An English Squire. Coleridge Christabel Rose

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СКАЧАТЬ spoke, it occurred to Mr Lester with new distinctness that he was really doing his second son a wrong, by allowing him to take for the time a place which could not be his permanently. This boy, with his ready tongue, his bright wit, and the look in his face that his father loved, was not his heir; was it well for him to act as if he were so? With a sudden resolution he wrote his eldest son a letter, requesting him to pay him a visit, and make his brothers’ acquaintance.

      Alvar, perhaps hurt at the long neglect, refused to do so, giving as a reason his grandmother’s serious illness, and his father gladly let the matter drop. Cheriton was disappointed, and asked to be allowed to spend his next long vacation in Spain, and to see his brother. Mr Lester, mindful of his own experiences, refused decidedly; and two years more had passed without any serious renewal of the subject (though Alvar’s grandmother died in a few months), when Mr Lester, while hunting, had a dangerous accident, and though he escaped comparatively unhurt, the thought would obtrude itself, “A little more, and my boys must have welcomed as the head of the family an absolutely unknown foreigner.” Under the influence of this feeling he wrote again to Alvar in a different strain, and received a different answer. Alvar agreed to come, and pledged himself to remain in England for a year, so as to have ample opportunity of becoming acquainted with his relations, and with the sort of life to which he was born as an English gentleman.

      Chapter Three.

      A Mother of Heroes

      “And the old grandmother sat in the chimney corner and spun.”

      Alvar Lester was coming home; but his image was so complete a blank to his brothers, that they could form no idea as to how it would become them to receive him. Jack, after lingering a little longer by the hall fire, observed that he could get nearly two hours’ reading before dinner, and went off to his usual occupations. Cheriton’s studies were, to say the least, equally important, as he was to take his degree in the ensuing summer; but now he shook his head.

      “I can’t fiddle while Rome is burning. There’s too much to think of, and I’m tired with skating. I shall go and see what granny has to say about it.”

      But when he was left alone, he still stood leaning against the mantelpiece. The Lesters were not a family who took things easily, and perhaps there was not one of them who shrank from the thought of the strange brother as much as he who had so persistently urged his return. Not all his excellent arguments could cure his own distaste to the foreigner. He was shy too, and could not tell how to be affectionate to a stranger, and yet he valued the tie of relationship highly, and could not carelessly ignore it. And he knew that he was jealous of the very rights of eldership on which he had just been insisting. Which of those things that he most valued were his own, and which belonged to the eldest son and heir of Oakby? What duties and pleasures must he give up to the newcomer? He did not think that any of their friends would cease to wish to see him at their houses, even if they included Alvar in their invitations.

      Certainly he had a much more powerful voice than his brothers in the management of the stable, and indeed of all the estate; but he held this privilege only by his father’s will; and probably Alvar would ride very badly, if at all. No – that sentiment was worthy of Bob himself! Certainly he could not understand English farming, if he were only half as ignorant of foreign countries as the clever English undergraduate, who did not feel quite sure if he had ever heard of any animals in Spain but bulls and goats, and could have sworn to nothing but grapes as a vegetable product of the peninsula. Nor could any stranger enter into the wants and welfare of his father’s tenants, nor be expected to understand the schemes for the amusement and improvement of the neighbourhood, with which Cheriton was in the habit of concerning himself.

      How could Alvar be secretary of a cricket club, or captain of a volunteer corps? No more than he could know each volunteer and cricketer, or be known by them, with the experience and interest of a life-time. “They wouldn’t hear of him,” thought Cherry. He was too young, and his father was too young, for his thoughts to move easily forward to the time when Alvar was to be the master; it was simply as elder brother that he regarded him. “He ought to carve, and sit at the bottom of the table when my father’s away!” And having come to this magnificent result of so much meditation, he laughed and shook himself, the ludicrous side of his perplexities striking him like a gleam of sunlight as he came to the wise resolution of letting things settle themselves as they came, and ran upstairs to his grandmother.

      The ground-floor of Oakby Hall consisted of the hall, before mentioned, on one side of which opened a billiard-room, and on the other a large, long library, containing a number of old books in old editions, in which Mr Lester took a kind of pride, though he rarely disturbed them in their places. There were some pictures, dark, dingy, but bearing honoured names, and much respected by the family as “old masters,” though Cheriton had once got into a great scrape by declaring that he had lived all his life in doubt as to whether a certain one in a corner was a portrait or a landscape, until, one exceptionally sunny day, he discovered it to be a fruit and flower piece.

      The room was panelled with dark oak and fitted up with heavy carved furniture, and curtains, which, whatever their original tint, were now “harmonious” with the fading of more than one generation. Three small, deeply-recessed windows looked out to the front, and at the end of the long room opposite the door was a large one facing westward, with thick mullions and a broad, low-cushioned window-seat. This window gave its character to the room, for through its narrow casements miles and miles of moor and fell were visible; a wide, wild landscape, marked by no conspicuous peaks, and brightened by no expanse of water, yet with infinite variety in its cold, dark northern colouring, and grandeur and freedom in its apparently limitless extent.

      Here was the place to watch sunset and moonrise, or to see the storms coming up or drifting away, and to hear them, too, howling and whistling round the house or dashing against the window-panes. The west window was one of the strong influences that moulded life at Oakby. This library was the Lesters’ ordinary living room; but behind it was a smaller and more sheltered one, called Mr Lester’s study, which he kept pretty much to himself.

      The dining-room was at the other side of the house, behind the billiard-room, and had a view of a hill-side and fir-trees. It contained all the modern works of art in the house – a large picture of Mr Lester and his second wife, their children, horses, and dogs, all assembled at the front-door; and a very stiff pink and white, blue-eyed likeness of Cheriton in hunting costume, which had been taken when he came of age.

      There was a fine old staircase with wooden wolves of inferior size, but equal ferocity, to their stone brethren without, adorning the corners of the balustrade, and above the library was the drawing-room, whither Cheriton now betook himself. It was a stiff, uninteresting room, but with an unmistakable air of stateliness and position, and though, like all the house, it lacked the living charm of living taste and arrangement, it possessed what even that cannot always give, and what is quite impossible to a new home without it – a certain air of rightness and appropriateness, as if the furniture had grown into its place. Still, the room, handsome as it was, and full of things which were choicer and more valuable than their owners knew, was uncomfortable, the chairs were high and the sofas were hard, and the yellow damask, with which they were covered, slippery; no one had a place of his own in it; the wild western view gave it an unhomely dreariness, hardly redeemed by an extra window looking south over the flower-garden, which in that bleak climate would have needed more fostering care than it ever obtained, to be very gay, even in summer. Now of course it was snowy and desolate.

      Only in this winter weather would Mrs Lester have been found in her arm-chair in the drawing-room; but an attack of rheumatism had recently reminded her of her seventy years, and obliged her to remain in the house, at any rate till the frost was over. She had lived with her son ever since his second wife’s death, and had kept his house, and in a manner presided over the education of his children; but though she was the only woman of the family, and an old woman and a grandmother, it was not from her that the boys looked for spoiling tenderness, СКАЧАТЬ