“We can’t do that, mother, unless we had experience like you; and how are we to get experience unless we risk something? What can we ever know here?—the hours the post goes out, though we have so few letters, the times they have parties at the abbey, though we’re never asked. The only thing we can really get to know is how high the river rises when it’s in flood, and how many days’ rain it takes to make it level with our garden. Oh, how uncomfortable that is, and how chill and clammy! What else can we ever know at Penton Hook?”
“Oh, girls!” said Mrs. Penton again.
Si jeunesse savait! But this is what will never be till the end of the world. And at the same time there was something in her maternal soul that took their part. That they should have their pleasure like the other girls; that they should have their balls, their triumphs like the rest; that to dress them beautifully and admire their bright looks might be hers, a little reflected glory and pleasure for once in her dim, laborious life—her heart went out with a sigh to this which was so pleasant, so sweet. But then afterward? To give it up was hard—hard upon those who had not discounted it all as she had done, taking the glory to pieces and deciding that there was no satisfaction in it. She felt for her husband and the children, though for them more than for him—but her feeling was pity for a pleasant delusion which could not last, rather than sympathy. Penton itself was to her nothing; she disliked it rather than otherwise as something which had been opposed to her all her life.
“If your father accept this offer,” she said after a time, “we need not stay in Penton Hook. We might let it; or at least we might leave it in the winter and go to some other place. We might go to London, or we might even go abroad; then you would really see the world. If your father had to give up Penton without any advantage that would be a real misfortune. But of course they would give him a just equivalent. Our income would be doubled and more than doubled. Oswald could stay at Marlborough; Walter might go to Oxford. We should be better off at once without waiting for it, and we should be free, not compelled to keep up a large place or spend our money foolishly. You might have your fun, as you call it. Why shouldn’t you? We would be a great deal better off than at Penton, and directly—at once. You know what everybody says about waiting for dead men’s shoes. Sir Walter may live for ten years yet. When a man has lived to eighty-five he may just as well live to ninety-five. And I am sure if we only could get a little more money to live on, none of us wishes him to die.”
“Oh, no,” said the girls, one after another. “If it is any pleasure to him to live,” Anne added reflectively, after a pause.
“Pleasure to live? It is always a pleasure to live, at least it seems so. No one wishes to die as long as he can help it. I wonder why myself; for when you are feeble and languid and everything is a trouble, it seems strange to wish to go on. They do, though,” said the middle-aged mother with a sigh. She thought of Sir Walter as they thought of her, with a mixture of awe and impatience. They felt that their own eager state, looking forward to life, must be so far beyond anything that was possible to her; just as she felt her own weary yet life-full being to be so far in the range of vitality above him. She drew the stocking off her arm as she spoke, and smoothed it out, and matched it with its fellow, and rolled them both up into that tidy ball which is the proper condition of a pair of stockings when they are clean and mended, and ready to be put on. “I think I will go up to the nursery and take a look at the children,” she said. “Horry had a cold; I should like to see that there is no feverishness about him now he is in bed.”
Ally and Anne dropped their work with one accord as their mother went away, not because her departure freed them, but because their excitement, their doubt, their sense of the family crisis all intensified when restraint was withdrawn, and they felt themselves free to discuss the problem between themselves. “What do you think?” they both said instinctively, the two questions meeting as it were in mid career and striking against each other. “I think,” said Anne, quickly, not pausing a moment, “that there is a great deal in what mother says.”
“Oh, do you?” said Ally, with an answering look of disappointment; then she added, “Of course there must be, or mother would not say it. But would you ever be so happy anywhere as you would be in Penton? Would you think anywhere else as good—London, or even abroad—oh, Anne, Penton!”
And now it was that Anne showed that skeptical, not to say cynical spirit, that superiority to tradition which had never appeared before in any of her family.
“After all,” she said, “what is Penton? Only a house like another. I never heard that it was particularly convenient or even beautiful more than quantities of other houses. It is very large—a great deal too large for us—and without furniture, as mother says. Fancy walking into a great empty, echoing place, without a carpet or a chair, and pretending to be comfortable. It makes me shudder to think of, whatever you may say.”