Prudence slipped a cloak over her evening dress and softly unlatched her
bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing. There was no show of
hesitation in her movements now. She was doing an unwise thing; she
realised that perfectly; but something outside her volition urged her on
to the course she was taking. She wanted to see Philip Steele, to talk
with him once more--for the last time--talk with him uninterruptedly
with no fear of being seen or overheard, with the certainty of being
alone together, unsuspected, and with no explanations to be demanded by
any one concerning their doings. The freedom of the thought was like a
breath of fresh air in her lungs.
But there was need for caution too. She stood still for a second or so
on the landing, and listened with rapidly beating heart to the sounds
which disturbed the silence of the sleeping house. Every one had gone
to bed hours before; the lights were all extinguished; but the moonlight
shone at intervals brightly through the big windows, and illumined the
staircase and the hall below.
Prudence grasped the bannister and began the descent. Carefully though
she trod, the stairs creaked ominously as they never seemed to creak in
the daylight. And the great clock in the hall swung its heavy pendulum
noisily backwards and forwards. The familiar sound struck unfamiliarly
on her excited fancy; it seemed to her that the old clock was ticking a
warning, that it sought to rouse the house. Stealthily she crossed the
hall towards the drawing-room; the windows were easier to unfasten than
the barred and chained front door. To reach the drawing-room it was
necessary to pass the library; in doing so a sound from within the room
caught her attention, causing her heart to momentarily stop its beating.
Some one was moving about, treading with heavy cautiousness over the
carpet. She took a hurried run, heedless, in her fear of being
discovered there, whether her footsteps were audible or not, and gaining
the drawing-room door, slipped inside the room, and remained still,
watchful and alert.
The figure of a man emerged from the library, hesitated, and then
approached the hat-rack in the hall. Prudence watched the man while he
divested himself of his cap and overcoat and shoes before going quietly
upstairs, shoes in hand, to his room. She stood amazed and surveyed
these doings through the narrow opening of the partially closed door.
Intuition assured her that these mysterious proceedings were not
connected in any way with herself. Whatever it was that had taken
William abroad it could have no association with her concerns. William
had shown as furtively anxious a desire to avoid detection as she had;
he wore the air of a person engaged in nefarious practices. The hall
was not sufficiently light to reveal the expression of worried annoyance
on his face; she recognised only the familiar outline of his form, and
noted the secretiveness of his movements, and the care with which, in
his stockinged feet, he had crept upstairs.
Abruptly some words of Bobby's, uttered half jestingly years ago,
recurred in an illuminating flash across her mind: "You are taking it
too much for granted that the old boy's life is lived on the surface."
Perhaps after all William had a life apart from the factory and the
home, a life which he did not choose to reveal before the world. It was
strangely disconcerting to discover a person whom one had believed
hitherto to have walked always circumspectly through life, stealing
furtively about the house in the middle of the night like a burglar in
search of plunder.
In the surprise of this amazing development in the night's proceedings,
Prudence lost sight of her own fears and became wonderfully clear-headed
and reliant. The responsibility of her present action weighed less
heavily with her. She unfastened the window quietly, and without haste,
and stepped out on to the gravelled path. Immediately Steele was beside
her. It seemed to her little short of miraculous that William should be
abroad and have failed to discover his presence. Steele, as a matter of
fact, was alive to William's nocturnal prowling, and had concealed
himself from sight among the shrubs. He came forward now quickly and
with caution, took Prudence's hand, and led her from the garden.
"Some one's about," he said.
"William," she whispered back. "We only missed coming face to face in
the hall by the fraction of a second."
"I know." He gripped her hand tightly. "When I saw him pass round the
corner of the house I made sure you'd run into him. What's he doing,
anyway?"
"I don't know. He was so anxious to avoid detection that it was easy to
evade him." She laughed nervously. "I wonder what would have happened
if I had run into him?"
They passed through the gate side by side and came out on the moonlit
road. Steele drew his companion into the shadow of the wall and caught
her in his arms and kissed her.
"Oh, Prudence!" he said, and held her, scrutinising the shadowy outline
of her face, with the dear eyes, misty and starlike, gazing sadly back
into his.
She made a feeble effort to extricate herself from his embrace.
"I don't think we ought," she said, and found herself suddenly crying,
with her face pressed against his shoulder.
It was altogether wrong. She knew quite well that she ought not to be
there alone with him in the night. She had not allowed for his
following her to Wortheton. The shock of seeing him again unnerved her.
Steele soothed her and kissed the tears away. Then he started to walk
again, keeping his arm about her.
"We can't talk here," he said. "I've a lot of things to say to you.
We'll cut across the fields and sit on that jolly stile where I
discovered you picking primroses--was it really seven years ago? Seven
years! My God! Prudence, what a fool I was to believe you would wait
for me till that time."
"I didn't know..." she faltered.
"Never mind," he said quickly. "We won't speak of it. We'll wipe the
years out. You are here--with me. The other is just a dream. It was
yesterday that we picked primroses together, and spent the morning
mooning in the woods. You were so sweet, dear. I just loved you. I so
longed to kiss you that day. What a fool I was not to kiss you. I
remember so well how the sunlight played on your hair. I watched it,
and loved it--and you. Oh, my dear!"
"Don't!" Prudence urged him. "I can't bear it. And I ought not to
listen. You mustn't say these things to me--now."
"But I must," he said. And added: "Now! Why not now? It's my time.
As though it matters--anything. I'm not going to consider anything but
just my need of you. You are mine, by every right under the sun."
"No," she protested. "No! I can't let you say these things. I ought
not to have come out with you. Don't make me regret coming."
He was silent for a while after that; and she heard him breathing in
hard deep breaths as he walked close by her side. Many emotions stirred
him; passion and desire and resentment strove furiously within him,
making speech difficult, and defeating his effort after control. The
sense of loss, of defeat, weighed bitterly with him. He wanted her so,
wanted her with an intensity that resembled hunger--wanted her urgently,
savagely, with a crude, primitive, human want that was for setting aside
every consideration, every civilised law and code; that was for taking
the law into his own hands and making her see eye to eye with himself.
And she would not see things as he wished her to. She was difficult.
She was altogether too civilised.
He turned to her abruptly, and snapped the silence sharply by hurling an
unexpected question at her.
"Why did you come out?" he asked. "What did you expect?"
"I don't know," she answered, and drew a little away from him. "I think
I wanted to talk to you just once more before--we parted."
"Oh!" he said, with a short laugh. "So that was it? If that was your
only reason you shouldn't have come. I'm not intending to part--like
that anyhow. I wanted to talk to you on quite another subject. You
were stolen from me. I'm for stealing you back. I haven't any
scruples--of that kind Mine was the greater injury. I love you. You
love me. You can't deny that, Prudence."
Prudence made no attempt to deny it. She faced him fully in the
moonlight with her steady eyes lifted to his in saddened appeal. He
realised the quiet strength of her nature with a sense of impotent anger
in feeling it opposed to his will. There was going to be a fight in any
case and the issue appeared uncertain.
"Whether we love one another or not," she said, "we have to bear in mind
that I am married."
She was indeed more conscious of the fact at the moment than of any
other. She felt the necessity of impressing it upon him. But Steele
needed no reminding. The rage in his heart leapt up at her words like a
flame fed by some combustible fluid. He seized her roughly in his arms
and rained hot kisses upon her mouth.
"But you don't love him?" he breathed. "You don't love him?" He stared
at her as she pushed his face back, and laughed harshly. "God! Do you
suppose I'm not bearing it in mind?--every moment since I learned the
truth from your lips? It's like murder in my heart, that knowledge.
I'd like to kill him. I could have struck him in the face that night
when he came in and found us together, and took you away. And he
knows... He knows that only the legal tie binds you to him. I saw the
knowledge in his eyes. He doesn't trust you. If he knew that you were
out here, walking with me in the night, he would believe the worst.
He's that type of man. Nothing you could say would convince him
otherwise. They are made like that, those narrow, strictly conventional
people. They daren't trust their own emotions; they never allow them
full play. And they don't trust any one else. They judge others by
their own feeble standards. They aren't human--it's sawdust, not blood,
in their veins."
He helped her over the first stile and led her along the field-path and
so on to the next gate. Prudence was rather silent and worried and
somewhat dispirited. She left him to do the talking, and walked on like
a woman only half awake, to whom everything appears hazy and a little
unreal. And he unfolded his views to her on life, and love, and
happiness, and the right of the individual to independent action.
"It's not as though this business of marriage were a natural
institution," he argued; "it's purely artificial. When a man and a
woman are honestly in love they don't bother with that aspect of the
relationship. They just want one another. Marriage is merely a result
attendant on the natural impulse. I came home with the idea of marrying
you, and I find you no longer free. That fact maddens me; its fills me
with despair. But it doesn't alter the initial fact that I want you.
That desire is no less keen than before I heard of your marriage.
Prudence, dearest, be true to yourself. You love me. Come with me--
now. I came down here for that purpose--to take you away with me."
He pulled her down on the stile beside him and put his arm about her and
held her close to him. She did not repulse him. She felt strangely
little angry at what he said. She was too greatly moved to experience
the lesser emotions which a sense of outraged virtue might have called
forth at another time. She had hurt this man badly; and she felt too
sorry for him to resent in indignant terms the proposal which he made.
He wanted her, wanted her urgently; and they loved one another. Why had
she allowed the years to separate them so irrevocably?
"You don't answer," he said, and brought his face nearer to here and
looked her in the eyes. "You don't answer me."
His voice shook with hardly repressed passion; his whole form shook.
She felt the shoulder which pressed against her shoulder tremble, and
the hand which gripped hers trembled also, and was burning to the touch.
"You don't answer," he said again hoarsely.
"My dear," she said, "what is there to say?" And broke down again and
wept.