A BITTER EXPERIENCE.
There followed some dull and sorrowful days for little Polly after
Valentine Ambleton had made his unexpected visit.
It might truly be said to have been Polly’s first experience of
sadness, for hitherto life had run along smoothly and merrily enough.
But with that curious, painful scene in which Christina had played such
a strange part, the whole mental atmosphere of their home life had
been charged with new elements, and Polly came upon the fact that it
was an easy step from careless, youthful happiness to deep thought and
unhappiness.
Neither she nor Winifred knew what had happened to make Christina go
deliberately out of her home, but they, in common with the rest of the
household, were enlightened as to her intentions when, later in the
day, a message was brought from old Mrs. Pennington’s house, situated a
little way out of London, asking that Miss Christina’s things might be
packed at once and sent to her at her grandmother’s residence.
Mrs. Pennington was downstairs in her accustomed place when this note
was brought by a neat maid, and Polly saw that the pallor and the
strained look on her mother’s face deepened as she read the few curtly
written words.
It was just the hour before dinner, and Polly could see that her mother
had struggled against her attack of illness, and had come down simply
so that her husband should not be alarmed when he came home.
“Father has so much on his mind just now,” she had said, when Polly
had ventured on a protest; “we must all do what we can to make things
bright and cheerful. Has—has Chrissie come in yet, Polly dear? I fancy
I heard her steps.”
But Chrissie had not come back, and her note brought in at that moment
struck the final touch of loving, confident hope from the mother’s
heart.
She gave the note to Polly.
Somehow, though Polly was younger than Winifred, her mother turned to
her more easily.
“Will you put Chrissie’s things together, love?” the quiet voice asked,
simply. “You see she is very angry with me, and she will stay with your
grandmother for a little while.”
Polly’s eloquent face took an expression of pain and tears.
“Chris does not mean to vex you, mother darling; I am sure of it,”
she said, eagerly; but her eagerness was not to defend Chrissie as in
former times, but to give pleasure and solace to her mother’s heart.
Mrs. Pennington smiled faintly.
“Ah! Polly, dear,” she said, with a little break in her voice, “we all
make big, sad mistakes sometimes. Pray God my Chris may never live to
regret the mistake she is making.”
Polly went upstairs and into Christina’s room with a heart that ached,
as she said to herself, “like toothache,” and a blinding mist before
her.
It seemed to her almost as though she were committing a fault to find
herself in Chrissie’s room at all.
Chrissie’s whole life had always been so different from the rest of
them, and her room seemed to convey this more plainly than words.
The furniture was luxurious, the decorations charming, and a whole
regiment of pretty and costly things were scattered about.
Christina, fortunately for herself, had been her grandmother’s
godchild, and money had never been denied her.
There was some feeling, Polly did not know what it was, between her
mother and her father’s mother; old Mrs. Pennington had never been kind
or amiable to her son’s wife, she kept all her kindness for Christina.
It was no easy task to gather together all the things Chrissie had
enumerated, but Polly did it, eventually.
Her back ached, and her hair was rumpled, and she had torn her dress
when Winifred came up from dinner.
“Father is furious because you did not come down,” said Winnie, looking
round Christina’s dismantled room with a curious expression; then she
laughed. “Well, what have you to say to your angel now, I should like
to know?” she inquired. “Nice, kind, sweet nature, hasn’t she, to turn
her back on her family at a moment’s notice?”
“You do talk such stuff and nonsense,” Polly observed, sharply. She was
hungry, and Winifred had had her dinner. “As if Christina had gone away
for good!”
Winifred laughed again.
“As if she ever intended to come back here again! Father says he
will go down to-morrow and talk to her. He may as well save himself
a journey. Chrissie is not easily moved. She is gone, and I,” said
Winifred neatly, “consider she was quite right to go!”
“When your opinion is asked, then give it!” observed Polly, in
exasperation.
She sat down and cried a little when she was alone.
She did not want Christina to go, she did not want any changes in her
home; everything had been very happy before that big, nasty man had
come that morning and upset them all. It was he who had driven Chrissie
away.
Of course Polly did not quite think Chrissie ought to have gone, and
have left her mother so unhappy, especially when that mother had always
been so good to Chrissie.
In a little, stinging way, remembrance brought before Polly very
clearly how much had been given to Chrissie, and had been lacking
elsewhere.
In every way possible her mother had spared her eldest child. She did
not know, in her blind love, that her unselfishness in this had been
remarked by more than one person, and she had surely never dreamed that
the day would come when Chrissie would repay her so poorly.
Polly was very unhappy about it; she hated shedding tears, as a rule,
but now she wept freely.
“Home will never be the same again,” she said to herself, with a
desolating feeling pressing on her heart.
She saw the maid who had come from Chrissie, and to her she confided
one or two boxes, and a little scribbled note she had written on the
spur of the moment.
“Tell my sister the other things shall be sent to-morrow, and oh!
please will you be sure to give Miss Pennington that note?”
There never came an answer to that little penciled note, and Polly’s
loving heart sank very low in the days that followed.
There was much to depress her and to make her sad.
Her mother was ill to begin with, not very ill, only tired, and very
weak.
Her father had gone north on most important business. Whether he
had been to see Christina or not Polly never knew, and she asked no
questions. The story of coming trouble that Winifred had given her that
Monday morning was confirmed.
“Father has had some heavy losses,” her mother told her, in a quiet,
dull way. “We must reduce expenses everywhere. I have given most of
the servants notice to go.”
“I am very glad,” was Polly’s remark. “I will be cook, and I will be so
economical, mumsy, and Winifred shall be parlormaid and butler.”
Mrs. Pennington smiled that wan smile of hers at the girl’s enthusiasm,
but words seemed to have gone from her for a time. She who had been so
brave, who had fought so long against that most hideous of miseries, a
false position, seemed to have no more strength left to fight now.
Polly constituted herself nurse in her mother’s room, and concocted
mysterious dishes.
“You must eat this, my love!” she would cry. “Look, a ragout a la
Marguerite, my own invention. You simply cannot refuse it, mother
dearest!”
When the news came, conveyed in the form of an announcement in the
paper, that Christina was married, the mother seemed to wake from her
apathy. She broke into passionate tears; they were such tears as Polly
had never seen her mother shed before.
“Oh, my heart is broken!” the poor woman cried wildly. “I never knew I
could suffer so much, and through Chrissie! She has broken my heart!”
was the moan again and again, while poor Polly stood by, blanched and
trembling.
Once the mother lifted her face.
“It is all true, Polly,” she whispered, “all that Mr. Ambleton said.
She has known it all along—he is a hopeless drunkard, and she has
married him, married him against my prayers, against her father’s will.
What hope of blessing can rest on such a marriage? Oh, I would I had
been dead before I had lived to see this thing come to my own dear
child!”
Winifred only shrugged her shoulders when she heard the news.
“Sir Mark may be ten times worse than they say, he is still Sir Mark
and a very rich man, and Chrissie is now Lady Wentworth. I can’t see
what there is to make such a fuss about.”
Polly made no reply. Her heart was surging with pain, bewilderment and
doubt.
She was too young to understand it all, but on one point she was very
much determined—she detested Valentine Ambleton with all her might and
main.
“If he had not come here and made that scene, Chrissie would never have
done what she has done!” she said to herself, confidently.
She had her small hands full in these days; her mother’s health gave
her much anxiety.
The servants had departed, and though Polly was glad they should go, in
one sense, it made the big house very gloomy.
Winifred took her share of the work, but Polly almost wished she had
not done so, for all that Winnie did was done with a kind of quiet
resentment that made itself felt.
Visitors came occasionally, but few were admitted. Mrs. Pennington’s
health was the excuse, so that those who desired to gratify their
curiosity about Chrissie’s marriage had to go away unsatisfied.
One guest came, however, who was immediately admitted. He was a favored
guest in the Pennington household, and Polly never realized how much
comfort and pleasure could be conveyed to her in the person of one
human being till the day that Hubert Kestridge reappeared to invite
himself to dinner in his usual unconventional manner, and to shed a
sort of radiance throughout the house with his bright, happy manner.
It was quite three months now since Kestridge had paid them a visit,
and Polly gave a little gasp of surprise when she heard he had come.
He was, in a sort of way, their kinsman, being the stepson of their
Aunt Nellie (Mrs. Pennington’s sister), who had married his father many
years before, and who was the only mother Hubert had ever known.
Starting in a city office to earn his living during his father’s
lifetime, Hubert now found himself a kind of small landowner in
Ireland, and he spent the greater part of his life over there, working
his property himself, and endeavoring to get something good out of it.
The Pennington girls called him their cousin, but he was, of course,
no relation at all. Nevertheless, he brought a rush of warmth to poor
Polly’s overtired little heart the moment she heard his voice in the
hall below.
“Hubert has come,” she cried to Winifred, rushing up the stairs two at
a time in her excitement. “At last something nice has happened! I must
run and tell mother. This will cheer her up. What a blessing,” added
Polly, thoughtfully, “that we had roast beef for lunch. Hubert loves
roast beef, and he must be so hungry. Make haste, Winnie, and go and
speak to him.”
But Winnie was particularly careful in her dress arrangements this
evening. She put on her prettiest frock, and brushed and plaited her
hair to perfection. She looked very sweet, and modest, and charming as
she went downstairs. She remembered as she went that she had a very
dismal future ahead of her, and she said to herself, in her quiet
little way, that it behoved her to alter this future by any and every
means in her power.
“Aunt Nellie was full of enthusiasm for the wonders Hubert had done
already to his Irish property. I quite believe he will be rich one of
these days. Polly does not care whether she is a pauper all her life,”
was Winifred’s final thought. It was a thought born of a certain fact
known only to Winifred, and it was not altogether free from irritation.
For Winnie could see much in her quiet, little way, and she had
discovered the last time Hubert Kestridge had come from Ireland, that
he had found something new and charming in little Polly Pennington,
something that Winifred feared might lead to complications if it were
not nipped in the bud, for it was by no means desirable that Hubert
should find Polly pretty or charming, since she, Winifred, had resolved
to become his wife.