Imprudence Part 13

"Oh!" said Prudence, and felt oddly chilled by this revelation.

She had liked the man, had hoped that the acquaintance so informally begun would develop pleasantly on ordinary lines, a hope which she realised very certainly could never be fulfilled. Further intercourse would be forbidden her. Though had the road been open to a pursuance of the acquaintance Prudence herself would no longer have wished to follow it up. The colour had gone out of the pleasure and left a neutral-toned picture in its stead, a picture of life in its least lovely aspect, with the sordid streak of self-indulgence trailing its disfiguring smudges across the canvas. Was nothing that was pleasant altogether fine? In this complex meandering of human destinies was this mean streak, which spoilt the fine grain of the wood, discoverable in each separate individual?

Prudence lay back against the cushions feeling utterly weary and unable to cope with the rush of swift emotions which flooded her mind.

Reaction followed upon the period of excitement. She was conscious only of the pain in her foot. No one had thought of removing her shoe. She had loosened it in the car; but the foot had swollen and felt too big for its covering. She made an effort now to remove the shoe, whereupon Agatha, capable but unsympathetic, came to her a.s.sistance.

"You ought to have done that before," she complained petulantly, and to her own surprise, as well as to her sister's, broke down and cried weakly.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Though not serious, Prudence's injuries confined her to the house for some time. It proved an irksome time for the members of her family as well as for herself. She was not patient, and it exasperated her to be compelled to lie on the sofa, unequal to rising from it and running away when her sisters, from a sense of duty, installed themselves near her couch with the sociable intention of keeping her company. They insisted on her occupying herself with some sewing as a relief to the tedium of enforced inaction. Prudence hated sewing, and made a demand for books; whereupon her sisters in turn read aloud to her the works of Miss Nouchette Carey, which were familiar to Prudence from childhood, and bored her exceedingly. She wanted something more stimulating; something which did not depict Wortheton ideals and sentiment. But the more modern writers were banned as unwholesome, and the poets were discredited on account of an erotic tendency to idealise pa.s.sion and adorn sensuousness with an exalted language better suited to more spiritual qualities. Or so Miss Agatha thought.

"The merit of a book," she affirmed, "depends upon whether it stands the test of being read aloud without causing embarra.s.sment to the reader and to the audience."

"Books never embarra.s.s me," Prudence said, "but occasionally they bore me. I don't care to read about people who lead the stodgy kind of life we lead."

"Life is not stodgy," Agatha reproved her. "And it is the same everywhere."

"G.o.d forbid!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Prudence, and thereby brought a storm of horrified reproach upon her head.

On occasions Matilda arrived and spent an afternoon or morning with her, such an altered Matilda that she appeared to Prudence in the guise of a stranger. Matilda had emerged since her marriage, and from being a mild reflection of her eldest sister, reflected now Mr Jones quite brightly and unconsciously. She echoed him in a feminine note, and quoted him with unintentional inaccuracy, but with sufficient likeness to recall the original with unpleasant vividness to Prudence's mind. Usually Mr Jones was too busy to accompany her.

"The vicar leaves so much to him," Mrs Jones explained. "Ernest hopes to move from Wortheton shortly."

"I understood that he was greatly attached to his work here," Prudence said. "He likes the factory and the people."

"He has hopes of a living," Matilda confided, lowering her voice.

"Oh, a living! That's another matter. You'll be quite important."

Matilda looked a little doubtful.

"It's a very poor living," she confessed, "even if he succeeds in obtaining it. No clergyman without private means could accept it."

"I see." Prudence did see, very clearly. She smiled suddenly. "How grateful he must feel to you," she added.

Matilda resented this very much in the manner Prudence decided in which Mr Jones would have resented it.

"That matters only in regard to this particular living," she said.

"Ernest would succeed in any case; he is so clever."

Prudence's accident, with the unfortunate complication which had effected Major Stotford's entry upon the scene, was used by Agatha, backed by brother William, as a sufficient reason against future cycling. Agatha went to an immense amount of trouble in her efforts to gain her father's veto against Prudence riding again. She persuaded him to get rid of the bicycle as the surest means of avoiding fresh misadventures; and rendered him so nervous with her gloomy forebodings that he did consent to part with the bicycle; but he reserved his veto against riding until he saw how Prudence viewed a possible prohibition.

He could not deny her pleasure merely because the idea of her riding made him nervous. Bobby had met with accidents when he first cycled; but it never had been suggested that Bobby should give up riding from a fear he might break his neck.

The damaged cycle was disposed of; William saw to that. Agatha undertook to inform her sister; she also sought to prevail with her to give up the exercise. She enlarged upon her father's anxiety, so injurious in the case of a man of his years, and pointed out to Prudence that duty demanded this sacrifice of her pleasure to his anxious love.

Prudence heard her out in silence, a stony silence which betrayed nothing of the rage that burned within her breast. With the finish of the oration her chin tilted aggressively.

"This is your doing," she said.

"It is father's wish," Agatha replied. "The bicycle was sold by his orders."

"Oh!" Prudence exclaimed, with a gesture of impatience. "I know.

What's the good of talking? I am sick of all this pretence of anxiety.

You hate me to have any enjoyment. You never rest--you never have rested, from seeking to make my life colourless and dull. You are satisfied only when you keep me sewing, or working in the parish. Well, I won't sew any more--for fear I p.r.i.c.k my fingers, and I won't work in the parish either from a nervous dread of having my morals contaminated.

If I can't do the things I like, I won't do the things I don't like either."

Miss Agatha's anger, if more controlled, was every whit as great as Prudence's. She gazed down upon her sister where she lay upon the sofa with eyes of cold dislike. Always they had been antagonistic. She had resented her father's second marriage bitterly, and had disliked his young wife: the earlier resentment, and the dislike for Prudence's mother, influenced her largely in her antagonism towards the child of the marriage, the child who was dearer to their father than any of his other children, and who was so unlike the rest. But she had, according to her own view, conscientiously done her duty by her young sister: the accusation of jealous injustice stung her; she felt that she had not merited that.

"You are wicked and ungrateful," she said. "You display a great want of control, and an unchristian spirit. I hope that later, when you have given yourself time to reflect, you will regret what you have said. I confess I don't understand you."

"No," Prudence rejoined. "You never have understood me. I don't suppose you ever will."

"You are not," Miss Agatha answered shortly, "so complex as you imagine."

Having nothing further to say, and feeling irritated by the laugh with which her rebuke was received, she closed the interview by leaving the room.

But the matter was not ended. Prudence had no intention of allowing it to rest there. She meant to have it out with her father. He had given the bicycle to her; he had no right to dispose of it without consulting her. The business of having it out with him in private was not easy of accomplishment; she seldom saw him alone, and pride restrained her from broaching the subject before the others. Matters were complicated by the arrival of Mr Edward Morgan, who, to Prudence's secret disappointment, came himself on his firm's business instead of sending a subordinate. Prudence had very vividly in her memory that former occasion when Steele visited Wortheton. She recalled their different meetings, few in number but strangely pleasant and familiar; recalled too the stolen interview with Steele under her window. She longed to speak of him to Mr Morgan; but self-consciousness tied her tongue and made mention of his name too difficult. She waited in the hope that Mr Morgan would allude to the young man's visit. But Mr Morgan was not accommodating. He had as a matter of fact almost forgotten Steele's existence, had entirely forgotten that visit of Steele's to Wortheton over a year ago. Steele had left Morgan Bros, shortly afterwards and gone abroad: that, so far as Edward Morgan's interest in him was concerned, was the finish.

It became plain to Prudence, and to the members of Prudence's family, as the days pa.s.sed and Mr Morgan showed no haste to depart, that he was becoming more than ordinarily interested in herself. He had known her for years. As a child she had delighted him; as a girl he had found her amusing; but the woman in her came as a startling revelation, and carried this middle-aged and rather serious-minded business man out of his immense abstractions and his rather c.u.mbersome habit of reserve.

He became surprisingly alert and attentive to Prudence's whims. He was quick to lend a hand when she left her sofa; and he sat beside the sofa in the evenings, and played chess with her, and taught her card games.

William's amiable efforts to draw him into conversation with himself, or to entice him into the library, met with no encouragement.

"It's dull for your sister, not being able to get about," he explained.

"We've got to amuse her."

He did amuse her; and he earned her grat.i.tude at the same time. It was a new and agreeable experience to be considered first and consulted deferentially and made to feel oneself of some importance. He bought her chocolates and books, books such as Miss Agatha did not approve of, and which Prudence read with avidity. She shared her chocolates, but she kept the books to herself.

"If you only knew what pleasure you give me," she said, on receiving a volume. And Mr Morgan, looking pleased, answered quietly:

"That's what I want to give you--pleasure."

The next day he gave her another book.

"I don't read novels myself," he explained. "But I demand the best, and place myself unreservedly in the bookseller's hands. Generally they know what is worth reading."

Prudence confided in him her trouble over the cycling veto, antic.i.p.ating sympathy, and was disappointed in him because he sided with the family in their objection to her riding. He did not approve of cycling for ladies, he said. That struck her as a very antiquated prejudice.

Cycling for women was so general until motoring became more popular.

"If father would give me a car," she said, "I should prefer it."

"Better have a pony carriage," he advised, "if you intend driving it yourself. Safer and pleasanter, really."

"How stodgy!" she said, and laughed. "That's much too slow."

It was regrettable, she reflected, that he was so elderly; and she wondered what he had been like as a young man, and why he had never married.

The answer to that question was that, until he met her as a woman, he had never known love. He knew it now. And he recognised it for the one pa.s.sion of his life--a disturbing pa.s.sion on account of the disparity in their ages. This disparity he recognised as a barrier, but a barrier which might be overcome. It is a barrier which many people surmount and not always unsuccessfully. None the less the undertaking is attended with risks, and the risks are worthy of consideration. The ideal marriage is based on equality in essential things. Contemporaneous ideas and sentiments lend themselves most readily to sympathy. Without sympathy and understanding a perfect relationship cannot exist. The individual of forty who fails to recognise this fact deserves no compa.s.sion when he strikes the rocks ahead.