The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Is bright and shining:

I therefore turn my clouds about,

And always wear them inside out,

To show the lining!'

I

Cecily Wake had not been brought up by her aunt. Even before the death of her father, which had followed that of her mother at an interval of some years, she had been placed in one of those convent schools which, in certain exceptional circumstances, take quite little children as boarders. Accordingly, till the age of eighteen, the only home she had ever known was the large, old-fashioned Georgian manor-house near Brighton, which had been adapted to suit the requirements of the French nuns who had first gone there in 1830.

As time went on that branch of the Order which had settled in England had become cosmopolitan in character. Among those who joined it were many English women, one of them a sister of Cecily's mother. But the Gallic nationality dies hard, even in those who claim to be citizens of the heavenly kingdom, and Cecily's convent remained French in tradition, in methods of education, and in the importance attached by the nuns to such accomplishments as bed-making, sewing, cooking, and feminine deportment. They also taught the duty of rather indiscriminate charity, holding, with the saint who had been their founder, that it is better to give alms to nine impostors rather than risk refusing the tenth just beggar; but this interpretation of a Divine precept was unconsciously abandoned by Cecily after she had become intimately acquainted with the conditions of life which surrounded the Melancthon Settlement. Still even there she remained, to the regret of her colleagues, curiously open-handed, and—what was worse, for a principle was involved—she always, during her connection with the Settlement, persisted in saying that she herself, were she in the place of the deserving seeker for help, would rather receive half a crown in specie than five shillings' worth of goods chosen by some one else!

As for education, in the modern sense of the word, Cecily was, and remained, very deficient; many subjects now taught to every school-girl were never even mentioned within the convent walls, and this was specially true of all the 'ologies, including theology. On the other hand, Cecily and her school-fellows were taught to read, write and talk with accuracy two languages. The daughter of a man who has left his mark on English literature, and whose children had one by one returned to the old fold, taught them English composition, as she herself had been taught it by a good old-fashioned governess. This nun, a curious original person, also introduced the elder girls under her charge to much of the sound early Victorian fiction with which she herself had been familiar in her youth.

The Superioress, who reserved to herself the supervision of all the French classes, was a fine vigorous old woman, the daughter of a Legitimist who had been among the leaders of the Duchesse de Berri's abortive rising. As was natural, she held and taught very strong views concerning the state, past and present, of her beloved native country. To her everything which had taken place in France before the Revolution had been more or less well done, while all that had followed it was evil and reprobate. Without going so far as to show Louis XIV. 'étudiant les plans du General La Vallière et du Colonel Montespan,' she completely hid from her pupils the ugly side of the old régime, and exhibited the Sun King as among the most glorious descendants of St. Louis. To her the romance of French history was all woven in and about Versailles, the town where she had herself spent her girlhood, and on the steps of whose palace her own uncle had fallen in defending the apartments of Marie Antoinette on the historic 5th of October. The many heroic episodes of the revolution and of the Vendean wars were as familiar to this old nun, who had spent more than half her long life in England, as if she had herself taken part in them, and she delighted in stirring her own and her pupils' blood by their recital.

So Cecily's heroes and heroines all wore doublet and hose, or hoops, patches, and powder. Most of them spoke French, though in the spacious chambers of her imagination there was room left for Charles I., his Cavaliers, and their valiant wives and daughters.