The eldest surviving aunt, Mrs. Westbury, who was full of Renton traditions, almost went mad of this event, so afflicted was she by such a departure from use and wont. She had two boys of her own, whom she had steadfastly kept in the family groove, and, accordingly, had the very best grounds for her indignation. ‘But what was to be expected,’ she said, ‘from such a wife?’ Mrs. Renton was as harmless a soul as ever lay on a sofa, and had little more than a passive influence in the affairs of her family; but her husband’s sister, endowed with that contempt for the masculine understanding which most women entertain, put all the blame upon her soft shoulders. Two men-about-town, and a boy in the Guards! ‘Is Laurence mad?’ said Mrs. Westbury. It was her own son who had gone to the house in Calcutta, which might have mollified her; but it did not. ‘My boy has to banish himself, and wear out the best of his life in that wilderness,’ she said, vehemently, ‘while Ben Renton makes a fool of himself at home.’ When they brought their fine friends to the Manor for shooting or fishing, she had always something to say of her boy who was banished from all these pleasures; though, indeed, there had been a great rejoicing in the Westbury household when Richard got the appointment. It was but a very short time before her brother’s death that Aunt Lydia’s feelings became too many for her, and she felt that for once she must speak and deliver her soul.
‘Ben is to succeed you, I suppose?’ she said, perhaps in rather an unsympathetic way, as she took Mr. Renton to the river-side for a walk, under pretence of speaking to him ‘about the boys.’ He thought, poor man, that it was her own boys she meant, and was very good-natured about it. And then it was his favourite walk. The river ran through the Renton woods, at the foot of a steep bank, and was visible from some of the windows of the Manor. The road to it was a charming woodland walk, embowered in great beeches, the special growth of Berks. Through their vast branches, and round about their giant trunks, playing with the spectator’s charmed vision like a child, came glimpses of the broad, soft water, over which willows hung fondly, and the swans and water-lilies shone. Mr. Renton was not sentimental, but he had known the river all his life, and was fond of it;--perhaps all the more so as he found out what mistakes he had made, and that life had not been expended to so much purpose as it ought to have been; so that he walked down very willingly with his sister, and inclined his ear with much patience and good-nature to hear what she had to say about her boys.