‘I am perfectly satisfied,’ said Laurie; ‘and Ben is happy for the first time for some years. As for Frank, he must speak for himself; he has been dreaming, and it is sometimes unpleasant to wake up.’
‘If I have been dreaming, it was not for myself,’ said Frank; ‘a man with a family is so different from you fellows; but if it will be any satisfaction to you, I think I may say I am content, since better can’t be.’
And then he went up-stairs abruptly to dress. Alice had been waiting for him long, trembling a little, and not daring to believe anything till her authorised expositor of external events came to deliver the judgment to her. It did not seem right to Alice that Frank should not be the first in any distribution of prizes or honours. And yet she was not insensible to the claims of natural justice. ‘We should never have been able to give it up if it had come to us,’ she said to herself; ‘and it would have been contrary to all traditions of the family to disinherit Ben.’
‘You always told me he was to have it,’ she said, when Frank came in, with the remnants of his sulkiness still hanging about him. ‘You used to say if it came to you, you would give it up to Ben.’
‘And so I should, of course,’ said Frank; ‘the thing is, the fellow was so self-satisfied,—with a kind of look of pleasure that we were all cut out. That was what I could not stand.’
‘But don’t you think he meant to be good to us?’ Alice said, trying hard to smoothe her savage down.
‘Good to us, by Jove! but fortunately that’s all over,’ said Frank. ‘We are safe enough. No need to worry yourself over those blessed children any more. Poor little beggar! he won’t have much to look forward to; but still you may bring him up at home, and that is all you care for, you little goose,’ the young husband said, softening over the happiness in Alice’s eyes.
‘How much shall we have, Frank?’ she asked, with a sudden relapse into prudence.
‘Let me dress now,—and go and make yourself pretty,’ he said. ‘We shall not be so badly off; there will be something like a thousand a-year.’
And thus Frank Renton too acknowledged to himself that things might have been worse, and that he was content.