A Poor Gentleman

by Mrs. Oliphant

“I think I will take—a little turn, sir,” the young man said.

“You are always taking turns!” said Mr. Penton, with irritation. “Why can’t you do something? Why can’t you be going on with your Greek?”

There had been nothing said about Greek for some time. What could he mean by alluding to it now? Walter’s foreboding mind at once attached significance to this. He thought that his father meant to suggest a return to his abandoned studies by way of preparing for something serious to come of them. But his dismay at the suggestion was not so ungenerous as the looker-on might have supposed. It was not that he was afraid of being made to work. What he was afraid of was that this was but another sign of the abandonment of Penton—of turning aside to other purposes and other views than those which had been in some sort the religion of his life.

It need scarcely be said that no such idea was in Mr. Penton’s mind. He took up the Greek, a missile lying ready to his hand, and tossed it at Walter as he would have flung a stone at a dog which had come in his way in the present perturbed state of his spirits. Having done this, he thought no more of it, but went into his book-room and shut the door with a little emphasis, which meant that he was not to be troubled, but which to Walter seemed to mean that he declined further argument and had made up his mind. The boy stood for a moment groping for his hat, following his father with his eyes, and then rushed out into the night in a turmoil of feeling—indignation, misery, surprise. He had been taken so entirely at unawares. Such a thought as that of being called upon to relinquish Penton had never entered into his mind; it had never occurred to him as a possibility. He knew well enough, whatever any one might say, that to abolish entail was not a thing to be done in a minute. Revolutions in law take time. It was not likely that a man of eighty-five would live long enough to see a change like this accomplished. He had dismissed that idea with scorn; and from what other quarter could any attack come? Walter had felt himself invulnerable—unassailable in his own right. No son could be more dutiful, more affectionate, less likely to calculate upon his father’s death; yet, oddly enough, his father had appeared to him only as a secondary person in this matter—a man with a temporary interest; it was he who was the heir. And—without any fault of his, in complete independence of him, without asking his opinion any more than as one of the children, any more than that of Ally or Anne—his birthright was about to be given away!

A dim evening, soft and damp, and with little light in it, had succeeded the brilliant watery sunset. There was a moon somewhere about, but she was visible only by intervals from among the milky clouds. A sort of pale suffusion of light was in the atmosphere, in which all the chief features of the landscape were visible, but more clearly the house, with all its matted-work of creepers, the lights in the windows, the bare branches rising overhead, with a little sighing wind in them, a wind that moaned and murmured of rain. More rain!—rain that would fill up higher the link of darkly shining water which all but surrounded Penton Hook. The sky was full of it, the atmosphere was full of it; the branches glistened with damp; the very gravel, where you had made an indentation with your heel, filled up with the oozing water, of which the soil was full: and the wind kept sighing with its little lugubrious tone among the branches, saying, “More rain! more rain!” There was a certain moral chill in the air by reason of this, but it was not cold; it was what is called “muggy” on Thames-side. Walter was so well used to it that he made no remark to himself on the damp, nor did he feel the chill. He went crunching along the gravel in his boots, which made a great many indentations, and left a general running of little stray water-gleams behind him, to a certain bench which he had himself made under the tall poplar close to the river bank. It had not been put there because there was shade to be had in the season when shade was wanted, and when it is pleasant to sit out and see the river at one’s feet. It was put there for quite a different reason, because when you knew exactly where to look, there was one small corner, the angle of a chimney at Penton, visible among the trees. And there he seated himself to think.

The mother had been right when she said that they had worshiped Penton. The children had all been brought up in that devotion. It was a sort of earthly paradise, in which they took refuge from all the immediate humiliations and vexations of their lot. To be poor, yet to belong to the class which is rich, is not a comfortable position. Those who in his own estimation were Walter’s equals were in every external circumstance more separated from him than were the young farmers about; and yet the farmers would have been put out by his presence among them, and he would have found himself entirely out of his element. He was thus a young solitary belonging to nobody, at home with none of his compeers, without companions or friends of his age. The farmers, had he taken to them or they to him, were better off than he; they had horses to ride, they followed the hunt, they kept dogs that ran in coursing matches. Wat had nothing except, if he pleased, a share now and then of the solid, sturdy little pony-of-all-work, and Elfie, the shaggy little terrier. What youth of twenty could live in the country and see Fred Milton, who had been in his division at Eton, and little Bannister, go by in pink and not feel it? He felt it, and so did Ally feel it when she read Eva Milton’s name among the list of the young ladies who were presented and who had been at the court ball. Do you suppose Ally did not wish to see what a ball was like as well as the rest? The farmers’ daughters had their dances too, and got beautiful white tulle dresses for them as well as their superiors in rank. But Ally got nothing; neither the one nor the other. They were shut out of everything, these poor young people, and felt it, being made but of ordinary flesh and blood.

But Penton had been amid all this the refuge of their imaginations. They had been told indeed that even when they were in Penton they would be poor. But poverty in such circumstances would be transformed. They would no longer be shut out of everything, they would come within the range of the people who were “like themselves.” Walter seated himself at the foot of the poplar-tree, with the river running far too close to his feet, for it was very high, sweeping round with an ominous hurry and murmur, preparing floods to come, and the bare branches overhead rustling and whispering in the wind—and directed his eyes to the high wooded bank, the belt of trees, the Penton chimney corner. He could not see it with his bodily eyes, but in his soul he saw it dominating the landscape, and saw as in a panorama everything it involved. Sir Walter Penton of Penton was a power in the county, he was not a mere squire like Fred Milton’s father, or a lordling of yesterday like Bannister’s ennobled papa. Sir Walter Penton of Penton—not the old man who lived shut up in his library, who was taken out for a drive on fine days. Young Walter meant no harm to the old man, but he was himself the Sir Walter Penton whom he had seen in his dreams. What was it he had looked for? Was it only the vulgar improvement, more money to spend, better dinners, horses, travels, all that a young man wants? He had wanted these things, but something more. He had wanted first of all to find himself in his place; to be somebody, not nobody; to recover the importance which was his right, to have all the evils of fortune made up to him. Is not that what the young dream everywhere, whatever their circumstances may be?—to have everything set right, to do away with all the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. Those who spurn you may not be unworthy, and your own merit may not be patent, or even you may be conscious that you are not meritorious at all. But still we dream, even without such a tangible occasion for dreaming as Walter, of everything being set right.

And now in a moment this hope was all to be cut away. Penton was to be made nothing—nothing to him, no more than any house about, no more than Bannister’s fictitious abbey with its new Strawberry Hill cloister, which was founded upon nothing but wealth, whereas there had been Pentons of Penton since the thirteenth century, and most likely long before. And he was the representative of them all! In his veins was concentrated the essence of theirs: and yet he was to be cut off; he was to stand stupid and look on, without even a right to say no, though it was his inheritance. Walter felt the very possibility of thought taken from him in this dreadful catastrophe. He had nothing to do with it! that was what everybody would say. He was not one-and-twenty, but even if he had reached that age he had nothing to do with it, though it meant his very life.

The tumult of these thoughts overwhelmed the poor young fellow. They carried him away as the river carries everything away when it is in flood, and turned him over and over and dashed him against stones and muddy projections, and poured waves of bitterness over his head. He sat and bit his nails, and gnawed his under lip, and thought and thought, if there was any way to get out of it, if he could say anything, make any protest to his father, declare his own readiness to go anywhere, do anything, rather than suffer this sacrifice. He might go to Australia—in Australia people make fortunes quickly. He might soon be able to make money, to send home something for the children; or to India, or to the gold fields somewhere where nuggets were still to be had. These thoughts can scarcely be called disinterested, for it was how to save what was more to him than nuggets or fortune that Walter was thinking of; but at all events it was not for himself in the first place that he meant to labor. It was for an ambition altogether visionary after all—for Penton, which meant to him the something better, the something loftier, the ideal of life. As he sat musing, the clouds cleared away a little; there began to be a clear place in the sky; it grew lighter, but he did not remark it—until all at once, without a word of warning, the moon suddenly struck out, and made an outburst of radiant reflection upon the river at his feet which called his attention in spite of himself. He looked up instinctively, by the instinct of long habit, and lo! everything was clear over Penton; the moon shining full, the clouds all floating away in masses of fleecy whiteness, and a weather-cock somewhere blazing out, as if it were made of gold and silver, to the right.

This sudden revelation was too much for the boy. He gave a cry of insupportable indignation, a loud protest and utterance of despair, and then hid his face, as if the white light had blinded him, in his hands.