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.

The girls had their little grievances, too, but felt Wat’s grievance to be so much greater than theirs that they took up his cause vehemently, and threw all their indignation and the disapproval of their young intelligences into the weight of his. It was impossible that they could be as they were, young creatures full of life and active thought, without feeling what a mistake it all was, and how far the authorities of the family were wrong. They subjected, indeed, the decisions of the father and mother, but especially the father, as all our children do, to a keen and clear-sighted inspection, seeing what was amiss much more clearly than the wisest of us are apt to do in our own case. A little child of ten will thus follow and judge a philosopher, perhaps unconsciously in most cases, without a word to express its condemnation. The young Pentons were not so silent. They spoke their mind, in the perfect confidence of family intercourse, to their mother always, sometimes to their father too. And no doubt in pure logic, this criticism and disapproval should have dealt a great blow at the discipline of the house, and destroyed the principle of obedience. But fortunately logic is the last thing that affects the natural family life. Wat and Ally and Anne were in reality almost as obedient as were the little ones to whom the decisions of papa and mamma were as the law and the gospels. It had never occurred to them to raise any standard of rebellion; they did what they were told by sweet natural bonds of habit, by the fact that they had always done it, by the unbroken sentiment of filial subjection. The one thing did not seem to affect the other. It never occurred even to Wat to stop and argue the point with his father; he did what he was told, though afterward, when he came to think of it, he might think that his own way would have been the most wise.

The conversation which is set down in the last chapter did not give any insight into the family controversy that had been going on—being only, as it were, the subsiding of the waves after that discussion had come to an end. The subject in question was one which greatly moved and excited all the young people. Oswald, the second boy, who came next in the family after Anne, was the genius of the house. He was not much more than fifteen, but he had already written many poems and other compositions which had filled the house with wonder. The girls were sure that in a few years Lord Tennyson himself would have to look to his laurels, and Mr. Ruskin to stand aside; for Oswald’s gifts were manifold, and it was indifferent to him whether he struck the strings of poetry or the more sober chord of prose. Wat’s fraternal admiration was equally genuine and more generous, for it is a little hard upon a big boy to recognize his younger brother’s superiority; and it was dashed by a certain conviction that it would be for Osy’s good to be taken down a little. But Wat as much as the girls was agitated by the question which had been, so to speak, before a committee of the whole house. It was a question of more importance at Penton Hook than the fate of the ministry or the elections, or anything that might be going on in Europe. It was the question whether Osy should be continued where he was, at Marlborough, or if his education should be suspended till “better times.” Behind this lay a darker and more dreadful suggestion, of which the family were vaguely conscious, but which did not come absolutely under discussion, and this was whether Osy’s education should be stopped altogether, and an “opening in life” found for him. Nothing that had ever happened to them had moved the family so much as this question. The “better times” which the Pentons looked forward to could be nothing other than the death of Sir Walter and Mr. Penton’s accession to the headship of the family; and it was in the lull of exhaustion that followed a long discussion that Mrs. Penton made her suggestion about the propriety of an allowance being made to her husband as the heir of the property, which had led him into the expression of those general but discouraging ideas about entails and primogeniture. It had not perhaps occurred to Mr. Penton before; but now he came to think of it it seemed just of a piece with the general course of affairs, and of everything that had happened to him in the past, that new laws should come in at the moment and deprive him in the future of the heirship of which he had been so sure.

When Mr. Penton went out for his walk after the statement he had made of these possibilities, Wat and the girls went out too, on their usual afternoon expedition to the post. There was not very much to be done at Penton Hook, especially at this depressing time of the year when tennis was impracticable and the river not to be thought of. The only amusement possible was walking, and that is a pleasure which palls—above all when the roads are muddy and there is nowhere in particular to go to. It was Anne, in the force of her youthful invention, who had established the habit of going to the post. It was an “object,” and made a walk into a sort of duty—not the mere meaningless stroll which, without this purpose, it would turn to; and though the correspondence of the household was not great, Anne also managed that there should always be something which demanded to be posted, and could not be delayed. When there was nothing else she would herself dash off a note to one of the many generous persons who advertise mysterious occupations by which ladies and other unemployed persons may earn an income without a knowledge of drawing or anything else in particular. Alas! Anne had answered so many of these advertisements that she was no longer sanguine of getting a satisfactory reply; but if there was no letter to be sent off, nothing of her father’s about business, no post-card concerning the groceries, or directions to the dress-maker, or faithful family report from Mrs. Penton to one of her relations, such as, amid all the occupations of her life, that dutiful woman sent regularly, Anne could always supply the necessary letter from her own resources. It was on a similar afternoon to that on which the Pentons at the great house had discussed and thought of the poorer household; and a wintery sunset, very much the same as that on which Mr. Russell Penton and his wife had looked, shone in deep lines of crimson and gold, making of the river which reflected it a stream of flame, when the three young people, far too much absorbed in their own affairs to think of the colors in the sky or the reflections in the river, or anything but Osy and his prospects, and the state of the family finances, and the mistakes of family government, came down the hill from the level of the Penton woods toward their own home. The western sky, blazing with color, was on the left hand; but even the sky toward the north and east shared in the general illumination, and clouds all rose-tinted, concealing their heaviness in the flush of reflection, hung upon the chill blue, and seemed to warm the fresh wintery atmosphere before it sunk into the chill of night. The girls and their brother kept their heads together, speaking two at once in the eagerness of their feelings, and found no time for contemplation of what was going on overhead. A sunset is a thing which comes every evening, and about which there is no urgent reason for attention, as there was upon this question about Osy, which struck at the foundations of family credit and hope.

“When I left Eton,” said Wat with melancholy candor—“I had not much sense, to be sure—it seemed rather fine coming away to work at home. Fellows thought I was going to work for something out of the common way. I liked it—on the whole. When you are at school there is always something jolly in the thought of coming home. And so will Osy feel like me.”

“But you were never clever, Wat,” said the impetuous Anne.

This was perhaps a little hard to bear. “Clever is neither here nor there,” said Wat with a little flush. “It does not make much difference to your feelings; I suppose I can tell better how Osy will take it than one of you girls.”

“Oh no; for girls are more ambitious than boys, I mean boys that are just ordinary like the rest. And Osy is not like you. He is full of ambition, he wants to be something, to make a great name. I have the most sympathy with that. Ally and you,” cried the girl with a toss of her head like a young colt, “you are the contented ones, you are so easily satisfied; but not Osy nor me.”

“Contented is the best thing you can be,” said gentle Ally. “What is there better than content? Whatever trouble people take, it is only in the hope of getting satisfaction at the end.”

“I wish I was contented,” said Walter, “that is all you know. What have I got to be contented about? I have nothing to do; I have no prospects in particular, nothing to look forward to.”

“Oh, Watty—Penton!”

“Penton is all very well: but how can we tell when Sir Walter may die? No, I don’t want him to die,” cried the young man. “I wish no harm to him nor to any man. I only say that because—Of course, so long as Sir Walter lives Penton may be paradise, but it has nothing to say to us. And then, as father says, the law may be changed before that happens, or something else may come in the way. No, I don’t know what can come in the way; for after Sir Walter, of course father is head of the family, and I am the eldest son.” These words had a cheering effect upon the youth in spite of himself. He turned back to look up where the corner of the great house was visible amid the trees. The Pentons of the Hook knew all the spots where that view was to be had. He turned round to look at it, turning the girls with him, who were like two shadows. No prospects in particular! when there was that before his eyes, the house of his fathers, the house which he intended to transmit to his children! He drew a long breath which came from the very depths of his chest, a sigh of satisfaction yet of desire—of a feeling too deep to get into words. “I say, what a sunset!” he cried, by way of diverting the general attention from this subject, upon which he did not feel able to express himself more clearly.

They all looked for the first time at the grand operation of nature which was going on in the western sky. The heavens were all aglow with lines of crimson and purple, the blue spaces of the great vault above retiring in light ineffable far beyond the masses of cloud, which took on every tinge of color, preserving their own high purity and charms of infinitude. The great plain below lay silent underneath like a breathless spectator of that great, ever-recurring drama, the river gathering up fragments of the glory and flashing back an answer here and there in its windings wherever it was clear of the earthly obstructions of high banks and trees. Something of the same radiance flashed in miniature from the young eyes that with one accord turned and looked—but for a moment and no more. They noted the sunset in a parenthesis, by a momentary inference; what they had sought was Penton, with all its human interests. And then they turned again and faced the north, where lay their poor little home and the lowliness of the present, to which neither the sunset nor any other glory lent a charm.

“You are the eldest son,” said Anne, resuming without a pause; “that’s all about it. That makes everything different. Suppose it is right—or at least not wrong—for you to loaf about. But Osy hasn’t got Penton; he has got to make himself a name. If he is stopped in his education, what is he to do? You ought to speak to father; we all ought to make a stand. If Osy is stopped in his education it is quite different. What is he to do?”

“Father would never stop his education if he could afford it. It is the money. If we could only give up something. But what is there we can give up? Sugar and butter count for so little,” said Ally, in soft tones of despair.

“I should not mind,” said Anne, “if we did not get anything new for years.”

“We so seldom have anything new,” her sister said, with a sigh; there was so little to economize in this way. All the savings they could think of would not make up half the sum that had to be paid for Osy. Their young spirits were crushed under this thought. What could they do? The girls, as has been said, had answered a great many of those advertisements which offer occupation to ladies; they had tried to make beaded lace and to paint Christmas cards. Alas! that, like the butter and sugar, counted for so little. They might as well try to make use of the colors of the sunset as to make up Osy’s schooling in that way: and Wat was even more helpless than they. It was so discouraging a prospect that no one could say a word. They walked down with their faces to the grayness and dimness from whence night was coming, and their hopes, like the light, seemed to be dying away.

It was Anne, always the most quick to note everything that happened, who broke the silence. “What is that,” she cried, “at our door? Look there, wheeling in just under the lime-trees!”

“A carriage! Who can it be?”

“The Penton carriage! Don’t you see the two bays? Something must be up!” cried Walter, a flash of keen curiosity kindling in his eyes.

They stopped for a moment and looked at each other with a sudden thrill of expectation.

“No one has been to see us from Penton for years and years.”

“The carriage would not come for nothing!”

“It has been sent perhaps to fetch father!”

They hurried down with one accord, full of excitement and wonder and awe.