THE HEART OF PENELOPE (Murder Mystery). Marie Belloc Lowndes
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Persian mission to his partner, an American banker, to whose firm an influential English friend had introduced him when he first turned his thoughts towards an American haven of refuge, he had done so in order to escape, if only for a few months, from a state of things brought about by what he was wont to consider the second great misfortune of his life. Downing was one of those men who seemed fated to make mistakes, and then to amaze those about them by the fashion in which they face and overcome the consequences.
Owing, perhaps, to sheer good luck, after having endured a kind of disgrace only comparable to that which may be felt by a soldier who has been proved a traitor to his cause and country, Downing had so acted that in twenty years—a few moments in a nation's diplomatic life—he had received, not only the formal rehabilitation and recognition implied by his G.C.B., but what, to tell truth, he had valued at the moment far more highly: a touching letter from the venerable statesman who had rejected his boyish appeal for mercy.
The old man had asked that he might himself convey to Downing the news of the honour bestowed on him, and he had done so in a letter full of honourable amend, of which one passage ran: 'As I grow older I have become aware of having done many things which I should have left undone; the principal of these, the one I have long most regretted, was my action concerning your case.'
Only one human being, and that a woman whose sympathy was none the less valued because she had scarcely understood all it had meant to her friend, was ever shown the letter which had so moved and softened him. But from the day he received it the thought of going home, back to England, never left him, and he would have accomplished his purpose long before, had it not been that the consequence of his second great mistake still pursued him.
II
Attracted by a prim modesty of demeanour and apparent lack of emotion, new to him in women of his own class, and doubtless feeling acutely the terrible loneliness and strangeness attendant on his new life in such a city as was the New York of that time, George Downing had married, within a year of his arrival in America, a girl of good Puritan-Dutch stock and considerable fortune. Prudence Merryquick—her very name had first attracted him—had offered him that agreeable emotional pastime, a platonic friendship. Soon the strange relationship between them piqued and irritated him, and, manlike, he longed to stir, if not to plumb, the seemingly untroubled depths of her still nature. At first she resisted with apparent ease, and this incited him to serious skilful pursuit. Poor Prudence had no chance against a man who, in despite and in a measure because of his youth, had often played a conquering part in the mimic love warfare of an older and more subtle civilization. She surrendered, not ungracefully, and for a while it seemed as if the ex-Foreign Office clerk was like to make a successful American banker.
Their honeymoon lasted a year; then an accident, or, rather, some exigencies of business, caused them to spend a winter in Washington. There Downing's story was of course known; indeed, the newly-appointed British Minister had been a friend of his father, and one of those who had tried ineffectually to save him. This renewal of old ties brought on a terrible nostalgia. To Prudence a longing for England was incomprehensible—England had cast her husband out—indeed, she desired, with a fierceness of feeling which surprised Downing, to see him become a naturalized American, but to this he steadily refused to consent.
As winter gave way to spring they moved even further apart from one another, and, as might have been expected, the first serious difference of opinion, too grave to call a quarrel, concerned their future home.
Downing, on the best terms with his partners, had arranged to return permanently to Washington. To his wife, a world composed of European diplomatists and cosmopolitan Americans was utterly odious and incomprehensible. She showed herself passionately intolerant of her husband's friends, especially of those who were his own countrymen and countrywomen, and she looked back with increasing longing to her early married life in New York, and to the days when George Downing had apparently desired no companionship but her own.
Both husband and wife were equally determined, equally convinced as to what was the right course to pursue, and no compromise seemed possible. But one day, quite early in the winter following that which had seen them first installed in Washington, Downing received an urgent recall to New York. With the easy philosophy which had been one of his early charms, he went unsuspectingly, but a few days after he and Prudence had once more settled down in the Dutch homestead inherited by her from Knickerbocker forebears, he came back rather sooner than had been his wont. Prudence met him at the door, for she had returned to this early habit of their married life.
'Tell me,' he said quietly and while in the act of putting down his hat, 'did you ask Mr. Fetter to arrange for my return here?'
She answered unflinchingly: 'Yes; I knew it would be best.'
He made no comment, but within a month he had gone, leaving her alone in the old house where she had spent her dreary childhood, and where she had experienced the one passionate episode of her life.
Twice he came back—the first time with the honest intention of asking Prudence to return with him to the distant land where he had at last found a life that seemed to promise in time rehabilitation, and in any case a closer tie with his own country. Prudence hesitated, then communed with herself and with one or two trusted friends, and finally refused to accompany her husband back to Teheran. Already in her loneliness she had become interested in one of the great religious movements which swept over America at that period of its social history.
The second time that Downing returned to New York it was to make final arrangements for something tantamount to a separation. Of divorce his wife would not hear; her religious principles and theories made such a solution impossible. To his surprise and relief, she accepted the allowance he eagerly offered. 'Not in the spirit it is meant,' he said, half smiling, as they stood opposite to one another in the office of their old and much-distressed friend, Mr. Fetter; 'rather, eh, Prudence, as an offering to the Almighty on my behalf?' And she had answered quite seriously, but with the flicker of an answering smile: 'Yes, George, that is so;' and for years the two had not been so near to one another as at that moment. The arrangement was duly carried out, and in time Downing learnt that the offering foreseen by him had taken the very sensible shape of a young immigrants' home, the upkeep of which absorbed that portion of Mrs. Downing's income contributed by her husband.
Years wore themselves away, communications between the two became more and more rare, and his brief married life grew fainter and fainter in Downing's memory. Indeed, he far more often thought of and remembered trifling episodes which had taken place much earlier, even in his childhood. But the time came when this far-distant, half-forgotten woman hurt him unconsciously in his only vulnerable part. He learnt with a feeling of indescribable anger and annoyance that, having become closely connected with a number of English Dissenters, whose tenets she shared, she had made for some time past a yearly sojourn among them. To him the idea that his American wife should live, even for a short space of time each year, among his own countrymen and countrywomen, while he himself lingered on in outer banishment appeared monstrous, and it was one of the reasons why, even after he had already done much to effect his rehabilitation, he preferred to remain away from his own country.
At last he was urgently pressed to return home, and it was pointed out to him that his further absence was injurious to those financial interests which concerned others as well as himself. This is how it came to pass that he found himself once more in London, after an absence of twenty years. At first Downing had planned to be in England early in June, and those of his friends whose congratulations on the honour bestowed on him had been most sincere and most welcome had urged him to make a triumphal reappearance at the moment when they would all be in town. Moreover, they had promised him—and some of them were in a position to make their promises come true—such a welcome home from old and new friends as is rarely awarded to those whose victories are won on bloodless fields.
Accordingly, he had started early in May from the distant country where his exile had proved of such signal service to England. Then, to the astonishment and concern of those who considered his early return desirable, he lingered through June and half July on the Continent, ever writing, 'I am coming, I am coming,' to the few to whom he owed a real apology for thus disappointing