أنت هنا
قراءة كتاب An English Squire
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
class="narrative">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