“Mother!” Could the old house have been moved by hot human breath as by a wind of indignation, it would have shook from parapet to basement: but Mrs. Penton on her deep foundation of sense and reason was not shaken at all. She took no notice of the outcry.
“No, we can have no associations with it,” she said, calmly. “I have dined there three or four times in my life, and the children have never been there at all. It would not matter much to us if it were to be swallowed up in an earthquake, so long as its value remained.”
The girls did not take their mother’s prosaic view. Each on her side, they consoled and smoothed down the gentlemen—the young heir, hot with the destruction of hopes that were entirely visionary, that had never had any reality in them—and the immediate heir, to whom this one thing was the sole touch of romance or of expectation in life.
“Tell us about it, father,” and “Oh, Wat, be quiet; nothing’s done yet!” was what they said.
“Your mother takes it all very easy. She was not born a Penton,” said the father. “Yes, I’ll tell you about it, though she’s settled it already without any trouble, you see. It is not so simple to me. Women can be more brutal than any one when they take it in that way. Alicia was disposed to see it in the same light. She said she had been born there, and never had lived anywhere else, so that her feeling to it must be quite different from mine. Different from mine! to whom it has been an enchantment all my life.”
“What your cousin said was quite natural, Edward. I should have said the same thing myself.”
“You have just done so, my dear,” he said, with a sarcasm which went quite wide of its mark. “Yes, I’ll tell you all about it, children. Alicia and her father, it appears, have been thinking it over. They think—they know, to be sure, for who can have any doubt on the subject?—that I am poor. I am a poor man, with a number of children. A man in my position can not do what he likes, but what he must. I need money to bring you all up, to set you out in the world. Eight of you, you know; that’s enough to crush any man,” he said.
The girls looked at each other with a look which was half indignant yet half guilty. They felt that somehow they were to blame for being there, for crushing their father. Walter had no such sensation, but yet he recognized the truth of the complaint. He was the eldest, a legitimate, even a necessary party to this question; since but for his existence, in his own opinion, his father’s heirship would have been unimportant. But the others were, he allowed to himself, so much ballast on the other side, complicating the question, making a difficulty where there should be none.
“I should have thought,” he said, indignantly, “that Sir Walter would have seen how mean it was to take advantage—what a poor sort of thing it was to trade upon a man’s disabilities—upon his burdens—upon what he can not throw off, nor get rid of.”
Mrs. Penton’s mind had been traveling meanwhile upon its own tranquil yet anxious way.