On the wings of fate

by Effie Adelaide Rowlands

Polly’s high-handed treatment of her sister gave her a certain satisfaction, but the manipulation of certain business with her father’s lawyer gave her far more. This business was purely personal, and had been carried out by her quite unknown to her mother.

Her father’s will, made a couple of years before, had been duly read and proved, although so great had been the change in the dead man’s affairs that this will had had as little value attached to it as the paper on which it was written. But apart from the will, there had been a certain sum of insurance money which Robert Pennington had always intended should be divided between his three daughters. In the event of either one of them being well married and provided, the money was to go to the ones or one as the case might be, left unmarried; and should all three be married, then the money was to go to the boy, Harold, to be used for him as his mother should think fit. Polly, therefore, at her father’s death, inherited this money.

This arrangement had been made when Mr. Pennington had reckoned confidently on leaving his widow, if not a wealthy woman, at least in a condition of complete comfort, but the severe losses he had sustained in his business during the last year of his life, had seen his careful provision for his wife melt away with his other capital, and at the time of his death Mrs. Pennington had nothing she could call her own, save a very small yearly income she had inherited from her father.

“Now,” said Polly to the lawyers in her most businesslike way, when the matter of the insurance money was laid before her, and she became aware that she could claim about three thousand pounds as her own—“now, since you tell me this money is mine, I will tell you what I am going to do with it. I am going to invest it in an annuity for my mother. Oh! yes, I am!” this rather defiantly. “I know all about what I mean to do, and I have quite made up my mind to do it. My mother is far more important than I am, and I want her to feel she has something certain, if small, to live upon during her lifetime. She can then do as much as she wants to for my brother’s education, and as I make my home with her I shall share all she has. Please arrange this for me.”

Polly had finished with an air that conveyed her desire to have no further discussion on the matter. Her journey that morning she had met Valentine in the omnibus had been to the lawyers to receive the news that her command had been executed.

“And when it is done I shall tell her myself, and then, as the matter cannot be undone, she will resign herself to circumstances.”

This is what Polly said to the solicitor when she bade him good-morning, but, as a matter of fact, she had no intention of telling her mother anything about it.

She had constituted herself the business man for the moment, and she could very easily let her mother understand that the winding up of the estate had been more satisfactory than had been imagined. Of course, Polly had had any amount of protest to meet with from the lawyers when she announced her determination to urge her mother to remain on in the big house. She had an answer, however, for all that was put forward against this.

“Suppose,” it was suggested to her, “that Mrs. Pennington gets no offer for the house, what then?”

“Why, then,” said Polly, promptly, “we shall live in it till the expiration of our lease, by which time any amount of things may have happened. We shall only use a portion of the house. Mother is going to sell some of the more valuable furniture, and we have dismissed all the servants but one. If you can show me that this is going to ruin us, I am prepared to be assured of the fact.”