“Disapproving father is one thing,” said Wat, “but all the rest I do, and I don’t care if they know it or not. Penton ought to be mine. You and my father don’t think so--at least you think there are other things more important.”
Mrs. Penton looked at her boy from her husband’s judicial chair with a mild dignity with which Wat was unacquainted.
“Penton would not be yours,” she said, “if Sir Walter were dead now. Would you like to step into what is your father’s, Wat? Would you like to say he is only to live five years or ten years because the inheritance is yours? Your father will probably live as long as Sir Walter. I hope so, I am sure. He is fifty now, and that would be thirty-five years hence. Would Penton be yours, or would you be impatient for your father to die?”
“Mother!” they all cried in one indignant outcry, the three together.
“It looks as if you meant that. You don’t, I know--but it looks like it. Sir Walter may just as well live ten years longer, and your father thirty years after that, so that you would be sixty before you succeeded to Penton. Is it so much worth waiting for? Is it worth while showing yourself envious, dissatisfied with what your father is doing, unkind to your relations, because, forty or fifty years hence, perhaps--”
Walter got up from his chair, as a man is apt to do when the argument becomes intolerable. “Mother,” he said, “you know very well that not one of those intentions was in my mind. I don’t want to become bosom friends with people who are injuring us for their own advantage; but as to wishing my father a single hour, a single moment less--or even Sir Walter--” the youth cried, with a break in his voice.
“Oh,” cried Anne, with impatience, “as if mother did not know that! Mother, the others are dreadfully unreasonable. I’ll go.”
Mrs. Penton paused a little and cleared her throat. “I am afraid you are just the one that is not asked. I dare say your cousin thinks that you are not out, Anne: and no more you are, my dear.”
“She is as much out as I am, and we have always said when we went anywhere we should go together. Mother, if you wish it, of course I’ll go.”
“And equally of course I will go too,” said Walter, somewhat indignant to be left out, “when my mother puts it like that.”