"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.