Читать книгу Imprudence - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 7

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“I want,” Prudence said in her soft appealing voice, “the sum of fifty pounds.”

Mr Graynor looked not unnaturally amazed. Prudence’s wants had never assumed such extravagant proportions before: it puzzled him to understand what she could possibly require to necessitate the demand for so large a sum, and, because he had only a few hours earlier refused to listen to another outrageous request of hers and told her a little harshly that there were matters with which she should not concern herself, he hoped, despite a general reluctance to part with money, that this further demand was one he could treat more generously. He put a large shaky hand on her curls and tilted her head back and smiled into the wide blue eyes.

“Fifty pounds, eh?” he said. “That’s a big sum, Prue.”

“You’ll let me have it?” she asked, and clasped her hands round his arm.

“That depends,” he answered, “on what you want it for.”

“I’d rather not tell that,” she said slowly.

Mr Graynor removed his hand. Secrecy savoured of a want of candour; he could not allow that.

“I can’t give you a cheque without knowing what you purpose spending the money on,” he said firmly. “It’s a big sum for a little girl—even for finery. You mustn’t develop extravagance.”

Prudence braced herself and faced him a little defiantly.

“It’s not for me,” she said. “I don’t need anything. But you are sending the Clapps away, and they’ve nowhere to go and no money. That isn’t just; it’s—wicked.”

His face hardened while he listened to this sweeping indictment, and he turned away from her with an air of sharp annoyance.

“You are extremely foolish, Prudence,” he said. “Leave these matters which you are not able to understand to your elders. I forbid you to mention this subject again.”

Prudence was defeated but not subdued. She accepted the defeat, but she had her retort ready.

“Very well,” she said, as she moved towards the door. “Then I’ll just pray hard night and morning that God will befriend Bessie Clapp. When you see me kneeling I hope you will remember.”

Then she was gone; and the old man, staring with his dim eyes at the closed door, reflected uncomfortably that Prudence was growing strangely annoying. She was, as he also recognised, growing extraordinarily like her mother. Of course, he told himself, unconsciously self-deceiving, he had always intended to see that these people were sufficiently provided for. It was not necessary for his youngest daughter to point out his duty to him.

So Prudence was not really defeated; though she was denied the satisfaction of knowing of her victory. Mr Graynor’s subsequent generosity amazed the recipients no more than it amazed his eldest daughter and William, both of whom entirely disapproved of a munificence they deemed unnecessary and an encouragement in wrong-doing. But old Mr Graynor, furtively watching Prudence’s golden head bowed over her clasped hands during the evening prayers, bowed in almost aggressive supplication, knew that he could not view it thus night and morning with a deaf ear turned to her appeal for succour for the friendless. The good-night kiss he gave her was, had she but known it, an answer to her prayer.

Prudence retired to her room that night in a state of antagonism towards every one. She knew herself to be in disgrace. Agatha treated her with chill disapproval, and William ignored her. It was William’s invariable rule to show his displeasure by treating the object thereof as though she did not exist. Prudence had been ignored before: she did not resent this; it amused her. William, when he attempted to be dignified, was altogether ridiculous.

He maintained the dignified rôle throughout the next day, and laboured under the delusion that his pompous disregard was impressing his young sister with a proper sense of the enormity of her indiscretion; a belief which suffered a rude awakening at luncheon, when Prudence threw off her ill-humour and emerged from the large silences in which she had enwrapped herself to participate in the unenlivening talk carried on fragmentally by the various members of the family. She had watched brother William, who was a big man and corpulent of build, as she had watched him for many years, with an amazed dumb criticism in her look, unfasten with big deliberate fingers the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat and the top button of his trousers on sitting down to lunch for his greater convenience and the more thorough enjoyment of his food. He performed this office regularly, with the formal solemnity of an important rite. Prudence had come to regard it as William’s grace before meals. She sometimes wondered what ran through the serious minds of the portly whiskered butler and the elderly parlourmaid, who ministered to the family needs under his direction, daily privileged to witness this public tribute of respect to the good things of life. Perhaps they regarded these manifestations of epicurean nicety, as Agatha regarded them, as becoming in William as a man and the prospective head of the house of Graynor. It was an inconsistency in Agatha’s prudish nature to consider that men might do things which could not be tolerated in the other sex, and that whatever William did must of necessity be seemly. In Prudence’s opinion, William’s table manners were gluttonous and disgusting.

“A man called on me at the works this morning,” William observed, addressing his father, who latterly stayed much at home and left the control and worry of business largely to his son. “He had a letter of introduction from Morgan. I asked him to call at the house this afternoon in time for tea. His name’s Steele.”

“You should have asked him to dine,” Mr Graynor said.

“Time enough for that after you have seen him,” William returned, and for some reason, which he would have been at a loss to explain, his gaze travelled in Prudence’s direction and rested for the space of a second on her listening, eager face.

“I’ve seen him,” Prudence said. “He’s quite young.”

William raised his eyebrows; Miss Agatha’s head came round with a jerk; several other heads jerked round likewise, and every one looked at Prudence.

“I saw him from my window,” Prudence explained, unabashed by the general interest, “striding down the hill. His back looked nice.”

William sought to ignore the interruption and the interrupter, and addressed himself exclusively to his father. But it was useless. Prudence, having broken her silence, refused to be excluded from the conversation, and expressed the flippant desire to see the face belonging to the nice-looking back.

Had it been possible to banish her young sister to her bedroom, Agatha would have done so; but Prudence lately had shown a growing tendency to break away from control, and she was wise enough not to put a further strain on the weakening strands of her already frayed authority. Therefore Prudence was in the drawing-room when the stranger called—indeed, she was the only person present so far as he was concerned. He paid her far more attention than Miss Agatha deemed necessary or in good taste. The manners of youth, as each generation which has left youth behind unfailingly recognises, are sadly deteriorating.

As for Prudence, she admired the front view as greatly as she had admired the back. Mr Philip Steele was eminently well-favoured. Prudence considered him handsome. She had met so few men that anyone who escaped middle-age and stoutness appeared to her in the guise of masculine perfection, provided only that his face was strong. Steele’s face matched with his name, sharp, clear-cut, firm of jaw. And he was clean-shaven. William wore a beard. Hair on a man’s face was patriarchal.

Tea was brought in by the butler and deposited on a table in front of Miss Agatha; and the young man, seizing the opportunity when his hostess’ attention was thus engaged, demanded of Prudence in a confidential undertone:

“I say, wasn’t it you I saw leaning from a window two nights ago?”

“Yes.” Prudence looked at him with a frank laugh in her blue eyes. “I saw you pass. It must have been gorgeous, walking down there in the moonlight.”

“It was pleasant,” he said without enthusiasm, and added with a return smile: “I was thinking how jolly it must be up there where you were, looking out on the quiet fragrance of the night.”

And then they both laughed happily, though there was manifestly nothing to laugh at. Miss Agatha, disapproving of this mutual enjoyment, called Prudence away to make the tea; whereupon the young man followed her to the tea-table and hovered over it, wishful to be of use.

“One teaspoonful for each person and one for the teapot,” Miss Agatha directed precisely; and the visitor wondered with resentment why on earth the old girl didn’t make the brew herself.

“I hope you’ll like our tea,” she said, when, having handed round the various cups, Steele returned to the table for his own. “We give eighteenpence a pound for it. We drink it for an example.”

She did not explain why, nor for whom, the example was deemed necessary. Steele sipped his tea, and tried not to looked amazed, and assured her that it was jolly good. Then he wandered back to Prudence’s side, openly curious as to her relationship in regard to the others.

“I say,” he murmured—“don’t think me rude—but where do you come in?”

Prudence scrutinised him for a perplexed moment, at a loss for his meaning; whereupon he suggested with a smile:

“Niece, perhaps?”

“Oh!” The gay little laugh, which so irritated Miss Agatha’s ears, broke from her lips once more. “I see. No. I’m Mr Graynor’s youngest daughter... by his second marriage,” she added, with just a hint of malice in her voice.

The young man grasped the position.

“I’m getting hold of it,” he said, a sympathetic light in his eyes. “The thing puzzled me. I couldn’t place you. You don’t seem to fit in.” Then he said with a kind of inspiration, as though the idea had suddenly presented itself to him: “You don’t fit in, you know. Your place rightly is leaning out of a window. That’s how I shall always picture you.”

It was an extraordinary talk, and altogether delightful. Prudence enjoyed his visit tremendously. But when he left, Miss Agatha reproved her sharply for pushing herself forward and monopolising the visitor.

“He monopolised me,” Prudence contended. “I retired into corners, and he followed.”

“You made yourself conspicuous,” Miss Agatha said, “and behaved altogether in a forward and unseemly manner.”

Prudence had occasion later to regret this success in which she had triumphed at the time; Mr Philip Steele had not succeeded in winning general favour, and so never received the invitation to dine. He did not possess sufficient nerve to present himself at the house uninvited, or he would have called again for the pleasure of meeting Prudence. He did meet her, but the encounter was accidental. It was all the more enjoyable on that account. They met where there were neither walls nor interruptions, where they could talk without reserve and laugh unrestrainedly, with only the mating birds to hear them, and the soft wind to catch up and echo their mirth in the tall trees overhead—a joyous meeting, with the springtime harmony about them, and the springtime gladness in their hearts and eyes.