A POOR GENTLEMAN.

By MRS. OLIPHANT.
FIRST HALF.
NEW YORK:
GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER,
17 to 27 Vandewater Street.

A POOR GENTLEMAN.

CHAPTER I.
THE TWO FAMILIES.

The house of Penton is one of the greatest in the county of which it is an ornament. It is an old house, but not of the kind which is now so generally appreciated and admired. It is not Elizabethan nor Jacobean, nor of the reign of Queen Anne. The front is Grecian, or rather Palladian, in heavy stone supplemented by plaster, with the balustrades of a stony terrace surmounting the level frontage of the single story, lofty, yet flat, which stretches like a screen across the higher cluster of building which forms the body of the house. When you turn the corner from this somewhat blank and low but imposing line you come upon the garden-front, which is of the livelier French order of architecture, with long windows, and many of them. The gardens are the pride of the house. These are arranged in terraces and parterres, brilliant with flowers, and there is even an elaborate system of water-works, a little out of order now, and a few statues here and there, half covered with lichens, yet not unworthy of better preservation. The rooms inside are lofty and sumptuous, intended for great entertainments and fine company, but the gardens are such as Watteau would have delighted in, and which he might have made the scene of many a fête champêtre and graceful group of fine ladies and fine gentlemen in costumes more brilliant than are now thought of. The grounds at Penton, indeed, are still filled at times with parties of gayly dressed people, and the lawns brightened by maidens in muslin and young men in flannels; but Watteau would have had no sympathy with the activities of lawn-tennis. That popular game, however, was not pursued with any enthusiasm at Penton. It was permitted rather than encouraged. There was no youth in the house. Sir Walter Penton was an old man, and though he had, like most old gentlemen who figure in romance, an only daughter, she was not either young or fair. She was a lady of somewhat stern aspect, between forty and fifty, married, but childless. The household consisted of her father, her husband, and herself, no more. And there were many circumstances which combined to make it anything but a cheerful house.

Three or four miles from Penton, but on a lower level, lay the house of Penton Hook. It was on the banks of the river, planted on a piece of land which was almost an island in consequence of the curve of the stream which swept round it. The great house stood high on the brow of the bank, an object seen many miles off, and which was the distinguishing feature of the landscape. The smaller one—so small that it was scarcely worthy to be called a country-place at all—lay low. When the river was in flood, which happened almost every winter, Penton Hook stood dismally, with all its little gardens under water, in what seemed the middle of the stream. And though the Pentons all protested that the water never actually came into the house, which was raised on a little terrace, their protest was received by all their neighbors with shaking of their heads. Everything was green and luxuriant, as may be supposed. The house was so covered with creepers that its style was undefinable. A little glimmer of old red brick, delightfully toned and mellowed, looked out here and there from amid the clusters of feathery seed-pods on the clematis, and below the branches of the gloire de Dijon in winter. In the brighter part of the year it was a mass of leaf and flower; but during all the dark season, when the water was up, when the skies were dark, damp and dreariness were the characteristics of Penton Hook. The rooms looked damp, there was a moist look about the tiles in the little hall. The paper was apt to peel off and the plaster to fall. There were many people who declared that the house was a very fever-trap, and everybody was of opinion that it must be unhealthy. It ought to have been so, indeed, by very rule of sanitary science. A kind Providence alone took care of the drainage. Mr. Penton did not know much about it, and took care not to inquire; for had he inquired it would probably have been necessary to do something, and he had no money to spend on such vanities. Neither, indeed, did there seem much occasion, for, notwithstanding what everybody said, eight young Pentons, tall and straight, and ailing nothing, with appetites which were the despair of their mother, grew up and flourished among the mud and damp, and set all prognostications at defiance.

Nothing could be more unlike than the two families who bore the same name, and lived within sight of each other. The one all gravity and importance and severe splendor: the other poor, irregular, noisy, full of shifts and devices, full of tumult and young life. Mrs. Penton, Sir Walter’s daughter (for her husband, who was nobody in particular, had taken her name), went from time to time with the housekeeper through the ranges of vacant rooms, all furnished with a sort of somber magnificence, to see that they were aired and kept in order; while her namesake at the Hook (as it was called) schemed how to fit a bed into a new corner, as the boys and girls grew bigger, to make room for their lengthening limbs and the decorums which advancing years demanded. It was difficult to kill time in the one house, and almost impossible to find one day long enough for all the work that had to be done in it, in the other. In the one the question of ways and means was a subject unnecessary to be discussed. The exchequer was full, there were no calls upon it which could not be amply met at any moment, nor any occasion to think whether or not a new expense should be incurred. Mr. Russell Penton, perhaps, the husband of Mrs. Penton, had not always been in this happy condition. It was possible that in his experience a less comfortable state of affairs might have existed, or even might still, by moments, exist; but so far as the knowledge of Sir Walter and his daughter went, it was only mismanagement, extravagance, or want of financial capacity which made anybody poor; they could not understand why their relations at the Hook should be needy and embarrassed.

“So long as one knows exactly what one’s means are,” said Mrs. Penton, “what difficulty can there be in arranging one’s expenditure? There are certain things which can, and certain things which can’t be done on a certain income. All that is necessary is to arrange one’s outgoings accordingly.”

“You see that, my dear,” Sir Walter would reply, “for you were born with the spirit of order; but there are some people who have no sense of order at all.”

The some people were the poor people at Penton Hook. These remarks were made on a day in winter, when the family at the great house were together in the library. It was a very comfortable room, nay, a beautiful one. The house was warmed throughout, and in December was genially, softly, warm as in May, no cold to be got anywhere in corridors or staircases. The fire in the library was a wood-fire, for beauty and pleasantness rather than for warmth. The walls were lined with books, dim lines of carved shelves with gleams of old gilding, and an occasional warm tone of mellowed Italian vellum here and there giving them a delightful covering. The large window looked across the country, commanding the whole broad plain through which the river ran. This landscape fell away into lovely tones of distance, making you uncertain whether it was the sea or infinitude itself at which you were gazing, in far-away stretches of tender mist, and blueness and dimness, lightly marked with the line of the horizon. Over the mantel-piece there was one picture, the portrait of an ancestor of whom the Pentons were proud—a veritable Holbein, which was as good, nay, far better, than the most finely emblazoned family pedigree. There was no room for other pictures because of the books which filled every corner; but a port-folio stood open upon a stand in which there was a quantity of the finest old engravings, chiefly historical portraits. Amid this refined and delightful luxury it would be foolish to mention the mere furniture, though that was carved oak, and very fine of its kind. Sir Walter himself sat surrounded by all the morning papers, which, as Penton was not very far from town, were delivered almost as early as in London. Mrs. Penton had a little settlement of her own between the fire and one of the windows, where she made up her household accounts, which she did with the greatest regularity. Mr. Russell Penton was the only member of the little party who seemed at all out of place. He had no special corner which he made his own. He was a restless personage, prone to wander from the fire to the window, to look out though there was nothing particular to look at, nothing more than he saw every day of his life, as his wife sometimes said to him. He ran over the papers very quickly, very often standing before the fire, which was a favorite trick of his; and after he had got through that morning duty he would lounge about disturbing everybody—that is, disturbing Mrs. Penton and Sir Walter, who were the only people subject to be affected by his vagaries. He never had letters to write, though this is one of the first duties of man, of the kind of man who has nothing else to do. A man who has no letters to write should at least pretend to do so, assuming a virtue if he has it not, in the leisure of a country house; or he should have some study, if it were only the amount of the rainfall; or he should draw and expound art. But none of all these things did Mr. Russell Penton do. And he had not the art of doing nothing quietly and gracefully as some men have. He was restless as well as idle, a combination which is more trying to the peace of your house-mates than any other can be.

Sir Walter was essentially well-bred, and the carpets were very thick, and the paneling of the floors very solid; but yet there is always a certain thrill under a restless foot, however steady the flooring is and however thick the carpet: and Mrs. Penton could not help seeing that her father now and then stopped in his reading and fixed his eyes and contracted his eyebrows with a consciousness of the movement. But after all it is difficult to find fault with one’s husband for nothing more serious than walking from the fire to the window and from the window back to the fire.

Yet it was this rather detrimental and unmeaning personage who chose suddenly, without any reason at all, to cross the current of family feeling. “The spirit of order is a very good thing,” he said, all at once, making his wife hold her breath, “but, in my opinion, when you have a large family a little money is still better.” This speech was launched into the domestic quiet like an arrow from a bow.

“Better!” said Sir Walter, letting his newspaper drop upon his knees, and pushing up his spectacles upon his forehead the better to see the speaker, who was standing, shutting out the pleasant blaze of the log on the fire in his usual careless way.

“Gerald means,” said his wife, “that it is easier to keep things in order when there is money. I have heard people say so before, and perhaps it is true—to a certain extent. You know, sir, that when one has money in hand one can buy a thing when it is cheap; one can lay in one’s provisions beforehand. The idea is not original, but there is a certain amount of truth in it, I dare say.”

“No one supposed there was not truth in it,” said Sir Walter; “for that matter there is truth in everything, the most paradoxical statement you may choose to make; but these people are not without money, I suppose. They have an income, whatever the amount may be. They are not destitute. And so long as you have certain means, as you were yourself saying, Alicia, you know what you can afford to spend, and that is what you ought to spend by every law, and not a penny more.”

“Nothing could be more true,” said Mrs. Penton, with a look from under her eyelids to her husband, who was fidgeting from one leg to another, restless as usual; “and speaking of that,” she said, with curious appropriateness, “I have been anxious to ask you, papa, about the tapestry chamber, of which, you know, we have always been so proud. Mrs. Ellis and I have made a very odd discovery—the moth has got into one of the best pieces. We have done all we could, and I think we have arrested the mischief, but to put it right is beyond our powers.”

“Dear me! the tapestry!” cried Sir Walter; “that’s serious indeed—the moth! I should think you might have done something, you and all your women, Alicia, to keep out a moth.”

“One would think so, indeed,” she said, with a smile, “but it is not so easy as it seems. It is an insidious little creature, which gets in imperceptibly. One only discovers it when the mischief is done. Gerald, who is so very clever in such matters, thinks we had better get a man over from Paris, from the Gobelins. It would be a good deal of trouble, but still it is the best way.”

“I was not aware that Gerald knew anything about such matters,” said Sir Walter. “As for the trouble, it is only writing a letter, I suppose. But do it, do it. I can not have any thing happen to my tapestry. A man from Paris will be a nuisance—they’re always a nuisance, those sort of fellows—but get it done, get it done.”

“I will write at once,” Mrs. Penton said.

“I remember that tapestry as long as I remember anything,” said the old gentleman, musing. “In the firelight we used to think the figures moved. It used to be my mother’s room. How frightened I was, to be sure! One night, I recollect, the hunters and the hounds seemed all coming down upon us. There, was a blazing fire, and it was the dancing of the flames, don’t you know? I was no bigger than that,” he said, putting his hand about a foot from the ground. The recollection of his infancy pleased the old man. He smiled, and the expression of his face softened. There was nothing cruel or unkind in his aspect. He was a little rigid, a little severe, very sure that he was right, as so many are; but when he thought of his mother’s room, and himself a little child in it, his ruddy aged countenance grew soft. Had there been another little child there, to climb upon his knee, it would have melted altogether. But Providence had not granted that other little child. He gave a wave of his hand as he dismissed these gentle thoughts. “But get the man from Paris, my dear; don’t let anything go wrong with the tapestry,” he said.

Mr. Russell Penton went out as his wife turned to her writing-table, and at once began her necessary letter. It was true that it was he who recommended that a man from Paris should be procured, but he had done it without any of that cleverness in such matters which his wife attributed to him. He was not, perhaps, a man entirely adapted for the position in which he found himself. He had occupied it for a long time, and yet he had not yet reconciled himself to that constant effort on his wife’s part to make him agreeable to her father.

For his own part he had no desire to be disagreeable to Sir Walter or any man; he had married with a generous affection if not any hot romantic love for Alicia; for they were both, he thought, beyond the age of romantic love. She had been thirty-five, very mature, very certain of herself; while he, though a little older and a man who had, as people say, knocked about the world for a long time, and undergone many vicissitudes, was not at all so sure. She had picked him up out of—not the depths, perhaps—but out of an uncomfortable, unsettled, floating condition, between gentility and beggary; and had taken him into the warmest delightful house, and made everything comfortable for him. He had been very willing to make himself agreeable, to do what he could for the people who had done so much for him, and yet so unreasonable was he that he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to the position. He could scarcely endure those warning glances not to go too far, not to say this or that, or her pretenses of consulting him, of being guided by his counsels, the little speeches, such as had been made to-day, about Gerald being so clever—which was his wife’s way of upholding her husband. He was not clever, and he did not wish to pretend to be so. He was not cautious, and he could not take the credit of it. He had been thought to be a fortune-hunter when he married, and he was supposed to be a time-server now; and yet he was neither one thing nor the other. He was fond of Alicia and he liked Sir Walter well enough; yet there were moments when he would rather have swept a crossing than lived in wealth and luxury at Penton, and when the sacrifices which he had to make, and the advantages which he gained in return, were odious to him, things which he could scarcely bind himself to bear.

This was perhaps the reason why, as he went out, without anything to do or to think of, and looking across that wide, bare, yet bright, wintery landscape, losing itself in the wistful distance, caught the chimneys of Penton Hook appearing among the bare trees, there occurred to his mind a contrast and comparison which made his sensations still less agreeable. It was nobody’s fault, certainly not his, not even Sir Walter’s, that the Pentons at the Hook were so poor, that there were eight children of them, that it was so difficult for the parents to make both ends meet. Could Sir Walter have changed the decrees of Providence by any effort in his power, it was he who should have had those eight sturdy descendants. He would have accepted all the responsibilities gladly; he would have secured for those young people the best of everything, an excellent education, and all the advantages that wealth could give. But the children had gone where poverty, not riches was; and to Sir Walter and Alicia it was a wonder that their parents could not keep within their income, that they could not cut their coat according to their cloth, as it is the duty of all honest and honorable persons to do. Alicia in particular was so very clear on this point; and then she had turned to her table, and written her letter, and ordered the man to be sent from Paris from the great Gobelins manufactory to mend the damages made by the moths in the old tapestry! How strange it was! Russell Penton could not tell what was wrong in it. Perhaps there was no conscious wrong. They had a right to have their tapestry mended, and it was pretty, he could not but confess, to see the old man forget himself and talk of the time when he was a child. What was that about a treasure which rust or moth could not corrupt? It kept haunting his ear, yet it was not applicable to the situation. It would be a thousand pities to let the tapestry be spoiled. And as for taking upon his shoulders the burden of Mr. Penton’s large family, no one could expect old Sir Walter to do that. What was wrong in it? And, on the other hand, he could not find it in his heart to blame the poor people at the Hook who had so many cares, so much to do with their income, so many mouths to feed. It was not their fault, nor was it the fault of Alicia and her father. And yet the heart of the man, who was little more than a looker-on, was sore. He could do nothing. He could not even find any satisfaction in blaming one or the other: for, so far as he could see, nobody was to blame.

CHAPTER II.
PENTON.

The family at Penton had not always been so few in number. Twenty years before the opening of this history there were two sons in the great house; and Alicia, now so important, was, though always a sort of princess royal, by no means so great a personage as now. She was the only daughter of the house, but no more; destined apparently, like other daughters, to pass away into a different family and identify herself with another name. The two brothers were the representatives of the Pentons. They were hopeful enough in their youth—healthy, vigorous, not more foolish than young men of their age, with plenty of money and nothing to do; and it was a surprise to everybody when, one after the other, they took the wrong turn in that flowery way of temptation, so smooth to begin with, so thorny at the end, which is vulgarly termed “life.” No such fatal divergence was expected of them when Walter came of age, and all the neighborhood was called together to rejoice. They were both younger than their sister, who was already the mistress of the house, and a very dignified and stately young lady, at this joyful period. Their mother had died young, and Sir Walter was older than the father of such a family generally is. He had, perhaps, not sufficient sympathy with the exuberance of their spirits. Perhaps the quiet which he loved, the gravity of his house, repelled them and led them to form their friendships and seek their pleasures elsewhere. At all events, the young Pentons “went wrong,” both of them, one after the other. Edward Penton, of the Hook, a young relation of no importance whatever, was much about the house in those days. He was the son of Sir Walter’s cousin, who had inherited the house at Penton Hook from some old aunts, maiden sisters of a far-back baronet, so that the relationship was not very close. But the bonds of kindred are very elastic, and count for much or for nothing, as inclination and opportunity dictate. Edward was much more about the house of Penton than was at all for his good. He fell in love with Alicia for one thing, who naturally would have nothing to say to her poor relation; and, what was still worse, he was swept away by Walter and Reginald in the course of their dissipated career into many extravagances and follies. They drew him aside in their train from all the sober studies which ought to have ended in a profession; they taught him careless ways, and the recklessness which may be pardonable in a rich man’s son, but is crime in the poor. It is true that there was something in him—some gleam of higher principle or character, or perhaps only the passive resistance of a calmer nature, which held him back from following them to the bitter end of their foolish career; but all the same they did him harm—harm which he never got the better of, though it stopped short of misery and ruin. They themselves did not stop short of anything. There are some sins like those which made the heart of the Psalmist burn within him—sins which seem to go unpunished, and in the midst of which the wicked appear to flourish like a green bay-tree. And there are some which carry their own sentence with them, and in which the vengeance does not tarry. Even in the latter case ruin comes more slowly to the rich than to the poor. They have more places of repentance, more time to think, more possibility, if a better impulse comes to them, of redeeming the past; but yet, in the end, few escape who embark their hopes and prosperity on such a wild career.

There were ten years in the history of the Penton household of which the sufferings and the misery could not be told. Sir Walter and his daughter lived on in their beautiful house and watched the headlong career toward destruction of these two beloved boys (still called so long after they had become men) with anxiety and anguish and despair which is not to be told. There are few families who do not know something of that anguish. Of all the miseries to which men and women are liable there is none so terrible. In every other there is some alleviation, some gleam of comfort, but in this none. The father grew old in the progress of these terrible years, and the proud Miss Penton, the handsome, stately young woman, who looked, the neighbors said, “as if all the world belonged to her,” grew old too, before her time, and changed and paled, and turned to stone. Not that her heart was turned to stone—on the contrary, it was a fountain of tears; it was a well of tenderness unfailing; it was the heart of a mother, concentrated upon those objects of her love for whom she could do nothing, who were perishing before her eyes. The Pentons were proud people, and they kept up appearances; they entertained more or less, whatever happened. They had parties of visitors in their house; they kept up the old-fashioned hospitality, and all that their position exacted, and never betrayed to the world the agonized watch they were keeping, as from a watch-tower, upon the proceedings of the young men who would have none of their counsel, and who returned more and more rarely, and then only when help, or nursing, or succor of some sort was wanted, to their home. Latterly, under the excuse of Sir Walter’s health, there was a certain withdrawal from the world, and the father and daughter accomplished their miserable vigil with less intrusion of a watchful neighborhood. First Reginald and then Walter came home to die. Death is kind; he sheds a light upon the wasted face even when it is sin that has wasted it, and wrings the heart of the watchers with looks purified by pain, that remind them how the sinner was once an innocent child. Through all this the father and daughter went together, leaning upon each other, yet even to each other saying but little. They were as one in their anguish, in their lingering hopes, in the long vigils by these sick-beds, in the unutterable pangs of seeing one after another die. Ten years is a long time when it is thus told out in misery and pain. Alicia Penton was a woman of thirty-five when she walked behind the coffin of her last brother to the family burying-ground. She was chief mourner, as she had been chief nurse and chief sufferer all through, for Sir Walter had broken down altogether at the death-bed of his last boy.

This double tragedy passed over with little revelation to the outside world. Everybody, indeed, knew what lives the young men had lived, and how they had died. And people pitied the father to whom it must be, they felt, so great a disappointment that his baronetcy and his old lands should go out of the family, and that in the direct line he should have no heir. If only one of them had married, if there had been but a child to carry on the family, the kind neighbors said. It was thought that Sir Walter was far more proud than tender, and that this would be his view. As for Miss Penton, it was believed that she must find great consolation in the fact that her position and her importance would be so much increased. A few years quiet (such as was inevitable in their deep mourning) would make up for all the sacrifices Sir Walter had made for the boys; and then Alicia would be a great heiress, notwithstanding that a considerable portion of the estate was entailed. People thought that when she realized this, Alicia Penton would dry her tears.

She did not in any case make very much show of her tears. Her father and she went on living in the great, silent house, where now there was not even an echo to be listened for, a piece of evil news to be apprehended; where all was silent, silent as the grave. She had been courted as much as most women in her younger days; she had been loved, but she had listened to no one. Her youth had glided away under the shadow of calamity, the shadow which had stolen away all beauty and freshness from her and made her old before her time, and, lest they should express too much, had turned her features to stone. She had always been stately, but she was stern now that all was over, and there was neither terror for the future nor sound of the present to keep her tortured heart alive.

But naturally, after awhile, these intense emotions, which no one suspected, were calmed, and life began again. Life began even for Sir Walter, who was nearly seventy, much more for his daughter, who was thirty-five. They could not die, nor could they darken their windows and shut out the sunshine forever because two poor wrecks, two dismal, ruined lives, had come to an end. It must be such a relief, people said, even though no doubt it was a grief in its way. And though the ending of anxiety in such a way seems almost an additional pang, an additional loss to obstinate love, yet after all it is a dismal relief in its blank and stillness. And life had to be carried on. When Miss Penton, Sir Walter’s only child and heiress, came out of her long seclusion there were still men to be found who admired, or said they admired her, and who were very eager to place themselves at her disposal. Among these was Gerald Russell, a man who had once been kind to one of “the boys,” and who was known as the most good-natured, the least exacting of men. He was poor; he had no particular standing of his own to confuse the family arrangements: and the two liked each other. Truly and honestly they liked each other; he had been almost a suitor of her youth, kept back, both of them were willing to believe, by his poverty. Gerald Russell was not unaware that there would be sacrifices to make, that he was accepting a position not without drawbacks, in which, indeed, there might possibly be a good deal to bear. But he had not made much of his life hitherto, and he made up his mind to risk it. And they married, and he was not unhappy. This was the present position of affairs. He was not unhappy, and she was more nearly happy than she could have been had he not been there. Had “anything happened,” as the phrase goes, to him—that is, had he died—the world would have become blank to Alicia. Had she been the victim Mr. Russell Penton would have been truly grieved, and would have mourned honestly for his wife, but the sense of freedom might perhaps have been something of a compensation to him. Thus they were not equal any more than two human creatures ever are equal. She seemed to have the best of it upon the surface of affairs. She was the head of the house. Both without and within she was the pivot upon which everything turned, and he was by no means of equal importance; but yet he would have been to her a greater loss than she to him, which perhaps made the balance equal once more.

He returned to that question about the tapestry when they set out, as was their custom in the afternoon, to take a walk together. They went through the wood which covered the crest of the high river-bank upon which Penton stood, and which defended the house from the north. Everything, it is needless to say, was beautifully kept, the woodland paths just wild enough to preserve an aspect of nature amid the perfection of foresting and landscape gardening on the largest scale. Wherever there was a point of view the openings were skillfully arranged so as to get its finest aspect, and the broad valley, or rather plain, stretched out below with village-spires and scattered clusters of houses, and a red-roofed town in the distance, with a light veil of smoke hanging between it and the sky. The river flowed full and strong in its winter volume at their feet, reflecting the gray blueness of the heavens, the deeper colors that began to blaze about the west, and the gray whiteness of the vapors overhead. It was when they had turned, after a momentary pause at one of these mounts of vision, that Russell Penton turned suddenly to his wife with a smile.

“Did you send for the man from the Gobelins?” he said.

“Yes. What put that into your mind now?”

“Nothing; the chimneys at Penton Hook,” he replied.

“And why the chimneys at Penton Hook? Your mind jumps from one subject to the other in the strangest way. What connection can there be between two things so unlike?”

“Nothing,” he said, with a faint laugh; “and yet perhaps more than meets the eye. There is no great volume of smoke rising from those chimneys. A faint blue streak or so and that is all. It does not look like fire in every room or a jolly blaze in the kitchen.”

“What are you aiming at, Gerald? I think you mean mischief. No; probably they have not fires in all the rooms; but what has that to do with us or with the man from Paris? I don’t follow you,” she said.

“My dear Alicia, what does it matter? My ways of thinking are jerky, you are aware. If you had as many children as poor Mrs. Penton you would have fires in all the rooms.”

“Ah! if—” she said, with a sigh; then, in a tone of impatience, “Poor Mrs. Penton, as you call her, and I—would probably not in any circumstances act in the same way.”

“No, because you are rich Mrs. Penton, my dear. I think you were a little hard upon them, upon the duty of keeping within your income, and all that. I dare say the children have blue little hands and cold noses. If they were mine they should have fires in their rooms whatever my income might be.”

“They would have nothing of the sort—that is, if I were your wife, Gerald,” said Mrs. Penton, with composure. She made a little pause, and then added, with a momentarily quickened breath, “Perhaps under these circumstances I might not have been so.”

He felt the blow; it was a just one, if not perhaps very generous. And if he had been a man of hot temper, or of very sensitive feelings, it would have wounded him. But he was pacific and middle-aged, and knew the absolute inutility of any quarrel. So he answered quietly, “As I can not conceive myself with any other wife in any circumstances, that is not a possibility we need consider.”

Mrs. Penton’s mind went quickly, though her aspect was rigid. She had begged his pardon before these words were half said, with a quick rising color, which showed her shame of the suggestion she had made.

“I was wrong to say it; yet not wrong in what I said. If you had been a poor man, Gerald, your wife would have known how to cut her coat according to her cloth.”

“You mean if she had not been a rich woman. It is ill judging, they say in Scotland, between a full man and a fasting. I have a proverb, you see, as well as you. You were quite right, my dear, to send for that man from the Gobelins; but I would say nothing about my poor neighbors and the coat that is not cut according to the cloth.”

“If you think I am wrong you should say so plainly, Gerald.” The color still wavered a little upon her cheek. She was perhaps not so patient even of implied blame as she thought she was. “It is perhaps wrong,” she added, quickly, “but I should not wonder if I shared without knowing it my father’s feeling about the heir. Oh, you need not say anything; I know it is unreasonable. It is not Edward Penton’s fault that he is the next in the entail. But human creatures are not always reasonable, and they say no man likes to be haunted with the sight of his heir.”

“Poor heir!” said Russell Penton, very softly, almost under his breath.

“Poor heir? I should say poor possessor, poor old man, who must see his home go into the hands of a stranger!”

They had come to another point where their accustomed feet paused, where the bare winter boughs, with all their naked tracery, framed in a wide opening of sky and cloud and plain, and where once more those clustered chimneys of Penton Hook, with their thin curls of smoke, seemed to thrust themselves into the front of the landscape. The house lay almost at the gazers’ feet, framed in with a cluster of trees, encircled with a glowing sweep of the stream, which, looked like a ribbon of light full of shimmering color, round the brown settlement of the half-seen building and wintery branches. Mrs. Penton clasped her hands together with a sudden quick suppressed movement of strong feeling, and turned hastily away.

CHAPTER III.
PENTON HOOK.

Soon after the day when this discussion was carried on among the woods of Penton over their heads, the family at Penton Hook were holding a sort of committee of ways and means in their damp domain below. The winter afternoon was clear and bright, and the river ran in deceitful brightness round the half-circle of the little promontory. It was not of itself at all a disagreeable house. If it had not been that the mud and wetness of the garden paths, where the water seemed to well up even through the gravel, made every footstep mark the too bright blue and brown tiles in the hall, and gave it a sloppy and disorderly look, the entrance itself might have been pretty enough; but there had been no attempt made to furnish or utilize it, and there were tracks of glistening steps across it in different directions to the different doors, all of which opened out of the hall. And the drawing-room was a well-sized, well-shaped room, with three or four windows; a room of which, with a little money and taste, something very pretty might have been made. But the windows were turned to the north, and the furniture was bare and worn; the walls and the carpets and curtains had all alike faded into a color which can only be described as being the color of poverty. The pattern was worn and trodden out upon the carpet; it was blurred and dull upon the walls—everything was of a brownish, greenish, grayish, indescribable hue. The picttures on the walls seemed to have grown gray, too, being chiefly prints, which ran into the tone of the whole. The table at which Mrs. Penton (poor Mrs. Penton) sat with her work was covered with a woolen cover, the ground of which had been red with a yellow pattern; but it (perhaps mercifully) had faded, too. And as for the lady, she was faded like everything else. Her dress, like the room, had sunk into the color of poverty. There was nothing about her that was above the level of matter-of-fact dullness. She was darning stockings, and they were also indefinite in hue. Her hair, which had been yellow or very light brown, had lost its gloss and sheen. It was knotted behind in a loose knot, and might have been classical and graceful had it not suggested that this was the easiest way possible to dispose of those abundant locks. Her head was stooped over her work; her basket on the table was overflowing. She paused now and then, and looked up to make her observation when it was her turn, but not even for the sake of the family consultation could she intermit her necessary work. Nine pairs of stockings, not to speak of her own, are a great deal for a woman to keep in order. Her own were not much worn, for she walked very little. She was one of those women who are indolent by nature, yet always busy. Once seated at her work, stocking after stocking went through her hands, and holes as big as a half-moon got deftly, swiftly, silently filled up; but it cost her an effort to rise from her seat to go about her domestic business. She was indolent in movement, though so industrious; a piece of still life, though her hands were never idle. This was the kind of woman to whom, in his maturer judgment, the man who had once been Alicia Penton’s adorer had turned.

He was not far from her, seated in an elbow-chair, not an easy-chair, but an old-fashioned mahogany article with arms, upon which he reposed his elbows. His hands were clasped in front of him, and now and then, when he forgot himself, he twirled his thumbs. He bore a family likeness to Sir Walter Penton, having a high nose and long face; but he was not the same kind of man. Old Sir Walter at nearly eighty was firm and erect still, but Edward Penton was limp. He was prone to tumble down upon himself, so to speak, like a crumbling wall; to go sinking, telescoping into himself like a slippery mass of sand or clay. There was an anxious look in his countenance, contradicting the pretensions of that prominent feature, the nose, which looked aristocratic, his family thought, and did its best to look strong. It was the mouth that did it, some people thought, a mouth which was manifestly weak, with all kinds of uncompleted piteous curves about it, and dubious wavering lines. His lower lip would move vaguely from time to time, as though he were repeating something. He was dressed in knickerbockers and gaiters and a rough coat, as if he had a great deal to do out-of-doors. He might have been a gentleman farmer, or a squire with an estate to look after, or even a gamekeeper of a superior kind; but he was nothing of all these. He was only a man who lived in the country, and had nothing to do, and had to walk about, as it were, for daily bread.

On the corner of the table, not far from Mrs. Penton, sat, with his legs swinging loosely, a younger, a quite young man; indeed, poor Wat did not know that he was a man at all, or realize what he was coming to. He was the eldest son. That did not seem to say very much, considering the character of the house, and the manner of life pursued in it, but it sounded a great deal to them, for young Walter was the heir intail male. He was the representative of all the Pentons, the future head of the family. He thought a great deal of his position, and so did the family. In time Penton would be his, the stately old house, and the title would be his which his ancestors had borne. The young man felt himself marked out from his kind by this inheritance. He was humble enough at present, but he had only to go on living, to wait and keep quiet, and he must be Sir Walter Penton of Penton in the end. He felt greater confidence in this than his father did who came before him. Mr. Penton did not look forward to the baronetcy for his part with much enthusiasm. It did not rouse him from his habitual depression. Perhaps because care was so close and so constant, perhaps because he had come to an age which expects but little from any change. He did not feel that to become Sir Edward would do much for him, but even he felt that for Wat it was a great thing.

The other two people in the room were the two girls; that was all that anybody ever said of them. They were scarcely even distinguished by name the one from the other; you could scarcely say they were individuals at all; they were the two girls. The children were apt to run their two names into one, and call them indiscriminately—Ally-Anne. Whether it was Ally or whether it was Anne who came first did not matter, it was a generic title which belonged to both. And yet they were not like each other. Ally had been called Alicia, after her relation at Penton, who was also her godmother, but at Penton Hook life was too full for so many syllables. They never got further than Alice in the most formal moments, and Ally was the name for common wear. Anne bore her mother’s name, but Mrs. Penton was Annie, whereas the girl preferred the one tiny syllable which expressed her better; for Anne, though she was the youngest, had more fiber in her than all the rest put together; but description is vain in face of such a little person. Her sister, though the eldest, was the shadow and she the substance, and no doubt it was one of the subtle but unconscious discriminations of character which the most simple make unawares, which led the little ones to call whichever individual of this pair appeared by the joint name.

“I shall always say, Edward, that you ought to have your share now,” said Mrs. Penton in a soft, even voice, never lifting her eyes from her work, but going on steadily like a purling stream; “you have more to do with it than Mr. Russell Penton, who never can succeed to anything; you ought to have your allowance like any other heir.”

“I don’t know why I should have an allowance,” said Mr. Penton, with a voice in which there was a certain languid irritation; “I have always held my own, and I shall always hold my own. And besides, Sir Walter does not want me to have the land; he would rather a great deal that it went to—Russell Penton, as you call him, though he has no right to our name.”

“But that can’t be,” cried young Wat, “seeing that I—I mean you, father, are the heir of entail.”

“It might be,” said Mr. Penton, going on with his tone of subdued annoyance, “if the law was changed; and one never knows in these revolutionary times how soon the law might be changed. It has been threatened to be done as long as I can remember. Primogeniture and the law of entail have been in every agitator’s mouth; they think it would be a boon to the working-man.”

“How could it be a boon to the working-man? What have we got to do with the working-man? What does it matter to him who has the property? it could not come to him anyhow,” cried Wat, with great energy, coloring high, and swinging his legs more than ever in the vehemence of personal feeling. It is all very well to talk of political principles, but when the question involves one’s self and one’s own position in the world, the argument is very much more urgent and moving. Young Walter was rather a revolutionary in his own way; he was of the class of generous aristocrats who take a great interest in the working-man; but there is reason in all things, and he did not see what this personage had to do with his affairs.

“Oh, I don’t know, there is no telling; they might be made to think it would do them good somehow. It has always been a favorite thing to say. At all events, you know,” Mr. Penton continued, with his mild disgust of everything, “it could not do them any harm. Primogeniture has always been a sort of thing that makes some people foam at the mouth.”

“My dear Edward!” cried Mrs. Penton; she almost looked up from her work, which was a great thing to say; and when this mild woman said, “My dear Edward,” it was the same thing as when a man says “By Jove,” or “By George.” In the gentle level of her conversation it counted as a sort of innocent oath. “My dear Edward! how could they abolish primogeniture? which so far as I know is just the Latin way of saying that one of your children is born before the other. Isn’t it, Wat? Well, I always thought so. The Radicals may get to be very powerful, but they can’t make you have your children all in a heap at the same time.”

“But they can make it of no importance which is born first; that is what it means,” said Mr. Penton. “They would have the children all equal, just the same; whether it is little Horry or Wat there who thinks himself such a great man.”

“Well, so they are all the same,” said the mother, a little bewildered. “I often wonder how it is that people can make favorites, for I am sure I could not say, for my part, which of them all I liked best. I like them all best—Horry because he is the littlest, and Wat because he is the biggest, and all the rest of them for some other reason, or just for no reason at all. And so, I am sure, Edward, do you.”

“In that way Wat would be no better than any of the rest,” said Anne.

“I should have no call to do anything for you,” said the young man, with an uncomfortable laugh. “It would be every one for himself. There would be no bother about little sisters or brothers either. On the whole, it would be rather a good bargain, don’t you think so, mother? Horry and the others must all shift for themselves when there is no eldest son—”

This time Mrs. Penton really did lift her soft eyes. “Don’t say such wicked things!” she said; “it is going against Scripture. As if anything could change you from being the eldest son! Who should look after the children if your father and I were to die? Oh, Wat! how can you speak so?—when it is just my comfort, knowing how uncertain life is, that the eldest is grown up, and that there would be some one to take our place, and take care of all these little things!”

Mrs. Penton had no mind for politics, as will be perceived, but the vision of the little orphans without an elder brother struck her imagination. This picture of unnatural desolation brought the tears warm to her eyes. She took another view of primogeniture from that which is familiar to discussion, and it was some time before they could explain it to her and get her calmed and soothed. Indeed, as to explaining it, that was never accomplished; but when she fully knew that her first-born did not cast off all responsibility in respect to little Horry she was calm.

“I don’t pretend to understand politics,” she said, with great truth, “but I know nature,” which perhaps was not quite so true.

Mr. Penton was not at all moved by this little digression, he took no notice of the argument between the mother and the children. He was a man who inclined to the opinion that things were badly managed in this world, and that those who meant to do well had generally a hard fight. He thought that on the whole the worst people had the best of it, and that a man like himself, struggling to do as well as he could for his children, and to live as well as he could, and do his duty generally, was surrounded by hinderances and drawbacks which never came in the way of less scrupulous people. Such an opinion as this often fills a man with indignation and something like rage, but it did not have this effect upon Mr. Penton. It gave him a general sense of discouragement, a feeling that everything was sure to go against him; but it did not make him angry. Instead of pointing, as the Psalmist did, with wonder and indignation to the wicked who flourished like a green bay-tree, he was more disposed to regard this spectacle with a melancholy smile as the natural course of affairs. One might have known that was how it would be, his look said. And he was rather apt perhaps to identify himself as the righteous man who had no such good fortune to look for. He had followed his own train of thoughts while the others talked, and now he went on continuing the subject. “We never can tell,” he said, “one day from another what changes may be made in the law. Sir Walter is an old man, and it doesn’t seem as if there could be any changes in his time; but still a craze might get up, and the thing might be done all in a moment, which has been threatened ever since I can recollect. So I hope none of you will fill your heads with foolish thoughts of what may happen when Penton comes to me: for you see, for anything we know, it may never come to me at all.”

Having said this, he ceased twirling his thumbs, and rising up slowly cast a glance about him as if looking for his hat. He never brought his hat into the drawing-room, yet he always did this, just as a dog will try to scrape a hole in a Turkey carpet; and then Mr. Penton said, as if it was quite a new idea, “I think I’ll just take a little walk before tea.”

It was from an unusual quarter that the conversation was renewed. Ally, who was so like her mother, who had the same kind of light-brown hair shading her soft countenance, knotted low at the back of her head, the same fragile willowy figure and submissive ways, lifted up her head after the little pause that followed his exit, when they all instinctively listened, and followed him, so to speak, with their attention while he walked out of the house. Ally raised her head and asked, in a voice in which there was a little apprehension, “I wonder if father really thinks that; and what if it should come true!”

“Your father would not say it,” Mrs. Penton replied, always careful to maintain her husband’s credit, “unless he thought it, in a kind of a way. But, for all that, perhaps it may never happen. Things take a long time to happen,” she said, with unconscious philosophy. “We just worry ourselves looking for changes, and no change comes after all.”

“But such a thing might happen suddenly,” said Wat, thinking it necessary, in his father’s absence, to take up the serious side of the argument, “father is quite right in that. With all the extensions of the suffrage and that sort of thing, which you don’t understand, Ally, a change in the law that has been long talked about might happen in a moment. It all depends upon what turn things may take.”

“Then we may never go to Penton at all,” said Anne, jumping up and throwing her work into her mother’s large basket. “I have always been frightened for Penton all my life. It’s a horrid big chilly place that never would look like home. I like the little old Hook best, and I hope they will abolish primogeniture, or whatever you call it, and so Wat will have to do something and we shall all stay at home.”

“Anne! do you wish that your father should never come into his fortune,” her mother said, in a reproachful tone, “when you know his heart is set upon it? I am frightened myself sometimes when I think of the change of living, and having to give dinner-parties and all that; but when I think that Edward has never yet been in his right element, that he has never had the position he ought to have had—ah! for that I could put up with anything,” she said.

CHAPTER IV.
THE YOUNG PEOPLE.

The young people at Penton Hook were good children on the whole. They respected their father and their mother, and though they did not always agree in every domestic decision, with that holy ignorance which distinguishes childhood, they were not much less docile than the little ones in respect to actual obedience. At seventeen and eighteen, much more at twenty, a young soul has begun to think a little and to judge, whether it reveals its judgment or not. Anne had her own opinions on every subject by perversity of nature; and Wat, who was a man, and the heir, took on many points a very independent view, and could scarcely help thinking now and then that he knew better than his father. And even Ally, who was the quietest, the most disposed to yield her own way of thinking, still had a little way of her own, and felt that other ways of doing things might be adopted with advantage. They were great friends all three, each other’s chief companions: and among themselves they talked very freely, seeing the mistakes that were being made about the other children, and very conscious of much that might have been done in their own individual cases. Wat, for example, had much to complain of in his own upbringing. He had been sent for a year or two to Eton, and much had been said about giving him the full advantage of what is supposed to be the best education. But it had been found after awhile that the infallible recurrence of the end of the half, and the bills that accompanied it, was a serious drawback, and the annoyance given by them so entirely outbalanced any sense of benefit received, that at sixteen he had been taken away from school under vague understandings that there was to be work at home to prepare him for the University. But the work at home had never come to much. Mr. Penton had believed that it would be a pleasant occupation for himself to rub up his Latin and Greek, and that he would be as good a coach as the boy could have. But his Latin and Greek wanted a great deal of rubbing up. The fashions of scholarship had changed since his day, and perhaps he had never been so good a scholar as he now imagined. And then it was inconceivable to Mr. Penton that regularity of hours was necessary in anything. He thought that a mere prejudice of school-masters. He would take Wat in the morning one day, then in the afternoon, then miss a day or two, and resume on the fifth or sixth after tea. What could the hours matter? It came about thus by degrees that the readings that were to fit the young man for matriculation failed altogether, and no more was said about the University. Wat had no very strong impulse to work in his own person, but when he came to be twenty and became aware that nothing further was likely to come of it, he felt that he had been neglected, and that so far as education was concerned he had not had justice done him. Had he been a very intellectual young man, or very energetic, he would no doubt have been spurred by this neglect into greater personal effort, and done so much that his father would have been shamed or forced into taking further steps. But Wat was not of this noble sort. He was not fond of work; he had always seen his father idle; and it seemed to him natural. So that he, too, fell into the way of lounging about, and doing odd things, and taking the days as they came. They kept no horses, so he could not hunt. He had not even a gun, nothing better than an old one, which, now he was old enough to know better, he was ashamed to carry. So that those two natural occupations of the rural gentleman were denied to him. And it is not to be supposed that a boy could reach his twentieth year without feeling that an education of this kind—a non-education—had been a mistake. He knew that he was at a disadvantage among his fellow-boys or fellow-men. Whether he would have felt this as much had he been under no other disadvantages in respect to horses and guns and pocket-money, we do not venture to say; but, taking everything together, Wat could not but feel that he was manqué, capable of nothing, having no place among his kind. And if he felt doubly in consequence the importance of his heirship, and that Penton would set all right, who could blame him? It was the only possibility in that poor little dull horizon which at Penton Hook seemed to run into the flats of the level country, the mud and the mist, and the rising river, and the falling rain.

The girls had their little grievances, too, but felt Wat’s grievance to be so much greater than theirs that they took up his cause vehemently, and threw all their indignation and the disapproval of their young intelligences into the weight of his. It was impossible that they could be as they were, young creatures full of life and active thought, without feeling what a mistake it all was, and how far the authorities of the family were wrong. They subjected, indeed, the decisions of the father and mother, but especially the father, as all our children do, to a keen and clear-sighted inspection, seeing what was amiss much more clearly than the wisest of us are apt to do in our own case. A little child of ten will thus follow and judge a philosopher, perhaps unconsciously in most cases, without a word to express its condemnation. The young Pentons were not so silent. They spoke their mind, in the perfect confidence of family intercourse, to their mother always, sometimes to their father too. And no doubt in pure logic, this criticism and disapproval should have dealt a great blow at the discipline of the house, and destroyed the principle of obedience. But fortunately logic is the last thing that affects the natural family life. Wat and Ally and Anne were in reality almost as obedient as were the little ones to whom the decisions of papa and mamma were as the law and the gospels. It had never occurred to them to raise any standard of rebellion; they did what they were told by sweet natural bonds of habit, by the fact that they had always done it, by the unbroken sentiment of filial subjection. The one thing did not seem to affect the other. It never occurred even to Wat to stop and argue the point with his father; he did what he was told, though afterward, when he came to think of it, he might think that his own way would have been the most wise.

The conversation which is set down in the last chapter did not give any insight into the family controversy that had been going on—being only, as it were, the subsiding of the waves after that discussion had come to an end. The subject in question was one which greatly moved and excited all the young people. Oswald, the second boy, who came next in the family after Anne, was the genius of the house. He was not much more than fifteen, but he had already written many poems and other compositions which had filled the house with wonder. The girls were sure that in a few years Lord Tennyson himself would have to look to his laurels, and Mr. Ruskin to stand aside; for Oswald’s gifts were manifold, and it was indifferent to him whether he struck the strings of poetry or the more sober chord of prose. Wat’s fraternal admiration was equally genuine and more generous, for it is a little hard upon a big boy to recognize his younger brother’s superiority; and it was dashed by a certain conviction that it would be for Osy’s good to be taken down a little. But Wat as much as the girls was agitated by the question which had been, so to speak, before a committee of the whole house. It was a question of more importance at Penton Hook than the fate of the ministry or the elections, or anything that might be going on in Europe. It was the question whether Osy should be continued where he was, at Marlborough, or if his education should be suspended till “better times.” Behind this lay a darker and more dreadful suggestion, of which the family were vaguely conscious, but which did not come absolutely under discussion, and this was whether Osy’s education should be stopped altogether, and an “opening in life” found for him. Nothing that had ever happened to them had moved the family so much as this question. The “better times” which the Pentons looked forward to could be nothing other than the death of Sir Walter and Mr. Penton’s accession to the headship of the family; and it was in the lull of exhaustion that followed a long discussion that Mrs. Penton made her suggestion about the propriety of an allowance being made to her husband as the heir of the property, which had led him into the expression of those general but discouraging ideas about entails and primogeniture. It had not perhaps occurred to Mr. Penton before; but now he came to think of it it seemed just of a piece with the general course of affairs, and of everything that had happened to him in the past, that new laws should come in at the moment and deprive him in the future of the heirship of which he had been so sure.

When Mr. Penton went out for his walk after the statement he had made of these possibilities, Wat and the girls went out too, on their usual afternoon expedition to the post. There was not very much to be done at Penton Hook, especially at this depressing time of the year when tennis was impracticable and the river not to be thought of. The only amusement possible was walking, and that is a pleasure which palls—above all when the roads are muddy and there is nowhere in particular to go to. It was Anne, in the force of her youthful invention, who had established the habit of going to the post. It was an “object,” and made a walk into a sort of duty—not the mere meaningless stroll which, without this purpose, it would turn to; and though the correspondence of the household was not great, Anne also managed that there should always be something which demanded to be posted, and could not be delayed. When there was nothing else she would herself dash off a note to one of the many generous persons who advertise mysterious occupations by which ladies and other unemployed persons may earn an income without a knowledge of drawing or anything else in particular. Alas! Anne had answered so many of these advertisements that she was no longer sanguine of getting a satisfactory reply; but if there was no letter to be sent off, nothing of her father’s about business, no post-card concerning the groceries, or directions to the dress-maker, or faithful family report from Mrs. Penton to one of her relations, such as, amid all the occupations of her life, that dutiful woman sent regularly, Anne could always supply the necessary letter from her own resources. It was on a similar afternoon to that on which the Pentons at the great house had discussed and thought of the poorer household; and a wintery sunset, very much the same as that on which Mr. Russell Penton and his wife had looked, shone in deep lines of crimson and gold, making of the river which reflected it a stream of flame, when the three young people, far too much absorbed in their own affairs to think of the colors in the sky or the reflections in the river, or anything but Osy and his prospects, and the state of the family finances, and the mistakes of family government, came down the hill from the level of the Penton woods toward their own home. The western sky, blazing with color, was on the left hand; but even the sky toward the north and east shared in the general illumination, and clouds all rose-tinted, concealing their heaviness in the flush of reflection, hung upon the chill blue, and seemed to warm the fresh wintery atmosphere before it sunk into the chill of night. The girls and their brother kept their heads together, speaking two at once in the eagerness of their feelings, and found no time for contemplation of what was going on overhead. A sunset is a thing which comes every evening, and about which there is no urgent reason for attention, as there was upon this question about Osy, which struck at the foundations of family credit and hope.

“When I left Eton,” said Wat with melancholy candor—“I had not much sense, to be sure—it seemed rather fine coming away to work at home. Fellows thought I was going to work for something out of the common way. I liked it—on the whole. When you are at school there is always something jolly in the thought of coming home. And so will Osy feel like me.”

“But you were never clever, Wat,” said the impetuous Anne.

This was perhaps a little hard to bear. “Clever is neither here nor there,” said Wat with a little flush. “It does not make much difference to your feelings; I suppose I can tell better how Osy will take it than one of you girls.”

“Oh no; for girls are more ambitious than boys, I mean boys that are just ordinary like the rest. And Osy is not like you. He is full of ambition, he wants to be something, to make a great name. I have the most sympathy with that. Ally and you,” cried the girl with a toss of her head like a young colt, “you are the contented ones, you are so easily satisfied; but not Osy nor me.”

“Contented is the best thing you can be,” said gentle Ally. “What is there better than content? Whatever trouble people take, it is only in the hope of getting satisfaction at the end.”

“I wish I was contented,” said Walter, “that is all you know. What have I got to be contented about? I have nothing to do; I have no prospects in particular, nothing to look forward to.”

“Oh, Watty—Penton!”

“Penton is all very well: but how can we tell when Sir Walter may die? No, I don’t want him to die,” cried the young man. “I wish no harm to him nor to any man. I only say that because—Of course, so long as Sir Walter lives Penton may be paradise, but it has nothing to say to us. And then, as father says, the law may be changed before that happens, or something else may come in the way. No, I don’t know what can come in the way; for after Sir Walter, of course father is head of the family, and I am the eldest son.” These words had a cheering effect upon the youth in spite of himself. He turned back to look up where the corner of the great house was visible amid the trees. The Pentons of the Hook knew all the spots where that view was to be had. He turned round to look at it, turning the girls with him, who were like two shadows. No prospects in particular! when there was that before his eyes, the house of his fathers, the house which he intended to transmit to his children! He drew a long breath which came from the very depths of his chest, a sigh of satisfaction yet of desire—of a feeling too deep to get into words. “I say, what a sunset!” he cried, by way of diverting the general attention from this subject, upon which he did not feel able to express himself more clearly.

They all looked for the first time at the grand operation of nature which was going on in the western sky. The heavens were all aglow with lines of crimson and purple, the blue spaces of the great vault above retiring in light ineffable far beyond the masses of cloud, which took on every tinge of color, preserving their own high purity and charms of infinitude. The great plain below lay silent underneath like a breathless spectator of that great, ever-recurring drama, the river gathering up fragments of the glory and flashing back an answer here and there in its windings wherever it was clear of the earthly obstructions of high banks and trees. Something of the same radiance flashed in miniature from the young eyes that with one accord turned and looked—but for a moment and no more. They noted the sunset in a parenthesis, by a momentary inference; what they had sought was Penton, with all its human interests. And then they turned again and faced the north, where lay their poor little home and the lowliness of the present, to which neither the sunset nor any other glory lent a charm.

“You are the eldest son,” said Anne, resuming without a pause; “that’s all about it. That makes everything different. Suppose it is right—or at least not wrong—for you to loaf about. But Osy hasn’t got Penton; he has got to make himself a name. If he is stopped in his education, what is he to do? You ought to speak to father; we all ought to make a stand. If Osy is stopped in his education it is quite different. What is he to do?”

“Father would never stop his education if he could afford it. It is the money. If we could only give up something. But what is there we can give up? Sugar and butter count for so little,” said Ally, in soft tones of despair.

“I should not mind,” said Anne, “if we did not get anything new for years.”

“We so seldom have anything new,” her sister said, with a sigh; there was so little to economize in this way. All the savings they could think of would not make up half the sum that had to be paid for Osy. Their young spirits were crushed under this thought. What could they do? The girls, as has been said, had answered a great many of those advertisements which offer occupation to ladies; they had tried to make beaded lace and to paint Christmas cards. Alas! that, like the butter and sugar, counted for so little. They might as well try to make use of the colors of the sunset as to make up Osy’s schooling in that way: and Wat was even more helpless than they. It was so discouraging a prospect that no one could say a word. They walked down with their faces to the grayness and dimness from whence night was coming, and their hopes, like the light, seemed to be dying away.

It was Anne, always the most quick to note everything that happened, who broke the silence. “What is that,” she cried, “at our door? Look there, wheeling in just under the lime-trees!”

“A carriage! Who can it be?”

“The Penton carriage! Don’t you see the two bays? Something must be up!” cried Walter, a flash of keen curiosity kindling in his eyes.

They stopped for a moment and looked at each other with a sudden thrill of expectation.

“No one has been to see us from Penton for years and years.”

“The carriage would not come for nothing!”

“It has been sent perhaps to fetch father!”

They hurried down with one accord, full of excitement and wonder and awe.

CHAPTER V.
A WINTER’S WALK.

Mr. Penton went out to take his walk in a depressed mood. He was familiar with all the stages of depression. He was a man who thought he had been hardly dealt with in the course of his life. In his youth there had been a momentary blaze of gayety and pleasure. In those days, when he had shared the early follies of Walter and Reginald, and fallen in love with Alicia, it had not occurred to him that the path of existence would be a dull one. But that was all over long ago. When the other young men had fallen into dissipation and all its attendant miseries, he had pulled himself up. Pleasure was all very well, but he had no idea of paying such a price for it as that. He was not a man who had ever been brought under any strong religious impulse, but he knew the difference between right and wrong. He pulled himself up with great resolution, and abandoned the flowery path where all the thorns are at first hidden under the bloom and brightness. It was no small sacrifice to descend into the gray mediocrity of Penton Hook, and give himself up to the dull life which was all that was possible; but he did it, which was not an easy thing to do. It was true that he was still in those days a young man, and might have made something better of his existence: but he had no training of any special kind, no habit of work, no great capacity one way or other. He settled down to his dull country life without any feeling that he could do better, leaving all excitement behind him. It was perhaps a more creditable thing to do than if he had been able to plunge into another kind of excitement, to face the world and carve a fortune out of it, which is the alternative possible to some men. And as there had been no illusion possible when he accepted that neutral-tinted life, so there had been no unexpected happiness involved in its results. He had married a good woman, but not a lively one. His children had been pleasant and amusing in their babyhood, but they had brought innumerable cares along with them. Before their advent Penton Hook had been dull, but it had not been without many little comforts. He had been able to keep a couple of horses, which of itself was a considerable thing, and to hold his place more or less among the county people. But as the young ones grew it made a great difference. Just at the time when life ought to have opened up for their advantage, it had to be narrowed and straitened. He was compelled to give up his own gratifications on their account, yet without any compensating consciousness that he was doing the best he could for them. Indeed, there seemed no possibility of doing the best that could be done for any one. To keep on, to do what was indispensable, to provide food and clothing—the mere sordid necessities of life—was all that was within his power. In the early days after his marriage nothing had been saved; the necessity of education and provision for the children seemed either ludicrous in presence of the tiny creatures who wanted nothing but bread and milk and kisses, or so far off as to be beyond calculation. But by gradual degrees this necessity had become the most important of all. And with it, unfortunately, had come that depreciation in the value of land which made his little estate much less productive exactly at the time when he wanted money most.

One of his farms was vacant, the others were let at low rents—all was sinking into a different level. And, on the other hand, the wants of the family increased every day. It is not to be supposed that Mr. Penton liked to take Osy from school. He had been indifferent about Wat for various reasons first because he then quite believed that was really capable of “reading” with his boy, and would rather like it than otherwise, and then it would be a good thing for them both; and second, because Wat was the heir, and no great education is necessary (Mr. Penton thought with Mrs. Hardcastle in the play) to fit a man to spend a large income. But with Osy no such argument told. Osy was heir to nothing. He was the clever one of the family; and as for reading with Osy, his father knew that he was not capable of any such feat, even if he had not proved that to keep settled hours and give up a part of his day to his son’s instruction had come to be a thing impossible to him. He knew very well now that to take Oswald from school would be to do him an injury. But what could the poor man do? All that the young ones said in their warm partisanship for Osy, in their indignation at the idea of making him suffer, had more or less affected their father. He was not very sensitive to anything they could say, and yet it wounded him in a dull way. It made him a little more depressed and despondent. To battle with the waves, to be tossed upon a great billow which may swallow you up, yet may also throw you ashore and bring you to a footing upon the solid earth, is less terrible than just to keep your head above the muddy tide which sucks you down and carries you on, with no prospect but to go to the bottom at last when your powers of endurance are spent. This last was Mr. Penton’s state. There was no excitement of a storm, no lively stir of winds and waters—all was dull, dreary, hopeless; a position in which he could do nothing to help himself, nothing to save himself—in which he must just go on, keeping his head above water as he could, now and then going down, getting his eyes and throat full of the heavy, muddy, livid stream. Poverty is little to the active soul which can struggle and strive and outwit it, which can still be doing; but to those who have nothing they can do, who can only wait speechless till they are ingulfed, how bitter is that slowly mounting, colorless, hopeless, all-subduing tide!

There was very little for a man to do at Penton Hook. He had tramped about the fields of the vacant farm, trying helplessly to look after things which he did not understand, and to make the fallow fields bear crops by looking at them, in the morning; and he had come away from them more depressed than ever, wondering whether, if he could get money enough to start and work the farm anything might be made of it; then reflecting dolefully that in all likelihood the money for such operations, even if he could raise it, might in all probability be as well thrown into the river for any good it would do. In the afternoon he did not attempt any further consideration of this question, but simply took a walk as he had been in the habit of doing for so many years. And though in some circumstances there are few things so pleasant, yet in others there is nothing so doleful as this operation of taking a walk. How much helpless idleness, how many hopeless self-questions, miserable musings, are summed up in it; what a dreamy commonplace it turns to, the sick soul’s dull substitute for something to do or think of. It was in its way a sort of epitome of Edward Penton’s wearisome life. He knew every turning of the road; there was nothing unexpected to look forward to, no novelty, no incident; when he met any one he knew, any of his equals, they were most probably riding or driving, or returning from a day with the hounds, splashed and tired, and full of talk about the run. He took off his hat to the county ladies as they drove past, and exchanged a word with the men. He had nothing to say to them nor they to him. He was of their sphere indeed, but not in it. He knew when he had passed that they would say “Poor Penton!” to each other, and discuss his circumstances. He was happier when he came now and then upon a solitary poor man breaking stones on the way, with whom he would stop and have a talk about the weather or how the country was looking. When he could find twopence in his pocket to give for a glass of beer he was momentarily cheered by the encounter. It was a cheap pleasure, and almost his only one. It gave a little relief to the dullness and discouragement which filled all the rest of the way.

There was, however, one incident in his walk besides the twopence to the stone-breaker. There was no novelty in this. Every day as he came up to the turning he knew what awaited him; but that did not take away from perennial interest. This incident was Penton, seen in the distance: not the terrace front, which he, like all the Pentons, thought a monument of architectural art, but a high shoulder of red masonry, which shone through the trees, and suggested all the rest to his accustomed eyes. Penton was the one incident in his walk, as it was in his life. He was poor, and the waters of misery were almost going over his head. Yet Penton stood fast, and he was the heir. He had said this to himself for years, and though the words might have worn out all their meaning, so often had they been repeated, yet there was an endless excitement in them. Twenty years before he had said them with a sense of mingled exultation and remorse, which was when the last of “the boys” died, and he became against all possibility the next heir. Sir Walter had been an old man then, and it seemed probable that these recurring calamities would end his life as well as his hopes. Edward Penton had nothing to reproach himself with; he had never been hard upon his cousins, though he had abandoned their evil ways, and he had been shocked and sorry when one by one they died. But afterward he had looked forward to his inheritance; he had believed that it could not be far off. He had come to this turning when first he began to feel life too many for him, and had looked at the house that was to be his and had taken comfort. But twenty years is a long time, and waiting for dead men’s shoes is not a pleasant occupation. He looked at Penton now always with excitement, but without any exhilaration of hope. It did not seem so unlikely as before that Sir Walter might live to be a hundred; that he might live to see his younger cousin out. As he had outlived his own sons he might outlive Edward Penton and his sons after him. Nothing seemed impossible to such an old man. And Mr. Penton did not feel that his own powers of living, any more than any other powers in him, were much to be reckoned upon. He stood on this particular day and gazed at the house of his fathers with a long and wistful look. Should he ever step into it as his own? Should he ever change his narrow state for the lordship there? This question did not bring to him the same quickening of the breath which he had been sensible of on so many previous occasions. He was too much depressed to-day to be roused even by that. He turned away with a sigh, and turned his back to that vision and his face homeward. At home all his cares were awaiting him—as if he had not carried them with him every step of the way.

As he walked back toward Penton Hook his ear was caught by the chip of the hammer, which sounded in the stillness of the wintery afternoon like some big insect on the road. Chip, chip, and then the little roll of falling stones. The man who made the sound was sitting on a heap of stones by the road-side, working very tranquilly, not hurrying himself, taking his occupation easily. He was gray-haired, with a picturesque gray beard, and a red handkerchief knotted underneath. He paused to put his hand to his cap when he saw Mr. Penton. The recollection of past glasses of beer, or hopes for the future, or perhaps the social pleasure, independent of all interested motives, of five minutes’ talk to break the dullness of the long afternoon, made the approach of the wayfarer pleasant.

“Good-afternoon, sir,” he said, cheerfully.

Old Crockford, though he was a great deal older than Mr. Penton, and much poorer absolutely, though not comparatively, was by no means a depressed person, but regarded everything from a cheerful point of view.

“Good-morning, Crockford,” said Mr. Penton. “I didn’t see you when I passed a little while ago. I thought you had not been out to-day.”

“Bless you, squire, I’m out most days,” said Crockford; “weather like this it’s nothin’ but pleasure. But frost and cold is disagreeable, and rain’s worst of all. I’m all right as long as there’s a bit o’ sunshine, and it keeps up.”

“It looks like keeping up, or I am no judge,” said the poor squire.

Crockford shook his head and looked up at the sky. “I don’t like the look of them clouds,” he said. “When they rolls up like that, one on another, I never likes the look on them. But, praise the Lord, we’s high and dry, and can’t come to no harm.”

“It is more than I am,” said Mr. Penton, testily. “I hate rain!”

“And when the river’s up it’s in of the house, sir, I’ve heard say? That’s miserable, that is. When the children were young my missis and me we lived down by Pepper’s Wharf, and the fevers as them little ones had, and the coughs and sneezin’s, and the rheumatics, it’s more nor tongue can say. Your young ladies, squire, is wonderful red in the face and straight on their pins to be living alongside of the river. It’s an onpleasant neighbor is the river, I always do say.”

“If you hear any fools saying that the water comes into my house you have my permission to—stop them,” said Mr. Penton, angrily. “It’s no such thing; the water never comes higher than the terrace. As for fevers, we don’t know what they are. But I don’t like the damp in my garden; that stands to reason. It spoils all the paths and washes the gravel away.”

“That’s very true,” said Crockford, with conviction; “it leaves ’em slimy, whatever you do. I’ve seen a sight to-day as has set me thinking, though I’m but a poor chap. Poor men, like others, they ’as their feelings. I’ve seen a lady go by, squire, as may be once upon a day years ago, you, or most of the gentlemen about—for she was a handsome one, she was—”

“Ah, an old beauty! ‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.’ And who might this lady be?”

“Many a one was sweet upon her,” said Crockford. “I ain’t seen her, not to call seeing, for many a year. I don’t know about ashes, squire, except as they’re useful for scouring. And they say that beauty is but skin deep: but when I looks at an ’andsome lady I don’t think nothing of all that.”

“I didn’t know you were such an enthusiast, Crockford.”

“I don’t always understand, squire,” said Crockford, “the words the quality employ. Now and then they’ll have a kind of Greek or Latin that means just a simple thing. But I sits here hours on end, and I thinks a deal; and for a thing that pleases the eye I don’t think there’s nothing more satisfying than an ’andsome woman. I don’t say in my own class of life, for they ages fast, do the women; they don’t keep their appearance like you and me, if I may make so bold. But for a lady as has gone through a deal, and kep’ her looks, and got an air with her, that with riding in her own carriage behind a couple of ’andsome bays—I will say, squire, if I was to be had up before the magistrates for it—and you’re one yourself, and ought to know—and what I say is this: that Miss Aliciar from the great house there is just as fine a sight as a man would wish to see.”

“Miss Alicia!” cried poor Penton. The name was one he had not heard for long, and it seemed to bring back a flush of his youth which for a moment dazzled him. He burst out into a tremendous laugh after awhile. “You old blockhead!” he said. “You’re talking of Mrs. Russell Pentonon, my cousin, who hasn’t been called by that name these twenty years!”

“Twenty years,” said old Crockford, “is nothin’ squire, to a man like me. I knew her a baby, just as I knowed you. You’re both two infants to the likes of me. Bless you, I hear the bells ring for her christening and yours too. But she’s a fine, ’andsome woman, a-wheelin’ along in her carriage as if all the world belonged to her. I don’t think nothin’ of a husband that hain’t even a name of his own to bless himself with nor a penny to spend. It’s you and her that should have made a match; that’s what ought to have been, squire.”

“Unfortunately, you see,” aid Mr. Penton, “I have got a wife of my own.”

“But you hadn’t no wife nor her a husband in the old days,” said Crockford, meditatively, pausing to emphasize his words with the chip, chip of his hammer. “Dear a me! the mistakes that are in this life! One like me, as sits here hours on end, with naught afore him but the clouds flying and the wind blowing, learns a many things. There’s more mistakes than aught else in this life. Going downright wrong makes a deal of trouble, but mistakes makes more. For one as goes wrong there’s allays two or three decent folks as suffers. But mistakes is just like daily bread; they’re like the poor as is ever with us, accordin’ to the Scripture; they just makes a muddle of everything. It’s been going through my mind since ever I see Miss Aliciar in her chariot a-driving away, as fine as King Solomon in all his glory. The two young gentlemen, that was a sad sort of a thing, squire, but I don’t know as t’other is much better, the mistakes as some folks do make.”

“Crockford, you are growing old, and fond of talking,” said Mr. Penton, who had heard him out with a sort of angry patience. “Because one lets you go on and say your say, that’s not to make you a judge of your betters. Look here, here’s twopence for a glass of beer, but mind you keep your wisdom to yourself another day.”

“Thank ye, squire,” said Crockford. “I speak my mind in a general way, but I can hold my tongue as well as another when it ain’t liked. Remarks as is unpleasant, or as pricks like, going too near a sore place—”

“Oh, confound you!” said the squire; “who ever said there was a—” But then he remembered that to quarrel with Crockford was not a thing to be done. “I think, after all,” he said, “you’re right, and that those clouds are banking up for rain. You’d better pack up your hammer, it’s four o’clock, and it will be wet before you get home.”

“Well, squire, if you says so, as is one of the trustees,” said Crockford, giving an eye to the clouds, as he swung himself leisurely off his hard and slippery seat upon the heap of stones—“I’ll take your advice, sir, and thank ye, sir; and wishing you a pleasant walk afore the rain comes on.”

Mr. Penton waved his hand and continued his walk downhill toward his home. The clouds were gathering indeed, but they were full of color and reflection, which showed all the more gorgeous against the rolling background of vapor which gradually obliterated the blue. He was not afraid of the rain, though if it meant another week of wet weather such as had already soaked the country, it would also mean much discomfort and inconvenience in the muddy little domain of Penton Hook. But it was not this he was thinking of. His own previous reflections, and the sharp reminder of the past that was in old Crockford’s random talk, made a combination not unlike that of the dark clouds and the lurid reflected colors of the sky. Mistake? Yes; no doubt there had been a mistake—many mistakes, one after another, mistakes which the light out of the past, with all its dying gleams, made doubly apparent. His mind was so full of all these thoughts that he arrived at his own gates full of them, without thinking of the passing vision which had stirred up old Crockford, and his own mind too, on hearing of it. But when he pushed open the gate and caught sight of the two bays, pawing and rearing their heads, with champ and stir of all their trappings, as if they disdained the humble door at which they stood, Edward Penton’s middle-aged heart gave a sudden jump in his breast. Alicia here! What could such a portent mean?

CHAPTER VI.
RICH MRS. PENTON AND POOR MRS. PENTON.

Mrs. Russell Penton had not come to the Hook for nothing. It was years since she had visited her cousin’s house—partly because of repeated absences—for the family at Penton were fond of escaping from the winter, and generally spent that half of the year on the Riviera—partly from the feeling she had expressed to her husband, which was not a very Christian feeling, of repulsion from her father’s heir: and partly, which was perhaps the strongest reason of all, because they were not, as she said, “in our own sphere.” How can the wife and many children of a poor man living in a small muddy river-side house be in the sphere of one of the great ladies of the district? Only great qualities on one side or another, great affection or some other powerful inducement, would be enough to span that gulf. And no such link existed between the two houses. But there had come to light between her father and herself in one of those close and long consultations, to which not even her husband was admitted, a plan which required Edward Penton’s concurrence, and which, they concluded between them, had better be set before him by Alicia herself. This might have been done by summoning the heir-at-law to Penton. But Russell Penton’s veiled remonstrances, his laugh at her inconsistency, his comparison of the importance of the moth-eaten tapestry and poor Mrs. Penton’s inability to cut her coat according to her cloth, had not been without effect on his wife’s mind. She was not incapable of perceiving the point which he made; and though she confessed to nobody, not even to herself, that her visit to Penton Hook had a little remorseful impulse in it, yet this mingled largely with the evident business which might have been managed in another way. Many recollections rose in her mind also as she went along, not exposed even to such interruptions as that of old Crockford, all by herself with her own thoughts, remembering in spite of herself the youthful expeditions in which the Hook was so large a feature, the boating parties that “took the water” there, the anxious exertions of poor Edward to make his forlorn little mansion bright. Poor Edward! She remembered so clearly his eager looks, his desire to please, the anxious devices with which he sought to gratify her tastes, to show how his own followed them. She had not seen much of his older aspect, and had no distinct image in her mind to correct that of the eager young man reading her face to see if she approved or disapproved, and having no higher standard by which to shape his own opinions. She saw him in that aspect: and she saw him as by a lightning flash of terrible recollection, which was half imagination, as he had appeared to her by the side of her last brother’s grave, the chief mourner and the chief gainer, concealing a new-born sense of his own importance under the conventional guise of woe. Alicia was half conscious that she did poor Edward wrong. He was not the sort of man to exult in his own advantage as purchased by such a terrible family tragedy. But even now, when the passion of grief and loss was over, she could not surmount the bitter suggestion, the knowledge that he had certainly gained by what was ruin to her father’s house. When she drove past the old stone breaker on the road without taking any notice of him, without even remarking his presence, this had been the recollection with which her soul was filled. But her heart melted as the carriage swept along by all the well-remembered corners, and a vision of the happy youthful party of old, the sound of the boats at the little landing, the eager delight of the young master of the place, seemed to come back to her ears and eyes.

But Penton Hook did not look much like a boating party to-day. The water was very near the level of the too green grass, the empty damp flower-beds, the paths that gleamed with wet. A certain air of deprecating helplessness standing feebly against that surrounding power was in everything about. Alicia, as she was now, the active-minded manager of much property, full of energy and resources, one of those who, like the centurion, have but to say, “Come, and he cometh; do this, and he doeth it,” cast her eyes, awakened out of all dreams, upon the sweep of river and the little bit of weeping soil which seemed to lie in its grasp appealing for mercy to the clouds and the skies. The sight gave new life to all her scornful comments upon the incompetency of those who, knowing what they had, could not take the dignified position of making it do, but sunk into failure and helpless defeat. She planned rapidly in a moment what she would do, were it but to keep the enemy at bay. Were it hers she would scarcely have waited for the dawn of the morning, she would have sent in her workmen, prepared her plans, learned the best way to deal with it, long ago. She would have made herself the mistress, not the slave, of the surrounding stream. In whatever way, at whatever cost, she would have freed herself, she would have overcome these blind influences of nature. It was with a little scorn, feeling that she could have done this, feeling that she would like to do it, that it would be a pleasure to fight and overcome that silent, senseless force, that Mrs. Russell Penton, rich Mrs. Penton, swept in through the weeping gardens of the Hook, and with all the commotion of a startling arrival, her bays prancing, her wheels cutting the gravel, drew up before the open door.

The door was always open, whether the day was warm or cold, with an aspect not of hospitality and liberal invitation, but rather of disorder and a squalid freedom from rule. The hall was paved with vulgar tiles which showed the traces of wet feet, and Mrs. Russell Penton sunk down all at once from her indignant half-satisfied conviction that it was a sign of the incompetency of poor Edward in his present surroundings that he had never attempted to do anything to mend matters when brought thus face to face with poverty. The traces of the wet feet appalled her. This was just such an evidence of an incompetent household and careless mistress as fitted in to her theory; but it was terrible to her unaccustomed senses, to which a perfection of nicety and propriety was indispensable, and any branch of absolute cleanness and purity unknown. The maid, who hurried frightened, yet delighted, to the door, did not, however, carry out the first impression made. She was so neat in her black gown and white apron that the visitor was nonplussed as by an evident contradiction. “Can you tell me if Mr. Penton is at home?” she asked, leaning out of the carriage and putting aside the footman with a momentary feeling that this, perhaps, might be one of poor Edward’s daughters acting as house-maid. “No, my lady; but missis is in,” said the handmaid with a courtesy which she had learned at school. Martha did not know who the visitor was, but felt that in all circumstances to call a visitor who came in such a fine carriage my lady could not wrong.

“Missis is in!” Rich Mrs. Penton felt a momentary thrill. It was as if she had been hearing herself spoken of in unimaginable circumstances. She paused a little with a sense of unwillingness to go further. She had met on various occasions the insignificant pretty young woman who was poor Edward’s wife. She had made an effort to be kind to her when they were first married, when the poor Pentons were still more or less in one’s own sphere. But there had been nothing to interest her, nothing to make up for the trouble of maintaining so uncomfortable a relationship, and since that period she had not taken any notice of her cousin’s wife, a woman always immured in nursing cares, having babes or nourishing them, or deep in some one of those semi-animal (as she said) offices which disgust a fastidious woman, who in her own person has nothing of the kind to do. A woman without children becomes often very fastidious on this point. Perhaps the disgust may be partly born of envy, but at all events it exists and is strong. Mrs. Penton hesitated as to whether she would turn back and not go in at all, or whether she would wait at the door till Edward came in, or ask to be shown into his particular sitting-room to wait for him: but that, she reflected, would be a visible slight to Edward’s wife. The unexpressed unformulated dread of what Russell might say restrained her here. He would not criticise, but he would laugh, which was much worse. He would perhaps give vent to a certain small whistle which she knew very well, when she acknowledged that she had been to Penton Hook without seeing the mistress of the house. She did not at all confess to herself that she was a coward, but as a matter of fact rich Mrs. Penton was more afraid of that whistle than poor Mrs. Penton was of anything, except scarlatina. Alicia hesitated; she sat still in her carriage for the space of a minute, while simple Martha gazed as if she had been a queen, and admired the deep fur on the lady’s velvet mantle, and the bonnet which had come from Paris. Then Mrs. Penton made up her mind. “Perhaps your mistress will see me,” she said; “I should like to wait till Mr. Penton comes in.”

“Oh, yes, my lady,” Martha said. Though she had been carefully instructed how to answer visitors, she felt instinctively that this visitor could not be asked her name as if she was an ordinary lady making a call. She then opened the drawing-room very wide and said, “Please, ma’am!” then stopped and let the great lady go in.

Mrs. Penton, poor Mrs. Penton was sitting by the fire on a low chair. There was not light enough to work by, and yet there was too much light to ask for the lamp. It was a welcome moment of rest from all the labors that were her heritage. She liked it perhaps all the better that her husband and the older ones, who would talk or make demands upon her to be talked to, were out and she was quite free. To be alone now and then for a moment is sweet to a hard-worked woman who never is alone. Indeed, she was not alone now. Two of the little ones were on the rug by her feet. But they made no demands upon their mother, they played with each other, keeping up a babble of little voices, within reach of her hand to be patted on the head, within reach of her dress to cling to, should a wild beast suddenly appear or an ogre or a naughty giant. Thus, though they said nothing to each other, they were a mutual comfort and support, the mother to the children and the children to the mother. And if we could unveil the subtle chain of thinking from about that tired and silent woman’s heart, the reader would wonder to see the lovely things that were there. But she was scarcely aware that she was thinking, and what she thought was not half definite enough to be put into words. A world of gentle musings, one linked into another, none of them separable from the rest, was about her in the firelight, in the darkness, the quiet and not ungrateful fatigue. She was not thinking at all she would have said. It was as though something revolved silently before her, gleaming out here and there a recollection or realization. The warmth, the dimness, the quiet, lulled her in the midst of all her cares. She had thought of Osy till her head ached. How this dreadful misfortune could be averted; how he could be kept on at Marlborough; until, in the impossibility of finding any expedient, and the weariness of all things, her active thoughts had dropped. They dropped as her hands dropped, as she gave up working, and for that moment of stillness drew her chair to the fire. There was nothing delightful to dwell upon in all that was around and about her. But God, whom in her voiceless way she trusted deeply, delivered the tired mother from her cares for the moment, and fed her with angels’ food as she sat without anything to say for herself, content by the fire.

It was a moment before she realized what had happened when the door opened and the visitor swept in. She was not clever or ready, and her first consciousness that some one had come in was confused, so that she did not know how to meet the emergency. She rose up hastily, all her sweet thoughts dispersing; and the children, who saw a shadowy tall figure and did not know what it was, shuffled to her side and laid hold of her dress with a horrible conviction that the ogre who eats children on toast had come at last. Rich Mrs. Penton sweeping in had command of the scene better than poor Mrs. Penton had who was its principal figure. She saw the startled movement, the slim figure rising up from before the fire, in nervous uncertainty what to say or do, and the sudden retreat of the little ones from their place in the foreground, lighted by the warm glow of the fire, to the shelter of their mother’s dress. The whole group had a timid, alarmed look which half piqued and half pleased Alicia. She rather liked the sensation of her own imposing appearance which struck awe, and yet was annoyed that any one should be afraid of her. She had no doubt what to do; she went forward into the region of the firelight and held out a hand. “You don’t remember me,” she said, “or perhaps it is only that you don’t see me. I am Alicia Penton. May I sit down here a little till my cousin comes in?”

“Mrs. Russell Penton! oh, sit down, please. Will you take this chair, or will you come nearer the fire? I am ashamed to have been so stupid, but I have not many visitors, and I never thought—will you take this chair, please?”

“You never thought that I should be one? Oh, don’t think I blame you for saying so. It is my fault; I have often felt it. I hope you will let by-gones be by-gones now, and look upon me as a friend.”

“Horry,” said Mrs. Penton, “run and tell Martha to bring the lamp.” She did not make any direct reply to her visitor’s overture. “I am fond of sitting in the firelight,” she said. “A little moment when there is nothing to do, when all is so quiet, is pleasant. But it is awkward when any one comes in, for we can not see each other. I hope Sir Walter is quite well,” she added, after a momentary pause.

It was in the rich Mrs. Penton’s heart to cry out, “Don’t ask me about Sir Walter; you don’t hope he is well; you wish he was dead, I know you must, you must!” These words rushed to her lips but she did not say them. There was in this mild interior no justification for such a speech. The absence of light threw a veil upon all the imperfections of the place, and there was something in the gentle indifference of the mistress of the house, the absence of all feeling in respect to her visitor except a startled civility, which somehow humbled and silenced the proud woman. She had been, in spite of herself, excited about this meeting. She had come in with her heart beating, making overtures, which she never would have made to a stranger. She did not know what she expected; either to be received with warm and astonished gratitude, or to be held at arm’s-length in offense. But this mild woman in the soft confusion of the firelit gloom did neither—had not evidently been thinking of her at all—had no feeling about her one way or another. Mrs. Russell Penton felt like one who had fallen from a height. She blushed unseen with a hot sensation of shame. To feel herself of so much less consequence than she expected, was extraordinary to her, a sensation such as she had rarely felt before. She felt even that the pause she made before replying, which she herself felt so much, and during which so many things went through her head, was lost upon the other, who was preoccupied about the lamp, and anxious lest it should smell, and concerned with a hundred other things.

“My father is quite well,” said Alicia, with a little emphasis; “I never saw him in better health. It is not thought necessary for him, he is so well, to go abroad this year.”

The maid was at the door with the lamp, and there came in with her, exactly as Mrs. Penton feared, an odor of paraffin, that all-pervading unescapable odor which is now so familiar everywhere. She scarcely caught what her visitor said, so much more anxious was she about this. And in her mind there arose the anxious question, what to do? Was it better to say nothing about the smell, and hope that perhaps it might not be remarked? or confess the matter and make a commotion, calling Mrs. Penton’s attention to it by sending it away? Even if she did the latter she could not send away the smell, which, alas! was here, anyhow, and would keep possession. She resolved desperately, therefore, to take no notice, to hope, perhaps, that it might not be remarked. This presumption, though poor Mrs. Penton was so far from suspecting it, completed the discomfiture of the great lady who had made sure that her visit would be a great event.

“I am very glad,” said the mistress of the house at last, vaguely; “Edward has gone out for a walk, he will be in directly, and I am sure it will give him great pleasure to see you. The girls are out, too; there is not very much for them in the way of amusement at this time of the year.”

And then there was a pause, for neither of the ladies knew what to say. Mrs. Russell Penton examined her hostess closely by the light of the malodorous lamp. It was kinder to the poor lady than daylight would have been, and to the poor room, which, with the flickering firelight rising and falling, and the shade over the lamp, which left the walls and the furniture in a flattering obscurity, showed none of their imperfections to the stranger’s eyes. And all that was apparent in Mrs. Penton was that her gown, which was of no particular color, but dark and not badly cut, hung about her slim figure with a certain grace, and that the curling twist of her hair, done up in that soft large knot on the back of hegr head, suited her much better than a more elaborate coiffure would have done. Rich Mrs. Penton looked closely at her poor relation, but her scrutiny was not returned. The thing that had now sprung into prominence in the mind of the mistress of the house was whether Martha would bring tea in nicely, and whether the cake would be found which was kept for such great occasions, without an appeal to herself for the keys. She was careful and burdened about many things; but in the very excess of her anxieties was delivered from more serious alarms. It did not occur to her to trouble herself with the questions which the children had asked each other so anxiously, which Mr. Penton was inquiring of himself with a beating heart, “What could have brought Alicia Penton here?”

CHAPTER VII.
THE YOUNG AND THE OLD.

There was, however, no lack of excitement when the rest of the family came in. The girls dazzled with the quick transition from the darkness outside to the light within, their eyes shining, their lips apart with breathless curiosity and excitement, and a thrill of interest which might have satisfied the requirements of any visitor; and after a little interval their father, pale, and somewhat breathless, too, whose expectation was not of anything agreeable, but rather of some new misfortune, of which perhaps his cousin had come to tell him. Edward Penton did not pause to think that it was very unlikely that Alicia would thus break in upon his retirement in order to tell him of some misfortune. The feeling was instinctive in his mind, because of long acquaintance with defeat and failure, that every new thing must mean further trouble. He was always ready to encounter that in his depressed way. He came into the atmosphere which was tinged with the smell of paraffin, the discomfort of which was habitual to him, added to the undercurrent of irritation in his mind, and with the feeling that there was already a crowd of people in the room, where probably no one was necessary but himself. Alicia Penton had long, long ceased to be an object of special interest to him; nobody now was of particular interest to Mr. Penton in that or any sentimental way. The people who were about him now either belonged to him, in which case they gave him a great deal of altogether inevitable trouble; or else they did not belong to him, and were probably more or less antagonistic—wanting things from him, entertainment, hospitality, subscriptions, something or other which he did not wish to give. Such were the two classes into which the human race was divided; but if there was a debatable ground between the two, a scrap of soil upon which a human foot could be planted. Sir Walter and his daughter were its possible inhabitants. They belonged to him, too—in a way; they were antagonistic, too—in a way. Both the other halves of the world were more or less united in them.

He came forward into the light, which, however, revealed his knickerbockers and muddy boots more distinctly than his face. “It is a long time,” he said, “since we have met.”

“Yes, Edward, it is a long time; I have been saying so to your wife. The girls have grown up since I saw them last; they were little girls then, and now they are—grown up—”

When emotion reaches a high strain and becomes impassioned the power of expression is increased, and eloquence comes; but on the lower levels of feeling, suppressed excitement and commotion of mind often find utterance in the merest commonplace.

“Yes, they are grown up—the boy, too,” said Mr. Penton, under the same spell.

She cast a glance upward to where, beyond the lamp, on his mother’s side of the table, Wat appeared, a lengthy shadow, perhaps the most uncongenial of all. She made a slight forward inclination of her head in recognition of his presence, but no more. The girls she had shown a certain pleasure in. They stood together, with that pretty look of being but one which a pair of sisters often have, so brightly curious and excited, scanning her with such eager eyes that it would have been difficult not to respond to their frank interest. But Mrs. Penton could not tolerate Wat; his very presence was an offense to her, and the instinctive way in which he went over to his mother’s side, and stood there in the gloom looking at the visitor over the shade of the lamp. She would have none of him, but she turned with relief to the girls.

“I am ashamed to ask the question,” she said, “but which of you is my godchild? You seem about the same age.”

It was a vexation that it should be the other one—the one who was like her mother, not the impetuous darker girl whose eyes devoured the great lady who was her cousin—who replied, “It is I who am Ally. There is only a year between us. We are more together than any of the others.”

“Ally?” said Mrs. Russell Penton, with a little scorn. “And what is your name?”

“I am Anne.”

“She should be Anna,” said her mother, “which is far prettier; but she likes what is shortest best. There are so many of them. None of them have their full names. Some families make a great stand on that—to give every one their full name.”

“It is a matter of taste,” said the visitor, coldly.

She was doubly, but most unreasonably, annoyed after her first moment of interest to find that it was the wrong sister who was her godchild, and that even she did not bear the name that had been given her. It seemed a want of respect, not only to herself, but to the family, in which there had been Alicias for countless years.

“I hope my uncle is well?” said Mr. Penton, after another embarrassed pause. Sir Walter was not his uncle, but it was a relic of the old days, when he was a child of the house, that the younger cousin was permitted to call the elder so. “I heard you were not going away this year.”

“No; the doctors think he may stay at home, as there is every prospect of a mild winter. Of course, if it became suddenly severe we could take him away at a moment’s notice.”

“Of course,” Edward Penton said. However severe the weather might become neither he nor his could be taken away at a moment’s notice. He could not help feeling conscious of the difference, but with a faint smile breaking upon his depression. Alicia did not mean it, he was sure, but it seemed curious that she should put the contrast so very clearly before him. There was a little whispering going on between the mother and daughters about the tea. Tea was a substantial meal at the Hook, and the little ornamental repast at five o’clock was unusual, and made a little flurry in the household. Mrs. Penton had to give Anne certain instructions about a little thin bread-and-butter and the cake. She thought that Edward, who was keeping up the conversation, screened off these whisperings from his cousin’s notice; but as a matter of fact Alicia was keenly alive to all that was taking place, and felt a sharper interest in the anxiety about Martha’s appearance than in anything Edward was saying. “You still keep the villa at Cannes?” he went on.

“Yes; up to this time it has been a necessity for my father; but I have not seen him so well for years.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” Mr. Penton said, with a little emphasis. He had to stand aside as he spoke, for Martha arrived, rather embarrassed, with her tray, for which there was no habitual place; and the girls had to clear the books and ornaments off a little table while she waited. He was used to these domestic embarrassments, and it must be said for him that he did the best he could to screen them even at the sacrifice of himself. He drew a chair near to his cousin and sat down, thus doing what he could to draw her keen attention from these details. “It is long since I have seen Penton,” he said. “I hear you have made many improvements.”

“Nothing that you would remark—only additions to the comfort of the house. It used to be rather cold, you will remember.”

“I don’t think I knew what cold was in those old days,” he said, with a slight involuntary shiver, for the door had just opened once more to admit the cake, and a draught came in from the always open hall.

“We have had it now warmed throughout,” said Mrs. Russell Penton, with a slight momentary smile; “and we are thinking of fitting it up with the electric light. My husband has a turn for playing with science. It is a great deal of trouble at first, but very little afterward, I believe: and very convenient, without any of the drawbacks of lamps or gas.”

She could not but turn her head as she spoke, to the large crystal lamp upon the table, which filled the room with something more than light. The tea had been arranged by this time, and poor Mrs. Penton had begun to pour it out, but not yet was her mind disengaged from the many anxieties involved—for the tea was poor. She shook her head and made a little silent appeal to the girls as she poured out the first almost colorless cup. And then there was a jug of milk, but no cream. This necessitated another whispering, and the swift dispatch of Ally to fetch what was wanted. Mrs. Russell Penton looked on at all this, and took in every detail as if it had been a little scene of a comedy enacted for her amusement; but there was in the amusement an acrid touch. The smile was sharp, like Ithuriel’s spear, and cut all those innocent little cobwebs away.

“I have no doubt you will make it very complete,” Edward Penton said, with a sigh. There was an assumed proprietorship about all she said, which was like cutting him off from the succession, that only possibility which lay in his future. And yet they could not cut him off, he said, to himself.

“Is this tea for me? How very kind! but I never take it at this hour,” said Alicia, putting up her gloved hand with a little gesture of refusal. It smote, if not her heart, yet her conscience, a little to see the look that passed between the mother and the girls. Had Russell seen that scene he would assuredly have retired into a corner, and relieved himself with a whistle, before asking for a cup and eating half the cake, which was what he would have done regardless of consequences. Rendered compunctious by this thought, Alicia added, hastily, “You must bring the girls up to see the house; they ought to know it; and I hope I may see more of them in the time to come.”

“Their mother, I have no doubt, will be pleased,” said Edward Penton, vaguely.

“Indeed, you must not think of me,” his wife said; she had not taken offense. It was not in her mild nature to suppose that any one could mean to slight or insult her; but she was a little annoyed by the unnecessary waste of tea. “I am a poor walker, you know, Edward; and always occupied with the children; but I am sure the girls would like it very much. It would be very nice for them to make acquaintance—Wat could walk up with them if you were busy. Especially in the winter,” she said, with a little conciliatory smile toward the great lady, “I am always looking out for a little change for the girls.”

“Then we shall consider that as settled,” said Alicia. She rose, in all the splendor of her velvet and furs, and the whole family rose with her. A thought ran through their minds—a little astonished shock—a question, Was it possible that this was all she had come for? It was a very inadequate conclusion to the excitement and expectation in all their minds. Mrs. Penton alone did not feel this shock. She did not think the result inadequate; a renewal of acquaintance, an invitation to the girls, probably the opening to them of a door into society and the great world. She came forward with what to her was warmth and enthusiasm. “It is very kind of you to have called,” she said, “I am truly grateful, for I make few calls myself, and I can’t wonder if I fall out of people’s recollection. It is a great thing for a woman like you to come out of your way to be kind to Edward’s little girls. I am very grateful to you, and I will never forget it.” Poor Mrs. Penton gave her rich namesake a warm pressure of the hand, looking at her with her mild, large-lidded gray eyes, lit up by a smile which transformed her face. Not a shadow of doubt, not the faintest cloud of consciousness that Alicia’s motive had been less than angelic, was in her look or in her thoughts.

Rich Mrs. Penton faltered and shrunk before this look of gratitude. She knew that, far from deserving it, there had been nothing but contempt in her thoughts toward this simple woman who had been to her like a bit of a comedy. She withdrew her hand as quickly as possible from that grateful clasp.

“You give me credit—that I don’t deserve,” she said. “I—I came to speak to my cousin on business. It was really a—I won’t call it a selfish motive, that brought me. But it will give me real pleasure to see the girls.”

To divine the hidden meaning of this little speech, which was entirely apologetic, occupied the attention of the anxious family suddenly pushed back into eagerness again by the intimation of her real errand. It was not all for nothing, then! It was not a mere call of civility! Mr. Penton, who had felt something like relief when she rose, consoled by the thought that there could not at least be any new misfortune to intimate to him, fell again into that state of melancholy anticipation from which he had been roused, while the young ones bounded upward to the height of expectation. Something was coming—something new! It did not much matter to them what it was. They looked on with great excitement while their father conducted his cousin across the hall to his book-room, as it was called. They were not given to fine names at Penton Hook. It had been called the library in former days. But it was a little out at elbows, like the rest of the house—the damp had affected the bindings, the gilding was tarnished, the russia leather dropping to pieces, a smell of mustiness and decay, much contended against, yet indestructible, was in the place. And it was no longer the library, but only the book-room. The door of the drawing-room being left open, the family watched with interest indescribable the two figures crossing the hall. Mrs. Russell Penton, though she had not been there for so many years, knew her way, which particular interested the girls greatly, and opened a new vista to them, into the past. Mrs. Penton, for her part, knew well enough all about Alicia, but she was not jealous. She shivered slightly as she saw the great lady’s skirt sweep the hall.

“Oh, Anne,” she whispered, “tell Martha to bring a cloth and wipe it. A velvet dress! You children, with your wet feet, you are enough to break any one’s heart. What are the mats put there for, I should like to know?”

“Oh, what do you think of her, mother? Did you like her? Don’t you think she meant to be kind? Do you think we must go?”

“Certainly you must go,” said Mrs. Penton. “What do I think of her? This is not the first time I have seen Alicia Penton, that you should ask me such a question. Yes, yes, you must go. You ought to know that house better than any house in the country, and it is only right that you should first go into society there.”

“Do you think Cousin Alicia will ask us to parties? Do you think she really meant—really, without thinking of anything else—to be kind to Ally and me?”

“Anne, I am sorry that you should take such notions. What object could she have but kindness?” said Mrs. Penton, with mild conviction, “for coming here? It is all very well to talk of business with your father. Yes, no doubt she has business with your father, or she would not have said so; but I am very sure she must have suffered from the estrangement. I always thought she must suffer. Men do not think of these things, but women do. I feel sure that she has talked her father over at last, and that we are all to be friends again. Sir Walter is an old man; he must want to make up differences. What a dreadful thing it would be to die without making it up!”

“Was there any real quarrel?” said Wat, coming forward with his hands in his pockets. “She may be kind enough, mother, that fine lady of yours, but she does not like me.”

“How can she know whether she likes you or not? She doesn’t know you, Wat.”

“She hates me, all the same. I have never done anything to her that I know of. I suppose I did wrong to be born.”

“If it were not you it would be some one else,” said Mrs. Penton; “but, children! oh, don’t talk in this hard way. Think how her brothers died, and that she has no children. And the house she loves to go away from her, and nothing to be hers! I do not think I could bear it if it was me. Make haste, Anne, oh, make haste, and get Martha to wipe up the hall. And, Horry, you may as well have the thin bread and butter. If I had only known that Mrs. Russell Penton never took tea—”

About this failure Mrs. Penton was really concerned; it was not only a waste of the tea and of that nice bread and butter (which Horry enjoyed exceedingly), but it was a sort of a sham, enacted solely for the benefit of the visitor, which was objectionable in other points of view besides that of extravagance. It gave her a sense of humiliation as if she had been masquerading in order to deceive a stranger who was too quick of wit to be deceived. But Mrs. Penton neither judged her namesake, nor was suspicious of her, nor was she even very curious as the children were, as to the subject of the interview which was going on in the book-room. She feared nothing from it, nor did she expect anything. She was not ready to imagine that anything could happen. Sir Walter might die, of course, and that would make a change; but she had Mrs. Russell Penton’s word for it that Sir Walter was better than usual; and in the depth of her experience of that routine of common life which kept on getting a little worse, but had never been broken by any surprising incidents, she had little faith in things happening. She felt even that she would not be surprised for her part if Sir Walter should never die. He was eighty-five, and he might live to be a hundred. Though they had not met for years she saw nothing extraordinary in the fact that Alicia Penton had come to talk over some business matters with her cousin. It was partly indolence of mind and partly because she had so much that it was real to occupy her that she had no time for imaginary cases. And so while the girls hung about the doors in excitement unable to settle to anything, curious to see their great relation pass out again, and to watch her getting into her carriage, and pick up any information that might be attainable about the object of her mission, Mrs. Penton with a word of rebuke to their curiosity, took Horry upstairs to the nursery and thence retired to her own room to make her modest little toilet for the evening. There was no dinner to dress for, but the mother of the household thought it was a good thing as a rule and example that she should put on a different gown for tea.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE PROPOSAL.

Alicia was a little subdued when she found herself in the old library, the room she had known so well in other circumstances. The air of decay, the unused books which she had borrowed and read and talked over, Edward being a little more disposed that way than her brothers, and ready to give her advice about her reading, and receive with reverence her comments which the others took no interest in, impressed her in spite of herself. Her eyes turned to the corner in which there had been a collection of the poets more accessible and readable than any that existed at Penton, where the books were all of a ponderous kind. They were still there, the same little volumes, which it had been so easy to carry about, which had been brought from the Hook in Edward’s pocket, which she had taken with her in the boat and read in the shady corners under the trees among the water-lilies. She could see they were still there, the binding a little tarnished, the line broken, as if several volumes were lost or absent. Who read them now? She gave but one glance and saw everything, then turned her back upon that corner. There was a table in the window which had not been there formerly, a table covered with books and papers such as she was sure Edward Penton did not amuse himself with. It would be the boy whose name had not been mentioned, whom she had taken no notice of, yet of whom, with a jealous, angry consciousness she had felt the presence through all.

“You have made few changes,” she said, involuntarily, as she turned the chair he had placed for her half round, so as not to see the shelf with its range of little volumes. The book-room was perhaps the most comfortable in the house, but for that faint mustiness. The walls were well lined with books. It had been a good collection twenty years ago, and though there had been few additions made, it was still a good collection, and the fading of the gilding and a little raggedness of binding here and there did not injure the appearance of the well-covered walls. Mr. Penton lighted the two candles on the writing-table, which seemed to add two little inquisitive eldritch spectators, blinking their little flames at the human actors in this drama, and watching all they did and said.

“No, there are no changes to speak of; I have had other things to think of than making changes,” he said, with a little abruptness, perhaps thinking that she was making a contrast between the unalterable circumstances of his poverty and all that had been done in the great house. But she had no such meaning, nor did she understand the tone of almost reproach in which he spoke.

“You must have had a great deal to do, with your family; but there are cares which many people count as happiness.”

“I am making no complaint,” he said.

And then there was a pause. There had been struck a wrong note which rang jarring into the air, and made it more difficult to begin again.

“You must have been surprised,” she said, “to find me here to-day.”

“I don’t know that I was surprised; perhaps it was more surprising, if I may speak my mind, Alicia, that so long a time has passed without seeing you here. I never harmed you, that I know.”

“No,” she said, “you never harmed us; it has been a miserable mistake altogether. For years past I have felt it to be so; but we are the slaves of our own mistakes. I never seemed to have the courage to take the first step to make it right.”

She had neither meant to say this, nor in cold blood would she have allowed it to be true; but she was carried away by the subtle influence of the familiar place, by the sight of the books she used to borrow, and many an indefinable recollection and influence besides.

He gave a little short laugh. “That is the second time to-night,” he said, “that I have heard the same thing said.” If she had but known who the other was who had said it, the old man breaking stones, who had been so glad of his twopence! Mr. Penton could not restrain the brief comment of that laugh.

“It does not matter who says it,” said Alicia, “it is true. A thing is done in passion, in misery: and then it is hard to descend from our pride, or to acknowledge ourselves wrong. And you will think, perhaps,” she added, quickly, with rising color, “that it is a selfish motive that brings me here to-day?”

Edward Penton shook his head. “A selfish motive would mean that I could be of use to you; and I don’t think that is very probable,” he said.

Mrs. Russell Penton colored still more. “Edward,” she said, faltering a little, “it is curious, when there is an object on which one has set one’s heart, how one is led on to do things that only in the doing appear in their true colors. I have let you think I came to renew old friendship—to see your children, your girls.” She grew more and more agitated as she went on, and there came out in her a hundred tones and looks of the old Alicia, who had seemed to him to have no connection with this mature dignified self-important woman—looks and tones which moved him as the old books in the corner, and all the associations of the place, had moved her.

“It does not matter why you have come; I am glad you have come, anyhow; and if I can do anything—” he made a pause, and laughed again, this time at himself. “It doesn’t seem very likely, looking at you and at me; but you know I was always your faithful servant,” he said.

“There is only one thing I have to say for myself, Edward—I would not allow the proposal to be made to you by any one but me.”

“What is it?” he asked. There was a proposal then, and it was something to benefit her! Edward Penton’s bosom swelled with perhaps the first pleasurable sense of his own position which he had felt for years. Penton had always been an excitement to him, but there had been little pleasure in it. For a moment, however, now, he felt himself the old, the young Edward Penton, who had been the faithful servant of Alicia. He could not imagine anything which he could have it in his power to do for her, but still less could he imagine anything which he would refuse.

She went on with a hesitation which was very far from being natural to her. “You know,” she said, “that when my father dies, which is an event that can not be far distant, I shall have to give up—the only home I have ever known.”

His attention was fully aroused now. He looked at her across the gleam of the inquisitive candles, with a startled look. Was she going to ask him to give up his inheritance? He was too much surprised to speak.

“You will think this an extraordinary beginning; but it is true. I have never lived anywhere else. My marriage, you know, fortunately, has made no difference. Of course I am my father’s heir in everything but what is entailed. It has occurred to us—we have thought that perhaps—”

“What have you thought, Alicia?” he cried, with a sudden, sharp remonstrance in his tone; “that I was just as in former times, ready for anything that you—What have you thought?—that I was in the same position as of old—that there was no one to consult, no one to consider—except my devotion to you?”

“You mistake me altogether,” she cried. “Your devotion to me—which no doubt is ended long ago—was never taken into consideration at all. We thought of an entirely different motive when we talked it over, my father and I. You will remember that I am only asking a question, Edward. I wanted to ask only if a proposal might be made to you, that was all.”

“And what was the motive which you supposed likely to move me?” he said.

He had risen up from his seat, and came and stood by the mantel-piece, leaning on it, and looking down upon her. There was a great commotion in his mind—a commotion of the old and of the new. He had grown soft and tender a few minutes before, feeling himself ready to do anything for her which a lady could ask of a man. But now, when it appeared to him that she had gone far beyond that sphere, and was about to ask from him the sacrifice of everything—his property, his inheritance, the fortune of his children—a sudden hot fountain of indignation seemed to have risen within the man. He felt as the knight did in the poem when his lady lightly threw her glove among the lions—an impulse to give her what she asked, to fling it in her face, doing her behest in contempt of the unwomanly impulse which had tempted her to strain her power so far. This was how he felt. No reasonable sentiment of self-defense, but a burning temptation to take his heirship, his hopes, all that made the future tolerable, and fling them with an insult in her face.

“Edward,” she said, “I came to you in confidence that you would hear me—that you would let me speak plainly without offense; I mean none,” she said, with agitation. “But we have both come to a reasonable age, and surely we may talk to each other without wounding each other—about circumstances which everybody can see.”

“Speak freely, Alicia. I only want to know what you wish, and what there is in me to justify the proposal, whatever it may be, that you have come to make.”

“I have begun wrong,” she said, with a gesture of disappointment. “It is difficult to find the right words. Will you be angry if I say it is no secret that you—that we—for Heaven’s sake don’t think I mean to hurt you—plainly, that I, with all my father can leave, will be in a better position for keeping up Penton than you who are the heir-at-law.”

He stood for some time with his arm on the mantel-piece making no answer, looking down at the faint redness of a fire which had almost burned out.

“So that’s all,” he said at last, with the tremulous note of a sudden laugh; and drawing a chair close up to it, began to gather together the scraps of half-consumed wood into a blaze. All that he produced was a very feeble momentary glimmer, which leaped up and then died out. He threw down the poker with another short laugh. “Significant,” he said, “symbolical! so that is all, Alicia? You are sure you want no more?”

“You have not heard me out: you don’t understand. Edward, I know the first effect must be painful, but every word you will listen to will lessen that impression. I am, if you will remember, a little older than you are.”

“We were born, I think, in the same year.”

“That makes a woman much older. I told you so when it meant more. And I am a woman, more feeble of constitution than you are—not likely to live so long.”

“On the contrary, if you will allow me to interrupt you; women, I believe, as a rule, are longer-lived than men.”

She drew back with a pained and irritated look. “You make me feel like a lawyer supporting a weak case. It was not in this way that I wanted to talk it over with you, Edward.”

“To talk over the sacrifice of everything I have ever looked to—my birthright, and the prospects of my children. This is rather a large affair to be talked over between you and me after five-o’clock tea, Alicia, over a dying fire.”

“Then,” she said, “it would have been better I had not meddled at all, as my father always said. He thought it should have been made a business proposal only, through a solicitor. But I—I, like a foolish woman—remembering that we had once been dear friends, and feeling that I had been guilty of neglect, and perhaps unkindness—I would not have anything said till I had come myself, till I had made my little overture of reconciliation, till I—”

“If there is to be frankness on one side there should be frankness on both. Till you had put forth the old influence, which once would have made me do anything—give up anything—to please you.”

“You said,” she cried, provoked and humiliated, “not five minutes since, though I did not wish it—never thought of it—that you were my faithful servant still!”

“Yes,” he said; “and do you know what I should like to do now? You have come to ask me for my inheritance as you might ask for a flower out of my garden—if there were any! I should like to fling you your Penton into your apron—into your face—and see you carry it off, and point at you, like—you were always fond of poetry, and you will remember—the fellow that jumped among the lions for a glove—only a glove: only his life, don’t you know!”

It was not often that Edward Penton gave way to passion, and it was brutal, this that he said: but for the moment he had lost all control of himself.

She rose up hurriedly from her chair. “That was no true man!” she cried. “Supposing that the woman was a fool too, she used him only according to his folly to show how false he was.” She paused again, breathless, her heart beating with excitement and indignation. “I am not asking you for your inheritance: I came to ask you—whether an arrangement might be proposed to you which should be for your advantage as well as mine. Let us speak frankly, as you say. I am not a girl, to be driven away by an insult, which comes badly—oh, very badly!—from you, Edward. If I have wounded you, you have stung me, bitterly; so let us be quits.” She looked at him with a smile of pain. “You have hit hardest, after all; you ought to be pleased with that!”

“I beg your pardon, Alicia,” he said.

“Oh, it is not necessary. It was business, and not sentiment, that brought me here. And this is the brutal truth, Edward—like what you have just said to me. You are poor, and I am well off. Penton would be a millstone round your neck; you could not keep it up. Whereas to me it is my home—almost the thing I love best. Will you come to terms with us to set aside the entail and let me have my home? The terms shall be almost what you like. It can be done directly. It will be like realizing a fortune which may not be yours for years. I ask no gift. Do you think I am not as proud as you are? I would not ask you for a flower out of your garden, as you say, much less your property—your inheritance! Ah, your inheritance! which twenty years ago, when we used to be here together, was no more likely to be yours—! If we begin to talk of these things where shall we end, I wonder?” she added, with another pale and angry smile. “You understand now what I mean? And I have nothing more to say.”

“Wait a moment,” he said; “I am not sure that I do understand you now. It is not what I thought, apparently, and I beg your pardon. I thought it was something that would be between you and me. But if I hear right, it is a business transaction you propose—something to be done for an equivalent—a bargain—a sale and barter—a—”

“Yes, that is what I mean; perhaps my father was right, and the solicitors were the people to manage it, not you and me—”

“To manage it—or not to manage it, as may turn out. Yes, I think that would be the better way. These sort of people can say what they like to each other and it never hurts, whereas you and I—Are you really going? I hope you are very well wrapped up, for the night is cold. But for this little squabble, which is a pity, which never ought to have been—”

“I can not think, Edward, that it was my fault.”

“They say that ladies always think that,” he said with a smile, “otherwise this first visit after—how long is it?—went off fairly well, don’t you think? At forty-five, with a wife and children, a man is no longer ready to throw anything away; but otherwise when it comes to business—”

“I was very foolish not to let it be done in the formal way,” she said, with an uneasy blush and intolerable sense of the sarcasm in his tone. But she would not allow herself to remain under this disadvantage. “Shall I tell my father that you will receive his proposal and give it your consideration?”

“My consideration? Surely; my best consideration,” he replied, with still the same look of sarcastic coolness, “which anything Sir Walter Penton suggests would naturally command from his—successor. I can not use a milder word than that. My position,” he added, with gravity, “is not one which I sought or had any hand in bringing about: therefore I can have no responsibility for the changes that have happened in the last twenty years.”

“It is I who must beg your pardon now. You are quite right, of course, and there was no fault of yours. Good-night and good-bye. I hope you will at least think of me charitably if we should not meet again.”

“We shall certainly, I hope, meet again,” he said, opening the door for her. “The girls will not forget your invitation to them. They have never seen Penton, and they take an interest, which you will not wonder at—”

“Oh, I don’t wonder—at that or anything,” she added, in a lower tone; and, as ill-luck would have it, Wat, standing full in the light of the lamp which lighted the hall, tall in his youthful awkwardness, half antagonistic, half anxious to recommend himself, stood straight before her, so that she could not, without rudeness, refuse his attendance to the door where the carriage lamps were shining and the bays pawing impatiently. She gave his father a look of mingled misery and deprecation as she went out of sight. He alone understood why it was she could not bear the sight of his boy. But though her eyes expressed this anguish, her mouth held another meaning. “You will hear from Mr. Rochford in a day or two,” she said, as she drove away.

He sent her back a smile of half-sarcastic acquiescence still; but then Edward Penton went back to his library and shut himself in, and disregarded all the appeals that were made to him during the next hour, to come to tea. First the bell: then Ally tapping softly, “Tea is ready.” Then Anne’s quicker summons, “Mother wants to know if we are to wait for you?” Then the little applicant, whom he was least able to resist, little Mary, drumming very low down upon the lower panels of the door, with a little song of “Fader! fader!” To all this Mr. Penton turned a dull ear. He had been angry—he had been cut to the quick; that his poverty should be thus thrown back upon him—that he should be expected to make merchandise of his inheritance, to give up for money the house of his fathers, the only fit residence for the head of the family! All this gave a sharp and keen pang, and roused every instinct of pride and self-assertion. But when the thrill of solitude and reason fell on all that band of suddenly unchained demons, and he thought of the privations round him—the shabbiness of the house; the damp; the poor wife, who could not now at all hold up her head among the county people; the girls, who were little nobodies and saw nothing; Wat, whose young life was spoiled: and Osy—Osy! about whom some determination must be come to. To see a way out of all that and not to accept it: for pride’s sake to shut up, not only himself, that was a small matter, but the children, to poverty! The fire went out; the inquisitive candles blinked and spied ineffectually, making nothing of the man who sat there wrapped up within himself, his face buried in his hands. He was chilled almost to ice when his wife stole in and drew him away to the fire in the drawing-room, from which the young ones withdrew to make place for him, with looks full of wonder and awe. And then it was, when he had warmed himself and the ice had melted, that he drew the family council together, and laid before them, old and young, the proposal which Alicia Penton had come to make.

CHAPTER IX.
FAMILY COUNSELS.

Mr. Penton drew his chair toward the fire, which was not a usual thing for him to do. When he felt chilly he went to the book-room, where in the evening there was always a log burning. In the drawing-room it was the rule that nobody should approach the fire too closely; Mr. Penton said it was not good for the children, it gave them bad habits, and it scorched their cheeks and injured their eyes. The moral of which probably was that, as there were so many of them, they could not all get near it, and therefore all had to hold back.

But this evening everything was out of rule. The little ones had been sent to bed. The basket of stockings was pushed aside on the table. Mrs. Penton indeed, unable to bear that breach of use and wont, had taken a stocking out of it furtively and pulled it up on her arm. It was a gray stocking, with immense healthy holes the size of half a crown. She could not get at her needle and worsted without disturbing the family parliament, but at least she could measure the holes and decide how best to approach them, and from what side. Walter had placed himself on the other side of the fire, opposite his father, feeling instinctively that his interests must be specially in question; the girls filled up the intervals between their mother and Wat on the one side, their father on the other. The fire had been stirred into a blaze and danced cheerfully upon all the young faces. The lamp with its smell of paraffin was put aside too, as if it were being punished and put in the corner, for which vindicative step, considering how it smelled and smoked, there was good cause.

“You will understand,” said Mr. Penton, “that the visit we have just received must have had some special motive.”

“I don’t see why you should be so sure of that, Edward,” said Mrs. Penton, “unless she said something. It might be just civility. Why not?”

“It was not just civility; I knew that from the first.”

“My dear, perhaps you know your own family best: but if it had been one of mine I should have thought it quite natural: to see the children, and hear how we are getting on.”

To this Mr. Penton made no reply; the idea of some one coming to see how he and his family were “getting on” did not gratify him as perhaps it ought to have done.

“I think,” said Ally, softly, “that Aunt Alicia came out of kindness, papa.”

“To herself, I suppose,” he said, quickly; then added, “From her point of view it might appear kindness to us too.”

There was again a pause, and they all waited with growing curiosity to know what it was.

Mr. Penton sat in silence, balancing himself in his chair, knitting his brows as he gazed into the fire. Mrs. Penton pulled the stocking further up upon her arm and made a searching study of the holes.

“You all know,” he said at length, “that Penton has been a long time in our family, and that I am the heir of entail.”

At this Walter moved a little, almost impatiently, in his chair, with a quick start, which he restrained at once, as if he would have interfered. And he did feel disposed to interfere—to say that it was he who was the heir of entail. His father’s priority of course was understood, but it seemed hardly worth while to insist upon it. Nevertheless after the first impulse Walter restrained himself.

“I,” said his father, rather sharply, with a certain comprehension and resentment of the impulse, of which, however, he was not minded to take any notice, “am the heir of entail. It is tied down upon me, and can’t, in the nature of things, go to any one else.”

“Unless the law were to be changed,” interrupted Anne, remembering too well the discussion of the morning.

He waved his hand with an expression of impatience. “We need not take any such hazard into consideration; it is most improbable, and quite out of the question. As things are, I am the heir of entail. That has been, I don’t doubt, a thorn in Sir Walter’s flesh. He can’t alienate an acre, nor, at his time of life, in honor, cut down a tree.”

“I have always said it was hard upon him,” Mrs. Penton observed, in an undertone.

They all gave her a look—the look of partisans, to whom any objection is an offense—all except Anne, who kept up an attitude of impartiality throughout the whole.

“I don’t know why he has put off so long if he had the mind to make such an offer. If it had been further off perhaps I might have been more tempted; but as it is—Alicia wants me to join with her father and break the entail.”

The female part of the committee did not immediately see the weight of this statement. It took some time to make them understand: but Walter saw it in a moment, and sprung to his feet in quick resentment. “Father, of course you will not listen to it for a moment!” he cried.

“To break the entail?” said the mother; “but I thought nothing could do that, Edward.”

“Except,” said Anne, “a change in the law.”

“There is no question of any change in the law,” said Mr. Penton, angrily. “How should there be a change in the law? None but demagogues or socialists would ever think of it. The law is too strong in England. As for empirics and revolutionaries—” He snapped his fingers with hot contempt. The suggestion made him angry, although he had himself dwelt upon it in the morning. Then he came back to the real matter: “Yes, there is one way in which it can be done; that is what they want me to do. If I joined with Sir Walter in taking certain steps the entail could be broken: and Penton would go to Alicia, which it appears is his desire.”

“Father!” Walter cried. It was such an unspeakable blow to him, striking at the very root of his personal importance, his dreams, his prospects, everything that was his, that the young man was, what did not always happen, the first to seize upon this terrible idea. He could not keep his seat, but stood up tremulous, leaning upon the mantel-piece, looking down with an angry alarm at all their faces, lighted up by the fire. It seemed to Walter that in this slowness to understand there was something of the indifference which those who are not themselves affected so often show in the threatening of a calamity. Their unawakened surprised looks, not grappling with the question, had a half-maddening effect upon him. They did not care! it did not affect them.

“But, Edward, why should you do that—to please Sir Walter—to please—your cousin? Well, I should always like to keep on good terms with my relations, and do what I could for them; but to give up what we have been looking forward to so long—and the only thing we have to look forward to! I am sure,” said Mrs. Penton, tears getting into her voice, “I should be the last person to say anything against relations, or make dispeace, but when you think that it is the only provision we have for the children—the only—and when you remember that there’s Walter—” She stopped, unable to go on any further, bewildered, not knowing what to think.

“Father does not mean that. It is not that, whatever it may mean.”

“Of course I do not mean that. You take up all sorts of absurd ideas and then you think I have said it. Sir Walter and Alicia are my relations, it is true, but they don’t set up a claim on that score, neither am I such a fool. Try and understand me reasonably, Annie. Property is different from everything else; you don’t give up your rights to please anybody. Here’s how it is. When the heir is willing to step in and break the entail, of course he has compensation for it. Sir Walter is a very old man, the property in all human probability will soon be in my hands, therefore my compensation would be at a heavy rate. They are rich enough,” said Mr. Penton, in a sort of smile, “they could afford that.”

“They would give father the money,” said Anne, in a way she had before found effectual in clearing her mother’s ideas; “and he would let them have the land.”

“Edward, is that what it means?”

“Yes, strictly speaking: if you put feelings and pride and everything to one side, and the thought of one’s family, and of all we’ve looked forward to for years.”

“You can’t put them to one side,” cried young Walter, sharply, in the keen, harsh, staccato tones of bitterness and fear. “You can’t! No money would make up for them, nothing could be put in their place. Father, you feel that as well as I?”

“I feel that as well as you! To whom are you speaking? What are you in the matter?—a boy that may never—that might never—whereas I’ve thought of it all my life; it has been hanging within reach of my hand, so to speak, for years. I’ve built everything on it. And a bit of a boy asks me if I feel that—like him! Like him! What is he that he should set himself as a model to me?”

“Oh, father!” cried Ally, with her hand upon his arm.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Penton in her quiet voice, quenching this little eddy of passion far more effectually than if she had taken any notice of it, “that makes a great difference. They would give you the money, and you would let them keep the land? There is justice in that, Edward. I do not say it is a thing to be snapped at at once, although we do want the money so much. But still it is quite just, a thing to be calmly considered. I wish you would tell us now exactly what your cousin wants, and what she would give instead of it. It is like selling a property. I am sure I for one should not mind selling this property if we could get a good price for it: and as we have no associations with Penton and have never lived there, nor—”

“Mother!” Could the old house have been moved by hot human breath as by a wind of indignation, it would have shook from parapet to basement: but Mrs. Penton on her deep foundation of sense and reason was not shaken at all. She took no notice of the outcry.

“No, we can have no associations with it,” she said, calmly. “I have dined there three or four times in my life, and the children have never been there at all. It would not matter much to us if it were to be swallowed up in an earthquake, so long as its value remained.”

The girls did not take their mother’s prosaic view. Each on her side, they consoled and smoothed down the gentlemen—the young heir, hot with the destruction of hopes that were entirely visionary, that had never had any reality in them—and the immediate heir, to whom this one thing was the sole touch of romance or of expectation in life.

“Tell us about it, father,” and “Oh, Wat, be quiet; nothing’s done yet!” was what they said.

“Your mother takes it all very easy. She was not born a Penton,” said the father. “Yes, I’ll tell you about it, though she’s settled it already without any trouble, you see. It is not so simple to me. Women can be more brutal than any one when they take it in that way. Alicia was disposed to see it in the same light. She said she had been born there, and never had lived anywhere else, so that her feeling to it must be quite different from mine. Different from mine! to whom it has been an enchantment all my life.”

“What your cousin said was quite natural, Edward. I should have said the same thing myself.”

“You have just done so, my dear,” he said, with a sarcasm which went quite wide of its mark. “Yes, I’ll tell you all about it, children. Alicia and her father, it appears, have been thinking it over. They think—they know, to be sure, for who can have any doubt on the subject?—that I am poor. I am a poor man, with a number of children. A man in my position can not do what he likes, but what he must. I need money to bring you all up, to set you out in the world. Eight of you, you know; that’s enough to crush any man,” he said.

The girls looked at each other with a look which was half indignant yet half guilty. They felt that somehow they were to blame for being there, for crushing their father. Walter had no such sensation, but yet he recognized the truth of the complaint. He was the eldest, a legitimate, even a necessary party to this question; since but for his existence, in his own opinion, his father’s heirship would have been unimportant. But the others were, he allowed to himself, so much ballast on the other side, complicating the question, making a difficulty where there should be none.

“I should have thought,” he said, indignantly, “that Sir Walter would have seen how mean it was to take advantage—what a poor sort of thing it was to trade upon a man’s disabilities—upon his burdens—upon what he can not throw off, nor get rid of.”

Mrs. Penton’s mind had been traveling meanwhile upon its own tranquil yet anxious way.

“Was there any offer made you, Edward? Did she say how much they thought?—wouldn’t that be one of the first things to think of? We might be troubling ourselves all for nothing, if they were intending to take advantage, Walter says. But, then, how should Walter know? They would never take him into their confidence. Was any sum mentioned? for that would show whether they meant to take advantage. I never heard they were that sort of people. Your cousin Alicia has the name of being proud, but as for taking advantage—”

“Can’t you see,” he cried, with irritation, “that you are driving me distracted, going over and over one set of words? Walter’s a fool. Do you suppose the Pentons are cheats? To make such an offer at all was taking an—If we had been as well off as they are they never would have ventured. That’s all about it. I never supposed they would try to outwit me in a bargain.” After this little blaze of energy he sunk into his more usual depression. “If it hadn’t been for you and the children of course I shouldn’t have listened, not for a moment.”

“Why should you do it for us, father? We don’t cost so much. We could go away and be governesses, rather than be such a burden!”

Mrs. Penton put down the hand upon which she had drawn the stocking to give Anne a warning touch, while her father took no notice except with a passing glance.

“A man can do himself no justice when he’s weighted down on every side. It has always been my luck. I wonder, for my part, now that they have had the assurance to propose it at all, why they didn’t propose it years and years ago.”

“What a thing it would have been!” said Mrs. Penton; “many an anxiety it would have saved us, Edward. Why, it would make you a rich man! We have always looked forward so to Penton, and nobody ever supposed Sir Walter would live till eighty-five; but I have never thought of it as such a paradise. For, in the first place, it would want a great deal of money to keep it up.”

“Yes, it would take money to keep it up.”

“Everybody says it is kept up beautifully. You never could reconcile yourself to neglecting anything, and hearing people say how different it was in Sir Walter’s time. Then the house is such a grand house, and it would come to us empty or nearly empty. Oh, I’ve thought it all over so often. Gentlemen don’t go into these matters as a woman does. Of course, your cousin Alicia would take away all the beautiful furniture that suits the house. Her father would leave it to her, for that’s not entailed, you know. We should go into it empty, or with only a few old sticks: what should we do with the things we’ve got in Penton?” She looked round with an affectionate contempt at the well-worn chairs, the table in the middle, the old dingy curtains with no color left in them. “The first thing we should have to do would be to furnish from top to bottom, and where should we find the money to do that?”

Mr. Penton did not say anything. He made a little impatient wave of his hand, but he did not contradict or even attempt to stop her soft, slow, gentle voice as she went on.

“And then the gardeners! they are a kind of army in themselves. To pay them all their wages every week, the men that are in the houses, and the men that are outside, and the people at the lodges, and the carpenters, and the men that roll the lawns; where should we find the money? If we could have the rents and go on living here, of course I don’t say anything against it, we should be rich. But to live at Penton we should just be as poor as we are now—as poor but much grander—obliged to give parties and keep horses—and dress—If I ever had ventured to tell you my opinion, Edward, I should have told you, instead of looking forward to Penton it has been my terror night and day. I always thought,” she continued, after a pause, “that I should try and persuade you to let it, until, at least, we had a little money to the good.”