Originally published: 1904
Genres: Romance
Gutenberg link: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71205
Chapters: 24
Warning: This may include outdated and derogatory language and attitudes.
CHAPTER I
“’TWAS ON A MONDAY MORNING.”
Fractiousness was the keynote of the mental atmosphere in a certain substantial-looking South Kensington house on a certain Monday morning. Not that this bad-tempered atmosphere was peculiar to this one particular Monday by no means. As a rule, every living thing in the house, from the master down to the blind and asthmatic pug that lived under the kitchen table, started the working week in a mood that was detestable in an individual as well as collective sense.
And perhaps the worst offender of the lot was Mrs. Pennington.
Her hatred of Mondays had become traditional.
Seated at her well-worn writing table, surrounded by tradesmen’s books of every size, color, and description, she was simply unapproachable.
On ordinary occasions gentle-voiced and sympathetic, the advent of Monday saw her transformed into a flushed, querulous, pugilistic person, whose whole attitude denoted war and hatred toward every washerwoman, every butcher, baker, or greengrocer that ever had existed or ever would exist. Life in the Kensington household for at least three hours on the average Monday might be likened to the sensation of a train that had suddenly left the rails and was bumping along with a series of shocks, till either the steam was turned off in time or a catastrophe occurred.
That a catastrophe never had occurred is one of those everyday marvels with which we are hemmed about. Why, for instance, “Cook”—a generic term which covered a multitude of persons—had never turned on her mistress and thrashed out the end of the “suet question” with fists instead of angry impertinence, was one of those problems which Polly, at least, had never been able to solve.
“You know,” she had said on more than one occasion to Winifred, up in the seclusion of their bedroom, “you know it would take so little to smash Mother; she makes a lot of noise when she is cross, but she is such a small thing, anybody could bowl her over in a minute, and there would be an end of the argument!”
“I don’t think you ought to talk like that about Mother,” Winifred said on one of these occasions. As a matter of fact, it happened to be the same Monday morning alluded to in the very commencement of this story.
Polly, who was making out her washing list, writing the items down with savage dabs to get some response from a pencil with a broken lead, asked in a curt sort of way:
“Why not?”
“It is not respectful,” Winifred explained.
“Then,” said Polly, looking up with a defiant, not to say joyous, gleam in her eyes, “it is the one thing that I shall continue to say! I must have a vent somewhere!” she finished, as she returned to the washing list and the impotent pencil.
After a moment of silent reproach from Winifred, Polly broke forth into speech again.
“Oh, how I hate Mondays! How I loathe Mondays! How I wish one could skip every Monday that ever comes!”
“Tuesdays would be just the same,” said Winifred, with her superior smile.
“There ought to be no beginning to the week at all. What good does it serve? Why can’t we run straight along in one unbroken line, I would like to know? There must be something vicious about a Monday. Look what a bad effect it has on all of us.”
It was now Winifred’s turn.
“I do wish, Polly,” she said, sharply, “that you would come and do your share of the room instead of talking such a lot of rubbish!”
Polly subsided.
“I am coming,” she said, in her meekest way; and after pinning the washing list to the compact brown Holland bundle, she put it outside the door, and forthwith equipped herself with duster and feather brush, and set to work to make her corner of the large room as neat as Winifred’s.
This was not altogether feasible, since Winifred’s idea of neatness and hers did not quite coincide. For instance, every Monday, for the last year, at least, Polly had registered a vow that she would set herself the task of mending the old rug by her bedside before another week came around, but the days slipped by somehow, and the rug’s shabbiness became more and more enforced; it was, in fact, as shabby as it could be. Polly gazed at it this morning with a touch of shame.
“I think I will do it now. I can darn it with some of that crewel wool, and I shall at least preserve my neck, if not the original pattern.”
With Polly, sudden suggestions meant operations. She sat down on the floor cross-legged and pulled the once valuable rug on her knees.
“I shall ask Father to give me a new one for my Christmas present,” Polly observed, as she sorted out the nearest shade in her wools to cover over the jagged hole.
Winifred rubbed at her few silver ornaments a moment or two in silence.
“If I were you, I don’t think I would say much about a Christmas present this year,” she observed, after a little while, as she made the top of her old salts bottle gleam like a mirror beneath her industrious leather.
Polly looked up.
When Polly looked upward with her strange gray-green eyes she had the most bewitching air in the world.
“Why not?” she queried, promptly. “We always do have a present at Christmas.”
“This Christmas,” Winifred remarked, sententiously, “will not be like other Christmases.”
Polly frowned and threaded her needle.
“Don’t be mysterious, for goodness sake!” she cried; “you do so love putting on creepy, crawly sort of ways, Winnie.”
Winifred set all her little treasures in their proper places; everything looked spotless and at its best.
“Father has lost a lot of money this year. I heard Mother and Aunt Nellie talking together the other afternoon, and I found out then the meaning of lots of things that have puzzled us lately. We are living beyond our income,” Winifred said, rather grandly—she said it as if she were making a notable statement. “We only stay on here because Father has a long lease of the house, and we should have to pay the rent whether we lived here or not. Besides, Mother told Christina that she hoped things would mend in the next year, and she doesn’t want to make any big change till Chrissie is married.”
Polly darned on laboriously.
The rug was dusty and the floor was hard, and something, she did not know what seemed to be pressing very tightly on her heart. She was sorry, in a vague sort of way, that she should have been so cross, and that she should have desired her father to give her a Christmas present.
She was not very old or learned as yet, but she had a very deep font of sympathy in her fresh young heart, and Winifred’s clear, matter-of-fact statement seemed to make a claim upon that sympathy for some reason or other.
She recalled her father’s face as he had kissed them goodbye that morning, before rushing off to the city, after a hurried breakfast, and what she had called “Monday grumps,” took another form now.
“You mustn’t tell Chrissie that I heard anything, Polly,” Winifred said, suddenly. “Mother told Aunt Nellie she particularly did not want Chrissie to be worried.”
“I’m not a sneak,” was Polly’s retort.
She was thinking little things over in her mind. There had been a great difference of late in her home, things had been wanted very badly and had remained wanting. Two or three of the maids had been sent away. The lessons she and Winifred had been taking with fashionable masters had ceased in the autumn, and though more studies were spoken of, they had not begun yet.
Oh, yes, there had been many changes in the current of their life this past year. The only thing that had remained unchanged, Polly determined, had been the characteristics of the detestable Monday mornings with the dusting, and arranging and the elements of anger and dissatisfaction throughout the house.
And for this fact, Polly in her thinking, felt as if she had lighted on a truth, too.
Who knew how much care and real trouble had lain closed up in those tradesmen’s books for her poor little mother! trouble that had to be faced and met each Monday morning? How could she tell now, with Winifred’s neat little story of their poverty ringing in her ears, what a weight of anxiety might not have underlain those wordy arguments her mother had fought out with a succession of cooks?
Polly darned her rug slowly, while Winifred having finished her tasks sat down in her own prim fashion in her own prim armchair and continued her discourse.
“I think, too, that Father has had to pay a lot of money for Harold this year. I must say I have always thought it silly of Father to send Harold abroad. Boys always do get money spent on them so freely.”
There was a decided touch of prettiness about Winifred Pennington as she sat with her small, white hands—Winifred wore gloves to save her hands on all occasions—folded demurely together on her lap, and her wealth of hair—maybe of a tone that was a trifle colorless—arranged about her little head in countless plaits, a custom that is out of fashion nowadays, yet that suited her. Winifred’s eyes were gray, like Polly’s, but how unlike! and her features were as regular as her natural instincts.
“Harold is a duck,” Polly interposed, warmly.
“He is the kind of duck that costs!” was Winifred’s quiet rejoinder. She gave a little sigh that had something of impatience in it. “Chrissie will have a good time this year, at any rate.”
Polly drew the last thread of her darning together with a little jerk and spread the rug on the floor.
“I wish I knew something more about this man she is going to marry! Just fancy, Winnie, none of us have seen him yet, and Chrissie is to be his wife in a few months. It doesn’t seem quite right somehow.”
Winifred’s eyebrows went up a little.
“I don’t think it matters very much our not having seen him. All that does matter is, that he is Sir Mark Wentworth and that Chrissie will be very rich and very happy.”
Polly stood up and surveyed her workmanship.
She was not the best darner in the world, and the rug had rather a drawn-up look where the yawning rent had been, nevertheless, Polly gazed at it complacently—it was a feat to have accomplished it at all. Then she shook off the bits of thread from her gown and went to work to finish up her corner.
It aggravated her to see Winifred sitting there so calmly, and the row of little gleaming silver things irritated her still more.
Polly had her own share of such ornaments. A photograph frame that held her mother’s picture, a queer small spoon someone had given her on her last birthday, a piece of old Dutch silver, fashioned to hold holy water, and a broad silver belt buckle, all of which were carefully displayed on her little shelf, but all of which were just as black and tarnished as Winifred’s possessions were brilliant and clean.
She had her row of family portraits, too, which were very dear to her. She was wicked enough to confess to herself she was far fonder of Winifred’s picture than she was of Winifred herself.
“That is because I have to live with her, I suppose, and because she does make such a fuss about being clean and tidy. I like dust, plenty of it—nice, thick, black, London dust!” she now and then said, pugnaciously, to herself.
Mrs. Pennington had never trained her girls to be accustomed to the luxury of a maid. She was old-fashioned in her educational theories and considered a certain amount of housework absolutely necessary for the welfare of her daughters. Hence every morning, Polly and Winifred had to make their own beds and dust their room, and every Monday they were expected to turn it out thoroughly and make it as clean as a new pin.
Downstairs in the drawing room, Christina had to dust all the china and to keep the many valuable ornaments in good order, and once a week each girl was sent down for an hour’s study with Cook.
The mother, like an industrious bee, hovered over all the arrangements of her house, and her hand was always ready to make a rough corner smooth.
On this particular morning even her clever, deft hands found the rough corner a little too rough to be manipulated.
The usual scenes in the study, the usual fights over the household books had ended, but the trouble was not finished with them. Christina, when she went to seek her mother at the customary hour, found her sitting very still in her chair, her pale, worn, interesting face supported by her hand, which overshadowed her eyes, but could not hide from her daughter the fact that she had been crying.
“Mother, why would you not let me do the books for you? You worry yourself far too much.” Chrissie’s voice was very like Winifred’s—even, musical, rather cold, and there was a strong resemblance between them.
The elder girl was, however, far more attractive; in fact, when Polly declared her eldest sister to be beautiful, she was not far wrong, for beautiful Christina Pennington was, in a delicate, classical way. Her features were almost perfect, her eyes of a wonderful shade of dark blue, she had the rarest skin, and her figure, though very slight, was well proportioned.
Mrs. Pennington roused herself hurriedly as her daughter spoke.
“I am all right now, Chrissie, dear. I made myself very angry with Cook, but she is really too impertinent. I—I am afraid she will have to go.” Mrs. Pennington said this half nervously.
“I wanted you to send her away long ago, dear,” Christina said, quietly; “and if she has been rude to you today, I think she ought to go at once.”
Mrs. Pennington colored painfully.
“I will give her proper notice next week,” was her answer. She moved the papers nervously on her desk; there was something most pathetic in the look of her small, thin fingers. “Are you going out, my darling?” she asked, looking up hurriedly.
“I came to know if you would come with me, Mother? I heard from Sunstead this morning. Mark wants me to go to his grandmother for Christmas, and I must get at least two new frocks—one for evening, and the other for everyday wear.”
“Shall you go to Celeste as usual?” Mrs. Pennington asked. She made a big endeavor to speak lightly, but any person of keen perception would have read the heaviness, the perplexity that lay in her voice.
Christina paused.
“I think so. She cuts so well, and she is not more expensive than anyone else. Grannie’s check came to me this morning, happily, and it will just see me comfortably through this visit. I am sorry to leave you, Mother, dear, but I suppose I must go, must I not?”
When Christina put a little pleading into her sweetly toned voice she was quite irresistible, to her mother at least.
“Oh, my dear, of course you must go. It is only right and proper that you should be at Sunstead as often as possible since it is to be your future home. We—we shall miss you, that you know only too well,” Mrs. Pennington said, with a faint smile breaking the troubled look on her face, “but we must not be selfish.”
Christina kissed her mother in a pathetic little way.
“Do come out, dear,” she said. “The air will do you good, and I want your advice with Celeste. No one has such taste as you.”
Mrs. Pennington held her beautiful daughter in her arms for a long moment and then broke into words and laughter as she hurried from the room.
“We have just an hour and a half before luncheon. Are the girls coming too, Chrissie?”
Chrissie shook her head.
“Winnie must practice, and it is Polly’s day to attend to the plants in the conservatory,” she said, very precisely. She exercised a certain control over her sisters.
She moved upstairs gracefully to her own room, and Mrs. Pennington followed more slowly.
Each step she took seemed to be weighed as with lead, and once she stopped and pressed both her hands on her heart before she could go on.
Polly, who had finished cleaning her silver, was on her way to the conservatory—already Winifred’s clear, neat scales were running up and down the piano with the perfection of an automaton—when she met her mother at the top of the stairs.
To pop down the watering can and fold her mother in her arms was the work of an instant.
“You duck!” she said, kissing the small, dear, worn face, “do you know how much I love you? Have you the least idea how sweet you are, you lamb and dove?”
Mrs. Pennington nestled almost like a child in those clinging young arms.
“Polly, you have no respect for me,” she said, and although she spoke in her usual tone, Polly detected a difference. It was perhaps due to the train of thought that Winifred’s chance words had awakened in the girl’s mind that she heard that faint difference in her mother’s voice.
“Mums!” she said, wistfully, “may I come and help you dress? You are going out, I know.”
“I can manage by myself, Polly, and you have a lot of work to do in the conservatory, my pet. Chrissie and I are going to her dressmaker; she has to have some new frocks, as she is going to spend Christmas with Sir Mark and his mother.”
Polly gave vent to a deep exclamation of disappointment.
“Oh! Mother,” she said, “I thought Chrissie would be sure to be with us this Christmas; it is the last she will spend with us in a proper way,” she finished, quaintly.
She would have said more, but something urged her not to press the matter today.
She picked up her watering can and went slowly to the conservatory.
Winifred had left her scales for her exercises, and Polly stopped to listen. She and Winifred played the same exercises, but Polly played them differently.
“Why do people grow up and get married?” she asked herself. “Chrissie belongs to us and yet that nasty Mark Wentworth comes and steals her away. I hate him! I think he might have let her be with us for Christmas. I am sure dear little mother feels it awfully, but she is such a sweet thing she never complains. She looks very tired today,” Polly mused, as she drew a very large pair of gardening gloves over her hands and prepared to do her duty among the plants.
The conservatory, like everything else in the house, had a shabby and rather dull appearance. Fresh plants were wanted and some of the windows were cracked.
“I wonder if what Winnie told me just now is true; if we are going to be very poor?” Polly said to herself.
She looked about her today with new eyes, and a certain seriousness stole into her brown, mischievous face.
She was quite a contrast to her sisters, both of whom resembled their mother. Polly, on the other hand, was neither like her father nor her mother. When this was remarked upon she got very angry.
“I hark back,” she would observe. “Goodness knows who I am like. I don’t think it matters much; looks are not everything, are they?”
For silly little Polly imagined that because she inherited neither her father’s good looks nor her mother’s once undoubted beauty, she must perforce be exceedingly plain. She was, on the contrary, exceedingly pretty, a fact that was making itself patent to more than one person by slow degrees.
She was a very young girl, a real old-fashioned young lady, with her head crammed with romantic ideas and any amount of illusions.
She loved sweets and spent all her modest pocket money on chocolate caramels and Turkish delight. Her age was seventeen and a half, and she looked at least two years younger than that, very unlike Winifred, whose nineteen summers might easily have passed for twenty-five.
Polly’s hair was, again, a contrast to her sisters’. Winifred had masses of soft dun-colored hair, and Christina had a wealth of warm brown tresses. Polly’s hair was uncompromisingly dark hair that was never very tidy but never needed tongs or curling paper since it had a trick of framing itself about her small head in a most seductively caressing manner.
She called her nose a disgrace to her family. It was a nondescript nose, not quite straight, with a wonderful amount of humor in the cut of the nostrils. It would have been impossible to imagine any other nose to match with those queer, lovely eyes of hers, eyes which had the strangest and quickest gradations of color in them, and which, like their prototype, the sea, could in an instant flash green and then grow wonderfully blue.
“Cat’s eyes,” Winnie called them, but they had nothing feline, cunning, or shifty in their expression. They were too clear, too joyous, too full of life and the gladness of life, to have any of the subtlety, the blind sort of beauty one sees in a cat.
From the conservatory, Polly had a good view of all that came and went on the stairs, and an hour or so after her mother, looking wan and shadowy but still attractive, followed by Chrissie, a vision of smartness and beauty, had passed down the stairs, Polly became aware that Jane, the parlormaid, was having an altercation with somebody at the front door.
Polly’s pulse beat a little nervously. She was beginning to know the significance of troublesome callers by degrees, and she turned with a start as Jane, evidently flushed and beaten, came running up the stairs.
“There’s a gentleman, Miss Polly, what’s asking for master or mistress, and he won’t be said nay. I have told him they ain’t neither of them at home, but he won’t believe me, and he won’t go away.”
Polly hesitated a moment. Her heart was beating very quickly, she did not know why, and she felt a little frightened. But she saw something had to be done. She drew off her gloves and her big apron.
“Show the gentleman into the dining room. I will come and speak to him, Jane.”
Giving her gown a tweak, and her hair two or three futile pats, Polly went slowly down the stairs.
She was not sure if she was doing right or wrong, but most certainly, if the man would not go away at Jane’s desire, then he must go away at her command.
Jane met her at the foot of the stairs.
“He’s in the dining room, miss,” she said, still hot and angry.
Polly walked in her stateliest way into the dining room.
A young man, tall, and of a very big build, was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire. He was frowning darkly and was evidently in a very bad temper.
“Looks as if he had been born in a hurry on a Monday!” was impertinent Polly’s quick summing up to herself.
She shut the door with a click and advanced into the room.
The young man, who had been regarding his boots, now lifted his eyes and regarded her, and for the space of two or three seconds, his exceedingly angry eyes gazed into the girl’s defiant ones while silence reigned.
And thus it was that Valentine Ambleton met pretty Polly Pennington for the first time.
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