An English Squire

After this picture had been put away, Jack began to look round and to relieve the impression made on him by a little artistic conversation, evidently carefully studied from the latest Oxford authorities. He looked at the pictures on the wall, found fault so correctly with what would have naturally been pleasing to him, and admired so much what a few months before he would have thought hideous, that Cheriton’s eyes sparkled with fun, and Alvar, for once appreciating the humour of the situation, said, —

“We must ask Jack to write a book about the pictures at Oakby;” while Gipsy, seeing it all, laughed, spite of herself.

“Ah, Gipsy, he is carrying his lady’s colours, like a true knight,” said Cherry softly, as Jack faced round and inquired, —

“What are you laughing at?”

“Who lectures on art at Oxford, Jack?” said Cherry. “What a first-rate fellow he must be!”

“Ah, he is indeed a great teacher,” said Alvar, “who has taught Jack to love art.”

“A mighty teacher,” said Cherry, under his breath.

“Of course,” said Jack, “as one sees more of the world, one comes to take an interest in new fields of thought.”

“Why, yes,” said Gipsy, recovering from Cherry’s words, and flying to the rescue, “we all learned a great deal about art at Seville.”

“My dear,” said Mrs Stanforth, “aren’t you going to show them the knights?”

For she thought to herself that if a year was to pass before Jack’s intentions could meet with an acknowledgment, his visits had better be few and far between, especially in the presence of Cherry’s mischievous encouragement. “Mr Stanforth himself being as bad,” as she afterwards remarked to him.

Now, however, Mr Stanforth turned his easel round and displayed the still unfinished picture for which he had begun to make sketches in Spain, when struck with the contrast of his new acquaintances, and with the capabilities of their appearance for picturesque treatment.

The picture was to be called “One of the Dragon Slayers,” and represented a woodland glade in the first glory of the earliest summer – blue sky, fresh green, white blossoms, and springing bluebells and primroses, all in full and yet delicate sunshine – a scene which might have stood for many a poetic description from Chaucer to Tennyson, a very image of nature, the same now as in the days of Arthur.

Dimly visible, as if he had crawled away among the brambles and bracken to die, was the gigantic form of the slain dragon, while, newly arrived on the scene, having dismounted from his horse, which was held by a page in the distance, was a knight in festal attire – a vigorous, graceful presentment of Alvar’s dark face and tall figure – who with one hand drew towards him the delivered maiden, a fair, slender figure in the first dawn of youth, who clung to him joyfully, while he laid the other in eager gratitude on the shoulder of the dragon slayer, who, manifestly wounded in the encounter, was leaning against a tree-trunk, and who, as he seemed to give the maiden back to her lover, with the other hand concealed in his breast a knot of the ribbon on her dress; thus hinting at the story, which after all was better told by the peculiar beaming smile of congratulation, the look of victory amid strife, of conquest over self and suffering – a look of love conquering pain, which was the real point of the picture.

Jack stood looking in silence, and uttering none of his newly-acquired opinions.

“Is it right, Jack?” said Mr Stanforth. “Yes, I know,” said Jack briefly; and then, “Every one will know Alvar’s portrait. And who is the lady?”

“She is a little niece of mine – almost a child,” said Mr Stanforth; while Cheriton interposed, —

“It is not a group of photographs, Jack. Of course the object was the idea of the picture, not our faces.”

“Well, Cherry,” said Mr Stanforth smiling, “your notion of sitting for your picture partakes of the photographic. You did not help me by calling up the dragon slayer’s look.”

“That was for the artist to supply,” said Cherry; “but it seems to me exactly how the knight ought to have looked.”

“For my part,” said Alvar, “I should not have liked to have been too late.”

“It is very beautiful,” said Jack; “but I don’t think I approve of false mediaevalism. At that date these fellows would have fought, and the best man would have had the girl.”

“Pray, at what date do you fix the dragon?” said Cherry.

“Jack is as matter-of-fact as the maiden herself,” said Mrs Stanforth, “who will not be happy because her uncle will not tell her if the knight got well and married somebody else.”

“No – no, mamma,” said one of the Stanforth girls, “he did no such thing; he was killed in King Arthur’s last battle. We settled it yesterday – we thought it was nicer.”

“You don’t think he gave in to the next dragon?” said Cherry, half to tease her.

“No, indeed, that knight never gave in. Did he, papa – did he?”

“My dear Minnie, I am not prepared with my knights’ history. There they are, and I leave them to an intelligent public, who can settle whether my object was to paint sunlight on primroses, or a smile on a wounded knight’s face – very hard matters both.”

“Don’t you really like it?” said Gipsy aside to Jack.

“Oh, yes,” said Jack uneasily, “I have seen him look so. I know what your father means. But I hate it. I’d rather have had a picture of him as he used to be, all sunburnt and jolly. Yes, I know, it’s the picture, not Cherry; but I don’t like it.”

Gipsy demurred a little, and they fell into a long talk in the twilight garden. Jack kept his promise, he did not “make love” to her, but never, even to Cheriton, had he talked as he talked then, for if he might not talk of the future, he could at least make Gipsy a sharer in all his past. When Cheriton came out upon them to call Jack away, they looked at him with half-dazzled eyes, as if he were calling them back from fairy-land.

The dinner-party at Lady Cheriton’s offered no such chances, though it was a gathering together quite unexpected by some of the party. Lady Cheriton, when the question of a school for Nettie had been discussed, had renewed her offer of having her to share the studies of her younger daughters; and Cheriton, who thought that Nettie in a London boarding-school would be very troublesome to others and very unhappy herself, had succeeded in getting the plan adopted. So here she was, dignified and polished, in her long black dress, and bent, so said her aunt, in a silent and grudging fashion, on acquiring sufficient knowledge to hold her own among other girls. She was wonderfully handsome, and so tall that her height and presence marked her out as much as her intensely red-and-white complexion and yellow hair. There, too, were Virginia and her brother Dick, Cherry being guilty of assuring his aunt that there was no reason why Alvar should not meet them. For Dick’s examination had at length been successfully passed, and an arrangement had been made that he should board with some friends of Mr Stanforth’s, and Virginia had availed herself of an invitation from Lady Cheriton to come to London with him.

“You did not tell me she was coming,” said Alvar angrily to Cheriton.

“It is impossible that you should avoid so near a neighbour,” replied Cherry.

“I do not like it,” said Alvar; and the effect on him was to shake his graceful self-possession, make him uncertain of what he was saying, and watch Virginia as she talked to Cherry of Dick’s prospects, with a look that was no more indifferent than the elaborate politeness of Jack’s greeting to Miss Stanforth. She was more self-controlled, but she missed no word or look. But if Cheriton had played a trick on his brother, he himself received a startling surprise when Mr and Mrs Rupert Lester were announced. “You cannot avoid meeting your cousins” was as true as his excuse to Alvar; but he could not help feeling himself watched; and as for Ruth, her brilliant, expressive face showed a consciousness which perhaps she hardly meant to conceal from him as she looked at him with all the past in her eyes. Ruth liked excitement, and the situation was not quite disagreeable to her; but while her look thrilled Cheriton through and through, the fact that she could give it, broke the last thread of his bondage to her. She made him feel with a curious revulsion that Rupert was his own cousin, and that she had tried to make him forget that she was his cousin’s wife; and as, being a man, he attributed far too distinct a meaning to the glance of an excitable, sentimental girl, it repelled him, though the pain of the repulsion was perhaps as keen as any that she had made him suffer. He did not betray himself, and it was left to Jack to frown like a thunder-cloud.

When Cheriton came out of the dining-room, Nettie pursued him into a corner, and began abruptly, —

“Cherry, I want to speak to you. When Jack went to Spain did he tell you anything about me?”

“Nothing that I recollect especially,” said Cherry, surprised.

“Well, I am going to tell you about it. Mind, I think I was perfectly right, and Jack ought to have known I should be.”

“Have you and Jack had a quarrel, then?”

“Yes,” said Nettie, standing straight upright, and making her communication as she looked down on Cherry, as he sat on a low chair. “I taught Dick to pass his examination.”

“You!”

“Yes. You know he wouldn’t work at anything, and I used to make him come and say his lessons to me – the kings of England, you know, and the rivers, and populations, and French verbs. Well, then, if he didn’t know them, I made him learn them till he did. But of course he didn’t wish any one to know, so we had to get up early, and sit in the hay-loft, or down by the bridge. I could not help the boys knowing that Dick and I went out together, and at last Jack found us in Clements’ hay-loft. Dick ran away, but Jack was very angry with me, and insulted me; and Cherry – he went and told papa, and they sent me to London. But I never told the reason, because I had promised Dick. Now, Cherry, wouldn’t it have been very wrong to give up the chance of doing Dick good because Jack chose to be ridiculous? It just made him succeed, and perhaps he will owe it to me that he is a respectable person, and earns his living. You would have helped him, wouldn’t you?”

“Why, yes,” said Cherry; “but that is not quite the same thing.”

“Because I am a girl. Cherry, I think it would be mean to have let that stop me. But now he is through, I shall never do it again, of course; and, Cherry, indeed I meant it just as if he had been a ploughboy.” Here Nettie hung her tall head, and her tone grew less defiant.

“But, after all, Nettie, you should not have done what you knew granny and father would not like,” said Cherry, much puzzled what to say to her.

“It was because papa never knew that I told you,” said Nettie rapidly.

Cheriton asked a few more questions, and elicited that Nettie had, very early in their intimacy, taken upon herself the reform of Dick, and had domineered over him with all the force of a strong will over a weak one. Nettie had acted in perfect good faith, and had defied her brother’s attack on her; but as the lessons went on, her instinct had taught her that Dick found her attractive, and came to learn to please himself, not her. The girl had all the self-confidence of her race, and having set her mind on what she called “doing good” to Dick, she defied her own consciousness of his motives, having begun in kindness dashed with considerable contempt. But lazy Dick had powers of his own, and by the time of her quarrel with Jack, Nettie had felt herself on dangerous ground. “I shan’t marry – no one is like our boys,” she said to herself; but there was just a little traitorous softening and an indefinite sense of wrong-doing which had made her seek absolution from Cheriton, and with the peculiar absence of folly, which was a marked characteristic of the slow-thinking twins, she gave herself the protection of his knowledge.

Cheriton’s impulse was to take up Jack’s line and give her a good scolding, but he was touched by her appeal, and had learned to weigh his words carefully. He said something rather lame and inadequate about being more particular in future, but he gave Nettie’s hand a kind little squeeze, and she felt herself off her own mind. It had been a curious incident, and had done much to make Nettie into a woman – too much of a woman to look on her protégé with favouring eyes. Dick, too, was likely to find other interests, but Nettie had helped to give him a fair start, and her scorn of his old faults could never be quite forgotten.

Chapter Five.

A New Suggestion

“Once rememberYou devoted soul and mindTo the welfare of your brethrenAnd the service of your kind,Now what sorrow can you comfort?”

Soon after the scenes recorded in the last chapter, Alvar received a letter from Mrs Lester, in which she thanked him, in a dignified and cordial manner, for his proposal that the home at Oakby should go on as usual, but said she did not consider that her residence there would be for the happiness of any one. During her son’s married life she had lived in a house at Ashrigg, which was part of the Lester property, and was called The Rigg. This was now again vacant, and she proposed to take it, making it a home for Nettie, and for any of her grandsons who chose so to consider it. The great sorrow of her dear son’s death would be more endurable to her, she said, anywhere but at Oakby. The neighbourhood of the Hubbards would provide friends for herself and society for Nettie, who would be very lonely at Oakby in her brothers’ constant absences. Alvar was sincerely sorry. He was accustomed to the idea of a family home being open to all, and did not, in any way, regard himself as trammelled by his grandmother’s presence there, while Cheriton was utterly taken by surprise, and hated the additional change and uprooting. He did not think the step unwise, especially as regarded Nettie, but he marvelled at his grandmother’s energy in devising and resolving on it. He had expected a great outcry from Nettie, but she proved not to be unprepared, and said briefly, “that she liked it better than staying at home now.”

“But you will not desert me?” said Alvar. “Shall I drive you too away from your home?”

“No,” said Cherry. “No, I’ll come home for the holidays, and the boys, too, if you will have them; though I suppose granny will want to see us all sometimes.”

“I wish that I could take you home now,” said Alvar. “I think you are tired with London – you see too many people.”

Cheriton coloured a little at the allusion, but he disclaimed any wish to leave London then, shrinking indeed from breaking through the externals of his profession. It ended by Alvar going down to meet his grandmother at Oakby, and to make arrangements for the change, during which he proved himself so kind, courteous, and helpful to her, that he quite won her heart; and Nettie, on her return, was astonished at hearing Alvar’s judgment deferred to, and “my grandson” quoted as an authority, on several occasions.

Jack, after a few days in London, joined a reading party for the first weeks of the vacation; and Bob, on his return from the gentleman who was combining for him the study of farming and of polite literature, joined Nettie in London, and took her down to Ashrigg; so that the early part of August found only Cheriton and Alvar at Oakby.

Cherry liked this well enough, for though the house could not but seem forlorn and empty to him, daily life was always pleasant with Alvar, and he would have gladly helped him through all the arrears of business that came to hand. These were considerable, for Mr Lester’s subordinates had not been trained to go alone, and none of them had been allowed universal superintendence. Cheriton thought that Alvar required such assistance, and that he ought to have an agent with more authority; but oddly enough he did not take to the proposal, and in the meantime he made mistakes, kept decisions waiting, failed to recognise the relative importance of different matters, and, still worse, of different people.

One afternoon, towards the end of August, Cheriton went over to Elderthwaite. What with business at home, expeditions to Ashrigg, and a great many calls on his attention from more immediate neighbours, he had not seen very much of the parson, and as he neared the rectory he beheld an unwonted sight in the field adjoining, namely, some thirty or forty children drinking tea, under the superintendence of Virginia and one of the Miss Ellesmeres.

“Hallo, Cherry,” said the parson, advancing to meet him; “where have you been? Seems to me we must have a grand – what d’ye call it? – rural collation before we can get a sight of you.”

“As you never invited me to the rural collation, I was not aware of its existence,” said Cherry laughing, as Virginia approached him.

“Oh, Cherry, stay and start some games,” she said. “You know they are so ignorant, they never even saw a school-feast before.”

“Then, Virginia, I wonder at you for spoiling the last traces of such refreshing simplicity. Introducing juvenile dissipation! Well, it doesn’t seem as if the natural child wanted much training to appreciate plum-cake!”

“No; but if you could make the boys run for halfpence – ”

“You think they won’t know a halfpenny when they see one.”

“Do have some tea!” said Lucy Ellesmere, running up to him. “Perhaps you are tired, and Virginia has given them beautiful tea, and really they’re very nice children, considering.”

So Cherry stayed, and advanced the education of the Elderthwaite youth by teaching them to bob for cherries, and other arts of polite society, ending by showing them how to give three cheers for the parson, and three times three for Miss Seyton; and while Virginia was dismissing her flock with final hunches of gingerbread, the parson called him into the house.

“Poor lassie!” he said; “she is fond of the children, and thinks a great deal of doing them good; but it’s little good she can do in the face of what’s coming.”

“How do you mean?” said Cheriton. “Is anything specially amiss?”

“Come in and have a pipe. A glass of wine won’t come amiss after so much tea and gingerbread.”

They went into the dining-room, and the parson poked up the fire into a blaze, for even August afternoons were not too warm at Elderthwaite for a fire to be pleasant, and as he subsided into his arm-chair, he said gravely, —

“Eh, Cherry, we Seytons have been a bad lot – a bad lot – and the end of it’ll be we shall be kicked out of the country.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said Cherry, quite sincerely. “What is the matter?”

“Well, look round about you. Is there a wall that’s mended, or a plantation preserved as it ought to be? Look at the timber – what is there left of it? and what’s felled lies rotting on the ground for want of carting. There’s acres of my brother’s hay never was led till the rain came and spoiled it. Look at the cottages. Queenie gets the windows mended, but she can’t make the roofs water-tight. Look at those woods down by the stream, why, there’s not a head of game in them, and once they were the best preserves in the country!”

“Things are bad, certainly,” said Cherry.

“And yet, Cherry, we’ve loved the place, and never have sold an acre of it, spite of mortgages and everything. Well, my brother’s not long for this world. He has been failing and failing before his time, and though he has led a decent life enough, things have gone more to the bad with years of doing nothing, than with all the scandals of my father’s time.”

“Is Mr Seyton ill?” said Cheriton.

“Not ill altogether; but mark my words, he’ll not last long. Well, at last, he was so hard up that he wrote to Roland – and I know, Cheriton, it was the bitterest pill he ever swallowed – and asked his consent to selling Uplands Farm. What does Roland do but write back and say, with all his heart; so soon as it came into his hands he should sell every acre, house and lands, advowson of living and all, and pay his debts. He hated the place, he said, and would never live there. Sell it to the highest bidder. There were plenty of fortunes made in trade, says he, that would give anything for land and position. So there, the old place’ll go into the hands of some purse-proud stranger. But not the church – he shan’t go restoring and improving that with his money. I’m only fifty-nine, and a good life yet, and I’ll stick in the church till I’m put into the churchyard!”

Cherry smiled, it was impossible to help it; but the parson’s story made him very sad. He knew well enough that it was a righteous retribution, that Roland’s ownership would be a miserable thing for every soul in Elderthwaite, and that the most purse-proud of strangers would do something to mend matters; and yet his heart ached at the downfall, and his quick imagination pictured vividly how completely the poor old parson would put himself in the wrong, and what a disastrous state of things would be sure to ensue.

“I’d try and not leave so much ‘restoration’ for any stranger to do,” he said.

“Eh, what’s the good?” said the parson. “She had better let it alone for the ‘new folks.’”

“Nay,” said Cherry, “you cannot tell if the ‘new folks,’ as you call them, will be inclined for anything of the sort, and all these changes may not take place for years. It doesn’t quite pay to do nothing because life is rather more uncertain to oneself than to other people.”

Cheriton spoke half to himself, and the parson went on with his own train of thought.

“Ay, I’ll stick to the old place, though I thought it a heavy clog round my neck once; and if you knew all the ins and outs of that transaction, you’d say, maybe, I ought to be kicked out of it now.”

“No, I should not,” said Cherry, who knew, perhaps, more of the Elderthwaite traditions than the parson imagined. “Things are as they are, and not as they might have been, and perhaps you could do more than any one else to mend matters.”

The parson looked into the fire, with an odd, half humble, half comical expression, and Cherry said abruptly, —

“Do you think Mr Seyton would sell Uplands to me?”

“To you? What the dickens do you want with it?”

“Why – I don’t think it would be a bad speculation, and I should like, I think, to have it.”

“What? Does your brother make Oakby too hot to hold you?”

“No, indeed. He is all that is kind to me,” said Cherry indignantly. “Every one misconstrues him. But I should like to have a bit of land hereabouts, all the same.”

“Well, you had better ask my brother yourself. He may think himself lucky, for I don’t know who would buy a bit of land like that wedged in between the two places. Ah, here’s Queenie to say good-night. Well, my lassie, are you pleased with your sport?”

“Yes, uncle; and the children were very good.”

Cheriton walked a little way with Virginia, beyond the turning where they parted from Lucy Ellesmere. He found that she was unaware of the facts which the parson had told him, and though somewhat uneasy about her father, very much disposed to dwell on the good accounts of Dick and Harry, and on the general awakening in the place that seemed to demand improvements. Oakby offered a ready-made pattern, and other farmers had been roused by Mr Clements to wish for changes, while some, of course, were ready to oppose them.

“They begin to wish Uncle James would have a curate, Cherry,” she said; “but I don’t think he ever will find one that he could get on with. No one who did not know all the ins and outs of the place could get on either with him or with the people.”

“It would be difficult,” said Cheriton thoughtfully; “yet I do believe that a great deal might be done for parson as well as people.”

“Ah, Cherry,” said Virginia, with a smile, “if you hadn’t got another vocation, Uncle James would let you do anything you liked. I wish you were a clergyman, and could come and be curate of Elderthwaite; for you are the only person who could fit into all the corners.”

Virginia spoke in jest, as of an impossible vision, but Cheriton answered her with unexpected seriousness.

“It would be hard on Elderthwaite to put up with a failure, and an offering would not be worth much which one had waited to make till one had nothing left worth giving; I’m afraid, too, my angles are less accommodating than you suppose – ask Alvar.” Cherry finished his sentence thoughtlessly, and was recalled by Virginia’s blush; but she said as they parted, “That is a safe reference for you.”