“I will try with pleasure, but I am afraid likenesses, under the circumstances, are rarely quite satisfactory. You have a photograph?”
Jack produced a very bad daguerreotype, and a photograph taken for Cheriton before he left home.
“This is a good likeness,” he said; “but Cherry thinks it wants fire and spirit.”
“I will take both,” said Mr Stanforth, seeing that Cherry had turned aside from the photograph, and took no part in the discussion. “I will make a little sketch, and when you are in London you can tell me what you wish about it. And now I think I must be getting back to Ashrigg; to-morrow I go home.”
Jack eagerly said that to-morrow he was going to London on his way to Oxford, and received the longed-for permission to call at Kensington. Poor boy! he could not keep himself from looking ecstatically happy even while he told Mr Stanforth, as he walked through the park with him, how sorry he was to leave Cheriton with so much on his hands.
Cheriton himself would gladly have kept Jack beside him. He was capable of seeing both sides of the difficult question, and was, moreover, so individual and independent in his modes of thought, that home matters were less personal to him. He had, too, his own hopes, and had chalked out his own career, so that, young as he was, he was a support to Cherry’s spirits, even while more than half the reason why his own were less overpowered was that the brother who was all in all to him was still left. His presence did not always conduce to peace with Bob, for he had grown away from him, and was disposed to lecture him; but though he departed with more good advice to his family than was necessary, he left another gap, and Cherry, trying to rouse himself from the added feeling of loneliness, went over to Elderthwaite to see the old parson. He had been away so long that every familiar place brought fresh associations, and he tried to get the first sight of each one over quickly and alone.
He could not walk past the stables and through the farm-buildings without the image of his father meeting him at every turn. Here they had planned a new fence together, in this direction the very last walk he had had strength for before leaving home had been taken. How well he remembered then sitting on that bench under the stable wall, and watching his father with a sad wonder if he should ever sit there again. This was the short way from the station by which he used to come home from school. Here his father used to meet him—nay, suddenly he recollected, with a memory that started into life after lying asleep for years, here he had parted for the last time from his mother, and the long-past grief seemed to come back in the light of the new one. He said to himself that he ought to rejoice in the thought that his parents were once more together; but in the strangest way he longed for this long-lost mother to comfort him in the new grief of his father’s death.
And then he walked on through the fir plantation, across the bit of bare, bleak fell, into the woods of Elderthwaite. And as he walked he thought of Jack’s bright hopes, and of that sweet and promising future that was to make up to him for all that the past had taken from him. Here, by the broken stile and ruinous wall, all hope of such a future had been dashed away from Cheriton’s heart. This memory had no sweetness to temper its pain; and he hurried on through the plantation and down the lane that led to the vicarage. As he passed the church he saw that some one was trimming the ivy round the windows, and it struck him that they had been cleaned, and that the whole place had a somewhat improved appearance. A little girl made him a curtsey; she wore a smart red flannel hood, and had a clean face; he thought that he had never seen an Elderthwaite child look so respectable. Nay, as he passed one of the larger cottages, it shone upon him resplendent with whitewash, and looking in at the open door he beheld a row of desks, and sundry boys and girls seated thereat, and with curiosity much excited by this evidence of reform, he hastened on towards the vicarage.