“Children, children! In the first place it’s not amusement, and your cousin has never asked you before. She is a great deal richer, a great deal better off than we are. Stop a little, Ally and Wat. I don’t say that as if being rich was everything; but it is a great deal. You will meet better society there than anywhere else. And even though your father is going to part with Penton, you never can separate yourselves from it. We shall be called Pentons of Penton always, even though we never enter the house.”
“Mother,” said Wat, “you don’t feel perhaps as I do; that is the best of reasons why I should never enter the house. So long as I was the heir, if they had chosen to ask me it might have been my duty; but now—” cried Wat, his voice rising as if into a salvo of artillery. Unutterable things were included in that “now.”
“Now,” said his mother, “because we are giving up, because we are leaving the place, so to speak, it is now much more necessary than ever it was. Your cousins have done nothing that is wrong. They don’t mean to injure you; they are doing a very natural and a very sensible thing. Oh, I am not going to argue the question all over again; but unless you wish to insult them, to show that you care nothing for them, that their advances are disagreeable to you, and that you don’t want their kindness—”
“Mother,” said Walter, “not to interrupt you, that is exactly what I want to do.”
And Ally had her soft face set. It did not seem that the little face, all movable and impressionable, could have taken so fixed a form, as if it never would change again.
“You want to insult the people, Walter, who are, to begin with, your own flesh and blood.”
“Cousins—and not full cousins—are scarcely so near as that,” said Anne, with an air of impartial calm.
“To insult anybody is bad enough, if they were strangers to you—if they were your enemies. What can be nearer than cousins except brothers and sisters? I say Mrs. Russell Penton is your own flesh and blood, and I don’t think it is very nice of you, on a subject which I must know better than you do, to contradict me. Your father calls Sir Walter uncle. How much nearer could you be? And if you live long enough, Wat, you will be Sir Walter after him. In one sense it is like being grandson to the old gentleman, who lost his own sons, as you know well enough. And is it he you would like to insult, Wat?”
This made an obvious and profound impression. The audience were awed; their mutinous spirit was subdued. The domestic orator pursued her advantage without more than a pause for breath.
“I never knew the boys: but when I saw the Pentons first everybody was talking of it. Your father had never expected to succeed, oh, never! It was a tragedy that opened the way for him. They had no reason to expect that a young cousin, a distant cousin” (this admission was no doubt contradictory of what she had just said, but it came in with her present argument, and she did not pause upon that), “should ever come in. If they had hated the very sight of those who were to take the place of their own, who could wonder? I should if—oh, Wat, if it were possible that—Osy and you”—she paused a little—“I feel as if I should hate Horry even in such a case.”