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 class 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 quantity 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 principally
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 assumed 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 substitute. 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 ass, 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 bumper of champagne."
He filled her glass for her and one for himself.
"Cheer up," he cried, and raising his glass, 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 glass
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 assurance 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.
"If it is becoming, I don't believe you like it very well," she said.
"It makes you look old--perhaps that's why," he answered, and thought
with regret of the little girl who had given place to this tall and
gracious young woman.