“I know what you think, Gerald—that I ought to be more sympathetic. In what way could I be sympathetic? She is buried in calculations as to how they are to live here; and he—”
“I respect her calculations,” said Russell Penton. “It is a dreadful white elephant to come into the poor lady’s hands.”
“And yet you scarcely concealed your pleasure when it passed away from me—to whom it has always been a home so dear.”
“I never stand on my consistency, Alicia. I am glad and sorry about the same thing, you see. I am sorry that you are sorry to go away, yet I can’t help being glad that you are freed from the bondage of this place, which has been a kind of idol to you all; and I am glad they have it, yet sorry for poor Lady Penton and her troubled looks. When we go away from Penton I shall feel as if we were starting for our honey-moon.”
“Don’t say so, Gerald—when you think how it is that this has come about.”
“It has come about by a great grief, my darling, yet a natural one—one that could not have been long averted. And I hope you don’t object Alicia, now that you have fulfilled your duty to the last detail, that your husband should be glad to have you more his own than Penton would ever have permitted you to be.”
She accepted the kiss he gave her, not without a sense of the sweetness of being loved, but yet with a consciousness that when he spoke of her fulfilling her duty to the last detail he implied a certain satisfaction having got rid of that duty at last. She knew as well as he did, with a faint pleasure mingling with many a thought of pain and some of irritation, that this setting out together was indeed at last their real honey-moon, in so far as that consists of a life together and alone.
Lady Penton returned very grave and overwhelmed with thought to the shelter of those red roofs at the Hook which made so picturesque a point in the landscape from Penton. She did not make any response to the children who rushed out in a body to see the parents come home, to admire the pair of screws, and the new carriage. She went into the drawing-room and gazed long upon the chiffonier, measuring and gauging it with her eye from every side. It had, as has been said, a plate-glass back, and it was inlaid, and had various brass ornaments entitling it to the name of ormolu. She touched its corners with her hand lovingly, then shook her head. “Not even the chiffonier will do for Penton,” she said; “not even the chiffonier!” Nothing else could have given the family such an idea of the grandeur of the great house, and their own grandeur to whom it belonged, as well as of the saddening yet exhilarating fact that everything would have to be got new.
“Well, my dear,” said Sir Edward, “we must make up our minds to that, for to tell the truth, though you were always so pleased with that piece of furniture, I never liked it much.”
He never liked it much! Lady Penton turned a reproachful glance upon her husband; it was as if he had abandoned a friend in trouble.