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An English Squire

by Christabel R. Coleridge · English · Gutenberg #43148 · 799,570 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: An English Squire

Author: Christabel R. Coleridge


        
Release date: July 8, 2013 [eBook #43148]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43148

Credits: Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ENGLISH SQUIRE ***

An English Squire
By C.R. Coleridge
Published by Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London.
This edition dated

PREFACE.

In bringing this tale in a complete form before the public, I should
wish it to be understood that it arose out of a series of conversations
with a friend who suggested the character of Alvar Lester, to the
original invention of which I can lay no claim whatever.  He came to me
from his Spanish home, and I have done nothing with him but turn him
into an English Squire.

C.R.  Coleridge.

PART ONE.

HOME LIFE.

  "A little more than kin, and less than kind."

CHAPTER ONE.

THE LESTERS OF OAKBY.

  "Young barbarians all at play."

Some few years ago Mr Gerald Lester was the head of a family of good
blood and position, and the owner of Oakby Hall, the great house of a
village of the same name in the county of Westmoreland.  The border line
between Westmoreland and Yorkshire crossed his property; but his house
and park were in the former county, for which he was a deputy sheriff
and justice of the peace.

He was not a man of very large fortune, and Oakby Hall was not a show
place, but a well-built mansion of the last century, with some
architectural pretensions, and standing in the midst of that sort of
wild and romantic scenery which, perhaps more than any other, fixes the
affections of its inhabitants.  Oakby, at any rate, was very dear to its
owner.

The great sweeps of heather-clad moor, the fell sides, with their short
green turf, the fertile valleys, had a character of their own, inferior
as they were to the better-known parts of Westmoreland.

Oakby village was situated in one of the largest of these valleys, and
the Hall lay low on the side of a hill over which the well-planted park
stretched on either side.  The house could be seen all the way up the
long carriage drive, for it was only shut off from the park by an iron
railing, within which the turf was mown close and fine, instead of being
left to be cropped by sheep and cattle.  The gardens were at the side,
and there were no trees in front of the house but one oak of great size
and beauty.  There was a wide carriage sweep, and the space between this
and the house was paved, and on either side of the front-door was a
stone wolf of somewhat forbidding aspect--the crest of the Lesters.

The grey stone house thus exposed to view was stately enough, and though
too open and free to be exactly gloomy, this northern front was bleak
and cold, especially on a frosty winter twilight, when the light was
dying away in the distance, and the piece of ornamental water and the
pleasant bits of woodland, beyond were not distinctly visible.  No such
thought ever crossed the minds of the young Lesters, who came back to it
from school and college as to the dearest of homes; but to a stranger, a
little doubtful of a welcome, it might perhaps look formidable.

Within doors a blazing fire and abundance of rugs and skins made the
hall the most attractive place in the house, both for dogs and men;
especially between the lights, when there was little to do anywhere
else, and all were tired with their day's work, or ready to discuss
their day's amusement.

Just before Christmas play was legitimate; and the young Lesters, skates
in hand, had just returned from the lake, and were grouped together
round, the fire, noisily praising and criticising each other's recent
performances.

"I never should have had a tumble all day if Bob hadn't come up against
me like a steam engine," cried the one girl, a tall creature of sixteen,
big, fair, and rosy.

"I came against you!  That's a good one.  Who could keep out of your
way?" ejaculated the aggrieved twin brother.  "You can no more guide
yourself than--"

"A balloon," put in the more softly accented voice of the eldest brother
present, as he unfastened his skates from the neck of his great Saint
Bernard, who had dutifully carried them home for him.

"Now, Cherry, that's not true!" cried the girl in loud indignation.  "Of
course I can't be expected to do figures of eight and spread-eagles like
you and Jack."

"I saw an American fellow the other day who skated twice as well as
either of us."

"No?  All!  I don't believe that!" from the girl.

"But then they've ice all the year round," from Bob.

"I daresay they can't do anything else," from Jack.

"Jack always is so liberal!" from Cheriton; and then, "Hush! here's the
squire."

It was sometimes said that no one of the young Lesters would be so fine
a man as his father; and certainly Mr Lester was a splendid specimen of
an English gentleman, though the big Jack rivalled him in inches, and
promised equal size and strength, while Cheriton, who was of a slighter
build, inherited his blue eyes and brilliant colouring.  But they were
his own children--every one fair, and tall, and healthy; and their
characteristic differences did not destroy their strong resemblance to
each other and to their handsome father, who now stood in the midst of
them with a foreign letter in his hand, at which the children glanced
curiously.

He was not much above fifty; his hair and beard, which had once deserved
to be called golden, had rather faded than grizzled, his skin was still
fresh and healthy, and his eyes bright in colour and full of expression;
the level brows met over them.  His children, as has been said, were
curiously like him--Annette, or Nettie, as she was commonly called,
perhaps the most so.  Although she was big and unformed, she had the
promise of great beauty in her straight sulky brows and large sky-blue
eyes, resplendent colouring which defied sunburn, and abundant yellow
hair.  Her nose was straight and fine, like her father's, but her full
red lips were a trifle sullen; the contour of her face was heavy, and
though she looked well born and well bred, she lacked the refinement of
intelligent expression.  But if her great blue eyes looked stupid and
rather cross, they were as honest as the day; and at sixteen there was
still time for thoughts and feelings to come and print themselves on
this beautiful piece of flesh and blood.

She was very untidily though handsomely dressed, and had the awkwardness
of a girl too big for her age; but as she stood leaning back against the
oak table, there was such vigour and life in her strong young limbs as
to give them a kind of grace.  She had a low voice of refined quality,
but she spoke with a strong north-country accent, as did her father.  In
the brothers it was much modified by their southern schooling.  The twin
brother, Robert, retained, however, a good deal of it.  He was a
heavier, less handsome likeness of her, and might have been described as
a fine lad or a great lout, according to the prepossessions of the
speaker.  The next brother, John, or, as he was usually called, Jack,
had, at nineteen, hardly yet outgrown the same ungainliness of manner;
but his height, and the strength trained by many an athletic struggle,
could not fail to be striking; and though he had something of the same
sullen straightness of brow, the eyes beneath were thoughtful and keen.
There was no lack of mental power in Jack's grave young face, and he was
a formidable opponent to his schoolfellows in contests of brain as well
as of muscle.

Cheriton, except that his brows arched a little, so that he could not
attain to the perfection of the family frown, and that he was an inch or
two shorter and much slighter, was so like Jack that when he was grave
and silent his brighter colouring and the moustaches to which he had
attained were, at first sight, the chief points of difference between
them.  But then Jack's face to-day would be his face to-morrow, while
Cheriton's expression varied with almost every word he spoke, so that he
was sometimes said to be the image of his father, sometimes to be the
one Lester who was like nobody but himself; while, now and then old
friends wondered how this handsome young man came to have such a look of
the mother, who had been no beauty, but only a high-minded and
cultivated woman.  He was his father's favourite, and somehow his
brothers were not jealous of the preference.  "Cherry," as they called
him, was the family oracle, though he risked his place now and then when
his utterances were not in accordance with the prevailing sentiment.

Mr Lester's expression was now dark enough to indicate annoyance of no
common kind; but it did not take much to make him look cross, and if his
sons and daughter had not known that there was an unusual speck on the
family horizon, they would have surmised that the keepers were in
disgrace, the newspaper late in arriving, or that they themselves had
unwittingly transgressed.

As it was they were all silent, though Cheriton looked up with a
question in his eyes, and the twins glanced at each other.

"I have had a letter from--your brother; he has started on his journey,
and will be here in a day or two."

No one spoke for a moment, and then Cheriton said,--

"Well, father, I shall be very glad to see him.  It's a good time for
him to come, and I hope we shall be able to make it pleasant for him."

"Pleasant for _him_," growled Bob.

"It won't be at all pleasant for _us_," said his sister.  "Fancy a
foreign fellow interfering in all our concerns.  And Granny says he's
sure to set us a bad example."

"Ay," said the father, "you lads needn't be in too great a hurry to get
up an intimacy."

"There's not much fear of that," said Cheriton.

"Ah, my boy," said Mr Lester, turning to him, "you take it very well;
but it's hard on you; no one knows better than I do."

"As for me," said Cheriton, with a shade of the characteristic family
gruffness in his much pleasanter voice, "you know it has always been my
wish that he should come, and why should we set ourselves against it?"

"He ought to have come sooner," said Jack.

"That's no affair of yours, Jack," said his father sharply.  "Don't be
so ready with your comments.  He is coming now, and--and I'll hear no
more grumbling.  I'm hanged if I know what we are all to make of him,
though," he muttered as he left the hall.

"He'd better not interfere with me," said Bob.  "I shall take no notice
of him."

"Poor fellow!" said Cheriton satirically.  "I won't kiss him, I
declare," cried his sister.

"Now you boys, and Nettie, look here," said Cheriton seriously.  "Alvar
is our father's son and our brother.  He is the eldest, and has his
rights.  That's the fact; and his having lived all his life in Spain
doesn't alter it.  And if his coming is strange to us, what will it be
for him?  Isn't it an awful shame to set our backs up before we see him?
Is it his fault?"  Cheriton's influence in the family was considerable,
and the younger ones had no answer to his arguments; but influence and
arguments are weak compared to prejudice; and no one answered till Jack
grumbled out,--

"Of course we must do our duty by him, and perhaps he'll improve."

"On acquaintance," suggested Cheriton, with half-suppressed fun.
"Suppose he's a finer fellow than any of us, and a better sort
altogether.  What shall we do then?"

"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.

She had handed down to her children, and still exhibited herself, their
height and vigorous strength, and perhaps something of their beauty,
though she was a darker and more aquiline-featured person than her son,
who resembled his father.  Whether the grandchildren inherited her
clear, but narrow vision, her upright, but prejudiced mind, and her
will, that went its way subject to no side lights or shadows, perhaps it
was early days to tell.  She was an entirely unintellectual,
unimaginative person; but within her experience, which was extremely
limited--as she could hardly realise, the existence, much less the
merits of natures unlike her own--she had a good deal of shrewd sense,
and it was much easier to feel her strictures unjust than to prove them
so.

She had a thorough knowledge of, and had all her life been accustomed to
share in, the outdoor sports and occupations of country life, and very
recently had been able to ride and drive with the skill of long
practice.  These had been the pleasures of her youth; but though she was
rather an unfeminine woman, she had never been in any sense a fast one.
She was altogether devoid of coquettish instincts, and though she had
been a handsome girl, who had passed her life almost entirely among
sporting men, and whose tongue was in consequence somewhat free, she had
hardly left through the country-side the memory even of an old
flirtation.

Within doors she had few occupations; but when her daughter-in-law's
death rendered her presence at Oakby again necessary, she had taken the
command of the children, and ruled them vigorously according to her
lights.  She wished to see them grow up after her ideal, and would have
despised them utterly if they had gambled, drunk, or dissipated their
property by extravagance.  She would have thought very slightingly of
them if their taste had been exclusively for an indoor or studious life,
or if they had been awkward riders or bad shots, though she recognised
the duty of "attention to their studies" in moderation, particularly on
wet days.

She was tolerably satisfied with her grandsons, who had imbibed this
view of life with the smell of the heather and the pines, but she was a
little suspicious of the Cheriton blood, and of the talents of which she
had succeeded in making Cherry and Jack half 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 of shyness.  "Oh, let's run away!"

"Let go.  I can't get down.  Stand still and don't be silly," said Jack,
gruffly, as he got off the steps, while the butler hurried forward and
threw open the door.  Nettie stood in the fire-light, her golden hair
flying in the gust of wind, her hands together, like a wild thing at
bay.  Bob remained perched, half-way up the ladder, and Jack made a step
or two forward.

A tall figure in a dark cloak, with bright crimson lining, and a large
felt hat, stood in the doorway.

"Are you Cheriton?" he said eagerly, and with a strong foreign accent.

"No; he's out.  I'm Jack.  How d'ye do?  We didn't know when you were
coming," said Jack, in a tone from which embarrassment took every shade
of cordiality.  He put out his hand quickly, however, as the stranger
made a movement as if possibly intending a more tender salutation.
Alvar took it, then removed his hat, and advancing towards the
speechless Nettie said,--

"This is my sister?  May I not salute her?" and lightly touched her
cheek with his lips.  "I have thought of you, my sister," he said.

"Have you?" stammered Nettie, hanging down her head like a child.  Bob
remained motionless on his ladder, and Jack said,--

"Here's my father," as Mr Lester came hurriedly into the hall, nearly
as much embarrassed as his children, and pale with an agitation which
they did not share.  Alvar turned round, and bowed low with a respectful
grace that his brothers certainly could not have imitated.

Mr Lester came forward and held out his hand.  It needed all his innate
sense of good breeding to overcome the repulsion which the very idea of
his strange son caused him.  The sense of owing him amends for
long-neglected duty, the knowledge how utterly out of place this
foreigner must be as heir of Oakby, the feeling that by so recognising
him he was wronging alike his forefathers and his other children, while
he yet knew how much his whole life through he had wronged Alvar
himself, came upon him with renewed force.  Then as he heard such tones,
and saw such a face as he had not seen for years, what rush of long past
sentiment, what dead and buried love and hate came rushing over him with
such agitating force, that in the effort to avoid a scene, and a display
of feeling which, yielded to, might have smoothed the relations between
them for ever, his greeting to his son was as cold as ice!

"How do you do, Alvar?  I am glad to see you.  We did not expect you so
soon.  You must have found your journey very cold."

"I did not delay.  It was my wish to see my father," said Alvar, a
little wistfully.  "My father, I trust, will find me a dutiful son."

Here Bob giggled, and Jack nearly knocked him off the ladder with the
nudge evoked by his greater sense of propriety.

"No doubt--no doubt," said Mr Lester.  "I hope we shall understand each
other, soon.  Where's Cheriton?  Jack, suppose you show--him--your
brother, his room.  Dinner at seven, you know.  I daresay you're
hungry."

"I did take a cup of coffee, but it was not good," said Alvar, as he
followed Jack upstairs; and the latter, mortally afraid of a
_tete-a-tete_, shut him into the bedroom prepared for him, and rushed
downstairs to encounter Cheriton, who came hurrying in, thinking himself
late for dinner.

"Cherry, he's come!"

"Oh, Cherry, he's so queer!  He makes pretty speeches, and he bows!"

"He's a regular nigger, he's so black!"

"Oh, Cherry, it's _awful_!"

"What have you done with him?  Where's the squire?" said Cherry, as soon
as he could make himself heard.

"Oh, papa has seen him, and Jack's taken him into his room," said
Nettie.

"He thought I was you," said Jack.  Cheriton stood still for a moment,
as shy as the rest, then, with an effort, he ran upstairs.

"It's only kind to go and say how d'ye do to a fellow," he thought, as
he tapped at the bedroom door, and entered with outstretched hand, and
blushing to the tips of his ears.  "Oh, how d'ye do?  I'm so sorry I was
out of the way; they kept me to nail up the wreaths.  I'm very glad to
see you.  Aren't you very cold?"

Probably the foreigner understood about half of this lucid and connected
greeting; but something in the warmth of the tone made him come forward
eagerly.

"You are then really my brother Cheriton?  I thought it was again the
other one."

"What, Jack?  Yes, we're thought alike, I believe."

"I do not see that," said Alvar, contemplating him gravely; "but I have
known you in my thoughts--always."

"I'm sure--we've all thought a great deal about you.  But there's no one
to help you.  Have you got your things?  I'll ring," nearly pulling down
the bell-rope.  "And, look here, I'll just dress and come back, and go
down with you--shall I?"  Cheriton's summons was rapidly answered, as
curiosity inspired the servants as well as their masters; and leaving
Alvar to make his toilet, he hastened upstairs.  The three brothers
slept in a long passage at the top of the house, over the drawing-room.
As Cherry's step sounded, both his brothers' doors burst open
simultaneously, and Jack and Bob, in various stages of dressing, at once
ejaculated,--

"Well!"

"How can I tell?  It's awfully late.  I shall never be ready," and
Cherry banged his own door, too much astounded by the new brother to
stand a discussion on him.

As soon as he was ready he went down stairs, and found Alvar, rather to
his relief, attired in correct evening costume.

"I suppose you haven't seen my grandmother yet?" he said.

"Your grandmother?  I did not know there was a grandmother," said Alvar,
in a much puzzled voice, which, together with the sense of how much his
brother had to learn, nearly upset Cherry's gravity.

"My father's mother, you know.  She lives with us," he said.  "She is
your grandmother too."

"Ah!" said Alvar, "I loved my grandmother much.  This other one, she
will be most venerable, I am sure."

"Come along then," said Cherry, unable to stand more conversation at
present.

Mrs Lester, whatever her private opinions might be, had too much
respect for the heir, for herself, and for the house of Lester, not to
attire herself with unusual dignity, and to rise and advance to receive
her grandson.

"How do you do, Alvar?" she said.  "You have been a long time in coming
to see us."

Alvar, after a moment's pause, as if doubtful what sort of salutation
would be acceptable, bowed low and kissed her hand.  Nettie laughed; but
her grandmother drew herself up as if the act of homage was not
altogether displeasing to her, and then looked keenly at the new
grandson, who, as far as looks went, was no unworthy scion of the
handsome Lesters.

He was as tall as his father, though of a different and slighter make,
and stood with a sort of graceful stiffness, unlike the easy
loose-limbed air of most young English gentlemen.  He had a dark olive
skin, and oval face; but his features were not unlike the prevailing
family type; and though his hair was raven black, it grew and curled in
the picturesque fashion of his father's, which Cheriton alone of the
other sons inherited.  But he had the splendid black liquid eyes, with
blue whites, and slender arched eyebrows of his Spanish mother, and
possessed a picturesque foreign beauty that seemed to group the
fair-haired brothers into a commonplace herd.  He had a grave, impassive
face, and held his head up with an air suggestive of Spanish grandees.

It was very difficult to make conversation when they went in to dinner,
the more so as Alvar evidently did not easily follow rapid English, and
either he was bewildered by new impressions, or not very open to them,
for he had not much to say about his journey.  Cheriton, as he tried to
talk as if there was no perplexing stranger present, could not help
wondering whether all that was so strange to himself came with any
familiarity to his father.  Had he known what his son would be like?
Could he touch any chord to which Alvar could find a response?  Had eyes
like those great rolling black ones ever looked love into his own?  And
if so, was it all forgotten, or was the remembrance distasteful?

"He was older than I am now," thought Cherry.  "Surely the thoughts of
to-day could never fade away entirely."

Mr Lester uttered no word that betrayed any knowledge of his son's
country.  He spoke less than usual, and after due inquiries for Alvar's
relations, entirely on local matters; Alvar volunteered few remarks, but
as the dessert appeared, he turned to Cherry, who sat beside him, and
said,--

"Is it not now the custom to smoke?"

"Not at dinner," said Cherry hurriedly, as his father replied,--

"Certainly not," and all the bright blue eyes round the table stared at
Alvar, who for the first time coloured, and said,--

"Pardon, I have transgressed."

"We'll go and have a pipe presently," said Cherry; and oh! how ardently
he longed for that terrible evening to be over.

"It was a _horrid_ Christmas Eve," muttered Nettie to Bob; and perhaps
her father thought so too, for he rang the bell early for prayers.

"What is this?" said Alvar, looking puzzled, as a prayer-book was placed
before him.

"We're going to have prayers," said Nettie, rather pertly.  "Don't you?"

"Ah, it is a custom," said Alvar, and he took the book, and stood and
knelt as they did, evidently matching for his cue.

When this ceremony was over, Bob and Nettie rushed off, evidently to
escape saying good-night, and Cheriton invited the stranger to come and
smoke with him, conducting him to a little smoking-room downstairs,
which was only used for visitors, as the boys generally smoked in a room
at the top of the house, into which Cherry knew Bob and Jack would
greatly resent any intrusion.  Mr Lester walked off with a general
good-night.  Alvar watched Cherry kiss his grandmother, but contented
himself with a bow.  Jack discreetly retired, and when Cheriton had
ascertained that Alvar never smoked a pipe, but only a cigar or a
cigarette, and had made him sit down by the fire, Alvar said,--

"My father is then a member of the clerical party?"

"I don't think I quite understand you," said Cherry.

"Your prayers--he is religious?"

"Oh, most people have prayers--I don't think we're more particular than
others.  My father and Mr Ellesmere, our rector, are friends,
naturally," said Cherry, feeling it very difficult to explain himself.

"My grandfather," said Alvar, "is indifferent."

"But--you're a Protestant, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes.  I have been so instructed.  But I do not interest myself in
the subject."

Cheriton had heard many odd things at Oxford said about religion, but
never anything to equal the _naivete_ of this avowal.  He was quite
unprepared with a reply, and Alvar went on,--

"I shall of course conform.  I am not an infidel; but I leave those
things to your--clergy, do you not call them?"

"Well, some people would say you were right," said Cherry, thankful that
Jack was not present to assert the inalienable right of private
judgment.

"And politics?" said Alvar; "I know about your Tories and your Whigs.
On which side do you range yourself?"

"Well, my father's a Tory and High Churchman, which I suppose is what
you mean by belonging to the clerical party; and I--if all places were
like this--I'd like things very well as they are.  Jack, however, would
tell you we were going fast to destruction."

"There are then dissensions among you?"

"Oh, he'll come round to something, I dare say.  But our English
politics must seem mere child's play to you."

"I have taken no part," said Alvar.  "My grandfather would conform to
anything for peace, and I, you know, my brother, am in Spain an
Englishman--though a Spaniard here."

"I hope you'll be an Englishman soon."

"It is the same with marriage," said Alvar; "I have never betrothed
myself, nor has my grandfather sought to marry me.  He said I must see
English ladies also.  One does not always follow the heart in these
matters," he concluded rather sentimentally.

"No one would ever dream of your following anything else," said Cherry,
beginning gruffly, but half choked with amusement as he spoke.

"No?  And you, you have not decided?  Ah, you blush, my brother; I am
indiscreet."

"I didn't blush--at least that's nothing.  Turkey-cock was my nickname
at school always," said Cherry hastily.

"I do not understand," said Alvar; and after Cherry had explained the
nature and character of turkey-cocks, he said, "But I think that was not
civil."

"Civil!  It wasn't meant to be.  English boys don't stand much upon
civility.  But," he added, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, "if
we are rough, I hope you won't mind; the boys don't mean any harm by it.
You'll soon get used to our ways, and--and we'll do our best to make
you feel at home with us."

A sudden sense of pity for the lonely brother, a stranger in his
father's house, softened Cheriton's face and voice as he spoke, though
he felt himself to be promising a good deal.

Alvar looked at him with the curious, impassive, unembarrassed air that
distinguished him.  "You are not `rough!'" he said! "you are my brother.
I am told that here you do not embrace each other.  I am an Englishman,
I give you my hand."

Cheriton took the slender, oval-shaped hand, which yet closed on his
more angular one, with a firm, vigorous grasp.

"All right," he said; "you'd better ask me if you don't know what to do.
And now I think you must be tired.  I'll show you your room.  I hope
you won't mind the cold much; I am sorry it's so frosty."

"Oh, the cold is absolutely detestable, but I am not tired," said Alvar
briskly.

It was more than Cheriton could say, as he shut this perplexing brother
into the best bedroom, which he could not associate with anything but a
state visit.  He felt oppressed with a sense of past and future
responsibility, of distaste which he knew was mild compared to what
every other member of his family would experience, of contempt, and
kindliness and pity, and, running through all, the exceeding
ludicrousness, from an Oakby point of view, of some of Alvar's remarks.

This latter ingredient in his perplexity was strengthened, when he got
upstairs, by Jack, who, detecting his dispirited look, proceeded to
encourage him by remarking solemnly,--

"Well, I consider it a great family misfortune.  Dispositions and habits
that are entirely incongruous can't be expected to agree."

"Do shut up, Jack; you're not writing an essay.  Now I see where Alvar's
turn for speechifying comes from; you get it somehow from the same
stock!  All I know is, it's too bad to be down on a fellow when he's
cast on our hands like this.  Now I am going to bed, I'm tired to death;
and if we're late on Christmas morning, we shall never hear the last of
it."

While the young brothers thus discussed this strange disturber of their
accustomed life, their father's thoughts were still more perplexing.  He
had so long put aside the unwelcome thought of his eldest son that he
felt inclined to regard his presence with incredulity.  Surely this
dark, stately stranger could have no concern with his beloved homestead
with its surrounding moors and fells.  This boy had never ridden by his
side, nor taken his first shots from his gun, nor differed from him
about the management of his estate.

Oakby, with all its duties and pleasures, had no connexion with him; and
with Oakby Mr Lester had for many years felt himself to be wholly
identified.  But those dark eyes, those slow, soft accents, that air so
strange to his sons, awoke memories of another self.  He saw Cheriton's
puzzled attempt at understanding the strange brother.  But this strange
son was _not_ strange to him.  He knew the very turns of expression that
Alvar's imperfect English suggested.  For the first time for years the
Spanish idioms and Spanish words came back to his memory.  He could have
so talked as to set his son in accordance with his surroundings, he
understood, to his own surprise, exactly where this very new shoe would
pinch.

But these memories, though fresh and living, were utterly distasteful,
and nothing that cost him pain awoke in Mr Lester's mind any answering
tenderness.  He was a man with a weak will, a careful conscience, and
imperfectly controlled temper and affections.

He much preferred to do right than to do wrong, and he generally did do
right; in this one crucial instance he had neglected and slurred over
the right thing for years, and now he was not sufficiently accustomed to
question himself to realise how far he could have made amends for past
neglect, how far he could now make his son fit for the heirship of which
he neither could nor would deprive him.  No, Alvar was a painful sight
to him, therefore he would continue to ignore him as far as possible.
He stood in the beloved Cheriton's light, and therefore all the small
difficulties that his incongruous presence caused would be left to
Cheriton to set to rights, or not be set to rights at all.

It was pleasant, and it was not very difficult to Mr Lester, as he woke
in the light of the Christmas dawn, to turn his mind from Alvar's
presence to the many duties that the season demanded of him.  The
children all woke up curious and half-unfriendly.  Cheriton wondered
what Alvar was thinking of.  But they none of them knew to what thoughts
or feelings the pealing, crashing Christmas bells awoke the unknown
heir.

"Nay, you'll know no more what he's after than if he was yonder
picture," said the grandmother in answer to some remarks, and as
Cheriton heard him coming down stairs he felt that this was exactly the
state of the case.

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE SEYTONS OF ELDERTHWAITE.

  "All things here are out of joint."

In the midst of a waste of unswept snow across the hill behind Oakby
Hall, there was a large old house, originally of something the same
square and substantial type, but of more ambitious architecture, for
there were turrets at the four corners, overgrown and almost borne down
by enormous bushes of ancestral ivy; while the great gates leading to
the stables were of fanciful and beautiful ironwork, now broken and
falling into decay.  Great tree-trunks lay here and there on undulating
slopes, the shrubberies flung wild branches over the low stone wall
dividing them from the park, where a gate swung weakly on its hinges.
There were few tall trees, but litre and there along the drive a
solitary beech of great size and beauty suggested the course of an
avenue once without its equal in the country round.  An old man was
feebly sweeping away the snow in front of the house, and a gentleman
stood smoking a cigar on the steps--a slenderly-made man, with a
delicate, melancholy face, and a pointed grey beard, dressed in a shabby
shooting-coat.  His eyes turned from the slow old sweeper, past the
relics of the avenue, to a ruinous-looking lodge, the chimneys of which
sent no smoke into the frosty air.

Mr Seyton of Elderthwaite was used to these signs of adversity, but
to-day he was struck by them anew, for he was wondering how they would
look in the eyes of a stranger.  Oakby, with its strict laws, its rough
humours, its ready-made life, would be a strange experience to its
foreign heir.  What would Elderthwaite, with ruined fortunes and
blighted reputation be to a petted and prosperous girl, brought up by
gentle, religious women, in all the proprieties and sociabilities of
well-to-do country villa life?  What would his daughter say to the home
she had left as a child, and had never seen since?

The Seytons were a family of older standing in the county than the
Lesters, and had once been of superior fortune.  At present their
condition was, and rightly, very different.  The Lesters, with many
shortcomings, had been men who, on the whole, had endeavoured to do
their duty in their station, and had governed their tenants, brought up
their children, attended to public business, and managed their own
affairs in an honest and right-minded, if not always in a very
enlightened fashion.

But the Seytons had had a bad name for generations.  It is true that no
tales of wild and picturesque wickedness were told of the present head
of the house, such as had made his father's name a bye-word for
harshness and violence, and for all manner of evil living; but the
family traditions were strong against him; he inherited debt and a
dishonoured name, and, alas! with them the tendencies and temptations
that had brought them about.  He had looked with bitter, injured eyes at
the timber that was sold for his father's gaming debts; but many a noble
tree fell to pay his own, before he married a girl, innocent,
high-minded, and passionate-tempered.

It was a very unhappy marriage, and Mr Seyton never forgave his wife
for her broken heart, nor himself for breaking it.  When she died, her
relations took away her daughter, pledging themselves to provide for
her, if she were left undisturbed in their hands.  The father had enough
to do with his sons.  The eldest, Roland, was a fine, handsome fellow,
and began life with the sad disadvantage of being expected to go wrong.
He got a commission, but during the short intervals that he spent at
home, was personally unpopular.

In one of these he took a great fancy to Cheriton Lester during an
interval between the latter's school and college life, and Cheriton
being warned against him as a bad companion, stuck to him with equal
perverseness and generosity.  Roland was much the elder of the two, but
Cherry's vigorous youth took the lead in the friendship, and gave it his
own impress.  It was ended by such a scandal in Elderthwaite village as
those which had made the name of Roland Seyton's grandfather hated by
all the country round, as one by whom no man's hearth was respected, and
with whom no man's daughter was safe.

The discovery shocked Cheriton unspeakably; all the parties concerned
were well known to him, and he felt that of such sins he could never
think or speak lightly.  But he would not join in loud or careless blame
of his friend, who perhaps felt his truest pang of repentance at the
boy's confused miserable face in the one parting interview allowed by
Mr Lester before Roland joined his regiment, about to sail for India.

"You need not have been afraid, sir," Roland said, when accused of
having set him a bad example; "I knew how to choose my confidant."

After Roland's departure, other tales to his discredit, and debts which
it was impossible to pay, came to his father's ears, and these
additional troubles helped to strengthen habits of self-indulgence
already formed, which had made Mr Seyton a man old before his time,
melancholy-faced and gentle-mannered, whom nobody respected and nobody
disliked.  But the two younger boys had a bad start in life, and seemed
little likely to redeem the family fortunes.

It was not often that Mr Seyton thought of anything but the immediate
dulness and discomfort of the hour, or of its small alleviations; but
to-day these recollections pressed on him.  He thought, too, of his
shabby furniture, and his ill-conducted household; how unfit a home for
his well-dowered daughter; how unlike both her aunt's house and the
pleasant foreign tour which, since her aunt's death, she had been
enjoying.

"Papa, papa!" cried a bright voice behind him, "Good morning," then as
he turned round, the newly-arrived daughter exclaimed, throwing her arms
round his neck, "Oh, how nice it is to say `Good morning, papa!'"

She was a fair creature enough, a true Seyton, with slender frame and
pointed chin, creamy complexion and rich brown hair, but the large,
round eyes, tender, intense, and full of life, were her mother's, though
clear and untroubled as the mother's had never been.

"So you are glad to come home, Virginia?" said her father, rather sadly.

"Yes, papa, I am just delighted.  I always made stories about home when
I was at Littleton.  I was very happy, you know, with dear Aunt Mary and
all my friends; but it was so _uninteresting_ not to know more of my
very nearest relations."

"You will find it very different, my dear, from what you are accustomed
to.  This is a dull place."

"Oh, papa, I think it is so silly to be dull!  I shall be quite ready to
like anything you wish," said Virginia warmly.

"My dear, you shall take your own way.  It would be hard at least if I
could not give you that," said Mr Seyton, looking at her as if he did
not quite know what to do with this gaily-dressed, frank-spoken
daughter.  "Now let us come to breakfast."

"I am afraid I am late," said Virginia; "but it is never easy to be in
time after a journey."

"You are punctual for this house, my dear; we take such things easy.
But your aunt is down, you see, in your honour."  As Mr Seyton spoke
they came into the dining-room, a long, low room, with treasures of
curious carving round its oak-panels, hardly visible in its imperfect
light.

A lady sat pouring out the tea.  She had the delicate features and
peculiar complexion of her family, but her eyes, instead of being like
Mr Seyton's, vague and sad, were sharp and sarcastic; she had more play
of feature, and, though she looked fully her age, had the air of having
been a beauty.

Miss Seyton had once been engaged to be married, but her engagement had
been broken off in one of the storms of discreditable trouble that had
overwhelmed her father and brothers, no one knew exactly how or why.
She had never married, and had lived ever since with her brother, not
always without scandal and remark.  Still her presence had kept
Elderthwaite on the visiting-list of the county, and made it possible
for her niece to live there.

In spite of her sharp, eager eyes, she had an indescribable laziness and
nonchalance of manner, and poured out the tea as if it was an effort
beyond her.  The boys' places remained vacant.  There was a little talk
at breakfast-time, but it did not flow easily.  Virginia would have had
plenty to say, but she had a sense that what she did say caused her aunt
inward surprise or amusement, and she began to feel shy.

When the meal was over, Mr Seyton sauntered away slowly, and Virginia
said, "Do we sit in the drawing-room in the morning, Aunt Julia?"

"Yes, as often as not," said Miss Seyton.  "You are welcome to arrange
all such matters for yourself.  Girls have ways of their own."

"I don't want to have any strange or uncomfortable ways, auntie," said
Virginia; "I want to feel quite at home, and to be useful."

"Useful!" said Miss Seyton.  "What's your notion of being useful?"

She did not speak unkindly, but with a curious sort of inward amusement,
as if the notions of the bright-eyed girl were an odd study to her.

"I'm afraid I haven't very clear notions.  I want to make it cheerful
for papa--Aunt Mary always said he wasn't strong or well; and perhaps
the boys want things done for them; my friends' brothers always did,"
said Virginia a little pathetically.

"There's one thing, my dear, I wish you to understand at once.  I shall
never interfere with you; but I don't mean to abdicate in your favour.
I keep house--whatever house is kept--and you'd better shut your eyes
and ears to it.  It isn't work for you."

"Oh, Aunt Julia!" said Virginia distressed, "I would not think of such a
thing.  It is your place."

"No, my dear, it's not; but I mean to stick to it," interposed Miss
Seyton.

"And I know nothing about housekeeping, I'm afraid.  I should be very
extravagant."

"Like a true Seyton.  So much for that, then.  And now another thing.
Don't you ever give your brothers so much as a half-sovereign secretly.
You have money, and they know it, and it's scarce here.  Mind what I
say."

A kind of puzzled sense of something that she did not understand crossed
Virginia's face.

"I would rather give them things than money," she said.  "Of course papa
lets them have what is right."

"Of course," said Miss Seyton, with the same perplexing expression of
indescribable amusement.

A good joke had for years been the solace, a bitter sarcasm the natural
outlet, of a life which certainly had been neither prosperous nor happy
in itself, nor glorified by any martyrdom of self-denial.

Miss Seyton was full of malice, both in the French and English
acceptations of the word.  She loved fun, and she could not see without
bitterness the young, unworn creature beside her.  To astonish Virginia
offered an almost irresistible temptation to both these tendencies.  Her
evident unconsciousness of the life that lay before her, was at once so
funny, and such a cruel satire on them all.

"So you built castles in the air about your relations?" she said, with
an odd longing to knock some of these castles down.

"Sometimes," said Virginia; "then Ruth told me about you; and two years
ago she and I met Cheriton Lester and his cousin Rupert in London, and I
used to talk to them, Cheriton made me wish to come home very much."

"Why?" said Miss Seyton shortly.

"He used to tell her about the place, and he made me remember much
better what it was like."

"Cheriton will have to play second fiddle.  The eldest brother is coming
back from Spain."

"Ah, I remember, he told us how much he wished it.  Oh, and he told me
Uncle James `wasn't half a bad fellow.'  I suppose that was a boy's way
of saying he was very nice indeed.  Perhaps I can help him, too, in the
village.  I like school-teaching, and I suppose there aren't many young
ladies in Elderthwaite?"

"You little innocent!" exclaimed Miss Seyton.  Then, moving away, she
said, in the same wicked undertone, "Well, you had better ask him."

Virginia remained standing by the fire.  She felt ruffled, for she knew
herself to be laughed at, and not having the clue to her aunt's meaning,
she fancied that her free and easy mention of Cheriton had elicited the
remark; and being a young lady of decided opinions and somewhat warm
temper, made up her mind silently, but with energy, that she would never
like her Aunt Julia, never!  She had been taken away from home when only
eleven years old, and since then had only occasionally seen her father
and her brothers.  Her cousin Ruth, who had frequently stayed at
Elderthwaite, had never bestowed on her much definite information; and
perhaps the season in London and the renewal of her childish
acquaintance with Cheriton Lester had done more than anything else to
revive old impressions.

She had been most carefully brought up by her aunt, Lady Hampton, with
every advantage of education and influence.  Companions and books were
all carefully chosen, and her aunt hoped to see her married before there
was any chance of her returning to Elderthwaite.  But such was the dread
of the reckless, defiant, Seyton nature, that her very precautions
defeated their wishes.

Virginia never was allowed to be intimate with any young man but
Cheriton, who at the time of their meeting was a mere boy, and with
thoughts turned in another direction; and though Virginia was
sufficiently susceptible, with a nature at once impetuous and dependent,
she came home at one-and-twenty, never yet having seen her ideal in
flesh and blood.

"Duties enough, and little cares," had filled her girlhood, and
delightful girl friendships and girl reverences had occupied her heart;
while her time had been filled by her studies, the cheerful gaieties of
a lively neighbourhood, and by the innumerable claims of a church and
parish completely organised and vigorously worked.

Lady Hampton was one of the Ladies Bountiful of Littleton; and Virginia
had taught in the schools, made tea at the treats, worked at church
decorations, and made herself useful and important in all the ways usual
to a clever, warm-hearted girl under such influences.  And with the same
passionate fervour of nature, and the same necessity to her life of an
approving conscience, which had made her mother's heart beat itself to
death against the bars of her unsatisfying home, Virginia's nature had
flowed on in perfect tune with her surroundings; till, when she was
nearly twenty, came the great grief of her kind aunt's death, leaving
her heiress to a moderate fortune.  By the terms of the will she was to
travel under carefully selected guardianship till she was of age, and
then to choose whether she would go home to her father, or have a home
made for her at Littleton.

Virginia chose promptly, and then, in the delicate, indefinite language
of those who fear to do harm by every word, was warned of difficulties.
Much would be painful to her, much would be strange; her home was not
like anything she had been used to.  She listened and looked sad, and
understood nothing of what they meant to imply; and thus ready to
admire, but with only one type in her mind of what was admirable; full
of love, but with none of the blinding softening memories that make love
easy, she came to a home where admiration was impossible, and love would
demand either ignorant indifference to any high ideal, or a rare and
perfect charity, alike unknown to a high-minded intolerant girl.

CHAPTER SIX.

VIRGINIA.

  "A sense of mystery her spirit daunted."

The vicar of Elderthwaite was Mr Seyton's youngest brother.  There had
been one between them, the father of the Ruth mentioned in the last
chapter, but he had married well, and died early, leaving this one girl,
who lived with her grandmother, and paid occasional visits to
Elderthwaite.

James Seyton had been the wildest of the three, and had taken orders to
pay his debts by means of the family living, the revenues of which he
had never fully enjoyed.  He had never married, and his life--though
just kept in bounds by the times in which he lived, so that he did not
get tipsy in the Seyton Arms, nor openly scandalise a parish with so low
a standard of right as Elderthwaite--was a thoroughly self-indulgent
one.  He read the service once on Sundays, and administered the
Communion three times a year, while the delay and neglect of funerals,
marriages, and baptisms were the scandal of every parish round.  He
rarely visited his flock; and yet the vicar was not wholly an unpopular
man.  He was good-natured, and though he drank freely and sometimes
swore loudly, he had a certain amount of secular intercourse with his
parishioners of a not unneighbourly kind.

The pressure of poverty made Mr Seyton a hard landlord, and between
oppression and neglect the inhabitants of the picturesque tumbledown
village were a bad lot, and neither squire nor parson did much to make
them better.  But their vicar now and then did put before the worst
offenders the consequences of an evil life in language plain enough to
reach their understanding; and he had a word and a laugh for most of
them.

Mr Lester was frequently heard to inveigh against Parson Seyton's
shortcomings, and seriously, as well he might, regretted the state of
Elderthwaite parish; but Mr Seyton doctored all his horses and dogs
when they were ill, and was, "after all, an old neighbour and a
gentleman."  He taught Cherry to catch rats, and took him out
otter-hunting, and there was the oddest friendship between them, which
Cherry, when a boy, had once exemplified in the following manner:--

The Bishop had paid an unexpected visit at.  Oakby, and Cheriton
following in the wake, while his father and Mr Ellesmere were showing
off their new schools, heard him express his intention of going on to
Elderthwaite; upon which Cherry ran full speed across the fields, found
Parson Seyton shooting rabbits, decidedly in shooting-costume, gave him
timely warning, and, with his own hands so tidied, dusted, and furbished
up the wretched old church, that its vicar, entering into the spirit of
the thing, fell to with a will, astonished the lazy blind old sexton,
and produced such a result as might pass muster in a necessarily lenient
north-country diocese.

Cherry then diffidently produced one of his father's white ties which he
had put in his pocket, "thinking you mightn't have one clean," and as
the old vicar, with a shout of laughter, arrayed himself in it, he
said,--

"Ay, ay, my lad, between this and the glass of port I'll give his
lordship (he won't better that in any parish), we'll push through."

And so they did.

Parson Seyton was a man, if an erring one; but the mischief with his
young nephews was that they seemed to have no force or energy even for
being naughty, and as they grew up their scrapes were all those of idle
self-indulgence, save when the hereditary passion for gambling broke out
in Dick, the elder of the two, as had been the case lately, causing his
removal from the tutor with whom he had been placed.  Like their father,
they had not strong health, and they had little taste for field sports,
and none for books; they lay in bed half the day, lounged about the
stables, and quarrelled with each other.  But then their father had
nothing to do, read little but the paper, and drank a great deal more
wine than was good for him.

Their uncle had conferred on them in his time the inestimable advantage
of one or two good thrashings, and had scant patience with a kind of
evil to which his burly figure, jolly red face, and hearty reckless
temper had never been inclined.

Virginia had thought a good deal about her uncle, and was not unprepared
to find him very far removed from the clerical ideal to which she was
accustomed.  Perhaps the notion of bringing a little enlightenment to so
"old-fashioned" a place was neither absent nor unwelcome, as she thought
of offering to teach the choir, and wondered who was feminine head of
the parish.

"I daresay Uncle James has some nice old housekeeper," she thought, "who
trots after the poor people, and takes them jelly, and perhaps teaches
the children sewing.  There must be a great many people here who
remember mamma.  I hope they will like me.  It will be a much more real
thing trying to be helpful here than at Littleton, where there were six
people for each bit of work."

Virginia, finding that her brothers did not appear, began to revive her
childish recollections by going over the house.  It was very large and
rambling, with long unused passages, with all the rooms shut up.
Windows overgrown with interlacing ivy, panels from which the paint
dropped at a touch, queer little turret chambers, with rickety
staircases leading up to them, seemed hardly objectionable to Virginia,
who liked the romance of the old forlorn house, and had not yet tried
living in it.  Yet it was not romantic, for Elderthwaite was not
ruinous, only very dirty and out of repair; and perhaps the untidy
housemaid, whom Virginia had encountered, was really more in accordance
with its condition than the white lady or armed spectre that she gaily
thought ought to walk those lonely passages.  Her own young smiling
face, and warm ruby-coloured dress, was in more startling contrast than
either.  So apparently thought her brother Dick as he ran up against her
on the stairs.

"Hallo, Virginia!" he exclaimed in astonished accents.  "What are you
doing up here?"

"Trying to remember my way about.  Don't we keep any ghosts, Dick?  I'm
sure they would find these dark corners exactly suited to them."

"Better ask old Kitty; she'll tell you all about them.  Good-bye, I'm
off," and Dick clattered downstairs, rather to Virginia's
disappointment, for she had thought the night before that his delicate,
handsome face was more prepossessing than the pale stout one of Harry
who now joined her.

"Where is Dick going?" she asked.

"Don't know, I'm sure," said Harry.  "Do you want to know all the old
stories?"

"Yes! can you tell me?"

"Do you see that room there?" said Harry, with eyes that twinkled like
his aunt's; "old grandfather Seyton was an old rip, you know, if ever
there was one, and he and his friends used to make such a row you heard
them over at Oakby.  _His_ brother was parson then, and bless you!
Uncle Jem's a bishop to him.  Well, he'd got a dozen men dining here,
and they all got as drunk as owls, dead drunk every one of them, and the
servants put them to bed up in this gallery.  One of them was in the
room next grandfather's, that room there, and he was found dead the next
morning.  Fact, I assure you."

"What a horrid story!" said Virginia, looking shocked.

"I'll tell you another.  Grandfather and his brother played awfully
high, that's how the avenue was cut down; and when they could get no one
else they played with each other, and one night they quarrelled and
seized each other by the throats, and they both would have been
strangled, only grandmamma rushed in in her nightgown screaming, and
parted them; but the parson had the marks on his throat for ever."

"Harry! you naughty boy!" exclaimed Virginia, laughing.  "You are
inventing all these frightful stories.  I don't believe them."

"They're as true as gospel," said Harry, looking at her bright,
incredulous eyes.  "There's another about the parson--how he came
through the park at sunrise.  That's not a pretty story to tell you,
though."

"I had much rather hear something about the parson, as you call him,
nowadays.  Come downstairs, it's so cold here, and answer all my
questions."

"Oh, the parson's a jolly old card," said Harry, following her.  "He's
just mad with Dick because he won't hunt.  He's been in at the death at
every meet round, and don't he swear when any one rides over the dogs,
that's all!"

Virginia began to think Elderthwaite must be very old-fashioned indeed.

"Doesn't Dick like hunting?" she said.  "No, Dick takes after the
governor.  It's cards that'll send him to the devil, and the first
Seyton he'll be that's not worth having, says Uncle James."

Harry talked in a low, solemn voice, with the same odd twinkle in his
eyes, and it was very difficult to say whether it was wicked mischief,
or a sort of shameless _naivete_, that made him so communicative.

Virginia still strongly suspected him of a desire to astonish her; but
his last speech gave her a strange new pang, and she turned away to
safer subjects.

"I suppose the Lester boys are friends of yours?"

"Well, that's as may be.  We're such a bad lot, you see, that Bob's
never allowed to come here.  There was a row once, and old Lester, a
humbugging chap, just interfered.  Jack's such a confounded prig he
wouldn't touch us with a pair of tongs."

"And Cheriton, of course, is too old for you."

"Cherry! oh, he isn't a bad fellow.  I go over to Oakby sometimes when
he's there.  But it's a slow place, and old Lester keeps them very
tight.  And then he's always humbugging after his schools and things.
Writing to my father about the state of the village.  As if it was his
affair!" said Harry, in a tone of virtuous indignation.

"Doesn't papa approve of education?" said Virginia.

"Bless you, he don't trouble his head about it.  Why should he?  Teach a
lot of poaching vagabonds to read and write!"

"But Uncle James--"

"Oh, Uncle James," said Harry, with a spice of mimicry, "he likes his
glass of grog and his ferrets too well to put himself out of the way.
By Jove, here's Aunt Julia!  I shall be off before I'm asked what has
become of Dick."

Virginia sat still where he had left her.  She only half believed him,
and strange to say there was something so comical in his manner that she
was rather attracted by its cool sauciness.  But she was frightened and
perplexed.  What sort of a world was this into which she had come?
Those stories, even if true, happened a long time ago; Harry must be in
joke about Dick, and everything was different nowadays.

It was true.  The golden age, if such an expression can be permitted, of
Seyton wickedness had passed away; and these were smaller times, times
of neglect, mismanagement, and low poor living, the dreary dregs of a
cup long since drained.  Nobody could quote Mr Seyton as a monster of
wickedness, because he dawdled away his time over his sherry, and knew
no excitement but an occasional game of cards at not very high stakes.
There was many another youth in Westmoreland who gambled and played
billiards in low company like Dick, and some ladies perhaps who found
all their excitement in the memory of other times, and troubled
themselves as little over any question of conscience as Miss Seyton.

But it was not all at once that this absence of all that makes life
worth living could be apparent, and Virginia found her first
confirmation of Harry's words as she walked through the village on
Christmas morning, and noted the wild, untidy look of the people, and
the wretched state of their houses, and observed the sullen look of
their faces as her father passed.  Dick did not appear at all; Harry
audibly "supposed the governor was going to church because Virginia was
there," and certainly church-going did not appear to be a fashion of the
village.

Neither her childish recollections, nor Harry's remarks, had prepared
her, as they came into the small, ivy-grown church, for broken floors,
cracked windows, and damp fustiness; still less for the very scantiest
of congregations, and a rustling silence where responses should have
been.  Her uncle read the service rapidly, with the broad northern
accent now strange to her ears.  The old clerk trotted about whenever
his services were not required, and did a little sweeping.  Her uncle
paused as he began the Litany, and called to him in a loud and cheerful
voice to shut the door.

Virginia peeped out between the faded green-baize curtains that, hanging
round the great square pew, represented to her every Church principle
she had been taught to condemn; and found her view obstructed by a large
cobweb.  Harry poked at the spider, and Virginia recalling her own
attention from her despairing visions of having no better church than
this, perceived that her father was leaning idly back in his corner.
All her standards of right and wrong seemed confused and shocked; so
much so that, at the moment, she hardly distinguished the pain of
finding herself left alone after the sermon, and seeing her father turn
away, from her horror at her uncle's dirty surplice, and the dreary
degradation of the whole place.  When the parson came after her after
service, and loudly told her she was the prettiest lass he'd seen for
long enough, kissing her under the church porch, she still felt as if
the typical bad parish priest of her imagination had come to life, and
behold he was her own uncle!

Since this comprehensible form of evil was so plain to her eyes, what
terrible secrets might not lurk behind it!  Virginia felt as if she
would never be light-hearted again.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

FIRE AND SNOW.

  "A northern Christmas, such as painters love.
  * * * * *
  Red sun, blue sky, white snow, and pearled ice,
  Keen ringing air which sets the blood on fire."

Christmas is no doubt, theoretically, the right season for relations who
have been long parted to meet, and there was an ideal appropriateness in
the long absent heir appearing at Oakby for the first time on Christmas
Day.  But practically it would have been better for Alvar if he had come
home at any other time of the year.  In the first place the frost
continued with unabated severity, and precluded every outdoor amusement
but skating, in which Alvar of course had no skill, and which he did not
seem at all willing to learn.  Besides, the season brought an amount of
local and parish business which Mr Lester attended to vigorously in
person, but the existence of which Alvar never seemed to realise.  His
grandmother's charities he understood, and was rather amused at seeing
the old women come to fetch their blankets and cloaks; but what could he
have to do with any of these people?

Tenants' dinners and choir-suppers might form a good opportunity for
introducing him to his neighbours; and Cheriton, who was the life and
soul of such festivities, tried to put him forward; but he only made
magnificent silent bows, and comported himself much as his brother Jack
had done, when in an access of gruff shyness and democratic ardour he
had called the Christmas feasts "relics of feudalism," and had shown his
advanced notions of the union of classes by never speaking a word to any
one.

Between the newcomer and his father there was an impassable distance.
Alvar never failed in courtesy; but Cheriton's quick eyes soon perceived
that he resented deeply the long neglect; saw too that the sight of him
was a pain and distress to his father, sharpened his temper, and
produced constant rubs; though he was careful to do everything that the
proper introduction of his son demanded of him.  A grand ball was
organised in his honour, and also a stiff and ponderous dinner-party at
which Alvar was to be introduced to the county magnates.

Special invitations were also sent to him by their various neighbours,
and he created quite an excitement in the dull country neighbourhood.
Mr Lester only half liked being congratulated on his son's charming
foreign manners; but still, as a novelty, Alvar had great attractions,
and in society never seemed shy or at a loss.  Mr Lester's
brother-in-law, Judge Cheriton, invited the stranger to pay him a visit
when the season had a little advanced, and to let him see a little
London society; for which attention Mr Lester, who hated London, was
very grateful, as Alvar's grandfather had Spanish friends there, and it
would have been too intolerable for the heir of Oakby to have appeared
there under auspices which, however distinguished, Mr Lester thought
suitable only to a political refugee or a music master.

He had, when he had ceased to pay for Alvar's English tutor, made him an
allowance which had been magnificent in Spain, and greatly added to
Alvar's consideration there, and he now increased this to what he
considered a sufficient sum for his eldest son's dignity.  In short he
did everything but overcome his personal distaste to him; he never
willingly spoke to him, and the very sight of him was an irritation to
him.  He got less too than usual of Cheriton's company; their walks, and
talks, and consultations were curtailed by Alvar's requirements.  Indeed
Cherry was pulled in many different directions, and he ended by
sacrificing all the reading that was to have been got through during the
vacation.  For the home life was very difficult, and the more they saw
of the stranger the less they liked him.

"He's not of our sort," said Bob, as if that settled the matter, not
perceiving that his slowness to receive impressions, and difficulty in
accommodating himself to a new life, might spring as much from his
Lester blood as from his Spanish breeding.

"He might try and _look_ like an Englishman," growled Jack.

"When you go to Spain, we shall see you in a _sombrero_ dancing under
the orange-trees to a pair of castanets," retorted Cheriton.  "_We_
should all be so ready at foreign languages and so accommodating,
shouldn't we?"

Alvar's individuality was not to be ignored, though unfortunately it was
very distasteful to his kindred.  He was so dignified, so terribly
polite they were half afraid of him, and as the awe wore off, they
wanted to quarrel with him.  He announced that he loved riding, and
seemed to know something of horses; he played billiards much too well to
be a pleasant opponent to his father, he sang much too quaintly and
prettily for his family to appreciate, and he played the guitar!  Even
Cheriton wished it had been a fiddle.  He hated going to walk, smoked
incessantly, and was indifferent to every one except Cheriton, to whom
he deferred in everything.

Poor Cheriton!  "Among the blind, the one-eyed is king," and his
sentiments were amazingly liberal for Oakby; but he was very young and
deeply attached to his home and his surroundings, too tender-hearted not
to be touched at Alvar's preference, imaginative enough to realise his
position, and yet repelled and put out of countenance by his
peculiarities.  To be tenderly addressed as "my brother," "mi caro," "mi
Cheriton," "Cherito mio," to be deferred to on all occasions, and even
told in the hearing of Jack and Bob "that his eyes when he laughed were
the colour of the Mediterranean on a sunny day," was, as he said, "so
out-facing, that it made him feel a perfect fool," especially when his
brothers echoed it at every turn.

Yet he put up with it.  It was so hard on the poor fellow if no one was
kind to him!  So hard, he added to himself, to be an unloved and
unloving son.

Perhaps, after all, Alvar's essential strangeness prevented Cheriton
from feeling himself put aside.

Cheriton was very popular at school and at college.  He had strong,
intellectual ambitions, and though of less powerful mind than Jack, had
attained to much graceful scholarship and possessed much command of
language.  He hoped to take honours, to go to the bar, and distinguish
himself there under his uncle, Judge Cheriton's, auspices.  He had too a
further and a sweeter hope, hitherto confided to no one.

But it was a certain "genius for loving" that really distinguished him
from his fellows--really made him every one's friend.  He did not seek
out his poorer neighbours so much from a sense of duty, as because his
heart went out to every one belonging to Oakby, nay, every animal, every
bit of ground--nothing was a trouble that conduced to the welfare of the
place.  This loving-kindness was a natural gift; but Cheriton made good
use of it.  He had high principles, and deep within his soul, struggling
with the temptations of this ardent nature, were the pure aspirations
and the capability of fervent piety which have made saints--
responsibilities with which he was born.

But all this fire and force did not make tolerance easy; he was full of
instinctive prejudices, and perhaps his greatest aids in his dealings
with his new brother were his joyous unchecked spirits and the keen
sense of the ludicrous that enabled him to laugh at himself as well as
at other people.

Some little time after Alvar's arrival there was a deep fall of snow,
and while the pond was being swept for skating, the young Lesters, with
Harry Seyton and the children from the rectory, who had come up for the
purpose, proceeded to erect a snow man of gigantic proportions in front
of the house.

"What a fright you have made of him!" said Cheriton, coming up with
Alvar as they finished; "he has no nose and no expression."

"Well, come and do his nose, then; it keeps on coming off," said Nettie,
who was standing on a bench to put the finishing touches.

Cherry was nothing loath, and was soon engaged in moulding the snowy
countenance with the skill of long practice, while Alvar, with his great
crimson-lined cloak wrapped about him, stood looking on.

"Give him a good _lumpy_ nose, that won't melt," said Cherry.  "There,
he's lovely! got an old pipe for him?"

As he spoke a great snowball came stinging against his face, and in a
moment, to the astonishment of Alvar, the whole party set on Cherry, and
a wild bout of snowballing ensued.

"No, no, that's not fair!  I can't fight you all," shouted Cherry; "and
you've got all your snowballs ready made.  Give me the girls, and then--
Come on."

"Oh, yes, yes; we'll be on Cherry's side," cried Nettie.

It was a picturesque scene enough--the pale blue sky overhead, the
dazzling snow under foot, the little girls in their scarlet cloaks or
petticoats, their long hair flying as they darted in and out, the great
boys struggling, wrestling, knocking each other about with small mercy.
No one threw a snowball at Alvar; perhaps they had forgotten him, as he
stood silently watching them as if they were a troop of Berserkers, till
the contest terminated in a tremendous struggle between Cheriton and
Jack, who were, of course, much the biggest of the party.  Cherry was
getting decidedly the worst of it, and either tripped in the rough snow
or was thrown down into it by Jack, when suddenly Alvar threw off his
cloak, stepped forward, and seizing Jack by the shoulders, pulled him
back with sudden irresistible force.

"By Jove!" was all that Jack could utter.

"What on earth did you do that for?" ejaculated Cherry as soon as he
gained his breath and his feet.

"He might have hurt you, my brother," said Alvar, who looked flushed,
and for once excited.  "And besides, I am stronger than either of you.
I could struggle with you both."

"Hurt me?  Suppose he had?" said Cherry disdainfully.  "But, Jack--Jack,
I do believe you're getting too many for me at last."

"That is what you call athletics," said Alvar, who looked unusually
bright.

"Yes; wrestling is a regular north-country game, and the fellows about
here have taught us all the tricks of it.  Come, Jack, let us show him a
bout."

The two brothers pulled off their coats, and set to with a will; and
after a long struggle, and with considerable difficulty, Cheriton
succeeded in throwing Jack.

"There, I've done it once more!" he said breathlessly, "and I don't
suppose I shall ever do it again.  You're getting much stronger than I
am, and of course you're heavier."

"Let me try to throw you down," said Alvar eagerly.

"Nay, Jack may have first turn; but it's fair to tell you there's a
great deal of knack in it."

Alvar, however, was man instead of boy; he was quite as tall as Jack,
and however he might have learnt to exercise his muscles, his grasp was
like steel; and though Jack's superior skill triumphed in the end, Alvar
rose up cool and smiling, and Jack panted out, in half-unwilling
admiration,--

"You'd beat us all with a little training."

"Ah yes; that is because I am an Englishman," said Alvar complacently.
"But I bear no malice, Jack.  It is in sport."

"Of course," said Jack.  "Now, Cherry, you try."

"It's hardly fair in a biting frost," said Cherry; "nobody can have any
wind.  However, here's for the honour of Westmoreland."

The younger ones gathered round in an admiring circle, and Cheriton, who
did not like to be beaten, put forth all the strength and skill of which
he was master.  But he was the more slightly made, and had met his
match, and to the extreme chagrin of his brothers and Nettie, sustained
an entire defeat.

"Well, I never thought you would throw _him_," said Jack, in a tone of
deep disappointment.

"Ah," said Alvar, "they always called me the strong Englishman."

"Papa was the strongest man in Westmoreland," said Nettie.

"Then," said Alvar, "so far I have proved myself his son, and your
brother.  I would not skate with you, for I should look like a fool; but
I knew you could not easily throw me down, since that is your sport.
But, my brother, I have hurt you."

"No," said Cheriton getting up, "only knocked all the wind out of me,
and made _me_ look like a fool!  Never mind, we shall understand each
other all the better.  Come upstairs, and we will show you some of the
cups and things we have won in boat-races and athletics."

This was a clever stroke of Cheriton's; he wanted to make Alvar free of
the premises, and had not yet found a good excuse.  So, leaving the
younger ones to finish their snowballing, he and Jack conducted Alvar up
to the top of the house, where, at the end of the passage where they
slept, was a curious low room, with a long, low window, looking west,
above the west window of the drawing-room, and occupying nearly one side
of the room, almost like the windows of the hand-loom weavers in the
West Riding.

There was a low seat underneath, broad enough to lie on, but furnished
with very dilapidated cushions.  There was a turning-lathe in the room,
and a cupboard for guns, and sundry cases of stuffed birds, one table
covered with tools, glue-pots, and messes of all descriptions; and
another, it is but justice to add, supplied with ink, pens, and paper,
and various formidable-looking books, for here the boys did their
reading.  There was a great, old-fashioned grate with a blazing fire in
it, and very incongruous ornaments above it--a stuffed dormouse,
Nettie's property--she maintained a footing in the room by favour--
various pipes, two china dogs, white, with brown spots on them,
presented to Cherry in infancy by his nurse, and a wooden owl carved by
their cousin Rupert--a cousin in the second degree, who had been much
with them owing to his father's early death.  On one side of the room
were arranged on a sort of sideboard the cups and tankards which were
the trophies of the brothers' prowess, and these were now each pointed
out to Alvar, and the circumstances of their acquisition described.
Cheriton's were fewer in proportion, and chiefly for leaping and
hurdle-racing; and Jack explained that Cherry's forte was cricket, and
that, since he had once knocked himself up at school by a tremendous
flat-race, their father had greatly objected to his going into training.

"Oh, it's not that," said Cherry; "he would not care now; but I really
haven't time.  I must grind pretty hard from now to midsummer."

"There is one thing I have read of," said Alvar, "in English newspapers.
It is a race of boats on the Thames between Oxford and Cambridge."

"Oh, yes, you must go and see it.  That's Jack's ambition--to be one of
the crew."

"Ah, but you see there's no river at R--, and that's so unlucky," said
Jack seriously.

And so what with explanations and questions the ice melted a little.
Alvar looked smiling and beneficent; he did not seem at all ashamed of
his own ignorance; and Jack evidently regarded him with a new respect.

Cheriton also contrived that the Seytons, with the vicar of Oakby, Mr
Ellesmere and his wife, should be asked to dinner; and as the vicar had
some general conversation, some information about Spain was elicited
from Alvar, who, moreover, was pleased to find himself in ladies'
society, and was evidently at ease in it; while Virginia, in exchange
for the pleasant talk that seemed to come out of her old life, could
tell Cheriton that her cousin Ruth was coming to stay with her, and
could confide in him that home was still a little strange.

"Well, strangers _are_ strange," said Cherry.  "_We_ are shaking down,
but the number of tempers lost in the process might be advertised for
`as of no value except to the owners,' if to them.  Only the home-made
article, you understand--"

"Dear me," said Virginia, "I should as soon think of losing my temper
with the Cid.  Aren't you afraid of him?"

Cheriton made an irresistibly ludicrous face.

"Don't tell," he said, "but I think we are; and yet, you know, we think
`yon soothern chap,' as old Bates called him, must be `a bit of a softy'
after all."

"Oh, Cherry, that is how you talked yourself when we were children,"
exclaimed Virginia impulsively.  "Do you know I _feel_ I was born here,
when I hear the broad Westmoreland.  I never forgot it."

"Nay, I'm glad you don't say I talk so now," said Cherry.  "They tell me
at Oxford that my tongue always betrays me when I am excited.  But here
comes Alvar; now make him fall in love with Westmoreland.  Alvar, Miss
Seyton _has_ been abroad, so _she_ is not quite a benighted savage."

"My brother Cheriton is not a savage," said Alvar, smiling, as Cherry
moved away.  "He is the kindest and most beautiful person I have ever
seen."

"Yes, he is very kind.  But I hope, Mr Lester, that you do not think us
_all_ savages, with that one exception."

"In future I can never think so," said Alvar, with a bow.  "These boys
are savage certainly--very savage, but I do not care."

"It is strange, is it not," said Virginia, rather timidly, "to have to
make acquaintance with one's own father?"

"Of my father I say nothing," said Alvar, with a sudden air of hauteur,
that made the impulsive Virginia blush, and feel as if she had taken a
liberty with him, till he added, with a smile, "Miss Seyton, too, I
hear, is a stranger."

"Yes, I have been away ever since I was a little girl, and--and I had
forgotten my relations."

"I have not known mine," said Alvar; "Cheriton wrote to me once a little
letter.  I have it now, and since then I have loved him.  I do not know
the rest, and they wish I was not here."

"But don't you think," said Virginia earnestly, "that we--that you will
soon feel more at home with them?"

"Oh, I do not know," said Alvar, with a shrug.  "It is cold, and I am so
dull that I could die.  They understand no thing.  And in Spain I was
the chief; I could do what I wished.  Here I must follow and obey.  My
name even is different.  I do not know `Mr Lester.'  I am `Don Alvar.'
Will you not call me so?"

"But that would be so very strange to me," said Virginia, parrying this
request.  "Every one will call you Mr Lester.  How tall Nettie is
grown.  Do you not think her very pretty?"

"Oh, she is pink, and white, and blue, and yellow; but she is like a
little boy.  There is not in her eyes the attraction, the coquetry,
which I admire," said Alvar, pointing his remark with a glance at his
companion's lucid, beaming, interested eyes, in which however there was
little conscious coquetry.

"I am sorry to hear you admire coquettes," was too obvious an answer to
be resisted.

"Nay, it is the privilege of beauty," said Alvar.

Virginia, like many impulsive people, was apt to recollect with a cold
chill conversations by which at the time she had been entirely carried
away.  But on looking back at this one she liked it.  Alvar's dignity
and grace of manner made his trifling compliments both flattering and
respectful.  His feelings, too, she thought, were evidently deep and
tender; and how she pitied him for his solitary condition!

CHAPTER EIGHT.

A DAY OF REST.

  "Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar."

On the third Sunday morning after Alvar's arrival, Mr Lester came down
as usual at the sound of the gong, and as he glanced round the
dining-room missed his two elder sons.

Prayers were over and breakfast had begun before Alvar entered.

"Ah pardon," he said, bowing to his grandmother; "I did not know it was
late."

"I make a point of being punctual on Sunday," said Mr Lester, in a tone
of incipient displeasure.

"Cheriton is late too," said Alvar.

"No," said Jack, "he's gone to Church."

"All, then _we_ do not go to-day," said Alvar, with an air of relief so
comical that even the solemn Jack could hardly stand it.

"Oh, yes, we do," he said, "this is extra."

"Cheriton," said Mr Lester, "is very attentive to his religious
duties."

"I suppose he'll have breakfast at the Vicarage," said Nettie, as Alvar
raised his eyebrows and gave a little shrug.

It was a gesture habitual to him, and was not intended to express
contempt either for religion or for Cheriton, but only a want of
comprehension of the affair; but it annoyed Mr Lester and called his
attention to the fact that Alvar had appeared in a black velvet coat of
a peculiar foreign cut, the sight of which he disliked on a week-day,
and considered intolerable when it was contrasted with the spruce
neatness of the rest of the party.  He could not very well attack Alvar
on the subject, but he sharply reproved Bob for cutting hunches of bread
when no one wanted them, and found fault with the coffee.  And then,
apparently _a propos_ of nothing, he began to make a little speech about
the importance of example in a country place, and the influence of
trifles.

"And I can assure _every one_ present," he concluded emphatically, "that
there is no need to look far for an example of the evil effects of
neglect in these particulars."

"Elderthwaite?" whispered Nettie to Jack.

"Ay," said Mrs Lester, "young people should show respect to Sunday
morning.  It is what in my father's house was always insisted on.  Your
grandfather, too, used to say that he liked his dogs even to know
Sunday."

"It is strange to me," said Alvar coolly.

"It will be well that you should give yourself the pains to become
accustomed to it," said his father curtly.

It was the first time that the stately stranger had been addressed in
such a tone, and he looked up with a flash of the eye that startled the
younger ones.

"Sir, it is by your will I am a stranger here," he said, with evident
displeasure.

"Stranger or no, my regulations must be respected," said Mr Lester, his
colour rising.

Alvar rose from his seat and proved his claim at any rate to the family
temper by bowing to his grandmother and marching out of the room.

"Highty tighty!" said the grandmother.  "Here's a spirt of temper for
you!"

"Intolerable insolence!" exclaimed Mr Lester.  "Under my roof he must
submit to what I please to say to him."

"It's just what I told ye, Gerald; a foreigner's ways are what we cannot
do with," said Mrs Lester.

"Of course," blurted out Jack, with the laudable desire of mending
matters; "of course he is a foreigner.  How can you expect him to be
anything else?  And father never said it was his coat."

"His coat?" said Mr Lester.  "It is his temper to which I object.  When
he came I told him that I expected Sunday to be observed in my house,
and he agreed."

"But he did not understand that you thought that coat improper on
Sunday," said Jack with persevering justice.

"I am not in the habit of being obscure," said Mr Lester, as he rose
from the table, while Jack thought he would give Alvar a little good
advice.

Cherry was too soft; he was equally impartial, and would be more plain
spoken.  But as he approached the library he heard an ominous tinkling,
and entering, beheld Alvar, still in the objectionable coat, beginning
to play on the still more objectionable guitar, an air which Jack did
not think sounded like a hymn tune.

Jack really intended to mend matters, but his manner was unfortunate,
and in the tone he would have used to a disobedient fag he remarked, as
he stood bolt upright beside his brother,--

"I say, Alvar, I think you'd better not play on that thing this
morning."

"There is no reason for you to tell me what to do," said Alvar quietly.

"It's not, you know," said Jack, "that _I_ think there's any harm in it.
_My_ views are very liberal.  I only think it's a frivolous and unmanly
sort of instrument; but the governor won't like it, and there'll be no
end of a row."

"You have not a musical soul," said Alvar loftily, for he had had time
to cool down somewhat.

"_Certainly_ not," said the liberal Jack, with unnecessary energy and a
tone of disgust; "but that's not the question.  It's not the custom here
to play _that sort of thing on a thing like that_ on a Sunday morning.
Ask Cherry."

"Would it vex my brother?" asked Alvar.

"If you mean Cheriton, it certainly would.  He hates a row."

"A row?" said the puzzled Alvar, "that is a noise--my guitar?"

"Oh, hang it! no, a quarrel," began Jack, when suddenly--

"Sir, I consider this an act of defiance; I beg I may see that
instrument put away at once," and Mr Lester's voice took the
threatening sound that made his anger always appear so much worse than
it really was.  "I will have the proprieties of my house observed, and
no example of this kind set to your younger brothers."

Alvar had taken Jack's interference with cool contempt, but now he
started up with a look of such passion as fairly subdued Jack into a
hasty--

"Oh come, come, I say, now--don't!"  Alvar controlled himself suddenly
and entirely.

"Sir, I obey my father's commands.  I will say good morning," and taking
up his guitar went up to his own room, from which he did not emerge at
church time, and as no one ventured to call him they set off without
him.  Among themselves they might quarrel and make it up again many
times a day, but Alvar's feelings were evidently more serious.

It was occasionally Cheriton's practice to sing in the choir, more for
the popularity of his example than for his voice, which was indifferent.
Alvar had been greatly puzzled at his doing so, and had then told him
that "in that white robe he looked like the picture of an angel," a
remark which so discomfited Cherry that he had further perplexed his
unlucky brother by saying,--"_Pray_ don't say such a thing to the
others, I should never hear the last of it.  You'd better say I look
like an ass at once."

He did not therefore see anything of his family till he met them after
the service, when Jack attacked him.

"What induced you to go out this morning?  Everything has gone utterly
wrong, and I shouldn't wonder if we should find Alvar gone back to
Spain."

"Why, what's the matter?"

"Alvar came down late in that ridiculous coat and then played the
guitar.  And if ever you saw a fellow in a passion!  He likes his own
way."

"Was father angry?"

"I should just think so, I don't expect they'll speak."

This was a pleasant prospect.  Cheriton saw that his father's brow was
cloudy, and as he went upstairs his grandmother called him into her
room.

"Cheriton," she said mysteriously, as she sat down and untied her
bonnet, "Jack has told you of your brother's behaviour, and it's my
belief there's a clue to it, and I hope you'll take warning, for I
sometimes think ye've a hankering after that way yourself."

"What way, grandmamma?  I never play the guitar on a Sunday morning."

"Nay, but there's more behind.  It's well known how Sunday is profaned
in Popish countries.  I've heard they keep the shops open in France.
Your brother has been brought up among Papists, and it would be a sad
thing for your father's son to give all this property into the hands of
the priests."

"Dear me, granny, what a frightful suggestion.  But I'm sure Alvar has
no Romish sympathies.  He has no turn for anything of the kind, and I
should think the Roman Church was very unattractive in Spain."

"Ay, but they're very deep."

"Well," said Cherry, "if Alvar is a Jesuit in disguise, as you say, and
rather a dissipated person, as my father seems to think, and has such an
appalling temper as Jack describes, we're in a bad way.  I think I'll go
and see for myself."

When Cherry entered Alvar's room he found this alarming compound of
qualities sitting by the fire looking forlorn and lonely.  "Why, Alvar,
what's all this about?"

"Ah, my brother," said Alvar, "you were absent and all has been wrong.
My father is offended with me.  I know not why.  He insulted me."

"Oh, nonsense! we never talk about being insulted.  My father's a little
hasty, but he means nothing by it.  What did you do that annoyed him?"

"I played my guitar and Jack scolded me.  No one shall do so but you."

"I daresay Jack made an ass of himself--he often does; but he is a
thorough good fellow at bottom.  You know we do get up in our best
clothes on Sunday."

"I can do that," said Alvar, "but your Sunday I do not understand.  You
tell me I may not play at cards or at billiards; you do not dance nor go
to the theatre.  What good does it do?  I would go to church, though it
is tiresome, and I shudder at the singing.  It is a mark, doubtless, of
my father's politics; but at home--well, I can smoke, if that is
better?"

Driven back to first principles, Cheriton hardly knew what to say.  "Of
course," he answered.  "I have often heard the matter discussed, and I
don't pretend to say that at Oxford the best of us are as particular as
we might be.  But in a country place like this, carelessness would do
infinite harm.  And, on the whole, I shouldn't like the rule to be
otherwise."

Alvar sighed, and made no answer.

"But," continued Cherry, "I think no one has a right to impose rules on
you.  I wouldn't bring out the guitar in the morning--it looks rather
odd, you know--nor wear that coat.  But we're not so very strict; there
are always newspapers about, and novels, and, as you say, you can smoke
or talk, or play the piano--I'm sure no one would know what the tune
was--or write letters.  Really, it might be worse, you know."

Perhaps Cherry's coaxing voice and eyes were more effectual than his
arguments; any way, Alvar said, "Well, I will offer my hand to my
father, if he will take it."

"Oh, no; pray don't make a scene about it.  There's the gong.  Put on
your other coat, and come down.  We _do_ eat our dinner on Sunday, and
I'm awfully hungry."

Whether Mr Lester accepted the coat as a flag of truce, or whether he
did not wish to provoke a contest with an unknown adversary, nothing
more was said; but Alvar's evil star was in the ascendant, and he was
destined to run counter to his family in a more unpardonable way.

He had no sympathy whatever with the love for animals, which was perhaps
the softest side of his rough kindred.  All the English Lesters were
imbued with that devotion to live creatures which is ingrain with some
natures.  No trouble was too great to take for them.  Bob and Nettie got
up in the morning and went out in all weathers to feed their ferrets, or
their jackdaws, or whatever pet was young, sick, or troublesome.
Cheriton's great Saint Bernard, Rolla, ranked somewhere very near Jack
in his affections, and had been taught, trained, beaten, and petted,
till he loved his master with untiring devotion.  Mrs Lester had her
chickens and turkeys, Mr Lester his prize cattle and his horses, some
of the latter old and well-tried friends.

It must be admitted that Oakby was a trying place for people devoid of
this sentiment.  Every one had a dog, more or less valuable, and
jackdaws and magpies have their drawbacks as members of a family.  Alvar
openly said that he had never seen anybody make pets of dumb animals,
and that he could not understand doing so; and though he took no notice
of them, Rolla and an old pointer of Mr Lester's, called Rose, had
already been thrashed for growling at him.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, the bright cold weather clouded
over and promised a thaw.  Alvar preferred dulness to the weather
out-of-doors, and Cheriton accompanied his father on the Sunday stroll,
which included all the beasts on the premises, and generally ended in
visits to the old keeper and coachman, who thought it the height of
religious advantage to bear the squire read a chapter.

Mr Lester was aware that he had been impatient with his son, and that
Alvar could not be expected to be imbued with an instinctive knowledge
of those forms of religion with which his father had been inspired by
his young brilliant wife, when "Fanny" had taught him to restore his
church and build his schools in a fuller fashion than had satisfied his
father, and made him believe that his position demanded of himself and
his family a personal participation in all good works--some control of
them he naturally desired.

He was, as Mr Ellesmere said, with a little shrug, when forced to yield
a point, "a model squire," conscientious and open-handed, but
unpersuadable.  Perhaps the clear-eyed, wide-souled Fanny might have
allowed more readily for the necessary changes of twenty years.
Certainly she would better have appreciated a newcomer's difficulties;
while poor Mr Lester felt that Fanny's ideal was invaded, and not by
Fanny's son.  It spoilt his walk with Cheriton, and made him reply
sharply to the latter's attempts at agreeable conversation.  Cheriton at
length left him at the old gamekeeper's; and while Mr Lester's
irritable accents were softened into kindly inquiries for the old
father, now pensioned off, he chatted to the son, at present in command,
who had been taking care of a terrier puppy for him.

Finding that Buffer, so called from his prevailing colour, was looking
strong and lively, Cheriton thought it would be as well to accustom him
to society, and took him back to the house.  He could not help wondering
what would become of Alvar when he was left alone at Oakby.  Another
fortnight would hardly be sufficient to give him any comfortable,
independent habits; how could he endure such deadly dulness as the life
there would bring him?  That fortnight would be lively enough, and there
would be his cousin, Rupert Lester, for an additional companion, and
another Miss Seyton, more attractive than Virginia, for an occasional
excitement.  If Alvar was so fascinating a person to young ladies, would
he--would she--?  An indefinite haze of questions pervaded Cheriton's
mind, and as he reckoned over the county beauties whom he could
introduce to Alvar, and whom he would surely admire more than just the
one particular beauty who had first occurred to his thoughts, he reached
the house.  He found his brothers and Nettie alone in the library, Alvar
sitting apart in the window, and looking out at the stormy sky.

"Hallo!" said Jack, "so you have brought Buffer up.  Well, he has grown
a nice little chap."

"Yes, I thought it was time he should begin his education.  Nice head,
hasn't he?  He is just like old Peggy."

"Yes, he'll be a very good dog some day."

"Set him down," said Bob; "let's have a look at him."

"Little darling!" said Nettie, enthusiastically.

Buffer was duly examined, and then, as Cherry turned to the fire to warm
himself, observing that it was colder than ever, began to play about the
room, while they entered on a discussion of the merits of all his
relations up to their dim recollection of his great-grandmother.

Buffer made himself much at home, poked about the room, and at last
crossed over to Alvar, who had sat on, unheeding his entrance.  Buffer
gave his trousers a gentle pull.  Alvar shook him off.  Here was another
tiresome little beast; then, just as Cherry crossed over to the window
in search of him, he made a dart at Alvar's foot and bit it sharply.
Alvar sprang up with a few vehement Spanish words, gave the little dog a
rough kick, and then dashed it away from him with a gesture of fierce
annoyance.  Buffer uttered a howl of pain.

"I say, that's too rough," exclaimed Cherry, snatching up the puppy,
which cried and moaned.

"But it bit me!" said Alvar, angrily.

"I believe you have killed him," said Cheriton.

"You cruel coward," cried Nettie, bursting into a storm of tears.

Alvar stood facing all the four, their blue eyes flashing scorn and
indignation; but, angry as they were, they were too practical to waste
time in reproaches.  Jack brought a light, and Bob, whose skill in such
matters equalled his literary incapacity, felt Buffer's limbs
scientifically.

"No ribs broken," he said; "he's bruised, though, poor little beggar!
Ah! he has put his shoulder out.  Now, Cherry, if your hand's going to
shake, give him to Jack.  I'll pull it in again."

"I can hold him steady," said Alvar, in a low voice.

"No, thank you," said Cherry, curtly, as Jack put a hand to steady his
hold, and the operation was performed amid piteous shrieks from Buffer.
Alvar had the sense to watch them in silence.  What had he done?  A kick
and a blow to any domestic animal was common enough in Spain.  And now
he had roused all this righteous indignation, and, far worse, offended
Cherry, and seen his distress at the little animal's suffering, and at
its cause.  Buffer was no sooner laid in Nettie's arms to be cossetted
and comforted, than he seized Cherry's hand.

"Ah, my brother!  I did not know the little dog was yours.  I would not
touch him--"

"What difference does that make?" said Cherry, shaking him off and
walking away.

"I shall keep _my_ dog out of his way," said Bob, contemptuously.

"I suppose Spaniards are savages," said Jack, in a tone of deadly
indignation.

"He'd better play a thousand guitars than hurt a poor little innocent
puppy!" said Nettie, half sobbing.

Alvar stood looking mournfully before him; his anger had died out; he
looked almost ready to cry with perplexity.

Cheriton turned round.  "I won't have a fuss made," he said.  "Take
Buffer upstairs to my room, and don't say a word to any one.  It can't
be helped."

"I know _who_ I shall never say a word to," said Nettie; but she obeyed,
followed by Jack and Bob.  Alvar detained Cheriton.

"Oh, my brother, forgive me.  I would have broken my own arm sooner than
see your eyes look at me thus.  It is with us a word and a blow.  I will
never strike any little beast again--never."

He looked so wretched that Cheriton answered reluctantly, "I don't mean
to say any more about it."

"But you are angry still?"

"No, I'm not angry.  I suppose you feel differently.  I hate to see
anything suffer."

"And I to see you suffer, my brother."

"I? nonsense!  I tell you that's nothing to do with it.  There, let it
drop.  I shall say no more."

He escaped, unable further to satisfy his brother, and went upstairs,
where Buffer had been put to bed comfortably.

"Did you ever know such a nasty trick in your life?" said Jack, as they
left the twins to watch the invalid's slumbers.

"Oh!" said Cherry, turning into his room, "it's all hopeless and
miserable.  We shall never come to any good--never!"

"Oh, come, come now, Cherry," said Jack, for once assuming the office of
consoler.  "Buffer'll do well enough; don't be so despairing."

Cheriton had much the brighter and serener nature of the two; but he was
subject to fits of reaction, when Jack's cooler temperament held its
own.

"It's not Buffer," he said, "it's Alvar!  How can one ever have any
brotherly feeling for a fellow like that?  He's as different as a Red
Indian!"

"It would be very odd and unnatural if you had much brotherly feeling
for him," said Jack.  "Why do you trouble yourself about him?"

"But he does seem to have taken a sort of fancy to me, and the poor
fellow's a stranger!"

"You're a great deal too soft about him.  Of course he likes you, when
you're always looking him up.  Don't be superstitious about it--he's
only our half-brother; and don't go down to tea looking like that, or
you'll have the governor asking what's the matter with you."

"Remember, I'll not have a word said about it," said Cheriton
emphatically.

Nothing was said publicly about it, but Alvar was made to feel himself
in disgrace, and endeavoured to re-ingratiate himself with Cherry with a
simplicity that was irresistible.  He asked humbly after Buffer's
health, and finally presented him with a silver chain for a collar.

When Buffer began to limp about on three legs, his tawny countenance
looking out above the silver engraved heart that clasped the collar with
the sentimental leer peculiar to puppyhood, the effect was sufficiently
ludicrous; but he forgave Alvar sooner than his brothers did, and
perhaps grateful for his finery, became rather fond of him.

CHAPTER NINE.

RUTH.

  "She has two eyes so soft and brown."

There was a little oak-panelled bedroom at Elderthwaite, which had been
called Ruth's ever since, as a curly-haired, brown-skinned child, the
little orphan cousin had come from her grandmother's in London and paid
a long visit in the North some five or six years before the winter's day
on which she now occupied it, when she came to be present at the
Lesters' ball.  She was a nut-brown maid still, with rough, curly hair
and great dark eyes, with curly, upturned lashes--eyes that were like
Virginia's in shape, colour, and fervour, but which glanced and gleamed
and melted after a fashion wholly their own.  She was slender and small,
and though with no wonderful beauty of feature or perfection of form,
whether she sat or stood she made a picture; all colours that she wore
became her, all scenes set off her peculiar grace.  Now, her brown
velvet dress, her rusty hair against the dark oak shutter, as she sat
crouched up in the window-seat, were a perfect "symphony in brown."

Ruth Seyton was an orphan, and lived with her grandmother, Lady
Charlton, a gentle, worldly old lady, whose great object was to see her
well married, and to steer her course safely through all the dangers
that might affect the course of a well-endowed and very attractive girl.
The scorn which Ruth felt for the shallow feelings and worldly notions
with which she was expected to enter on the question of her own future
was justifiable enough, and led to a violent reaction and to a fervour
of false romance.  Ruth had found her hero and formulated her view of
life, and the hero was Rupert Lester, whom she was about to meet at the
ball given in Alvar's honour, and between whom and herself lay the
memory of something more than a flirtation.

The theory was, that the hero once found, the grand passion once
experienced, was its own justification, itself the proof of depth of
character and worth of heart.  A girl who paused to consider her lover's
character or her friends' disapproval, when she had once given her heart
away, was a weak and cold-natured creature in her opinion.  She knew
that many difficulties lay between her and Rupert Lester, and she
gloried in the thought of how they should be overcome, rejoiced in her
own discrimination, which could see the difference between this real
passion and the worldly motives of some of her other admirers, or the
boyish fancy of Cheriton Lester, who talked to her about his brothers
and his occupations, and had room in his heart, so it seemed to her, for
a thousand lesser loves.  Ruth believed that she despised flirtation;
but there could be no harm in being pleasant to a boy she had known all
her life and whose attentions just now were so convenient.  Besides,
Cheriton was really very like his cousin Rupert, very like the
photograph which she now hid away as Virginia came in search of her.

The two cousins had been a great deal together at intervals and were
fond of each other, and Virginia knew something about Rupert; but Ruth
knew better than to give her full confidence on the subject.

"Well," she said, as her cousin entered, "and how does the world go with
you?  Do you see much of the Lesters?"

"Yes; while the frost lasted I used to go down to the ice with the boys,
and we met there.  Cheriton comes over here sometimes, and once he
brought his brother."

"What, the Spaniard?  How _do_ they manage?  Is he very queer?"

"Oh, no!  Of course he is very unlike the others.  Cherry gets on very
well with him.  I believe Mr Lester does not wish the boys to come here
much," added Virginia, abruptly.

"Well, it wasn't approved of in Roland's time," said Ruth.

"Were we always bad company?" said Virginia.  "I have had a great deal
to learn.  Why did you never make me understand better what Elderthwaite
was like?"

"But, Queenie," said Ruth cautiously, using a pet name of Virginia's
girlhood, "surely you _were_ told how tumbledown the place was, and how
stupid and behindhand everything would be.  Poor dear Uncle James ought
to have lived fifty years since."

"I don't believe that parish priests taught their people nothing but to
catch rats fifty years since," said Virginia, with a touch of the family
bitterness in her voice.  "Is it because papa is poor that the
men-servants get tipsy, and Dick and Harry are always after them?  Oh,
Ruth," suddenly softening, "I ought not to have said it, but the boys
aren't brought up well; and if you _saw_ how wretched the people in the
village are--and they look so wicked."

"Yes," said Ruth, as Virginia's tears silenced her, "but you know we
Seytons _are_ a bad lot.  We're born, they say, with a drop of bad blood
in us.  Look at Aunt Julia, _she_ was driven desperate and ran away--
small blame to her--when her lover's father forbade the match; but they
caught and stopped her.  After that she never cared what she did, and
just lived by making fun of things."

Virginia shuddered.  Could her lazy, sarcastic aunt have ever known the
thrillings and yearnings which were beating in her own heart now?

"There is not much fun in it," she said.  "No.  As for Dick, I don't
think much of him.  Poor old Roland was worth a dozen of him.  I don't
care what people _do_ as long as they _are_ something.  But Dick has no
fine feelings."

"Ruth," said Virginia, "I think I was not taught better for nothing.  I
am sure papa is very unhappy; he thinks how wrong everything is.  Poor
papa!  Grandpapa was such a bad father for him.  I cannot make friends
with Dick, and Harry will go back to school.  Indoors I have nothing to
do; but I am going to ask Uncle James, and then if I go to the cottages
and get the children together a little, perhaps it may be better than
nothing.  Old nurse says they all grow up bad.  Poor things, how can
they help it!"

"Well, Queenie," said Ruth dubiously, "I don't think the people are very
fit for you to go to.  I don't think Uncle Seyton would like it."

"I should not be afraid of them," said Virginia.  "It would be doing
something for papa, and doing good besides."

To think of her father as an involuntary victim to the faults of others
was the one refuge of Virginia's heart; his graceful, melancholy
gentleness had caught her fancy, and she was filled with a pity which,
however strange from a child to a father, vibrated in every tender
string of her nature.  On the other hand, all her notions of right were
outraged by the more obvious evils prevailing at Elderthwaite, and she
went through in those first weeks a variety of emotions, for which
action seemed the only cure.  She felt as if the sins of generations lay
on her father's shoulders, and she wanted to pull them on to her own--
wanted to stand in the deadly breach with the little weapon that her
small experience had put into her hand.  She wanted to teach a few poor
children, a thing that might only be a pleasant occupation or the most
commonplace of duties.  But it was turning her face right round on the
smooth slope the Seytons were treading, and trying to make a step up
hill.

Ruth did not think that first step would be easy, and would have liked
to see Virginia go downstairs in a somewhat less desperate humour, to
find her uncle chatting to Miss Seyton in the drawing-room.

"Ha, ha, Miss Ruth!  Come North just in time to make a conquest of the
fine Frenchman at Oakby."

"I thought he was a Spaniard, uncle," said Ruth.

"Eh, pretty much of a muchness, aren't they?  I've got a card for a
grand ball to go and see him.  Ha, ha!  I'd sooner see him with a red
coat on at Ashrigg meet next Thursday."

"But you must go to the ball, uncle, and dance with me," said Ruth.

"That's a bargain," said the jolly parson, striking his hands together.
"Any dance I like?"

"To be sure."

"Ah, mind you look out, then.  When you're sitting quiet with the
Frenchman you'll see your old uncle round the corner."

"I never dance with any one who doesn't know the _trois temps_, uncle."

"Bless my soul!  My favourite dance is the hornpipe, or old Sir Roger--
kiss the girls as you pop under.  That's an old parson's privilege, you
know."

All this time Virginia had been standing apart, working up her courage,
and now, regardless of the unities of conversation, and with a
now-or-never feeling, she began, her fresh young voice trembling and her
colour rising high.

"Uncle James, if you please.  I wanted to tell you I shall be very glad
to do anything to help you, if you will allow me."

"Help me, my dear?  Teach me the _troy tong_, or whatever Ruth calls
it?"

"To help you in the parish, uncle."

"Parish?  Ha, ha!  Do they have the pretty girls to read prayers in the
grand Ritualistic places nowadays?"

"I thought I might perhaps teach some of the children," faltered poor
Virginia through her uncle's peal of laughter.

"Teach?  We don't have many newfangled notions here, my dear.  Do your
wool-work, and dance your _troy tong_, and mind your own business."

"I have always been accustomed to do something useful," said Virginia,
gaining courage from indignation.

"Now look here, Virginia," said Parson Seyton emphatically.  "Don't you
go putting your finger into a pie you know nothing of.  There's not a
cottage in the place fit for a young lady to set her foot in.  There's a
vast deal too much of young women's meddling in these days; and as for
Elderthwaite, there's an old Methody, as they call him, who groans away
to the soberer folks, and comforts their hearts in his own fashion.
What could a chit of a lass like you do for them?  Go and captivate the
Frenchman with your round eyes--you've a grand pair of them--and give me
a kiss."

Parson Seyton put out his hand and drew her towards him.

"But, uncle," she stammered, yielding to the kiss in such utter
confusion of mind that she hardly knew what she was doing--"But, uncle,
do you _like_ that Methodist to--to attract the people?"

"Bless your heart, child, people must have their religion their own way.
They'd stare to hear _me_ convicting them of their sins.  `What's the
parson done with his own?' they'd ask.  But it comforts them like
blankets and broth, and it's little they get of either," with a side
glance at his sister; "so I take good care to keep out of the way.  I
told Cherry Lester I should go and hear him some Sunday afternoon.
`Hope it would do you good, parson,' says he, coolly.  Eh, he's a fine
lad.  What a confounded fool old Lester must think himself to have this
foreign fellow ready to step into his place."

"Are you and Cheriton as great friends as ever, uncle?" asked Ruth.

"Friends!  Oh, he's like Virginia here.  Wants to teach me a lesson now
and then.  Got me over last year to their grand meeting of clergy and
laity for educational purposes, and there I was up on the platform with
the best of them."

"Did you make a speech, uncle?" asked Ruth.

"I did, my lass, I did!  When they had quarrelled and disputed, and
couldn't by any means agree, some one asked my opinion, and I said, `My
lord,'--Lord--was there, you know,--`and my reverend brethren, having no
knowledge whatever of the subject, I have no opinion to give.'  And old
Thorold--he comes from the other side of the county, mind you,--remarked
that `Mr Seyton's old-fashioned wisdom might find followers with
advantage.'  Ha--ha--you should have seen Cherry's blue eyes down below
on the benches when I gave him a wink!  `Old-fashioned wisdom,' Miss
Virginia; don't you despise it."

"Hallo, uncle!" shouted Harry, putting his head in, "here's a fellow
come tearing up to say the wedding's waited an hour, and if the parson
isn't quick they'll do without him."

"Bless my soul, I forgot all about 'em.  Coming--coming--and I'll give
'em a couple of rabbits for the wedding dinner.  Virginia'll never ask
me to marry her, that's certain."  And off strode the parson, while poor
Virginia, scandalised and perplexed as she was, was fain, like every one
else, to laugh at him.

CHAPTER TEN.

THE OLD PARSON.

  "He gave not of that text a pulled hen
  That saith that hunters ben not holy men."

Perhaps no amount of angry opposition to her wishes could so have
perplexed Virginia as her uncle's _nonchalance_, which, whether cynical
or genial, seemed to remove him from the ranks of responsible beings,
and to make him a law unto himself.  When we read of young high-souled
martyrs, we are apt to fancy that their way was plain before them; that
however hard to their flesh, it was at least clear to their spirit; that
Agnes or Cecilia, however much afflicted by the wickedness of their
adversaries, were never perplexed by anything in them that was perhaps
not wicked.  Virginia Seyton was full of desires as pure, wishes as warm
to lead the higher life, was capable of as much "enthusiasm of humanity"
as any maiden who defied torture and death; but she was confronted by a
kind of difficulty that made her feel like a naughty girl; the means to
fulfil her purpose were open to so much objection that she could hardly
hold firmly to the end in view.  It may seem a very old difficulty, but
it came upon her as a startling surprise that so much evil could be
permitted by those who were not altogether devoid of good.  For she was
inclined to be sorry for this jolly, genial uncle, and not to wish to
vex him; while yet his every practice and sentiment was such as she had
been rightly taught to disapprove.

Anxious for a chance of settling her confused ideas, she slipped away by
herself, and went out into the muddy lanes, heedless of a fast-falling
shower.

The thaw had set in rapidly, and rich tints of brown, green, and yellow
succeeded to the cold whiteness of the snow on moor and hill-side.  A
thaw, when the snow has fairly gone, even in the depth of winter, has a
certain likeness to spring; the violent, buffeting wind was warm and
soft, and the sky, instead of one pale sheet of blue, showed every
variety of wild rain-cloud and driven mist.

Virginia plunged on through the mud with a perplexity in her soul as
blinding as the tears that rose and confused the landscape already
half-blotted out by wreaths of mountain mist.  Suddenly, as she turned a
corner, something bounced up against her, nearly knocking her down, and
a voice exclaimed,--

"Down, Rolla!  How dare you, sir!  Oh, dear me, how sorry I am! that
great brute has covered you with mud;" and Cheriton Lester, very muddy
himself, and holding by the neck an object hardly recognisable as
Buffer, appeared before her.

"I was very muddy before," said Virginia.  "Why, what has happened to
the puppy?"

"He fell into the ditch.  Nettie will wash him; it's her favourite
amusement.  I was coming up here to ask after a young fellow I know, who
works at this farm; he hasn't been going on very well lately."

"I suppose you know every one in Oakby," said Virginia, abruptly.

"Pretty well," answered Cherry.  "I couldn't help doing so."

"I should like to know the people in Elderthwaite," said Virginia.

"It would be a very good thing for some of them if you did."

"Ah!" she said, suddenly, "but Uncle James will not let me do so."

"Ah!" said Cherry, with an inflection in his voice that Virginia did not
understand.  Then he added quickly, "What did you want to do?"

"I wanted," said Virginia, moved, she hardly knew why, to confidence as
they walked on side by side, "to go to the cottages sometimes, and
perhaps teach some of the children.  Don't you think it would be right?"

"I think it would hardly do for you to go about at haphazard among the
cottagers."

"But why?  I am used to poor people," said Virginia.

Her sentences were short, because she was afraid of letting her voice
tremble; but she looked at him earnestly, and how could he tell her that
many of the people whom she wished to benefit owed her family grudges
deep enough to make her unwelcome within their walls, how betray to her
that the revelations they might make to her would affect her relations
to her own family more than she could hope to affect their lives in
return.  But Cheriton was never deaf to other people's troubles, and he
answered with great gentleness--

"Because we're a rough set up here in the North, and they would scarcely
understand your kind motives.  But the children--I wish you could get
hold of them!  I do wish something could be done for them.  What did the
old parson say to you?"

"He said he didn't approve of education."

"Oh, that's no matter at all!  I declare I think I see how you might do
it, and we'll make the parson hunt up a class for you himself!  What!
you don't believe me?  You will see.  Could you go down to the vicarage
on Sunday mornings?"

"Oh, yes! but Uncle James--"

"Oh, I'll make him come round.  They might send over some benches from
Oakby, and the children would do very well in the vicarage hall."

"But, Cheriton," exclaimed the astonished Virginia, "you can't _know_
what my uncle said about it!"

"He said, `Eh, they're a bad lot.  No use meddling with them,' didn't
he?" said Cheriton, in the very tone of the old parson.

"Something like it."

"Never mind.  He would like to see them a better lot in his heart, as
well as you or I would."

"Ruth says he is really very kind," said Virginia; "and I think he means
to be."

"Ah, yes, your cousin knows all our odd ways, you know.  She is with
you?"

"Yes, she came yesterday."

"Ah! she knows that he _is_ a very kind old boy.  He loves every stone
in Elderthwaite, and you would be surprised to find how fond some of the
people are of him.  Now I'll go and see him, and come and tell you what
he says.  May I?"

"To be sure," said Virginia, "and perhaps then Aunt Julia will not
object."

"Oh, no, not to this plan," said Cherry.  He called Rolla, and went in
search of the parson.

Cherry liked management; it was partly the inheritance of his father's
desire for influence, and partly his tender and genial nature, which
made him take so much interest in people as to enjoy having a finger in
every pie.  As he walked along, he contrived every detail of his plan.

Jack was wont to observe that Elderthwaite was a blot on the face of the
earth, and a disgrace to any system, ecclesiastical or political, that
rendered it possible.  But then Jack was much devoted to his young
house-master, and wrote essays for his benefit, one of which was
entitled, "On the Evils inherent in every existing Form of Government,"
so that he felt it consistent to be critical.  Cheriton had a soft spot
in his heart for a long existing form of anything.

He soon arrived at the vicarage, a picturesque old house, built half of
stone and half of black and white plaster.  It was large, with great
overgrown stables and farm-buildings, all much out of repair.  Cheriton
found the parson sitting in the old oak dining-room before a blazing
fire, smoking his pipe.  Some remains of luncheon were on the table, and
the parson was evidently enjoying a glass of something hot after it.
Cheriton entered with little ceremony.

"How d'ye do, Parson?" he said.

"Ha, Cherry! how d'ye do, my lad?  Sit down and have some lunch.  What
d'ye take? there's a glass of port in the sideboard."

"Thanks, I'd rather have a glass of beer and some Stilton," said Cherry,
seating himself.

As he spoke, a little bit of an old woman came in with some cold
pheasant and a jug of beer, which she placed before him.  She was
wrinkled up almost to nothing, but her steps were active enough, and she
had lived with Parson Seyton all his life.

"Ay, Deborah knows your tastes.  And what do you want of me?"

"I want to give you a lecture, Parson," said Cherry coolly.

"The deuce you do?  Out with it, then."

"Virginia has been telling me that you will not let her teach the little
kids on a Sunday."

"Bless my soul, Cheriton! d'ye think I'm going to let the girl run all
over the place and hear tales of her father and brothers, and may be of
myself into the bargain?"

"No," said Cherry; "but you ought to be very much obliged to her,
Parson.  It's a shame to see those little ruffians.  Now you're going to
call on half-a-dozen decentish people and tell them to send their
children down here of a Sunday morning at ten o'clock.  Virginia will
teach them in the hall.  I'll get them to send over a couple of forms
from Oakby.  Don't let her begin with above a dozen, and don't have any
big boys at first.  Deborah might give them a bit of cake now and again
to make the lessons go down.  What do you say?"

"I say you're the coolest hand in Westmoreland, and enough to wile the
flounders out of the frith!" said the old parson, as Cherry peeped at
him over his shoulder to see the effect of his words.

"What are we coming to?"

"A model school, perhaps."

"And a model parson.  Eh, Cherry, these enlightened days can't do with
the old lot much longer."

"Oh, you're moving with the times," said Cherry, as he came and stood
with his back to the fire, looking down at the parson as he filled his
pipe, and smiling at him.  Perhaps no other being in the world could
have got Parson Seyton to consent to such an innovation, but he loved
Cheriton Lester, who little knew how much self-respect the allegiance of
his high-principled, promising youth was worth to the queer old sporting
parson.  One atom of pretence or of priggishness in a well-conducted
correct young man would have been of all things odious to him, but the
shrewd old man believed in Cheriton to the backbone, and of all the
admiration and affection that the popular young man had won perhaps none
did him so much credit as the love that made him a sort of good angel to
rough Parson Seyton.

"You got my best dog out of me when I gave you Rolla," he said, "so I
suppose you'll have your own way now."

"And it'll turn out quite as well as Rolla," said Cherry rather
illogically.

Parson Seyton set about fulfilling his promise after a manner of his
own.

He rapped with his dog-whip at a cottage door and thus addressed the
mother:--

"Eh, Betty, there's a grand new start in Elderthwaite.  Here's Miss
Virginia going to turn all the children into first-rate scholars.  Wash
them up and send them over to my house on Sunday morning, and I'll give
a penny to the cleanest, and a licking to any one that doesn't mind his
manners."

If Parson Seyton had been a school-board visitor he could hardly have
put the matter more plainly, and on the whole could hardly have adopted
language more likely to be effectual.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

ALVAR CONFIDENTIAL.

  "He talked of daggers and of darts,
  Of passions and of pains."

The rain had ceased, and long pale rays of sunshine were streaming
through the mist as Cheriton made his way through a very dilapidated
turnstile and across a footpath much in need of drainage towards
Elderthwaite House.  As he came up through the overgrown shrubberies he
saw in front of him a small fur-clothed figure, and his colour deepened
and his heart beat faster as he recognised Ruth.  He had been thinking
that he should see her ever since his promise to Virginia, but he had
not expected to meet her out-of-doors on so wet a day, and he had hardly
a word to say as he lifted his hat and came up to her.  She was less
discomposed, perhaps less astonished.

"Ah! how do you do?" she said.  "Do you know when I saw some one coming
I hoped it might be your new brother.  I am _so_ curious to see him."

"He is not a bit like any of us," said Cherry.

"No?  That would be a change, for all you Lesters are so exactly alike."

Ruth had a way of saying saucy things in a soft serious voice, with
grave eyes just ready to laugh.  Cheriton and she had had many a passage
of arms together, and now he rallied his forces and answered,--

"Being new, of course he'll be charming.  Rupert and Jack and I will
know all our partners are longing for him.  But as he can only dance
with one young lady at a time, in the intervals I shall hope--I am much
improved in my waltzing--just to get a turn."

"Really improved--at last?" said Ruth; then suddenly changing to
sympathy--"But isn't it very strange for you all?  How do you get on?
How do _you_ like him?"

"Oh, he isn't half a bad fellow, and we're excellent friends."

"That's very good of you.  Now I have such a bad disposition that if I
were in your place I should be half mad with jealousy."

Cheriton laughed incredulously.

"I daresay you would stroke us all down the right way.  Rupert says he
feels as if he were lighting his cigar in a powder-magazine.  But they
get on very well, and Grace and Mary Cheriton think him perfectly
charming."

"I think I shall come to the ball in a mantilla.  But have you done
anything for poor Virginia?"

"Oh, yes; the old parson only wanted a little explanation," said Cherry,
quite carelessly enough to encourage Ruth in adding earnestly,--

"It is _so_ good of her to want to help these poor people.  Queenie is
like a girl in a book.  I really think she likes disagreeable duties."

"I am sure you, who can sympathise with Virginia and yet know all the
troubles, will be able to make it smooth for her.  I wish you would."

"Ah, but I am not nearly so good as Virginia," said Ruth--a perfectly
true statement, which she herself believed.  Whether she expected
Cheriton to believe it was a different matter.

Alvar had no excuse now for finding Oakby dull; the house was full of
people, Lady Cheriton and her daughters were enchanted with his music,
and he brightened up considerably and was off Cheriton's mind, so that
nothing spoilt the radiance of enjoyment that transfigured all the
commonplace gaiety into a fairy dream.  The younger ones found the times
less good.  Jack was shy and bored by fine people, Bob hated his dress
clothes, Nettie was teased by Rupert, who varied between treating her as
a Tomboy and flattering her as an incipient beauty, and thought her
grandmother's restrictions to white muslin and blue ribbons hard.  But
Mrs Lester had no notion of letting her forestall her career as a
county beauty.

When Cheriton came back from Elderthwaite he found the whole party by
the hall fire in the full tide of discussion and chatter, Nettie on the
rug with Buffer in her arms complaining of the white muslin.

"Sha'n't I look horrid, Rupert?"

"Frightful; but as you'll be sure to bring Buffer into the ball-room
he'd tear anything more magnificent."

"I sha'n't bring in Buffer!  Rupert, what an idea!  He'll be shut up,
poor darling!  But at least I may turn up my hair, and I shall.  I'm
quite tall enough."

"Turn your hair up?  Don't you do anything of the sort, Nettie.  Little
girls are fashionable, and yellow manes and muslin frocks will carry the
day against wreaths and silk dresses.  You let your hair alone, and then
people will know it's all real by-and-by."

"Well, I'd much rather turn it up," said Nettie simply.

"Well, perhaps I would," said Rupert.  "Fellows might say you let it
down on purpose."

Rupert conveyed a great deal of admiration of the golden locks in his
tone, but Nettie, though vain enough, was insensible to veiled flattery.

"Plait it up, Nettie," said Cherry briefly.

"If anybody thought I did such a nasty, mean, affected thing as that I'd
never speak to him again.  _Never_!  I'd cut it all off sooner," cried
Nettie.

"Young ladies' hair does come down sometimes," said Rupert; "when it's
long enough."

"Mine _never_ shall," said Nettie emphatically.

"Don't do it yourself, then," said Cherry.

"If Nettie ever takes to horrid, affected, flirting ways," said Jack,
who had joined the party, "I for one shall have nothing more to say to
her."

"You don't admire flirts, Jack?" said Rupert.

"I don't approve of them," said Jack crossly.

"Oh, come, come, now, Jack, that's very severe."

"Poor Jack!" said Cherry; "he speaks from personal experience.  There
was that heartless girl last summer, who, after hours of serious
conversation with him, went off to play croquet with Tom Hubbard, and
gave him a moss-rose-bud.  Poor Jack! it was a blow; he can't recover
from it!  It has affected all his views of life, you see."

"Poor fellow!" said Rupert, as Jack forcibly stopped Cherry's mouth;
"I'd no notion it was a personal matter.  Will she be at the ball?"

"No; you see, we avoided asking her."

"Cherry!" interposed the disgusted Jack, "how can you go on in this way!
It's all his humbug, Rupert."

This serious denial produced, of course, shouts of laughter--in the
midst of which Alvar entered and joined himself to the group round the
fire as they waited for the arrival of some friends of Cheriton's.

"And what have you been about?" asked Cherry.

"I have been singing with your cousins.  Ah, it is pleasant when there
are those who like music!"

"You found all these fellows awful savages, didn't you?" said Rupert.

Alvar turned his great dark eyes on Cheriton with the same sort of
expression with which Rolla was wont to watch him.

"Ah, no," he said; "my brother is not a savage.  But I do like young
ladies."

"But I thought," said Rupert, "that in Spain young ladies were always
under a duenna, so that there was no chance of an afternoon over the
piano?"

"But I assure you Miladi Cheriton was present," said Alvar seriously.

"Oh, that alters the question!" said Rupert.  "But come, now, we have
been hearing Jack's views--let us have your confessions.  Is the duenna
_always_ there, Alvar?"

"Here is my sister," said Alvar, with the oddest sort of simplicity, and
yet with a tone that conveyed a sort of reproach to Rupert and--for the
first time--of proprietorship in Nettie.

Rupert burst into a shout of laughter: "My dear fellow, what are you
going to tell us?"

"She is a young girl; surely even here you do not say everything to
her?" said Alvar, looking perplexed.

"By Jove, no!" said Rupert; "not exactly."

"Since Nettie is here, we should not have asked you to tell us anything
we did not wish her to hear," said Cheriton, with a sense of annoyance
that Alvar should be laughed at.

"_You_ did not ask me," said Alvar quietly.

At this moment Bob called Nettie so emphatically, that she was obliged
unwillingly to go away.

"Now then, Alvar," said Rupert, "now for it.  We won't be shocked.  Tell
us how you work the duennas."

"It would not have been well to explain that to Nettie," said Alvar
seriously.

"Why not?" said Jack, suddenly boiling up.  "Do you think _she_ would
ever cheat or want a duenna?  English girls can always be trusted!"

"_Can_ they?" said Rupert.  "Shut up, Jack; you don't understand.  We
only want you to tell us how you do in Spain.  _Affaires du coeur_--you
know, Alvar."

Alvar looked round with an air half-shrewd, half-sentimental; while
Cheriton listened a little seriously.  He knew very little of Alvar's
former life; perhaps because he had been too reticent to ask him
questions; perhaps because Alvar found himself in the presence of a
standard higher than he was accustomed to.  Anyway, Nettie might have
heard his present revelations.

"There was a time," he said, sighing, "when I did not intend to come to
England--when I had sworn to be for ever a Spaniard.  Ah, my cousin, if
you had seen my Luisa, you would not have wondered.  I sang under her
window; I went to mass that I might gaze on her."

"Did you now?  Foreign customs!" interposed Rupert; while Cherry
laughed, though he felt they were hardly treating Alvar fairly.

"I knew not how to speak to her.  She was never alone; and it was
whispered that she was already betrothed.  But one day she dropped her
fan."

"No, no--surely?" said Cherry.

"I seized it, I kissed it, I held it to my heart," said Alvar, evidently
enjoying the narration, "and I returned it.  There were looks between
us--then words.  Ah, I lived in her smiles.  We met, we exchanged vows,
and I was happy!"

Rupert listened to this speech with amusement, which he could hardly
stifle.  It was inexpressibly ludicrous to Cheriton; but the fun was
lost in the wonder whether Alvar meant what he said.  This was neither
like the joking sentiment nor the pretended indifference of an
Englishman's reference to such passages in his life; yet the memory
evidently cost Alvar no pain.  Jack sat, looking totally disgusted.

"At last," Alvar went on, "we were discovered.  Ah, and then my
grandfather was enraged, and her parents, they refused their consent,
since she was betrothed already.  I am an Englishman, and I do not weep
when I am grieved, but my heart was a stone.  I despaired."

"She must have been a horrid little flirt not to tell you she was
engaged," said Jack.

"She did not know it till we had met," said Alvar.

"What awful tyranny!"

"Ah, and she was your only love!" sighed Rupert.

"No," said Alvar simply, "I have loved others; but she was the most
beautiful.  But I submitted, and now I forget her!"

"Hm--the truest wisdom," said Rupert.

Cherry was growing angry.  He did not think that Rupert had any business
to make fun of Alvar, and he was in a rage with Alvar for making himself
ridiculous.  That Alvar should tell a true love-tale with sentimental
satisfaction to an admiring audience, or sigh over a flirtation which
ought to have been a good joke, was equally distasteful to him.  He
burst out suddenly, with all his Lester bluntness, and in a tone which
Alvar had hitherto heard only from Jack,--

"If you fellows are not all tired of talking such intolerable nonsense,
I am.  It's too bad of you," with a sharp look at Rupert.  "I don't see
that it's any affair of ours."

"You're not sympathetic," said Rupert, as he moved away; for he was
quite familiar enough with his cousins for such giving and taking.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE OAKBY BALL.

  "She went to the ball, and she danced with the handsome prince."

That week of gaiety, so unusual to Oakby, was fraught with great
results.  The dim and beautiful dream of the future which had grown with
Cheriton Lester's growth became a definite purpose.  Ruth Seyton was his
first love, almost his first fancy.  Whatever other sentiments and
flirtations had come across him, had been as light as air; he had loved
Ruth ever since he had taught her to ride, and since she had tried to
teach him to dance.  He had always found her ready to talk to him of the
thoughts and aspirations which found no sympathy at home, and still more
ready to tease him about them.  She was part of the dear and sacred home
affections, the long accustomed life which held so powerful a sway over
him, and she was besides a wonderful and beautiful thing, peculiar to
himself, and belonging to none of the others.

He had not seen her since the season when he had met her in town with
Virginia; he did not know very much really about her, but she was kind
and gracious to him, and he walked about in a dream of bliss which made
every commonplace duty and gaiety delightful.  Ruth was mixed up in it
all, it was all in her honour; and though Cheriton's memory at this time
was not to be depended on, he had spirits for any amount of the hard
work of preparation, and a laugh for every disagreeable.

He regarded his tongue as tied till after he had taken his degree in the
summer--he hoped with credit; after which his prospects at the bar with
Judge Cheriton's interest, were somewhat less obscure than those of most
young men.  He had inherited some small fortune from his mother, and
though he could not consider himself a brilliant match for Miss Seyton,
he would then feel himself justified in putting his claims forward.
Many spoke with admiration of the entire absence of jealousy which made
him take the second place so easily; but Cheriton hardly deserved the
praise, he had no room in his mind to think of himself at all.

His cousin Rupert was a more recent acquaintance of Ruth's, though
matters had gone much further between them.  His attentions had not been
encouraged by her grandmother, as, though his fortune was far superior
to anything Cheriton possessed, his affairs were supposed to be
considerably involved, and this was so far true, that it would have been
very inconvenient to him to lay them open to inquiry at present.  He
hoped, however, in the course of a few months to be able so to arrange
them, as to make it possible to apply to Ruth Seyton's guardians for
their consent.

Rupert was a lively, pleasant fellow, with a considerable regard for his
Oakby cousins, though he had never considered it necessary to regulate
his life by the Oakby standard, or concerned himself greatly with its
main principles.  His life in the army had of course been quite apart
from Cheriton's at school and college, and the latter did not care to
realise how far the elder cousin, once a model in his eyes, had grown
away from him.  Nor did he regard him as a rival.

Ruth gave smiles and dances to himself, and he little guessed that while
he did his duty joyously in other directions, looking forward to his
next word with her, she had given his cousin a distinct promise, and
engaged to keep it secret till such time as he chose to ask for her
openly.  Perhaps Rupert could not be expected to scruple at such a step,
when he knew how entirely Ruth had managed her affairs for herself in
all her intercourse with him.

And as for Ruth she rejoiced in the chance of making a sacrifice to
prove her love; and whether the sacrifice was of other people's
feelings, her own ease and comfort, or of any little trifling scruples
of conscience, ought, she considered, to be equally unimportant.  "Love
must still be lord of all," but the love that loves honour more was in
her eyes weak and unworthy.  Faults in the hero only proved the strength
of his manhood; faults in herself were all condoned by her love.

Ruth was clever enough to put into words the inspiring principles of a
great many books that she read, and a great deal of talk that she heard,
and vehement enough to act up to it.  Rupert, who had no desire to be at
all unlike other people, had little notion of the glamour of enthusiasm
with which Ruth plighted him her troth at Oakby.

The Lesters had expended much abuse on the morning of their ball on the
blackness of the oak-panels, which no amount of wax candles would
overcome but what was lost in gaiety was gained in picturesqueness, and
the Oakby ball, with its handsome hosts and its distinguished company,
was long quoted as the prettiest in the neighbourhood.  Perhaps it owed
no little of its charm to the one in whose honour it was given.  Alvar
in society was neither silent nor languid; he was a splendid dancer, and
played the host with a foreign grace that enchanted the ladies, old and
young.  At the dinner-party the night before he had been silent and
stately, evidently fearing to commit himself before the country
gentlemen and county grandees, who were such strange specimens of
humanity to him; but with their daughters it was different, and those
were happy maidens who danced with the stranger.  He was of course duly
instructed whom he was thus to honour, but he found time to exercise his
own choice, and Virginia was conscious that he paid her marked
attention.

Why waste more words?  She had found her fate, and softened with home
troubles, attracted by the superiority of the Lesters, and dazzled with
the charm of a manner and appearance never seen before, yet suiting all
her girlish dreams of heroic perfection, she was giving her heart away
to the last man whose previous training or present character was likely
really to accord with her own.

Though she had never been an acknowledged beauty, she could often look
beautiful, and the subtle excitement of half-conscious triumph was not
wanting to complete the charm.

"There never had been such a pleasant ball," said Cheriton the next
morning, as he was forced to hurry away to Oxford without a chance of
discussing its delights.

"It is indeed possible to dance in England," said Alvar.

"I think we made it out very well," said Rupert, with a smile under his
moustaches.

"There are balls--and balls," said Ruth to her cousin.  "You don't
always have black oak, or black Spanish eyes, eh, Queenie? or some other
things?"

And Virginia blushed and said nothing.

Nettie, after all, had rejoiced in the partners of which her white frock
and plaited hair had not defrauded her (she never should forgive her
hair for coming down in Rupert's very sight in the last waltz).  Jack
had not been so miserable as he expected; and Alvar found that it was
possible to enjoy life in England, and that the position awaiting him
there was not to be despised, even in the face of parting from his
beloved Cheriton.

Rupert by no means considered Alvar as an amusing companion, nor Oakby
in the dull season an amusing place, but it suited him now to spend his
leave there, and suited him also to be intimate at Elderthwaite.
Consequently he encouraged Alvar to make excuses for going there, and
certainly in finding some interests to supply Cheriton's place.  He
cultivated Dick Seyton, who was of an age to appreciate a grown-up man's
attentions, so that altogether there was more intercourse between the
two houses than had taken place since the days of Roland.

Ruth was paying a long visit at Elderthwaite.  One of her aunts--her
grandmother's youngest and favourite child--was in bad health, and Lady
Charlton was glad to spend some time with her and to be free from the
necessity of chaperoning her granddaughter.  The arrangement suited Ruth
exactly.  She could make Elderthwaite her head-quarters, pay several
visits among friends in the north, and find opportunities of meeting
Rupert, whose regiment was stationed at York, and who was consequently
within reach of many north-country gaieties.

For the present no gaieties were needed by either to enliven the wintry
woods of Elderthwaite; they were as fairy land to the little brown
maiden who, among their bare stems and withered ferns found, as she
believed, the very flower of life, and had no memory for the bewitching
smiles, the soft, half-sentimental laughter, the many dances, and the
preference hardly disguised which were the food of Cheriton's memory,
and gave him an object which lightened every uncongenial task.  These
little wiles had effectually prevented every one from guessing the real
state of the case.  Rupert's difficulty was that he never could be sure
how far Alvar was unsuspicious.  There was a certain blankness in his
way of receiving remarks, calculated to prevent suspicion, which might
proceed from entire innocence, or from secret observation which he did
not choose to betray.  But he was always willing to accompany Rupert to
Elderthwaite, and in Cheriton's absence found Virginia by far his most
congenial companion.

The amount of confidence already existing between Ruth and her cousin
really rendered the latter unsuspicious, and ready to further
intercourse with Rupert, believing Ruth to be in a doubtful state of
mind, half encouraging, and half avoiding his attentions.  And Ruth was
very cautious; she never allowed Rupert to monopolise her during his
ostensible visits, and if any one at Elderthwaite guessed at their
stolen interviews, it was certainly not Virginia.

The scheme of the Sunday class had answered pretty well.  Virginia knew
how to teach, and though her pupils were rough, the novelty of her grace
and gentleness made some impression on them.

The parson did not interfere with her, and it never occurred to her that
he was within hearing, till one Sunday, as she tried to tell them the
simplest facts in language sufficiently plain to be understood, and
sufficiently striking to be interesting, and felt, by the noise on the
back benches, that she was entirely failing to do so, a head appeared at
the dining-room door, and a stentorian voice exclaimed,--

"Bless my soul, you young ruffians; is this the way to behave to Miss
Seyton?  If any lad can't show respect to a lady in my house, out he'll
go, and, by George he won't come in again."

This unwonted address produced an astonished silence; but it frightened
the teacher so much more than her class, that her only resource was to
call on the more advanced ones with great solemnity "to say their hymn
to the vicar."

Parson Seyton straightened himself up, and listened in silence to--

"There is a green hill far away," stumbled through in the broadest
Westmoreland; and when it was over, remarked,--

"Very pretty verses.  Lads and lasses, keep your feet still and attend
to Miss Seyton, and--_mind_--I can hear ye," a piece of information with
which Virginia at any rate could well have dispensed.

But she was getting used to her rough uncle, and was grateful to
Cheriton for the advice that he had given her, and so she told Alvar one
day when they were all walking down to the vicarage, with the ostensible
purpose of showing Nettie some enormous mastiff puppies, the pride of
the vicar's heart.

In the absence of her own brothers Nettie found Dick Seyton an amusing
companion, "soft" though he might be; she began by daring him to jump
over ditches as well as she could, and ended by finding that he roused
in her unsuspected powers of repartee.  Nettie found the Miss Ellesmeres
dull companions; they were a great deal cleverer than she was, and
expected her to read story books, and care about the people in them.
Rupert and Dick found that her ignorance made her none the less amusing,
and took care to tell her so.

So everything combined to make intercourse easy; and this was not the
first walk that the six young people had taken together.

"Your brother," said Virginia to Alvar, "was very kind to me.  I should
never have got on so well but for his advice."

"My brother is always kind," said Alvar, his eyes lighting up.  "I
cannot tell you how well I love him."

"I am sure you do," said Virginia heartily, though unable to help
smiling.

"But in what was it that he helped you?" asked Alvar.

Virginia explained how he had persuaded her uncle to agree to her wishes
about teaching the children.

"To teach the ignorant?" said Alvar.  "Ah, that is the work of a saint!"

"Oh, no!  I like doing it.  It is nothing but what many girls can do
much better."

"Ah, this country is strange.  In Spain the young ladies remain at home.
They go nowhere but to mass.  If my sister were in Spain she would not
jump over the ditches, nor run after the dogs," glancing at Nettie, who
was inciting Rolla to run for a piece of stick.

"Do you think us very shocking?" said Virginia demurely.

"Nay," said Alvar.  "These are your customs, and I am happy since they
permit me the honour of walking by your side, and talking with you.
You, like my brother, are kind to the stranger."

"But you must leave off calling yourself a stranger.  You too _are_
English; can you not feel yourself so?"

"Yes, I am an Englishman," said Alvar.  "See, if I stay here, I have
money and honour.  My father speaks to me of a `position in the county.'
That is to be a great man as I understand it.  Nor are there parties
here to throw down one person, and then another.  In Spain, though not
less noble, we are poor, and all things change quickly, and I shall not
stay always here in Oakby.  I am going to London, and I see that I can
make for myself a life that pleases me."

"Yet you love Spain best?"

"I love Spain," said Alvar, "the sunshine and the country; but I am no
Spaniard.  No, I stayed away from England because it was my belief that
my father did not love me.  I was wrong.  I have a right to be here; it
was my right to come here long ago, and my right I will not give up!"

He drew himself up with an indescribable air of _hauteur_ for a moment,
then with sudden softness,--

"And who was it that saw that right and longed for me to come, who
opened his heart to me?  It was Cheriton, my brother.  He has explained
much to me, and says if I learn to love England it will make him happy.
And I will love it for his sake."

"I hope so; soon you will not find it so dull."

"Nay, it is not now so dull.  Have I not the happiness of your sympathy?
Could I be dull to-day?" said Alvar, with his winning grace.

Virginia blushed, and her great eyes drooped, unready with a reply.

"And there is your cousin," she said, shyly; "he is a companion; don't
you think him like Cheriton?"

"Yes, a little; but Cheriton is like an angel, though he will not have
me say so; but Rupert, he has the devil in his face.  But I like him--he
is a nice fellow--very nice," said Alvar, the bit of English idiom
sounding oddly in his foreign tones.

Virginia laughed, spite of herself.

"Ah, I make you laugh," said Alvar.  "I wish I had attended more to my
English lessons; but there was a time when it was not my intention to
come to England, and I did not study.  I am not like Cheriton and Jack,
I do not love to study.  It is very pleasant to smoke, and to do
nothing; but I see it is not the custom here, and it is better, I think,
to be like my brother."

"Some people are rather fond of smoking and doing nothing even in
England."

"It is a different sort of doing nothing.  I hear my father or Cheriton
rebuke Bob for doing nothing; but then he is out of doors with some
little animal in a bag--his ferret, I think it is called--to catch the
rats; or he runs and gets hot; that is what he calls doing nothing."

There was a sort of _bonhommie_ in Alvar's way of describing himself and
his surroundings, and a charm in his manner which, added to a pair of
eyes full of fire and expression, and a great deal of implied admiration
for herself, produced no small effect on Virginia.

She saw that he was affectionate and ready to recognise the good in his
brothers, and she knew that he had been deprived of his due share of
home affection.  She did not doubt that he was willing himself to do and
to be all that he admired; and then--he was not boyish and blunt like
his brothers, nor so full of mischief as Cheriton, nor with that
indescribable want of something that made her wonder at Rupert's charm
in the eyes of Ruth; she had never seen any one like him.

She glanced up in his face with eyes that all unconsciously expressed
her thoughts, and as he turned to her with a smile they came up to the
vicarage garden, at the gate of which stood Parson Seyton talking to Mr
Lester, who was on horseback beside him.

"Ha, squire," said the parson, "Monsieur Alvar is a dangerous fellow
among the lasses.  Black eyes and foreign ways have made havoc with
hearts all the world over."

Mr Lester looked towards the approaching group.  Virginia's delicate
face, shy and eager under drooping feathers, and the tall, slender
Alvar, wearing his now scrupulously English morning suit with a grace
that gave it a picturesque appropriateness, were in front.  Ruth and
Rupert lingered a little, and Nettie came running up from behind, with
Rolla after her, and Dick Seyton lazily calling on her to stop.  Mr
Lester looked at his son, and a new idea struck him.

"I wish Alvar to make acquaintances," he said.  "Nothing but English
society can accustom him to his new life."

Here Alvar saw them, and raised his hat as he came up.

"Have you had a pleasant walk, Alvar?" said his father, less stiffly
than usual.

"It has been altogether pleasant, sir," said Alvar, "since Miss Seyton
has been my companion."

Virginia blushed, and went up to her uncle with a hasty question about
the puppies that Nettie was to see, and no one exchanged a remark on the
subject; but that night as they were smoking, Rupert rallied Alvar a
little on the impression he was making.

Alvar did not misunderstand him; he looked at him straight.

"I had thought," he said, "that it was here the custom to talk with
freedom to young ladies.  I see it is your practice, my cousin."

"Yes, yes.  Besides, I'm an old friend, you see.  Of course it is the
custom; but consequences sometimes result from it--pity if they didn't."

"But it may be," said Alvar, "that as my father's son, it is expected
that I should marry if it should be agreeable to my father?"

"Possibly," said Rupert, unable to resist trying experiments.  "Fellows
with expectations have to be careful, you know."

"I thank you," said Alvar.  "But I do not mistake a lady who has been
kind to me, or I should be a coxcomb.  Good-night, my cousin."

"Good-night," said Rupert, feeling somewhat baffled, and a little angry;
for, after all, he had been perfectly right.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION.

  "Love me and leave me not."

The hill that lay between Oakby and Elderthwaite was partly covered by a
thick plantation of larches, through which passed a narrow footpath.  In
the summer, when the short turf under the trees was dry and sweet, when
the blue sky peeped through the wide-spreading branches, and rare green
ferns and blue harebells nestled in the low stone walls, the larch wood
was a favourite resort; but in the winter, when the moorland winds were
bleak and cold rather than fresh and free, when the fir-trees moaned and
howled dismally instead of responding like harps to the breezes, before,
in that northern region, one "rosy plumelet tufted the larch," or one
lamb was seen out on the fell side, it was a dreary spot enough.

All the more undisturbed had it been, and therefore all the more
suitable for the secret meetings of Rupert and Ruth.  Matters had not
always run smooth between them.  An unacknowledged tie needs faith and
self-restraint if it is to sit easily; and at their very last parting
Rupert expressed enough jealousy at the remembrance of Cheriton's
attentions to make Ruth furious at the implied doubt of her faith,
forgetting that _she_ was miserable if he played with Nettie, or talked
for ten minutes to Virginia.

Rupert insisted that "Cherry meant mischief."  Ruth vehemently asserted
"that it wasn't in him to mean;" and after something that came
perilously near a quarrel, she broke into a flood of tears, and they
parted with renewed protestations of inviolable constancy, and amid
hopes of chance meetings in the course of the spring.

Ruth fled away through the copses to Elderthwaite feeling as if life
would be utterly blank and dark till their next meeting; and Rupert
strolled homeward, thinking much of Ruth, and not best pleased to meet
his uncle coming back from one of his farms, and evidently inclined to
be sociable; for Rupert, as compared with Alvar, had an agreeable
familiarity.

Mr Lester, though he had held as little personal intercourse with Alvar
as the circumstances of the case permitted, had hardly ceased, since he
came home, to think of his future, and that with a conscientious effort
at justice and kindness.  He still felt a personal distaste to Alvar,
which ruffled his temper, and often made him less than civil to him; but
none the less did he wish his eldest son's career to be creditable and
fortunate, nor desire to see him adapt himself to the pursuits likely to
be required of him.  He made a few attempts to instruct him and interest
him in the county politics, the requirements of the estate, and the
necessities of the parish; but Alvar, it must be confessed, was very
provoking.  He was always courteous, but he never exerted his mind to
take in anything that was strange to him, and would say, with a shrug of
his shoulders and a smile, "Ah, these are the things that I do not
understand;" or, as he picked up the current expressions, "It is not in
my line to interest myself for the people," with a _naivete_ that
refused to recognise any duty one way or the other.  In short, he was
quite as impervious as his brothers to anything "out of his line," and,
like Mr Lester himself, thought that what he did not understand was
immaterial.

Mr Lester was in despair; but when he saw Alvar and Virginia together,
and noticed their mutual attraction, it occurred to him that an English
wife would be the one remedy for Alvar's shortcomings; and he also
reflected, with some pride in his knowledge of foreign customs, that
Alvar would probably require parental sanction before presuming to pay
his addresses to any lady.

As for Virginia, though she was of Seyton blood, all her training had
been away from her family; her fortune was not inconsiderable, and she
herself, enthusiastic, refined, and high-minded, was exactly the type of
woman in which Mr Lester believed.  Besides, since he could not make
Alvar other than the heir of Oakby, his one wish was that his
grandchildren at least should be English.  He was very reluctant that
Alvar should return to Spain, and at the same time hardly wished him to
be a permanent inmate of Oakby.  It had been arranged that Alvar should
pay a short visit to the Cheritons before Easter, when he would see what
London was like, go to see Cherry at Oxford, and having thus enlarged
his experiences, would return to Oakby for Easter and the early part of
the summer.

After Cheriton had taken his degree, he too would enjoy a taste of the
season, and Alvar might go to town again if he liked; while in August
Alvar must be introduced to the grouse, and might also see the fine
scenery of the Scotch and English lakes.  These were plans in which
Alvar could find nothing to complain of; but they would be greatly
improved in his father's eyes if they could end in a suitable and happy
marriage; for he saw that Alvar could not remain idle at Oakby for long,
and had the firmest conviction that he would get into mischief, if he
set up for himself in London.  His mind, when he met Rupert, was full of
the subject, and with a view to obtaining a side light or two if
possible, he asked him casually what he thought of his cousin Alvar, and
how they got on together.

"I don't think he is half a bad fellow," said Rupert, "a little stiff
and foreign, of course, but a very good sort in my opinion."

This was well meant on Rupert's part, for he did not personally _like_
Alvar, but he had tact enough to see the necessity of harmony, and
family feeling enough to wish to produce it.

"Of course," said Mr Lester, "you can understand that I have been
anxious about his coming here among the boys."

"I don't think he'll do them any harm, sir."

"No; and except Cherry, they don't take to him very warmly; but I hope
we may see him settle into an Englishman in time.  A good wife now--"

"Is a very good thing, uncle," said Rupert, with a conscious laugh.

"Yes, Rupert, in a year or two's time you'll be looking out for
yourself."

Rupert liked his uncle, as he had always called him, and, for a moment,
was half-inclined to confide in him; but he knew that Mr Lester's good
offices would be so exceedingly energetic, and would involve such
thorough openness on his own part, that though his marriage to Ruth
might possibly be expedited by them, he could not face the reproofs by
which they would be accompanied.

So he laughed, and shook his head, saying, "Excellent advice for Alvar,
sir; and see, there he comes."

Alvar approached his father with a bow; but was about to join Rupert, as
he turned off by another path, when Mr Lester detained him.

"I should like a word or two with you," he said, as they walked on.  "I
think--it appears to me that you are beginning to feel more at home with
us than at first."

"Yes, sir, I know better how to suit myself to you."

"I am uncommonly glad of it.  But what I meant to say was--you don't
find yourself so dull as at first?" said Mr Lester rather awkwardly.

"It is a little dull," said Alvar, "but I can well endure it."

This was not precisely the answer which Mr Lester had expected; but
after a pause, he went on,--

"It would be hard to blame you because you do not take kindly to
interests and occupations that are so new to you.  I do not feel, Alvar,
that I have the same right to dictate your way of life as I should have,
if I had earlier assumed the charge of you; but I would remind you that
since one day you must be master here, it will be for your own happiness
to--to accustom yourself to the life required of you."

"My brother ought to be the squire," said Alvar.

"That is impossible.  It is not a matter of choice; but it would cause
me great unhappiness if I thought my successor would either be
constantly absent or--or indifferent to the welfare of the people about
him."

"You would wish me," said Alvar, "to live in England, and to marry an
English lady."

"Why, yes--yes.  Not of course that I would wish to put any restraint on
your inclinations, or even to suggest any line of conduct; but it had
occurred to me that--in short, that you find Elderthwaite attractive,
and I wished to tell you that such a choice would have my entire
approval."

Mr Lester's florid face coloured with a sense of embarrassment; he was
never at his ease with his son, whereas Alvar only looked considerate,
and said thoughtfully,--"Miss Seyton is a charming young lady."

"Very much so, indeed," said the squire; "and a very good girl."

Alvar walked on in silence.  Probably the idea was not strange to him;
but his father could not trace the workings of his mind, and a sense of
intense impatience possessed him with this strange creature whose
interests he was bound to consult, but whose nature he could not fathom.
Suddenly Alvar stopped.

"My father, I have chosen.  This is my country, and Miss Seyton--if she
will--shall be my wife."

"Well, Alvar, I'm very glad to hear it," said his father, "very glad
indeed, and I'm sure Cheriton will be delighted.  Don't, however, act in
a hurry; I'll leave you to think it over.  I see James Wilson, and I
want to speak to him."

And Mr Lester called to one of the keepers who was coming across the
park, while Alvar went on towards the house.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

VIRGINIA'S CHOICE.

  "Things that I know not of, belike to thee are dear."

There was the shadow of such a thought on the blushing face of Virginia
Seyton as she sat in a great chair in the old drawing-room at
Elderthwaite and listened to the wooing of Alvar Lester.  She held a
bouquet on her lap, and he stood, bending forward, and addressing: her
in language that was checked by no embarrassment, and with a simplicity
of purpose which had sought no disguise.  Alvar had reflected on his
father's hints over many a cigarette, he had thought to himself that he
was resolved to be an Englishman, that Miss Seyton was charming and
attractive beyond all other ladies, it was well that he should marry,
and he would be faithful, courteous, and kind.

Assuredly he was prepared to love her, she made England pleasant to him,
and he had no strong ties to the turbulent life of Spain, from which his
peculiar circumstances and his natural indolence had alike held him
aloof.  He had no thought of giving less than was Virginia's due, it was
a simple matter to him enough, and he had come away that morning, with
no false shame as to his intentions, with a flower in his coat and
flowers in his hand, and had demanded Miss Seyton's permission to see
her niece, heedless how far both households might guess at the matter in
hand.

With his dark, manly grace, and tender accents, he was the picture of a
lover, as she, with her creamy skin rose-tinted, and her fervent eyes
cast down, seemed the very type of a maiden wooed, and by a favoured
suitor.  But if the hearts of this graceful and well-matched pair beat
to the same time, the notes for each had very different force, and the
experiences and the requirements of each had been, and must be, utterly
unlike those of the other.

Alvar recognised this, in its obvious outer fact, when he began,--

"I have a great disadvantage," he said, "since I do not know how best to
please an English lady when I pay her my addresses.  Yet I am bold, for
I come to-day to ask you to forget I am a stranger, and to help me to
become truly an Englishman.  Of all ladies, you are to me the most
beautiful, the most beloved.  Can you grant my wish--my prayer?  Can I
have the happiness to please you--Virginia?"

Virginia's heart beat so fast that she could not speak, the large eyes
flashed up for a moment into his, then dropped as the tears dimmed them.

"Ah! do I make you shed tears?" cried Alvar.  "How shall I tell you how
I will be your slave?  _Mi dona, mi reyna_!--nay, I must find English
words to say you are the queen of my life!" and he knelt on one knee
beside her, and took her hand.

Perhaps it was all the more enchanting that it was unlike a modern
English girl's ideal of a likely lover.

"Please don't do that," said Virginia, controlling her emotion with a
great effort.  "I want to say something, if you would sit down."

With ready tact Alvar rose at once, and drew a chair near her.

"It is my privilege to listen," he said.

"It is that I am afraid I must be very different from the girls whom you
have known.  My ways, my thoughts, you might not like them; you might
wish me to be different from myself--or I might not understand you," she
added very timidly.

"In asking a lady to be my wife, I think of no other woman," said Alvar.
"In my eyes you are all that is charming."

"This would not have occurred to me," said Virginia; "but since I came
home I have not been very happy, because it is so hard to accommodate
oneself to people who think of everything differently from oneself.  If
that was so with us--with you--"

"My thoughts shall be your thoughts," said Alvar.  "You shall teach me
to be what you wish--what my brother is.  I know well," and he rose to
his feet again and stood before her, "I am not clever, I do not know how
to do those things the English admire; my face, my speech, is strange.
Is that my fault; is it my fault that my father has hated and shunned
his son?  Miss Seyton, I can but offer you myself.  If I displease
you--"

Alvar paused.  Virginia had been pleading against herself, and before
his powerful attraction her misgivings melted away.  She rose too, and
came a step towards him.

"I will trust you," she said; and Alvar, more moved than he could
himself have anticipated, poured forth a torrent of loving words and
vows to be, and to do all she could wish.  But he did not know, he did
not understand, what she asked of him, or what he promised.

"But we must be our _true_ selves to each other," she said afterwards,
as they stood together, when he had won her to tell him that his foreign
face and tones were not displeasing to her--not at all.  No, she did not
wish that he was more like his brothers.

"I will be always your true lover and your slave," said Alvar, kissing
the hand that she had laid on his.  "And now must I not present myself
to your father?  He will not, I hope, think the foreigner too
presuming."

"There is papa," said Virginia, glancing out of the window; "he is
walking on the terrace.  Look, you can go out by this glass door."  And
leaving Alvar to encounter this far from formidable interview, she ran
away up to the little oak room in search of her cousin.

There were tears in Ruth's great velvety eyes as she turned to meet her,
but she was smiling, too, and even while she held out her arms to
Virginia, she thought--"What, jealous of the smooth course of _her_
little childish love!  I would not give up one atom of what I feel for
all the easy consent and prosperity in the world."  But none the less
was she interested and sympathetic as she listened to the outpourings of
Virginia's first excitement, and to the recital of feelings that were
like, and yet unlike, her own.

"You see, Ruthie, I could not help caring about him, he was so gentle
and kind, and he never seemed angry with the others for misunderstanding
him.  But then I thought that our lives had been so wide apart that he
_might_ be quite different from what he seemed; and one has always
heard, too, that foreigners pay compliments, and don't mean what they
say."

"I should have despised you, Queenie, if you had thrown over the man you
love because he was half a foreigner."

"Oh, no, not for _that_.  But I didn't--I hadn't begun to--like him very
much _then_, you see, Ruth.  And if he had not been good--"

"And how have you satisfied yourself that he is what you call `good'
now?" said Ruth curiously.

"Of course," replied Virginia, "it is not as if he had been brought up
in England.  He cannot have the same notions.  But then he cannot talk
enough of Cherry's goodness, and seemed so grateful because he was kind
to him.  Cherry _is_ a very good, kind sort of fellow of course; but
don't you think there is something beautiful in the humility that makes
so much of a little kindness, and recognises good qualities so
ungrudgingly?"

Ruth laughed a little.  Perhaps she thought Alvar's "bonny black eyes"
had something to do with the force of these arguments.

"Since you love each other," she said, "that is a proof that you are
intended for each other.  What does it matter `what he is like,' as you
say?"

"But `what he is like' made all the difference in the first instance, I
suppose?" said Virginia.

"Perhaps," said Ruth, with a little shrug.  "But now you have once
chosen, Virginia, _nothing_ ought to make you change, not if he were
ever so wicked--not if he were a murderer!"

"Ruth," exclaimed Virginia, "how can you be so absurd!  A murderer!"

"A murderer, a gambler, or a--well, I'm not quite sure about a thief,"
said Ruth, cooling down a little; and then the girls both laughed, and
Virginia sank into a dreamy silence.  She did not even yet know the
story of her mother's married life, or she could not have laughed at the
thought of a gambler for her husband; but she did know enough of her
family history to give definiteness to the natural desire of a
high-principled girl to find perfection in her lover.  Virginia's nature
inclined to hero-worship; reverence was a necessary part to her of a
happy love.  She had thought often to herself that she would never marry
a man of whose good principles she was not satisfied.  And since Alvar's
offer had not entirely taken her by surprise--his gallantry having been
tenderer than he knew--she had considered the point with an effort at
impartiality, and had justified the conclusion to which her heart
pointed by Alvar's admiration for the brother, whom, in Virginia's
opinion, he idealised considerably.  Of course, if she had chosen
wisely, it was instinct, and not knowledge, that led her aright.  She
knew absolutely nothing of Alvar; and just as from insufficient grounds
she now gave him credit for many virtues, it might be that, when the
differing natures jarred, a little failure, a little defectiveness,
might make her judgment cruelly hard, at whatever cost to

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