_COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A._
*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*
LADY PENELOPE BRADING . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
Who had ideas of her own.
CAPTAIN PLANTAGENET GOBY, V.C., LATE OF THE GUARDS
Who was ordered to read poetry.
LEOPOLD NORFOLK GORDON
Some said his real name was Isaac Levi.
AUSTIN DE VERE
He wrote poetry, and abhorred bulldogs and motor-cars.
THE MARQUIS DE RIVAULX
Anti-Semite to his manicured finger-tips.
RUFUS Q. PLANT
Born in Virginia.
CARTERET WILLIAMS, WAR CORRESPONDENT
He wrote with a red picturesqueness which was horribly
attractive.
JIMMY CAREW, A.R.A.
He was the best looking of the whole "horde"
THE EARL OF PULBOROUGH
Clever; but indolent.
*LADY PENELOPE*
*CHAPTER I.*
All the absurd birthday celebrations were over, and Penelope was
twenty-one.
She declared that her whole life was to be devoted to reform. She meant
to reform society, to make it good and useful and straightforward, and
simple and utterly delightful.
She let it be understood that men were in great need of her particular
attention. They were too selfish and self-centred, too extravagant, too
critical of each other, too vain. They acknowledged it humbly when she
mentioned it, for Lady Penelope Brading's beauty was something to see
and to talk of; major and minor poets agreed about it; artists desired
to paint her and failed, as they always do when true loveliness shines
on them. She had the colour of a Titian; the contours of a Correggio;
the witchery of a Reynolds, and under wonderful raiment the muscles of a
young Greek athlete. She wiped out any society in which she moved.
When sweet Eclipse showed herself, the rest were nowhere. The other
girls did not exist; she even made married beauties quake; as for the
men, they endured everything she said, and worshipped her all the more.
She was strange and new and a tonic. She had no sense of humour
whatsoever; she could not understand a joke even if it was explained by
an expert on the staff of _Punch_. This made her utterly delightful.
Her beautiful seriousness was as refreshing as logic in a sermon. She
believed in clergymen, in politicians, in the Deceased Wife's Sister, in
all eminent physicians, in the London County Council, in the City of
Westminster, in the British Constitution, in herself, and hygiene. She
read the _Times_, the _Athenaeum_, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Herbert
Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the late Mr. Drummond. She used Sandow's
exercises and cold water. She was opposed to war; she admired the
leader of the opposition and the lord mayor; she subscribed to a society
for establishing a national theatre to play Mr. Bernard Shaw's
tragedies, and to the nearest hospital. She was the most delightful
person in England, and was against vaccination. She had money and lands
and houses and ideas.
"We ought all to do something; to be something," said Lady Penelope
Brading.
It was an amazing statement, a shocking statement, and clean against all
class tradition when she interpreted it to the alarmed. Was it not to
be something if one was rich, let us say? Was it not to do something if
one spent one's money on horses and sport and dress and bridge? Heaven
defend us all if anything more is asked of man or woman than killing
time and killing beasts! Hands went up to heaven when Penelope
preached.
Not that she preached at length. Her sermons lasted five seconds by any
clock, save at the times when she warmed her ankles by the fire with
some pet friend of hers, and took into consideration how she was to use
her power for the regeneration of the world which was hers. Now she was
with Ethel Mytton, a remote relative of the celebrated Mytton who drank
eight bottles of port a day, and was a sportsman of the character which
makes all Englishmen prouder of sport than of their history. Ten
thousand on a football field would put him higher than Sir Richard
Grenville. Sidney was a fool to him. Her father was a cabinet
minister.
But Ethel was meek and mild, and followed Penelope at a humble distance,
modelling herself on that sweet mould of revolution. So might a penny
candle imitate an arc-light; so a glowworm worship the big moon.
"But you'll get married, dear," said Ethel, "of course you'll get
married."
Penelope was pensive.
"There are other things than marriage," said Penelope.
"Oh, are there?" sighed Ethel. She did not think so, for she was in
love. Penelope loved theories best.
"Which of them will you marry?" asked Ethel.
"Which what?"
"Silly, them," said Ethel. "What the duchess calls your 'horde.'"
"I don't know," replied Penelope. "I'm like Diogenes, and I'm looking
for an honest man."
"Oh, honesty,--yes, of course, I know what you mean. But there are
plenty of them, Pen dear.
"Boo!" said Pen; "so the other Greeks said to the man in the tub."
Ethel sighed.
"What Greeks and what man in what tub?" she inquired, plaintively.
And Penelope did not enlighten her darkness, for in came the Duchess of
Goring, her aunt, whose Christian name was Titania. She weighed sixteen
stone in glittering bead armour, and had a voice exactly like Rose Le
Clerc's in "The Duchess of Bayswater." She rarely stopped talking, and
was ridiculously moral and conventional, and, except for her voice, she
might have been a shopkeeper's wife in any suburb.
"My dear Penelope," said Titania, "I'm glad to see you again. You look
positively sweet, my darling, after all these parties and carryings-on,
and what not, and now at last you are quite grown up and yourself and
your own and twenty-one. I wish I was. I was nine stone then
exactly,--not a pound more. Oh, and it's you, Ethel. I hope your dear
papa is not overworking himself, now he's a cabinet minister. Cabinet
ministers will overwork themselves. I've known them die of it. Tell
him what I say, will you? But of course he will pay no attention, and
in time will die like the rest. It's no use advising men to be sensible.
I've given it up. Ah, here at last is Lord Bradstock."
Titania flowed on wonderfully; she flowed exactly like the twisting
piece of glass in a mechanical clock which mimics a jet of water. She
turned round and never advanced. But Augustin, Lord Bradstock, was as
calm as a mill-pond, as a mere in the mountains. He was tall and thin
and ruddy and white-haired at fifty. He had been twice a widower.
"Why at last, Titania?" he yawned, as he stood with Penelope's hand in
his. He was still her guardian in his heart, though she was out of
tutelage.
"I say at last, Augustin, because you were not here before me," cried
Titania. "And I expected you to be here before me from what you said
this morning. I told you I meant to come in and speak quietly and
seriously to Penelope, and you said you would come, too."
Penelope's eyes thanked her guardian, and they smiled at him
half-secretly, saying as plain as any words: "What a dear you are to
come in and dilute aunty for me!"
"Yes," said Bradstock, "I think I said I would prepare her."
"I've not had a single chance lately to say a word for her good," cried
Titania, "what with this person and that person and the horde. I think
it is time now, Penelope, that you reorganized your amazing circle of
acquaintances, mostly men, by the way. While Augustin was responsible
for you, of course you were obstinate, but now you are in a position of
greater freedom you will see the advisability of being guided by your
aunt. I'm sure, I'm positive of it."
Now the real sore point with the duchess was this matter of the "horde."
It was the only picturesque phrase she ever invented in her life, and
without any doubt it did characterize in some measure the remarkable
collection of men who were pretenders to Penelope's hand and fortune.
"Out of the entire, the entire--"
"Caboodle," said Bradstock, suggestively.
The duchess shook her head like a horse in fly-time.
"No, Augustin, not caboodle; pray, what is caboodle? Out of the
entire--lot, Penelope, there are hardly three who belong to your class.
I entreat you to go through them and dismiss those of whom we can't
approve, I and Lord Bradstock."
"Don't drag me in," said Bradstock. "They are all very good fellows; I
approve of them all."
"Tut, tut," said Titania, "is this the way you help, Augustin? You are
a hindrance. I believe it is entirely owing to you that Penelope has
these strange and alarming ideas. Yes, my dear, I'm afraid it is. He
is not the kind of man who should have been your guardian. I ought to
have been consulted. I knew a bishop who would have been admirable,
most admirable. He's dead, dear man, and the present one is a scandal
to the Protestant Church, what with incense and processions and candles
and confession-boxes. But, as I was saying, I do hope you will dismiss
some of these men. And I hope you will be sensible and not say shocking
things. No one should say shocking things till they are married, and
even then with discretion. Socialism and reform and marriage! Dear me,
you really must not talk about marriage, but you must get married to a
suitable person. I'm sure, Augustin, we should have no insuperable
objection to, let us say, young Bramber. He'll be an earl by and by.
And you mustn't talk about reforming society, my dear love. It is quite
impossible to reform society without abolishing it, my pet. Ethel
darling, many cabinet ministers have owned as much to me with much
alarm, almost with tears. It's no use trying. Tell your dear father
so, Ethel. I forgot to mention it the other day when we discussed the
London County Council and its terrible extravagance compared with the
economy of the government. We talked, too, about the War Office, and I
told him that it couldn't be reformed without abolishing it, which was
not to be thought of for an instant. What should we do without a War
Office, as we are always fighting? He sighed deeply, poor man. Dr.
Lumsden Griff says sighing is cardiac in its origin, and I wish your
father would see him, Ethel. He's the first doctor in London for the
ventricles of the heart. So every one says. But about your ideas,
Penelope--"
"Good heavens, aunty, I haven't any left," said Penelope. This was not
in the least surprising, for Titania reduced any ordinary gathering to
idiocy at the shortest notice.
"Oh, but you have," said Titania, "and society cannot endure ideas, my
love. Anything but ideas, darling."
"Well, well," sighed Bradstock, "what is the use of talking to her,
Titania? Pen is Pen, and there's an end of it."
"I wish there was," cried the duchess. "But she rails against marriage.
And she's only twenty-one. Dear, dear me!"
"She pays too much attention to you married women," said Bradstock.
"How's the duke, by the way?"
As the duke was engaged in running two theatres at the same time, not
wholly in the interests of art or finance, Bradstock might have asked
after his health at some other juncture. Titania ignored him.
"She rails against marriage," lamented Titania.
"I don't," said Penelope.
"You do," said her aunt.
"It's only the horrible publicity," said Penelope, "and the way things
are done, and the ghastly presents and the bishops and the newspaper men
and the horrible crowd outside and the worse crowd inside, and all the
horrid fluff and flummery of it. If I'm ever married, I'll get it done
in a registrar's office."
"Oh, Penelope," wailed Ethel.
But Titania became terrible.
"You shall not be, Penelope," she cried. "I could not stand it. As
your aunt, my dear-- Oh, my love, I knew some one who was married in
that way, and it was a most shocking affair, and of course it turned out
that he had been married before and was a bigamist. The scandal was
hushed up, and the first wife, who was the sweetest girl, and died of
consumption shortly afterward at her father's vicarage in Kent or
Yorkshire, near Pevensey or Pontefract; at any rate it began with a P,
and the man, though a villain, was a gentleman, for he married the
second one all over again in a foreign place, with a chaplain
officiating; much better than a registrar, who can marry you, I'm told,
in pajamas if he likes, though not like a bishop, which one might have
expected in his case. You all knew him slightly, at any rate. Never,
my dear, get married at a registrar's."
"It's better than the open shame of a cathedral and a bishop," said
Penelope. "Being married is one's private business, and it's nothing
but horrid savagery to have crowds there!"
"Bravo!" said Bradstock, and Titania turned on him.
"Did I not say all this was your fault, Augustin? You were no more fit
to be her guardian than you are to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Am I a
savage, Penelope? and did I not get married in a cathedral, a most
beautiful cathedral, all Gothic and newly restored at a vast expense?
My dear, I am amazed and horrified and shocked to think that you should
not perceive the quite exquisite fitness of being married in a piece of
lovely Gothic architecture, to the very loveliest music, breathing over
Eden, and so on, while all your dearest friends shed tears of purest
joy--"
"To see her got rid of," said Bradstock.
And even Ethel Mytton laughed.
"Augustin! Ethel Mytton! How can you say such things and laugh? It's
wicked; it's indecent!"
"Yes," said Penelope, "that's what I say. There's nothing to choose
between your way and the American way the millionaire women have over
there, when they hold a flower-show in a gilded room, and get married
under a bell of roses at the cost of a hundred thousand dollars. I'd
rather be knocked down by a nice savage, or run away with by a viking,
or caught by a pirate. I won't be breathed over in Eden by a stuffy
crowd. If--if--"
"Oh, if what?" gasped Titania.
"If I ever do get married," said Penelope, "I'll never tell any of you
beforehand!"
"Good heavens!" said the duchess, "you won't tell us?"
"I won't."
"You'll let us find out! Shall I know nothing of the marriage of my
brother's child till I read it in the _Times_? It shall not be!
Augustin, does she mean it?"
Augustin lighted a cigarette and walked to the window, which looked down
on the traffic of Piccadilly.
"I give it up," said Augustin. "When could I answer riddles? Do you
mean it, Pen?"
And Penelope, rising up, stood on the hearthrug and, looking like the
descendant of a viking and some fair Venetian, declared that she did
mean it. And she further went on to say, in great haste and with a most
remarkable flow of words, that it shouldn't be in the _Times_ or any
other paper. And she said that if Titania, Duchess of Goring, was her
aunt, it couldn't be helped, and that her principles were more to her
than any one's approval. Though she loved her aunt and her dear sweet
guardian, these same principles were even dearer than they were. And
she said that they had no principles ("not even Guardy dear"), and that
they only thought of a demon thing called Society, which was at once a
fetich and a phantom. And she became so excited that she talked like a
real woman orator upon a platform, and expressed her intention of using
her influence to bring about reform, especially in such matters and with
regard to young men who did nothing, and seemed to think they had been
created for that very purpose. And, as she talked, there wasn't a man
in the world who would not have yearned to take his coat off and ask for
a pick and shovel at the least, for she was as beautiful as any young
goddess fresh from Grecian foam or from high Olympus. Even Bradstock
sighed to think that he had never done anything for the human race,
which required so much help, but sit in the Upper House, a speechless
phantom. And Ethel Mytton cried with an imparted enthusiasm, while the
duchess wept with horror.
"And more than that," said Penelope, who broke down in her eloquence and
resorted to the tone of conversation, "more than that, I'll never, never
let you know whom I marry! I mean it! That--that's flat!"
And after this damp but awful peroration, she sat down with heaving
bosom, and poor, bewildered Titania shook her head till it looked as if
it would come off. She found no flow of words to oppose Penelope with.
The biggest river is nothing when it flows into the sea, and, if Titania
was the Amazon, Pen was the South Atlantic.
"Not who he is?" said the duchess, as feebly as if she were no more than
a brook in a meadow.
"I will not," said Penelope, like a sea in a cyclone.
"Not-- Oh, I must go home," piped Titania. "Augustin, she's capable of
marrying a chauffeur, because he can drive at sixty miles an
hour,--or--or a groom!"
"I'd rather marry either or both," said Pen, furiously, "than be mobbed
and musicked into matrimony with a grinning crowd of idiots looking on."
"This is immoral," said Titania, "it's very immoral; you couldn't marry
both. I'll go home, Bradstock."
And Bradstock took her there.
"You've done it, Titania," he said, as they drove. "She's as obstinate
and as violent as a passive resister. You've put her bristles up, and
Pen never goes back from what she says."
"You are very like a man, Augustin," sobbed the duchess.
"She's more like a woman than I'm like a man," growled Bradstock.
He had never risen to eminence, and only once to his feet in the Upper
House, and sometimes this rankled.
"Yes, I mean it, I mean it," said Penelope.
"And I wanted to be your bridesmaid," sobbed Ethel.
"You never will be, and you can tell every one what I say."
"I won't," said Ethel, "I won't."
And she went away and told them.
*CHAPTER II.*
In spite of what good conventional people said, there was nothing
abnormal in Penelope's character. The walking world appears abnormal to
an institute for cripples; good going is an absurdity, and as for
running-- The truth is that Penelope, by some unimaginable freak of
fortune, had been born quite sound and sane, barring her one lack, that
of humour. The providential death of her parents at an early age saved
her from a deal of teaching. Bradstock saved her from a great deal more,
and she saw to the rest. It pleased Augustin, Lord Bradstock, to play
with gunpowder, in spite of what he said about dynamite. He encouraged
her to trust to herself in a way that every well-regulated woman
considered highly dangerous, and he used to enrage her in order to hear
what she had to say to him. There was a period in which she swore
vigorously. She learnt her language from an old stableman, who adored
her even more than he did any horse. This was at the age of three. Her
first interview with her aunt, the Duchess of Goring, was positively so
shocking to Titania, who was mid-Victorian, and never got over it, that
the poor thing almost fainted when Penelope, a shining brat of three,
damned her eyes with terrific vigour. Goring, who was that very curious
and absurd survival of a thousand ages, known as a sportsman, roared
with laughter. There was humanity in him. There was none in Titania,
though there might have been if she had married any one but a duke. And
Penelope damned her eyes for saying she mustn't go to the stables
without a retinue, an escort, a bodyguard of footmen and nurses and
governesses.
"I haven't a governeth now," lisped Penelope. "I thacked the latht one,
didn't I, Bradstock?"
Lady Bradstock, number two, was then reigning without governing as far
as Bradstock was concerned, and governing without reigning as far as
another was concerned, and she paid no attention to Penelope, except to
encourage her to amuse her guardian. Thus Penelope grew like a tree in
the open, and there were no Dutch gardeners to clip her. At fifteen she
greeted her last governess, a lady of great learning and no ability,
with the news that she had had her luggage got ready, and that there was
the carriage at the door for her. There is no defending such conduct.
Pen never defended it herself in later years. She acknowledged she had
been a brute to Miss Mackarness, and gave her a position as housekeeper
in one of her own houses, that she never visited, with permission to
receive the shillings some visitors paid to see a mansion like a
sarcophagus, with one treasure of a Turner in it.
The trouble was that Penelope was natural. She had not been trained to
become so; she grew so. There is no more painful and laborious a process
than to learn to be natural in later life. But to grow like it! Ah,
that was splendid, and many unthinking people laughed to hear Pen when
she swore, or cried, or begged for pardon, or dominated the whole little
world around her. The world indeed smiled on Pen, and now she was
twenty-one and splendid, mobile, gracious, Venetian, strong, and as rich
as an American heiress, and she already had as many wooers as Penelope
of old. But the little bow of Cupid was too much for them. Other
defence was too good. And now these strange notions grew up in her.
There was some natural shame in her heart that the crowd of duchesses
and what not could not understand. When He came at last, riding
gallantly, a brave male, virile, strong, and bold, armed in shining
armour, should she lead him out into Piccadilly, investing him in a
frock coat for his armour and a cylinder for his helmet, and marry him
in a crowd, while a paid organist played something about Eden? Oh,
where was Eden?
Here's romance then, and in a new guise in a young woman. For the true
romantic age is the age of feminine desperation. When one has been
"taught" all one's best years, it's hard to be romantic till one wears
through one's fetters at the very foot of the scaffold, when it's too
late. How many sweet women sour in cream-jugs, and escape the cat, or
some roaring lion, for nothing but sourest contemplation. They crowd
feminine churches.
Pen's brother, or, rather, half-brother, was ten years her senior, and
played a suitable part in the orchestra of the House of Lords as Lord
Brading. He voted for the government when it was conservative, and
against it when it was liberal with perfect certainty and good-will.
There was nothing remarkable about Brading but the strange, almost
awestruck admiration with which he worshipped Penelope. A man even of
the most absurd conservative solidity must be a radical and an anarchist
somewhere, and indeed he pretended to be something of a socialist.
Nevertheless, he had humour. Brading thought his half-sister a wonder,
and had no criticism for her. Indeed it is believed that he helped the
groom mentioned above to teach her unrefinements of the English language
peculiarly shocking to early and mid Victorians. But in his heart
"Bill" Brading considered Pen's mother accounted for, excused
everything. The last Lady Brading was an American who wallowed in
money, which she invested in repairing her husband's character and his
castles. When he died, and nothing could be done for his character but
suppress biographers, she invested in ancient demesnes on Pen's behalf,
and bought her rat-riddled and ghost-haunted mansions of historic
character till there were few (and among them Penelope could not be
counted) who could tell how many of them she owned. Then Lady Brading
went to a newer world than the United States, and left Pen to the care
of Augustin, Lord Bradstock, a man of brains and no voice when on his
legs. It is reported that he learnt a speech of his own composing by
heart, and when he rose to deliver it all he said was, "Good God," in an
astonished whisper, and collapsed, struck by a form of paralysis which
rarely attacks fools and which bores cannot suffer from.
Penelope was richer than her half-brother, for her mother, having paid
her husband's debts, rebuilt Brading House, and saved his life from
being written after a very quiet and gentlemanly departure, considered
she had done her duty to the family. She left her stepson five thousand
pounds, it is true, and, with a want of ostentation not peculiarly
American, she left another five to Penelope, and modestly made her
residuary legatee. The residue was considerably over a million dollars.
And then there were the houses, most of them ineligible properties in
ring-fences, fit for immediate occupation after they had been restored.
For poor Lady Brading had a passion for ruins, and collected castles as
some do bric-a-brac. The two great griefs of her life were that she
could not buy Haddon Hall and Arundel Castle.
Well, there is the situation plainly outlined. Pen was as savage as
Pocahontas, so some said, and she could, an she liked, wallow in money.
She owned property all over England, to say nothing of a chateau near
Tours, a palazzo in Venice, and a building in New York which brought in
more than the rest cost to keep up. She had a brother, a peer with a
voice, a guardian a peer without one, an aunt who was a duchess, and
strange ideas of her own which got up and talked on the most unsuitable
occasions.
But then there was her beauty as clamant as a rose of fire, as sweet as
violet or verbena! The rose can be gilded it seems, like a lily, and
the gold was a power to her, giving authority over men. She who had
enough to command the work of many thousands at current wages (for this
is money truly) commanded that strange respect for power as well as love
for herself. Her lovers were numberless, so people said, and there was
this truth in their being beyond arithmetic that no one troubled to
count them. Marriageable beauties of a lesser order of loveliness
prayed for her extinction in matrimony. Mothers of the marriageable
prayed for it with a fervour only equalled by the fervour of her
hopeless lovers, if there can be fervour without hope. It is the
command of true beauty that it can. Had not all the painters, all the
sculptors, from Pheidias down to the unselected classics of our own
time, met together when she rose, a newer Aphrodite from the sea of the
unknown! Her loveliness was sweet and intolerable; one ached at it.
Cowards shrank from it. Brave men cried for her. There are strange
tales!
What a strange motley gathering she selected. They had one thing in
common, to be discovered shortly, one would think. She discovered their
qualities by inspection. Many would-bes she drove away overcliff. She
knew men of many classes adored her, wondering and humble. One great
lover of hers, who was very good to horses, and only reasonably bitter
against motor-cars, was her groom, Timothy Bunting. He didn't know he
loved her. Indeed, he imagined he loved her maid. But there is this
quality in a great love, that it asks all or nothing. Tim was perhaps
as great as the greatest, but he rode behind her even when the Marquis
de Rivaulx or Rufus Q. Plant rode alongside her with a quiet and
unjealous mind. There was much in Timothy, as much or more than there
was in the French marquis, who rode "well enough," as Tim said, or as in
Plant, who rode "all over 'is 'orse," as became one bred in Arizona.
These must show themselves by and by. They had the quality, at any
rate. Even Tim knew it.
But what was it that gave permission to Mr. Austin de Vere to join the
throng? He wrote poetry. He followed her as close as a rhyme in a
couplet. He never wrote her any, for which she was pleased to be
flatteringly thankful. There are some things that cannot be set down in
verse even by the greatest, and the poet De Vere acknowledged this
humbly. He had the character of being the most conceited and
immitigable ass in England, and when he was with Penelope he was as
humble as a puppy in leash. There was something great in his mighty
subjection. Not even Goby, late of the Guards, was so mitigable and so
mitigated when Pen was by. And Goby's V.C. was almost as much valued by
him as his clothes and boots. He gained it by a fit of angry rage, such
as had led him to pay several sovereigns at a desk in a back office at a
police-station, and came out of his temper to discover he was a hero.
So much for luck when a big man, with the quality and temper of a bull,
gets into a row in a sangar without any police to stay his hand.
"As for that De Vere," said Goby, "why, I could crush him with one
hand."
"And he could make you sore with a few words," said Penelope.
"He couldn't," bragged Goby.
Penelope smiled.
"No, perhaps he couldn't," she said, pensively, and Goby was pleased
with her opinion of his bull's hide. Europa had at any rate scratched
him. He indicated the sea of matrimony with inarticulate bellows. But
of course he was really quite possible. As Chloe Cadwallader said, his
boots were inspiration, polished, and his Christian name was
Plantagenet. He had some obscure right to it.
Then there was Lord Bramber. Some folks said if she married any one,
she would marry Bramber, because his father was the Earl of Pulborough.
They forgot all the rest of the aristocratic mob. If any title pleased
her democratic soul, she could pick strawberries. One senile and one
merely silly duke pursued her panting. But she certainly liked Bramber,
and showed her partiality for him or her unpartiality with frankness.
She had hopes of him, though he appeared hopeless now at the age of
twenty-seven. She maintained that men were half their age and women
twice it, at the least.
"Dear Titania is ninety," said Penelope, "and Guardy is twenty-five.
Lord Bramber will perhaps think of doing some work when he is fifteen."
There came with these, with and not after, Jimmy Carew, who was an
A.R.A. He painted portraits, and talked about art with eloquence till
no one, even an artist, could guess what he meant. But he believed
things with such faith that many of his fair sitters agreed with him.
He was the best looking of the whole "horde," as Titania called Pen's
adorers.
The "horde" included Leopold Norfolk Gordon, who had a house in Park
Lane and ever so many people's money to keep it up with. As may be
guessed from his name, he was a Jew. Several people, with whom he could
not share the money he had acquired by unsullied dishonesty, said his
real name was Isaac Levi. Goby, who hated him bitterly, consoled him
when a less successful Israelite called him "Ikey," at Ascot, by saying:
"It's damned hard lines, Gordon. A man may be born in Whitechapel
without being a Jew."
So near may insolence come to wit. When this was pointed out to Goby,
he told the story everywhere with many chuckles. But it was impossible
to deny certain attributes to poor Gordon, whether his name was Levi or
Moses, or Ehrenbreitstein, for that matter. Penelope had no racial
prejudices, and anti-Semitism was unnatural and abhorrent to her. She
said things about negroes to Rufus Q. Plant (born in Virginia) which
made his flesh creep almost as badly as if he had been born in Delaware.
So in spite of Gordon's looking somewhat Semitic, she asserted there
were the qualities she required in the poor man, who indeed was not
bumptious or loud or peculiarly offensive in her presence. He that
stole millions feared a girl. He polished his last week's hat with
trembling hands, that had signed death-warrants in the city, when he
spoke with her.
And to round off the "horde" with another sample, there came in Carteret
Williams. He was the biggest of the lot, and had a voice like a
toastmaster's, or that of the man who announces the train at Zurich. It
is worth going there to hear him, by the way. Many good Americans
travel for less. Williams was a writer, a journalist, a
war-correspondent, or, as he said, a "battle vulture." When he could
dip his pen in blood, he wrote with a red picturesqueness which was
horribly attractive. He belonged to a very decent family, and took to
his present trade by nature. That gives some hint of why Penelope liked
him.
What was the secret, then, the secret that brought young Bramber, and
Rufus Quintus Plant, and "Ikey Levi," alias Leopold Norfolk Gordon, and
Captain Plantagenet Goby, and the verse-making De Vere, together with
the Marquis de Rivaulx and Jimmy Carew, under one table-cloth, so to
speak, at the Tattenham Corner of wooing? Some said Penelope wouldn't
have anything to do with any one who was not a Man. It is true she
abhorred those who were not men; but so much depends upon a definition.
In the West (and the East, for that matter) a Man goes for what he is
worth, and is common currency, as he should be, and a "White Man" is the
gold. To be called a White Man is the true compliment, and
implies,--well, it implies what the "horde" implied. They were men and
Man, and "White," so Penelope said when she had picked up the
picturesque figure from Rufus Q. Plant. They might be asses (and some
were, or at least mules), but they meant to run straight. They were
lazy, or some were, but the laziest lay under the delusion that laziness
was their godlike duty. They needed the spur. They might be brutes in
the way of business (you should read what has been written in a New York
paper about Plant, or hear what a certain disembowelled set in the city
say of Gordon, who turned them inside out), but they played the game.
They knew what cricket was, even when it was played with red-hot shot,
and not to carry one's bat meant blue ruin. After saying that they were
all this, which implies they were men of honour, each according to the
code of their fellows (for this is honour), I shall show you how they
came, or how many of them came, to utter grief in curious ways under
very odd stresses. What can a man of honour do in an entirely new
position, one not provided for in any code? It would puzzle a jury of
archangels to say.
"Have you heard?" asked Goby, with wondering eyes.
"What she says?" replied Gordon.
"Shade of Titian!" cried Jimmy Carew.
"Well, I'm damned!" said Carteret Williams.
"This is romance," sighed the De Vere.
"I'm--I'm--that's what I am," whistled Rufus Q. Plant.
"Imphm!" murmured Lord Bramber.
"Sapristi!" shrieked the French marquis.
Wasn't it enough to make them exclaim when it was reported all over
London, and in the country, and in papers and cables to New York that
Penelope Brading had sworn, with a great oath, that she meant to upset
the holy apple-cart of all tradition (at least since Adam) by never
letting any one know who her husband was! They knew her, and knew her
word was sacred. Now let all unwhite men, all unrealities, all ghosts,
all vain folks vanish one by one.
With one voice the "horde" exclaimed, as they set their teeth:
"Well, we don't care!"
What does this say for Penelope's faculties of distinguishing men from
monkeys, and white from gray?
*CHAPTER III.*
All that happened now only shows one how the greatest sense of modesty
may end in the biggest advertisement. Penelope, though determined to do
her duty, which was mainly to educate mankind, meant doing it
unobtrusively, and there was not a man or woman in the British Isles or
in the United States who did not hear of her quiet intention. The
cables hummed with Penelope's name; it was whispered in the great deeps
of the sea; wireless telegraphists caught Lady Penelope Brading out of
Hertzian waves; ships ploughed the ocean laden with Penelope and copy
about her.
In two twos the notoriety hunters in London sank into insignificance;
professional beauties were neglected, and the sale of their photographs
fell off. There was an immense demand for Penelope's, which, luckily, no
one could satisfy until an enterprising New Yorker flooded the United
States with portraits. Before it was found out that this particular
photograph was one of a young actress whom he proposed introducing to
the public shortly, he sold amazing quantities of them. When there was
one in every inquiring household from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico,
the real sitter for it wrote to the papers and complained bitterly. She
is now playing to crowded houses. There are many paths to fame.
Poor Pen was at first horribly shocked. She was young. And yet she was
human. She said: "Oh, dear, oh, dear!" and, swearing that she would
never read a word about herself, she subscribed to a newspaper cutting
agency.
From the New York papers alone one could cull a highly coloured account
of her whole history. And they gave Bradstock's history, too, not
omitting his two-word exclamatory speech in the House of Lords.
Bradstock stood it like a Trojan, like a Spartan. He never turned a
hair even when they said that he was going to marry Penelope himself.
They gave a full biography of Titania, with a real photograph. When the
duchess saw it, she was silent for full five minutes, such was the shock
it gave her. Then she talked for five hours, and called on the American
ambassador.
"Cannot you do anything for me?" asked Titania, perorating.
"I'm afraid not, your Grace," said the ambassador, wearily. He said it
was an awful thing to be an ambassador sometimes, though it had its
points.
Being discomfited for once by an ambassador, she turned on Bradstock,
and rent him limb from limb. And then she went to Penelope.
"I'm only doing my duty," said Penelope, with her beautiful lips as firm
as Grecian marble.
"Your duty!" shrieked the duchess; "and look at the papers!"
"I can't help what they say, aunt. One's duty--"
"They tell my weight," said Titania. "How did they know?"
"They must have guessed it," said Penelope.
"I don't _look_ it," pleaded the duchess, now suddenly plaintive.
"No, no, dear auntie, you don't," said poor Penelope. "Oh, it's cruel
of them."
"Help me, then," said Titania. "Get married at once in a cathedral, and
all this will stop. I'll ask the dear archbishop to officiate,
Penelope. Oh, my darling!"
But Penelope became Pentelican marble again; she froze into a severe
goddess, and she saw Titania weep.
"It's scandalous! Oh, and they have a list of them all," said Titania.
Indeed, the _New York Dustman_ had the "horde" set out in a row like the
entries for the Derby. They said the betting was on Rufus Q. Plant, of
course. They gave a short and succulent biography of them all. They
headed the list "The Lady Penelope Handicap." They used some slang
about "weight for age."
"Great heavens!" said Titania, "all town is ringing with it. If this is
the result of looking on marriage as one's private business, give me
publicity!"
There would have been less of it if a prince had married a publican's
daughter in St. Paul's, and had presented the dean with a set of pewter
pots.
"And if she does what she says!"
The only men who did not talk much about Penelope were naturally those
who aspired to win her. Every one neglected politics and sport to
discuss her. She became politics and sport. Huge sums of money were at
stake as to whether she would keep her word; as to the length of time
she would keep the secret, and as to who the man was to be. There were
public and private books made on the series of events. And there was a
Penelope party and an opposition. Many young people who were
revolutionary in their sentiments said she was right. There was a
Penelope Cave in the House of Commons. Some of those who fought year in
and year out for the Deceased Wife's Sister backed her up. It was
whispered that the prince was a Penelopian; two princesses threatened
with objectionable persons of the royal blood were heard to observe that
there was something in what she said. Penelope was within measurable
distance of becoming a national, or even an international, question.
Mrs. X. wrote an article in the _Fortnightly_ on "Secret Marriage in
History." Mr. Z. sat down and wrote a novel, bristling with "wit and
epigram," in ten days, which ran into the third edition of two hundred
and fifty copies in thirty. It was said that questions were to be asked
in the House. A play on the subject was forbidden by the lord
chamberlain. The wittiest article on the subject was written by a Mr.
Shaw. He argued that no really beautiful woman had any right to be
married at all. He said plaintively that it wasn't fair, and convinced
the ugly in two syllogisms.
And, as the result of this, Penelope went away into the country, though
it was May, with Ethel Mytton and Mrs. Cadwallader, who was called
Chloe, and stood by Pen remorselessly in every difficulty. For Pen had
helped her out of an awful mess, the history of which would make a whole
story of itself. As a result of it, Cadwallader was in the Rocky
Mountains shooting, and a certain young soldier was taking too much
liquor and too little quinine in Nigeria, and Chloe got her diamonds
back from Messrs. Attenborough, and was eternally grateful to Penelope
in consequence.
"And I shall send for them one by one," said Penelope. "They can come
down by the ten o'clock train from Paddington, and go back by the five
o'clock one from here. And after lunch I shall explain my ideas to
them."
"And I'll be with you," said Chloe, who was as dark-locked as a raven's
wing.
"Oh, I don't mind," said Penelope; "of course you will. I'm too young,
am I not, to be left alone, Chloe? Is it true, Chloe, that the older a
woman gets the bigger fool she is?"
Chloe said it was true.
"I'll ask Titania to let Bob come over," said Penelope. "He's the
wisest person I know."
Bob was Titania's grandson, and was certainly young enough to be wise,
as he was only fourteen. He had been sent to three of the great public
schools, and had been taken away because of his fighting capabilities.
He never knew when he had enough, and it is quite impossible to keep a
boy at any school if he breaks out of bounds to fight some young butcher
or baker in a back alley at least once a week. Now he had a tutor who
had been an amateur boxer of great merit. It began to take the tutor
all his time to handle his pupil. But if Bob was knocked endways about
three times a week, it sobered him and made him do his work. He did not
yet know whether he wanted to be a prize-fighter or the
commander-in-chief. But he loved Penelope.
"I'll send for Bob," said Penelope.
And Bob came with Mr. Guthrie, his tutor, and Titania was glad to get
rid of him for a time.
"Oh, Pen," said Bob, "how jolly kind of you to ask me. I'm sick of
grandmother; she worries me to death. Always says, 'Robert, you
mustn't.' I say, have you read Kip's 'Cat that Walked by Himself'? Mr.
Guthrie says it's splendid, and I say it's rot. But old Guth likes
Virgil and Horace. Isn't that strange, for he can box like anything.
Baker, the groom, says he can. And Baker's awful good with the mitts.
But I say, Pen, what's all this about you in the papers? Grandmother
wails when she sees one now. I ain't sure I like having you so much in
the papers, Pen."
"I don't like it, either," said Penelope, "but I can't help it."
"Is it true that you're going to be married and never tell any one?"
demanded Bob from the bottom of a huge rocking-chair, as they sat on the
lawn. They were in one of Pen's habitable houses, and the lawn ran down
to the Thames.
"I won't if I don't want to," said Penelope. "But you're a boy, Bob, and
don't understand these things."
Bob snorted and smiled, not unsubtly.
"Oh, Pen, don't be like grandmother. I understand pretty nearly
everything now. Granny's always saying that, and it's jolly rot. You
can't be like me, turned out of three schools, and not know something.
Are you going to get married soon?"
Pen shook her head.
"She's very savage at your knowing that Jew cad, Gordon, but grandfather
isn't. He says that Gordon may be a Jew, of course, but he's all right.
I asked him if I could get put on a board as a director, and he was so
mad with me. I think Gordon's asked him to be a director, and he'd like
to only he daren't. He's got none too much money, you know, Pen. But
about all these chaps, Pen?"
He went through the horde seriatim, and pronounced upon them all with
ineffable wisdom.
"Goby's an ass, but a good ass, Pen," he said, as he kicked with his
legs. "He gave me a thick-un a year ago when I was in difficulties.
But he hasn't the brains to make a good corporal. Baker says that.
Baker was a sergeant in the Dublin Fusiliers. I like Plant, though, Pen.
Baker says he rides in a rummy fashion, more like a circus man than
anything else, but he can stick to a horse. And there's your Frenchman.
I say, how does he come to be called Rivaulx? Was he called after
Rivaulx in Yorkshire, or was it called after him? Ask him if he shoots
larks in his native country. All Frenchmen do, old Guth says. He says
he read a book the other day in which a French priest says he never sees
a lark without wanting to shoot it. What a miserable rotter, wasn't he?
But Rivaulx isn't so bad, though. He's a gentleman, at any rate, though
he is French. I say, why do foreigners never look like gentlemen?
Dashed if I know. I've often wondered, because grandfather likes them,
through his having been an ambassador. Sometimes a German does, though.
And Bramber's all right, Pen. I don't think I'd mind your marrying him."
"I won't marry any one who isn't a useful citizen," said Pen.
"He's all right," urged Bob. "He's as strong as a bull. Baker says
he'd peel better than most prize-fighters. What is a useful citizen? I
say, if you get married, you'll tell me who it is?"
"No," said Penelope.
"I call that mean," said Bob. "I'd not tell any one, and I'd help like
fun."
"I'm sure you would, Bob. But I may never get married."
"Rot," said Bob, "a girl like you not get married! Oh, I say!"
And he continued to say for some hours, and proved himself most
entertaining company, quoting Baker, who had been a sergeant in the
Dublin Fusiliers, and had been very severely knocked about by Jem Mace,
and appealing to Mr. Guthrie, who came over with him to get him to look
at a book in the mornings, to back him up. He was really very modest
and gentlemanly, at the same time that he was exceedingly bumptious and
arrogant, after the best manner of the extremely healthy English boy.
And at twelve o'clock he came running to Penelope and Chloe by the
river-bank in wild excitement.
"I say, Pen, I say, Pen, there's old Goby coming, and with that
miserable rotter who makes poetry. What's brought 'em here?"
"I asked them to lunch," said Pen.
"Eh, what?" cried Bob. "Goby and that rotter, Austin de Vere! I say,
Mr. Guthrie--"
He ran off to Guthrie, bawling:
"I say, Mr. Guthrie, here's that poet chap, Austin de Vere, come.
Didn't you say he mostly wrote rot?"
And Goby and De Vere came across the lawn together, like a mastiff and a
Maltese in company. They made each other as nervous as cats, and
couldn't for their lives understand why they were asked together.
"The clumsy brute," said De Vere.
"The verse-making monkey," said Goby.
But tailors could have admired them both. They were perfect. And lunch
was a most painful function, only endurable to Penelope because she was
on the track of her duty, and to Chloe because she laughed internally,
and to Mr. Guthrie (who was really a clever man) because he liked to
study men and manners, and to Bob because he talked all the time, owing
to the silence of the others.
"I say, Captain Goby, I've got a splendid bull-pup. Baker got him for
me, cheap, for a quid,--a sovereign, I mean. You remember Baker. He
was a sergeant,--oh, I told you that just now. Do you like bulldogs, Mr.
de Vere?"
De Vere was politely sulky.
"Bulldogs, oh, ah, well, I do not know that I do."
He looked at Goby, who was also sulky and feeling very much out of it.
But the subject of bulldogs appealed to him, because he saw it didn't
amuse his rival.
"I'll give you a real good pup, Bob," he said, good-naturedly; "one that
no one could get for a sovereign.
"A real pedigree pup?"
"With a pedigree as long as your own," said Goby.
Bob sighed, and laid his hand on Goby's.
"I say, Pen, isn't Captain Goby a real good 'un?" he asked. "Baker
says--"
But what Baker said does not come into this history, as the lunch
finished, and they all went into the garden. Goby spoke to Bob as they
went out.
"I say, Bob, get hold of that ass De Vere, and talk to him as hard as
the very deuce, will you?"
"You meant that about the pup?" said Bob.
"Of course, Bob."
"I'll talk his beastly head off," said Bob.
And this was why Penelope spoke confidentially to Captain Goby before
she did so to the poet. She was exceedingly pale and very dignified,
but she lost no time in getting to the point.
"Captain Goby," she said, "you have asked me to marry you at least three
times."
Goby sighed.
"Is it only three?" he demanded, and he added, firmly, "it will be more
yet."
"And I said 'no' because I had no idea of marrying any one."
"That was rot," said Goby. "For, if you married no one else, you would
marry me."
"Certainly not as you are," retorted Penelope. "I want you and all men
(that I know) to reform."
Goby was not astonished at anything Penelope said.
"I reformed long ago," he said. "As soon as I saw you, I said I'd
reform and I did. It was a great deal of trouble, but I did it. Oh,
you've no idea how I suffered. But I said, 'Plantagenet, my boy, if you
are to be worthy, you must buck up!'"
This was encouraging.
"I'm glad I've had so much influence," said Pen, who didn't quite know
what his reforms had been. "But there are other things. This is merely
negative. What are you doing to be useful to the state? Are you loafing
about on your money? Do you do any work? Are you educating yourself?"
Goby gasped.
"I say, come, Lady Penelope, I've done all that! Education! why, I had a
horrid time at school and at a crammer's--"
"Do you read?" asked Pen, severely.
"Why, of course," said Goby.
"What?"
Goby rubbed his cropped hair with two fingers.
"Papers?"
"Anything?" said Pen.
"Well, I read the _Sportsman_ and the _Pink Un_ (at least, I did before
I reformed) and the _Referee_," said Goby.
"Books?"
"Not many," said Goby. "But I will. What do you recommend?"
"I think Tennyson and Shelley would do you good," said Pen, "but you had
better ask Mr. de Vere. And do you do anything useful?"
"De Vere! Oh, Lord!" cried Goby. "Anything useful? Why, I was in the
army--"
"And now you do nothing. Well," said Penelope, "I think you had better
begin at once. Any man I know has to do something useful. You must go
to the War Office and ask to be made something again. I think a
colonelcy of a militia regiment would suit you. And I am going to ask
Mr. de Vere to take an interest in your reading."
"The devil!" said Goby. "I say, my dear Lady Penelope, I can't stand
him. Why, you may have seen we are barely civil to each other."
"I shall speak to him firmly," said Penelope, "and it's for his good,
too. He leads an unhealthy indoor life. I want you to change all that.
You row a great deal still, don't you?"
"Since I reformed I began again," said Goby. He felt the muscles of his
right arm with complacency.
"Take him out and make him row, then," said Pen, "and while he rows you
can read poetry to him, and so on. It will be good for both of you."
"But--" said Goby.
"Yes?"
"If I do this, will you marry me?"
Penelope shook her head.
"If you do it, I'll think whether I'll marry you."
"Oh," said the soldier, "and if I just can't hit it off with that poet?"
"Then I won't think about it," replied Pen. "I'll never, never consider
the possibility of marrying any one who isn't leading a useful life, and
educating himself, and living on less than a thousand a year. Can you
do that, too?"
"Dashed if I see how it can be done," said Plantagenet Goby. "But I'll
try, oh, yes, I'll try."
"Now you talk to Chloe," said Penelope, and she went away to the rescue
of the poet. For Bob had got him in a corner.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN PLANTAGENET GOBY, V.C., LATE OF THE GUARDS. Who
was ordered to read poetry]
"I say, Mr. de Vere, wasn't that ripping of old Goby to say he'd give me
a real pedigree bull-pup? He knows a bull-pup from a window-shutter, as
Baker says. You don't like them? No, but you would if you had one. I
feed mine myself, and I wear thick gloves, so's not to get hydrophobia
when he bites. He's a most interesting dog, and not so good-tempered as
most bulldogs. When he sees a cat, oh, my, it's fun! Look here, when
Goby gives me the new pup with the pedigree, you can have mine, if you
like, cheap. I know you have a place in the country, and you must want
a bulldog. Will you buy him?"
"Good heavens, no!" said the poet.
"Humph!" cried Bob, who of course had quite forgotten that he was doing
all this for Goby, and was just enjoying himself. "Why, what do you do
in the country without a dog? Do you ride?"
"No," said De Vere.
"Well, of all--I say, Mr. de Vere, what do you do? Do you walk about
and make poetry, and do you like making it? Old Guth, I mean Mr.
Guthrie, he's my tutor, and he's over there talking to Mrs. Cadwallader,
he reads a lot, and some of yours, too."
"Oh, does he!" said De Vere, who began to take some interest. "Does
he?"
"Oh, a lot of yours, he says; most of it, I think."
"And does he like it?"
Bob put his head on one side.
"Well, he says it's not bad, some of it."
De Vere flinched at this faint praise.
"Indeed! And what does he like best?" he asked.
"Oh, the beastliest rot," returned Bob, "Browning and Shelley, and I
say, do you see that bulge in his pocket? That's Catullus. He reads
him all day. But here comes Pen. I say, won't you have my bull-pup?
I'll let you have him for half a sovereign; I got him for a sovereign,
at least, Baker did. _I_ think your poetry's very fine, sir; Mr.
Guthrie lent me some."
But Penelope came across the lawn, and De Vere forgot Bob and the
bull-pup, and fell down and worshipped. And the goddess took hold of
him, and stripped a lot of his poetry away, and set a few facts before
him and made him gasp.
"I heard a very strange rumour, Lady Penelope," he said, when he was
once more standing upright before Aphrodite. "I heard--oh, but it was
absurd! I can't believe it."
"Then it is probably true," said the goddess, breathlessly, "for I mean
to have my own way and to initiate a reform in marriages, Mr. de Vere. I
have been reading the accounts of some fashionable weddings lately, and
they made me ill. What you have heard is quite true."
The poet shook his head.
"I have had the honour to beg you to believe a thousand times that I am
devoted to you--"
"Three times, I think," said Pen, who was good at arithmetic.
"Is it only thrice? But do I understand that, if I were to have the
inexpressible delight of winning your love, Lady Penelope, that the
marriage would be a secret one, that no one would know of it?"
"I mean that," said Penelope, enthusiastically. "It is a new departure,
an assertion of a just individualism, although I am a socialist. I
abhor ceremonies, and will not be interfered with. I have stated with
the utmost clarity to all my relations that I shall not consult them or
let them know until I choose, and I shall only get married (if I ever
do) on these terms."
"I agree to them," said the poet. "Lady Penelope, will you do me the
inexpressible honour to be my wife?"
"Oh, dear, no," said Pen. "Why, certainly not, Mr. de Vere. I don't
love any one yet, and perhaps I never shall. But what I say is this:
I'll think as to whether I shall marry you if you do as I wish about
this matter and about others."
"My blessed lady," said the poet, "is there anything I would not dare or
do?"
"I've told Captain Goby exactly the same thing," said Penelope, thereby
putting her pretty foot upon the sudden flowers of De Vere's
imagination, "and what I want of you is to be more an out-of-door man.
You live too much in rooms, hothouses, Mr. de Vere, and in your own
garden."
"I was in a garden, I a poet, with one who was (oh, and is) an angel,"
said De Vere, "but now I dwell in arid deserts, shall I say the Desert
of Gobi? What have I to do with him? Shall he dare to pretend to you,
dear lady?"
"He's a very good chap," said Pen, quite shortly, "and I think it would
do you good to associate with him more. I've told him so, and he
agrees. I want you to make him read a little, and exercise his
imagination. And he can take you out rowing and shooting perhaps, and I
think a little hunting wouldn't do you harm. You might ask him to stay
with you, and he'll ask you. And I want you to go out in motor-cars."
"Good heavens!" said De Vere.
"I know it will be hard," said Pen, consolingly. "But you know what I
want. It's not enough to be rich and write poetry, Mr. de Vere. I
think you might read statistics; statistics are a tonic, and I want you
to be a useful citizen, too. There are things to be done. Just look at
my cousin Bob. Now he'll be a splendid man."
"He wanted to sell me a bull-pup," murmured the poet.
"He's a good boy," said Pen, affectionately, "and his instincts are to
be trusted. I think a bulldog would do you good perhaps. And I shall
expect to hear you have asked Captain Goby to stay with you. And don't
forget the statistics."
"I'll do it," said the unhappy poet, "for while the One Hope I have
exists, and until 'vain desire at last and vain regret go hand in hand
to death,' I am your slave."
And, as he went away, he called Bob to him.
"I'll give you half a sovereign for that bulldog," he said, bitterly.
"Oh, I say. But Baker says he's worth two sovereigns," cried Bob.
"I'll give you two," said the poet.
And Bob danced on the lawn.
*CHAPTER IV.*
If Penelope had had any sense of humour, she would have deprived the
round world of much to laugh at in sad times, when laughter was wanted.
But thanks be to whatever gods there are, some folks have no humour, and
some have a little, and a few much, and thus the world gets on in spite
of the spirit of gravity, which, as may be remembered by students of
philosophy, Nietzsche branded as the enemy. Pen went ahead, bent on
cutting her own swath in the hay-field, and she cut a big one. Goby and
the poet must stand as exemplars of her clear and childlike method. It
was Pen's Short Way with Her Lovers. She got Rivaulx, who was
Nationalist and Anti-Semite to his manicured finger-tips, and had been
mixed up in the Dreyfus case, and set him cheek by jowl with Gordon,
alias Isaac Levi.
She made them dine together in public, and the poor marquis, being head
over heels in love with the earnest creature who was so beautiful,
submitted like a lamb.
"Very well, I will," said Rivaulx. There were almighty shrieks in the
Paris press. The _Journal_ had an article that was wonderful. The
affair woke up anti-Semitism again. Rivaulx had been bought by Jewry;
France was once more betrayed; the bottom of the world was falling out.
Pen, with no sense of humour, had a native capacity for discovering
every one's real weakness. As the Frenchman would rather have died than
dine as he did, so Gordon would almost prefer to die suddenly than to
run the risk of it. He had wonderful brains, and was a power in
finance: he could risk a million when he hadn't it or when he had it as
coolly as most men can risk a penny on the chance of a slot-machine
working. But physically he was timid. Rivaulx went ballooning. He
intended to rival Santos-Dumont.
"You must go with him, Mr. Gordon," said Penelope. Gordon nearly
fainted, but Pen was firm, as firm as a rock. Gordon offered to
subscribe to all the hospitals in London if she would let him off. He
offered to build a small one and endow it; he even suggested that he
would build a church. But the poor man had to go. It was now thoroughly
understood that any man who refused to do exactly what she told him was
struck off the list. The comic papers were almost comic about it. On
the day that Gordon went up with Rivaulx in an entirely non-dirigible
balloon, the Crystal Palace grounds were crowded with all the Frenchmen
and all the Jews in London. The balloon came down in a turnip-field
fifteen miles from anywhere, and Gordon got back to London and went to
bed. He was consoled by a telegram from Penelope, who congratulated him
on overcoming his natural cowardice, and suggested he should do it
again.
"I'll give her up first," said Gordon, knowing all the time that he
could no more do it than give up finance. He went out and robbed a lot
of his friends as a compensation for disturbance, and found himself a
hero. In about forty-eight hours the sensation of being looked on as a
man of exceptional grit so pleased him that he adored Penelope more than
ever. He was as proud of having been in a balloon as Rivaulx was of
having dined _tete-a-tete_ with him in the open.
She sent for Rufus Q. Plant, and she introduced him to Lord Bramber.
Plant was a big American with the common delusion among Americans that
he had an entirely English accent. But he hated aristocrats. Bramber
had an Oxford accent (Balliol variety), and disliked Americans more than
getting up in the morning. He was a fine-looking young fellow with a
good skull, who did nothing with it. He had the tendencies of a citizen
of Sybaris, and got up at noon. Plant rose at dawn. Bramber loved
horses and hated motor-cars. Plant had a manufactory of motors. Pen
sent them away together on a little tour, and hinted delicately to Plant
that his English accent would be improved by a little Oxford polish.
"And as for you, Lord Bramber, when you come back, I hope you will be
more ready to acknowledge that you don't know everything. Mr. Plant
will do you good, and will teach you to drive a motor!"
She had never been so beautiful. She showed at her best when her
interest in humanity made her courageous and brutal. The colour in her
cheeks was splendid; her eyes were as earnest as the sea. If Bramber
choked, he submitted, though he blasphemed awfully when he got alone.
"Go at once," said Penelope.
She paired off Carteret Williams with Jimmy Carew, A.R.A. Williams knew
as much about art as a hog does of harmony. Jimmy thought the war
correspondent a howling Philistine, as indeed he was, and believed
anything that could not be painted was a mere by-product of the
universe.
"You'll do each other good," said Pen, clasping her beautiful hands
together with enthusiasm. Jimmy wanted to draw her at once. Williams
wished for an immediate invasion, so that he could save her life and
write a flamboyant article about it.
"Show him pictures, Mr. Carew, beginning with Turner and Whistler."
"Make him understand that art isn't everything, Mr. Williams."
She sent them away together, and was wonderfully pleased with herself.
"They are all fine men," she said, thoughtfully, "but it is curious that
every man I know thinks every other man more or less of a fool or an
idiot, or a cad. They are dreadfully one-sided. When they come back
they will be much improved. This is my work in the world, and I don't
care a bit what people say."
People said lots, though after a bit the fun died down, except among her
own people. And even they laughed at last. At least, every one did but
Titania, and she had no more sense of humour than Penelope herself.
Indeed, she had less, for Penelope could understand a joke when it was
explained to her carefully, and Titania couldn't. And in after years
Pen came to see the humourous side of things. She even appreciated a
joke against herself, which is the crucial test of humour. But Titania
died maintaining that life was a serious business, and should be taken
like medicine.
"I never heard of more insane proceedings," said Titania, "never! The
notion of sending that poor Jew up in a balloon with that mad Frenchman!
Balloons at the best are blasphemous. And to make Captain Goby read
with poor little De Vere! I'm sure there will be murder done before
she's married. And now it's an understood thing that she will marry one
of them. And Brading laughs! If he is only her half-brother, I
consider him responsible. And Augustin smiles and smokes and smokes and
smiles. And Chloe Cadwallader, whom I never approved of and never
shall, backs her up, of course. One of these days I shall tell Chloe
Cadwallader what I think of her!"
"I say, granny, what do you think of her?" asked Bob.
"Never mind," said Titania; "there are things that you know nothing of,
Robert."
"Oh, are there?" said Bob. "I say, granny, I ain't sure of that. I've
been expelled from three schools, and Baker says--"
"Oh, bother Baker," cried his exasperated grandmother. "I think Mr.
Guthrie might keep you away from Baker."
"He can't," said Bob, cheerfully. "Old Guth and I have made a treaty.
I do what he tells me between ten and twelve, and what I like afterward.
If we are reading Latin, and the clock strikes twelve, I say, 'Mr.
Guthrie, don't you think Latin's rot?' and he says, 'Oh, is it twelve?
I thought it was only eleven!' I get on with Guth, I tell you."
And he was very thick with Goby, who had given him the pedigree
bull-pup. Mr. de Vere now owned the interesting one which had to be fed
with gloves on, and loathed it with an exceeding hatred only exceeded by
his hatred for Goby.
"I say, Pen, you go it," said Bob. "There's heaps of fun in this. They
all tip me now like winking."
But Pen did not see the fun. It was a serious business. She looked
after her lovers with the greatest care. They brought her reports; they
complained of each other. She smoothed over difficulties, and explained
what they were to do.
"How the devil am I to live on a thousand a year!" said Goby. But he
tried it and found it quite exciting. It exercised his self-control
wonderfully. He went into the War Office once a week and demanded some
kind of job, and was put off with all kinds of regulations. He sent a
telegram to Penelope the first week, saying that according to his
accounts he had spent no more than L20. She wired congratulations, and
received another wire:
"Have made a mistake. Forgot to include a few bills. Will be more
careful in future.
"GOBY."
Plant said:
"What, a thousand a year! That's easy. I can live on thirty shillings
a week. My dear Lady Penelope, I've done it on half a dollar a day.
I'll show you."
He took one room in Bloomsbury, and sent in his bills and accounts to
her weekly. She suggested he should find out if his great success in
the United States had ruined any one in particular, and if so that he
should compensate them. This cost him a hundred thousand dollars.
Almost every other day she got a telegram something like this:
"Have found another person I ruined. Am cabling five thousand dollars
to widow and orphans. Man is dead."