CHAPTER VIII.WINNING A HUSBAND.
Polly made her way home after her interview with the lawyer, feeling a little less depressed than she had done for some time.
Firstly, this interview had been more satisfactory than she had anticipated, and the report she had to carry to her mother would be cheering in a sense, and then, for some peculiar reason or other, it had pleased her to meet Mr. Ambleton.
Though she had abused him so much and had felt so much anger toward him, later events had occurred that justified Val’s conduct to a very great extent in her eyes.
Polly saw now that if he had acted with a minimum of tact, he had been actuated by the strongest feelings of consideration for the welfare of a woman, who, after all, had been a complete stranger to him.
For the rest there was something that was attractive to Polly in this man’s appearance. It was not that she considered him even fairly good-looking, but she could not be insensible to his frank, pleasant manner, and to the undoubted sympathy which had pervaded him in this, their second and more agreeable meeting. Maybe, too, the fact that Hubert Kestridge had testified so warmly to the many good qualities that were crammed into Valentine Ambleton’s nature had the greatest power of all in putting the man before her in a good light.
“Mother will be surprised to hear that I have met Mr. Ambleton,” Polly said to herself, as she jolted home to Kensington in another omnibus. “I rather hope he will come and see her. I feel somehow she might enjoy hiscoming. My poor, little mother!” Polly added, with a sigh.
Her sympathy and pity for her mother were illimitable, and she was quite ignorant that, on her side, Mrs. Pennington gave her unreasonable sympathy and pity in return.
Things had been so sad, and so full of anxiety these last few weeks, that Polly had not had time to sit down and realize the blow that had fallen on her young heart. She was only conscious, in a dumb sort of way, of a curious pain that seemed to lie heavily always in one spot, and she knew she shrank sharply from even the remembrance of Winnie or of the man who was now Winnie’s husband.
As to how Hubert Kestridge had fallen into this position of being Winifred Pennington’s husband few people, and Polly last of all, could have offered a thorough explanation. In truth, one person alone could have afforded this explanation, and that person was Winnie herself.
The game she had played had been a very clever, and yet a very simple, one. It is a game that has been played scores of times in the world’s history, and may very easily be played many hundreds or scores again, at least so long as there exist women of the caliber of Winifred Pennington. Given two natures so honest, so proud and yet so open to influence as Kestridge’s and Polly’s, it will be seen at a glance that Winifred’s task of alienating them even before they had thoroughly realized what lay in their hearts, and substituting herself in the guise of the necessary sympathy, was not a phenomenally difficult one. Worked by her sister’s slender, iron, little hands, Polly was transformed into a sharp-tongued, bad-tempered creature, in whose eyes Hubert could do nothing but wrong. The few weeks he spent in town were made miserable to him by Polly’s apparently undisguised contempt and dislike for him, and if it had not been for Winnie hewould have left his self-selected task of looking after Mrs. Pennington’s affairs, and gone back to Ireland in a violent rage. It was not, however, possible for him to leave, while Winnie made such constant demands on his sympathy.
“Oh! don’t go, Hubert,” she used to plead, eagerly, her eyes, filled with tears, upraised to him. “You are such a comfort. I don’t know what mother and I shall do when you go back to Ireland.”
“It seems to me I don’t do much, according to Polly’s ideas,” Hubert had said, gloomily, on more than one occasion, “I know I am not much account, but still—I came to see if Aunt Phœbe, and——”
Winnie was always ready with some pretty, soothing word. She was always sweet and gentle with him; always so pretty to look at, that her influence stole imperceptibly over the man’s troubled heart, and one evening it came to pass that he was holding Winnie’s neat little figure in his arms, and was kissing away her tears, and promising her all the happiness and sunshine she longed for so ardently, poor child! It had been a repeated story of the misery of life under the same roof with Polly that, ending in a flood of passionate tears, had driven Winifred, like a child, to Hubert for comfort, and in less than sixty seconds the words were spoken, the link tied, and Polly was lost to him forever! The marriage had followed swiftly on this. Again it had been Winnie’s work.
“Take me away,” was her perpetual cry. “Oh! Hubert, take me away. I am so unhappy here. Why must we wait for anything? Oh! I don’t want a grand marriage. I only want peace and happiness and you!”
And so one fine morning Polly, coming up from the kitchen, where she had been preparing a dainty little luncheon to tempt her mother’s appetite, found that mother sitting in the dining room with an open letter in her hand.
The woman’s eyes were dry, but they held a strange expression in them, and Polly knew instantly that something fresh had happened.
“Darling, what is it?” she had whispered, running up to that silent, pathetic, little creature.
Mrs. Pennington’s own pain was instantly lost in the pain she knew she was about to deal this other dear heart, for Polly’s secret had been no secret to her mother.
“Polly, you are all that is left to me,” she said, and she forced a smile to her pale lips. “Can you guess what this letter has told me?”
Polly looked down and saw Winifred’s neat writing.
Her face went as white as the apron she wore, and for one instant she felt cold from head to foot. Then she conquered herself.
“Why, it is the easiest thing to guess in the world, my lovee, dear! This letter is from Winnie, and it is to tell you that she—she and Hubert are married.”
Mrs. Pennington took the girl’s hand in hers, and kissed it tenderly. She felt that hand so chill and trembling, that she was well-nigh breaking down; but for Polly’s sake she controlled herself. The girl’s mind must be diverted, if possible, from the full weight of this blow, and Mrs. Pennington played her rôle accordingly.
Winifred’s news had given her a great shock, and though she could not possibly object to the marriage, she did resent most keenly the way in which the matter had been carried out.
She saw in Winnie’s conduct a repetition of the heartless selfishness that had characterized Christina’s whole attitude during the past and especially the later past.
Mrs. Pennington had not been blind to all Winnie’s maneuvers with Hubert, and she had had a longing more than once to speak out plainly, and set matters right in the young man’s mind where Polly was concerned; butshe was a woman of infinite delicacy and tact, and, moreover, she had never imagined that Winnie’s artful artlessness would have reached such a point in such a short time.
There was nothing to excuse this hurried and secret marriage; indeed, there was every reason why Winnie, if she had studied her right duty, should have set aside the thought of marriage until the difficult pathway of her parents’ troubles had been made a little smoother at least.
In her very natural resentment at this hasty act, Mrs. Pennington found herself condemning the man more even than the girl.
“Hubert has acted in a way I should never have believed it possible for him to act,” she said to Polly, after the matter had been discussed in a few short sentences. “I have always thought that he had a sincere affection for me.”
“Do not doubt that, mother, darling,” Polly had answered, in a low, hurried voice. “Hubert loves you most dearly.”
“Then, if he loves me, he has taken a very strange way of showing it. Surely some consideration was due to me. What is the meaning of this marriage at all? Hubert’s duty was to come to me, to speak out his intentions, and to have abided by my decision. I am deeply hurt, Polly, and it is useless for me to pretend otherwise, and how I am to explain the matter to your father I hardly know.”
The attitude her mother adopted was one that gave Polly sharp pain in one respect, but in another Mrs. Pennington’s outspoken blame did good. It roused the girl from that curious blighting sense of stupefaction that the realization of Winifred’s treachery had brought. For, to herself, Polly did not disguise matters. She knew Winnie had been a traitress to her, and she understood all those hurtful words Winnie had spoken so frequently in their true meaning, now that it was too late.
She was bitterly grieved, poor little Polly, to have to hold such thoughts in her heart against her sister; but she was essentially just, and she knew she was not wronging Winnie one iota when she set down the whole blame of this marriage to the girl, and not to the man. She grieved, too, for Hubert’s sake, for she, perhaps, out of all the world, knew Winnie in her true character, and she feared for the future.
Her own feelings had been, as we know, wholly chaotic where Hubert was concerned, and this transformation of him into another being—that of a brother—put a definite stop to all the vague dreams and thoughts he had awakened in her mind. Nevertheless, he had always been dear to her, and he would remain dear, even though she might have to stand aloof and never minister to him, or give him a word of sympathy.
They were sad days, those days that had followed on Winnie’s marriage.
The bride and bridegroom had gone abroad.
“You know I am always ill in the winter, so Hubert is going to give me all the sunshine he can,” Winnie had written in her explanatory letter, and Mrs. Pennington had winced here once again at the unblushing selfishness of her child.
To take Hubert out of reach at this particular crisis was worthy of Winnie, or Christina.
Polly felt both glad and sorry. Glad for her own sake, but very, very sorry for her mother.
They were drawn closer together than they had ever been in their lives in that time, and the mother found a deep joy out of all her sorrow in testing and proving the sweetness, the beauty of the youngest girl’s heart.
Then had come that other blow, that unexpected death of the husband and father, and the smaller griefs and regrets were all swallowed up in this great one.
Polly was not quite sure how she had managed to get through those days. She had been the one creature available to do everything, for though there were plenty of relations who might have come forward and aided her, these relations were careful to keep out of the way. They feared being asked for material help.
Poor Robert Pennington’s misfortunes were too widely known among his family to admit of much tangible sympathy being offered. But Polly wanted none of them. She did everything there was to be done, and right well she did it. With the lawyer’s sanction she determined that she and her mother should remain in their old home until they were fortunate enough to let the house.
Of course, they had to pay taxes, but they were rent free, and it was better to incur no expense of moving till they were obliged to go.
Christina had written a very guarded letter to her mother, offering assistance, but Polly had sent a curt refusal.
She was hotly angry with Lady Wentworth, who made no suggestion of paying her mother a visit, and she felt she would like to have taken Christina and shaken her violently.
How much the girl was spared at this moment she little knew, for could she but have imagined that for the sake of spite and revenge Christina was actually pretending a generosity toward herself and her mother, Polly’s weight of care would have been made much heavier than it was. As it was, she felt she had said farewell to both her sisters, and that her mother would have, in truth, in future only one daughter upon whom she could rely.
“We are going to live together, all our lives,” she said every day to her mother; “and some day, oh! yes, some day, lovee, we shall be so happy! We shall let this big old house and go and live in the country, and we will find asweet little cottage covered with roses—and—and things,” though Polly was now quite grown up and important, she was still the old Polly in the matter of phraseology—“and Harold shall come home there for his holidays, and we will play cricket, and you shall grow fat. You promise me you will grow fat in the country, won’t you, sweetheart? And I shall milk the cows and do a lot of farm work.” And the flood of nonsense would flow on till Polly had succeeded in winning a smile from her mother’s wan, sad face, and then the girl was content.
“I must make her happy again. I must—I must!” Polly would say, to herself at night, when she lay awake in the small room adjoining her mother’s. “How I wish I were big and strong, like Mr. Ambleton. One can command so much when one is big, but when one is small, and a girl, too—well, there is not much one can do but hope and pray, and pray and hope!”