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.