An English Squire

“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 was born to him. It seemed no moment for making such a disclosure. His grief for his brother sheltered the shock and surprise of the death of the poor young wife, and he satisfied his conscience by writing to the English clergyman who had solemnised his marriage, and desiring that he should baptise the boy according to the rites of the English Church. As this stipulation had been made at the marriage, Don Guzman allowed the order to be carried into effect. But as no desire was expressed by the father as to a name, it was christened Alvaro Guzman – the Spanish grandfather omitting the Gerald, which he felt had been an ill-omened name to his daughter.

Gerald himself, meanwhile, was almost ready to forget the little Alvar’s existence. He was ashamed of his foolish marriage, and remorseful at its secrecy and disobedience; the new life opened to him by his brother’s death was exceedingly congenial. Why could not those unhappy months be as if they had never been!

The child was of course an unfamiliar idea to him, and except with an occasional pang he hardly realised its existence; when the thought was forced on him, he regarded it with aversion.

Three months had not, however, passed since his wife’s death, when he became acquainted with a Miss Cheriton, a young lady of good family and some fortune. She was not very pretty; but she was full of intelligence and refinement, and she was very good. Perhaps the force of contrast was half the attraction. When his father urged him to pay his addresses to Miss Cheriton, he felt how willingly he would have done so, but an awkward disclosure lay between them. With all his faults he could not be so dishonourable as to marry her, without telling her that his heir was already born.

But the friendship between them, so different from anything that he had ever known before, grew and strengthened, till at last one evening he told her all the story. He had married foolishly and secretly, as far as his relations were concerned; his wife was dead and had left a little son. That was the story. Must it be for ever a bar between them? Fanny Cheriton listened, though she was a merry, quick-tongued girl, in silence. Then she said that he must tell his father the whole truth, and must acknowledge the child; he ought to come home and be brought up as an Englishman.

“Who is to bring it up?” asked Gerald.

“I will,” said Fanny simply, amid fierce blushes, as she saw what her answer implied.

Thus supported, Gerald would indeed have been a coward had he shrunk from the communication; but it was a great blow to his father, who, however, was a stronger man than his son; and having been satisfied that all was fair and legal, and that Alvaro Guzman Lester was really his lawful heir, and next to Gerald in the entail, said shortly, —

“Fetch him home, and make an Englishman of him if you can. What’s done can’t be undone.”

But when Gerald arrived at Seville, where Don Guzman lived, and where little Alvar had been taken, he found that by a strange coincidence the child had at once become of importance to his relations on both sides. By the death of Don Guzman’s son, Alvar had become his heir, and when Gerald expressed a desire to take him home, he was met by great reluctance, and by a declaration that the child was so delicate that a removal to a northern climate would certainly kill him. Perhaps Gerald’s consciousness that he would not regard the poor little fellow’s death as a misfortune, made him afraid to insist in the face of this argument. At any rate he returned without the child. Don Guzman’s indifferentism in religion allowed him to consent that Alvar should, when he grew old enough, be taught the English language and the Anglican faith, and even showed how this might be managed by means of an English clergyman residing at Seville for his health; so that he was left with a sort of understanding that his mother’s family were to have the charge of him for the present.

Miss Cheriton was much disappointed.

“Every year will make it harder,” she said, and she resolved to use all her influence on Alvar’s behalf. But her father-in-law’s death soon after her marriage deprived her of his powerful aid, and, though his will carefully assured the succession to his son’s eldest son, she could not contend with her husband’s distaste and the Spanish relations’ determination not to give up the child. She had no other troubles. Her husband shared her views as to the duties and responsibilities of his station, and they did much for the good of those around them.

In spite of some harshness, Gerald was a good landlord and a good magistrate, and the most loving of fathers to the fair rosy boy who was now born to them. He never cared quite so much for the younger ones, but “Cherry” was his delight and pride, so pretty, so clever, and so apt at riding his little pony, or learning to fire a gun, and so fond of his father! If Alvar could but have been forgotten!

But Mrs Lester was wise and far-seeing, and she would not allow Cheriton to forget. She talked to him about Alvar; she made him say his prayers for “my eldest brother away in Spain;” and she even caused him once to write a little letter expressing his wish to see his big brother, and to show him his pony and his dogs. Perhaps Alvar’s education was less advanced, for there only arrived a message of love from him in one of the rare letters that Don Guzman indited to Mr Lester.

Cherry was rather a thoughtful child; his mother had succeeded in impressing his imagination, and he thought and talked a good deal about Alvar. One attempt was made to bring the child to England; but, when he reached France, he fell ill, and his grandfather hurried him back again, assuring his father that it was impossible he could live in a northern climate. Mr Lester was too ready to believe this.

Soon after Cheriton went to school, Mrs Lester died suddenly, and her loss was greater than even Cheriton in his passion of childish grief could guess. Grief sharpened Mr Lester’s temper, and the loss of his wife’s influence narrowed his mind and character. His mother, who lived with him, and took care of the four children, did not urge on him the need for Alvar’s return. It ceased to be under discussion, and the intercourse grew less and less.

Cherry, in his school life, naturally forgot for the time to think much about him, and at home he had a thousand interests, some shared with his father, some of his own. For Cheriton and Jack inherited their mother’s talent, and as they grew up, had their minds full of many things out of their father’s ken. When Cherry was twenty-one, his birthday was celebrated with various festivities. He was very popular, and the tenants drank his health. Nature had given him a ready tongue, and the speech he made was much beyond the usual run of boyish eloquence. And as he concluded, thanking them for their kindness, he paused, and with a deep flush, added, “And I wish my eldest brother, who is now in Spain, was here too, that we might know him, and that you might drink his health as well as mine.”

“Cheriton, why did you say that?” said his father afterwards.

“Father, I thought they would forget Alvar’s existence, and – I was afraid of forgetting it myself.”

As Cheriton 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, nor were the softer and sweeter elements of the family life, few as they were, fostered by her influence.