The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

As the cab finally turned down St. James's Street, he took the hand, still soft and of perfect shape, which lay nearest to his on Lady Wantley's knee. 'We are nearly there,' he said. 'I will see you into the hall, and then go off for an hour.'

II

Mr. Gumberg was one of those who early school themselves to wait on life. Sitting in the pretty, gay morning-room, which opened upon a stately little garden—designed in the days when Italy was to the cultivated Englishman what the England of to-day is to the travelled American—he was rarely disappointed, even in August, as to what the day would bring forth.

Few afternoons went by but some acquaintance journeyed westward from the City to ask his advice concerning matters of business moment. In the hottest summer weather foreigners of distinction would find their way to St. James's Place, bearing letters of courteous introduction, couched in well-turned phrases, of which the diction, even in France and Austria, will soon be a lost art. And then, again, friends passing through town would remember the old man, and hasten to spend with him an idle hour, bearing with them a budget of the news he loved to hear.

But it was the day bringing forth the utterly unexpected that renewed Mr. Julius Gumberg's grip on life. It was then that he felt he was still taking part in the world's affairs, for the unexpected, in his case, almost always meant an appeal connected with one of those byways of human life in which he still took so vivid and so practical an interest.

To the old worldling a call from Lady Wantley had always been something of an event, and this over fifty years of their two lives. He respected her reserve, he admired her reticence, and, while himself so deeply interested in those about him, he yet delighted in the company of the one woman of his acquaintance whom he knew to have ever regarded the soul and the future life as of such infinitely more moment than the body and the pleasant world about her.

She was herself quite unaware of the peculiar feeling with which her old friend regarded her, and ignorant that on the rare occasions of her visits to St. James's Place no other visitor was welcome, or, indeed, tolerated. Still, at this painful, anguished moment of her life some subtle instinct caused her to turn to one with whom, in many ways, she had so little in common. She felt secure of his sympathy, and had implicit trust in his discretion; indeed, her belief in him extended to the hope that he would suggest a way by which Penelope should surely be saved from what the mother, full of pain and shrinking terror, could not but regard as a most awful fate.

The interview began badly. The gay little garden room, which still kept something of the insouciant, roguish charm of the famous eighteenth-century beauty from whose executors Mr. Julius Gumberg had originally purchased the house, formed an incongruous background to the shrunken figure, the parchment-coloured face, the hairless head, always, however, covered with a skull-cap, of Lady Wantley's old friend.

Gilt-rimmed, tarnished mirrors destroyed the sense of solitude, and seemed to Mr. Gumberg's visitor to reflect shadowy witnesses and mocking eavesdroppers of her shame and distress.

So strong was this impression that Lady Wantley doubted whether she had been well advised in coming. She felt inclined to get up and go away; and something of what was passing in her mind was divined by her host.