CHAPTER XVIII.
PREPARATION FOR THE GUESTS.
THE arrival 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, as they 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 this question, 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 themselves into 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 in reality. 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. Did your first 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 own perhaps 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 not wish 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 did not 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.