LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу