Mr. Penton waited through all the dreary day. He sent the young ones away peremptorily at the earliest opportunity, without throwing any light to them on the state of affairs. “It would be bad taste, the worst of taste, to have you here at such a time,” he said, but without explaining why. “Tell your mother I will come back when I can—but not before—” He spoke in ellipses, with phrases too full of meaning to be put into mere words.

“Mab is coming with us, father,” said Ally. “We couldn’t leave her here by herself.”

“Mab? Who is Mab?” said Mr. Penton, but he looked for no reply. His mind was too much absorbed to consider what they said to him. There seemed so little in their prattle that could not wait for another time. And his mind was full of a hundred questions. By this time, as was natural, the pathetic impression which had been made on him when he stood by his uncle’s bedside through those solemn moments, and felt that next to Alicia it was he, of all the world, who had the best right to be there, had died away. Common life had come back to him—his own position, the prospects of his family, what he was to do. He wandered about the house, up and down, with very much the air of a man inspecting it before taking possession, which was what he actually was. But no such consciousness was in his mind. He was overflowing with thought as to what he was to do in the new crisis at which he had arrived. It was a crisis which ought to have been long foreseen, and indeed had been fully entered into in detail many a day. But lately it had been put away from his thoughts, and other possibilities had come in. He had thrust Penton away from him, and allowed himself to feel the power of his wife’s arguments, and even to act upon the possible increase of fortune which should be immediate, and bring no responsibility with it. Gradually, and with a struggle, his mind had been brought to that point. But now all this new condition of affairs was gone, and everything restored to the old basis. The change had come in a moment, so far as he was concerned. He had not anticipated it, had not thought of it, until Sir Walter had suddenly lifted up his dying voice and began to talk of the boy. The boy! he did not realize even now, or scarcely ask himself, who was the boy. The crisis was too great for secondary matters. The real thing to think of was that the new deeds had never been signed nor completed, that no change had been made, that Penton was his, as he had always looked forward to it, not a new fortune unencumbered and free, but Penton with all its burdens, with all its honors, with the old family importance, the position of which he had so often heard, and so often said, that it was one of the best in England. Perhaps at any time he would have been startled and alarmed by the first consciousness of entering into this great inheritance. It was not an advancement that could be thought of lightly as mere getting on in the world. It was like ascending a throne. It was entering on a post rather than on a mere possession. The master of Penton had claims made upon him which were different, he thought, from those of a mere country gentleman. At any time there would have been solemnity in the prospect. But now that he had put it all away from him, and made up his mind to the other, to mere money without any position at all, and had calculated even on withdrawing from the smaller claims of Penton Hook, and setting up in perfect freedom, without any responsibilities, any land or burden of the soil, the awe with which he felt his natural importance come back to him, and all his plans brought to nothing, was great. It was as if Providence had refused to accept that sacrifice which he had not indeed been willing to make, which he had done not for his own pleasure but in deference to what seemed best for the children, more practicable for himself. Providence had made light of all those deliberations, of the mother’s arguments, and his own laborious and cloudy attempts to decipher what was best. Whether it was the best or the worst, in a moment God had changed all that, and here he was again at the point from which he had set out—master of Penton, or if not so already, at least in an hour or two to be.

And he looked, to the servants at least, exactly as if he were taking possession, inspecting his future property. He went from one room to another with eyes that seemed to be investigating everything, though in reality they saw nothing. He walked about the library with his hands in his pockets, looking at all the books, then from the windows over the park, which stretched away down to the river, and in which there was a great deal of wood that might come down. He lingered long over the view; was he marking in his mind the clumps which were thickest, where the trees most wanted cutting—the easiest way to make a little money? Then he went to the dining-room and looked in the same keen way at the plate upon the sideboard, calculating perhaps which were heir-looms and which were not. The butler had his eye upon the probable new master, and drew his own conclusions. And then he went to the drawing-room, where he remained a long time, looking at everything. The butler had a great contempt for the poor relation who was about to come into this great property. “I don’t know what he could find to do away with there,” that functionary said, and suggested that perhaps the painted roof was the thing that had occupied the speculations of the hungry heir. As it happened, poor Edward Penton’s reflections were of the most depressed kind. He asked himself what would she do there—how could she settle herself and her work-basket and the children among those gilded pillars? How were they ever to furnish it? as she had said. His wife after all was a woman of great sense. She knew how difficult it was to adapt one way of living to another, to transpose a household from what was little more than a cottage to what was little less than a palace. But now all her arguments were to come to nothing, and the revolution in his own mind to be set aside. He stood and shivered; for the heating had been neglected on this dismal and exciting day. The heating and everything else had been neglected, and the great room with one feeble fire burning was cold as any deserted place could be. What would she do there with Horry and the rest of the little ones, and her basket with the stockings to darn? Ally had asked herself the same question, but with a sort of awed satisfaction, feeling that this problem would never have to be solved. But now it had come. He strayed at last from the drawing-room through the corridor to the great room sometimes called the music-room, for there was an organ in it, sometimes called the king’s room, since a sacred majesty had once, as at Lady Margaret Bellendean’s castle of Tillietudlem, broken his fast there—where the dancing had been. And here it was that the disorganization of the household became apparent. Shutters were still closed and curtains drawn in this room. The pale light struggled in by every crevice, by the folds of the shutters, from the large open chimney, which was filled with flowers. The walls were hung with greenery, garlands of ivy and holly, and feathery bunches of the seed-pods of the clematis. They had been beautiful last night; they were ghastly now, looking as if they had hung there for fifty years. There was something in the neglect, in the deserted place, in the contrast of all that faded decoration with the stillness and desolation of the day, that suited Edward Penton’s mood. The rest of the house suggested life and its ordinary occupations, neither sad nor glad, but serious and still. This was the banquet-hall deserted, which is of all human things the most dismal and suggestive. He walked up and down looking at the banks of flowers, half seen in this curious subdued and broken light. Here it was that the children were dancing, timid strangers, half afraid of it, and of all that was going on, last night: and now to-day—

Solemn steps came in at the other end, slowly advancing over the waxed and slippery floor; a solemn figure in black, more grave than ever mourner was, holding its hands folded. “Sir,” the butler said, “my mistress has sent me to tell you all is over, about a quarter of an hour ago.”

“All over! You mean, my uncle is dead?”

“Sir Walter Penton died, sir, about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour ago, at twenty-five minutes past three.”

The butler took out his watch and looked at it with solemnity. “Just twelve minutes since, sir, by the clock, sir.”

It cost the man a great effort not to say Sir Edward. Sir Edward it had been for twelve minutes by his watch; but the decorum and a sense that he was himself on the other side restrained him. He paused a minute, waiting for anything that might be said to him, then went back again, his footsteps sounding solemnly all the way upon the uncarpeted floor. Edward Penton sat down on one of the red chairs against the wall which the dancers had used. A more forlorn picture could not have been made. The day breaking in through the shutters, the drooping decorations, the waxed floor reflecting faintly those lines of pale light, and the man against the wall with his face hidden in his hands. He might have been a ruined spendthrift hearing of the final catastrophe of his fortune, hearing it with metaphorical propriety, amid the relics of feasting and merry-making. But no one would have recognized that picture to represent a man who had just come into his inheritance.

He met Rochford going away as he returned to the inhabited parts of the house. “I suppose I need not hesitate to congratulate you,” the lawyer said. “Sir Edward, it is not as if the poor old gentleman had been a nearer relation.”

“I don’t know what you call near. My uncle was the nearest relation I had of my name; nor why you should call him poor because he has just died.”

“I beg your pardon. I meant nothing; it is the ordinary way of talking,” said the lawyer, somewhat abashed.

“And a very inappropriate one, I think,” Edward Penton said. He had relapsed into his usual manner, in which there was always a little suppressed irritation. “I suppose there never was any possibility of producing—” He looked at the bag which Rochford carried.

“It is all so much waste paper,” said the young man. “I felt it was so as soon as I saw him; even if we could have got him to sign it would have been of no legal value; he was too far gone. It is curious,” he added, “to be so nearly done, and yet not done. I wonder if you are sorry or pleased?”

Edward Penton made no reply. Rochford’s ease and familiarity had seemed natural enough a few days ago, the conceit perhaps of a youngster, nothing more. Now it offended him, he could not tell why. “Do you know,” he said, “if my cousin is still there?” He made a movement of his hand toward the room in which Sir Walter lay.

“She has gone to her own room; they have persuaded her to lie down. Mr. Russell Penton is about, I know, if you want to see him.”

Edward Penton went on with another wave of his hand. It was not so much his new position (though as a matter of fact he felt that), but the change in all things, and the confused absorbing sentiment of all that had happened which made his companion disagreeable to him, like a presuming stranger. He himself was as a man in a dream. As he came through those rooms again they too were changed. They were now his. All that foolish idea of having nothing more to do with them was past forever. They were now his. He walked through them with the step of the master, thinking involuntarily how this and that must be changed. The house had become to him a place no longer to be judged on its merits as suitable or unsuitable for the habitation of his family, but one to be adapted, arranged, borne with as being his own. Everything had changed—himself and his surroundings, his future, his place in the world, and the mind with which he approached that place. In the library, to which he returned as the room in which he was most likely to meet some one to whom he could talk, he found Russell Penton, and the two men instinctively shook hands with each other as if they had not met before.

“I hope there was no more suffering,” Edward Penton said.

“None. He never recovered consciousness, but just slept away. No man could have wished a calmer end. He has had a long life, and his dying has been very peaceful. What more could a man desire?”

Edward Penton bowed his head, and they stood together for a moment saying nothing, paying their tribute not only to the life but to the state of affairs that was over. They both felt it, the one as much as the other. To Russell Penton it was, if not actual, at least possible freedom, especially now that the Penton arrangement was over. He grieved for his father-in-law, if not painfully, yet sincerely. He was a venerable figure, a sustaining personality gone out of his life. He had so much less to do and to think of, which was in its way a sorrowful thought. But with that came the secret exhilaration of the consciousness that now perhaps the guidance of his own life would be his own. He would not oppose Alicia nor endeavor to coerce her; that would be the greatest mistake, he felt; but it was likely enough that in her softened state she would of her own accord subdue herself to this. At least, he hoped so, and it spread before him the prospect of a new existence. After they had stood together silent for a minute, Russell Penton spoke.

“I think I ought to say this,” he said. “Whatever Alicia may feel, and I fear she will be disappointed, I am myself much more pleased, Penton, that things should be as they are.”

“I thought that was your feeling all along.”

“Yes, they both knew it was; but I have always abstained from saying anything. My first desire was that she should as much as possible have what she liked best. She has well deserved it at my hands.”

Edward Penton said nothing on this subject. It was not one in which he could deliver his opinion. “It is a great house,” he said, “and a great responsibility for a man with a large family like me.”

“You will find it perhaps easier than you think; everything is in very perfect order. Alicia would like me to tell you, Penton, that though it was too late to be added as a codicil, her father’s wish is sacred to her, and that it shall be as he desired about your boy.”

“My boy! do you mean Wat? What has he to do with it?” Edward Penton cried, half affrighted. He who had so nearly parted with the birthright himself, he was a little jealous of any interference now: and especially of this, that the feelings of his son should be brought into account in the matter.

“You heard what Sir Walter said. Your son took his fancy very much. He found a resemblance, which I also can see: but Alicia dislikes to hear of it, and so will you, perhaps.”

“A resemblance!” said Edward; and then he thought of Walter Penton, his cousin. If Wat had not been like that unfortunate scapegrace why should he have thought of him now? He said, with energy, “There is no resemblance. They have dwelt so long on the memory of the boys that everything they see seems to have got identified with them. It was not so in their life. My boy Wat is more like—Why, you know, Russell; you remember what a broken-down miserable—”

“Hush!” said Russell Penton, lifting his hand. “Let their memory be respected here. Alicia thinks with you; she sees no resemblance: but she will give effect to her father’s wishes. Everything he desired is sacred in her sight.”

“I hope she will think no more of it,” said Edward Penton, growing red. “Beg of her from me to think no more of it. I could not have—I should not wish—in short, I should prefer nothing more to be said on the subject. He was an old man. His memory had got confused. As I can not be of any use here, can I have something to drive home? My wife will be anxious, she will want to know.”

And then there was a few minutes’ brief conversation about the funeral and all the lugubrious business of such a moment. It was with a sense of relief that Edward Penton quitted for the first time the house that was his own. He looked back upon it with curiously mingled feelings. He was glad to get away. It was an escape to turn out of the avenue into the clear undisturbed air in which there was nothing to remind him of the close still atmosphere, the silence, the associations of this fatal place. But yet when he looked back his heart swelled with a sensation of pride. It was his. He had given up thinking of it, avoided looking at it, weaned his heart in every way from that house of his fathers. Never man had tried more honestly than he to give it up, entirely and from the bottom of his heart—this thing which was not to be for him. And now, without anything that could be called his doing, lo! it had come back into his hands. It was the doing of Providence, he thought: his heart swelled with a sort of solemn pride. As he went silently along, the landscape took another aspect in his sight. It was the country in which he was to spend all the rest of his life. It was his country, in which he was one of the chief people, a man important to many, known wherever he passed. By degrees a strange elation got into his mind. “Drive quickly, I am in haste to get home,” he said to the groom who drove him. “Yes, Sir Edward,” said the man, respectfully. He had changed his very name—everything was changed. Then as the red roof of Penton Hook appeared below at the foot of the hill he thought of the anxious faces looking out for him, the young ones with awe in them, thinking of the first death that had crossed their way; his wife wistful, ready to read in his face what had happened. But none of them knowing what had really happened—that Penton was his after all.

END OF FIRST HALF.

A POOR GENTLEMAN.

By MRS. OLIPHANT
SECOND HALF
NEW YORK:
GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER,
17 to 27 Vandewater Street.

A POOR GENTLEMAN.