An English Squire. Coleridge Christabel Rose
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“I have had a letter from – your brother; he has started on his journey, and will be here in a day or two.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then Cheriton said, —
“Well, father, I shall be very glad to see him. It’s a good time for him to come, and I hope we shall be able to make it pleasant for him.”
“Pleasant for him,” growled Bob.
“It won’t be at all pleasant for us,” said his sister. “Fancy a foreign fellow interfering in all our concerns. And Granny says he’s sure to set us a bad example.”
“Ay,” said the father, “you lads needn’t be in too great a hurry to get up an intimacy.”
“There’s not much fear of that,” said Cheriton.
“Ah, my boy,” said Mr Lester, turning to him, “you take it very well; but it’s hard on you; no one knows better than I do.”
“As for me,” said Cheriton, with a shade of the characteristic family gruffness in his much pleasanter voice, “you know it has always been my wish that he should come, and why should we set ourselves against it?”
“He ought to have come sooner,” said Jack.
“That’s no affair of yours, Jack,” said his father sharply. “Don’t be so ready with your comments. He is coming now, and – and I’ll hear no more grumbling. I’m hanged if I know what we are all to make of him, though,” he muttered as he left the hall.
“He’d better not interfere with me,” said Bob. “I shall take no notice of him.”
“Poor fellow!” said Cheriton satirically. “I won’t kiss him, I declare,” cried his sister.
“Now you boys, and Nettie, look here,” said Cheriton seriously. “Alvar is our father’s son and our brother. He is the eldest, and has his rights. That’s the fact; and his having lived all his life in Spain doesn’t alter it. And if his coming is strange to us, what will it be for him? Isn’t it an awful shame to set our backs up before we see him? Is it his fault?” Cheriton’s influence in the family was considerable, and the younger ones had no answer to his arguments; but influence and arguments are weak compared to prejudice; and no one answered till Jack grumbled out, —
“Of course we must do our duty by him, and perhaps he’ll improve.”
“On acquaintance,” suggested Cheriton, with half-suppressed fun. “Suppose he’s a finer fellow than any of us, and a better sort altogether. What shall we do then?”
“Oh, but he’s a foreigner, you know,” said Nettie, as if this settled the question. “Come, Bob, let’s go and see the puppies fed.”
“What I say is,” said Jack, as the twins went away and left their elders to a freer discussion, “that the thing has been left too late. Here is Alvar, – twenty-five, isn’t he?”
“Yes; he is only two years older than I am.”
“How can he turn into an Englishman? It’s all very well for you to chaff about it, and lecture the young ones; but the squire won’t stand him with patience for a day; there’ll be one continual row. Everything will be turned topsy-turvy. He’ll go back to Seville in a month.”
Cheriton was silent. He was older than Jack by nearly four years, and perhaps should not have attributed so much importance to the grumbling of his juniors; but his wider out-look only enabled him to see that their feelings were one-sided, it did not prevent him from sharing them; and the gift of a more sympathetic nature did but make him more conscious of how far these feelings were justifiable. Home life at Oakby had its difficulties, its roughnesses, and its daily trials; but what did this signify to the careless boys who had no dignity to lose, and by whom a harsh word from their father, or a rough one from each other, was forgotten and repeated twenty times a day? He himself had hardly grown into that independent existence which would make an unkindness from a brother an insult, an injustice from a father a thing to be resented beyond the day. It was still all among themselves, they knew each other, and suited each other, and stood up for each other against the world. They were still the children of their father’s house, and that tie was much too close and real for surface quarrels and disputes to slacken it. But this stranger, who must be the very first among them all, yet who did not know them, and whom they did not know, who had a right to this same identity of interest, and yet who would assuredly neither feel nor win it!
Jack accused his father of having acted unjustly to them all; the younger ones rebelled with a blind prejudice which they did not themselves understand. Cheriton was vividly conscious of the stranger’s rights, yet shrank from all they claimed from him; to the father he recalled resentment, weakness of purpose, and a youthful impulse, from the consequences of which he could not escape. The grandmother upstairs, no inconsiderable power in the Oakby household, formulated the vague distaste of her descendants, and strongly expressed her belief that a foreign heir would grieve his father, corrupt his brothers, and ruin his inheritance.
And now who was this foreign heir, this unknown brother, and what was the explanation of his existence?
Chapter Two.
The Son and Heir
“Love should ride the wind
With Spain’s dark-glancing daughters.”
Some six or seven and twenty years before the date when his sons were thus discussing their elder brother’s arrival, Gerald Lester, then a young man fresh from college, had been sent abroad by his father to separate him from a girl, somewhat his inferior in rank, for whom he had formed an attachment. He was not then his father’s heir, as he had an elder brother living, and he was supposed to be going to make his way at the bar; but though well-conducted and brilliantly handsome, his talents and tastes were not of an order to make success rapid or certain, and such a marriage as he had contemplated would have been, though he had a small independence, peculiarly inexpedient. Though at times passionate and defiant, he was not a person of much strength of will; and he yielded to the pressure put on him, partly from sense of duty – for he was by no means wanting in principle – and partly because it was too much trouble to resist.
The affair, however, left him in an unsettled state of mind, and increased his dislike to his profession. While wandering about in the south of Spain, he became acquainted, through some letters of introduction with which he had been provided, with a family of position of the name of De la Rosa. While staying with them he met with an accident which disabled him from travelling, and afforded him time and opportunity to flirt and sentimentalise with the beautiful Maria de la Rosa, who fell passionately in love with the handsome Englishman. Gerald’s feelings were more on the surface, but he was much carried away by the circumstances; he felt that he would make a poor return for the hospitality that had been shown him if he only “loved and rode away.”
He was enough irritated by the compulsion that his father had put upon him to feel glad to act independently; while the natural opposition of Don Guzman de la Rosa to his daughter’s marriage with a foreigner, stirred Gerald to more ardour than Maria’s dark eyes had already awakened. Her birth, at any rate, was all that could be desired, her religion ought not to be an objection in one so good and pious, and the nationality of his younger son’s wife could be of no consequence to old Mr Lester. Don Guzman was not a zealous Catholic, and he yielded at length to his daughter’s entreaties; the young Englishman’s small independence seeming, in the eyes of the frugal Spaniard, a sufficient fortune.
Gerald Lester and Maria de la Rosa were married at Gibraltar, the difficulties of a legal marriage between a Protestant and a Roman Catholic being almost insurmountable on Spanish territory. In Gibraltar they lived for some time; but the marriage was not a happy one. Maria was a mere ignorant child, with all her notions irreconcilably at war with her husband’s; and Gerald, who had his ideals, was very unhappy.
After some months, the sudden illness of his elder brother summoned him home, and while he was absent his child was born unexpectedly, and his young wife died. He learnt almost at once that he was his father’s heir, and that a son