The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

I

All over the East, and even nearer home, on the Continent, old women take a great place, and are even permitted to play a great rôle, in the human affairs of those about them. Here in England it is otherwise. Here they are allowed but grudgingly the privilege of standing on the bank whence they see helpless boats, laden with freights to them so precious, drifting down a current of whose dangerous places, of whose shoals and shallows, their knowledge and experience are counted of no moment.

In a French country-house three such women as Lady Wantley, Theresa Wake, and the old nurse, Mrs. Mote, would have been the pivots round which the younger people would have naturally revolved. At Monk's Eype their presence—and this although each was singularly individual in character and disposition—did not affect or modify one jot the actions of the men and women about them.

Mrs. Robinson, now weaving with unfaltering hand her own destiny, absorbed in her own complicated emotions of fear, love, and pain, would have listened incredulously indeed, had a seer, greatly daring, warned her that each of these three old women might well, were she not careful to respect their several prejudices, bring her to shipwreck.

Downing, whose business it had long been to study those about him with reference to their attitude to himself, instinctively avoided the solitary company of Lady Wantley, for in her he recognized a possible and formidable opponent. But of old Miss Wake's presence in the villa he was scarcely conscious. Penelope's maid he knew to be a point of danger, the living spark which might set all ablaze.

The day after his coming to Monk's Eype, Sir George Downing and Mrs. Mote had met face to face, and he had turned on his heel without a word of greeting. Yet when he had last seen her they had parted pleasantly, the servant believing, foolishly enough, that she and her mistress were then seeing the last of one who had been their inseparable companion for many, to her increasingly anxious, days.

Mrs. Mote's crabbed face and short, ungainly figure were burnt into Downing's memory as having cast the only shadow on the sunny stretch of time which had so marvellously renewed his youth, brought warmth about his chilled heart, and made the future bright exceedingly. And so the meeting with the old nurse had been to him a sharp reminder that one person at least at Monk's Eype already wished him ill, and would fain see him go away for ever.

The maid also avoided him, though she sat long hours at her window, taking note of his comings and goings, jealously counting the moments that her mistress chose to spend in his company, either down in the Beach Room, or, more often, pacing up and down on the broad terrace, and under the ilex-trees which protected from relentless sea-winds the delicate flowering shrubs that were counted among the greatest glories of Monk's Eype.

It was there, under those trees, completely screened from the windows which swept the terrace, that Mrs. Robinson preferred to spend what leisure Sir George Downing allowed himself from his work. More than once Motey had come down from her watching-place, and had crept into the little pine-wood to watch, to overhear, what was being done and what was being said in the ilex grove. But the old woman's unhappy, suspicious eyes only saw what they had seen so often before: her mistress and Downing walking slowly side by side, she listening, absorbed, to his utterances. Sometimes Penelope would lay her hand a moment on his arm, with a curious, familiar, tender gesture—curious as coming from one who avoided alike familiarity and tenderness when dealing with her friends.

Only once, however, had Mrs. Mote surprised a gesture which might not have been witnessed by all the world. One afternoon when a strand of Mrs. Robinson's beautiful hair had become loosened, and so uncoiled its length upon her shoulder, Downing, turning towards her, had suddenly taken it up between his fingers and raised it to his lips. Then the old nurse had seen the bright gleam of what was so intimately a part of her mistress mingling for a moment with the dark moustache heavily streaked with white, and she had clenched her hands in impotent anger and disgust.