The impression deepened, especially as she stopped with a low cry, to wring her hands, as if realizing that impossible catastrophe. Walter was entirely overawed. He saw the unspeakable pathos of the situation in a moment. Supposing Horry—Horry! should come in to be the heir, something having happened to Oswald and to himself!
“Don’t agitate yourself, mother,” he said, soothingly; “I see what you mean.”
“And yet you would like to insult these poor people, to refuse to see how hard it was for them, and what they have had to bear, oh, for so many years!”
Having thus broken down all opposition, Mrs. Penton made a pause, but presently resumed.
“And then from our side, children, there’s something to be said. I wish you to accept the invitation. I wish it because after all it’s your own county, and you’re of an age to be seen, and you ought to be seen first there. When all this is settled your father will be in a position to take you into society a little. We shall be able to see our friends. If I have never gone out, it has been for that—that I could not invite people back again. Now I may have it in my power more or less to do this. And I want you to be known—I want you to be seen and known. It is of great importance where young people are seen first. I can’t take you to court, Ally, which is the right thing, for we never were in circumstances to do that ourselves. And the next best thing is that you should be seen first in the house of the head of your family. Now all that is very important, and it has got sense in it, and you must now allow an impulse, a hasty little feeling, to get the better of what is sensible and reasonable—you must not indeed. It would be very unkind to me, very foolish for yourselves, very harsh and unsympathetic to the Pentons. And you have a duty to all these. To them? oh, yes, to them too, for they are your relations, and they are old, and though they are prosperous now, things went very badly with them. Besides, it would be as if you disapproved of what your father was doing and envied them Penton: which I suppose is the last thing in the world you would have them to see.”
“Disapproving father is one thing,” said Wat, “but all the rest I do, and I don’t care if they know it or not. Penton ought to be mine. You and my father don’t think so—at least you think there are other things more important.”
Mrs. Penton looked at her boy from her husband’s judicial chair with a mild dignity with which Wat was unacquainted.
“Penton would not be yours,” she said, “if Sir Walter were dead now. Would you like to step into what is your father’s, Wat? Would you like to say he is only to live five years or ten years because the inheritance is yours? Your father will probably live as long as Sir Walter. I hope so, I am sure. He is fifty now, and that would be thirty-five years hence. Would Penton be yours, or would you be impatient for your father to die?”
“Mother!” they all cried in one indignant outcry, the three together.
“It looks as if you meant that. You don’t, I know—but it looks like it. Sir Walter may just as well live ten years longer, and your father thirty years after that, so that you would be sixty before you succeeded to Penton. Is it so much worth waiting for? Is it worth while showing yourself envious, dissatisfied with what your father is doing, unkind to your relations, because, forty or fifty years hence, perhaps—”