“My consideration? Surely; my best consideration,” he replied, with still the same look of sarcastic coolness, “which anything Sir Walter Penton suggests would naturally command from his—successor. I can not use a milder word than that. My position,” he added, with gravity, “is not one which I sought or had any hand in bringing about: therefore I can have no responsibility for the changes that have happened in the last twenty years.”
“It is I who must beg your pardon now. You are quite right, of course, and there was no fault of yours. Good-night and good-bye. I hope you will at least think of me charitably if we should not meet again.”
“We shall certainly, I hope, meet again,” he said, opening the door for her. “The girls will not forget your invitation to them. They have never seen Penton, and they take an interest, which you will not wonder at—”
“Oh, I don’t wonder—at that or anything,” she added, in a lower tone; and, as ill-luck would have it, Wat, standing full in the light of the lamp which lighted the hall, tall in his youthful awkwardness, half antagonistic, half anxious to recommend himself, stood straight before her, so that she could not, without rudeness, refuse his attendance to the door where the carriage lamps were shining and the bays pawing impatiently. She gave his father a look of mingled misery and deprecation as she went out of sight. He alone understood why it was she could not bear the sight of his boy. But though her eyes expressed this anguish, her mouth held another meaning. “You will hear from Mr. Rochford in a day or two,” she said, as she drove away.
He sent her back a smile of half-sarcastic acquiescence still; but then Edward Penton went back to his library and shut himself in, and disregarded all the appeals that were made to him during the next hour, to come to tea. First the bell: then Ally tapping softly, “Tea is ready.” Then Anne’s quicker summons, “Mother wants to know if we are to wait for you?” Then the little applicant, whom he was least able to resist, little Mary, drumming very low down upon the lower panels of the door, with a little song of “Fader! fader!” To all this Mr. Penton turned a dull ear. He had been angry—he had been cut to the quick; that his poverty should be thus thrown back upon him—that he should be expected to make merchandise of his inheritance, to give up for money the house of his fathers, the only fit residence for the head of the family! All this gave a sharp and keen pang, and roused every instinct of pride and self-assertion. But when the thrill of solitude and reason fell on all that band of suddenly unchained demons, and he thought of the privations round him—the shabbiness of the house; the damp; the poor wife, who could not now at all hold up her head among the county people; the girls, who were little nobodies and saw nothing; Wat, whose young life was spoiled: and Osy—Osy! about whom some determination must be come to. To see a way out of all that and not to accept it: for pride’s sake to shut up, not only himself, that was a small matter, but the children, to poverty! The fire went out; the inquisitive candles blinked and spied ineffectually, making nothing of the man who sat there wrapped up within himself, his face buried in his hands. He was chilled almost to ice when his wife stole in and drew him away to the fire in the drawing-room, from which the young ones withdrew to make place for him, with looks full of wonder and awe. And then it was, when he had warmed himself and the ice had melted, that he drew the family council together, and laid before them, old and young, the proposal which Alicia Penton had come to make.
CHAPTER IX.
FAMILY COUNSELS.
Mr. Penton drew his chair toward the fire, which was not a usual thing for him to do. When he felt chilly he went to the book-room, where in the evening there was always a log burning. In the drawing-room it was the rule that nobody should approach the fire too closely; Mr. Penton said it was not good for the children, it gave them bad habits, and it scorched their cheeks and injured their eyes. The moral of which probably was that, as there were so many of them, they could not all get near it, and therefore all had to hold back.
But this evening everything was out of rule. The little ones had been sent to bed. The basket of stockings was pushed aside on the table. Mrs. Penton indeed, unable to bear that breach of use and wont, had taken a stocking out of it furtively and pulled it up on her arm. It was a gray stocking, with immense healthy holes the size of half a crown. She could not get at her needle and worsted without disturbing the family parliament, but at least she could measure the holes and decide how best to approach them, and from what side. Walter had placed himself on the other side of the fire, opposite his father, feeling instinctively that his interests must be specially in question; the girls filled up the intervals between their mother and Wat on the one side, their father on the other. The fire had been stirred into a blaze and danced cheerfully upon all the young faces. The lamp with its smell of paraffin was put aside too, as if it were being punished and put in the corner, for which vindicative step, considering how it smelled and smoked, there was good cause.
“You will understand,” said Mr. Penton, “that the visit we have just received must have had some special motive.”
“I don’t see why you should be so sure of that, Edward,” said Mrs. Penton, “unless she said something. It might be just civility. Why not?”