“HOWEVER it goes,” said Mr. Russell Penton, “I don’t think you can help taking some notice of the young people. In the first place it is right, but that I allow does not count much in social matters; and next it is becoming and expedient, and what the world will expect of you, which is of course much more important.”
“Gerald,” said his wife, “what have I done to make you speak to me like that?”
“I don’t know that you have done anything, Alicia. It is of course your affair rather than mine. But I think it is hard upon your cousins. It is like that business about the birthright, you know—you have got the mess of pottage, and they—the other thing, half sentimental, half real.”
“I wonder at you, Gerald,” cried Mrs. Penton. “What true sentiment can they have in the matter? They never lived here; their immediate ancestors never lived here. False sentiment, if you like, as much of that as you like, but nothing else; and the real advantage will be immediate, as you know.”
“Yes, I know. I never said it was the sentiment of acquisition; it is the sentiment of personal importance, which perhaps is even more telling. Apart from Penton they will feel themselves nobodies.”
“As they are, as they have always been.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Russell Penton, with a shrug of his shoulders, “I have always said it was your affair and not mine.”
“You never said that you disapproved. You have heard all the conversation that has gone on about it, and yet you have never said a word. How was I to know that you disapproved?”
“I don’t disapprove. It is a question between you and Sir Walter and your relations. It would not become me to thrust in my opinion one way or the other.”
Tears came into Mrs. Penton’s eyes. “When you say such things, Gerald, you make me feel as if I were no true wife to you.”
“Yes, you are my true wife, and a very dear one,” he said, after a momentary pause, without effusion, but with serious kindness. “But we knew, Alicia, when we married, that the position was different from that of most husbands and wives. I am a sort of Prince Consort, to advise and stand by you when I can; but it is my best policy, for my own self-respect as well as your comfort, not to interfere.”
“The Prince Consort was not like that,” she said; “he was the inspiration of everything. It was not in the nature of things that anything could be done or thought of without him.”
“I have not that self-abnegation,” he said; “there is but one like that in a generation; besides, my dear, you are not the queen. You must defer to another’s guidance. What is settled between Sir Walter and you is for me sacred. I make any little observations that occur to me, but not in the way of advice. For example, I permit myself to say that it is hard on your cousin, because I think you don’t quite appreciate the hardship on his side—not to prevent you carrying out your own purpose, which I don’t doubt is good and very likely the best.”
She shook her head doubtfully. “You are very kind and very tolerant, Gerald, but all you say makes me see that you would not have done this had you been in my place.”
He paused a little before he replied.
“It is very difficult for me to imagine myself in your place, Alicia. A man can not realize what it would be to be a woman, I suppose. But I’ll tell you what I should have done had I been in Sir Walter’s place, with one dear daughter and an heir of entail—I should have moved heaven and earth to kick him out or buy him out. There can be no doubt as to what I should have done in that case.”
Alicia took his hand and held it in both hers. She looked gratefully into his face, and said, “Dear Gerald!” but yet she turned away unsatisfied, with a haunting suspicion. Being Sir Walter, that was what he would have done. But he thought the woman who was his wife should not have done it. In no way had Russell Penton intimated this to be the case. He had never said that a woman should have a different standard of duty set up for her. But Alicia had intuitions which were keener than her intelligence, just as she had longings for approval and sympathy which went far beyond her power of communicating the same. He would have liked her better if she had not grasped at Penton. Without any aid of words this was what she divined. The blank of the doubt which was in her made her heart sore. She wanted to carry his sympathy with her, at any cost. She called after him as he was going away,
“As you are so much concerned about those young people, I will ask them. I will ask them, to please you; if you like, next week, when the Bromley Russells are here.”
He looked at her for a moment with something like a stare of surprise; then his countenance relaxed; a smile came over his face.
“Why not?” he said.
“Why not? There can be no reason against it if you wish it.”
This time Russell Penton laughed out.
“No,” he said, “no reason; the other way. Let the young fellow have his chance.”
“What chance?” Alicia stiffened in spite of herself. His laugh offended her, but she would not show her offense, nor inquire what he meant, in case that offense might be increased. “I was not thinking,” she added, “of any young fellow. I was thinking of the girls.”
“If my wish has weight with you, let the boy come, too. The sisters will want a chaperon, don’t you know?”
“The sisters?” said Mrs. Penton. An inexpressible sense of dislike, of displeasure, of repugnance came over her, as if some passing wind had carried it. “Not that sharp girl,” she said, with a look of fastidious dissatisfaction—something that moved the lines of her nostrils as if it offended a sense.
“Not the sharp girl, and not the boy,” said Russell Penton. “But then who is left?”
“My godchild is left, Alicia, the one I like best; or, rather, whom I—”
“Dislike least,” said her husband, with his laugh. “I can not see, now that everything is likely to be settled to your satisfaction, what possible reason there can be for disliking them at all.”
“There is none,” she said, with an effort. “I am the victim of a state of affairs which is over; I can not get my feelings into accordance with the new circumstances. You can not blame me, Gerald, more than I blame myself.”
He said nothing at all in reply to this, but turned away as he had done with the intention of going out, when she called him back. Once more she recalled him, with the same dull sense of his disapproval aching at her heart.
“Gerald, after all, you see I do not even wait till things are settled to ask the children. Give me a little credit for that.”
“You said, Alicia, that it was to please me.”
“And so it is! and so are many things—more, a great many more, than you think.”
He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked into her face. “You are always very good, very kind, and ready to please me. Is it for that I am to give you credit? or for generosity toward your young cousins? You are not very logical, you see.”
“Women are not supposed to be logical,” she said.
He gave a grave smile as he took his hands away. “Women are more logical than they acknowledge,” he said. “It is a convenient plea.”
And this time there was no recall. He went out without any further hinderance, not much pleased with himself, and perhaps less with her. He was not, as she divined, satisfied at all. Rich Mrs. Penton’s husband had as little devotion to Penton as had poor Mr. Penton’s wife. He felt that he would have been more at his ease in any other house, and a subtle sort of rivalry with Penton, antagonism partly irrational, and disappointment in the thought that Sir Walter’s death, when it came, would bring him no enfranchisement, filled his mind with an irritation which it was not always possible to keep under. He did not want her to do this scanty justice to her young relations, her only relations, in order to please him. They had done no harm; why should it be an offense to her that they had in their veins a certain number of drops of kindred blood? Presently, however, this irritation turned into displeasure with himself. He had been hard upon Alicia; he had asked that the young Pentons should be invited, vaguely, without any particular meaning; and she had said she would ask them at once, along with the heiress, the great prize for whom so many were contending. It had jarred upon her when he laughed, and it now occurred to him that his laugh had been ill-timed and out of place; yet all alone as he was, when it came back to his mind he laughed again. Why not? he had said—and why not? he repeated with a gleam of humor lighting up thoughts which were not particularly pleasant in themselves. He, a poor scion of the Russells, had carried off the Penton heiress; why should not young Penton, the poor and disinherited, have a try at the other, the Russell heiress? But if Alicia saw the reason of his merriment, no wonder that it had jarred upon her. It was in bad taste, he said to himself. To compare her with the little Russell girl was a thing which even in thought was offensive. He did not wonder that she was offended by his laugh, that it made her stiff and cold. He sighed a little as all inclination to laugh died out of him. It would have suited him better to have had a mate of a lighter nature, one who would have let him laugh, who would have been less easily jarred, less serious, less full of dignity; but this was a thing that Russell Penton was too loyal even to say to himself. It might touch the surface of his thoughts, but only to be banished. It was because of this inevitable jar, this little difference, which was so little yet was fundamental, that he sighed.
And she sighed, too, she who did so many things to please him—more, far more than he had any idea of. She was ready to do almost anything to please him; almost, yet with a great reserve. Instinctively she was aware that Penton stood between them—that the bondage of the great house which was not his, and the burden of representing a family of which he was only, so to speak, an accidental member, lay very heavy upon the easy mind and cheerful, humorous nature of her husband. He was not born to be the head of a house. What he liked was the case of a life without responsibilities, without any representative character. A cheerful little place with all its windows open to the sun, where he could do what he liked, where no man could demand more of him than to be friendly and agreeable which he could leave when he chose and come back to as he pleased; that would have been his ideal home. She said to herself that the wife whom he had taken to such a little house would have been very happy, and sometimes, in the days when she still indulged in dreams (which women do in the strangest way, long after the legitimate age for it), she had seen that tiny place in a vision with children about it and no cares (as if that were possible!) and Gerald’s countenance always beaming with genial content. But the woman who was so happy, who was at her ease, whom no troubles touched, who was Gerald’s other self, was not Alicia. She had to sigh and turn away, feeling that this could never be. Her life had been already settled when she married. There was no change or escape for her; indeed, what was stranger still, though she perceived the happier possibilities in the other lot, she knew that it had never been possible to her. The ease would have wearied, perhaps even disgusted her. Attending that vision of happiness would come revelations of the slipshod, glimpses of what ease and happiness so often come to when they grow to overluxuriance. No, the difference was very slight, but it was fundamental. And in this, as in so many other contradictions of life, the woman had the worst of it. Russell Penton was tolerant by nature, and he had trained himself to still greater tolerance. He made an observation, as he said, now and then, but it was possible to him to stand by and look on, without worrying himself about that which he could not change. He would say to himself that it was no business of his; he could even refrain from criticism except in so far as we have seen, when he made a good-natured protest in defense of some one wronged, or avenged another’s injury by a laugh. But Alicia, on her side, was not so easily satisfied. She wanted him to approve; his acquiescence, his plea that it was not his affair, his declaration that he would not interfere, were to her gall and bitterness. She could not adopt his light ways, nor take things easily as he did. Following her own course, acting upon her own principles, his concurrence, his approval, were the things she longed for before all others. When he said “You are quite right” she was happy, though even then never without a sense that he must have added within himself, “right from your own point of view.” The curious thing, however, and one which she was also aware of with a strange double consciousness, was that she never thought of adopting his point of view, or attempting even any compromise between his and hers. She had placed herself so completely in her own groove that she could not get out of it, and had no wish to get out of it. But yet she wanted his approval, all the same. She wanted it passionately, with an insistence which even her own complete enlightenment as to the difference between them never affected. Having her own way, even in the supreme question which now at the last had been opened only to promise the most satisfactory solution, she yet would have no real pleasure in it unless he approved. And his mode of passing it over, his assent which meant no approval, took the pleasure out of everything. What could she do to please him more than she was doing? But she never had it, that satisfaction of the heart.