Walter Pentonhad been the most satisfactory of sons and brothers. He had not rebelled much even against the discipline of reading aloud. He was only twenty, and there was nothing to do in the neighborhood of the Hook, especially in the evening, so that circumstances had helped to make him good. He had, to tell the truth, taken a great interest in the novels, so much as to be tempted often to carry off the current volume and see “how it ended” by himself, which the girls thought very mean of him. But very rarely, except in summer, or when there was some special attraction out-of-doors, had he declined to aid the progress of the pinafores, in his way, by reading. But lately he had not been so good. Perhaps it was because there was a moon, and the evenings had been particularly bright; but he had not asked the girls to share his walks, as formerly it had been so natural to do. Sometimes he did not come into the drawing-room at all after tea, but would intimate that he had “work” to do, especially now, when, if he were really going to Oxford, it was necessary for him to rub up his Greek a little. Nobody could say that this was not perfectly legitimate and in fact laudable; and though the ladies were disappointed they could make no complaint, especially as in the general quickening of the family life there was, for the moment, many things to talk of, which made reading aloud less necessary. For instance, on the evening of the day which they had spent in town there was no occasion for reading. The most exciting romance could not have been more delightful than the retrospect of that delightful day. They all went up together by the early train. Mr. Penton himself had said that he thought he might as well go too, and accompany Walter to the tailor’s, as that was a place in which ladies were inadmissable; and accordingly they parted at the railway, the mother and the girls going one way, and the father and his boy another—both parties with a sense of the unusual about them which made their expedition exhilarating. To spend money when you feel (and that for the firsttime) that you can afford it is of itself exhilarating, especially (perhaps) to women who have little practice in this amusement, and to whom the sight of the pretty things in the shops is a pleasure of a novel kind. It was a matter of very serious business indeed to the ladies, carrying with it a profound sense of responsibility. Two evening dresses, for a girl who had never had anything better than the simplest muslin! and a “costume” for morning wear of the most complete kind, with everything in keeping, jacket and hat and gloves. The acquisition of this could scarcely be called pleasure. It was too solemn and important, a thing the accomplishment of which carried with it a certain sensation of awe; for what if it should not be quite in the fashion? what if it should be too much in the fashion? too new, too old, not having received the final approval of those authorities which rule the world? Sometimes a thing may be very pretty, and yet not secure that verdict; or it may bemal porté, as the French say, worn first by some one whose adoption of it is an injury. All these things have to be considered: and when the purchasers are country people, ignorant people who do not know what is going to be worn! So that the responsibility of the business fully equaled its pleasantness, and it was only when the more important decisions were made, and the attention of the buyers, at too high a tension in respect to other articles, came down to the lighter and easier consideration of ribbons and gloves, that the good of the expedition began to be fully enjoyed. And then they all had luncheon together, meeting when their respective business was executed. Mr. Penton took them to a place which was rather a dear place, which he had known in his youth, when all the places he had known were dear places. It was perhaps, a little old-fashioned too, but this they were not at all aware of. And the lunch he had ordered was expensive, as Mrs. Penton had divined. She said as much to the girls as they drove from their shop to the rendezvous. She said, “I know your father will order the very dearest things.” And so he had; but they enjoyed it all the more. The extravagance itself was a pleasure. It was such a thing as had never happened in all their previous experience; a day in town, a day shopping, and then a grand luncheon and a bottle of champagne. “If we are going to be so much better off they may as well get the good of it,” Mr. Penton replied, in answer to his wife’s half-hearted remonstrance. For she too found a pleasure in the extravagance. Her protest was quite formal; she too was quite disposed for it once in a way—just to let them know, in the beginning of their mended fortune, what a little pleasure was.
And when they came home, bringing sugar-plums and a few toys for the little ones, they were all a little tired with this unusual, this extraordinary dissipation. After tea the pinafores did not make much progress; they were too much excited to care to go on with their reading. They wanted to talk over everything and enjoy it a second time more at their leisure. They had shaken off the sense of responsibility, and only felt the pleasure of the holiday, which was so rare in their life. Mr. Penton himself was seduced into making comparison of the London of which they had thus had a flying glimpse with the London he had known in the old days, and into telling stories of which somehow the point got lost in the telling, but which had been, as he said, “very amusing at the time;” while the girls listened and laughed, not at his stories so much as out of their own consciousness that it had all been “fun,” even the inconveniences of the day, and the prosiness of those inevitable tales. Mrs. Penton was the one who subsided most easily out of the excitement. But for a little look of complacence, an evident sense that it was she who had procured them all this pleasure, there was less trace in her than in any of the others of the day’s outing. She drew her work-basket to her as usual after tea. She was not to be beguiled out of her evening’s work; but she smiled as she went on with her darning, and listened to the father’s stories, and the saucy commentaries of the girls, with a happy abandonment of all authority in consideration of the unusual character of the day. The only thing that brought a momentary shadow over the party was that Walter was not there.
“There is no moon to-night, but Wat is off again for one of his walks. I wonder what has made him so fond of walks, just when we want him at home?” the girls cried. And then a little mist came over his mother’s eyes. She said, “Hush! he is probably at his Greek;” but whether she believed this or not nobody could say.
Walter, it need scarcely be said, was not at his Greek. He went up the road toward the village with long strides devouring the way, though there was no moon nor any visible inducement. The village was as quiet a spot as could be found in all England. The only lights it showed were in a few cottage windows, or glimmering from behind the great holly-bushes at the rectory; a little bit of a straggling street, with an elbow composed of a dozen little houses, low and irregular, which streamed away toward the dark and silent fields, with the church, the natural center, rising half seen, a dark little tower pointing upward to the clouds. There was scarcely any one about, or any movement save at the public-house, where what was quite an illumination in the absence of other lights—the red glow of the fire, and the reflection of a lamp through a red curtain—streamed out into the road, making one warm and animated spot in the gloom. Wat, however, did not go near that center of rustic entertainment. He stopped at a low wall which surrounded a cottage on the outskirts—a cottage which had once been white, and had still a little grayness and luminousness of aspect which detached it from the surrounding darkness. A few bristling dry branches of what was in summer a bit of hedge surrounded the low projection of the wall. Walter paused there, where there was nothing visible to pause for. The night was dark. A confused blank of space, where in daylight the great stretch of the valley lay, was before him, sending from afar a fresh breath of wind into his face, while behind him, in the nearer distance, shone the few cottage lights, culminating in the red glow from the Penton Arms. What did he want at this corner with his back against the wall? Nothing, so far as any one could see. He made no signal, gave forth no sound, save that occasionally his feet made a stir on the beaten path as he changed his position. They got tired, but Walter himself was not tired. Presently came the faint sound of a door opening, and a flitting of other feet—light, short steps that scarcely seemed to touch the ground—and then the gate of the little garden clicked, and, heard, not visible, something came out into the road.
“Oh, are you here again, Mr. Walter? Why have you come again? You know I don’t want you here.”
“Why shouldn’t you want me? I want to come; it’s my pleasure.”
The voice of the young man had a deeper tone, a manlier bass than its usual youthful lightness coming through the dark, and the great space and freedom of the night.
“It’s a strange pleasure,” said the other voice. “I should not think it any pleasure were I in your place. If even there was a moon! for people that are fond of the beauties of nature that is always something. But now it is so dark”—there seemed a sort of shiver in the voice. “The dark is a thing I can’t abide, as they say here.”
“For my part, I like it best. Come this way, where the view is, and you would think you could see it—that is, you can feel it, which is almost more. Don’t you know what I mean? The wind blows from far away; it comes from miles of space, right out of the sky. You could feel even that the landscape was below you from the feel of the air.”
“That is all very pretty,” she said, and this time there was the indication of a yawn in her tone, “but if it is only for the sake of the landscape, one can see that when it’s day, and feeling it is a superfluity in the dark. If that was all you came for—”
“I did not come for that at all, as you know. I came for—it would be just the same to me if there was no landscape at all, if it was a street corner—”
“Under a lamp-post! Oh, that is my ideal!” with a little clap of her hands. “What I would give to see a lamp again, a bright, clear, big light, like Oxford Street or the Circus! You think that is very vulgar, I know.”
“Nothing is vulgar if you like it. I should like lamp-posts too if they had associations. I saw plenty of them to-day, and I wished I could have had you there to take you for a walk past the shop windows, since you are so fond of them.”
“Oh, the shop windows! Don’t talk to a poor exile of her native country that she is pining for! So you were in town; and what did you see there?”
“Nothing,” said Wat.
“Nothing!—in London! You must be the very dullest, or the most obstinate, or prejudiced—Nothing! why, everything is there!”
“You were not there; that makes all the difference. I kept thinking all the time where I should have found you had you been in London. You never will tell me where you live, or how can I see you when you go back.”
“I am not going back yet, worse luck,” she said.
“But that is no answer. I kept looking out to-day to see if I could find any place which looked as if you mighthave lived there. The only place I saw like you was in Park Lane, and that, I suppose—”
“Park Lane!” she cried, with a suppressed laugh; “that was like old Crockford’s niece. I could receive all my relations then.”
“You are not old Crockford’s niece?”
“No, I told you—I am a heroine in trouble,” she said. Her laugh was perhaps a little forced, but if Walter observed that at all it only increased the interest and fascination of such a paradox as might have startled a wiser man. “And is town very empty?” she said. “But the streets will be gay and the shop windows bright because of Christmas—there is always a little movement before Christmas, and things going on. And to think that I shall see nothing—not so much as a pantomime—buried down here!”
“I thought most people came to the country for Christmas,” said Wat.
“Oh, the sw—; why shouldn’t I say it right out?—the swells you mean; but we are not swells in my place. We enjoy ourselves with all our hearts.”
“I am sorry you think it so dull in the country,” said poor Wat. “I wish you liked it better. If you had been brought up here, like me—but of course that is impossible. Perhaps when you get better used to it—”
“I shall never be used to it; I am on the outlook, don’t you know? for some one to take me back.”
“Don’t say that,” said Walter, “it hurts me so. I should like to reconcile you to this place, to make you fond of it, so that you should prefer to stay here.”
“With whom? with old Crockford?” she said.
Walter was very young, and trembled with the great flood of feeling that came over him. “Oh, if I had only a palace, a castle, anything that was good enough for you! but I have nothing—nothing you would care for. That is what makes it odious beyond description, what makes it more than I can bear.”
“What is more than you can bear?”
“Losing Penton,” cried the young man; “I told you. If Penton were still to be mine I know what I should say. It is not a cottage like Crockford’s, nor a poor muddy sort of place like the Hook. It is a house worthy even of such as you. But I am like the disinherited knight, I have nothing till I work for it.”
“That is a great pity,” she said; “I have seen Penton; it is a beautiful place. It seems silly, if you have a right to it, to give it up.”
“You think so too!” he cried; “I might have known you would have thought so; but I am only my father’s son, and they don’t consult me. If I had any one to stand by me I might have resisted—any one else, whose fortune was bound up in it as well as mine.”
“Yes: what a pity in that case that you were not married,” she said.
“I might be still,” cried Walter, with tremulous vehemence, “if you would have faith in me—if you would forget what I am, a nobody, and think what, with such a hope, I might be.”
“I!” there was a sound of mocking in the laughing voice; “what have I got to do with it? What would those great swells at Penton think if they knew you were saying such things to old Crockford’s niece.”
“It is they who have nothing to do with it,” he cried. “Do you think if you were to trust me that I should care what they—But oh, don’t, don’t call yourself so, you know it is not true; not that it matters if you were. You would to me, all the same, be always yourself, and that means everything that a woman can be.”
There was a pause before she replied, and her voice was a little softened. “They will never know anything about me at Penton, or anywhere else. I have come here in the dark; you have scarcely seen me in daylight at all, for all you are so silly.”
“Yes, a hundred times,” cried Walter. “Do you think you can go out that I don’t see you? I live about the roads since you have been here.”
“It is a pity,” she said, with a little sharpness, “that you have nothing better to do,” then, resuming her lighter tone, “If you don’t soon begin to do something a little more practical how are you ever to be—that somebody that you were offering to me?”
“It is true,” he said, “it is true; but don’t blame me. I am going to Oxford next month, and then, if I do not work—”
“To Oxford! But that’s not work, that’s only education,” she cried, with a faint mixture of something like disappointment in her voice.
“Education is work; it opens up everything. It gives a man a name. I have been kept back; but, oh, now, if you will say I may look forward—if you will say I may hope.”
“Look forward to what?” she said; “to come up here every evening, and invite me out to talk in the cold at the corner of old Crockford’s wall? I do not mind, for I’ve nothing else to amuse me now: and you have nothing else to amuse you, so far as I can see; but, presently I shall disappear like a will-o’-the-wisp, and what will you look forward to then?”
“That is what I say,” he said. “I feel it every day. You will go away, and what am I to do, where am I to find you? Every morning when I wake it is the first thing I think of—perhaps she may be gone, and not a trace, not an indication, left behind, not even a name.”
“Oh, it is not so bad as that. You know my name, but I tell you always it is a great deal better you should know no more, for what is the use? You are going to Oxford, where you will be for years and years before you can do anything. And at present you are the disinherited knight and I am a will-o’-the-wisp. Very well. We play about a little and amuse each other, and then you will ride off and I shall dance away.”
“No, no, no; for the sake of pity, if not for love—”
“What has a will-o’-the-wisp to do with these sort of things, or a young man at college? At college! it is only a school-boy a little bigger. Ride off, ride off, Sir Disinherited Knight; and as for me, it’s my part to go dancing, dancing away.”
And she was gone, disappearing with no sound but the little click of the gate, the pat of those footsteps which scarcely touched the ground, snatching from him the hand which he had tried to take, the hand which he had never yet been allowed to hold for a moment, he stood for a time at the corner of the wall, tantalized, tremulous, trying to persuade himself that she was not really gone, that she would appear again, a shadow out of the darkness. This was all he had seen of her except in distant glimpses, although their intercourse had gone so far. He was ready to pledge his life to her, and yet this was all he knew. Walter thought to himself as he went slowly down the hill, all thrilling with this interview, that never had there been a courtship before. He was proud of it, poor boy.There was something rapturous in its strangeness, in the fact that he did not even know her name, nothing but Emmy, which he had heard Martha call her. Emmy did not mean much, yet it was all he knew. He called her in his heart by names out of the poets—Una, Rosalind, Elaine. She was as much a creature of romance as any of them. He dreamed in those sweet dreams awake which are the privilege of youth, of seeing her flash out upon him from unimaginable surroundings, a princess, a peerless lady, something noble and great, something not to be put on the level of ordinary women. What she was doing in this cottage he scarcely asked himself—she who belonged to so different a sphere. But it was sweet to him to think that his love was so original, unlike that of any one else. His head was full of an intoxication of pleasure, of pride and wonder. Nobody had ever had such a story. Ah, if he had but Penton to take her home to! But anyhow he could conquer fortune for the sake of this sweet unknown.
This was how Walter spent his evenings while the others sat round the household lamp. He had the best of it. While Ally was thinking only of the visit to Penton, or at least of nothing else that she allowed even to herself, Wat, only two years older, felt himself standing on the threshold of an illimitable future, full of everything that was wonderful and sweet.
Itwas very near Christmas when Walter and Ally went to Penton on the visit which had caused so much excitement. It had been arranged that on Christmas-eve they should return, for to spend that day away from their family was impossible, a thing not to be done had the invitation come from royalty itself. They went with all their new things so nicely packed, and their hearts beating, and many warnings and recommendations from the most careful of mothers.
“Wat, be careful that you never, never let them see, if it was only by a look, that you do not agree with what your father is doing. You must not let him down among his relations. You must let them see that what he does—Oh, Wat, you must be very particular to show a proper pride. Don’t look as if you had any grudge; don’t let them suppose—”
“I hope I am not quite a fool,” said the indignant youth.
“A fool! I never thought you were a fool; but you are young, my dear boy, and you feel strongly. And, Ally! mind you don’t show that you are unaccustomed to the sort of service and waiting upon that is natural there. If your cousin offers to send her maid to help you, don’t you come out with, ‘Oh, no; I do everything for myself at home.’ I don’t want you to say anything that is not true. But, as a matter of fact, you don’t do everything for yourself at home. What does it matter to Mrs. Russell Penton whether you have a maid or whether it is Anne and I that help you? You always are helped, you know. Say, ‘Oh, I think I can manage quite well,’ or something of that sort.”
“But, mother, Cousin Alicia must know how we live, and that I have no maid at home.”
“Oh, they never think, these great ladies; they take it for granted that everybody has every thing just as they have. Most probably she would think it was my fault if she heard that you had no maid. And, Ally! don’t be so shy as you usually are; don’t keep behind backs; remember that the only thing you can do for people who wish you to stay with them is to be as friendly as possible, and to talk, and help to amuse them.”
“I—to amuse Cousin Alicia, mother!”
“Well, dear, as much as you can. Amuse perhaps is not the word: but you must not sit as if you were cut out of wood or stone. And, Wat! if there is shooting or anything going on, just do what the other gentlemen do. I have always heard that Mr. Russell Penton was very nice; you will be quite right if you keep your eye upon him.”
“One would think we were going to court, where there are all kinds of etiquettes, to hear you speak, mother.”
“Well, my dears, there are all sorts of etiquettes everywhere; and in one way it is easier at court, for if you don’t understand there is nothing wonderful in that, and every one is willing to tell you: whereas in a grand house you are supposed to know everything by nature. I don’t doubt at all that things will go on quite comfortably and all right. But, Ally, dear—”
“Mother, don’t bother her any more,” cried Anne. “She will be so frightened she will never venture to open her lips at all, for fear she should say something wrong. I wish it was only me.”
“Oh, so do I,” cried Ally, from the bottom of her heart.
“And I,” said Wat; “any one may have my share.”
“That is just how things are—always contrary, as Martha says. I should have rather enjoyed it. I should have liked to see everything. Cousin Alicia might have put on her icy face as much as she liked, she would not have frozen me. But we can’t change places now at the last moment, and the fly will have to be paid for if it waits. Come, Ally, come! for sooner or later you know you must go.”
Anne and her mother stood and watched the reluctant pair as they drove away with a mingled sense of envy and relief. The fly from the village was not a triumphal chariot; the old gray horse had a dilapidated aspect; the day was damp and rainy.
“We may be afloat before you come back,” said Anne, waving her hand.
And then they left the door and the house out of sight, and departed into the unknown. Into the unknown! If it had been to Russia it could not have been further away, nor could the habits and customs of a foreign country have been more alarming to the young adventurers. They were so much overawed that they said little to each other. Ally drew back into the corner of the carriage, Walter looked out of the opposite window. They were in a moment separated by half a world, though the same rug was tucked round both their knees. The boy looked out with an eagerness which he could scarcely conceal for something tangible, something of which his mind was full. The girl drew back into a vague delightful world of dreams in which there was nothing definite. Who was it that had said to her something about driving up unthinking to a door within which you might meet your fate. Who was it? she asked herself, and yet she remembered very well who it was; and as she drove along there rose before her a whole panorama of shifting, changing pictures. She was standing again by the muddy, turbid river, and hearing, as in a dream, the first words of wooing, the suggested devotion, the under-current of an inference which made her the chief interest, the center of the world: which is such a thingas may well startle any girl into attention. And then the scenery changed, and the new world opened, and other, vaguer figures, yet more wonderful, appeared about her, some of them with that same look in their eyes. How did Ally know what might be waiting for her in that home of romance, that wonderful house of Penton, with which all the visions of her life had been connected? Sometimes when one is not thinking one drives up to a door and finds inside one’s fate. What does that mean—one’s fate? Young Rochford had given her to understand that he had found his when he arrived at Penton Hook, and the words had vaguely seized upon Ally’s imagination, filling her with a curious thrill of sensation. His fate! She did not think of this with compunction or regret, as one who more thoroughly recognized what was meant might have done. It moved her rather to an excited, half-awed sense of power in herself which she did not understand before, than to any sympathy for him. She thought in the keen consciousness of awakening, of herself, and not of him. It was wrong; it was a guilty sort of selfishness: but she could not help it. His words, which had first opened her eyes—his looks, which perhaps a little earlier had lighted a spark of perception, had been like the sounding of theréveillé—like the rising of a morning star. She was not to blame for it; she had done nothing which could connect her with his fate, as he called it. It was a summons to her to behold and recognize her own position, the wonderful, mysterious position, which a woman—a girl—seemed to be born to, which she had been thrust into without any doing of hers.
When the fancy is first touched, the thoughts that follow are sweet—sweeter perhaps than anything that can succeed—in their perfectly indefinite exhilaration and vague sense of a personal beatitude that scarcely anything else can bring. This does not always mean love, which is a different effect. Ally knew nothing about love; she only felt in all her being the new and wonderful power of awakening motion in others, of which nobody had ever told her, and which she had never dreamed of as appertaining to herself. She had read of it as being possessed by others—by the beautiful maidens of romance, by ladies moving in those dazzling spheres of society which were altogether beyond the reach and even the desires of a little country girl. But Ally knew very well that she was not a great beauty, nor soclever and gifted as those heroines were who in novels and romances brought all the world to their feet. She entertained no delusions on this subject. She was not beautiful at all, nor clever at all. She was only Ally: and yet she had it in her power to bring that look into another’s eyes. It was more strange, more thrilling, sweet, confusing than words could say.
As for Walter, his imaginations were far more definite. They were very definite indeed, distant as every anticipation was. He looked out to see one figure, one face, which he could not look out upon calmly, with a spectator by his side, which he longed yet feared to behold in the daylight, in the midst of a world awake and observant, with Ally looking on. He expected nothing but to be questioned on the subject—to be asked what he was looking for, why he leaned out of the window, what there was to see. When it dawned upon him that Ally meant to ask no questions, that she had the air of taking no notice, he became suspicious and uneasy, thinking that she must mean something by her silence, that there was more in it than met the eye. By nature she would have asked him a hundred questions. She would have looked, too, wondering what he could possibly expect to see on the road or in the village that could be interesting. Walter said to himself that some report must have reached home of those expeditions of his to Crockford’s cottage, and that Ally must have been told to watch, not to excite his suspicions by questioning, to be on the alert for whatever might happen. He turned his back to her and blocked up the window with his head and shoulders as they drove past Crockford’s. And there, indeed, was the face he longed to see looking out from the cottage window, staring at him maliciously, with a smile which was not a smile of recognition, defying him, as it seemed, to own the acquaintance. A great panic was in Walter’s heart. To betray this secret, to make it visible to the eyes of the world—i. e., to the old rector, who, as ill-luck would have it, was strolling past at the moment, taking his afternoon walk, and of Ally watching him from her corner—was terrible to the young man. And to expose himself to be questioned—to be asked who she was (which he did not know), and where he had met her, and a hundred other details; perhaps to be solemnly warned that he must see her no more! All these reflections flashed throughWalter’s spirit. She was evidently in the mind to take no notice of him, to own no acquaintance: and there were so many temptations on his side to do the same, to make his eyes do all his salutations, to avoid giving any satisfaction to the spies about. But his instincts as a gentleman were too much for Walter. He leaned a little further out of the window and took off his hat. How could he pass the place where she was, and look at her and make no sign? It was impossible! Walter took off his hat with a heroism scarcely to be surpassed on the perilous breach. It might be ruin; it might mean discovery, betrayal; he might be sent away, banished from his gates of paradise; but, whatever happened, he could not be disrespectful to her.
She did not return the salutation, but she opened the window and looked out after the carriage, putting out into the damp air what Walter within himself called her beautiful head. It was not, strictly speaking, a beautiful head, but it had various elements of beauty—dark eyes full of light; a crop of soft brown silky hair, clustering in curly short luxuriance; a complexion pale and clear, but lightly touched with color; and a mouth which was really a wonder of a mouth beside the ordinary developments of that universally defective feature. She looked after him with mockery in her eyes, which only attracted the foolish boy the more, and made him half frantic to spring from his place in the sight of the village and put himself at her feet. It would have cost her nothing to give him a smile, a wave of her hand; and there was no telling what it might cost him to have taken off his hat to her; but she was immovable. He gazed, as long as he could see anything, out of the carriage window. At least, if he had sacrificed himself he should get the good of it, and look, and look, as long as eyes could see.
“How d’ye do?—how d’ye do?’ cried the rector, waving his hand toward the carriage. Perhaps he thought that the salutation was for him, the old bat. Walter drew in his head again, and looked with keen suspicion at his sister in her corner, who raised her eyes, which seemed heavy (could she have been asleep?), with a dreamy sort of smile, totally unlike the smile of a spy maturing her observations, and asked,
“Who was that?”
“Who was what?”
“The voice,” said Ally, “in the street—‘How d’ye do?’”
“It was the rector—who else should it be? Do you mean to say you did not see him going along the road?”
“No, I did not see him,” said Ally, with that dreamy, imbecile sort of smile. She had seen nothing, noticed Nothing! And the rector had taken it for granted that the greeting had been for himself, and thought young Walter was very civil: and all had passed over with perfect safety, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. Walter fell back into the other corner, and thus the brother and sister swung and jolted along, each in a beatitude and agitation of his (and her) own. Perhaps there was a subtle sort of sympathy in the silence. They did not say anything to each other until they had turned in at the gates, and were stumbling along the avenue at Penton under the pine-trees, all bare and moaning. This roused them instinctively, although their dreams were more absorbing than anything else in earth or heaven.
“Here we are at last,” said Ally, rousing herself, but speaking under her breath.
“Not yet; don’t you know the avenue is nearly a mile long? And don’t be frightened—remember what mother said.”
“Oh, not frightened,” she cried, but caught her breath a little. “Wat, I wish it was over, and we were going home.”
“So do I, Ally; but we must go through with it now we are here.”
“Oh, I suppose so. Will she be waiting at the door, do you think, or come to meet us? or will they tell us she is out, and offer to show us our rooms, and send us tea?”
“As they do in novels to the poor relations? I hope they will have better taste,” said Walter, growing red, “than to try the poor relation dodge with us. Oh, no! Mrs. Russell Penton knows that she is still more or less in our power.”
“I wish the first was over,” said Ally; “it may not perhaps seem so dreadful after that.”
And in this not ecstatic state of mind they drew up at the door, where the footman who came out looked with contempt at the shabby village fly. Mrs. Russell Penton had been walking, and was coming in at that moment,with a little chubby-faced girl by her side. Cousin Alicia and her companion took in every feature of the shabby fly, the old horse, the driver with his patched coat, as they came forward. It was almost more dreadful than what Walter called “the poor relation dodge,” though Mrs. Russell Penton was so civil as to come to the door of the fly, which was difficult to open, to receive her visitors. Already, before even they entered the house, their poverty had thus been put to shame. Neither of them, indeed, made much account of the little round-faced stranger who stood looking on, with her mouth a little open, watching their disembarkation. Nothing could look more insignificant than this little girl did. She might have been a little waiting-maid, an attendant, not smart enough for asoubrette; even Mrs. Russell Penton took no notice, did not introduce her, but left her standing as if she were of no importance, while she herself conducted Ally upstairs. Walter himself, in the confusion of the arrival, had nearly followed without thinking. But fortunately (which was a great satisfaction to him afterward) that habit of good-breeding which would not let him pass Crockford’s cottage without taking off his hat, inspired him to stand back, and let the little maid, as he thought her, pass in before him. She did this with a little blush and shy bow, and ran through the hall out of sight, as a little person in what was presumably her position would do; and Walter followed his sister upstairs. He felt that there was nothing to complain of in the matter of their reception, at least. They were not being treated as poor relations. Whatever might happen afterward, there was a certain soothing in that.
Thearrival of the visitors had not been unattended with excitement at Penton itself. Little Mab Russell, the great heiress, had reached the house only a few days before, and as her uncle’s stately wife was an object of some alarm to her, the prospect of a companion of her own age was doubly agreeable. Mab was the daughter of a brother of Mr. Russell Penton’s, who had never been of much account in the family, who had gone abroad and made a great fortune,and died, leaving this one little girl rich enough to cause a flutter in whatever society she came into, as good as an estate, much better than most appointments for any young man in want of an establishment. Russell Penton had taken from the first a whimsical sort of interest in her, which did not show itself in the way in which interest is usually exhibited by elderly relations. To shield her from fortune-hunters, to find some equal match in which the advantage should not be altogether on the gentleman’s side, did not seem to be a thing which entered into his thoughts. He spoke of her with a faint laugh full of humor and a realization of all the circumstances such as few men would have made apparent. With the charitable and amused eyes of a man who had himself, being poor, married an heiress, he looked at all the flutterers who had already appeared in Mabel’s youthful train. He was tolerant of the young men. He laughed half abashed, half sympathetic, at their little wiles, asking himself had he made his intentions so transparent as that? and putting forth his little measures of defense without any of the hard words that generally accompany such precautions. When other people warned the little girl against the dangers to which she was subject—and she had already receive many warnings to this effect, even from Mrs. Russell Penton herself, who was one of the most anxious of her advisers—Mabel had been greatly comforted to find that her uncle Gerald only laughed. The little girl did not quite understand the combination; for when Gerald laughed, his wife grew more grave than ever and anxious to protect the heiress. “Why does Uncle Gerald laugh?” she had asked one day. And Mrs. Russell Penton had grown very red, and said something about his inclination to see a joke in the gravest subjects, which Mabel, who was very fond of her uncle, thought severe. And their several accounts of the expected visitors perplexed her more and more.
“I hope, my dear,” Mrs. Russell Penton said, “that you will find my godchild pleasant. I can give you very little information about her, I am ashamed to say. We have been so much out of England—and though they are relations, they are rather out of our sphere.”
“Poor,” said her husband, “but not the less agreeable for that.”
“I would not go so far,” said Alicia, in her grave way.“To be poor is of course nothing against them, but unfortunately poverty does affect the training, and manners, and ways of thinking. I should have preferred not to have them when you were here, but circumstances, which I could not resist—”
“It is kind of you, Alicia, not to say over which you had no control: for the circumstances, I fear, were your unworthy uncle, Mab. I wanted them; and my wife, who is very good always, and ready to please me, gave in, which is generally more than I deserve.”
“Why did you want them, Uncle Gerald?” Mab inquired.
“There is a big question!” he answered, laughing; “am I to lay bare all my motives to this little thing, and let her see the depths of my thoughts?”
“And why did Aunt Gerald not want them?” pursued Mab. She had no genius or even much intelligence to speak of; but the fact of being an heiress has a very maturing influence, and little Mab was aware of a thing or two which has not been formulated in any philosopher. She inspected the two people who were so much older and wiser than she with very shrewd and wide-open eyes.
“My motives are clear enough,” said Mrs. Russell Penton, with a look at her husband which would have been angry if she had not had so much respect for him, and warning if she had not known how impracticable he was. “I felt it my duty to your family, my dear, that you should make no unsuitable acquaintances, nor run the risk perhaps of contracting likings, I mean friendships—I mean becoming perhaps attached to people who would not prove to be the kind of people you ought to know, in my—in our house.”
This very complicated sentence, so unlike the lucidity of Mrs. Russell Penton’s usual conversation, was entirely due to the fact that her husband’s eyes, with a laugh in them, were upon her all the time she was speaking. Mab’s astonished exclamation, “But your relations, Aunt Gerald—I have always heard that your family—”
“I can scarcely say that these young people belong to my family. They are the children of a distant cousin. Their mother I scarcely know. They have not been brought up as—you have been, for instance. They will not know any of the people you know. In short—but, of course, asthey will only be here for three days, it can not make much difference. What is it, Bowker? My father?—”
Mrs. Russell Penton got up very reluctantly to answer Sir Walter’s summons. She gave her husband an almost imploring look. She wanted to do more than put the heiress on her guard against these young people. She wanted Mab, in fact, to be set against them. The idea of any untoward complication happening, of the Russell family having it in their power to reproach her with inveigling their heiress into a connection with one of her own name, was intolerable to Alicia, all the more from the circumstances of her own marriage, which moved her husband so entirely the other way.
“One would think,” said little Mab, with her shrewd look, “that Aunt Gerald did not like her relations; but you, uncle, I think you do.”
“This is a problem which your little wits are scarcely able to solve unassisted,” he said, “though you make very good guesses, Mab. My wife is not fond of her relations—because they are her relations in the first place.”
“Uncle Gerald!”
“Such a statement is very crude and wants a great deal of clearing up. You never heard your aunt’s story, did you, Mab?”
“Story?” said Mab, faltering. “I—I did not know that there was any story—except—”
Russell Penton began to speak. “Oh, yes, it was this.” And then he was infected by Mab’s embarrassment. He stopped, laughed, but awkwardly, even grew red, which, for a man of his years and experience, was inconceivable, and said, “No, no; not in that way. The story is not perhaps what you would call a story. It concerns not anything in the shape of a lover, so far as I know—”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Uncle Gerald!”
“There is no harm done. She was not born to inherit all her father could leave to her, like you. There were brothers at first; and the heir of entail who succeeds now, who takes what should have been theirs, is the father of these two young ones. Don’t you see? There is nothing for a good strong family repugnance like a cousin who is the heir of entail.”
Mabel paused a little, employing her faculties upon thisquestion, which was new to her. Finally she delivered her judgment.
“Perhaps—at least I think I can understand. But the children haven’t done anything, have they? It is not their fault?”
“It is nobody’s fault, as is the case with so many of the worst complications of life. And this is something a little worse still than the heir of entail. It is the heir whom you are buying out, whom you are persuading to part with his rights. Well, perhaps they are a bad kind of rights. I prefer not to give an opinion. To bind up a property for generations so that it shall descend only in a certain way may be wrong; neither you nor I are capable of clearing up such high questions, Mab. It is good for the family, but bad for the individual, as ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ is, according to the laureate. But Mab, my little Mab, this boy Walter is the one that is to be done out of it. Don’t you see? It is quite fair between Alicia and his father, but the boy has no voice, and he is done out of it. I think it is rather hard upon the boy.”
“There was nothing said about a boy,” said little Mab, demurely. “I only heard of a girl.’
“That was because you are not supposed to take any interest in boys,” said her uncle, with a laugh; “not such a boy either in your eyes—over twenty, poor fellow, and no doubt having thought of the time when he should be the heir. He will be Sir Walter Penton in his turn, if he lives, but otherwise he is out of it. I, who never was in it, who am only a spectator, so to speak, I feel very much for young Wat.”
“Poor boy!” said Mab, under her breath. By effect of nature she took, as was to be expected, her uncle’s view. Perhaps he ought not to have thus sacrificed his wife and her cause. But he had a motive, this man devoid of all sense of propriety—a bad, dreadful, motive such as any correcter judgment would have condemned. He wanted to interest the heiress in a penniless, prospectless young man. Could anything be more wicked and dreadful? He wanted to surround young Walter Penton with a halo of romance in Mabel’s eyes, to call forth in his favor that charm of the unfortunate, that natural desire of the very young to compensate a sufferer, the very sentiments which he ought to have exorcised had they come by themselvesinto being. His eyes lighted up when this breath of pity came from Mab’s lips. A humorous sense of the balance in favor of the race of Penton which he thus meant to create, diminishing so far his own obligations, tickled his imagination. He would have liked to have some one to laugh with over this good joke. Perhaps even underneath the enjoyment there was something which was not so enjoyable, a sense of the worthlessness of wealth, and that poverty was by no means such a drawback as people thought. But that was altogether private, unopened in his own soul; and he had not even any one who could appreciate the joke which was on the surface, and the pleasure he felt in raising rebellions in little Mab’s mind, in prepossessing her in Wat’s favor, in thwarting Alicia. He would not have thwarted her in anything else; he had the greatest respect for his wife, and it wanted only different circumstances, a change of position, to have made him the husband of husbands. But to thwart her on this point was delightful to him. He had set his heart upon it. It would be turning the tables also on his own people, which was agreeable too. “Yes,” he said, more seriously. “Poor boy! all the more that he will not know how little, in reality, he loses by the bargain that is being made over his head.”
“What do you mean, Uncle Gerald? I thought you said you were so sorry for him—that he was losing so much.”
“More in idea than in fact—much, everything in imagination, this house—which he calls, no doubt, the house of his fathers.”
Mab looked round on the stately drawing-room which was full of a hundred beautiful things, a long room with a row of windows looking out over the wide landscape, divided and kept in proportion by pillars supporting a roof which, it had been the pride of a previous generation to tell, was painted by an Italian artist in the best taste of his century. “But isn’t it the house of his fathers?” she said.
“I suppose so, for as much as that is worth.”
“Oh, Uncle Gerald! although we had always very nice houses, papa never thought there was anything equal to—”
“Yes, I know,” he said, hurriedly, and paused a moment to remember. He went on by and by, with a voice slightly broken. “We were all brought up there from our childhood. Even that, Mab, is more in appearance than inreality. A man may get very little satisfaction even out of the place where he was born.”
Mab regarded him closely with her shrewd eyes. They were not beautiful eyes, they were rather small, but very blue, with a frosty keenness in them; and they saw a great deal. “You don’t take a very bright view of things in general,” she said.
Upon which he laughed and told her that he was an old grumbler, and not to be listened to. “Suppose I was to tell you that a ball every night (or half a dozen of them) would not make you perfectly happy, and that even your first season might bore you—”
“Uncle Gerald, I have always heard that you were very fond of society. Didyourfirst season bore you?” she asked.
“Not at all, not half enough, and—I am not sure that it would now, which is a confession to make at my age. Hush! not a word about that. I wish you to be kind to the young Pentons, remember, that is all. The little girl will be shy and the poor boy may be morose, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“But you have taken them under your protection,” the girl said, looking at him fixedly. “What could they have better than that? as if it mattered about me!”
Mr. Russell Penton shook his head, but he said nothing more. He went out of the room shortly after, when his wife came back. He was not a man to allow for a moment that there was anything in his position he did not like, or that his protection would not be effectual in his own, nay, in his wife’s, or rather in his wife’s father’s house. But as he went out with his hands in his pockets, and the remains of a philosophical shrug keeping his shoulders rather nearer his ears than usual, he could not help being aware that it was so. It was a curious fact enough, and he would have been as well pleased that little Mab had not divined it; but still it was all in the day’s work. He had known what the disadvantages would be when he accepted the position of Prince Consort, as he said to himself often. On the whole it was a position not without its alleviations, but (like most others in this world) it had to be taken with all its drawbacks, without any discussion, and still more without any complaint. There was no one who had not something to bear, some in one way, some in another, his ownperhaps not by a long way the worst. And then with a sort of grim amusement he began to wonder how, if his little plan should come to anything, young Wat would adapt himself to it. Young Wat, a foolish boy, mourning over his loss of this big house with all its French finery, its Renaissance front, its drawing-room roof by Sugero (this was his little joke upon the great Italian decorator’s name), its water-works all out of order, what a thing it would be for him should he marry the Russell heiress with all her moneybags. And afterward how would he agree with it? Russell Penton was very loyal, but yet he felt that were he Wat, in all the freedom of opening life, with the whole world before him, he would neither bind a great shell like Penton upon his shoulders nor himself to a crown matrimonial. If the boy but knew what it was to be free! if he could realize the happiness of going where he would and doing what he pleased! To be sure he would probably have to work for that freedom, and he had not himself at any period of his career been a man who understood work. It was a thing he had no genius for. To take up the labors of a profession was more entirely out of the traditions and capabilities of his soul than the rôle which he had adopted. He was quite aware of this, and, knowing it, was very willing to promote Wat’s interest in the same way which had, as people say, made his own fortune—judging Wat to have been in all likelihood spoiled for other kinds of advancement like himself. He had become even eager about this, determined that Wat should have his chance with the best, and that the Pentons should thus be even with the Russells, each family contributing a princess royal and each a fortunate consort; but in the midst of his benevolent scheme, of which his wife so entirely disapproved, he reserved to himself this subject of humorous curiosity—how Walter would take to the place, in which he was himself so loyal and patient, but yet never without a consciousness of all there was to bear and to do.
Mab, who was so shrewd, with all her wits about her, questioned Alicia closely when they were alone together. She knew already that the visitors were not much in the good books of the mistress of the house; but, that she was a little ashamed of the feeling and anxious to have it understood that there was no reason for it. “I will not conceal from you,” Mrs. Russell Penton repeated, “that I did notwish you to meet them: not from anything wrong in them—the girl is a nice gentle little thing, I have no doubt; and the boy—I know no harm of the boy; but I should have preferred that you had not met them here.”
“Why, Aunt Gerald? do tell me why?”
But this was what Mrs. Penton could not or else would not do. She said, “Because they are not in our sphere. They are very nice, I don’t doubt. They are, of course, just the same race as myself, so it is not for that; but you that have been brought up in the lap of luxury, and this girl, who probably has had the life of a nursery-maid (for the children are endless), how could you have anything to say to each other? There is too great a difference. This is what I always felt.”
“And the boy,” said Mab, in a little voice which was somewhat hypocritical, “is not he any better? Is he quite a common boy?”
“The boy is not worth considering,” said Mrs. Russell Penton. “He is a hobbledehoy, neither boy nor man, don’t you know? I don’t suppose he has had more education than his sister, and I don’t think he will amuse at all. But they are only coming for three days, and I hope you will not mind for that short time.”
“Oh, I shall not mind,” said Mab, “I like seeing people of all kinds.” And thus the conversation dropped. But it need not be said that all this was the very best introduction possible of the two young Pentons to the notice of the little heiress. She did not indeed resolve to make to Wat an offer of her hand and fortune. But the thought of the heir who was an heir no longer, and of how the mere fact of being “out of it,” while still so profoundly concerned, must work upon the mind, and all the traditional miseries of the poor gentleman took possession of her imagination. And fancy took the side of the unfortunate, as a young fancy always does. Accordingly, when the poor old broken-down fly drove up, and the portmanteaus were taken down, and the two timid young people stepped out of the moldy old carriage, Mab, though she saw the ludicrous features of the scene, felt not the least desire to laugh. She looked at them keenly, standing by, acting as audience to this little drama, and saw Ally’s anxious look at her brother as she passed into the house, and Walter’s keen consciousness of the footman’s scorn and Mrs. Penton’s toleration. He didnot notice herself, and evidently thought her a person of no importance, which for the moment piqued Mab. But when he paused to let her, a little nobody, as he thought, pass before him, all her romantic sympathies came back to her mind. And so it came to pass that it was not Ally who was the most excited of the young persons thus brought together in what seemed an accidental way; nor, perhaps, could their hearts have been seen, was it she who was the most likely to have met her fate.
Mrs. Russell Pentonwas not without her share of the general embarrassment. There was never any quarrel in the stately, well-regulated house. An angry look, a hot word, were things unknown. But still she knew very well when her husband was not in accord with her. His smile was quite enough. Matters had gone very far indeed before he whistled, but sometimes things did even go so far as that. This time there was no such climax. His lips had never even formed themselves into the shape of a whistle; and in his countenance there was no suspicion of a sarcastic meaning. But she knew that his thoughts were not as her thoughts. She knew even, which was a rare thing, that he was against her, that he meant to act more or less in a contrary sense. The young people whom she had invited against her will, whom she meant to be—not unkind to, that was not in her nature, but to treat at least no better than was necessary, he meant to take up and show the greatest attention to. She was aware of this and it troubled her. How was it possible that it should not trouble her? It was an accusation, nay, more, a verdict delivered against herself. And she saw even that little Mab was of the same way of thinking, that she was interested in the new-comers, that her questions had a meaning, and that even that little thing was critical of her attitude, and blamed her, actually blamed her, though of course she did not venture to say anything. This made Alicia Penton angry and sore within herself; and there was something still more disagreeable which lent a sting to all the rest; and that was that she washer own worse critic, and felt herself poor and small and petty, and acting an ignoble part.
But there was yet a deeper depth to which she never had expected to descend. Sir Walter in his great age changed his habits for nobody. He was never seen in the drawing-room except on rare occasions for an hour after dinner, when he felt better than usual. He thought the library the most cheerful as well as the warmest room in the house, and when visitors came it was expected that they should pay their respects to him there. Sir Walter had been a little restless on the day the young Pentons arrived. It had not seemed to Alicia that they were important enough to be presented to her father in a solemn interview. “There is no reason why you should trouble about them,” she said. “You will see them at dinner, that will be soon enough.” And the old gentleman had made no particular reply. Therefore when they arrived, as has been related, Mrs. Penton led them upstairs to the drawing-room and gave them tea. This room was very light, very bright, with its long range of large windows, of which the great breadth of the landscape below seemed to form a part, and the pillars which divided it into a sort of nave and aisles gave occasion for many little separate centers for conversation and the intercourse of congenial groups in a large company. Ally and Walter entered the room with dazzled eyes. It was to them as a dwelling of the gods. Had this visit been paid only a few weeks before they would have secretly taken possession, imagining how here and here each should have their special corner. The effect it produced on Walter now, as he looked round, too proud to show that it was new to him, too intent upon keeping all trace of anger out of his countenance to be otherwise than preternaturally grave, and on Ally, regarding its grandeur with an awe that was beyond words, was very different, but in both cases it was very profound. Ally thought with a movement of mingled regret and thankfulness how right mother was! What could we have done, she said to herself, in this great room? It would have been delightful indeed for the children, who on wet days would never have wanted to go out with such a place to play in. But then how could any one have had the heart to give this up to the children? She could not talk to Mrs. Penton, who maintained a little formal conversation, her mind was so full of this thought. It wasbeautiful. It was a magnificent room. It was wonderful to think that it might have belonged tous. But mother was right—oh, how right mother was! What could we have done with it? How could we even have furnished it? Ally said to herself; but she knew that Wat was annoyed when she allowed herself to say, “What a lovely room!”
“It is a very handsome room. I don’t think there is anything like it in the county,” said Mrs. Russell Penton. “I ought not perhaps to say so, for we have done a great deal to it ourselves. But I may allow that it is very perfect. You have never seen it before?”
“The view is fine,” said Wat, going to the window before his sister could answer; “it is so extensive that it makes any room look small.” He was so much out of temper and out of heart that he could not help making an attempt to “take” this serene great lady “down.”
She smiled in her dignified way, which made the young critic feel very small. “We seldom hear any fault found with its size,” she said.
And then, to the astonishment of Walter, the little person, whom he had allowed of his grace to pass in before him, came into the room, and took her place and addressed the great lady in the most familiar terms. “Aunt Gerald,” she said, “we are all a kind of cousins, don’t you think? We must be a kind of cousins, though we never saw each other before, for you are aunt to them and you are aunt to me, so of course we are friends by nature;” and with that she put out her hand not only to Ally, whose face brightened all over at this cordial greeting, but to Wat, who stood hanging over them like a cloud, not knowing what to say.
“You are mistaken, Mab,” said Mrs. Russell Penton; “I am not aunt but cousin to—to—” she did not know what to call them—“to my young relations,” she said at last.
“That comes exactly to the same thing—an old cousin is always aunt,” said Mab, settling herself on her seat like a little pigeon. She was very plump, pink and white, with very keen little blue eyes, not at all unlike a doll. There was nothing imposing in her appearance. “I am Mab,” she said, “and are you Alicia, like Aunt Gerald? Do all your brothers and sisters call you so? It is such a long name. I have neither brothers nor sisters.”
“Oh, what a pity,” said gentle Ally, who had brightened as soon as this new companion came in with all the freemasonry of youth.
“Do you think so? but then they say it is very good in another way. I have nobody to be fond of me though, nobody to bully me. Big brothers bully you dreadfully, don’t they?” She cast a look at Walter, inviting him to approach. She was not shy, and he was standing about, not knowing what to do with himself. Walter would have been awkward in any circumstances, having no acquaintance with strange ladies or habit of attending them at tea. He drew a step nearer indeed, but her advances did not put him at his ease; for had he not taken her for a lady’s-maid? though this she did not know.
Mrs. Russell Penton left them thus to make acquaintance, as Mab said, but not willingly. She had to obey a summons from Sir Walter. Sir Walter had been a great deal more restless than usual for the last day or two. There was nothing the matter with him, he said himself, and the doctor said he was quite well, there was not the slightest reason for any uneasiness; but yet he was restless—constantly sending for Alicia when she was not with him, changing his position, finding fault with his newspapers, and that all the little paraphernalia he loved was not sufficiently at hand. Mrs. Russell Penton was always ready when her father wanted her. She would have let nothing, not the most exalted visitor, stand between her and her father, and though she was by no means desirous of leaving these young people together, yet she got up and left them without a word. It was, however, a little too much for her when Sir Walter exclaimed almost before she got into the room, “Where are those children? I suppose they have come, Alicia. Why are you hiding them away from me?”
“The children!—what children? Father, I don’t know what you mean.”
“What children are there to interest menow, except the one set?” said Sir Walter, peevishly. “Edward’s children of course I mean.”
“Edward’s children!”
“Am I growing stupid, or what is the matter with you, Alicia? I don’t generally have to repeat the same thing a dozen times over. Naturally it is Edward’s son I want. Aman can scarcely help feeling a certain interest in the boy who is his heir.”
“I am afraid I am very stupid, father. I thought we had settled—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said the old man: “it is all settled just as you liked, I know; but all the same the boy is my heir.”
Mrs. Russell Penton made no reply. Sir Walter was old enough to be allowed to say what he would without contradiction; but the statement altogether was extremely galling to her. “Settled just as you liked.” It was not as she liked but as he liked. It was he who had moved in it, though it was for her benefit. Though she could not deny that the desire of her life was to possess Penton, to remain in her home, yet she was proudly conscious that she would have taken no step in the matter, done nothing, of her own accord. It was he who had settled it; and now he turned upon her, and asked for the boy who was his heir! Everybody was hard upon Alicia at this moment of fate. They all seemed to have united against her—her husband, the little girl even whom she had wished to defend from fortune-hunters—and now her father himself! If she had been twenty instead of fifty she could not have felt this universal abandonment more. But the practice of so many years was strong upon her. She would not oppose or make any objections to what he wished, though it was of the last repugnance to herself.
“I should have liked,” said the old man, “to see Edward too; when one has advanced so far as I have on the path of life, Alicia, likes and dislikes die away—and prejudices. I may have been too subject to prejudice. Edward never was very much to calculate upon. He had no character; he never could hold his own; but there was very little harm in him, as little harm as good you will perhaps say. Bring me the boy. He will be the same as I, Sir Walter Penton, when his turn comes, and it will not be long before his turn comes. Edward will never last to be an old man like me. He hasn’t got it in him; he hasn’t stuff enough. The young one will be Sir Walter—Sir Walter Penton, the old name. The tenth, isn’t it—Walter the tenth—if we were to count as some of the foreign houses do?’
“Oh, father, don’t!” cried Alicia. To think he could talk, almost jest, about another Walter!
He looked up at her quickly, as if out of a little gathering confusion, seeing for the moment what she meant.
“Eh! well, we must not always dwell on one subject—must not dwell upon it. Let me see the boy.”
Mrs. Russell Penton rang the bell and gave a message, out of which it was almost impossible to keep an angry ring of impatience. “Tell the young gentleman who is in the drawing-room, he who arrived half an hour ago—you understand—that Sir Walter would like to see him. Show him the way.”
“Why don’t you speak of him by his name, Alicia? Young Mr. Penton, Mr. Walter Penton, my successor, you know, Bowker, that is to be. Say I seldom leave my room, and that I should be pleased to see him here. My dear,” he went on, “the servants always act upon the cue you give them, and they ought to be very respectful to the rising sun, you know. It is bad policy to set them out of favor with the rising sun.”
Alicia’s heart was too full for speech. She kept behind her father’s chair, arranging one or two little things which required no arrangement, keeping command over herself by a strong effort. A little more, she felt, and she would no longer be able to do this. That even the servants should have such a suggestion made to them, that Edward’s boy was the heir! Had her father departed from the resolution which was, she declared to herself passionately, his own resolution, not suggested by her? Had he forgotten? Was this some wavering of the mind which might invalidate all future acts of his? She felt on the edge of an outbreak of feeling such as had rarely occurred in her reserved and dignified life, and at the same time she felt herself turned to stone. The old man went on talking, more than usual, more cheerfully than usual, as if something exhilarating and pleasant was about to happen, but she paid little attention to what he said. She stood behind, full of a new and anxious interest, when the door opened and Wat, timid, but on his guard, not knowing what might be wanted with him, half defiant, and yet more impressed and awed than he liked to show, came into the room. Mrs. Russell Penton gave him no aid. She said, “This is Edward’s son, father.” It annoyed her to name him by his name, though there was no doubt that he had a right to it, as good a right as any one. She could not form her lips tosay Walter Penton. But what she failed in Sir Walter made up. He half rose from his chair, which was a thing he rarely did, and held out both his hands. “Ah, Walter! I’m glad to see you, very glad to see you,” he said. He took the youth’s hands in those large, soft, aged ones of his, and drew him close and looked at him, as he might have looked at a grandson: and there was enough resemblance between them to justify the suggestion. “So this is Walter,” he went on, “I’m very glad to see you, my boy. You’re the last of the old stock—no, not the last either, for I hear there’s plenty of you, boys and girls, Alicia”—the old man’s voice trembled a little, tears came into his eyes, as they do so easily at his age—“Alicia, don’t you think he has a look of—of—another Walter? About the eyes—and his mouth? He is a true Penton. My dear, I’m very sorry if I’ve vexed you. I—I like to see it. I could think he had lived and done well and left us a son to come after him, my poor boy!”
And old Sir Walter for a moment broke down, and lifted up his voice and wept, running the little wail of irrepressible emotion into a cough to veil it, and swinging Wat’s hand back and forward in his own. Alicia stood as long as she could behind him, holding herself down. But when her father’s voice broke, and he called her attention to that resemblance, she could bear it no longer. She walked away out of the room without a word. Had she not seen it—that resemblance? and it was an offense to her, a bitter injury. He had neither lived nor done well, that other Walter, the brother of her love and of her pride. He had crushed her heart under his feet, beaten down her pride, torn her being asunder; and now to have it pointed out to her that this insignificant boy, who was not even to be the heir, whose birthright was being sold over his head, that he was a true Penton and like her brother! She could bear it no longer. Not even the recollection that this emotion might injure her father, that he wanted care to soothe him, sufficed to make her capable of restraining the passion which had seized possession of her. She went away quickly, silent, saying nothing. It was more than she could bear.