Imprudence Part 10

"You are impossible!" was all he could find to say.

Prudence, thinking over the scene later, while leaning from her window with the night wind cooling her heated face, wondered what was wrong with herself that this spirit of antagonism should flame forth at the slightest provocation. Why could she not endure William, and suffer his little homilies with patience? Why should Agatha's constant fault-finding irritate her to the verge of desperation? If she were possessed of a vein of humour, she told herself, these things would merely afford amus.e.m.e.nt. But they did not amuse. They were slowly souring a naturally sweet disposition.

Big tears welled in the blue eyes, hung for a s.p.a.ce on her lashes, and fell like silver dew upon the rose-leaves beneath the sill--hot tears that sprang from the well of discontent which had its source in a vain longing for unattainable things.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

The troubles of youth are none the less real because to riper age they appear trivial in the retrospect. In the constant fret against the irksome restrictions of her life Prudence's sunny nature fought under unequal conditions, with the result that the sun suffered many an eclipse. In one of these depressed moods she wrote to Bobby to the effect that she felt unequal to holding out until he came home for good, and that if matters did not improve the desperation of the situation would drive her to elope with the curate.

"The sole consideration which deters me," she added, "is that Jones is such an impossible name."

"What's in a name?" Bobby wrote back airily. "You're safe, old girl, if you jib at a little thing like that."

The curate, failing to meet Prudence alone and wearying of being fenced with, took a mean advantage of her at the annual Sunday-school treat, and secluding her in a corner of the playing-field with her cla.s.s of infants, set the infants running races and came rather abruptly to his point.

"I love to watch you with little children," he remarked with disconcerting suddenness. "You have such a wonderful sympathy with them."

"I like children," she answered guardedly; and tried to gather the babies about her; but the curate was throwing sweets for them, and they preferred scrambling for these to clinging to teacher's hands. There is a time for everything.

"So do I," he said, attentively scrutinising her averted face, and admiring the fine colour in her cheeks which a new quality in his voice had brought there. "Children in the home make home beautiful."

He swept the field with his glance, and decided that his chance was short-lived and might not come again. He plunged desperately.

"I want to marry," he said, hurriedly, and threw a further quant.i.ty of sweets to the children and turned more directly towards her. "I have been waiting so long for an opportunity of saying this to you that you will forgive me if I seem a little abrupt and choose my time inopportunely. I never see you alone now. You cannot have failed to observe how deeply in love I am. You are so sweet and gentle that I feel you will be kind. I want a little encouragement." He paused expectantly. "I may go on?" he asked, when she took no advantage of his hesitation. "You will give me a little hope?"

Prudence turned her face and met his eyes fully. There was no possibility of mistaking his meaning.

"No, please don't," she said. "I don't want you to say any more. I hoped you would see it wasn't any use. I'm sorry."

The curate although a vain man, had never felt very confident of winning her. He wanted her quite urgently; but he was not so deeply in love with Prudence as he was with himself, and the certainty of defeat wounded his pride more than it wounded his feelings. He had no intention of giving her the satisfaction of being in a position to say that she had refused him. He dissembled meanly, congratulating himself on the clever ambiguity with which he had worded his proposal.

"I am sorry you have formed that opinion," he said, trying to keep the chagrin he felt from betraying itself in his voice. "You are so much with her that I believed you would enjoy her entire confidence, and I was vain enough to expect a little encouragement. But I am not going to accept your opinion as final. I shall make my appeal to her. Perhaps I ought to have done so in the first instance; but a man feels naturally diffident at these times."

The play of expression on Prudence's face while she listened to his stilted sentences was remarkable. He would have been very obtuse if he believed that he succeeded in deceiving her. It was very evident that she apprehended him very clearly. A little smile hovered about her mouth when she replied to him.

"If it is Matilda you allude to," she said, with an ambiguity equal to his own, "I wish you all the success you deserve."

He raised his hat gravely and left her, carrying the bag of sweets with him, to the manifest disgust of the staring infants; and Prudence, watching his hurrying little figure making its purposeful way through the different groups in search of his unconscious quarry, laughed quietly and without malice, despite his ungenerous effort to humiliate her.

"Now I shall have a new enemy in my brother-in-law," she reflected. "He is marrying the chimneys. But Matilda will be too grateful to him to resent that."

Matilda was grateful. She was sufficiently overcome with the honour thus conferred on her to satisfy even Mr Jones' colossal vanity. Mr Jones accepted his triumph with becoming condescension; to describe his air as elated would be misleading. His manner towards his affianced wife, who was several years his senior, and had never been handsome, was benevolently patronising. His courtship was business-like, and free from those affectations of silly sentiment so unsuited to his calling.

If Miss Matilda regretted the lack of lover-like attentions, she concealed her disappointment, clinging insistently to the belief that everything that Ernest did was right and dignified. It would have been unbecoming in a clergyman to be demonstrative.

"I used to think," she confessed to Prudence in a moment of rare confidence, "that it was you he admired. You remember how he used to persist in accompanying us on our walks, and how he talked princ.i.p.ally with you? All the while he was thinking of me. He told me so. Isn't it wonderful?"

"He has the sense," Prudence answered, and kissed the flushed face kindly, "to realise that you will make the best wife in the world for a clergyman."

And she thought of Bobby's epithet, "money-grubbing little worm," and decided that it aptly fitted Ernest.

Bobby chaffed her about the curate, affecting to believe she had suffered a disappointment.

Prudence did not confide in him the tale of the curate's duplicity; loyalty to Matilda kept her silent on that subject. But her wrathful disgust was roused on the day of Matilda's wedding, when Mr Jones, claiming the privilege of a brother, caught her unprepared in the hall and kissed her unsuspecting lips.

"If you ever take such a liberty with me again," she said, white and angry, "I will make you the laughing-stock of Wortheton."

He a.s.sumed an air of dignity while conscious of looking ridiculous. Her words, her tone in uttering them, lashed him into a rage of hatred that cured him finally of any tender thought he had cherished in regard to her. He spoke of her later to his wife as ill-mannered and ungentle of temper, a description which, while holding it to be ungenerous, occasioned Matilda considerable comfort. She had felt uneasily jealous of Prudence at times, even during the days of her brief engagement. Mr Jones had shown such predilection for the society of the younger sister that Matilda, like Leah, was made to realise the humiliating position of the subst.i.tute. Her faith in his uprightness did not allow of disbelief; besides which his ill-natured criticism of her young sister carried conviction; his tone expressed cordial dislike.

"Fuller acquaintance with her reveals her more objectionable qualities,"

he said. "I believed her to be a nice, simple girl, but she is certainly not that."

"Prudence is very warm-hearted," Matilda said weakly in defence of the absent. "But father spoils her a little."

"He makes a fool of her," was the bridegroom's unclerical retort.

Thus Matilda left the home of her childhood, seated beside her husband in the carriage which was to take them to the junction, and to the back of which Bobby, with a sense of the eternal unfitness of things, had tied one of Matilda's discarded shoes. Not even the thought of the comfortable dowry which went with the gentle Matilda had the power to lighten Mr Jones' lowering countenance during the long drive to the station, and Mr Graynor had behaved with quite surprising generosity in the matter of settlements. The hard ring in Prudence's voice, when she had threatened to make a laughing-stock of him, the expression of disgust on her white face, hit his pride hard. And he dared not offend her further from the wholly unnecessary fear that she would put her threat into execution. He knew that he had paid her marked attention, and that Wortheton was aware of his preference. If she chose to spread tales about him they would not lack credence.

His frown deepened when he felt his wife's gloved hand timidly feeling for his; then he roused himself with an effort and responded to the gentle pressure of her fingers.

"It's nervous work getting married," he said, with an uneasy laugh.

"The fuss and the crowd... every one staring. Phew!"

Matilda sympathised with him; she had felt nervous also.

"I'm glad it's over--oh! so very glad--and happy, dear."

"Blithering a.s.s, isn't he?" was Bobby's cheerful comment, when, turning from watching the vanishing carriage, he found Prudence beside him, looking unusually tall and womanly in her bridesmaid's dress of soft blue, with a hat with cornflowers in it shading her face. "Come along, and drink to their connubial bliss in another b.u.mper of champagne."

He filled her gla.s.s for her and one for himself.

"Cheer up," he cried, and raising his gla.s.s, grinned at her over the brim. "There are more Joneses than one in the sea. You needn't sport the willow so openly. It's indecent. Here's to their health, wealth, and happiness! It will be wealth for him, anyway--cute little beast!"

Prudence became aware of her father surveying them from the doorway with a tired smile on his bored and worried face. He had slipped away from his guests, who lingered aimlessly on the lawn, and followed them indoors. She persuaded him to take a seat beside her and drink a gla.s.s of his own very excellent champagne.

"It's jolly good stuff. You did them awfully well, sir," said Bobby enthusiastically approving. "We've given Wortheton something to think about. It'll be Prue's turn next."

"There's plenty of time for Prudence," Mr Graynor said--"plenty of time."

He found himself looking at her in her unfamiliar dress, surprised, as Bobby had been, by the womanliness he realised for the first time. It disconcerted him.

"Weddings are a nuisance; they upset the household," he said. "I wish all these people would go."

"They are like the wasps," said Bobby; "they'll hang about so long as the grub's there. I'll go out and clear them off."

He left the room by the window. Mr Graynor looked after him, and meeting Prudence's eye, exchanged a smile with her.

"The a.s.surance of youth!" he remarked. "You and I, we've had enough of them, Prue." He regarded her again more attentively. "That blue dress is very becoming to you, my dear."

Prudence flushed warmly. His appreciation recalled to her mind the light of admiration in the curate's eyes, his quick hungry swoop towards her, the eager furtiveness of his kiss--the first time that a man's lips had touched hers, other than the members of her family. But he belonged to the family in a sense--a wretched little hanger-on, catching at the overflow from the Graynor pockets.