Читать книгу The Heart of Penelope - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 21

Table of Contents

To Cecily Wake, her first meeting with the woman to whom she was to give such faithful affection and long-enduring friendship ever remained vivid.

Mrs. Robinson had inherited from her mother, Lady Wantley, the instinct of dress, that gift which enables a woman to achieve distinction of appearance with the simplest as with the most splendid materials and accessories. She rarely wore jewels, but her taste inclined, far more than that of Lady Wantley had ever done, to the magnificent. Herself an artist, she dressed, when it was possible to do so, in a fashion which would have delighted the eyes of the Italian painters of the Renaissance, and it was perhaps fortunate, in these grey modern days, that her taste was checked and kept in bounds by the fact, often only remembered by her when at her dressmaker's, that she was a widow.

On the day that Mrs. Robinson, calling on Miss Wake, first met Cecily, the wedding to which she had just been was the excuse for a white velvet gown of which the brilliancy was softened and attenuated by a cape of silver-grey fur. To the elder Miss Wake the sight of her lovely kinswoman always recalled—she could not have told you why—the few purple patches which had lightened her rather dull youth. The night after seeing Penelope she would dream of her first ball, again see the great hall of a famous Northern stronghold filled with the graceful forms of early Victorian belles, and the stalwart figures of young men whose brilliant uniforms were soon to be tarnished and blood-stained on Crimean battle-fields.

As for Cecily, the girl's lonely heart was stormed by the first kindly glance of Mrs. Robinson's blue eyes, and it wholly surrendered to the second, emphasized as it was by the words: 'You should have written and told me of this new cousin; I should have come sooner to see you both.'

Then and there, after all due civilities to the aunt had been performed, the young girl had been carried off, taken for an enchanting drive, not round the dreary, still treeless park, where, every alternate morning, Miss Theresa Wake and Cecily walked for an hour by the clock, but through streets which, even to the convent-bred girl, were peopled with the shades of those who had once dwelt there.

Finally, after a long vista of duller, meaner streets, there came a halt before the wide doors of a long, low building, of which the latticed windows and white curtains struck a curious note of cleanliness and refinement in the squalid neighbourhood.

'Is this a monastery or convent?' Cecily asked.

Penelope smiled. 'No, but it is a very fair imitation of one. This is the Melancthon Settlement. Perhaps you have heard of it? No? Ah, well, this place was built by my husband.' Penelope's voice became graver in quality. She added, after a short pause: 'I lived here during the whole of my married life, and of course I still come whenever I'm in town and can find time to do so.' Something in the girl's face made her add hastily: 'Not as often as I ought to do.' But to her young companion this added word was but a further sign of the humility, the thinking ill of self, which she had always been taught is one of the clearest marks of sanctity.

Cecily's mind was filled with empty niches, waiting to be filled with those heroes and saints with whom she might have the good fortune to meet in her pilgrimage through life. Straightway, to-day, one of these niches was filled by Penelope Robinson, and though the radiant figure sometimes tottered—indeed once or twice nearly fell off its pedestal altogether—Cecily's belief in her certainly helped the poor latter-day saint, after her first and worst fit of tottering was over, to live up to the reputation which had come to her unsought.