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.