Chapter Fifteen.
A Bit of the Blarney.
“With him there rode his sone, a younge squire,
A lovyere and a lusty bachelere.”
In that year Easter fell very late, and it was nearly the end of April before the Lesters gathered together once more at Oakby. Alvar and Virginia had hardly had time to grow accustomed to their new relations to each other before the former went to London, where he perhaps adapted himself more easily to his surroundings than he would have done in the presence of his father and brothers. He found that all English people did not regard life precisely from the Oakby point of view; that Lady Cheriton greatly regretted that Nettie was such a tomboy, and almost feared that Bob would never be fit for polite society.
He was introduced to people who thought his music enchanting and his foreign manners charming; he was allowed to be on cousinly terms with the Miss Cheritons, and was an object of exciting interest to every young lady who met him. Under these circumstances he was very well content, and despatched graceful and tender letters to Virginia, which often had an amusing naïveté in their details of his impressions of English life. He also sent her various offerings, ornaments, sweetmeats, and flowers, always prettily chosen, and commended to her notice by some pleasant bit of tender flattery. His engagement was of course generally known, but his soft words and softer looks, though too universal to be delusive, were doubtless none the less attractive from the fact that his foreign breeding offered a constant cause and excuse for them.
Virginia, on her side, it need hardly be said, wrote him many letters, full of thoughts, feelings, and hopes, and sometimes requests for his opinion on any subject that interested her. Alvar’s replies were so charming, so flattering, and so tender, that she hardly found out that they were in no sense answers to her own.
He made a very great point of going to Oxford, and was full of excitement at the prospect of meeting “my brother” again. Cheriton, however, had lost some time by his idle Christmas vacation, and was forced to work very hard to make up for it. He had always too many interests in life to make it easy to concentrate all his efforts in one direction; but now the ambition and love of distinction that were a constant stimulus to the idle Lester nature in himself and Jack were fairly alight.
Cheriton cared for success in itself; he was too sweet-natural to resent failure, and conscientious enough to know that his love of triumph might be a snare to him, but each object in its turn seemed to him intensely desirable. He could not feel, and even prevailing fashion made it difficult for him to affect, indifference. Besides, he wanted to appear in the light of a young man likely to succeed in life before Ruth’s relations. So he wrote that he hoped Alvar would not think it unkind if he asked him to pay him only a short visit; and Alvar was half consoled by hearing the Judge speak in high terms of his nephew as a brilliant young man and likely to do them all credit.
“Ah,” said Alvar, “I fear I should have done my name no credit if I, like my brother, had gone to Oxford.”
“You are an eldest son, my dear fellow, and I don’t doubt that you would have kept up the family traditions,” said Judge Cheriton drily.
So Alvar went for one day to Oxford, where he showed an overpowering delight at seeing Cherry again, and a reprehensible preference for pouring out to him his various experiences, to inspecting chapels and halls. He greeted Buffer respectfully, and taxed Cheriton with overworking himself. He looked pale, he said, and thin—not as he did at Oakby.
Cherry only laughed at him, but insisted emphatically that he should say no word at home of any such impression, as perhaps he should stay up and read during the Easter vacation.
“But what shall I do,” said Alvar, “when the boys, who do not like me, come home, and you are not there?”
“You—why, you will be all day at Elderthwaite.”
“I shall never forget my brother who was kind to me first,” said Alvar earnestly.
Alvar finished up his London career by going to see the Boat Race, where he was exceedingly particular to appear in Oxford colours, and felt as if the triumph of the dark blue was Cherry’s own.
Easter week brought unwontedly soft airs and blue skies to Oakby, and, after all, Cheriton himself for a few days’ holiday. Every one rejoiced at the sight of him, though Jack promptly told him that he was very foolish to waste time by coming, and when Cherry owned that he wanted a little rest, grudgingly admitted that he might be wise to take it; then seized upon him, first to discuss with him the work he himself was doing with a view to a scholarship for which he meant to compete at Midsummer; then demanded an immediate settlement, from Cherry’s point of view, of several important and obscure philosophical questions; and finally confided to him a long history of Bob’s scrapes and deficiencies during the past term.
He was so low in the school—he got in with such a bad lot—he ought to leave school and go to a tutor’s. He, Jack, had told him he was going straight to the bad, but had done no good. Would Cherry give him a good blowing-up? Then Mr Lester, having had a letter from the headmaster, wanted to consult him on this very point, as well as to tell him all the story of Alvar’s courtship and his own diplomatic behaviour. Also to regret that Alvar would not take the trouble to understand the details of English law as applied to local matters; could not see why Mr Lester, as a magistrate, was prevented from transporting a poacher for life, or why, as an owner of land, he thought it necessary to be so particular as to the character of his tenants. Then an attempt at peacemaking with and for Bob, which resulted in little more than a persistent growl “that Jack was an awful duffer.”
Altogether the family did not seem in a restful state. Mrs Lester was very indignant because Mrs Ellesmere had observed that Nettie was growing too tall a girl to go about so much by herself. “Who was there that did not know Nettie in all the country-side?” While Bob and Nettie themselves, who usually hung together in everything, especially when either was in trouble, had an inexplicable quarrel, which made neither of them pleasant company for their elders.
Then Mr Lester’s affairs came forward again in the shape of a dispute with one of his chief farmers about a certain gate which had been planted in the wrong place, involving a question of boundaries and rights of way, and engaging Mr Lester in a difference of opinion with a new neighbour, “a Radical fellow from Sheffield,” whom Mr Lester would neither have injured nor been intimate with for the world. Alvar had the misfortune to observe that “he thought it was not worth while to be so distressed about the post of a gate,” an indifference even more provoking than the misplaced ardour of Jack, who had taken upon himself to examine the matter, and believing his father mistaken, thought it necessary to say so, which might have been passed over as a piece of youthful folly, if there had not been a frightful suspicion that Mr Ellesmere was of the same opinion.
Cherry had heard enough of the “post of a gate” by the time he had read half-a-dozen letters of polite indignation, and listened to an hour’s explanation from his father of the grounds of the dispute, after which he was requested to form an independent opinion on the subject.
“Well, father,” he said, looking askance at a plan of the scene of action which Mr Lester had drawn for his benefit, “it seems that the removal of this gate has mixed up Ashrigg, Oakby, and Elderthwaite to such a degree that we sha’n’t know who is living in which. Of course Alvar can’t see any boundaries between Oakby and Elderthwaite just now. How should he? His imagination leaps over them at once. But I don’t think it will ‘precipitate the downfall of the landed gentry,’ Jack, whichever way it is settled.” And having thus succeeded in making his father and Alvar laugh, and Jack remark “that he never could see the use of making a joke of everything,” he asked Mr Lester to come and show him the fatal spot. Couldn’t they ride over and look at it?
“And I have never seen you yet,” said Alvar reproachfully, when Mr Lester had acceded to this arrangement.
“But you are going to Elderthwaite? I will come and meet you there. And, look here, the weather is so fine I am sure we might all join forces and make an excursion somewhere. Wouldn’t that be blissful?”
“Ah, you make sport of me!” said Alvar; but he promised to propose the plan at Elderthwaite.
So Cheriton and his father rode through the bright spring lanes together, like Chaucer’s knight and squire, with the larks singing in the furrows, and the blue sky overhead, the sunshine full of promise and joy, even in the wild, bleak country, whose time of perfection never came till the purple heather clothed the bare moorlands and the summer months had had time to chase away all thought of the long, dreary winter. Every breath of the air of the hill-side was like new life to Cherry.
“It is so delightful to be at home,” he said; “it’s impossible to be very angry about ‘the post of a gate.’”
Perhaps this happy humour contributed no small share towards the harmonious ending of the scene which Cherry described quaintly enough when he presented himself at Elderthwaite in the afternoon. How on arriving at the scene of action they had found Farmer Fleming and the fellow from Sheffield both engaged in discussing the point; how Mr Wilson had expressed his readiness to put up two gates if that would settle the matter, but he could not be dictated to on his own land; how Mr Fleming’s view of the matter seemed to consist in a constant statement of the fact that he had been the squire’s tenant all his life, and his father before him; how the squire had remarked that Mr Fleming’s father, he was sure, would have known well that those four feet of land were common land, and half in Oakby and half in Ashrigg parish, Elderthwaite bordering them on the south, and that he, as Lord of the Manor, could not allow them to be enclosed; Mr Wilson had purchased certain manorial rights in Ashrigg parish; they certainly extended over the two feet on his own side of the lane.
Then Cherry had remembered Mr Wilson’s son at Oxford, and knew that last year he had taken a first. He had met him at breakfast; was he coming down soon? This had created a diversion; and while the squire and his tenant were at it hammer and tongs, Cherry had received several invitations, had warmly applauded Mr Wilson’s remark that he did not wish to be unpleasant to old inhabitants on first coming into the county, and the squire, having got his own way with the farmer, an amicable arrangement was arrived at; while Cherry went to see Mrs Fleming’s dairy, “because he remembered how she used to give him such beautiful new milk.”
“Oh, Cherry, you have more than a bit of the blarney,” said Ruth. “Haven’t you a drop of Irish blood somewhere?”
“No more than Jack,” said Cherry, who was perhaps a little pleased at his diplomacy. “I like to smooth things down, unless, to be sure, one is angry oneself.”
“You are always the peacemaker,” said Alvar.
“Ah, not always, I am afraid! But now I want all the blarney I can muster to persuade you that it is warm enough to go and spend the day at Black Tarn. We might go by train from Hazelby to Blackrigg; have lunch at the inn there, and go up to Black Tarn by the Otter’s Glen. I asked Mr and Mrs Ellesmere, and they will come with us”—to Virginia—“I assure you Alvar agrees.”
“You are wasting your blarney,” said Virginia smiling, “for we had agreed to go before you came. It will be very cold up at Black Tarn, but that will not signify if we take plenty of wraps.”
Such a genuine piece of natural and innocent amusement was quite a novelty at Elderthwaite, and the boys were delighted. The party agreed to meet at Hazelby station, and go by train some ten or twelve miles towards the mountains on the outskirts of which Black Tarn lay. There was a train in the evening by which they could return, and no one left at home was to be anxious about them until they saw them coming back.