A Poor Gentleman

by Mrs. Oliphant

This double tragedy passed over with little revelation to the outside world. Everybody, indeed, knew what lives the young men had lived, and how they had died. And people pitied the father to whom it must be, they felt, so great a disappointment that his baronetcy and his old lands should go out of the family, and that in the direct line he should have no heir. If only one of them had married, if there had been but a child to carry on the family, the kind neighbors said. It was thought that Sir Walter was far more proud than tender, and that this would be his view. As for Miss Penton, it was believed that she must find great consolation in the fact that her position and her importance would be so much increased. A few years quiet (such as was inevitable in their deep mourning) would make up for all the sacrifices Sir Walter had made for the boys; and then Alicia would be a great heiress, notwithstanding that a considerable portion of the estate was entailed. People thought that when she realized this, Alicia Penton would dry her tears.

She did not in any case make very much show of her tears. Her father and she went on living in the great, silent house, where now there was not even an echo to be listened for, a piece of evil news to be apprehended; where all was silent, silent as the grave. She had been courted as much as most women in her younger days; she had been loved, but she had listened to no one. Her youth had glided away under the shadow of calamity, the shadow which had stolen away all beauty and freshness from her and made her old before her time, and, lest they should express too much, had turned her features to stone. She had always been stately, but she was stern now that all was over, and there was neither terror for the future nor sound of the present to keep her tortured heart alive.

But naturally, after awhile, these intense emotions, which no one suspected, were calmed, and life began again. Life began even for Sir Walter, who was nearly seventy, much more for his daughter, who was thirty-five. They could not die, nor could they darken their windows and shut out the sunshine forever because two poor wrecks, two dismal, ruined lives, had come to an end. It must be such a relief, people said, even though no doubt it was a grief in its way. And though the ending of anxiety in such a way seems almost an additional pang, an additional loss to obstinate love, yet after all it is a dismal relief in its blank and stillness. And life had to be carried on. When Miss Penton, Sir Walter’s only child and heiress, came out of her long seclusion there were still men to be found who admired, or said they admired her, and who were very eager to place themselves at her disposal. Among these was Gerald Russell, a man who had once been kind to one of “the boys,” and who was known as the most good-natured, the least exacting of men. He was poor; he had no particular standing of his own to confuse the family arrangements: and the two liked each other. Truly and honestly they liked each other; he had been almost a suitor of her youth, kept back, both of them were willing to believe, by his poverty. Gerald Russell was not unaware that there would be sacrifices to make, that he was accepting a position not without drawbacks, in which, indeed, there might possibly be a good deal to bear. But he had not made much of his life hitherto, and he made up his mind to risk it. And they married, and he was not unhappy. This was the present position of affairs. He was not unhappy, and she was more nearly happy than she could have been had he not been there. Had “anything happened,” as the phrase goes, to him—that is, had he died—the world would have become blank to Alicia. Had she been the victim Mr. Russell Penton would have been truly grieved, and would have mourned honestly for his wife, but the sense of freedom might perhaps have been something of a compensation to him. Thus they were not equal any more than two human creatures ever are equal. She seemed to have the best of it upon the surface of affairs. She was the head of the house. Both without and within she was the pivot upon which everything turned, and he was by no means of equal importance; but yet he would have been to her a greater loss than she to him, which perhaps made the balance equal once more.

He returned to that question about the tapestry when they set out, as was their custom in the afternoon, to take a walk together. They went through the wood which covered the crest of the high river-bank upon which Penton stood, and which defended the house from the north. Everything, it is needless to say, was beautifully kept, the woodland paths just wild enough to preserve an aspect of nature amid the perfection of foresting and landscape gardening on the largest scale. Wherever there was a point of view the openings were skillfully arranged so as to get its finest aspect, and the broad valley, or rather plain, stretched out below with village-spires and scattered clusters of houses, and a red-roofed town in the distance, with a light veil of smoke hanging between it and the sky. The river flowed full and strong in its winter volume at their feet, reflecting the gray blueness of the heavens, the deeper colors that began to blaze about the west, and the gray whiteness of the vapors overhead. It was when they had turned, after a momentary pause at one of these mounts of vision, that Russell Penton turned suddenly to his wife with a smile.

“Did you send for the man from the Gobelins?” he said.

“Yes. What put that into your mind now?”

“Nothing; the chimneys at Penton Hook,” he replied.

“And why the chimneys at Penton Hook? Your mind jumps from one subject to the other in the strangest way. What connection can there be between two things so unlike?”

“Nothing,” he said, with a faint laugh; “and yet perhaps more than meets the eye. There is no great volume of smoke rising from those chimneys. A faint blue streak or so and that is all. It does not look like fire in every room or a jolly blaze in the kitchen.”

“What are you aiming at, Gerald? I think you mean mischief. No; probably they have not fires in all the rooms; but what has that to do with us or with the man from Paris? I don’t follow you,” she said.