BEYOND RECONCILIATION.
It had been all Polly’s work that she and her mother were remaining on
in their old home indefinitely.
When the moment for final settlement had arrived, the girl had
overruled her mother.
“We can, of course, find a small house somewhere, but by the time we
have moved and the rent and the rates and taxes paid, you see if we
are not more out of pocket than if we remained on here. The lease is
ours for another fifteen years, isn’t it, mother, darling? And though
the taxes are heavy, we can be very economical in other ways, and then
there is space for you to move about in, and air for you to breathe,
and a place for Harold to racket in when he comes home. I could not
endure you to be shut up in one of those poky houses, at least so long
as you are able to stay here, and it seems to me the most sensible
thing to do to live on till we sell or let the house.”
“I am afraid we shall be considered wrong in doing this,” Mrs.
Pennington said, nervously.
Polly’s eyes flashed fire.
“Who is going to interfere with us?” she demanded. “Who has the right
to interfere, I should like to know?”
Mrs. Pennington smiled faintly.
“People don’t always stop to consider if they have the right to
speak, Polly,” she said, then she paused a moment. “I heard from your
Grandmother Pennington this morning. Oh! it is a very kind letter.”
Polly’s lip curled, and there was still anger in her eyes.
“I know the sort of ‘kind’ letter Grannie Pennington can write. May I
see this letter, mother, dear?”
Mrs. Pennington at once gave it to the girl.
“We have no secrets, you and I, have we?” she said, and she rubbed her
hand softly up and down the girl’s arm. “How could I ever have imagined
that my wild little Polly could have grown up into such a wise and
clever person?”
Polly crouched down at her mother’s knees.
“Do I comfort you, then, a little, my sweet love?” she asked.
“A little? Why, Polly, do you realize that you are my all now?”
Polly laid her cheek on her mother’s hand.
“We shall be happy together yet. You see if we are not. We—we only
want time.”
Mrs. Pennington caressed the rough, brown curls; she could hardly see
them for tears. Remembrance had brought back to her swiftly a vision
of old, dead days, when her children had been little more than babies,
and her husband had chided her, tenderly enough, for the most natural
pride and love she had always had in her eldest born, her lovely little
Christina. It gave her a pang now to recall the love she had lavished
so freely, and that had given her back no love in return.
The queer little brown baby, Polly, had always crept very closely to
her father’s heart. The wife had known this, but Robert Pennington had
made no distinction in his affection for his children; he had been
essentially a just man. There was a strong element of her father in
Polly, and the mother’s heart was full of pride in the girl’s proud
courage that fought not only against a first great sorrow, but against
all the heavy difficulties that faced them now.
Polly’s influence was of far greater value than she had the least idea
of herself.
Mrs. Pennington found herself unconsciously emulating the girl in
courage and determination.
Sorrow such as hers would never be wholly shaken off; but despair could
not live while she had before her eyes the daily example of Polly’s
earnest resolution to live through her trouble; and Mrs. Pennington
knew that the full weight of the girl’s hurt was something that was
only revealed to her now day by day.
Though Hubert Kestridge had spoken no words and Polly had not even
confessed the truth to herself, the mother was only too well aware
of the pain that lay at the bottom of the cup of sorrow Polly had
to drain. Life truly stretched before the girl, but it would be a
long, long time before Winnie’s selfishness and treachery would be
a forgotten thing. For neither Mrs. Pennington nor Polly deceived
themselves about this marriage.
They knew Winifred had made herself Hubert Kestridge’s wife purely and
simply because she had no intention of facing the poverty and struggle
that life in the old home must have been to her. She cared about as
much for the man she had married as she cared for an old, discarded
glove, and herein lay the sharpest sting for Polly, for though Hubert
Kestridge was now passed out of her life, and ought not even to have a
place in her thoughts, such was her nature that the knowledge of what
lay before him in his marriage could not fail but grieve her.
Nevertheless, she was so brave, so cheerful and so ready to take on
her shoulders the whole burden of her mother’s cares, that she acted
on that mother in the most beneficial way possible, and the two became
in these days not merely a loving parent and child, but two devoted
friends and comrades eager to fight side by side.
They avoided, by common consent, all discussion of either Christina or
Winifred, neither of whom had done anything to show their mother love
and thought in her widowhood.
The Kestridges, of course, were abroad, but Lady Wentworth was within a
couple of hours of town, and Polly had expected that her eldest sister
would surely have left the grandeur of her new home to appear for a few
hours at least in the sorrowful atmosphere of the old one when the news
of her father’s death had been sent her. But Christina was thorough
in all she did, and she evinced no desire whatever to hurry to her
mother’s side.
She wrote a few constrained words to her mother, and to Polly she sent
a curt epistle, announcing that as she supposed ready money would be
necessary she would be prepared to send a check for fifty pounds when
it was needed.
To this Polly sent back a reply.
“When you are asked to send money,” she had written, “you may
rest assured it will be accepted. In the meanwhile, let me advise
you to spend this fifty pounds in buying yourself a fine, black
gown to mark the heaviness of your grief, and the respect which
has been such a prominent feature of your attitude toward your
father and mother.
“Yours,
“MARY PENNINGTON.”
She had written and posted this in a fit of temper that was not to
be measured, and she had not repented of so doing when the temper
was gone, though she felt she had cut off any possibility of a
reconciliation with Christina by this act. She said nothing to her
mother about it.
“She would only fret more than she does now,” was what she said to
herself.
Polly’s high-handed treatment of her sister gave her a certain
satisfaction, but the manipulation of certain business with her
father’s lawyer gave her far more. This business was purely personal,
and had been carried out by her quite unknown to her mother.
Her father’s will, made a couple of years before, had been duly read
and proved, although so great had been the change in the dead man’s
affairs that this will had had as little value attached to it as the
paper on which it was written. But apart from the will, there had been
a certain sum of insurance money which Robert Pennington had always
intended should be divided between his three daughters. In the event of
either one of them being well married and provided, the money was to go
to the ones or one as the case might be, left unmarried; and should all
three be married, then the money was to go to the boy, Harold, to be
used for him as his mother should think fit. Polly, therefore, at her
father’s death, inherited this money.
This arrangement had been made when Mr. Pennington had reckoned
confidently on leaving his widow, if not a wealthy woman, at least in a
condition of complete comfort, but the severe losses he had sustained
in his business during the last year of his life, had seen his careful
provision for his wife melt away with his other capital, and at the
time of his death Mrs. Pennington had nothing she could call her own,
save a very small yearly income she had inherited from her father.
“Now,” said Polly to the lawyers in her most businesslike way, when the
matter of the insurance money was laid before her, and she became aware
that she could claim about three thousand pounds as her own—“now,
since you tell me this money is mine, I will tell you what I am going
to do with it. I am going to invest it in an annuity for my mother. Oh!
yes, I am!” this rather defiantly. “I know all about what I mean to
do, and I have quite made up my mind to do it. My mother is far more
important than I am, and I want her to feel she has something certain,
if small, to live upon during her lifetime. She can then do as much as
she wants to for my brother’s education, and as I make my home with her
I shall share all she has. Please arrange this for me.”
Polly had finished with an air that conveyed her desire to have no
further discussion on the matter. Her journey that morning she had met
Valentine in the omnibus had been to the lawyers to receive the news
that her command had been executed.
“And when it is done I shall tell her myself, and then, as the matter
cannot be undone, she will resign herself to circumstances.”
This is what Polly said to the solicitor when she bade him
good-morning, but, as a matter of fact, she had no intention of telling
her mother anything about it.
She had constituted herself the business man for the moment, and she
could very easily let her mother understand that the winding up of the
estate had been more satisfactory than had been imagined. Of course,
Polly had had any amount of protest to meet with from the lawyers when
she announced her determination to urge her mother to remain on in the
big house. She had an answer, however, for all that was put forward
against this.
“Suppose,” it was suggested to her, “that Mrs. Pennington gets no offer
for the house, what then?”
“Why, then,” said Polly, promptly, “we shall live in it till the
expiration of our lease, by which time any amount of things may have
happened. We shall only use a portion of the house. Mother is going to
sell some of the more valuable furniture, and we have dismissed all the
servants but one. If you can show me that this is going to ruin us, I
am prepared to be assured of the fact.”
“That girl has got a head on her shoulders!” was one of the remarks
that was made after Polly had departed triumphant out of the lawyers’
office.
“And a —— good will of her own into the bargain,” was a second remark
made not without admiration for this same will.
Polly, meanwhile, carried out all her plans, and she was so energetic,
so helpful and so bright and courageous, as we have said, that she
imbued her mother with some of her spirit, and long before the new year
had dropped out of its newness, the two women had settled down into a
quiet, even life that had its share of work and thought to lift them
out of too deep a measure of sorrow.
Polly’s brain did an infinite amount of traveling in these days.
She was turning over a number of schemes in her head, needless to say,
schemes that would bring little grist to the mill, and insure her
mother even more comfort than she had now.
One day she thought of starting a cooking class, a second day she
pictured herself as mistress of dancing to a crowd of little children,
a third she had some other idea.
It would be easy, she told herself, to make some use of the big empty
rooms, if only once she would hit on just the thing to do. Teaching in
the ordinary sense of the word, was something Polly never would have
attempted.
“First of all, I know nothing,” she said to herself, candidly; “and,
then, I should just get mad with irritation and impatience. I would
rather sweep a crossing than be a governess.”
Nevertheless, each day as it went emphasized the necessity more in
the girl’s mind that something must be done to add to the very modest
income on which they had to live. Harold’s school bills alone made big
inroads into this income, and it was only by strenuous efforts that
Polly was able to steer clear of debt.
As her mother had foretold, the family in general expressed unqualified
disapproval of the arrangement by which Robert Pennington’s widow
remained on in the old house, and this disapproval took the form of
absenting themselves from the modest menage. Even Mrs. Pennington’s
sister, Hubert Kestridge’s stepmother, held herself aloof, but, then,
as Polly knew right well, the marriage with Winnie had been exceedingly
objectionable to her Aunt Nellie, and she and her mother had to bear
the brunt of this anger.
“I don’t think I care very much if I don’t see anyone of my relations
again,” Polly frequently informed herself.
The attitude of the family indeed acted on her as a kind of spur.
It made her desire for independence greater than ever, and her
determination to stand firm by her mother more eager.
As Christmas had passed, and the new year had come, Polly found herself
wondering at odd times if that big Mr. Ambleton would ever pay them a
visit.
“As he asked himself, I think it would be rather rude if he did not
come,” she said once to her mother. “Not that I want him, however,” she
added, quickly.
Mrs. Pennington said, in her quiet, soft way, that she thought she
would like to see Mr. Ambleton.
“From what Hubert said of him, I feel sure he must be a nice man,” she
remarked.
“Well,” said Polly to this, “if he is not nice he must be awfully
horrid, for there is so much of him! Big people ought to have more
virtues than little ones.”
“Somehow,” said Mrs. Pennington, looking up from her sewing and
falling, as she always now endeavored to do, into Polly’s mood,
“somehow I think I like little people best, Polly.”
And Polly kissed her.
“Then, now I know you like me a tiny, teeny bit, you darling!” she said.
And after this she sat and watched her mother’s white, thin fingers as
they threaded a needle and stitched away industriously, and while she
watched she dreamed the only dream dear to her young heart now—the
dream of giving this loved being all those things that her devotion
determined were the proper accompaniment of life for such a mother as
she possessed.