The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Soon the two, the woman and the girl, were at utter variance the one with the other, and Cecily suffered almost as keenly as did Penelope. It seemed to her only too clear that Mrs. Robinson grudged her, and disapproved of, Wantley's love. What else could mean her strange, obliquely stabbing phrases?

Cecily's mind often reverted to that most moving, sacred hour when Wantley had given her his mother's pearls, when he had told her, dryly and yet tenderly, of how truly he loved her. He had said—she remembered the words, and, so remembering, often let her eyes fall before those of her friend—'Unless you particularly wish to do so, I should prefer that you say nothing—just now, at once—to Penelope. Wait till I have spoken to your aunt, till we are both in London, till we are ready to tell all the world.' And, of course, she had assented, while yet feeling sure of Mrs. Robinson's real sympathy.

But now Cecily felt sure no longer, and over her heart there came something very like despair. How could she, Cecily Wake, who owed so much—nay, her very acquaintance with Wantley—to Penelope, go against her in so serious a matter? Cecily had retained the clear conscience, free of all casuistry, of a child. She knew that she loved Wantley with all her heart, that her feeling for him was no longer under her own control; but she also knew that she could never marry him in direct opposition to the wishes of the one human being to whom she regarded herself as indebted for all which made life worth living.

And so her happiness became quite overshadowed with misgivings and hesitations, of which she said nothing to her lover.

This reticence was made easy by Wantley's own conduct. With a punctiliousness which did him honour, he scorned to take any advantage of their hidden understanding. For many reasons he had preferred that their formal engagement should take place, and be publicly announced, in London. Meanwhile, he felt infinitely content, and in no haste to provoke the elder Miss Wake's tremulous, incredulous satisfaction, or to receive his cousin's ironical congratulations.

There are moments in almost every life when a man feels himself lifted far above his usual plane of thought and feeling, when he knows he is happily adrift from familiar moorings.

Such a moment had now come to Wantley. He would ask himself, with a certain exultation of heart, whether it were possible that a time could come when he would feel any nearer, ever more intimately linked, to his beloved, to this young and still mysterious creature, the tips of whose fingers he had not even kissed, and who, as he well knew, and was glad to know, lived in a spiritual sense in a world so far removed from that in which he had always dwelt.

He trembled at his own good fortune, and would fain have propitiated that sportive Fate which lies in wait for those to whom Providence has been too kind. So feeling, he told himself that he should not grudge Penelope the present companionship of Cecily. He divined something of his cousin's unhappiness and unrest, though far from suspecting their intensity, and so the gradual shadowing of Cecily's face was attributed by him to her hourly contact with one who was obviously ill at ease and sick at heart.

On the last day of Theresa Wake's stay at Monk's Eype, Mrs. Robinson quite unexpectedly and most capriciously, or so it seemed to the older lady, expressed a sudden wish that the aunt and niece should stay on for another two or three days.