Chapter Twenty Four.
On the morning that Edward Morgan left Wortheton it was arranged that Prudence should drive with him to the junction and see the train off. It was never clear to Prudence with whom the idea originated; it certainly did not emanate from her own brain. She was even a little embarrassed at the thought of the four-mile drive with her heavily coated and bemuffled fiancé, and the prospective ordeal of standing by the door of his compartment during those exasperating, interminable minutes before the starting of the train.
She came downstairs into the hall dressed for the drive in a navy costume which accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure to discover Mr Morgan winding his many wraps about him, and talking cheerfully with her father and sisters, who were gathered together to see him off.
He paused in the business of buttoning his coat to inquire anxiously if she were sufficiently warmly clad for the day, which was bright and cold, with a touch of December frost in the air. She replied carelessly that she did not feel cold; and Mr Graynor, with his arm about her shoulders, remarked thoughtlessly:
“Young blood, Morgan, defies the weather.”
“I think Prudence should wear a fur about her throat,” Agatha said. “It would look more suitable.”
Mary was despatched forthwith to fetch the unwanted addition, which, when it appeared, Mr Morgan insisted on placing round her shoulders. Prudence took her seat in the carriage, feeling oppressed with the warmth of the sable and the confined heated atmosphere of the artificially warmed brougham, with its windows carefully closed against the cold clear air. She dragged at the fur impatiently.
“I must take it off,” she said. “I feel stifled.”
“All right,” he acquiesced, and passed his arm round her waist in a clumsy caress. “I’ll keep you warm. Comfy, eh?”
She smiled at him a little nervously.
“You are just a mountain of clothes,” she said.
During the long drive Mr Morgan kept his arm about her, and held her so closely that Prudence felt suffocated. She proposed letting down the window part way; but Mr Morgan showed such alarm at the idea that she did not persist.
“You don’t understand the risk,” he said. “This winter travelling... It’s how people contract pneumonia, risking chills through open windows. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. It’s time I took a hand at it. I’m going to take great care of you, little girl,—all my life. Open windows!—no! This open-air craze is the cause of most of the ills of life.”
Prudence laughed.
“I understood it was the cure for them,” she replied. “I live in the open air—and sleep in it.”
“Sleep in it!” he ejaculated in horrified accents.
“Well, not actually that,” she said; “but with the bedroom window wide—always.”
He stared at her. He had never supposed that any one, save those undergoing the outrageous experiment of the new-fangled open-air cure, which he considered stark madness, slept with open windows in the winter. His own windows were always carefully secured and heavily curtained. Occasionally, during the very warm summer months, he allowed an inch at the top to remain open for purposes of ventilation.
“You will grow wiser as you grow older,” he said, and determined that on that point anyhow he would have his own way.
It was a relief to Prudence when they arrived at the station. She walked on to the platform, declining to accompany Mr Morgan to the booking-office while he procured his ticket. She wanted to fill her lungs with fresh air before the further ordeal of final leave-taking; and she wanted for a few minutes to be rid of his kindly presence, and the necessity of responding to his lover-like advances. It was all so dull and irksome; there was only one word which occurred to her as applicable to the situation, and that was stodgy. The stodginess of it was getting on her nerves.
When finally the big over-coated figure emerged upon the platform and came towards her Prudence felt a touch of compunction because she could not return the smiling gladness of his look with eyes which expressed a like pleasure at his approach; her own gaze was critical and entirely matter-of-fact.
His train was in. She opened the door of an empty compartment and stood beside it. He joined her, waited until the porter had placed his luggage on the rack, and dismissed him handsomely; then he motioned Prudence to get into the compartment, and followed her quickly and closed the door upon themselves.
“We’ve just time,” he said, “for a last good-bye.” And took her in his arms.
She had never felt so embarrassed in his presence before, perhaps because he had never before assumed so lover-like and determined an attitude. He tilted back her face and kissed her lips, and continued to hold and kiss her in this extravagant manner, despite the fact that people passed the carriage at intervals and stared in as they passed. Mr Morgan was indifferent to this manifest curiosity in his doings, and his broad figure blocked the middle window and screened Prudence from intrusive eyes.
“Oh!” she said, and attempted to withdraw from his embrace. “The train will be starting immediately. I had better get out.”
“Shy little girl!” he returned, and laughed joyously. “You’ve never been very free with your kisses, Prudence; and it will be a long time before I see you again. All right! You shall get out now. One good kiss before I let you go.”
He fairly hugged her. Prudence gave him a cool hasty peck on the cheek, slipped from his hold, and was out on the platform as soon as he opened the door. He closed the door and fastened it and leaned from the window to talk to her, holding her hand until the guard’s flag waved the signal for her release.
“Good-bye, my darling,” he called to her.
Prudence stood back and waved her hand to him, waved it gaily with a glad sense of relief. The last she saw of him as the train began to move out of the station was his grave face regarding her mournfully as he pulled up the window before settling down in his corner.
Prudence hurried out to the waiting carriage with her thoughts in a whirl. This business of being engaged was an altogether perplexing affair. She had not expected things to be like this somehow. She did not know quite what she had expected; but she had never imagined that the stolid Edward Morgan could assume the rôle of lover and confidently look for a similar response from her; she had believed he would maintain the more dignified attitude of a warm and affectionate friendliness throughout their engagement; and she felt vexed and cheated because he had disappointed her in this belief.
“It’s absurd,” she told herself, with her hot face turned to the sharp crisp air which came through the open window, “for him to imagine I am going to let him make love to me when I only want him to be nice and kind always.”
But she began dimly to apprehend that the absurdity was likely to go on.
Bobby came home for the Christmas holidays and talked to her seriously of the mistake she was making. He did not look forward to the prospect of coming home finally to find Prudence gone; and the next term at school was his last.
“Beastly rotten it will be here without you,” he remarked. “You might have waited, Prue, a little longer. You don’t love old Morgan, do you?”
That was a poser for Prudence.
“I’m fond of him,” she answered guardedly. “He’s kind, and generous. When I am married I shall be able to do as I like.”
“Rot!” he retorted. “It will mean simply exchanging one dulness for another. Then you’ll vary the dullness by falling in love with some one else, and there’ll be a scandal. I know you. You’ll never settle down to a stick-in-the-mud existence with old Morgan. And serve him jolly well right for being such an ass.”
Prudence regarded him with newly awakened interest, her expression slightly aggrieved.
“I had no idea you held such a low opinion of me,” she said.
He laughed.
“That’s human nature, old girl. If you intend to remain faithful to old Morgan you’ll not have to look at another man, because when the right man comes along you’ll know it; all the wedding rings in the world won’t keep you blind to facts. You chuck the silly old geyser,” he counselled in the inelegant phraseology he affected, “before you tie your life into a hopeless knot.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not so easy,” she said.
“They’d be down on you, of course. But I’d stand by you. We’d worry through.”
“I didn’t mean that.” She attempted explanations. “He’s so good and kind. You don’t understand. I’d feel the meanest thing on the face of the earth if I hurt him deliberately like that. And there isn’t any need. I want to marry him.”
“There’s no accounting for tastes, of course,” he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust.
The whole business of Prudence’s engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal space over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly.
The regular arrival of Mr Morgan’s weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William’s part, and a show of sly surreptitiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand.
The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as “Do we behold a billet doux?” or the murmured misquotation: “He sent a letter to his love.” And the bulky envelope would be passed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circumstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room.
“I can’t think how you stand it,” Bobby said once, when they were alone together. “If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I’d hit him.”
“I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me,” she answered. “William would vulgarise the most sacred thing.”
“You aren’t for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?” Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it.
“It’s one way out,” she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply.