Imprudence Part 1

Imprudence.

by F.E. Mills Young.

CHAPTER ONE.

"Now came still evening on." The fading light, warm and faintly glowing from the last rays of the May sun, lay with a lingering mellowness upon the fields, upon the light green of leafing trees, upon a white froth of late blackthorn blossoming in the hedges, upon the straggling township nestling in the hollow, and upon the tall red-brick chimneys dominating Wortheton--dominating the souls sheltering beneath the cl.u.s.tering roofs--dominating and subjugating brain and mind and body by the might of their crushing omnipotence, by the strength of wealth and industry and established order--gaunt chimneys, rising out of the green mist of the trees, grotesque, symbolic landmarks--index fingers witnessing in obelisk-like ugliness to the power and importance of successful commercial enterprise, to the dignity of capital and the drab necessity of labour, to, in short, the disproportionate values in most existing things.

In the evening light, between the lengthening shadows flung by the hedges along the dusty road that leads to Wortheton, a girl walked listlessly, a girl whose youth was marred by a look of world-weary wisdom, as much at variance with the young face as the tall brick chimneys with the harmonious beauty of the landscape. But for that look, and the sullen expression in the brown eyes, the girl would have been beautiful, as the scene was beautiful, and the soft primrose light upon the uplands; but the buoyant elasticity, the hope, and the freshness of youth, these were lacking; there remained only the pitiful fact that in years the girl was in the springtime of life and in experience more matured.

As she walked, her sullen gaze shifted furtively from the township below to the fair open country, growing momentarily dimmer and greyer as the light in the sky paled. A gap in the hedge revealed a narrow path between giant elms, and a cool shadowed coppice where the bracken fronds rose stiff and closely curled, and dark ivy twined thickly about the tree trunks. The girl turned aside into the coppice and, with the fugitive instinct of hiding from the light, penetrated its shaded depths, and paused and leaned her arms against the gnarled trunk of a sheltering beech tree, and rested her head upon her arms in dry-eyed tragic sorrow.

In a fork of the leafy branches overhead a bird had its nest, sitting in brooding satisfaction upon its delicate speckled eggs. The intrusion startled it from slumber: the round eyes betrayed a suspicious uneasiness, and the soft warm body nestled closer over the eggs it protected. Quaint thing of feathers and bright-eyed watchfulness and maternal instinct, with no sense of anything beyond the supreme importance of hatching those little speckled eggs--drawing its unconscious comparison by the pride of elemental right to the disproportion in values in this as in other matters, happy in its prospective motherhood, peering timorously through the green tracery sheltering it, home at the unhappy prospective human mothers with resentful eyes lifted curiously to observe its brooding content.

So still the girl remained, gazing upward into the deepening shadows that the little feathered mother lost her fear; the sharp anxiety faded from the round bright eyes, which never relaxed their unwavering vigilance even when the shadows, gathering closer, enveloped the still figure of the girl and wrapped her about with a hazy indistinctness that made her one with the landscape, a thing of indefinite outline and colouring, breathing, sentient nature in harmony with inanimate nature, immovable and silent as the tree against which she leaned.

So night settled silently over Wortheton, and a wanderer stole home in its kindly shade.

CHAPTER TWO.

In the big ugly morning-room at Court Heatherleigh six people sat engaged with different degrees of interest on six ugly pieces of coa.r.s.e material which were being fashioned into serviceable garments for the poor. The poor were an inst.i.tution in Wortheton and so was charity: both, like the big chimneys dominating the town, were things of usage; all were in a sense interdependent, and had their headquarters at Court Heatherleigh, which was the big house and belonged to the owner of the big chimneys--the owner of most things in Wortheton, from the ugly brick cottages in which his employees dwelt to, one might say, the employees themselves. The Trades Unions had not penetrated the select privacy of Wortheton as yet. If occasionally a voice was uplifted in discontent and hinted at these things, it was speedily silenced; and life flowed on tranquilly as it had before the grumbler raised his foolish protest; and his place knew him no more. But each whisper was as a small stone flung in a mill stream; and stones follow the law of aggregation till eventually they dam the stream.

The six busy workers in Court Heatherleigh morning-room were the six daughters of Mr Graynor, and their ages ranged from somewhere about fifty to eighteen. Besides the daughters, two sons had swelled the family. The younger of these had married indiscreetly, and died indiscreetly with his wife somewhere abroad, bequeathing an indiscreet son to his father because he had nothing else to leave behind him, having departed from the family tradition that the end and aim of life is to acquire wealth. He had acquired nothing beyond a wife and son; but he had loved both these, and been beloved in turn, so that, according to his views, he had prospered well: according to his brother William's views, he had been a fool.

William carried on the family traditions, and would eventually succeed his father as owner of the big chimneys, the family mansion, and the guardianship of his numerous sisters. He was not married. No one expected him to marry; he did not expect it of himself. No woman worthy of William's attention had ever adventured across his path.

Of the sisters, Miss Agatha Graynor, who was the eldest of the family by several years, took the lead in all things, social and domestic, and ruled the household with a despotism that not even old Mr Graynor had been known to question; though his wives--he had married twice--had never been permitted such absolute authority. In his youth he had been as despotic as Agatha; but he was an old man now, and weary; and his daughter overawed him. The one being to whom he clung was his young daughter. Prudence, the only child of his second wife; and after Prudence, his scapegrace grandson, Bobby, then at college, held possibly the strongest place in his tired affections.

They were two very human young people, Prudence and Bobby, with a contempt for the Graynor traditions, and lacking the Graynor pride and self-complacency, and all the other creditable characteristics of an old, influential, commercial stock that had owned the greater part of Wortheton for generations, and had come to regard themselves by reason of local homage as personages of high importance in the land.

Prudence made one of the working party from a matter of compulsion; charity of that nature bored her, and she hated sewing. Since leaving school, where her happiest years had been spent, Miss Agatha had imposed many irksome duties as a corrective for idleness: a healthy youthful desire for pleasure and recreation affronted her; if she had experienced such desires in her own youth she had forgotten them: possibly she had not experienced them; people are born deficient in various respects and in different degrees. Miss Agatha had always been Good: her young half-sister was lacking in piety, and suffered from warm human impulses which not infrequently led her into trouble and subsequent disgrace.

Also Prudence was pretty; the other five Miss Graynors were plain.

The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pa.s.s through the coa.r.s.e material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence.

Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke.

"Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning."

She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and pa.s.sed it down the line to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence's blue eyes snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn, dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game, thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to a.s.sert, why his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a visitor, and Prudence's delinquencies were forgotten in the business of welcoming the arrival.

"My dear Mrs North!" Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose hastily and shook hands with the vicar's wife, who, warm and a little flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves--all save Prudence; she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the first favourable moment.

"Such an astonishing thing has happened," Mrs North was saying breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied needles. "That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in her mother's house."

Miss Agatha's thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes.

"Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, _and_ Prudence, leave the room," she said.

Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence's more alert retreat. When they had pa.s.sed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha turned apologetically to her friend.

"Of course," she explained earnestly, "I couldn't discuss that subject in front of the girls."

Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously acquiesced.

"It was a little indiscreet of me," she allowed. "But I was never so astounded in my life. And the girl's mother actually defends her. She talks about 'her own flesh and blood.' ... As though that makes any difference! I knew you would be shocked. It's such a scandal in the place. And to come back... where every one knows!"

"She can't stay," said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as it pa.s.sed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked fixedly at the vicar's wife. "We can't tolerate such a scandal in Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of thing... it... We must set our faces against it."

"Of course," Mrs North agreed doubtfully. "That's why I came to you."

Every one came to Miss Agatha when an unpleasant situation had to be faced: she faced it so resolutely, with the inflexibility of justice untempered with mercy. Sin was sin. There were no intermediate shades between black and white. Sin had to be uprooted. The moral prestige of Wortheton demanded that all which was "not nice" must be eliminated from its community.

And in a dingy room in a dingy little house in a dingier side street, a girl with a beautiful face was thinking in her pa.s.sionate discontent how good it was to be a bird--a small feathered thing in a nest among the branches of a fine old tree--anything rather than a human being.

CHAPTER THREE.

Prudence leaned with her arms on the sill of her bedroom window, looking out on the night-shadowed garden and the white line of the road beyond its shrub-hidden walls. This was the best hour in the twenty-four--the hour when she could be alone; for the bedroom, which once had been a nursery, was all her own. The other Miss Graynors, with the exception of Agatha, shared rooms; but the little half-sister who had occupied the nursery alone for so many years was permitted to regard this haven as still hers: no one sought to dispossess her, though the room was large and had a south aspect, while Miss Agatha's room faced north. But Miss Agatha was not averse from a northern aspect; and the room had the advantage of commanding a view of the servants' quarters, so that she was enabled to watch the coming in and, which was still more important, the going forth of these dependants, whose seemly conduct she made her particular care.

Many people besides the poet have discovered that the pleasantest place in the house is leaning out of the window. Prudence knew that. From early spring to late autumn, and occasionally on fine frosty nights, she leaned from her window and thought, and felt, and dreamed dreams of romance and beauty, and of a life that was fuller than the life of Wortheton, a life beyond the seclusion of the walled garden, beyond the white winding road, the tall chimneys, and the dull succession of busy dreary days--days which commenced with morning prayers at seven-thirty, followed by breakfast at eight, by work, by an hour's walk before lunch, a little district visiting, the receiving and returning of calls, tea at five, a dull formal dinner at seven, and family prayers at half-past eight. Then nine o'clock and merciful release, and that good hour, sometimes longer, when she was supposed to be in bed and which she spent leaning out of the window, dreaming her girlish dreams. We all know those dreams of youth, though some of us forget them. They are just dreams, nothing more; but none of life's realities are half as good as those inspiring idle fancies which illumine the drabbest lives in the imaginative days of youth. The dreams of youth are worth all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages; and when they arise, as Prudence's arose, out of a spirit of dissatisfaction with existing things, they do not necessarily add to the dissatisfaction, but catch one away from realities in a flight of golden thought.

To-night, however, Prudence's mind was not concerned so much with personal matters as with the story of the girl of whose return she had heard that morning, the girl who was not good, and who was to be banished from Wortheton for fear that her example might contaminate others. Prudence wondered whether Wortheton were more susceptible to contamination than most places; otherwise the sending forth of the black sheep, who after all belonged to Wortheton, were to inflict an injustice on some equally respectable town. Black sheep cannot be banished to the nether world; they have to reside somewhere.

The details of the girl's case were known to Prudence. All the secrecy and silence of Miss Agatha's careful guardianship availed little against an inquiring and sympathetic mind and somewhat unusual powers of observation. Prudence at eighteen was not ignorant. To attempt to keep an intelligent person ignorant is to attempt the impossible. Miss Agatha did not shrink from impossible effort: furthermore she confused the terms ignorance and innocence, and in her furtive avoidances contrived to throw a suggestion of indelicacy upon the most simple of elemental things. Many well-meaning persons bring disrepute in this way on things which should be sacred, and utterly confuse the mind in matters of morality with the disastrous result that, bewildered and impatient, the individual not infrequently breaks away from conventional caution and adopts a line of indifference in regard to decent restraints. Life cannot be run on lines of suppression any more successfully than on the broader gauge of a too liberal tolerance.

Restraint has to be practised; and it is the right of the individual to be taught to recognise the necessity for this with the encouragement of the practice.

Miss Agatha's narrow creed proclaimed that the girl had sinned, and must therefore be thrust forth; Prudence, in her impulsive youth, felt this decree to be ungenerous, and, had she dared, would have championed the sinner's cause before all Wortheton. She did not fear Wortheton, but she was afraid of Agatha--Agatha, who, at the time of Prudence's birth, was older than Prudence's mother, and who had domineered over her mother and herself until the former's death, which sad event occurred when Prudence was five years old. She remembered her mother only dimly, but she hated Miss Agatha on her mother's account as she would not have hated her on her own. The mop of golden curls which, with the wide blue eyes, lent to Prudence's face a guileless and childlike expression, covered a shrewd little brain. It was no strain on the owner's intelligence to discern that Agatha was jealous of her, had been jealous of her mother before her, on account of their father's preference; and it occasioned her much inward satisfaction to reflect that not even Agatha had the power to lessen his love for her: she was the child of his old age and the light of his eyes.

"I've half a mind," she said to herself, and rested her dimpled chin on her hands and stared into the shadowy distance, "to tell him about Bessie. If I asked him to interfere and let her remain, he--might."

She did not feel very positive on that head; Mr Graynor was after all a male edition of Agatha. Nevertheless, she would at least make her appeal.

"I wonder..." she mused, and thought awhile.

"I suppose she was very much in love," was the outcome of these reflections. "I wonder what it feels like to be very much in love."

Prudence's world had not brought any of these experiences into her life.

She never met any men, save her father's friends and William's, none of whom were calculated to awaken sentiment in the breast of a girl of eighteen. The youngest of these was a man of forty, a nice kind old thing, who brought her chocolates, and pulled her curls before she put her hair up. Since the hair had gone up he had ceased to pull it, and he did not bring her chocolates so often; his kindliness had become more formal; but she liked him rather better on that account; the teasing had sometimes annoyed her.

Like most girls, Prudence allowed her mind at times to dwell on the subject of love and marriage. The older girls at school had discussed these subjects freely: one of them had professed an undying pa.s.sion for the drawing-master, who was married, and had a.s.severated before an admiring audience in the playing-field that she would cheerfully ignore the wife and run away with him if he asked her. He had not asked her.

He had indeed been entirely unaware of her devotion, and had regarded her as a rather dull pupil. Prudence had considered her silly. Also she held a belief that emotional excitement was not love. She was not very clear in her thoughts what the term love expressed exactly; but she believed that when it did come love would be a big thing. She did not consider it in relation with marriage: marriage was a contract, often a convenience. She would have been glad herself to marry, merely to escape from Agatha and Wortheton. When a girl was married she could at least fashion her own life. And Prudence loved children. She envied Bessie Clapp her coming motherhood more than she pitied her on account of the social ostracism entailed thereby. Prudence's ideas on morality, never having been wisely directed, inclined to exalt the beauty of motherhood and to ignore the baser aspect of crude and illicit pa.s.sions selfishly indulged. It is not the maternal woman who brings children into the world with a selfish disregard for the shame of their nameless birth.

While Prudence leaned from her window and thought of love and motherhood, she became abruptly and amazedly aware of a figure in the road beyond the high wall--a man's figure, tall and straight in the moonlight--walking with a purposeful air down the hill towards the town.

The man glanced up at the lighted window in which the girlish form was brightly framed, and broke off abruptly in the middle of a bar he was whistling softly, paused for the fraction of a second, and then went swinging on down the hill. He was a stranger; Prudence recognised that; there were no young men, except the factory employees and the tradesmen, in Wortheton.

"I wonder," she murmured to herself, and leaned further out to look after the vanishing figure, "what it feels like to be in love..."

A sudden sense of chill touched her. The moon vanished behind a cloud, and a little cold breeze sprang up and played on her bare neck and arms.

The garden showed dark with the white light withdrawn, dark and deserted. A shadowed loneliness had fallen on the spirit of the night.