Read Ebook: Lady Penelope by Roberts Morley Brown Arthur William Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2482 lines and 81922 words, and 50 pages

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."

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 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.

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 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-?-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 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.

"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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet