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.”