Imprudence Part 28

"You don't understand," she said, and clenched her hands on the chair arm, her face strained and weary and her eyes full of a humiliated appeal. "It's not the family. Their att.i.tude wouldn't matter. If I had only known! I thought you had forgotten, and I was so unhappy at home." Her head drooped suddenly; she hid her eyes from his gaze. "I can't tell you," she faltered. "I can't tell you."

He seized her hands almost roughly and held them in a grip which hurt.

His face, set and stern and paler than her own, seemed suddenly to have aged. His voice was hoa.r.s.e.

"You aren't going to tell me that you are married?" he said. "For G.o.d's sake, don't tell me that!"

Prudence did not answer, did not raise her head; she dared not meet his eyes. He loosened her hands abruptly and stood up.

"Some one's got before me," he said in odd constrained tones. "Is that it?"

He turned deliberately away, and remained rigid and outwardly composed, staring at a hideous old print on the wall, without consciously seeing what he looked at. Prudence stood up also, and approached him, a white-robed quiet figure, in the stillness of the dimly-lit room. She put one hand to her throat and nervously fingered the pearls which Edward Morgan had given her.

"Yes, I'm married," she said, "to Mr Morgan."

"That man!" He turned on her angrily. "He's old enough to be your father."

"My mother married a man much older than herself," she answered quietly.

"They were very happy."

He emitted a short hard laugh.

"So that's the end of my hopes," he said. "Fool that I was! I thought you cared for me."

She moved nearer to him, and something of her forced control left her in that moment of intense emotion. She laid a hand swiftly on his arm; and he read the despair and the longing in her saddened eyes.

"You know I cared," she said. "You know I care still. I didn't understand. I thought you had forgotten. I was not sure how much you really meant. You went away; and life was very difficult. I had to get away from it all--I had to. You had gone. I believed that I should never see you again. If I'd known you remembered, I would have borne with things; I would have waited all my life, if necessary, until you came back to me. And now you've come--and it's too late. It's too late."

He looked down at her long and steadily, with a hint of something in his eyes which she did not understand, which she instinctively feared. She put a hand before her eyes to shut out that look in his; and he seized the hand and dragged it aside and compelled her to meet his gaze.

"Look here," he said quickly. "We've got to meet and talk this matter out. We can't talk here. They'll miss you presently, and search for you."

They had missed her already. Mr Morgan was even then on his way to discover their retreat. He approached the door while Steele spoke.

Steele continued speaking rapidly and with vehement insistence.

"It's not going to end like this, you know. It can't. Now that I know you love me, I'm not reckoning anything else. Nothing else counts.

I'll win you, if I have to break every law under the sun. You are mine.

I'll have you, whoever stands in my way. Yours is no better than a forced marriage. You belong to me. You belonged to me first. I went abroad to make a home for you. I've done that. Now I've come back to fight for you--in a double sense. If I come through this war, you go back with me. I won't go without you. Think it over. I'll see you somehow, and learn your decision later. We'll bolt. Don't be frightened. It's a bit of a muddle, but it will all come right."

At which moment the door opened, and Mr Morgan, ruffled and large and important, with an air of refusing to see what was altogether painfully obvious, advanced with an exaggeration of dignity and offered Prudence his arm.

"Your partner is looking for you," he said. "You have overstayed the interval."

Prudence placed her hand on his sleeve, and, with her face averted from Steele, walked silently out of the room.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE.

The Edward Morgans left the dance early, at whose suggestion Prudence never remembered. She was quite willing to go home. The misery of meeting again Philip Steele after the lapse of years, of discovering that she loved him--that he loved her, had remained true to her memory always, was more than she could bear. The image of Steele filled her mind and so dominated her thoughts that she could not fix her attention on anything else.

She did not see him again. He left quietly soon after Edward Morgan led his wife away--disappearing as he had come, un.o.btrusively, without meeting his hostess, feeling unequal to facing her, and fearful of risking a further encounter with the girl whose memory he had cherished faithfully since the night he had stood under her window and caught a rose which she dropped down to him for a token at parting. The rose was in his possession still, and it was no more faded with the years, he reflected with bitterness, than his memory was in her fickle affections.

He felt angry with her, and in his anger he judged her harshly. He had thought of her so much, had imagined her pleasure at their meeting, had taken for granted that she would wait for him, confident of his return and of his love. And he came back to find her married--gone from her old place at the window, the setting in which he had pictured her during those five lonely years of work. He had sworn to take her back with him, sworn to have her in defiance of every law. He recalled the boast with a smile of grim irony. There was a suggestion of melodrama about it which struck him now as absurd. What, he wondered, had she thought of the boast--of him? She had remained so still and silent, with her half-averted face and an air of drooping sadness in her quiet pose. She loved him. In spite of his bitter resentment at her marriage, at her want of faith, deep down in his inner consciousness there remained the calm a.s.surance that her heart was his, would remain his, no matter what the years brought forth.

The Morgans exchanged scarcely a word during the drive home. But when they reached the house Mr Morgan followed his wife into the drawing-room with the air of a man who intends having things out. It was not the time for explanations. He would have displayed greater wisdom had he deferred the discussion to a more fitting occasion.

Prudence's nerves were all jarred. She had reached a stage of misery which rendered her desperate, and her husband's manner, conveying his sense of outraged pride and conscious authority, provoked her to a show of bitterness, which in calmer moments she deplored.

"That's the finish of all this dancing and merrymaking," he said rudely, and poured himself out a gla.s.s of water, which old Mrs Morgan's thought for their comfort had provided in chill readiness on a side table. "I have always felt that this frivolity was out of keeping with the seriousness of the times. Perhaps you will give me some explanation of your extraordinary behaviour. What is Steele to you? I saw there was something between you when you met. It was not difficult to see. Your manner attracted general attention. I won't have my wife make herself conspicuous with any man. Steele!"

He voiced the name with an oath, and banged down his gla.s.s so that the water spilled over on the polished table. Prudence watched him stonily, but without surprise, while he sopped up the water with his handkerchief. It was so characteristic of him to be careful in small matters even in a moment of great emotional strain.

"I am tired," she said, making the only appeal that presented itself to her mind whereby to avoid the discussion. "I would rather not talk about these things now."

"Tired!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed angrily. "You won't have to complain of that in future. I will see that you take more rest. And you _must_ talk of these things. I have every right to insist upon an explanation."

"Very well," she said, in quiet tones that should have warned him to desist. "But I think you are unwise. Mr Steele, when he met me to-night, had no idea that I was married; and, in the surprise of seeing him again, I suppose I betrayed my gladness. I did not mean to do that.

It was all so unexpected."

"But what is he to you?" Edward Morgan demanded. "Good G.o.d! can't you answer a plain question? What has there been between you and Steele in the past?"

Prudence turned away from him to conceal the quivering of her lips, but her voice was steady when she answered despite the wild beating of her heart.

"I loved him," she said simply, "and he loved me. There was that between us. But he went away, and I thought--he had forgotten."

A long silence fell between them, a heavy silence. In all his life Edward Morgan had never received such a blow to his pride as this. She had dealt him a blow before when she sought to break their engagement; but that was trifling as compared with this--this brazen confession of love for another man. She had never loved him--her husband. She had been in love with another man all these years.

"And yet you married me!" he said in a hard voice, snapping the silence abruptly.

Had she not been goaded past endurance, Prudence, would not have said what she did say; she was ashamed of it later. But his manner and his clumsy insistence irritated her into retorting.

"At least I tried to evade doing you that injury," she said.

His face became purple with anger. Nothing she could have planned to say could have enraged him more than that cutting reminder at such a time of her reluctance to become his wife.

"You did," he shouted, and smote the table beside which he stood so violently that the gla.s.ses on it jingled and the water was spilled again. This time he allowed it to remain; he appeared not to see it in his outburst of noisy pa.s.sion. "But you weren't honest with me even then. You concealed this thing from me deliberately. You deceived me.

I believed you were a simple-hearted girl whose love I could win with kindness. And I was kind to you. I have tried to be kind always-- though G.o.d knows! I received small return. Do you suppose I would have married you had you told me that you loved another man? I could feel some respect for you had you persisted in your refusal; I feel none for you now. It was an evil day for me when you married me."

"It was the one big mistake of my life," she answered, and turned and faced him fully, with blue eyes aflame with anger, her head lifted proudly, almost aggressively, her face expressing cold dislike. She had never loved Edward Morgan, but she had not until then actively disliked him. His bl.u.s.tering anger, and his ill-considered taunts repelled her.

"If you care to have a separation I am quite agreeable. I think we shall be happier apart."

"I don't doubt you would like that," he said brutally. "To be free to gallivant in your frivolous way at my expense, and under the protection of my name! I prefer to exercise full control over my wife. You are my wife, remember. Nothing's going to alter that. And since you bear my name I will see that you respect it. There's going to be no scandal in this family. Separation! So that's what you are after! Good G.o.d! I would sooner see you lying dead in your coffin than that you should disgrace the name of Morgan by dragging it into the courts."

She smiled coldly. His arrogant rhetoric recalled annoyingly William's pride in the Graynor Honour. They both seemed to fear these things were in jeopardy through her. The tissue-paper wrappings in which they preserved these qualities appeared to her as consistent as they were inadequate. There was a hollow ring in all this noisy talk. Respect was to her a personal attribute, which revealed itself daily in the commonplace round of homely things. She was not in the least concerned as to its chance of safe keeping in her possession.

"I'll go to bed," she said. "It isn't very profitable to stay here wrangling at this hour of night. And to-morrow I will go home. I want to get away. I am weary of everything."

"_This_ is your home," he said sharply. Prudence looked at him strangely.

"This has never been home to me," she replied. "It is your home. It is more your mother's home than mine. I have not even authority to order the meals, or direct the household."

"That's your own fault," he returned curtly. "You evinced no interest in these matters."