MR. PENTON went out to take his walk in a depressed mood. He was familiar with all the stages of depression. He was a man who thought he had been hardly dealt with in the course of his life. In his youth there had been a momentary blaze of gayety and pleasure. In those days, when he had shared the early follies of Walter and Reginald, and fallen in love with Alicia, it had not occurred to him that the path of existence would be a dull one. But that was all over long ago. When the other young men had fallen into dissipation and all its attendant miseries, he had pulled himself up. Pleasure was all very well, but he had no idea of paying such a price for it as that. He was not a man who had ever been brought under any strong religious impulse, but he knew the difference between right and wrong. He pulled himself up with great resolution, and abandoned the flowery path where all the thorns are at first hidden under the bloom and brightness. It was no small sacrifice to descend into the gray mediocrity of Penton Hook, and give himself up to the dull life which was all that was possible; but he did it, which was not an easy thing to do. It was true that he was still in those days a young man, and might have made something better of his existence: but he had no training of any special kind, no habit of work, no great capacity one way or other. He settled down to his dull country life without any feeling that he could do better, leaving all excitement behind him. It was perhaps a more creditable thing to do than if he had been able to plunge into another kind of excitement, to face the world and carve a fortune out of it, which is the alternative possible to some men. And as there had been no illusion possible when he accepted that neutral-tinted life, so there had been no unexpected happiness involved in its results. He had married a good woman, but not a lively one. His children had been pleasant and amusing in their babyhood, but they had brought innumerable cares along with them. Before their advent Penton Hook had been dull, but it had not been without many little comforts. He had been able to keep a couple of horses, which of itself was a considerable thing, and to hold his place more or less among the county people. But as the young ones grew it made a great difference. Just at the time when life ought to have opened up for their advantage, it had to be narrowed and straitened. He was compelled to give up his own gratifications on their account, yet without any compensating consciousness that he was doing the best he could for them. Indeed, there seemed no possibility of doing the best that could be done for any one. To keep on, to do what was indispensable, to provide food and clothing—the mere sordid necessities of life—was all that was within his power. In the early days after his marriage nothing had been saved; the necessity of education and provision for the children seemed either ludicrous in presence of the tiny creatures who wanted nothing but bread and milk and kisses, or so far off as to be beyond calculation. But by gradual degrees this necessity had become the most important of all. And with it, unfortunately, had come that depreciation in the value of land which made his little estate much less productive exactly at the time when he wanted money most.
One of his farms was vacant, the others were let at low rents—all was sinking into a different level. And, on the other hand, the wants of the family increased every day. It is not to be supposed that Mr. Penton liked to take Osy from school. He had been indifferent about Wat for various reasons first because he then quite believed that was really capable of “reading” with his boy, and would rather like it than otherwise, and then it would be a good thing for them both; and second, because Wat was the heir, and no great education is necessary (Mr. Penton thought with Mrs. Hardcastle in the play) to fit a man to spend a large income. But with Osy no such argument told. Osy was heir to nothing. He was the clever one of the family; and as for reading with Osy, his father knew that he was not capable of any such feat, even if he had not proved that to keep settled hours and give up a part of his day to his son’s instruction had come to be a thing impossible to him. He knew very well now that to take Oswald from school would be to do him an injury. But what could the poor man do? All that the young ones said in their warm partisanship for Osy, in their indignation at the idea of making him suffer, had more or less affected their father. He was not very sensitive to anything they could say, and yet it wounded him in a dull way. It made him a little more depressed and despondent. To battle with the waves, to be tossed upon a great billow which may swallow you up, yet may also throw you ashore and bring you to a footing upon the solid earth, is less terrible than just to keep your head above the muddy tide which sucks you down and carries you on, with no prospect but to go to the bottom at last when your powers of endurance are spent. This last was Mr. Penton’s state. There was no excitement of a storm, no lively stir of winds and waters—all was dull, dreary, hopeless; a position in which he could do nothing to help himself, nothing to save himself—in which he must just go on, keeping his head above water as he could, now and then going down, getting his eyes and throat full of the heavy, muddy, livid stream. Poverty is little to the active soul which can struggle and strive and outwit it, which can still be doing; but to those who have nothing they can do, who can only wait speechless till they are ingulfed, how bitter is that slowly mounting, colorless, hopeless, all-subduing tide!
There was very little for a man to do at Penton Hook. He had tramped about the fields of the vacant farm, trying helplessly to look after things which he did not understand, and to make the fallow fields bear crops by looking at them, in the morning; and he had come away from them more depressed than ever, wondering whether, if he could get money enough to start and work the farm anything might be made of it; then reflecting dolefully that in all likelihood the money for such operations, even if he could raise it, might in all probability be as well thrown into the river for any good it would do. In the afternoon he did not attempt any further consideration of this question, but simply took a walk as he had been in the habit of doing for so many years. And though in some circumstances there are few things so pleasant, yet in others there is nothing so doleful as this operation of taking a walk. How much helpless idleness, how many hopeless self-questions, miserable musings, are summed up in it; what a dreamy commonplace it turns to, the sick soul’s dull substitute for something to do or think of. It was in its way a sort of epitome of Edward Penton’s wearisome life. He knew every turning of the road; there was nothing unexpected to look forward to, no novelty, no incident; when he met any one he knew, any of his equals, they were most probably riding or driving, or returning from a day with the hounds, splashed and tired, and full of talk about the run. He took off his hat to the county ladies as they drove past, and exchanged a word with the men. He had nothing to say to them nor they to him. He was of their sphere indeed, but not in it. He knew when he had passed that they would say “Poor Penton!” to each other, and discuss his circumstances. He was happier when he came now and then upon a solitary poor man breaking stones on the way, with whom he would stop and have a talk about the weather or how the country was looking. When he could find twopence in his pocket to give for a glass of beer he was momentarily cheered by the encounter. It was a cheap pleasure, and almost his only one. It gave a little relief to the dullness and discouragement which filled all the rest of the way.
There was, however, one incident in his walk besides the twopence to the stone-breaker. There was no novelty in this. Every day as he came up to the turning he knew what awaited him; but that did not take away from perennial interest. This incident was Penton, seen in the distance: not the terrace front, which he, like all the Pentons, thought a monument of architectural art, but a high shoulder of red masonry, which shone through the trees, and suggested all the rest to his accustomed eyes. Penton was the one incident in his walk, as it was in his life. He was poor, and the waters of misery were almost going over his head. Yet Penton stood fast, and he was the heir. He had said this to himself for years, and though the words might have worn out all their meaning, so often had they been repeated, yet there was an endless excitement in them. Twenty years before he had said them with a sense of mingled exultation and remorse, which was when the last of “the boys” died, and he became against all possibility the next heir. Sir Walter had been an old man then, and it seemed probable that these recurring calamities would end his life as well as his hopes. Edward Penton had nothing to reproach himself with; he had never been hard upon his cousins, though he had abandoned their evil ways, and he had been shocked and sorry when one by one they died. But afterward he had looked forward to his inheritance; he had believed that it could not be far off. He had come to this turning when first he began to feel life too many for him, and had looked at the house that was to be his and had taken comfort. But twenty years is a long time, and waiting for dead men’s shoes is not a pleasant occupation. He looked at Penton now always with excitement, but without any exhilaration of hope. It did not seem so unlikely as before that Sir Walter might live to be a hundred; that he might live to see his younger cousin out. As he had outlived his own sons he might outlive Edward Penton and his sons after him. Nothing seemed impossible to such an old man. And Mr. Penton did not feel that his own powers of living, any more than any other powers in him, were much to be reckoned upon. He stood on this particular day and gazed at the house of his fathers with a long and wistful look. Should he ever step into it as his own? Should he ever change his narrow state for the lordship there? This question did not bring to him the same quickening of the breath which he had been sensible of on so many previous occasions. He was too much depressed to-day to be roused even by that. He turned away with a sigh, and turned his back to that vision and his face homeward. At home all his cares were awaiting him—as if he had not carried them with him every step of the way.
As he walked back toward Penton Hook his ear was caught by the chip of the hammer, which sounded in the stillness of the wintery afternoon like some big insect on the road. Chip, chip, and then the little roll of falling stones. The man who made the sound was sitting on a heap of stones by the road-side, working very tranquilly, not hurrying himself, taking his occupation easily. He was gray-haired, with a picturesque gray beard, and a red handkerchief knotted underneath. He paused to put his hand to his cap when he saw Mr. Penton. The recollection of past glasses of beer, or hopes for the future, or perhaps the social pleasure, independent of all interested motives, of five minutes’ talk to break the dullness of the long afternoon, made the approach of the wayfarer pleasant.
“Good-afternoon, sir,” he said, cheerfully.
Old Crockford, though he was a great deal older than Mr. Penton, and much poorer absolutely, though not comparatively, was by no means a depressed person, but regarded everything from a cheerful point of view.
“Good-morning, Crockford,” said Mr. Penton. “I didn’t see you when I passed a little while ago. I thought you had not been out to-day.”
“Bless you, squire, I’m out most days,” said Crockford; “weather like this it’s nothin’ but pleasure. But frost and cold is disagreeable, and rain’s worst of all. I’m all right as long as there’s a bit o’ sunshine, and it keeps up.”
“It looks like keeping up, or I am no judge,” said the poor squire.
Crockford shook his head and looked up at the sky. “I don’t like the look of them clouds,” he said. “When they rolls up like that, one on another, I never likes the look on them. But, praise the Lord, we’s high and dry, and can’t come to no harm.”
“It is more than I am,” said Mr. Penton, testily. “I hate rain!”
“And when the river’s up it’s in of the house, sir, I’ve heard say? That’s miserable, that is. When the children were young my missis and me we lived down by Pepper’s Wharf, and the fevers as them little ones had, and the coughs and sneezin’s, and the rheumatics, it’s more nor tongue can say. Your young ladies, squire, is wonderful red in the face and straight on their pins to be living alongside of the river. It’s an onpleasant neighbor is the river, I always do say.”
“If you hear any fools saying that the water comes into my house you have my permission to—stop them,” said Mr. Penton, angrily. “It’s no such thing; the water never comes higher than the terrace. As for fevers, we don’t know what they are. But I don’t like the damp in my garden; that stands to reason. It spoils all the paths and washes the gravel away.”
“That’s very true,” said Crockford, with conviction; “it leaves ’em slimy, whatever you do. I’ve seen a sight to-day as has set me thinking, though I’m but a poor chap. Poor men, like others, they ’as their feelings. I’ve seen a lady go by, squire, as may be once upon a day years ago, you, or most of the gentlemen about—for she was a handsome one, she was—”
“Ah, an old beauty! ‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.’ And who might this lady be?”
“Many a one was sweet upon her,” said Crockford. “I ain’t seen her, not to call seeing, for many a year. I don’t know about ashes, squire, except as they’re useful for scouring. And they say that beauty is but skin deep: but when I looks at an ’andsome lady I don’t think nothing of all that.”
“I didn’t know you were such an enthusiast, Crockford.”
“I don’t always understand, squire,” said Crockford, “the words the quality employ. Now and then they’ll have a kind of Greek or Latin that means just a simple thing. But I sits here hours on end, and I thinks a deal; and for a thing that pleases the eye I don’t think there’s nothing more satisfying than an ’andsome woman. I don’t say in my own class of life, for they ages fast, do the women; they don’t keep their appearance like you and me, if I may make so bold. But for a lady as has gone through a deal, and kep’ her looks, and got an air with her, that with riding in her own carriage behind a couple of ’andsome bays—I will say, squire, if I was to be had up before the magistrates for it—and you’re one yourself, and ought to know—and what I say is this: that Miss Aliciar from the great house there is just as fine a sight as a man would wish to see.”
“Miss Alicia!” cried poor Penton. The name was one he had not heard for long, and it seemed to bring back a flush of his youth which for a moment dazzled him. He burst out into a tremendous laugh after awhile. “You old blockhead!” he said. “You’re talking of Mrs. Russell Pentonon, my cousin, who hasn’t been called by that name these twenty years!”
“Twenty years,” said old Crockford, “is nothin’ squire, to a man like me. I knew her a baby, just as I knowed you. You’re both two infants to the likes of me. Bless you, I hear the bells ring for her christening and yours too. But she’s a fine, ’andsome woman, a-wheelin’ along in her carriage as if all the world belonged to her. I don’t think nothin’ of a husband that hain’t even a name of his own to bless himself with nor a penny to spend. It’s you and her that should have made a match; that’s what ought to have been, squire.”
“Unfortunately, you see,” aid Mr. Penton, “I have got a wife of my own.”
“But you hadn’t no wife nor her a husband in the old days,” said Crockford, meditatively, pausing to emphasize his words with the chip, chip of his hammer. “Dear a me! the mistakes that are in this life! One like me, as sits here hours on end, with naught afore him but the clouds flying and the wind blowing, learns a many things. There’s more mistakes than aught else in this life. Going downright wrong makes a deal of trouble, but mistakes makes more. For one as goes wrong there’s allays two or three decent folks as suffers. But mistakes is just like daily bread; they’re like the poor as is ever with us, accordin’ to the Scripture; they just makes a muddle of everything. It’s been going through my mind since ever I see Miss Aliciar in her chariot a-driving away, as fine as King Solomon in all his glory. The two young gentlemen, that was a sad sort of a thing, squire, but I don’t know as t’other is much better, the mistakes as some folks do make.”
“Crockford, you are growing old, and fond of talking,” said Mr. Penton, who had heard him out with a sort of angry patience. “Because one lets you go on and say your say, that’s not to make you a judge of your betters. Look here, here’s twopence for a glass of beer, but mind you keep your wisdom to yourself another day.”
“Thank ye, squire,” said Crockford. “I speak my mind in a general way, but I can hold my tongue as well as another when it ain’t liked. Remarks as is unpleasant, or as pricks like, going too near a sore place—”
“Oh, confound you!” said the squire; “who ever said there was a—” But then he remembered that to quarrel with Crockford was not a thing to be done. “I think, after all,” he said, “you’re right, and that those clouds are banking up for rain. You’d better pack up your hammer, it’s four o’clock, and it will be wet before you get home.”
“Well, squire, if you says so, as is one of the trustees,” said Crockford, giving an eye to the clouds, as he swung himself leisurely off his hard and slippery seat upon the heap of stones—“I’ll take your advice, sir, and thank ye, sir; and wishing you a pleasant walk afore the rain comes on.”
Mr. Penton waved his hand and continued his walk downhill toward his home. The clouds were gathering indeed, but they were full of color and reflection, which showed all the more gorgeous against the rolling background of vapor which gradually obliterated the blue. He was not afraid of the rain, though if it meant another week of wet weather such as had already soaked the country, it would also mean much discomfort and inconvenience in the muddy little domain of Penton Hook. But it was not this he was thinking of. His own previous reflections, and the sharp reminder of the past that was in old Crockford’s random talk, made a combination not unlike that of the dark clouds and the lurid reflected colors of the sky. Mistake? Yes; no doubt there had been a mistake—many mistakes, one after another, mistakes which the light out of the past, with all its dying gleams, made doubly apparent. His mind was so full of all these thoughts that he arrived at his own gates full of them, without thinking of the passing vision which had stirred up old Crockford, and his own mind too, on hearing of it. But when he pushed open the gate and caught sight of the two bays, pawing and rearing their heads, with champ and stir of all their trappings, as if they disdained the humble door at which they stood, Edward Penton’s middle-aged heart gave a sudden jump in his breast. Alicia here! What could such a portent mean?