"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.

CHAPTER NINE.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 embarra.s.sment 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 canva.s.ses 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.serted, 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 hara.s.sed and the Easter offering had proved disappointing, when he gazed upon this comfortable a.s.set lining his walls and decided that if Providence saw fit to raze his dwelling to the ground he would bear his loss with Christian fort.i.tude 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 st.u.r.dier sisters of a busier atmosphere as uns.e.xed 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 surrept.i.tiously! The curate was horrified.

"You are joking surely?" he said.

"Not much of a joke, when I have to supply the f.a.gs." 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 a.s.s, 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 quant.i.ty.

"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 emanc.i.p.ation."

"Thank you." Prudence's small chin was elevated, her lip curled disdainfully. "I shall contrive my own emanc.i.p.ation," 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 a.s.sured it would not be Prudence.

She would contrive her emanc.i.p.ation 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.