Imprudence

In the big ugly morning-room at Court Heatherleigh six people sat engaged with different degrees of interest on six ugly pieces of coarse material which were being fashioned into serviceable garments for the poor. The poor were an institution in Wortheton and so was charity: both, like the big chimneys dominating the town, were things of usage; all were in a sense interdependent, and had their headquarters at Court Heatherleigh, which was the big house and belonged to the owner of the big chimneys--the owner of most things in Wortheton, from the ugly brick cottages in which his employees dwelt to, one might say, the employees themselves. The Trades Unions had not penetrated the select privacy of Wortheton as yet. If occasionally a voice was uplifted in discontent and hinted at these things, it was speedily silenced; and life flowed on tranquilly as it had before the grumbler raised his foolish protest; and his place knew him no more. But each whisper was as a small stone flung in a mill stream; and stones follow the law of aggregation till eventually they dam the stream.

The six busy workers in Court Heatherleigh morning-room were the six daughters of Mr Graynor, and their ages ranged from somewhere about fifty to eighteen. Besides the daughters, two sons had swelled the family. The younger of these had married indiscreetly, and died indiscreetly with his wife somewhere abroad, bequeathing an indiscreet son to his father because he had nothing else to leave behind him, having departed from the family tradition that the end and aim of life is to acquire wealth. He had acquired nothing beyond a wife and son; but he had loved both these, and been beloved in turn, so that, according to his views, he had prospered well: according to his brother William's views, he had been a fool.

William carried on the family traditions, and would eventually succeed his father as owner of the big chimneys, the family mansion, and the guardianship of his numerous sisters. He was not married. No one expected him to marry; he did not expect it of himself. No woman worthy of William's attention had ever adventured across his path.

Of the sisters, Miss Agatha Graynor, who was the eldest of the family by several years, took the lead in all things, social and domestic, and ruled the household with a despotism that not even old Mr Graynor had been known to question; though his wives--he had married twice--had never been permitted such absolute authority. In his youth he had been as despotic as Agatha; but he was an old man now, and weary; and his daughter overawed him. The one being to whom he clung was his young daughter. Prudence, the only child of his second wife; and after Prudence, his scapegrace grandson, Bobby, then at college, held possibly the strongest place in his tired affections.

They were two very human young people, Prudence and Bobby, with a contempt for the Graynor traditions, and lacking the Graynor pride and self-complacency, and all the other creditable characteristics of an old, influential, commercial stock that had owned the greater part of Wortheton for generations, and had come to regard themselves by reason of local homage as personages of high importance in the land.

Prudence made one of the working party from a matter of compulsion; charity of that nature bored her, and she hated sewing. Since leaving school, where her happiest years had been spent, Miss Agatha had imposed many irksome duties as a corrective for idleness: a healthy youthful desire for pleasure and recreation affronted her; if she had experienced such desires in her own youth she had forgotten them: possibly she had not experienced them; people are born deficient in various respects and in different degrees. Miss Agatha had always been Good: her young half-sister was lacking in piety, and suffered from warm human impulses which not infrequently led her into trouble and subsequent disgrace. Also Prudence was pretty; the other five Miss Graynors were plain.

The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pass through the coarse material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence. Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke.

"Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning."

She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and passed it down the line to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence's blue eyes snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn, dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game, thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to assert, why his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a visitor, and Prudence's delinquencies were forgotten in the business of welcoming the arrival.

"My dear Mrs North!" Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose hastily and shook hands with the vicar's wife, who, warm and a little flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves--all save Prudence; she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the first favourable moment.

"Such an astonishing thing has happened," Mrs North was saying breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied needles. "That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in her mother's house."

Miss Agatha's thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes.

"Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, and Prudence, leave the room," she said.

Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence's more alert retreat. When they had passed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha turned apologetically to her friend.

"Of course," she explained earnestly, "I couldn't discuss that subject in front of the girls."

Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously acquiesced.

"It was a little indiscreet of me," she allowed. "But I was never so astounded in my life. And the girl's mother actually defends her. She talks about `her own flesh and blood.' ... As though that makes any difference! I knew you would be shocked. It's such a scandal in the place. And to come back... where every one knows!"

"She can't stay," said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as it passed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked fixedly at the vicar's wife. "We can't tolerate such a scandal in Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of thing... it... We must set our faces against it."