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.