The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

At last Penelope, paler than her wont, her voice tremulous, lacking its usual hard, bell-like quality of tone, spoke, and to some purpose: 'I have made up my mind to do what you have always wished—that is, to endow the Settlement. Though what you said just now about my husband and his arrangements made me angry, I know it was true. He ought not to have left me such power.'

Winfrith felt relieved but bewildered, and straightway he blundered. 'Certainly something of the kind ought to have been done long ago, but you always opposed it. You——'

'I suppose I have the right to change my mind, to be guided by circumstances? Besides, I am tired, utterly tired, of the responsibility as well as of the Settlement.' She looked at him fixedly for a moment. 'I know what you would like to say; that I have had nothing to do with it, in a real sense, for many years past. But that is false; no day goes by without my receiving some tiresome letter or letters. Whenever any of the "Settlers"'—Winfrith had never before heard her use the contemptuous term—'fall out, and they are always falling out——'

'That at least is untrue,' he interrupted.

'Yes, they do—they do! And when they do, then they write to me to patch up the quarrel!'

She paused, then went on in a more measured voice: 'And there are other things! How would you like it if, when acting the part of a traitor to your party, you were always being praised for your loyalty? I am a traitor to all that the Settlement represents. I hate—no, I do not hate, I despise—the wretched human beings to whom poor Melancthon gave up his life. I don't think they are worth the trouble expended on them. When I come into personal contact with them, of course I am sorry, so I am for the ants when Brown Bess puts her foot on an ant-hill! And to you, David, I have never pretended otherwise. Of course I recognise that in so feeling I am almost alone. Some of the people I have most cared for, my father'—she hesitated and added more gently—'you yourself, feel quite otherwise.'

Then breaking off short, she glanced down at the paper she held in her hand, and Winfrith saw with some surprise that it was covered with neatly pencilled notes. 'But, after all, I own no apology for what I feel to any human being, and so now let us consider the practical side of the matter. Apart from the question of the endowment, I wish arrangements to be made by which Cecily Wake can carry out her experiment—I mean her co-operative cheap food idea.'

Winfrith bit his lip. This, then, was the new scheme? He had never liked Cecily Wake; perhaps—but of this, of course, he was totally unaware—he was irritated by the girl's enthusiastic affection for Penelope, so much more unobtrusive and sincere than that of some of those whom he also unconsciously regarded as his rivals. Then, again, Cecily, like himself, had the power, in spite of her youth, in spite even of a certain childishness of which the bloom had not been rubbed off in the two years spent by her in working at the Settlement, of obtaining her own way, and of imposing her own point of view on others. Finally, he had the average Englishman's distrust of Roman Catholicism, and naturally suspected the motives of a convent-bred girl.

As to the proposed scheme, it was in some ways childish, in others revolutionary. In her dreams Cecily Wake had seen the squalid neighbourhoods about the Settlement each rejoicing in its own huge cheap and pure food emporium. To Winfrith the idea was little less than absurd, and to be, from every point of view, deprecated and discouraged; so he now nerved himself, without any great difficulty, to opposition.

'Miss Wake's scheme, from what I can make of it,' he said coldly, 'would not only require the outlay of a considerable amount of capital, but, what is more serious, could not but disorganize local trade.'