III
In most people's lives there has come, at times, a sequence of days, full of deep calm without, full of inward strife and disturbance within.
The departure of Sir George Downing from Monk's Eype brought no peace to the two women to whom his presence there had been of moment. Mrs. Mote believed that his going heralded some immediate change in Mrs. Robinson's life; as far as possible she never let her mistress out of her sight, and the tarrying of Penelope from the villa an hour later than she had been expected to do, more than once threw the old nurse into a state of abject alarm. But Motey, during those still days, had lost the clue to her nursling's heart and mind.
For some days and nights after Downing had left her, and she had deliberately denied herself the solace of his letters, Mrs. Robinson was haunted by the thought—sometimes, it seemed, by the actual physical presence—of her first love, David Winfrith.
The memory of the hours spent by her with him at Shagisham constantly recurred, bringing a strange mingling of triumph and pain. How badly she had behaved to him that day! how treacherously! it might almost be said, how wantonly! And yet, at the time, during that moment when she had come close to him, and uttered those plaintive words which had so greatly moved him, Downing for the moment had been blotted out of her memory, so intense had been her desire to bring Winfrith back to his old allegiance.
Now, looking back at the little scene, she knew that she had succeeded in her wish—but at what a cost! And in a few weeks, she could now count the time by days, it would become the business of Winfrith's life to forget her. She knew how his narrow, upright mind would judge her action; with what utter condemnation and horror he would remember that conversation held between them, especially that portion of it which concerned Sir George Downing.
The knowledge that Winfrith must in time realize how ill she had used him that day brought keen humiliation in its train. 'I have been far more married to him than I was to poor Melancthon!' she cried half aloud to herself during one of the restless, unhappy nights, spent by her in thinking over the past and considering the present; and the thought had come into her mind: 'If I had married David, and then if he, instead of Melancthon, had died, how much happier I should be to-day than I am now!'
But even as she had uttered the words, and though believing herself to be the only creature awake in the still house, Penelope in the darkness had blushed violently, marvelling to find herself capable of having conceived so monstrous an idea.
It added to Mrs. Robinson's unrest and disquiet to know, as she had done through Wantley, now—oh, irony!—the only link between herself and Kingpole Farm, that Downing and Winfrith had met more than once. The interviews, or so she gathered from her cousin, had been, from Downing's point of view, satisfactory, but she longed feverishly to know more—to learn how David Winfrith had comported himself, what impression he had made on the older man.
It was significant that Penelope never gave a thought as to how Downing had impressed Winfrith. To her mind the matter could not admit of doubt—his personality must dominate all those with whom it came into contact.
Neither man knew of her relation, past or present, to the other. Still, she felt a longing to be assured that all had gone well between them. It added to her vague discomfort that Wantley, when telling her of what had been the first meeting between the two men, had given her a quick, penetrating look from out his half-closed eyes, and then had glanced away in obvious embarrassment.
Well, she would soon have to see Winfrith, for on him she counted—and she never saw the refinement of cruelty involved—to make smooth, as regarded certain material matters, the path before her.
Mrs. Robinson wished to begin her new life stripped, as far as might be possible, of all that must recall to her that which had come and gone since she was Penelope Wantley. She hoped that by giving up the great fortune left by her husband, she might blot out the recollection, not only of poor Melancthon Robinson, for whose memory she had ever felt a certain impatient kindliness, but also of David Winfrith, to whom her tie of late years had been so close, though of that she had told Downing nothing.
This intention of material renouncement had not been imagined in the first instance by Penelope—the Robinson fortune had cost her so little and had been hers so long! But Downing, during one of their first intimate talks and discussions concerning the future, had assumed that, on her return to England, she would at once begin arranging for its dispersion, and she had instantly accepted the idea, and felt herself eager to act on it. Indeed, she had said after a short pause, and it was the first time that she had mentioned to this new friend and still unfamiliar lover, the oldest of her friends and the most familiar of her lovers, 'David Winfrith will help me about it all.'
'The new Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs?' he had asked, and she had answered quickly: 'Yes, his father is one of the trustees of the Settlement, and he has helped me a good deal over it.'
No more had then been said, and since her return to England Mrs. Robinson had done nothing concerning the matter.
But now she must bestir herself, see Winfrith, and that soon. He knew all about her affairs, and she intended that he should help her to hasten the inevitable formalities. As to what she was to say to him, how to offer, to one so matter-of-fact and clear-headed, any adequate reason for her proposed action, she trusted to her wit and to his obtuseness. He had often found the courage to tell her that some adequate provision should be made by her for the Melancthon Settlement, and that, as matters stood, too much was left to her own conscience and her own generosity. Well, she would now remind him of his unpalatable advice, and tell him that at last she was about to follow it.
Penelope also found time, during the days which followed Downing's departure, to think of her mother—to wonder, with tightened throat, how Lady Wantley would meet the ordeal coming so swiftly to meet and overwhelm her.
Even with those whose thoughts, emotions, and consciences seemed channelled in the narrowest grooves it is often difficult to foresee with what eyes, both of the body and of the soul, they will view any given set of circumstances. Lady Wantley had always seemed extremely wide-minded, in some ways nebulously so; but this had been in a measure owing, so Penelope now reminded herself, to the fact that she had lived a life so spiritually detached from those about her.
Since her husband's death the mother's loyalty to her only child had been unswerving, and she seemed to have transferred to Penelope the unquestioning trust she had felt in Penelope's father.
Old friends, including Mr. Julius Gumberg, had ventured to remonstrate, and very seriously, when the lovely, impulsive girl had announced her sudden engagement, after a strangely short acquaintance, to Melancthon Robinson; but Lady Wantley—and her daughter, looking back in after years, had often wondered sorely, with a shuddering retrospection, that it had been so—had seemed quite content, quite certain, that her beloved child was being Divinely guided.
She had accepted, with the same curious detachment, the fact of Penelope's widowhood, and during the years which followed had encouraged her daughter to lead the life that suited her best, looking on with indulgent eyes while Mrs. Robinson enjoyed what she always later recalled as the 'Perdita' stage of her existence.
This had been the period when the girl-widow, released from the bondage into which she had entered so lightly, returned with intense zest to the delightful frivolous world of which she had seen but little before her marriage. For three or four years Mrs. Robinson enjoyed all that this delicately dissipated section of society could give her in the way of lightly balanced emotion and fresh sensation, and her mother had been apparently in no wise shocked or surprised that it should be so.
Then had followed a period of travel, when the young widow had seen something of a wider world. Finally, Penelope had settled down to the life of which we know—still, when she was in London, seeing something of the gay, light-hearted circle of men and women who had once surrounded 'Perdita' with the pleasant and not insincere flattery they are ever ready to bestow on any and every human being who for the moment interests and amuses them. Mrs. Robinson had retained her place, as it were her niche, among them. They still delighted in 'Perdita's' beauty, and in her exceptional artistic gift; also—and she would have felt indeed angered and disgusted had she known it—her reputed wealth, which was by no means so great as was rumoured, played its part in keeping up her prestige with a world which is apt to become at times painfully aware of the value of money.
On the other hand, David Winfrith was not loved among these men and women who considered high living thoroughly compatible with—indeed, an almost indispensable adjunct to—high thinking. Winfrith took a grim pleasure in acting as kill-joy to certain kinds of human sport to which they were addicted, and, worse than that, he positively bored them! And so, when Mrs. Robinson, having drawn him once more into her innocent, but none the less dangerous, toils, had again formed with him an absorbing and intimate friendship, certain of her acquaintances were no longer as eager to be with her as they had once been, and they considered that their dear 'Perdita' was making herself slightly ridiculous.
Another reason why Mrs. Robinson found it impossible to divine how her mother would regard what she was now on the eve of doing, was because the younger woman knew well how her father would have regarded such a union as that which she was contemplating.
Lord Wantley had not been in the habit, as his wife had always been, of looking at life and those about him with charitable ambiguity; and there was no doubt as to how the great philanthropist, who had been in his lifetime a pillar of the Low Church party, regarded the slightest deviation from the moral law. Penelope now remembered with great discomfort and prevision of pain that concerning actual matters of life and conduct Lady Wantley's 'doxy' had always been, so far as she knew it, her husband's 'doxy.'