“There is a big question!” he answered, laughing; “am I to lay bare all my motives to this little thing, and let her see the depths of my thoughts?”
“And why did Aunt Gerald not want them?” pursued Mab. She had no genius or even much intelligence to speak of; but the fact of being an heiress has a very maturing influence, and little Mab was aware of a thing or two which has not been formulated in any philosopher. She inspected the two people who were so much older and wiser than she with very shrewd and wide-open eyes.
“My motives are clear enough,” said Mrs. Russell Penton, with a look at her husband which would have been angry if she had not had so much respect for him, and warning if she had not known how impracticable he was. “I felt it my duty to your family, my dear, that you should make no unsuitable acquaintances, nor run the risk perhaps of contracting likings, I mean friendships—I mean becoming perhaps attached to people who would not prove to be the kind of people you ought to know, in my—in our house.”
This very complicated sentence, so unlike the lucidity of Mrs. Russell Penton’s usual conversation, was entirely due to the fact that her husband’s eyes, with a laugh in them, were upon her all the time she was speaking. Mab’s astonished exclamation, “But your relations, Aunt Gerald—I have always heard that your family—”
“I can scarcely say that these young people belong to my family. They are the children of a distant cousin. Their mother I scarcely know. They have not been brought up as—you have been, for instance. They will not know any of the people you know. In short—but, of course, as they will only be here for three days, it can not make much difference. What is it, Bowker? My father?—”
Mrs. Russell Penton got up very reluctantly to answer Sir Walter’s summons. She gave her husband an almost imploring look. She wanted to do more than put the heiress on her guard against these young people. She wanted Mab, in fact, to be set against them. The idea of any untoward complication happening, of the Russell family having it in their power to reproach her with inveigling their heiress into a connection with one of her own name, was intolerable to Alicia, all the more from the circumstances of her own marriage, which moved her husband so entirely the other way.
“One would think,” said little Mab, with her shrewd look, “that Aunt Gerald did not like her relations; but you, uncle, I think you do.”
“This is a problem which your little wits are scarcely able to solve unassisted,” he said, “though you make very good guesses, Mab. My wife is not fond of her relations—because they are her relations in the first place.”
“Uncle Gerald!”
“Such a statement is very crude and wants a great deal of clearing up. You never heard your aunt’s story, did you, Mab?”