The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

As he grew older, passed the border-line of thirty, the longing for the stability afforded by a happy marriage appealed to him, for awhile, far more than it had done when he was a younger man. And so for some two years, being then much abroad, he had toyed with the idea of making, in France or in Italy, a mariage de convenance with some well-born, well-dowered girl who should leave her convent-school to become his wife, and with whom he would promise himself, when in the mood, an after-marriage romance not lacking in piquancy.

Unfortunately, Wantley was an Englishman, and by no means as unconventional as he liked to think himself. Accordingly, when he came to consider, and even more when he came to discuss, with some good-natured French or Italian acquaintance, the preliminaries of such a marriage as had appealed to his fancy, his gorge rose at certain sides of the question then closely presented to his notice, and finally he put the idea from him.

This spring Wantley had returned to England, ready, as usual, to spend the summer in half-unwilling attendance on his lovely cousin, and further than he had been for many years from all thought of marriage.

Then, with what seemed at times incredible and disconcerting swiftness, had come over him, in these few days of sunny quietude, a limitless unreasoning tenderness for a young creature utterly unlike his former ideals of womanhood. Even when aghast at the thought of how easily he might have missed her on the way of his life—even when he felt her already so much a part of himself that he could no longer have described her, as he had first seen her, to a stranger—Wantley admitted, nay, forced on himself the knowledge, that she was not beautiful, not even particularly gifted or clever. One reason why he had always displayed so sincere a lack of liking for the heiresses, willing to be peeresses, whom Penelope had thrust upon his notice, had been that to him they had all looked so unaccountably plain; and yet, compared with Cecily Wake, he knew that more than one of these young women might well have been considered a beauty.

Wantley had always been fond of analyzing his own emotions, and now the simplicity, as well as the strength, of his feeling amazed him. When with Cecily Wake he felt that he was journeying through some delicious unknown country, the old Paradise rediscovered by them two, she still a sweet mysterious stranger, whose better acquaintance he was making day by day. But when she was no longer by his side, and there were many hours he could only spend in thinking of her, then Wantley felt as a mother feels about her own little child, as if he had always known her, always loved her with this placid and yet uneasy care, this trusting and yet watchful tenderness.

He had ever deprecated enthusiasm, and had actively disliked philanthropists, as only those who in early youth are constrained to endure the company of enthusiasts and the atmosphere of philanthropy can deprecate the one and dislike the other. Well, now, so the young man whimsically told himself, had come what his old enemies—those who had gathered about his uncle and aunt in days he hated to remember—would doubtless have recognised as a distinct 'call.' It seemed to him that he had made a good beginning that first Sunday afternoon, when he had kept the aunt in play while the niece had accomplished her prosaic errand of mercy.

The same evening, late at night, he had gone into the room which had been the great Lord Wantley's study, and, under the grim eyes of the man who had never judged him fairly, he had pulled out faded Blue-Books, reports, and pamphlets which had been the tools of a mighty worker for his kind. Then, lamp in hand, he had wandered on into the studio, and there, oddly out of keeping with their fellows on the pretty quaintly placed white shelves framing the door, he had found newer, more digestible, contributions to the problems to which he was now, half unwillingly, turning his mind.

He took down a slim, ill-printed volume, bearing on the title-page the name of Philip Hammond, and composed of essays which had first appeared in the more serious reviews. Setting down his lamp on Penelope's deal painting-table, he opened the little book with prejudice, read on with increasing attention, and finally placed it back on the shelf with respect.

Even so, his lips curled as he remembered the only time he had seen the writer. The two men had met by accident in Mrs. Robinson's London house, and Wantley had been amused by Hammond's obvious—too obvious—devotion to the beautiful widow of the man whose aims and whose ideals he had known how to describe so well in this very book. For the hundredth time Wantley asked himself in what consisted Penelope's power of attracting such men as had been apparently Melancthon Robinson, as was undoubtedly Philip Hammond, as had become—to give the clinching instance—David Winfrith.

The day before, when driving back to Monk's Eype from the place where he had been spending a few pleasant days, he had passed the two riders, and had seen them so deeply absorbed in one another's conversation that they had ridden by without seeing him.