“Story?” said Mab, faltering. “I—I did not know that there was any story—except—”
Russell Penton began to speak. “Oh, yes, it was this.” And then he was infected by Mab’s embarrassment. He stopped, laughed, but awkwardly, even grew red, which, for a man of his years and experience, was inconceivable, and said, “No, no; not in that way. The story is not perhaps what you would call a story. It concerns not anything in the shape of a lover, so far as I know—”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Uncle Gerald!”
“There is no harm done. She was not born to inherit all her father could leave to her, like you. There were brothers at first; and the heir of entail who succeeds now, who takes what should have been theirs, is the father of these two young ones. Don’t you see? There is nothing for a good strong family repugnance like a cousin who is the heir of entail.”
Mabel paused a little, employing her faculties upon this question, which was new to her. Finally she delivered her judgment.
“Perhaps—at least I think I can understand. But the children haven’t done anything, have they? It is not their fault?”
“It is nobody’s fault, as is the case with so many of the worst complications of life. And this is something a little worse still than the heir of entail. It is the heir whom you are buying out, whom you are persuading to part with his rights. Well, perhaps they are a bad kind of rights. I prefer not to give an opinion. To bind up a property for generations so that it shall descend only in a certain way may be wrong; neither you nor I are capable of clearing up such high questions, Mab. It is good for the family, but bad for the individual, as ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ is, according to the laureate. But Mab, my little Mab, this boy Walter is the one that is to be done out of it. Don’t you see? It is quite fair between Alicia and his father, but the boy has no voice, and he is done out of it. I think it is rather hard upon the boy.”
“There was nothing said about a boy,” said little Mab, demurely. “I only heard of a girl.’
“That was because you are not supposed to take any interest in boys,” said her uncle, with a laugh; “not such a boy either in your eyes—over twenty, poor fellow, and no doubt having thought of the time when he should be the heir. He will be Sir Walter Penton in his turn, if he lives, but otherwise he is out of it. I, who never was in it, who am only a spectator, so to speak, I feel very much for young Wat.”
“Poor boy!” said Mab, under her breath. By effect of nature she took, as was to be expected, her uncle’s view. Perhaps he ought not to have thus sacrificed his wife and her cause. But he had a motive, this man devoid of all sense of propriety—a bad, dreadful, motive such as any correcter judgment would have condemned. He wanted to interest the heiress in a penniless, prospectless young man. Could anything be more wicked and dreadful? He wanted to surround young Walter Penton with a halo of romance in Mabel’s eyes, to call forth in his favor that charm of the unfortunate, that natural desire of the very young to compensate a sufferer, the very sentiments which he ought to have exorcised had they come by themselves into being. His eyes lighted up when this breath of pity came from Mab’s lips. A humorous sense of the balance in favor of the race of Penton which he thus meant to create, diminishing so far his own obligations, tickled his imagination. He would have liked to have some one to laugh with over this good joke. Perhaps even underneath the enjoyment there was something which was not so enjoyable, a sense of the worthlessness of wealth, and that poverty was by no means such a drawback as people thought. But that was altogether private, unopened in his own soul; and he had not even any one who could appreciate the joke which was on the surface, and the pleasure he felt in raising rebellions in little Mab’s mind, in prepossessing her in Wat’s favor, in thwarting Alicia. He would not have thwarted her in anything else; he had the greatest respect for his wife, and it wanted only different circumstances, a change of position, to have made him the husband of husbands. But to thwart her on this point was delightful to him. He had set his heart upon it. It would be turning the tables also on his own people, which was agreeable too. “Yes,” he said, more seriously. “Poor boy! all the more that he will not know how little, in reality, he loses by the bargain that is being made over his head.”