The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Equally real to the girl were the saints and martyrs with whose histories she was naturally as familiar, and it was characteristic of her sunny and kindly nature that she early adopted as her patroness and object of special veneration that child-martyr whose very name is unknown, and to whom was accordingly given by the Fathers that of Theophila—the friend of God.

Cecily, knowing very well what it was to be without those ties with which most little girls are blessed, thought it probable that even in heaven St. Theophila must sometimes feel a little lonely, especially when she compared herself with such popular saints—from the human point of view—as St. Theresa, St. Catherine, St. Anthony, and St. Francis.

Perhaps some of the nuns, who in the course of long years had grown to regard Cecily Wake as being as integral a part of their community as they were themselves, hoped that she would finally follow their own excellent example. This was specially the wish of the old house-sister who had been appointed the nurse of the motherless little girl whose arrival at the convent had been the source of such interest and amusement to its inmates. But the Mother Superior cherished no such hopes, or, rather, no such illusion. Not long before Cecily left the convent for 'the world'—as all that lies beyond their gates is generally styled by religious—the nuns spent a portion of their recreation in discussing the girl who was in so special a sense their own child, and whose approaching departure caused some among them keen pain. The Mother Superior heard all that was said, and then, speaking in her native tongue, and with the decision that marked her slightest utterances, observed: 'Cette petite fera le bonheur de quelque honnête homme. Elle est faite pour cela.' After a short pause, and with a twinkle in her small brown eyes, she had added: 'Et il ne sera pas à plaindre, celui-là!'

Cecily's first introduction to the world was not of a nature to make her fall in love with its pomps and vanities. The busy, cheerful conventual household, largely composed of girls of her own age, where each day was lived according to rule, every hour bringing its appointed duty or pleasure, was an unfortunate preparation for life in a small Mayfair lodging, spent in sole company with a nervous elderly woman, who, while capable of making a great sacrifice of comfort in order to do her duty by her great-niece, was yet very unwilling to have the even tenor of her life upset more than was absolutely necessary.

The elder Miss Wake, from her own point of view, had not neglected Cecily during the years the girl had been at school. She had made a point of spending each year the Christmas fortnight at Brighton, and of entertaining the child for one week of that fortnight. During those successive eight days the elder lady had always been on her best behaviour, and Cecily easy to amuse. Then, also, the child had many school-fellows in Brighton, and her aunt always took her once each year to the play. Cecily remembered these brief yearly holidays with pleasure, and when about to leave the convent she looked forward to life in London as to an existence composed of a perpetual round of pleasant meetings with old school-fellows, of evenings at the theatre, varied with visits and benefactions to Arcadian poor, for Cecily, after a sincere childish fashion, was anxious to do her duty to those whom she esteemed to be less fortunate than herself.

The reality had proved, as realities are apt to do, very different from what she had imagined. The elder Miss Wake, like so many of those women born in a day when no career—and it might almost be said no pleasant mode of life—was open to gentlewomen of straitened means, had learnt to content herself with a way of existence which lacked every source of healthy excitement, interest, and pleasure.

Her one amusement, her only anodyne, was novel-reading. For her and her like were written the three-volume love-stories, full of sentiment and mild adventure, for which the modern spinster no longer has a use. When absorbed in one of these romances, she was able to put aside, to push, as it were, into the background of her mind, her most incessant, though never mentioned, subject of thought. This was the problem of how to make her small income suffice, not only to her simple wants, but to the upkeep of the consideration she thought due to one of her name and connections.

Miss Theresa Wake never forgot that she belonged to a family which, in addition to being almost the oldest in England, would now have been doubtless great and powerful had it not remained faithful to a creed of which the profession in the past had meant the loss of both property and rank.

Settling down in London at the age of fifty, after a bitter quarrel with her only remaining brother, a small squire in the North of England, she had taken the ground-floor of a lodging-house of which the landlord and his wife had come from her own native village, and therefore grudged her none of that respect which she looked for from people in their position.

In their more prosperous days the Wakes had married into various great Northern families, and Miss Wake was thus connected with several of her Mayfair neighbours. For a while after her removal to London she had kept in touch with a certain number of people whose names spelled power and consideration, but as the years went on, and as her income lowered some pounds each year, she gradually broke with most of those whose acquaintanceship with her had only been based, as she well knew, on a good-natured acceptance of the claim of distant kinship. From some few she continued, rather resentfully, to accept such tokens of remembrance as boxes of flowers and presents of game; an ever-narrowing circle left cards at the beginning of the season, and fewer still would now and again come in and spend half an hour in her dreary sitting-room. These last, oddly enough, almost always belonged to the newer generation, the children of those whose parents she had once called friends; when a stroke of good fortune had come to these young people, sometimes when a feeling of happy vitality almost oppressed them, a call on Miss Wake took the shape of a small dole to fate.