The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

III

As Wantley walked along the terrace in front of the villa, past the opened windows of the Picture Room, he saw Lady Wantley sitting in her usual place. But there was about her figure, especially about her hands, which clasped and unclasped themselves across her knee, an unusual look of tension and emotion.

Wantley turned, and drew nearer to the window which seemed to frame the still graceful figure. But she remained quite unconscious that she was being watched. He saw that her lips were moving; he heard her speaking, as she so often did, to herself; and there came to him the conviction that she had been down to the Beach Room, that she had seen Downing, that she had made to him an appeal foredoomed to failure.

A keen desire to know whether he guessed truly, and, if so, to know what had actually taken place, warred for a moment with the young man's horror of a scene, and especially of a scene with Lady Wantley in one of her strange moods.

Suddenly she raised her voice, and he heard clearly the words, uttered in low, intense tones, and as if in answer to an invisible questioner: 'But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour to slay him with guile, thou shalt take him from My altar, that he may die.'

'It must have been horribly painful,' said the listener to himself. He began to pity Downing.

Familiarity had bred in Wantley, not contempt, but a certain indulgent pity not far removed from contempt, for what he and Mrs. Robinson, seeing eye to eye in this one matter, regarded as Lady Wantley's peculiar and slightly absurd religious vagaries. Dimly aware of this attitude, of this lack of respect for what were to herself vital truths, Lady Wantley, when in their presence, exercised greater self-control than either of them ever guessed.

But now, for the moment, she was in no condition to restrain herself; and though, as he opened the door of the Picture Room, she looked round for a moment, she still continued talking aloud in apparently eager argument with some unseen presence. 'Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.'

She spoke with increasing excitement, and with what seemed to the hearer a strange exultation.

He stopped short, and, retracing his footsteps, closed the door. It had always been tacitly agreed between himself and his cousin that Penelope's household should hear as little as was possible of Lady Wantley in these, her wilder moods.

Again he went towards her. As he did so, she stood up and advanced to meet him. Her pale face was on a level with his own; her grey eyes were dilated. Something had stirred her far more deeply than she was wont to be stirred by material things. She looked, Wantley thought, inspired, exhilarated, as one might look on emerging triumphantly from some awful ordeal.

As he gazed at her there came to him the hope, the almost incredulous hope, that she—the mother—had prevailed; that her words, even if winged with what seemed madness, had been so eloquent as to convince Downing that what he was about to do was an evil thing, one out of which no good could come to the woman he loved.

'Then you have seen him?' he asked in a low voice, and, as he spoke, he took Lady Wantley's hand in his own.

She made a scarcely perceptible movement of assent. 'Thy right hand, O Lord, has become righteous in power. Thy right hand, O Lord, has dashed in pieces the enemy.'

Her voice faltered, and her tall figure swayed forward.

'Sit down,' he said quickly, 'and tell me what happened. Were you able to make any impression on his mind?'

But as she sank back into her chair she answered vaguely, and her head fell forward on her breast. 'You ask me what happened?' She waited a moment, and then added, with what seemed a cry: 'He said, "The woman tempts me, and I shall eat!"'

'I do not think that he can have said that to you,' said Wantley gently. 'Think again. Try and remember exactly what he did say.'

'It was tantamount to that,' she answered, lifting her head and looking at him fixedly. 'He—he admitted I spoke the truth, yet declared he owed himself to her.' She hesitated, then whispered: 'I warned him of his way, he took no heed, he died in his iniquity, and his blood will not be required of mine hand.'

Even before she had uttered these last words an awful suspicion, a sick dread, had forced itself on Wantley's mind. He passed his hand over his face, afraid lest she should see written there his fear—indeed, his all but knowledge—of what she had done.

There was but a moment to make up his mind what he should say and what he should do. On his present action much might depend. In any case, he must soothe her, restore her to calmness. And so, 'We must now think,' he said authoritatively, 'of Penelope.' He waited a moment, and then repeated again the one word, 'Penelope.'

Lady Wantley's mouth quivered for the first time, and her eyes contracted with a look of suffering.

But he did not give her time to speak. 'No one knows—no one must know, for the sake of Penelope.'

Slowly she bent her head in assent, and he went on, in a low, warning voice. 'If you say a word—I mean of what has just taken place—the truth concerning Penelope and Sir George Downing will become known to all men.' Half unconsciously Wantley adapted the phraseology likely to reach most bindingly the over-excited, distraught brain of the woman over whose figure he was bending, into whose face he was gazing so searchingly.

He felt every moment to be precious, to be big with hideous possibilities, but he feared to leave her—feared to go before he felt quite sure he had made her understand that her daughter's reputation was bound to suffer, if she—Lady Wantley—in any way imperilled or incriminated herself.

'You will wait here, will you not, till I come to you?' he said anxiously. 'And if you see anyone, you will not speak? you will remain absolutely silent, for the sake of your daughter, of poor Penelope?'

He waited until she had again bent her head in assent, and then turned and left her, passing through the window on to the terrace, and so swiftly on, down through the wood, to the rough track leading to the shore.

As he jumped down on to the beach, both feet sinking deeply through the soft dry sand above the water-line, he paused a moment, and, looking round him, felt suddenly reassured, ashamed of the unreasoning dread which had come over him when listening to Lady Wantley's strange, wildly-uttered words.

The tide was only just beginning to turn, and the sea, in gentle mood, came and went to within a few feet of the Beach Room, of which the blank wall jutted out on to his right.

The absolute peace and quietude which lay about him soothed Wantley's nerves, and he walked round, below the wide-open window, of which the sill was just on a level with his head, with steady feet.

Then, taking up a stone, he knocked on the heavy wooden door, half expecting, wholly hoping, to hear in immediate response a deep-toned 'Come in.' But there came no such answer, and once more he knocked more loudly; he waited a few moments while vague fear again assailed him, and then, turning the handle, he walked into the Beach Room.

At first he only saw that the chair, set before the broad table covered with papers, was without an occupant. But gradually, and not quite at once—or so it seemed to him looking back—he became aware that in the shadow of the table, stretched angularly across the floor, lay Sir George Downing, dead.

Standing there, with the horror of what he saw growing on him, Wantley had not a moment of real doubt, of wild hope that this might not be death. Still, as he knelt down and brought himself to touch, to move, that which lay there, he suddenly became aware of a fact which would have laid any such doubt, for above Downing's right ear was a wound——

With a quick sigh Wantley, trembling, rose from his knees. In spite of himself, his mind vividly reconstituted the scene which must have taken place. First, the sudden appearance of the unexpected, unwelcome visitor; then the vision of Downing, with his old-fashioned courtesy, giving up the more comfortable chair, while he himself took that in which he, Wantley, had sat a short week ago; finally—the corner of the wide table only separating the two adversaries—after the exchange of a very few words, slow, decisive, on either side—the fatal shot.

The revolver which Wantley remembered having seen pinning the map of Persia to the table, now lay as it had doubtless fallen from the delicate, steady hand which had believed itself divinely guided to accomplish its work of death.

Even now he found time to realize with poignant pain, and yet with a certain relief, that such a man as had once been he now lying stretched out at his feet could certainly, had he cared to do so, have stayed, or at least deviated, the course of the weapon, and later on this knowledge brought Wantley comfort.

But he had no leisure now to give to such reasoning and, slipping the bolt in the door, he again stooped over the dead man.

What he was about to do was intolerably repugnant to him, and as, after a moment's pause, he thrust his hand into the old-fashioned pockets, turned back the coat, sought eagerly for what it was so essential he should find, he felt the sweat break out all over his body. But, to his dismay, there seemed to be no keys, either loose in the various pockets, or attached to the heavy gold chain, which terminated with a bunch of old seals and a repeater watch.

Wantley was turning away, half relieved to be spared the task he had set himself, when something strange and enigmatical struck him in the ashen, lined face, the wide-open, sightless eyes, from which he had till now averted his glance.

During the performance of what had been to him a hateful task, and after having so turned the head as to conceal the wound above the right ear, he had been at some pains to leave the body exactly as it had fallen. But in the course of his search he had been compelled to shift the position of the dead man's arms, and he now saw that Downing's right hand, lying across his breast, seemed to be pointing—to what was it pointing? Again the seeker stooped—nay, this time he knelt down; and at once he found what he had sought for so fruitlessly, for under the palm of the dead hand, in an inner waistcoat pocket, which had before escaped him, lay a small key.

For the first time Wantley bared his head, and a curious impulse came over him. 'You will forgive me,' he said, not loudly, but in a whisper, 'you will pardon, for her sake, for your poor Penelope's sake, what I have been compelled to do?'

And then heavy-hearted, full of fear and foreboding, he made his way back, up the rough track, so through the pine-wood, to the villa, mercifully spared on the way the ordeal of meeting, and having perchance to speak with, another human being.

Quickly he passed by the window where Lady Wantley was still sitting, up the shallow staircase leading from the hall to the upper stories of Monk's Eype, and so on to the room, close to his own, where, with pleasant anticipation of an agreeable friendship with his cousin's famous guest, he had ushered Downing the first night of his stay, just a month ago.

It was, as he now reminded himself, a month to a day, for that first meeting had been on the seventh of August, the eve of his, Wantley's own birthday, and this now was the seventh of September.

Wantley singled out at once a large red despatch-box as probably containing what he sought. The key he held in his hand clicked in the lock, and he saw, almost filling up the top compartment, a plain, old-fashioned leather jewel-case which contained more than he expected to find of moment to himself. There, smiling up at him, lay the baby face of Penelope, a miniature which he recognized as one that had been painted to be a surprise gift from Lady Wantley to her husband on their child's second birthday, and which had always stood on Lord Wantley's table. 'She should not have given him that!' was the young man's involuntary thought.

Instinctively he averted his eyes from the slender bundle of letters on which the miniature had lain. But, as he lifted them out, together with his cousin's portrait, he saw that they had served to conceal a sheet of note-paper—a piece of old-fashioned, highly-glazed note-paper, deeply edged with black—lying open across the bottom of the jewel-case. As he glanced at the first few words, 'The Queen commands me to request that you——' ah, poor Downing! For a moment Wantley hesitated; he had meant only to withdraw what concerned Penelope, but finally he laid everything—the summons to Balmoral, the letters written in the bold, pointed handwriting Wantley knew so well, the little miniature—back in the jewel-case, which he then locked away in his own room next door.