Marie Belloc Lowndes - THE HEART OF PENELOPE (Murder Mystery)

'I agree with you absolutely,' he said very gravely. 'I do not remember a more beautiful woman, even in the old days.'

This tribute to his taste sent Mr. Gumberg to bed in high good-humour; and as he made his slow progress along the passage, leaning on Downing's friendly arm, he kept muttering, 'Glad you met her—glad you met her.' So often are we inclined to rejoice at happenings which, if we knew more, we might regard as calamities.

Table of Contents Table of Contents Chapter I Chapter I Table of Contents 'London my home is; though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since call'd back, henceforward let me be, O native country, repossess'd by thee!' Herrick. Chapter II Chapter II Table of Contents 'If you enter his house, his drawing-room, his library, you of yourself say, This is not the dwelling of a common mind. There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor.'— Lord Byron's Journal. Chapter III Chapter III Table of Contents '... a queen By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned, I mean.' Browning. Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX

'... a queen

By virtue of her brow and breast;

Not needing to be crowned, I mean.'

Browning.

When Penelope Wantley became the mistress of Monk's Eype, she left the villa as she had always known it, for her sense of beauty compelled her to approve the few changes which had been made to the great bare rooms during her father's long tenure of the place. As child and as girl she had found there much that satisfied her craving for the romantic and the exquisite in nature and in art; and long after she was a grown-up woman the flagged terraces, each guarded by a moss-grown balustrade, broken at one end by steep stone steps which led from one rampart to another, commanding all the way down the blue-green and grey bars of moving water below, served as background to the memoried delights of her childhood.

Penelope the woman had but to withdraw herself from what was about her to see once more the child Penelope, watching with fascinated gaze the stone and marble denizens of the gardens and the wood. In the summer twilight, just before little Penelope went up to bed, the graceful water-nymphs sometimes came down from their pedestals on the bowling-green which lay beyond the western wing of the villa, and the malicious, teasing faun, leaving the spot from which he gazed over the changing seas, ranged at will through the little pine-wood edging the open down. Even in the daylight the little girl sometimes thought she caught glimpses of gentle green-capped fairies—a whole world of strange, uncanny folk—who played 'touch' and blind-man's buff among the hanging creepers and at the foot of each of the flower-laden bushes which covered the slopes of this enchanted garden.

In these fancies the young friends who occasionally came over to see her, riding their ponies or driving their governess-carts, from distant country-houses, had never any share. More was told to a boy with whom at one time little Penelope had been much thrown. David Winfrith, the son of a neighbouring clergyman, who, when shunned for no actual fault of his own, had seen himself and his only child received very kindly by Lord and Lady Wantley, was older than Penelope by those three or four years which in childhood count so much, and later count so little. He had spent more than one holiday at Monk's Eype, sharing Penelope's play-room, which, partly hollowed out of the cliff, was lifted a few feet above the beach by rude stone pillars. There a large solid table, filling up the whole space in front of the wide window, made a fine 'vantage-ground for the display of the boy's skill as toy-maker and boat-builder.

Penelope, looking back, associated David Winfrith with her earliest memories of Monk's Eype, and for her the villa, especially certain of the great rooms of which the furnishings had been so little disturbed for close on a hundred years, was instinct also with the thought and the vanished figure of her father, who, when wearied and cast down by being brought into contact with the misery he did so much to relieve, found in his western home a great source of consolation and peace.

Lord Wantley, or rather his wife, had been among the first and most ardent patrons of the group of painters who chose to be known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More than one of these had spent happy days at Monk's Eype, and it had been owing to the advice of the most famous survivor of the early P.R.B. that Penelope had been allowed, and even encouraged, to devote much of her early girlhood to the serious pursuit of art. How far her parents had been right her mother sometimes doubted; but there could be no doubt that the great artist had truly divined in the beautiful girl a touch of exceptional power—some would have called it by a rarer name. It was not his fault if such circumstances as youth, rank, beauty, and ultimately great wealth, had asserted their claims, and turned one who might have been a great woman artist into an amateur.

Therefore it was rather as a lover of beauty and as a woman, fully, if rather disdainfully, conscious of her own feminine supremacy, that Mrs. Robinson had been so far well content to leave the spacious rooms of her own, as it had been her father's, favourite home, in much the same order as when they had been arranged under the eye of her great-uncle Ludovic, known in local story as the Popish Lord Wantley.

There was a side of her nature which made her feel peculiarly at ease among the faded splendours of these Italian-looking rooms. Her tall figure, slenderly stately in its proportions; the small, well-poised head; clear-cut, delicate features; deep, troubled-looking blue eyes; masses of red-brown hair, drawn high above the broad low forehead, in the fashion worn when powdered locks lent charm to the plainest face—in short, her whole presence and individuality made a satisfying harmony with faded brocades, the ivory inlaid chairs and tables, and the massive gilt dower-chests, which had no desecration to fear from their present owner's beautiful hands.

That Penelope could create as well as preserve beauty of surroundings—the one power seems nowadays as rare as the other—was seen in the room, half studio, half library, where, when at Monk's Eype, she chose to spend much of her time.

Situated at the extreme western end of the villa, on which, indeed, it still formed a strange excrescence, the room had been added to the main building at a time when Penelope's parents had been inclined to believe much more than they afterwards came to do in the power of eloquent speech. The substantial brick walls of the hall, as it was still called by some of the older servants, had witnessed curious gatherings, and heard the voices of many a famous lay-preacher dealing with schemes which, whether practical or nebulous, had all the same single purpose—that of leaving the world better than it had been before.

Penelope Wantley, as a little girl, had once been taken, when in Paris, to see a certain old lady, who had in her day played a considerable rôle in the brilliant society of the forties. The room in which the English visitors had been received made a deep impression on the child's imagination. The walls were painted in that soft shade of blue which the turquoise is said to assume when a heart is untrue to its wearer, and which is of all tints that best suited to be a background, whether of human beings or of paintings; and the old lady's furniture had been hidden in what the little Penelope had likened to herself as white dimity overalls. The windows looked out on a fine old garden, along whose shady paths had once walked blind Châteaubriand, led by Madame Récamier.