Chapter Six.
It detracted somewhat from Prudence’s enjoyment when, having lunched delightfully off viands which would have met with less favour eaten off a plate from an ordinary dining-table, having subsequently strolled about the woods, engaged in botanical and other research, it abruptly occurred to her that it was time to return home. The thought of going home was less pleasant with the prospect so imminent. Picnicking in the woods with a comparative stranger was, she felt now, a sufficiently unusual proceeding to make explanation difficult. Neither Agatha nor her father would view the matter in the light in which she saw it—simply as a pleasant excursion breaking the monotony of dull days. The necessity to account for her absence at all annoyed her.
“The drawback to stolen pleasure,” she announced, regarding the young man with serious eyes in which a shade of anxiety was faintly reflected, “lies in the aftermath of nettles; while not dangerous, they sting.”
“By Jove! yes,” he agreed. “The little matter of going back has been sitting on my mind for the last ten minutes. The thing loses its humour when no longer in the background. I’m really horribly afraid of Miss Graynor.”
“You need not come,” said Prudence generously.
“Oh! I’m not so mean a coward as to back out,” he said. “It’s up to me to see it through with you. After all, the excursion was at my suggestion. And it was worth being stung for by all the nettles that ever grew. Besides, I want my tea.”
“You’ll be lucky if you get it,” she returned.
“Come now!” he urged. “Let us take a charitable view, and decide that they will dispense generous hospitality. Upon my soul, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be charmed to receive us. The Prodigal, you know, got an amazing reception.”
“Yes,” she laughed. “I think possibly we’ll get an amazing reception too. Please, if you don’t mind, I would rather you took that dead flower out of your coat.”
“They would never suspect you of putting it there,” he protested, with a feeling of strong reluctance to do what she proposed.
But Prudence insisted. She knew that when William’s eye fell on that withered memento her guilty conscience would give him the clue to its history.
“In any case,” she added diplomatically, “it adds a look of untidiness.”
And so the primrose never had the opportunity of lifting its head in water. Before discarding it, Steele was seized with the idea of placing it between the leaves in his pocket-book; but after a glance at the pretty, serious face of his companion he decided against this and left the dead flower lying in the bracken at their feet.
“The first brush against the nettles,” he remarked, and smiled at her regretfully. “I’m braced now. That first sting hurt more than any other can.”
The further stings proved embarrassing rather than hurtful. When Steele entered the drawing-room at Court Heatherleigh with Prudence he was made uncomfortably aware of the surprised gaze of five pairs of curious feminine eyes all focussed upon himself, and, advancing under this raking fire, felt his amiable smile of greeting fade before Miss Agatha’s blank stare of cold inquiry; her reluctantly extended hand, its chill response to his clasp, reduced him to a state of abject humility. He found himself stammering an apologetic explanation of his presence.
“I just looked in to say good-bye,” he began awkwardly. “I had the good luck to meet Miss Graynor this morning—”
“I presume you mean that you encountered my sister, Prudence?” Miss Graynor interrupted him frigidly.
He flushed, and felt savage with himself for being betrayed into the weakness.
“I met Miss Prudence—yes, and persuaded her to show me the woods. You have some very beautiful scenery about here; it seemed a pity to miss the best of it, and this was my last opportunity. I made the most of it,” he added with a touch of audacity which Miss Agatha inwardly resented.
“We’ve had a delightful time,” Prudence interposed defiantly, and turned as her father entered the room and forestalled his reproaches with a light kiss on his unresponsive lips. “I’ve been picnicking in the woods, daddy,” she said brightly. “And now we’ve come back—for tea.”
She made this announcement in the tone of a person who does not intend to be denied. Miss Agatha remarked tartly that it was not the hour for tea, and Mr Graynor, ignoring the hospitable suggestion, reproved her for her long absence.
“You caused me considerable anxiety,” he said.
Prudence expressed her contrition. Steele added his apologies, although in his heart he felt there was nothing in the adventure to apologise for.
“I am afraid the fault was mine,” he said. “The suggestion originated with me. I was thoughtless enough to overlook the fact that you might be worried.”
“The thoughtlessness was on my daughter’s side,” Mr Graynor answered. “She is fully aware that her absence from luncheon would cause anxiety. She should have invited you to return with her instead.”
Prudence flashed a surprised smile at him. To have done what he proposed was the last thing she would have dared to do. Had she given the invitation she would have been reproved quite as severely for taking the liberty as for absenting herself without permission. The privilege of independent action involving promiscuous hospitality was vested solely in Agatha and William.
Matters appeared to have reached a deadlock. Steele had nothing to say! Prudence had nothing to say! Miss Agatha had no desire to help the situation by bridging the silence; and Mr Graynor had nothing further to add to his reproof. He seated himself. Since Miss Agatha remained standing Steele had no option but to do the same: he felt increasingly awkward, and wished he had taken advantage of Prudence’s permission and remained out of it.
“Sit down, sit down,” exclaimed Mr Graynor suddenly, with an accession of ill-humour as he became aware of the general strain. “Why is every one standing?”
His intervention scarcely relieved matters. Steele said he thought he must be going, and murmured something about an early start on the morrow; he had merely called to make his adieux. Miss Agatha’s prompt acceptance of this explanation for the brevity of his visit was not flattering; but Mr Graynor, awakening tardily to a sense of the lack of cordiality, protested against his leaving so hurriedly.
“William will be in presently,” he said. “You had better wait and see him. And we’ll have tea. I see no object in deferring tea, Agatha, until a given hour.”
“Prudence,” Agatha commanded, “ring the bell, please.”
Steele attempted to forestall the girl; their hands touched as each reached out to press the button.
“Oh, Lord!” he murmured under his breath, and caught her eye and smiled dryly. “It will require something more efficacious than dock leaves to counteract these nettles.”
She drew back without replying, but her face was charged with meaning, and he detected the hidden laughter in her eyes. It was well for her, he decided, that she could find anything to laugh at in the dismal situation; for himself he would gladly have escaped and sacrificed the tea; a whisky and soda would have suited him better at the moment.
The tea, when it came, caused little unbending, but it provided a legitimate excuse for moving from Miss Agatha’s side, and it gave him an opportunity for a few minutes’ talk with Prudence, a disjointed, embarrassed talk under the close observation of the rest. Steele was conscious of those watchful eyes, of the listening hang in the conversation when he approached the girl. Prudence also was conscious of this silent manifestation of vigilant criticism on the part of her family; but she had reached a stage of recklessness which moved her to openly disregard the condemnation in Agatha’s eyes when Steele, having handed the cake to her, remained beside her for a few minutes, and held her in conversation.
“I have been reconsidering what you said in the wood,” he observed, “about the influence of others in regard to the enjoyment of life. You were entirely right.”
“Given the opportunity, I knew I could prove my case,” she answered with the same amount of caution in her tones as he had used. “But you mustn’t talk to me now, please; I’m in disgrace.”
“So am I,” he replied. “I wonder if you will be looking out of a window to-night?”
“I expect so.”
“I prowl about most nights,” he said, and scrutinised her face intently to observe the effect of his words.
“I know. I’ve seen you.”
“It is regrettable,” he remarked, “that the upper story of a private house is usually inaccessible. Won’t you have another piece of cake? No! Miss Matilda, may I fetch you some tea?”
The maidenly breasts of the four Miss Graynors, who were pale reflections of their eldest sister, were pleasantly stirred by Steele’s punctilious courtesy. They were envious of their young half-sister, whose temerity had led her into the indiscretion of spending an entire morning in the society of a member of the opposite sex. It does not follow that a life which has known no romance is innocent of romantic aspirations. Miss Matilda, spare and prim and slightly grey, experienced a vague sense of loss and of resentment against her single state when she met Steele’s smiling, youthful eyes, and reflected that no man’s glance had ever rested upon herself with that look of pleased interest which she observed in Steele’s face whenever it was turned in Prudence’s direction. Prudence, of course, was pretty and young. Miss Matilda’s girlhood lay behind her, but it had known none of the delights that her virgin heart longed for in the secret chamber which she seldom unlocked even for her own inspection. The emotions that lay concealed there were unbecoming in a modest woman whose function it was to be pious and dutiful in the acceptance of her lot.
It was possibly due to these hidden emotions that Steele found Miss Matilda’s society less depressing than her sister’s, and he clung to it tenaciously until the entrance of brother William assigned him as by right to the position of audience to the ponderous conversation of this man of limited intelligence and no humour. William would have failed to understand that a man, even when young, would rather talk with a woman than be talked to by himself. The manner in which his sisters effaced themselves in his presence was a tribute to, as well as a recognition of, his masculine superiority. It was the want of a proper appreciation on his youngest sister’s part in this respect that so frequently made it necessary for him to assert his dignity before her. He was angry with her now, and he passed her with his face averted, righteous indignation in his frown and in the set of his shoulders. Steele felt that it would be a pleasure to kick him; but when he detected the mischievous wickedness in Prudence’s eyes, William’s dignity became a matter for amusement rather than annoyance; the man was so obviously an ass.
“The weather,” William observed, as he took his tea, waited on by two of his sisters despite Steele’s efforts to relieve them, “shows signs of breaking. The barometer has fallen.”
“The country needs rain,” Miss Agatha remarked in tones of satisfaction.
And for the next few minutes the advantages of a good downpour and the benefit therefrom to the garden as well as to the farmers, was discussed in detail: the watering of the borders, it transpired, fully occupied the gardener’s time each evening as a result of the dry spell.
Bored beyond measure, Steele took an abrupt leave, and declining William’s invitation to take a stroll round the grounds in his company, seized his hat and fled.
“She’ll never stick it,” he reflected, as he banged the gate and hurried away down the road like a man pursued. “She can’t. She’ll do a bunk, one day. I would in her place.”
And Prudence, defenceless in the drawing-room, meeting the brunt of William’s anger, and the reproaches of the others, determined in her rebellious soul that if release did not come in some legitimate form before she was twenty-one, she would on acquiring that age obtain it for herself.
Chapter Seven.
The moonlight fell softly on Prudence’s bright hair, touching the curls lovingly with a wan brilliance that, paling their shining gold, added a purer sheen to replace the beauty stolen by the night. Its light was reflected in the blue depths of her eyes, eyes which took on the misty darkness of the night sky so that the moonbeams felt at home therein and lingered there confidingly. She leaned far out of the window, and the fragrance of some early gloire de Dijon roses was wafted towards her on the night breeze. A scent besides that of the roses stole up to her out of the shadows—the scent of cigarette smoke, too close under her window to suggest that the smoker was beyond the wall that shut off the garden from the road. Prudence had watched the smoker enter the garden; she watched him now throw away his cigarette among the flowers in one of the borders as he advanced, and she heard his voice speaking softly to her out of the gloom.
“Can’t you come down?” he asked.
“Not unless you have come provided with a rope ladder,” she replied as softly.
“By Jove! I never thought of that. But you aren’t locked in?”
“Not in the sense you mean. But locked doors would be trifles compared with the opposition I should encounter if I attempted to join you. I’d love to come out; but it’s impossible.”
“Is there any likelihood of our being overheard?” he asked with caution.
Prudence laughed quietly.
“Every likelihood,” she answered. “I don’t think I mind.”
Steele stood under cover of the wall of the house. There were no lights in the windows on that side; he had observed that on former occasions; the library, where Mr Graynor sat every evening with William, faced the other way.
“Then I’m going to run the risk and stay and talk with you,” he said.
There was a strange intimacy in the situation that appealed to Prudence. The adventure of the morning was as nothing compared with this stolen interview. The insufficient light of the moon, and the distance which divided them, added a touch of romance which she found pleasantly exciting. To gaze down upon his upturned face and the uncertain outline of his form below stirred her imagination; and the necessity for caution, occasioning them to lower their voices to whispers, gave to the utterance of the most trivial speech the flavour of intimate things. She leaned down nearer to him.
“It’s rather like Romeo and Juliet, isn’t it?” she said.
“That ended rottenly,” he replied, and laughed.
“So will this probably. What made you venture inside?”
“Isn’t the reason obvious?” he returned. “I thought I had prepared you for my visit at tea. It wasn’t possible for us to say good-bye like that. I’m sorry I got you into that mess.”
“You didn’t,” Prudence assured him gently. “I knew how it would be. I’m not regretting—anything. Stinging nettles cease to hurt when the rash subsides. William is furious. We don’t speak.”
“That must be rather a relief for you.”
She dimpled suddenly.
“He doesn’t think so. When I apologise I am to be taken into favour again. So, if he keeps to that, it is likely to be many years before we interchange remarks.”
“What an egregious ass he is,” Steele commented. “Never mind that now. We don’t want to discuss him. I came to-night to beg a favour. Will you write to me sometimes? ... and may I write? I don’t want to lose touch altogether.”
“I can’t promise that,” she said, and fingered a rosebud below her window, snapping its stem in nervous preoccupation. “All our letters go into a box at the post office and are sorted before we receive them. They would not allow me to correspond with you.”
“Could we not arrange a little deception,” he suggested, “by means of which you could collect your own letters from the post office?”
But this idea did not commend itself to Prudence. She might be a rebel, but she was honest, as courageous people usually are; anything in the nature of deceit repelled her. “I should not care to do that,” she said. Her answer pleased Steele, although it defeated his purpose. He had hoped to follow up this pleasant friendship begun under such unusual and difficult conditions. It was the quality of conspiracy and quick intimacy which made the acquaintance so extraordinarily attractive to him. He was more than half in love with her already; and it galled him to reflect that with his present uncertain prospects he was no match for this daughter of a wealthy man. He could not have afforded to marry had other conditions proved favourable, which they did not: Mr Graynor would scarcely have welcomed a son-in-law with a salary of under two hundred a year.
“I am afraid that settles it,” he said in tones compounded of a mixture of emotions. “I wonder if ever I’ll have the good luck to meet you again?”
This remark pulled Prudence up sharply. She had never considered the question of his going out of her life; the suggestion thus forced on her unwilling attention hurt. Abruptly the knowledge came to her that she did not wish to lose his friendship. She had not considered the matter of his going away seriously: she had taken it for granted that the business that had brought him to Wortheton would bring him again; no doubt had crossed her mind as to a further meeting—now that the doubt was implanted a vague distress seized her, bringing with it a sense of desolation. She realised that when he was gone she would miss him, would feel doubly lonely by comparison with this bright break in the monotony of her life.
“You’ll come again?” she said quickly.
“It’s possible,” he answered, “but not in the least likely. It was just a chance that brought me this time. The firm sends a more important man as a rule. If I come again you will soon know of it. I shall make my first appearance under your window. In the meanwhile you will quite possibly have forgotten my existence.”
“Amid the distractions of Wortheton!” Prudence retorted. “That’s very probable, isn’t it?”
He laughed.
“I won’t hear a word against Wortheton if it keeps your memory green,” he returned.
“It fossilises memory,” she answered. “Every little event that has ever befallen is stamped on my mind in indelible colours—drab colours for the unpleasant event, and brighter tints for the pleasant in comparison with their different degrees of agreeableness.”
“And this event?” he questioned. “These stolen moments? In what colour is this event painted?”
“I’ll tell you that when we meet again—perhaps,” she answered.
“Oh please!” he persisted. “I want to know now.”
Prudence laughed softly. He detected a slight nervousness in her mirth, a quality of shyness that gratified his eager curiosity, conveying as it did that the girl was not insensible of his influence and his unspoken homage.
“You see,” she said, and blushed warmly in the darkness as she leaned down towards him, “it is all a confusion of splashes of moonlight and brighter splashes of sunshine. There aren’t any colours on the canvas at all.”
“I’m contented with that,” he said... “a luminous impression! Your fancy pleases me. My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall—just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that—inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward.”
This extravagance led to further admissions. He managed very clearly to convey to his silent listener that his feeling for her was of quite an unusual quality, that he cared immensely, that he had no intention of letting her drop out of his life. He wanted to see more of her and was fully determined to do so. He made her realise that unless she disclaimed a reciprocal liking he intended taking her silence for acquiescence. He spoke so rapidly, and with so much concentrated passion in his lowered tones, that Prudence only vaguely comprehended all that his eager words attempted to convey. She was apprehensive of discovery, and, rendered doubly nervous by this clandestine love-making and the fear of interruption, could find no words in which to reply. She wanted time to think: the whole situation flurried her; and her heart was beating with a rapidity that made articulation difficult.
“Oh!” she said... “Oh! I didn’t know... I didn’t understand...”
“Well, you understand now,” he answered. “Prudence, give me one word—one kind word to carry away with me... dear!”
There followed a pause, during which her face showed dimly above him, with eyes shadowed darkly in the wan light. She leaned towards him.
“Ssh! Good-bye—dear!” she called back softly. And the next thing he realised, even as her words floated faintly down to his eager ears, was that he was standing alone in the darkness, gazing up at the place where she had stood and from whence she had vanished with startling and unaccountable suddenness.
Later Steele walked back to the quaint little hotel where he was staying, confused by the hurried sweetness of her farewell as she withdrew from her position at the window with a caution that suggested unseen interruption. He had stepped forward with noiseless haste to secure a rose which fell from her window, and carrying it with him, made his way silently out of the garden. He was never certain whether the falling of the rose had been accidental, or whether Prudence had dropped it for him as a token and a reminder; but because her hand had gathered it, he lifted it in the moonlight and touched its cool fragrance reverently with his lips. The act made him consciously her lover. The rose became a symbol—a bond between him and her. Just so long as he kept it he knew that her influence would dominate his life, and his memory of her retain its warm and vital quality, so that she would remain a beautiful inspiration amid the sordid worries of uncongenial things.
Chapter Eight.
“I heard you,” Miss Matilda said in tones of immense reserve to her youngest sister on the following morning when they met on the landing at the top of the stairs, “talking from your window last night.”
Prudence blushed brightly.
“Then it was you who came to my door?”
“Yes.” Miss Matilda kept her maidenly gaze lowered to the carpet. Her expression was guilty, so that one might have supposed that she, and not the defiant young woman whom she accosted in this unexpected way, had engaged in clandestine whisperings overnight. “I was afraid Mary might wake. You were a little imprudent, I think.”
Prudence laughed. The gently spoken reproof sounded like a play on her name.
“You are a dear,” she said, and felt more kindly towards this sister whom she so little understood.
Had Miss Matilda proved less pliant to Miss Graynor’s moulding she might have developed into an ordinary human being; but she had gone down under Miss Agatha’s training, had imbibed the family traditions until she became saturated with the Graynor ideals and lost her own individuality. In her heart she sympathised with her sister’s indiscretions; but her mind condemned this conduct as unseemly and unbecoming in a girl of refinement.
She went downstairs in advance of Prudence, and throughout the reading of the morning prayers her pink distressed face witnessed to its owner’s shame in being a partner to this flagrant deception. She was shielding her sister against her conscience: no accessory to a criminal offence could have felt more wickedly implicated. And Prudence did not care. She was so utterly reckless that she had not bargained even with Miss Matilda for her silence. It had not occurred to Prudence that anyone could be mean enough to inform against her.
With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off trimming a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably.
“It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds,” Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window.
Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was “tramps.”
“In that case,” she said with decision, “it is a matter for the police.”
The smile in Prudence’s eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda’s downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarrassment which follows upon duplicity.
Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele.
“I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning,” he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his buttons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. “I hope Morgan won’t send a man like that again.”
“Edward Morgan usually comes himself,” Mr Graynor observed. “But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble.”
“Well, of course,” said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, “he is getting old.”
Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty.
“Don’t be absurd,” interposed Miss Agatha sharply. “Mr Morgan is in the prime of life.”
Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence’s existence, was compelled to let the remark pass unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appetite, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the scrappy conversation to which she paid no attention.
At the finish of the meal Miss Agatha created a diversion by requesting William to call at the police station to report that tramps had been loitering on the premises and had made havoc of the flowers in the borders. William required to be shown the borders, which he inspected with an air of pompous vexation, describing the damage as scandalous and an outrage, to the secret amusement of his youngest sister, who observed him critically from the French window of the drawing-room, which looked upon the borders in question. William was aware of her presence and of the smiling impertinence of her glance. It may have been the sight of her standing there in her scornful indifferent youth that accounted for the connecting thought which caused him to lift his eyes with swift suspicion to the window above the despoiled bed. Prudence, intercepting the upward glance, felt her cheeks suddenly aglow. For the first time since their disagreement he looked her fully in the face; then, with a change of expression that was a studied insult, he looked away.
“I don’t think it is the work of a tramp,” he said. “But I will inform the police. If anyone is caught loafing about the premises I’ll run him in.”
And Prudence, gazing upon the outraged dignity of his retreating back, laughed with considerable enjoyment.
“If only he could see how ridiculous he looks!” she mused, and stepped out upon the path, and gathered a wallflower head, which with an air of bravado she pinned in the front of her dress.
She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele’s visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow’s head. Bobby’s incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence’s horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence’s frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt. There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence. For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle’s lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented. That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circumstances.
When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele’s visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly.
“Oh, that!” she said. “That’s ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background.”
“The new curate!” suggested Bobby, grinning. “The chap who is fluttering the dovecots on account of his being unmarried. You devoted several letters to him, I remember. What’s he like?”
“He’s a little man in a big coat and a big hat,” she answered. “What can be seen of him is quite nice, but it isn’t much. There must be a brain of sorts under the hat, but it’s little too. His chief idiosyncrasy is that he fancies himself all brain. Mrs North is trying to marry her daughter to him.”
“And he prefers you,” commented Bobby... “naturally.”
Prudence smiled wickedly.
“He says it is the duty of a curate with only his stipend to depend upon to marry a woman of independent means. I think myself he will marry Matilda. He would like to belong to the family; the factory attracts him.”
“Money-grubbing little worm!” said Bobby, who was barely a year younger than Prudence and presumed on that account to set aside her more responsible relationship. “I wish he would marry Aunt Agatha. That would be something of a lark.”
“Poor little man!” said Prudence. “He’s not so impossible as all that. And he is horribly afraid of her. She makes him stammer.”
Bobby laughed outright.
“We’re all horribly afraid of her. That’s the funny part of it. And yet, you know, if one turned round and cheeked her she’d crumple up. I’ll do it one day.”
Prudence regarded him with increased respect.
“I hope I’ll be there,” was all she said.
Chapter Nine.
Bobby made the acquaintance of the curate very soon after that talk. They met for the first time at the vicarage garden party, which, according to an invariable rule, was held on Mrs North’s birthday. This enabled the vicar’s wife to display her birthday gifts, exciting by their numerical strength rather than their quality envy in the breasts of those guests less favoured in the matter of tokens of esteem on the important day which by right of precedent we appropriate to ourselves, and causing embarrassment to the more neglectful of her visitors by this reminder of a custom ignored.
She made little self-depreciatory remarks in displaying these absurd articles, which wore in most instances an appearance of having come from some bazaar stall and a dejected air of expectation that eventually they would return thither by reason of their uselessness, and be sold and resold at extortionate prices for charitable ends.
When one tired of viewing the gifts one wandered about the garden and admired the flowers, and a few of the younger people played tennis. The vicar hovered on the outskirts and smiled with remote affability upon every one. He discussed eighteenth century art with anyone who would listen to him. He claimed to be an authority on eighteenth century art, and possessed a few pictures which he had dug out of second-hand dealers’ shops and bought for a trifle on account of their doubtful authenticity. He led the way triumphantly to his study where these treasures were hung, and discoursed learnedly on Humphreys, and other artists of that period, while he showed his canvasses to a listless, uninterested, and uninformed audience, who had seen most of them before. One crude portrait, that resembled a bad imitation of the Hamilton, he pronounced to be a Romney. No one believed him. It is doubtful whether he believed it himself; the dealer who had sold it to him had lied without conviction. But the possession of even a questionable Romney afforded him a sense of artistic importance. His collection was, he asserted, very valuable. He had insured it for a figure which would have tempted many people to the mean crime of arson: there were moments, when the vicar was harassed and the Easter offering had proved disappointing, when he gazed upon this comfortable asset lining his walls and decided that if Providence saw fit to raze his dwelling to the ground he would bear his loss with Christian fortitude and take a holiday abroad on the proceeds.
Bobby, as one of the younger guests, enjoying also the doubtful privilege of being one of the two bachelors of the party—the other being the curate—was spared a review of the pictures and carried off to the tennis court by Mable North and several middle-aged spinsters, who cheated themselves into the deception that because romance had not been met in their youth, youth lay before instead of behind them, and saw in every unattached male a suppliant for their favour or an object for their womanly sympathy. Why country parishes beget these women remains an unsolved problem, but that they do beget them is very certain—women who cherish sickly sentimentality beyond the time for its decent interment and who look down on their sturdier sisters of a busier atmosphere as unsexed for putting the impossible aside and seeking a justification for their existence in an independence apart from these things.
Bobby played several sets of tennis with various partners of doubtful efficiency, opposed to the curate with a similar inadequate support who beseeched him plaintively to take her balls whenever they pitched a yard from her racket. And then the two young men insisted upon a rest, and sat on a bench a little apart from the feminine element and took stock of one another. Prudence and a dispirited-looking woman of uncertain age played a set against Mable North and the Sunday-school lady superintendent, who was stout and forty and of a practical turn of mind. She rather preferred playing in a feminine foursome. The curate had eyes only for Prudence. It is doubtful whether he knew who else was on the court.
“Your cousin is so graceful,” he remarked to Bobby in an undertone. And Bobby, interrupted in the business of observing the curate’s infatuated glances, brought himself up sharply and allowed his surprised gaze to follow his companion’s.
“My—Oh! my aunt. Yes, she’s ripping, isn’t she?”
“The relationship seems so absurd,” the curate said, with his eyes on Bobby’s long legs. “I always confuse it.”
“Yes,” Bobby agreed. “I might as well be a grandfather as she my aunt. There’s not a year’s difference between us.”
He offered his cigarette case to the curate, who declined the invitation to smoke.
“It is such a mistake to drug the brain,” he said.
“It’s so difficult,” Bobby returned cheerfully, “to know whether one has a brain to drug.”
“Oh! I don’t think anyone can have any doubt about that,” the curate returned seriously.
“No,” Bobby agreed. “It is generally the other people who entertain doubts.”
He lighted himself a cigarette and slipped the case into his pocket.
“Prudence smokes—like a furnace,” he added—“whenever she gets the chance.”
Smokes! and surreptitiously! The curate was horrified.
“You are joking surely?” he said.
“Not much of a joke, when I have to supply the fags.” Bobby looked amused. “We have to be mighty close about it. I am not allowed to smoke in the Presence.” So he designated Miss Agatha.
“But we moon about the garden at night and enjoy ourselves.”
“Well played!” cried the curate enthusiastically, and ignored Bobby’s confidence in his warm admiration for Prudence’s spirited return. “That was very neatly placed indeed,” he said.
“Prudence is a very deceptive player. She always scores through trickery,” Bobby observed, and watched the effect of this remark on his disapproving listener. “Nothing very brilliant about her play, you may note; but she wins all the time.”
“She is so very graceful,” the curate said again, as though this quality was accounted a virtue in his estimation, as probably it was.
“He’s an awful ass, Prue,” Bobby confided to her later. “And I’ve spoilt your matrimonial chances by telling him you smoke.”
Whereupon Prudence laughed sceptically.
“As though I couldn’t counteract that by allowing him to convert me from the evil practice,” she said.
“I think you are an abandoned little wretch,” Bobby said, and dismissed the subject. It was so very evident that the curate as a rival for Prudence’s favour was a negligible quantity.
“Pretty tame, these old tabby meetings,” Bobby remarked presently. “Why don’t they do something in this benighted hole?”
“That’s what I am always wondering. I am looking to you to come home and wake the place up.”
“Paint it red?” he suggested, grinning.
“Paint it any colour, save the drab hues which at present disfigure it. There isn’t any earthly reason why people should remain satisfied to be so dull. What are you going to do when you come home to settle?”
“Well, the first thing I shall do will be to marry—in order to get away from the Court,” he replied with decision. “I refuse to be aunt-pecked any longer than necessity demands.”
“Does that include me?” Prudence inquired with irony.
“You! Oh Lord!” He threw back his head and laughed. “You can come along and share my emancipation.”
“Thank you.” Prudence’s small chin was elevated, her lip curled disdainfully. “I shall contrive my own emancipation,” she said.
“How?” he asked, suddenly interested.
“By marriage also,” she answered, and laughed and broke from his detaining hand and fled indoors.
Bobby looked after her in perplexity.
“By Jove! I had forgotten that chap,” he reflected, and recalled her earlier confidences with suddenly awakened suspicion and a mind not a little disturbed. He had been joking. Possibly Prudence had been joking also. But Wortheton without her would be a drear hole, he decided; and Wortheton and the factory were his ultimate and inevitable lot.
And yet he did not wish her to remain unmarried. His five spinster aunts and the unmarried women he had met that afternoon, hovering hungrily about the little curate, sickened him. Prudence had no place in that gallery. She was altogether too fine and too clever to be wasted in the narrow seclusion of this life which she led with such evident distaste. Of course she would marry and go away. That was the chief point; she would go away. It didn’t after all seem to matter who the fellow was, so long as he was a decent sort of chap and could provide for her an appreciate her qualities of beauty and intellect. If he didn’t appreciate her—so Bobby philosophised—it would be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire; but whoever it was got into the flames, the young man felt comfortably assured it would not be Prudence. She would contrive her emancipation more thoroughly than that.
“I wish I had asked her more about that fellow,” he mused.
But he recognised that the time for asking questions was past.
Chapter Ten.
“I’ve been thinking,” Bobby remarked one evening to Prudence, when they strolled up the road together in the dusk, “about our talk the other afternoon; and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of the place, it’s our own fault, that we find life dull. One place is much like another. Either we want too much, or else we are dull in ourselves and can’t get the enjoyment out of life that is there for our taking. That’s what I make of it anyhow.”
Prudence considered this.
“Possibly I want too much—I think I do,” she said after a while. “And so do you. We are the children of our age, Bobby; we’ve learnt to think for ourselves; when one begins to think one ceases to accept things unquestioningly. I’m alive to my finger tips. I want to enjoy. I am not satisfied merely to exist; a worm does that. I want to experience life to the full. Don’t you?”
“I suppose I do,” Bobby agreed—“when you put it that way.”
Prudence was triumphant.
“There you are, you see. It’s just the way a thing is put. For the moment you almost convinced me that the discontent lay in myself, and now I convince you that there is substantial ground for discontent. No one should remain quiet under dissatisfying conditions; we should each strive for individual liberty. Youth is the time in which to do things, and youth passes quickly. When we are old we cease to strive because the spirit of adventure leaves us; but the hunger for the things which we have missed remains. And that makes us bitter.”
“How do you know?” demanded Bobby, with a cynical smile for her youth.
“Know!” she repeated, and faced him, her eyes alight and scornful. “One has only to look around and note the disappointed, dull, sour people one meets; people who have had their chance and missed it, because they reasoned as you do; people who have not possessed courage or initiative, but in whose blood the desire for enjoyment has worked as surely as it works in ours. Do you suppose Agatha has never wanted to marry and manage a man and a home of her own? Do you suppose Matilda doesn’t hunger for children, and Mary for a lover? Didn’t daddy desire love? He married twice, and the second time at least was not merely a matter of expediency. I’m colder perhaps, harder anyway. I don’t want anything but just to get away from Wortheton and live my own life independently, and order my days as I please.”
Bobby stared at her open-mouthed, bereft in his astonishment of the power of speech. Prudence suddenly laughed.
“You old thing!” she cried. “I’ve properly scandalised you. Why do you set my thoughts working along these lines? You are just a boy.”
“Oh, shut it!” he ejaculated. “You aren’t much older.”
“A girl is a lot older than a boy,” she said. “She apprehends life more fully; your sex, until you are a responsible age, is just out for fun. But there’s a time limit to one’s capacity for enjoyment. In a few years I shall settle down to the routine, whatever it is that offers; and if I haven’t had my good time, I’ll just be a discontented dull reflection of the others. I know. And I’m going to guard against that.”
“But how?” he persisted. “What do you mean to do?”
“I haven’t thought that out,” Prudence answered after a moment for reflection. “I don’t know that I should confide in you if I had.”
He smiled at that, and stopped and lighted himself a cigarette.
“I don’t care what you do,” he said, and added cheerfully: “I only hope you will have a good time. You know you’re awfully pretty, Prue, and—and interesting, and all that.”
“Am I?” Prudence laughed again, and there was a note of satisfaction in her mirth. “I thank Providence that I am pretty; it makes things easier. But if I were plain I should still insist on my good time. It doesn’t necessarily include the homage of man. That’s a side issue. It is sometimes a means to an end, but the end is the thing which matters. I want my own individual life.”
“I don’t want any own individual life like that,” Bobby confessed in thoughtful seriousness. “I want a home of my own, of course, and—a wife, and all those jolly things.”
“At seventeen?” she scoffed.
And then he confided to her that he had met the divinity he hoped to marry at the home of a school chum. She was nearly as old as he was, and she was quite prepared to marry him as soon as circumstances permitted. She was a ripping good sort and very high spirited.
“You had better invite her to stay at Wortheton before the ceremony,” Prudence advised him. “If that doesn’t put her off, you’ll be sure of her genuine affection anyway.”
“I’m sure of that now,” he returned confidently.
“You’ve made good use of your time,” was all she said.
His words, the ring in his young voice, called up a mental picture of a strong clear-cut face looking up at her in the uncertain light of a moonlit night in May. She felt that somehow Bobby had outdistanced her.
“Here we are,” she exclaimed abruptly, “you and I, mooning, as we’ve mooned for years whenever the vacation came round. When we were children we mooned along and talked of splendid things—the things we meant to do, the positions we could create for ourselves in a world that was open and defenceless to our attacks; and now we moon sentimentally and talk of love instead.”
“But that’s splendid too,” he affirmed with young enthusiasm.
“Is it? ... I wonder. I think perhaps it’s just a little disappointing also... moonshine, like the rest.”
“Rot!” said Bobby elegantly. “Something’s changed you, Prue—or some one... Which?”
“The curate perhaps,” Prudence returned flippantly. “Marriage with him would not be moonshine exactly, but it would be a trifle dull—just the distractions which the parish offered, and on Sundays his sermons to listen to.”
“There would be stimulation in the way of jealousy,” Bobby suggested helpfully. “Think of all those women who work braces for him and lounge slippers. You’d have to compete, you know.”
“They cease all that when the curates marry,” Prudence returned with disgust. “If they only kept it up there would be some excitement offering; but they don’t.”
She turned and began to retrace her steps.
“Goodness knows how we got on this topic! Your brain is love-sick, Bobby, and you’re infecting me. If my memory serves me, there have been three ideal girls in your life already—and one of them was Mabel North.”
“Oh! that,” said Bobby, colouring, “was all rot. This is the real thing.”
“It’s always the real thing till the newer attraction comes along. You needn’t resent that; it’s true not only in your case. We are unstable as the waters which start from infinitesimal raindrops and run down in flood to the sea.”
Bobby chuckled.
“Your image doesn’t apply aptly to every one,” he said. “One can’t think of Uncle William in connexion with all that broiling strife.”
“Oh!” Prudence made a gesture which conveyed fairly adequately her contempt for the person referred to. “Some raindrops form into puddles, and the puddles cheat themselves into believing that they are the sea, and ridicule the idea of any expansion beyond their own muddy limits. William’s is a complete little destiny in itself. And he never suspects the mud at the bottom because he never stirs it up.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Bobby inquired. “You are taking it too much for granted that the old boy’s life is lived on the surface. He takes his annual holiday.”
“Well!” said Prudence, and turned her head and surveyed his grinning countenance with mixed emotions. “That’s the most evil suggestion I’ve heard from you. I’m not fond of brother William, but I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
He only laughed.
“There’s a bit of the old Adam in him as well as in the rest of us, I imagine,” he said, and drew her hand within his arm affectionately.
Thus, walking closely, they pursued their way along the dim country road which their childish feet had trodden and made familiar in its every aspect; which knew too the steadier tramp of their adolescent youth, and which in the near future was to know but seldom the lighter tread of the girl, whose feet stirred the unconscious dust that in the years ahead would lie undisturbed by her passing, when, in the pursuance of her destiny, the confined vista of her childhood, with its sense of security and dulness, should have become an elusive memory of drab and peaceful things.