LITMIR.BIZ

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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-à-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

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