The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind. Henry Rich might not have extended his appreciation of Yeats so far as to approve this image, which is scarcely compatible with an orthodox view of the activities of the Deity. But certainly at Mallows the years continued to trudge along, and it is possible that Penelope Ferneydale found them at least dun-coloured for the most part. Mr Rich published a book which had been ingeniously suggested to him by Dr Gaston as a species of occupational therapy: a small anthology of pieces, both in poetry and prose, English, French and Latin, in which the fact that all things flow held a prominent place. Fugit irreparabile tempus was the epigraph on the title-page, and Mr Rich gave the whole thing a further touch of learning by referring to it invariably as a parergon – a word which sufficiently curious persons looked up in their dictionaries and discovered to mean something like a by-product of graver labours. This rather dreary book was civilly noticed by a number of reviewers.
Caspar also produced his book, and it was received very well indeed in the circles for which it was designed. In fact Caspar looked like coming into his own at last, and it was therefore the sadder that he was killed in a railway accident within a few months of his work being published. Fulke came to the funeral, stayed for a decent number of days with his parents at the Hall, and returned to a life which nobody any longer knew much about. Fulke’s writing was declared by the critics to have deteriorated a little, and his fortune was known to have increased a great deal. It was asserted by some – but less on actual evidence than as an inherently probable conjecture – that he was now separated from his wife. Anything more scandalous than this found no circulation at Mallows.
That Penelope had been left childless as well as a widow was a state of affairs striking her father in two lights. It added to the calamity that his daughter should be without even one infant for whom to care. He grieved over this. Yet it was not an altogether unfortunate circumstance, if looked at from a dispassionate and realistic point of view. Penelope might have been left with three pairs of twins. And what came to her through the arrangements made at the time of her marriage, although not paltry, fell short of what might have been desired. It had to be Mr Rich’s hope that his daughter, perhaps in two or three years’ time, would make a second marriage more satisfactory than the first in point of material interest. There would still be plenty of time for her to bear children in reasonable number.
But this prudent and hopeful thinking did nothing to alter the present fact, which was that Penelope turned thirty was just where, a dozen years before, it had been predicted by some that she was only too likely to end up. She was the childless daughter of a widower of many years’ standing, and as that widower was the incumbent of a rural parish, she had more than half the chores of that parish on her hands. Mrs Ferneydale at the Hall helped, but with benevolence rather than activity. She commanded, that is to say, reasonable sums of money, which she applied to charitable uses under Penelope’s direction. But these were years in which rural life was changing in various ways; social relations were changing under the impact of social legislation; Penelope found it easy to feel something outmoded and even archaic in the role she was called upon to fill.
And during these years nothing much seemed to happen. People were growing older, no doubt, but only in Mr Rich’s case could this be called very evident. Charles Gaston, who had so injudiciously brought to the surface of Caspar’s mind circumstances which had only vaguely been troubling it, found himself distinctly unsettled by Caspar’s death, and in fact revived thoughts about Caspar’s widow which would have been entirely idle had Caspar lived. Then – too soon, perhaps, and from his own sense that the years were slipping treacherously by – he asked her to marry him. Penelope’s reply was instant and seemingly convinced. It was not her intention, she said, ever to marry again. If she thus saw herself as an inconsolable widow in the Victorian taste it was possibly because she had before her the example of her father, with whom widowerhood seemed now to be a settled thing. Slowly after this, however, her secret feeling came to approximate to that of a princess (or a vicar’s daughter) entranced in a tower, obscurely expectant of what didn’t turn up. It was a kind of existence in which, paradoxically, those years seemed less to linger than to slip unobtrusively by. On Sundays she frequently found herself joining in a hymn asserting that the daily round, the common task, should furnish all she ought to ask. Several remote relations, hitherto not much bothering about the Mallows Riches, became aware they had a duty to her, and once or twice in a twelvemonth she would pay a family visit, or join in a continental holiday with people she only slightly knew.
Mrs Martin, who had long ago evinced a disposition to look purposively ahead in Penelope’s interest, was the one person to seek some radical change in the situation, and to keep in mind the fact that her former pupil was still a young woman, with a life to live which might somehow be advantageously changed from the life she seemed settled in now. The crux of the problem appeared to Mrs Martin’s mind to be the vicar. Time, once more, and a certain advancement in her material circumstances following upon deaths and bequests in her family, had turned her into a person of property, and therefore of greater consequence in Mallows and the small world around it. Were she minded, she could even act with some degree of eccentricity without attracting censure. Eventually she decided that nothing but good – meaning Penelope’s good – would result were she to supplant the enchanted princess as the mistress of the vicarage and presiding lady in the parish. Elderly people, long known as intimate friends, frequently enter upon mutually supportive and convenient marriages. There was no reason why she should not become, even at this late hour, the second Mrs Henry Rich.
Or there was no reason except Henry Rich himself, a man now older than his years and settled in his ways. But Mrs Martin felt this to be no insuperable obstacle. The main difficulty lay in divining Penelope’s inner mind were such a radical change to be revealed as on the domestic carpet. In fact it had to be discussed with Penelope before any action could be taken. Mrs Martin, whose thoughts were never of a facile order, was far from underestimating the difficulty and hazard of this. In the end she discussed it first with Dora Quillinan.
Dora had by this time made the career she had promised herself, and in a business world still unhabituated to seeing a woman’s name in a list of company directors. She probably knew more about James Ferneydale than anybody else did, but she seldom made him a topic of conversation during her visits to the vicarage – which she was still not too preoccupied to pay every now and then. When consulted by Mrs Martin she agreed that something should be done, and that the doing of it could fall well within her own range of activity. She could, as she expressed it, ‘float’ Penelope into agreeable and reasonably remunerative employment in no time at all.
‘But that isn’t quite my idea,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘Penelope still isn’t too well off in her own right, but she has quite enough to make do without seeking employment. What I’d like to free her for is a successful second marriage. I had hopes, you know, of Charles Gaston. But that seems to have hung fire.’
‘Then Penelope needs a wider field of choice. A job would put her in the way of meeting eligible men in a way that just doesn’t happen at Mallows. Ideally, Mrs Martin, her getting a job, and meeting up with the right suitor, and learning that you and her father were proposing to get married, should tumble more or less on top of one another in that order.’
‘I see the force of that, Dora.’ Mrs Martin also felt uneasy about it, and quickly discovered why. ‘I’ve been forming a plan,’ she said. ‘And I’ve drawn you into that plan – which turns it into a conspiracy. I doubt whether one should make plans for other people at all, however much their welfare means to us. Plans should be about things like houses and dividends and literary projects and planting roses. You understand me?’
‘I certainly understand you. Making plans for people is a kind of reification, I suppose. Treating them as pawns, or at best as kings and bishops. But it’s not an argument that impresses me. I’m more conscious of the fact that any plan takes a measure of time to work out, and that then some unsuspected factor barges in and changes the whole scene. That’s always happening in business.’
It happened in the present private affair. Some further months went by, and at the end of them Mr Rich himself proved, rather unexpectedly, to have been addressing his mind to the same problem as was confronting the ladies. The vicar was conceivably a self-indulgent man to a degree a little beyond the average. But he was also a conscientious parent: a character in which he has already been exhibited in those early anxieties in the field of female education. It was his slow discovery that he was sacrificing his daughter to his own domestic ease. The germ of this perception had come to him when Charles Gaston had inadvertently half-revealed to him the fact of his having made Penelope that offer of marriage. Mr Rich found himself disappointed rather than relieved when nothing further seemed to have come of this, and it appeared to him that he himself must be a factor in Penelope’s hanging back. He had to conclude that his dependence on his daughter, domestically and as a helpmeet in his parochial labours, must be where the impediment lay, and he saw that to rectify this state of affairs there was a clear instrument close to his hand: in the room with him, in fact, as often as Mrs Martin visited the vicarage. After long deliberation, therefore, he took the plunge. He held a serious conversation with the chosen lady, and at its close found that he had specifically proposed that rational and (it was to be hoped) mutually agreeable arrangement over which Mrs Martin had been hesitating, as she knew, too long. The marriage was to take place, and Penelope thereby to be released into some vaguely conceived larger world – this perhaps under the superintendence of the useful and reliable Dora Quillinan.
As with many rational schemes designed to operate within the obscure field of the human heart, the result didn’t quite answer to expectation. Perhaps this was in part because the actual sequence of events was not as Dora had envisaged it. More significantly, Penelope saw what was going on, and took no particular pleasure in the idea that rescue work was in hand. She had been doing everything that her situation required uncomplainingly and efficiently, and she was humiliated by the thought that she had perhaps been betraying any sense of frustration or hankering after a different manner of life. Moreover the notion of a job (which she divined as intended to bring her into promising contact with eligible suitors) was slow to mature. Some sort of preliminary secretarial training there would have to be, which would be almost like going back to school. So all that happened for some time was that Penelope lived on as the second, rather than the first, lady of the vicarage. The situation was reasonably harmonious, but it could be that without being entirely comfortable, all the same.
And then there occurred the first event in Penelope’s life justly to be described as strange to the point of amazement. Fulke Ferneydale died abroad after what appeared to have been a fairly long illness. His will, when its contents were revealed, held nothing unusual in any major regard. To his wife, Sophie Ferneydale, whether because of some estrangement or not, he left little: a disposition of things not particularly out of the way, since Sophie was a rich woman in her own right. The bulk of his fortune was held in trust for his son, Silvan. There were various minor bequests. But one bequest couldn’t quite be described as that. To his sister-in-law, Penelope Ferneydale, he left a small income for life. And he left her, too, as her absolute property, his villa in France..