Authors: Mary Whistler
“And unless you’re absolutely craving for experi
ence—”
“I’m not!”
“Then stay as you are, little one. Not Penny Plain, but Penny Wise!”
She continued to keep her eyes lowered to her plate. “Is it such a good thing always to play for safety?”
“Perhaps not,” he conceded. “But for you
...
yes! I wouldn’t want you to be hurt, Penny, you’re such a nice little thing, such a kind-hearted little thing.” His voice grew softer, warmer. “I haven’t forgotten how upset you were that day I broke the news to you that there wasn’t going to be a wedding after all. I remember that you clung on to my arm, and you saw quite clearly that I was practically stunned ... I was,” he admitted grimly. “But it passed!”
“Did it?” she said, and her gentle tone was sceptical. “You don’t think you’re still a bit
...
well, a bit stunned, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But when I come to I’m going to be intensely relieved because I’ve had such a lucky escape. I came close to marrying a woman who would have let me down sooner or later, because although she’s lovely to look at that’s the way she’s made.” He stretched a hand across the table and touched her fingers lightly. “Penny, I’ve got an idea. Is there anything you want from life more than security?”
She stared at him.
“You value security, don’t you? That’s why you cling on to your aunt, and why you won’t cut loose and launch out for yourself
...
why you prefer changing library books and exercising poodles to doing something exciting like earning your living in the great big world, and renting a bed-sitter like other girls.”
“I’m not trained to earn my living,” she attempted to interrupt him, but he squeezed her fingers.
“You could have been trained. Even your Aunt Heloise wouldn’t have stood in your way. But you’re timorous by nature, and you need roots
...
and you need to cling! That’s why security is all-important to you.”
She pushed aside the vanilla ice with which she had been toying and sat up straight and stared at him—stared into his dark blue, magnetic eyes. All at once she paled. She had the feeling that something momentous was coming.
“I said just now that I’ve got an idea, Penny Wise,” he said distinctly. “It’s this. Marry me and ensure security for yourself for life ... I promise you that you’ll always be secure if you’ll become my wife in place of Veronica. I’ll make no demands on you, but I’ll keep you safe ... I think I’d enjoy keeping you safe!”
Penny heard herself give a gasp, but no words would pass her lips.
Stephen smiled in a quite extraordinary fashion, his blue eyes sparkled, and his voice challenged her.
“Say ‘yes’ before I change my mind, Penny! Say ‘yes’ for your own sake!”
CHAPTER III
Aunt Heloise s
tared at the telegram open in her hand, and the wording of it refused to make sense.
“Married to Stephen this morning. Hope you approve. Penny
.”
Mrs. Wilmott sat down blindly on one of the hard white seats on the terrace. At the table in front of her her writing-pad was spread out, and her morning’s mail. She had been about to begin a letter to her niece at Grangewood, instructing her to collect some important items that had been left over at the cleaners, and asking her to make certain that the dogs had their vitamin tablets. She had actually removed her pen from her handbag, deciding that the look of Hotel Splendide on the hotel notepaper—particularly when she knew that she couldn’t really afford Hotel Splendide prices—was impressive, if nothing else, when the telegram had been handed over to her by a trim little page with shining buttons.
Down on the beach Veronica was acquiring a delectable golden tan with the aid of a good-looking American young man who was anointing her shoulders with protective oil. Veronica was obviously enjoying the process, and she was enjoying everything about the South of France—the air, the sunshine, the relaxed atmosphere, the company (particularly, Mrs. Wilmott was not too happy to observe, the company! Which meant the young men who danced with her every night, and lounged with her on the beach, including the young American who might, or might not, have a wealthy father back home in the United States).
Mrs. Wilmott was so afraid that her daughter—experiencing a natural reaction after escaping the danger of marrying a man she had discovered a little late she did not love—might become involved even more disastrously while she was still revelling in her freedom. And by disastrously Mrs. Wilmott meant where there was little or no security for such a delicately reared girl.
Veronica saw her mother looking dazed on the terrace, and she picked up her wrap and beach bag and told the young American that she thought they ought to be returning to the hotel for something rather more stimulating than a bottle of coca-cola, with a straw stuck in the bottle, before lunch.
“Just as you say, honey,” the American agreed, and they approached the foot of the terrace steps with him carrying all her impedimenta, including the bottle of sun-tan oil.
Mrs. Wilmott held out the telegram.
“Read it,” she said faintly. “I’ve a feeling that the sun’s too hot, and perhaps I’ve had a little too much of it.”
Veronica took the telegram and read it while her escort vanished discreetly on the pretext of running to earth a waiter. Mrs. Wilmott waited for her daughter’s reaction to such an astonishing piece of news.
“Well?” she said, as Veronica stood with her lovely dark head bent, her scarlet sun-suit a gay blob of color on the terrace. She took off her dark glasses and re-read the telegram without them.
“Well, well!” she echoed her mother. “Well, well!”
“Darling, don’t be irritating,” Mrs. Wilmott begged. “This is an extraordinary piece of news, and you must feel very strongly about it. I’ll confess, I wouldn’t have believed it of Stephen
...
and, quite truthfully, I don’t believe it now! It’s a hoax. Some mischievous person’s idea of a joke.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Veronica returned, dropping into a comfortable chaise-longue and clasping her hands behind her head. She stared without emotion up into the blue, blue depths of the sky. “It’s happened before, you
know ...
marriage on the rebound after a bitter disappointment. And as Penny’s the very last person Stephen would contemplate marrying if he wasn’t half out of his head with misery, she’s the most likely one he would turn to in his present state of mind. Poor Stephen!” she added with belated sympathy, and stuck a cigarette in the end of a long ivory holder and lighted it with a gold lighter
...
which, incidentally, Stephen had once given her.
Her mother clicked her tongue in impatience.
“And you’re not even upset?” she demanded, with amazement. “You don’t mind that a man who professed to adore you could be so disloyal—forget you so soon!—and marry the girl who was entrusted with the task of returning all your wedding presents before the first of the acknowledgements could even begin to come in? You take my breath away! I find it quite impossible to understand you, Veronica!”
Veronica turned her head towards her a little wearily. “Don’t try and work yourself up into a state of furious indignation, darling,” she begged. “You know very well that I was never the least bit in love with Stephen—well, perhaps a little, at one time!—and that it was almost entirely your own idea that I should
marry him because he’s comfortably off, and you liked the idea of his being an important London surgeon. You were never very much concerned about whether or not I even liked Stephen ... so don’t go to the opposite extreme now and try and wish on me a broken heart!”
“Well—really!” Mrs. Wilmott spluttered.
Veronica directed at her a level look, tinctured very, very slightly with dislike and disapproval and a strong hint of criticism.
“As far as I’m concerned I say good luck, Stephen ... and good luck, Penny! She’ll probably need it, anyway.” she added thoughtfully. “And at least you can comfort yourself with the thought that we now have Stephen in the family! He didn’t marry me, but he has married your niece. That’s really quite extraordinary if you stop to think about it.”
Mrs. Wilmott exploded with a violence that actually surprised her daughter. The latter had had everything made easy for her these last few weeks, and it was the devoted mother who had borne the brunt of all the awkwardness and the planning to get away from it all. She had had to cancel arrangements, make things sound feasible to intimate friends, spend money like water after having spent too much already on all the splendid trimmings for a first-class wedding, and now with nothing but stilted letters from her bank manager likely to reach her, and a whole pile of bills still to be met, Veronica turned round on her and accused her of engineering the marriage that had not come off.
“Well, and what if I did?” she shrilled, looking for the first time in her life with distaste at her own daughter. “What if I did make up my mind that you should marry well? All your life I’ve done everything I could for you—bought you the most expensive clothes, sent you to horribly expensive schools! And to do it I had literally to
crawl
to my bank manager to get him to extend my overdraft over and over again! And all for nothing, because you let me down over Stephen, who would have made you a far better husband than you’re likely to get now that everyone knows you’ve jilted a man. A man with a reputation to consider!”
Veronica’s glorious violet eyes grew suddenly baleful.
“You
should have thought of that, Mummy darling, before you made such a wholesale grab at Stephen!”
Mrs. Wilmott gathered up her writing-pad, the telegram, everything that she could lay her shaking hands on, in preparation for withdrawing to their suite inside the hotel.
“And I don’t mind telling you, Veronica, that unless you do marry someone soon who has a great deal of substance behind him—whether you like him or not, or whether you even fancy you’re in love with him—there will be no more trips abroad of this sort for you and me, and I shall have to sell Grangewood. I’m not being spiteful, or joking
...
that is the absolute truth!”
Veronica saw Martin Myers, her American—who unfortunately hadn’t been able to impress her with his tales of life at home in “little old N’ York”—returning with a waiter bearing a tray of drinks in tow, and she sat up hastily and tried to soothe her mother.
“All right, Mummy, I get your point, but please don’t get yourself worked up when the temperature’s as high as it is. And, remember, Penny
is
your niece, and she was always a very devoted and amenable niece. You may live to be glad that she’s married Stephen and not let him become a prey for someone far less scrupulous. And don’t you think you ought to send off a telegram congratulating them?”
Mrs. Wilmott had also caught sight of the American,
and she had no wish to sit and listen to his nasal accent while the sun beat down on the terrace and her head was throbbing with indignation, and she was amazed at her daughter’s attitude.
“All right,” she said coldly, tugging her wide straw hat down over her eyes, and losing her sunglasses as she bent to retrieve her knitting. “I will do that, because I’m beginning to think Penny was much more deserving of all that I’ve done for you than my own daughter! I’ll tell her I forgive her for being unscrupulous, and wish her well
...
and Stephen, of course! Shall I say that you also wish them every happiness?” with much dryness.
“Of course,” Veronica replied complacently, and her mother stalked off to become involved with one of the reception clerks over the matter of sending a telegram to England.
But by the time she had worded it, decided that that wouldn’t do and re-worded, and finally got it off, another telegram was on its way to her from England. And that made the one she had just sent seem like a stroke of irony, or a bitter jest.
Stephen was so anxious to get the whole thing over and done with, once he had made that astonishing proposal to Penny, that without quite realizing what was happening to her she allowed herself to be rushed into a form of matrimony that could offer nothing for her future save security, and after giving a lot of thought to the word security she decided that she must have been mad to be tempted by it.
Stephen had been almost brutally plain
...
brutally blunt.
“I shan’t ask anything of you, Penny, because that would be rather like insulting you. I’m not in love with you, and you’re not in love with me, but you’re alone in the world and I can do a lot for you. You’ll be a nice little wife to have around the house, to act hostess when I give a dinner party, and that sort of thing, and I hope we’re good enough friends not to drive each other mad every time we meet at the breakfast table.”
He had said that the second time he took her out to dinner, and by that time she was already having secret qualms. In fact she was amazed at herself because she had ever let him talk her into agreeing to such an extraordinary and cold-blooded union when she was a young girl of twenty-four—quite pretty, because he frequently said so!—and he an apparently warm-blooded man of thirty-six.
It was true there was more than ten years between their ages, but Veronica had been exactly a year older than herself, and Stephen had been madly in love with her.
Penny didn’t expect him to pretend to fall in love with her—he was too bitterly unhappy, she well knew, over the collapse of that other engagement—but the thing that worried her was her own secret knowledge that she had been in love with him from the moment Veronica first brought him home to Grangewood, and, holding out his hand to her with an almost teasing smile in his blue eyes, he had called her Penny Wise because her eyes were so big and brown and slightly solemn, as if they were filled with wisdom.