“I don’t pretend to understand politics,” she said, with great truth, “but I know nature,” which perhaps was not quite so true.
Mr. Penton was not at all moved by this little digression, he took no notice of the argument between the mother and the children. He was a man who inclined to the opinion that things were badly managed in this world, and that those who meant to do well had generally a hard fight. He thought that on the whole the worst people had the best of it, and that a man like himself, struggling to do as well as he could for his children, and to live as well as he could, and do his duty generally, was surrounded by hinderances and drawbacks which never came in the way of less scrupulous people. Such an opinion as this often fills a man with indignation and something like rage, but it did not have this effect upon Mr. Penton. It gave him a general sense of discouragement, a feeling that everything was sure to go against him; but it did not make him angry. Instead of pointing, as the Psalmist did, with wonder and indignation to the wicked who flourished like a green bay-tree, he was more disposed to regard this spectacle with a melancholy smile as the natural course of affairs. One might have known that was how it would be, his look said. And he was rather apt perhaps to identify himself as the righteous man who had no such good fortune to look for. He had followed his own train of thoughts while the others talked, and now he went on continuing the subject. “We never can tell,” he said, “one day from another what changes may be made in the law. Sir Walter is an old man, and it doesn’t seem as if there could be any changes in his time; but still a craze might get up, and the thing might be done all in a moment, which has been threatened ever since I can recollect. So I hope none of you will fill your heads with foolish thoughts of what may happen when Penton comes to me: for you see, for anything we know, it may never come to me at all.”
Having said this, he ceased twirling his thumbs, and rising up slowly cast a glance about him as if looking for his hat. He never brought his hat into the drawing-room, yet he always did this, just as a dog will try to scrape a hole in a Turkey carpet; and then Mr. Penton said, as if it was quite a new idea, “I think I’ll just take a little walk before tea.”
It was from an unusual quarter that the conversation was renewed. Ally, who was so like her mother, who had the same kind of light-brown hair shading her soft countenance, knotted low at the back of her head, the same fragile willowy figure and submissive ways, lifted up her head after the little pause that followed his exit, when they all instinctively listened, and followed him, so to speak, with their attention while he walked out of the house. Ally raised her head and asked, in a voice in which there was a little apprehension, “I wonder if father really thinks that; and what if it should come true!”
“Your father would not say it,” Mrs. Penton replied, always careful to maintain her husband’s credit, “unless he thought it, in a kind of a way. But, for all that, perhaps it may never happen. Things take a long time to happen,” she said, with unconscious philosophy. “We just worry ourselves looking for changes, and no change comes after all.”
“But such a thing might happen suddenly,” said Wat, thinking it necessary, in his father’s absence, to take up the serious side of the argument, “father is quite right in that. With all the extensions of the suffrage and that sort of thing, which you don’t understand, Ally, a change in the law that has been long talked about might happen in a moment. It all depends upon what turn things may take.”
“Then we may never go to Penton at all,” said Anne, jumping up and throwing her work into her mother’s large basket. “I have always been frightened for Penton all my life. It’s a horrid big chilly place that never would look like home. I like the little old Hook best, and I hope they will abolish primogeniture, or whatever you call it, and so Wat will have to do something and we shall all stay at home.”
“Anne! do you wish that your father should never come into his fortune,” her mother said, in a reproachful tone, “when you know his heart is set upon it? I am frightened myself sometimes when I think of the change of living, and having to give dinner-parties and all that; but when I think that Edward has never yet been in his right element, that he has never had the position he ought to have had—ah! for that I could put up with anything,” she said.
CHAPTER IV.
THE YOUNG PEOPLE.
The young people at Penton Hook were good children on the whole. They respected their father and their mother, and though they did not always agree in every domestic decision, with that holy ignorance which distinguishes childhood, they were not much less docile than the little ones in respect to actual obedience. At seventeen and eighteen, much more at twenty, a young soul has begun to think a little and to judge, whether it reveals its judgment or not. Anne had her own opinions on every subject by perversity of nature; and Wat, who was a man, and the heir, took on many points a very independent view, and could scarcely help thinking now and then that he knew better than his father. And even Ally, who was the quietest, the most disposed to yield her own way of thinking, still had a little way of her own, and felt that other ways of doing things might be adopted with advantage. They were great friends all three, each other’s chief companions: and among themselves they talked very freely, seeing the mistakes that were being made about the other children, and very conscious of much that might have been done in their own individual cases. Wat, for example, had much to complain of in his own upbringing. He had been sent for a year or two to Eton, and much had been said about giving him the full advantage of what is supposed to be the best education. But it had been found after awhile that the infallible recurrence of the end of the half, and the bills that accompanied it, was a serious drawback, and the annoyance given by them so entirely outbalanced any sense of benefit received, that at sixteen he had been taken away from school under vague understandings that there was to be work at home to prepare him for the University. But the work at home had never come to much. Mr. Penton had believed that it would be a pleasant occupation for himself to rub up his Latin and Greek, and that he would be as good a coach as the boy could have. But his Latin and Greek wanted a great deal of rubbing up. The fashions of scholarship had changed since his day, and perhaps he had never been so good a scholar as he now imagined. And then it was inconceivable to Mr. Penton that regularity of hours was necessary in anything. He thought that a mere prejudice of school-masters. He would take Wat in the morning one day, then in the afternoon, then miss a day or two, and resume on the fifth or sixth after tea. What could the hours matter? It came about thus by degrees that the readings that were to fit the young man for matriculation failed altogether, and no more was said about the University. Wat had no very strong impulse to work in his own person, but when he came to be twenty and became aware that nothing further was likely to come of it, he felt that he had been neglected, and that so far as education was concerned he had not had justice done him. Had he been a very intellectual young man, or very energetic, he would no doubt have been spurred by this neglect into greater personal effort, and done so much that his father would have been shamed or forced into taking further steps. But Wat was not of this noble sort. He was not fond of work; he had always seen his father idle; and it seemed to him natural. So that he, too, fell into the way of lounging about, and doing odd things, and taking the days as they came. They kept no horses, so he could not hunt. He had not even a gun, nothing better than an old one, which, now he was old enough to know better, he was ashamed to carry. So that those two natural occupations of the rural gentleman were denied to him. And it is not to be supposed that a boy could reach his twentieth year without feeling that an education of this kind—a non-education—had been a mistake. He knew that he was at a disadvantage among his fellow-boys or fellow-men. Whether he would have felt this as much had he been under no other disadvantages in respect to horses and guns and pocket-money, we do not venture to say; but, taking everything together, Wat could not but feel that he was manqué, capable of nothing, having no place among his kind. And if he felt doubly in consequence the importance of his heirship, and that Penton would set all right, who could blame him? It was the only possibility in that poor little dull horizon which at Penton Hook seemed to run into the flats of the level country, the mud and the mist, and the rising river, and the falling rain.