’s censure.
“What does it matter to us what any one thinks?” he asked. “This ruling of one’s life by the world’s opinion is ridiculous. Here we are, you and I, in love with one another, wanting one another. Life is very sweet and precious while one loves. Prudence, but it isn’t worth more than a sigh when one is denied love. I want to make you mine before I leave for France. We’ll have our time together. Then, when I come back, I will take you with me—to a new country where no one knows anything about us. Dear, we shall be so happy.”
“You may never come back,” Prudence said, and sat up and started to dry her tears. “What would become of me then?”
“I may not, of course.” He stared at her with his hot eager eyes, careless in that hour of passionate longing about the consequences involved. He knew that for himself there was only one certainty—the present. He lived in the present; it was useless to look ahead. “Aren’t you ready to risk something? I’d rather leave you my widow than not have you,” he declared. “I can’t go away feeling that you belong to some one else. Prudence, I’m mad with jealousy. I’m jealous of that man’s claim on you. I’m beside myself. I don’t know what I’m saying. I know only one thing—I want you. I’m just hungry for you. I can’t rest.”
“Oh, hush!” she said.
“But you’ve got to hear,” he insisted. “You’ve got to know. I’ve been like this since you told me your news. I lie awake at nights, thinking, thinking, till it seems as if I were going mad. I think of you always. I’m wanting you always. For years I’ve thought of you as mine. I meant from the beginning to win you. Life’s just a nightmare for me while I know you belong to some one else. You made a mistake. Set it right, dear—as far as you can. Give yourself to me. Say you will—now.”
He seized her again in his arms and held her and set his lips to hers. Frightened as well as distressed. Prudence struggled against him, pushed his face gently away. She felt the quick beating of his heart against her breast while he held her close, and she knew that her own heart was beating as rapidly; the pulses in her throat were going like tiny hammers. The ardour of his kisses excited her. All the natural impulses of youth, repressed so long, leapt up to answer his passion and flamed into warmth beneath his touch. He stirred her, tempted her. She had never experienced passionate love before, but she knew it now; it burned her lips and set her blood on fire. She was a woman alight with love for the first time in her life. Her eyes glowed softly, and behind their glow, dried up as it were by that flame of love, the mist of sorrow’s unshed rain welled slowly and dimmed her sight of him.
“You can’t refuse me,” he pleaded. “My darling, you can’t send me out of your life.”
“Oh, don’t!” she sobbed, and clung to the gate, half swooning, and rested her face on her arm. “You’ve no right to say these things to me; it’s wicked of me to listen. I ought not to have come out. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say to you. It’s all so difficult.”
He refused to admit the difficulty.
“If you had an ounce of pluck,” he said—“if you cared, you would know what to do all right. I am asking you for one thing; it’s yes or no. Prudence.”
He gripped her shoulder and pulled her forcibly round till she faced him again.
“Look here!” he cried hoarsely. “Listen to me for a moment. This may be the last time I shall see you—it will be the last time, if you refuse what I ask. If I didn’t know that you love me I wouldn’t worry you. I shouldn’t want you if you did not want me. But you do. I don’t care a damn about your marriage. If you’ll trust me, and come to me, you shall never regret it. Oh! my little love!—my sweetheart! Don’t refuse what I ask. It means everything to me. Say you will, dear?”
“Oh, don’t!” she entreated him again, and shrank back from the passion in his eyes.
But his arms were about her; they held her tightly.
“Are you afraid?” he said, his face grim and set. “I’m dangerous to you to-night, and you know it. Here we are alone in the night together. What is to prevent me from taking what I want? Why should I consider your scruples—or anything? I am going out to that inferno... Why shouldn’t I seize my good hour before I go? What’s to prevent me? What’s to prevent me from kissing you now?”
He leaned over her and rained kisses on her mouth, kisses that seared her lips, that almost stifled her. He was giving rein to his passion. A quality both wild and lawless sprang to life in him and overrode his better nature for the time. Disappointed hope and baulked desire drove him to a frenzy of excess which in saner moments he would not have believed himself capable of. He would have been horrified at this complete loss of control had he been able to appreciate it. But a spirit of recklessness held him before which his commonsense melted like snow consumed by the fires which passion lit in his breast. It occurred to him while he held her, crushed and trembling, in his arms and kissed her madly, that he was a fool to attempt to reason with her. A girl nursed in the washy traditions of her class, as Prudence was, should not be hampered with the responsibility of choice: he ought to decide for her—ought to take full responsibility for the step he was urging her to accede to. It wasn’t fair to burden her conscience with a sense of willing concession. That was where he had made the mistake. He was asking too much of her.
“Little love,” he whispered against her lips, “don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear in love; and I love you better than life. You are going with me to-night. No, don’t speak! You are nervous and unstrung. You don’t know what you want. Leave this to me. I’ve got a car waiting in the village. We’ll travel up to town in it; and later, when I am drafted across the water, you’ll go to France as my wife, and live there until I can be with you again.”
He drew back his head to look at her, and his face softened to a wonderful tenderness; there were tears in his eyes. After a barely perceptible pause, he resumed more quietly:
“Prudence, I’ve thought of this hour day and night since I saw your dear face light up at sight of me, and your dear eyes smile their welcome into mine. You are mine by every natural law; and I’m going to take you. Scruples! We have no use for such folly. They didn’t scruple to marry you to a man too old for you. He had no scruple against taking you without love. They’ve themselves to thank for this. What does it matter? It’s our own lives we have to think for. Leave everything to me. Don’t worry. I’ll manage things. I am taking you away with me to-night... Life’s going to be just splendid, dear. We’ll be together. Oh, Prudence, it will be great—wonderful! My dear! ... Oh, my dearest!”
Very tenderly he kissed her lips again. Prudence suddenly disengaged herself from his arms and slipped to her feet and stood facing him, the moonlight splashed on her hair and face, and on the slender bare arms, which she lifted on an impulse, bringing the hands to rest on his shoulders.
“We can’t, dear,” she said. “We can’t. It isn’t that I’m afraid; it isn’t that I don’t love you—better than any one in all the world. It’s just because I love you so well, I think, that I can’t have the beauty of it spoiled. That sort of thing brings regret—always.”
“You don’t dare,” he said in sullen tones. “You are thinking of what people will say.”
“No; it isn’t that. I don’t wish to pose as good—I’ve never been good. But clean and decent living appeals to me. I’m cold, perhaps—even a little hard; it isn’t so difficult for me to practise restraint—when I try—hard. I’m loving you with all my heart, dear; but I don’t want to do what you ask. If I agreed, I should hate myself, my life, everything, when the glamour faded and I had time to reflect. I know myself so well. I would rather go on with my dull loveless life than go away with you and lose my self-respect.”
“You don’t love me,” he said. “You couldn’t talk like that if you were in love. It’s unnatural. I’d risk damnation for you.”
She leaned a little nearer to him, and a new quality came into her voice; her face was solemn and tender.
“There’s something else I’m thinking of besides these things,” she said. “I can’t bear that you should go to face death—to meet death, perhaps—with this sin upon your soul. I don’t like to think that men can talk so lightly of sinning in such grave and terrible times.”
He made an impatient sound that was like a cry of protest, and moved restlessly under her hands.
“Oh, hang it all! One doesn’t want to be thinking all the time about that.”
“When death stands so close as it stands to nearly every one of us these days; when one reads of nothing else,” she added quietly; “it makes one think. It alters all one’s view of life. I used to feel that my own life mattered tremendously; that I had to make the most of every opportunity which might add to my enjoyment. Now I see things differently. I don’t hold a lesser belief in the importance of life, quite the reverse; but the personal point of view is altogether unimportant. Satisfaction comes from living worthily. I have never done that. I have been always selfish and inconsiderate for others. I believe that to-night you have taught me self-knowledge. Teach me also to be strong.”
Her voice fell into silence, but she did not remove her hands from his shoulders. And he remained for a few seconds motionless, looking at her without speaking. The appeal in her eyes and in her voice was irresistible; it was as an appeal to his manhood from some one pathetically weak and conscious of her weakness; and the better side of his nature responded to it. But it cost him more than she could ever know to relinquish his dreams at her bidding.
He put his hands over hers and stood up. And so they remained for a while close together, looking into each other’s eyes.
“You are everything to me,” he said at last, breaking the silence unexpectedly. “I’ve thought of you so much—thought of you always as belonging to me. It doesn’t seem possible to rid myself of that idea. I’ve no interest in life outside it.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. It is not going to be easy for me either.”
They came upon another pause.
“At least you have a cause to fight for,” she said presently.
He shook his head.
“All that doesn’t count, somehow. But I shall be glad to go now. I shall never come back. Prudence.”
“Ah, don’t!” she cried, with a sob in her voice. “Don’t say that. I shall pray for your safety every day of my life.”
“Pray rather for a swift and merciful bullet,” he said. Then, seeing the pain in her eyes, he took her face between his hands and kissed it. “Don’t cry, little love. There are worse things to face than the long sleep. Alive or dead, you will live in my heart always. Keep my place green in your memory, dear.”
She dropped her face on his breast and sobbed her heart out in the shelter of his arms.
Chapter Thirty Nine.
More credit is given to heroism which arises from physical courage than is accorded usually to moral bravery. Yet the standard of physical courage, however loudly acclaimed, ranks no higher. To win a victory over one’s self demands greater strength of purpose than is required for the defeat of an ordinary foe. To obey a sense of right from motives other than discretion necessitates courage of a superior order. And it is through this courage, this quiet self-denial, that the world is kept a little better, a little sweeter, than would be possible if each individual set-out with the poor determination to gratify his every desire.
Prudence had won a victory; but she did not feel triumphant; there was no conscious elation in her heart. If the night air struck fresher and purer by reason of this restraint, it also struck very chill. Its cold breath enveloped her. She was weary and sad at heart.
Steele, too, was silent and dispirited. He parted from her in the road outside the gate, parted in almost apathetic calmness, and turned and walked quickly away down the hill. He did not once look back to where Prudence waited at the gate and watched him with sad eyes, tearless now, until the night enfolded him and hid him from her view. Then she let herself into the house and went wearily up to bed.
That was the beginning and the end of her romance. All the fine thinking in the world could not reduce the feeling of irreparable loss which she experienced in the knowledge that he had passed out of her life for ever. She had sent him away; and all her happiness went with him, all her love. If for a moment she regretted the triumph of virtue, it was but a transitory regret; but she did regret, passionately, that life had come between her and the realisation of love. She believed that she could never feel happy any more. She also believed that she could not return to her husband. The thought of living again beneath his roof was hateful to her.
Then merciful sleep overtook her, and the darkness closed down upon the misery of her thoughts.
The morning brought no relief. Heavy-eyed and languid, Prudence went downstairs, to find that she was late for prayers. She was aware of William’s gaze, as she slipped quietly into the room and took her seat, fixed upon her with a curious, it seemed to her, even a suspicious scrutiny. He paused in the reading and waited with a sort of aggressive patience until she was seated. Then he continued in his sonorous voice reading the lesson for the day.
Upon the finish of prayers breakfast followed, after which Mr Graynor repaired to the library with Prudence who since her return read the papers to him because of his failing sight. William prepared to start out on the day’s business. From the library Prudence could hear him calling loudly for his boots, and demanding of the servant who brought them why they were not in their accustomed place. It transpired that he had omitted to put them outside his bedroom door on the previous night and thereby caused delay in the cleaning of them. He muttered something in response, and hastily proceeded to draw them on.
The servant meanwhile went to the front door in answer to an imperative ring. Commotion followed upon the opening of the door. Mr Graynor looked round at these unexpected interruptions and signed to Prudence to cease reading. She sat with the newspaper open in her hands and listened to the sound of angry voices without.
Some one had entered and was talking loudly and defiantly to William in the hall. William was doing his utmost to eject the intruder and to talk her down at the same time—two impossible feats. The noise of their voices raised in fierce altercation drew nearer; and, attracted by the disturbance, Agatha made her appearance from the morning-room and stood, pink and trembling with indignation, looking upon the scene in incredulous amazement.
“What is that—creature doing here?” she asked of her brother.
He seemed to find some difficulty in answering her, and, evading her eyes, glared furiously at the defiant young woman, who, holding a child by the hand, maintained her stand with an air of assurance which refused to be cowed by his lowering scowl.
“You tell ’er what I want,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
“Go away,” he shouted. “Do you hear? Go away!”
“It isn’t difficult to ’ear you,” she retorted sharply. “I want a word with you, William Graynor; and I’m not going away until I’ve ’ad it.”
“Turn her out,” Miss Agatha exclaimed, shocked and affronted. “How dare she speak to you like that?”
“Why don’t you tell ’er,” the insolent voice insisted, “what I’ve come for, and why I speak as I do? Seems as if you was afraid of ’er.”
She looked round suddenly, and caught sight of Mr Graynor, standing with the library door open, surveying the scene. She shrank back, quailing before the cold anger of his look. But he had recognised her, and spoke now in a voice of sharp command.
“Come in here, girl,” he said; and to his son he added fiercely: “William, bring that woman inside, and shut the door.”
From force of habit, perhaps too because he recognised that there was no possible chance of evading explanations, William obeyed the order. He allowed Bessie Clapp to precede him, and following her into the room, shut the door sharply behind him, and stood with his back against it in an attitude of gloomy anger. Once he looked at Prudence, seated opposite their father with the newspaper in her lap, regarding the woman and child with pitiful understanding eyes. He would have liked to suggest the advisability of her retiring; but his natural effrontery had deserted him, and he remained silent.
Bessie Clapp also looked at Prudence. The sight of the quiet figure, the light of friendly interest in the blue eyes, proved heartening: the hardness melted from her own face. Standing a few steps inside the door against which William leaned, superb in her magnificent beauty, with the child clinging nervously to her hand, she confronted Mr Graynor, who, reseating himself, remained staring at her fixedly across the writing-table upon which he rested his shaking hand.
The stillness of their various poses, for with the closing of the door each had maintained a rigid immovability, was fraught with significance. There was no need for a verbal explanation of the presence of the woman with her child in that house. Mr Graynor knew, Prudence knew, as surely as William and the girl, what brought her there. Nevertheless Mr Graynor, leaning heavily upon the table, with his cold eyes upon the girl’s frightened face, demanded the reason of her noisy intrusion.
“I told her not to come,” William interposed sullenly. “I dared her to come here annoying you.”
Mr Graynor silenced him with a gesture, never once removing his gaze from the nervous, but still defiant, face. His question had been addressed to the girl, and he waited for her to answer him. She drew the child closer to her, and looked into the cold unsympathetic face of her questioner, and answered with a sort of sulky shame:
“I’ve brought William Graynor’s son ’ome.”
William made a move, taking a quick step towards her as though he would have silenced her with force; but no one looked in his direction; and he shrank back to his former position by the door.
“You make a serious charge,” Mr Graynor said, speaking harshly. “It will go hard with you if you cannot prove your words.”
“I can prove them all right,” she answered sulkily.
“I do not believe you,” Mr Graynor said. “This sort of thing has been tried often enough. It is an audacious lie. I say it is a lie. Give me your proof.”
Bessie Clapp smiled faintly. Her manner was growing more assured; the nervousness which the unexpected sight of him had caused her, was less apparent now.
“You can’t ’ave looked at the boy,” she said, and bent down and removed the cap from the child’s head and turned his face towards the man who questioned the truth of her statement.
Mr Graynor had given only a cursory glance at the child; he looked now more closely, and, staring with dim eyes fierce with passionate anger into the small face, beheld as in the days of his own youth the features of his elder son faithfully reproduced. There could be no dispute as to the likeness. A sickening sense of the truth of the woman’s claim, which before he had not so much doubted as refused to admit, held him dumb. He put his hand before his eyes to shut out the sight of the child’s face; and the little fellow, thoroughly frightened now, began to whimper. His mother held him and hushed his cries.
“You see,” she said, watching Mr Graynor curiously, fascinated and somewhat awed by his evident emotion; “that’s my proof. One ’as only to look at ’im to see who’s ’is father.”
A groan escaped Mr Graynor’s lips. He took his hand from before his eyes, and pushed aside some papers on the table, and rested his arms on it as before.
“How dare you bring him here?” he asked in low shaking tones. “Why do you bring him—now—after all this time? You want money, I suppose?”
Bessie Clapp turned a resentful gaze from him to William, who, furtively watching her, remained with his shoulders hunched dejectedly, scowling malevolently at her, and at the child whose claim upon him she sought to establish.
“’E knows why I came,” she said, indicating William with a brief nod. “I gave ’im ’is chance; but ’e wouldn’t ’elp me. I asked ’im to take the child off my ’ands, and ’e refused. ’E thought the work’ouse good enough for ’is son. But the work’ouse don’t ’elp these cases; and anyway I wouldn’t care for ’im to go there. And I can’t keep ’im no longer I’m going to be married. My man’s joined up, and I’ll draw the separation allowance. But ’e don’t want ’is child.”
Again she gave a nod indicating William, and then brought her gaze back to Mr Graynor’s face. The sight of the pained humiliation of his look caused a softening in her voice and manner. She had not wanted to distress him; she was not vindictive. She only required that the father of her child should make provision for it. He was wealthy enough to do so.
“I am sorry to ’ave ’ad to come,” she said. “I didn’t mean no ’arm. If ’e ’adn’t treated me mean, I wouldn’t ’a come. But I’ve got a chance now to start fair. I want to place the child somewheres. Plenty would take ’im if I could get the money guaranteed. But ’e,” with another nod at William, “won’t do nothing. That’s why I came. I warned ’im all right.”
The red of William’s face deepened to purple. He looked at the woman as if he would have killed her had he dared; but he did not move, did not utter a word even in his own defence. His animus against this girl, who had been his mistress, arose from the fact that she had broken with him. Had the initiative been his he might have acted differently. He hated her while he listened to her scornful denunciation of himself, and the sordid story of his meanness which she mercilessly unfolded. Not a word of what she uttered but had the ring of truth in it, and not a word in the miserable recital reflected any credit upon himself. He shifted his feet uneasily, and turned his furtive eyes from the spectacle of her standing there in her dark and tragic beauty, with the boy clinging timidly to her skirt, hiding his tear-stained face in her dress in fear of the old man who sat and glared at him and spoke to his mother in harsh angry tones. They frightened him, these strange people. He wanted to go away from the big house, and this fierce old man, and the red-faced man, whom he knew slightly but did not like. The red-faced man so often made his mother cry. But the mother took no heed of the small hands tugging at her dress; her thoughts were intent on other matters than the child’s distress.
Mr Graynor, his face transformed with anger, turned to his son, and, in a voice broken with emotion, with shame for that son’s dishonourable conduct and most despicable meanness, bade him speak.
“You stand there and say nothing to these charges,” he cried. “Why don’t you speak? Have you nothing to say in answer to what this woman alleges?”
“What is there to say?” William returned. “No doubt the child is mine. But I don’t flatter myself that I have been more favoured than others. She is a loose woman; and she is lucky enough to have forced a claim on me.”
“You lie, William Graynor,” she said fiercely. “And you know that you lie. From the time you pursued me, when I worked in the factory, a girl of sixteen, to the moment when I met the man I am going to marry, I never looked at another man. You are a mean liar, that’s what you are.”
Mr Graynor, ignoring the speaker and still looking towards his son, struck the table violently with his hand in an access of indignant anger.
“You admit the paternity of this child, and, instead of sharing the responsibility, meanly try to shift it, and impugn the morality of a woman whose immorality you brought about! How dare you utter these things in my hearing?”
“I’ve paid her,” William excused himself, and fingered his collar nervously as though it were too tight. “I kept her so long as—” He broke off abruptly; and added in a savage voice: “She’s had money enough from me.”
“I’m not complaining of what’s past,” the girl interposed. “If you ’adn’t stopped the payments I shouldn’t be ’ere now. I can’t afford to keep the child. ’E’s as much yours as mine.”
“There,” Prudence broke in to the general astonishment, for she had remained so quiet until now that they had almost forgotten her presence, “you are mistaken. The law protects the man in these cases.”
“Then the law’s rotten bad,” said Bessie Clapp bitterly.
Whether the sudden recollection of his daughter’s presence decided Mr Graynor to bring the interview to a close, or if he felt unequal to further discussion is uncertain, but at this point he waved the girl to silence, and unlocking a drawer in the table, took out his cheque book and wrote a cheque and tore it out and passed it across the table to her.
“I will see that my son makes suitable provision for the child,” he said quaveringly.
Bessie Clapp took the cheque and stood with it in her hand, looking at him out of her dark, sombre eyes.
“I’m sorry I come,” she said falteringly. “I’m going right away from ’ere. You won’t see me no more.”
Then suddenly Prudence rose. She left her place by the fire, and crossing to where the other girl stood beside the table, she bent over the child and took the little fellow by the hand and drew him to her.
“I am a childless woman,” she said, in a sweet voice full of sympathy, “and I love children. Give him to me.”