A Poor Gentleman

by Mrs. Oliphant

“One would think so, indeed,” she said, with a smile, “but it is not so easy as it seems. It is an insidious little creature, which gets in imperceptibly. One only discovers it when the mischief is done. Gerald, who is so very clever in such matters, thinks we had better get a man over from Paris, from the Gobelins. It would be a good deal of trouble, but still it is the best way.”

“I was not aware that Gerald knew anything about such matters,” said Sir Walter. “As for the trouble, it is only writing a letter, I suppose. But do it, do it. I can not have any thing happen to my tapestry. A man from Paris will be a nuisance—they’re always a nuisance, those sort of fellows—but get it done, get it done.”

“I will write at once,” Mrs. Penton said.

“I remember that tapestry as long as I remember anything,” said the old gentleman, musing. “In the firelight we used to think the figures moved. It used to be my mother’s room. How frightened I was, to be sure! One night, I recollect, the hunters and the hounds seemed all coming down upon us. There, was a blazing fire, and it was the dancing of the flames, don’t you know? I was no bigger than that,” he said, putting his hand about a foot from the ground. The recollection of his infancy pleased the old man. He smiled, and the expression of his face softened. There was nothing cruel or unkind in his aspect. He was a little rigid, a little severe, very sure that he was right, as so many are; but when he thought of his mother’s room, and himself a little child in it, his ruddy aged countenance grew soft. Had there been another little child there, to climb upon his knee, it would have melted altogether. But Providence had not granted that other little child. He gave a wave of his hand as he dismissed these gentle thoughts. “But get the man from Paris, my dear; don’t let anything go wrong with the tapestry,” he said.

Mr. Russell Penton went out as his wife turned to her writing-table, and at once began her necessary letter. It was true that it was he who recommended that a man from Paris should be procured, but he had done it without any of that cleverness in such matters which his wife attributed to him. He was not, perhaps, a man entirely adapted for the position in which he found himself. He had occupied it for a long time, and yet he had not yet reconciled himself to that constant effort on his wife’s part to make him agreeable to her father.

For his own part he had no desire to be disagreeable to Sir Walter or any man; he had married with a generous affection if not any hot romantic love for Alicia; for they were both, he thought, beyond the age of romantic love. She had been thirty-five, very mature, very certain of herself; while he, though a little older and a man who had, as people say, knocked about the world for a long time, and undergone many vicissitudes, was not at all so sure. She had picked him up out of—not the depths, perhaps—but out of an uncomfortable, unsettled, floating condition, between gentility and beggary; and had taken him into the warmest delightful house, and made everything comfortable for him. He had been very willing to make himself agreeable, to do what he could for the people who had done so much for him, and yet so unreasonable was he that he had never been able quite to reconcile himself to the position. He could scarcely endure those warning glances not to go too far, not to say this or that, or her pretenses of consulting him, of being guided by his counsels, the little speeches, such as had been made to-day, about Gerald being so clever—which was his wife’s way of upholding her husband. He was not clever, and he did not wish to pretend to be so. He was not cautious, and he could not take the credit of it. He had been thought to be a fortune-hunter when he married, and he was supposed to be a time-server now; and yet he was neither one thing nor the other. He was fond of Alicia and he liked Sir Walter well enough; yet there were moments when he would rather have swept a crossing than lived in wealth and luxury at Penton, and when the sacrifices which he had to make, and the advantages which he gained in return, were odious to him, things which he could scarcely bind himself to bear.

This was perhaps the reason why, as he went out, without anything to do or to think of, and looking across that wide, bare, yet bright, wintery landscape, losing itself in the wistful distance, caught the chimneys of Penton Hook appearing among the bare trees, there occurred to his mind a contrast and comparison which made his sensations still less agreeable. It was nobody’s fault, certainly not his, not even Sir Walter’s, that the Pentons at the Hook were so poor, that there were eight children of them, that it was so difficult for the parents to make both ends meet. Could Sir Walter have changed the decrees of Providence by any effort in his power, it was he who should have had those eight sturdy descendants. He would have accepted all the responsibilities gladly; he would have secured for those young people the best of everything, an excellent education, and all the advantages that wealth could give. But the children had gone where poverty, not riches was; and to Sir Walter and Alicia it was a wonder that their parents could not keep within their income, that they could not cut their coat according to their cloth, as it is the duty of all honest and honorable persons to do. Alicia in particular was so very clear on this point; and then she had turned to her table, and written her letter, and ordered the man to be sent from Paris from the great Gobelins manufactory to mend the damages made by the moths in the old tapestry! How strange it was! Russell Penton could not tell what was wrong in it. Perhaps there was no conscious wrong. They had a right to have their tapestry mended, and it was pretty, he could not but confess, to see the old man forget himself and talk of the time when he was a child. What was that about a treasure which rust or moth could not corrupt? It kept haunting his ear, yet it was not applicable to the situation. It would be a thousand pities to let the tapestry be spoiled. And as for taking upon his shoulders the burden of Mr. Penton’s large family, no one could expect old Sir Walter to do that. What was wrong in it? And, on the other hand, he could not find it in his heart to blame the poor people at the Hook who had so many cares, so much to do with their income, so many mouths to feed. It was not their fault, nor was it the fault of Alicia and her father. And yet the heart of the man, who was little more than a looker-on, was sore. He could do nothing. He could not even find any satisfaction in blaming one or the other: for, so far as he could see, nobody was to blame.

CHAPTER II.
PENTON.

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.