An English Squire. Coleridge Christabel Rose
ashamed. Perhaps her granddaughter was her favourite, and she rejoiced in the girl’s love for an outdoor life, and certainly did not discourage the outrageous idleness with which Nettie neglected the lessons she was supposed to learn of the governess at Oakby Rectory.
On the present occasion Cheriton found her in an unusually thoughtful mood. Her bright dark eyes were still so strong that she rarely used glasses; nor did she often give in to wearing a shawl; but her dress, which was scrupulously appropriate to her age and circumstances – handsome black silk, and soft white cap fastened under her chin – had an oddly inappropriate air on her tall, upright figure, and strong, marked features.
“Well, granny, so he’s really coming,” said Cheriton cheerfully, as he sat down opposite to her.
“Oh, your father’s been here,” said Mrs Lester. “We’ll have to do with him for a year, I suppose.”
“Oh, we’ll get on with him somehow. I mean to strike up a friendship,” returned Cherry boldly.
“You’ll be very soft if you do. Your father and I, remember, know what these Spaniards are like; they’re a bad lot – a bad lot.”
“Well, my father ought to know – certainly! But you see he has told us so little about them.”
“I have told my son that I think he couldn’t have chosen a worse time to have him home – just when you lads are all growing up, and ready to learn all the tricks he can teach you.”
“What tricks?” said Cheriton, feeling much insulted by the suggestion.
“D’ye think I’m going to teach you beforehand?”
“I assure you, granny,” said Cheriton impressively, “that the tricks I see at Oxford are such that it would be impossible for Alvar to beat them.”
“And what have you been up to now?” said his grandmother sharply.
“Why, granny, I really shouldn’t like to tell you the half of them. But I’m quite accustomed to ‘tricks,’ a monkey couldn’t be more used to them. There was that affair with the chapel door – ”
“Oh, don’t tell me your monkey tricks,” said his grandmother, with half-humorous indignation. “I know what they lead to; they’re bad enough. But your half-brother will smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish, and gamble before the lads on a Sunday. If those are your Oxford manners – ”
“Really,” said Cheriton seriously, “we have no reason to suppose that he will do anything of the kind; and if he did, the boys are very little in the mood to imitate him. I only hope they’ll be decently civil to him.” Mrs Lester was herself a much cooler and more imperturbable person than any of her descendants; but she was often the cause of irritation in others, from a calm persistency that ignored all arguments and refutation; and she was especially apt to come across Cheriton, whom she did not regard with the admiration due from a loving grandmother to a dutiful, handsome grandson.
“It’s a great misfortune, as I always told my son it would be. You, Cherry, are fond of strangers and outlandish ways, so maybe he’ll suit you.”
“Well, granny, I hope he may, and we’ll get you to come and light our pipes for us,” said Cherry, keeping his temper. But the coaxing sweetness that made him the one non-conductor of quarrels in a sufficiently stormy household, was apparently lost, for Mrs Lester went on, —
“He’ll suit the Seytons better than he’ll suit us.”
“There’s nothing to say against the Seytons now,” said Cheriton hotly; muttering under his breath, “I hate prejudice.” Mr Lester’s entrance interrupted the discussion, though a long story of a broken fence between his property and Mr Seyton’s did not give it a smoother turn.
As Mr Seyton’s fences had been in a disgraceful condition for at least as long as Cheriton could remember, he was well aware that the present grievance was only an outlet for a deeper-seated one, but his grandmother struck in, —
“Ah, Cheriton may see what it is to take to bad ways and bad connexions. I’ve been telling him his half-brother is likely enough to make friends with the Seytons, and bring their doings over here.”
“With a couple of boys younger than Jack,” cried Cheriton. “Any one would think, granny, that we had a deadly feud with the Seytons.”
“I’ll not hear the matter discussed,” loudly interposed Mr Lester. “Hold your tongue, Cherry. Alvar will have to mind what he is about. I’m sick of the sound of his name. If he had a good English one of his own it would be something.”
“Why hasn’t he, then?” was on the tip of Cherry’s tongue, but he suppressed it; and as his grandmother walked away, saying that it was time to dress for dinner, he got up and stood near his father.
“I say, dad, never mind; we’ll get along somehow,” he said.
The expression of passionate irritation passed out of Mr Lester’s face, and was succeeded by a look of regretful affection as he put his hand on his favourite son’s shoulder.
“I’d give half I’m worth, my boy, to undo it. It’s a wrong to you, Cherry – a wrong. It gives me no pleasure to think of the place in his hands after I’m gone.”
“Father,” interposed Cheriton firmly, “the only wrong is in speaking of it so. It is no wrong to any of us. And you know,” he added shyly and under his breath, “mamma would never let us think so.”
Mr Lester was a person who would not endure a touch on his tenderest feelings. He had never mentioned the young wife, whose word had been his law, to the son whom he adored for her sake, and who influenced his violent yet impressionable nature by the inheritance of hers. That influence led him to listen to the words which he could not controvert; but he did not love his unknown son the better for the pain which this defence of him had cost him. Cheriton felt that he had ventured almost too far, and he turned off the subject after a pause, by saying quaintly, —
“I wonder what the fox thinks of it all.”
“What d’ye mean?”
“Don’t you remember that old lady who came to see granny once, and when Jack and I raved about a day’s hunting, would say nothing but ‘I wonder what the fox thinks of it all?’ That was making the other side much too important, wasn’t it?”
“Ah, you’re ready with your jokes,” said his father, not wishing to follow out the little fable, but with a daily sense of liking for the voice and smile with which it was uttered. “Come, I’ll have a pipe with you before dinner.”
Chapter Four.
Strangers Yet!
“My mother came from Spain…
And I am Spanish in myself
And in my likings.”
It was late on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The hall at Oakby was full of branches of holly and ivy. Nettie, perched on the top of an oak cabinet, was sticking sprays into the frame of her grandfather’s picture, and Jack and Bob were arranging, according to time-honoured custom, a great bunch of bright-berried holly over the mantelpiece, to do which in safety was a work unattainable by feminine petticoats.
“It’s a great shame of Cherry not to come in time to help,” said Nettie.
“They’ll have got hold of him down at the church,” said Jack. “There, that’s first-rate.”
“I say, Jack, do you know Virginia Seyton came home yesterday? Isn’t it funny that they should have one too?”
“One what?”
“Why, a relation, a sister, when we’ve got a brother. I wonder – ”
Suddenly Nettie stopped, as a crash of wheels sounded on the frosty gravel, and the front-door bell pealed loudly.
“Oh, Jack!” and Nettie jumped off the cabinet at one bound, six feet high though it was, and caught hold of the end of Jack’s coat in a perfect agony