“I do not think your life has ever been useless yet, Cherry, even under the limitations that have been laid on it,” said Mr Ellesmere, quietly.
Cheriton sat looking into the fire in silence, then he turned round and smiled with much of his old playful defiance, though there was a deeper undercurrent.
“You can keep a look-out on me all the winter, and tell the Elderthwaite reformers that they don’t know what may happen, if they will only have patience. Then next spring I’ll come and ask your advice again, and if you make out a very good case against me, why, I’ll give in.”
He uttered the last words slowly, and Mr Ellesmere fully understood all that they implied. He feared that the question might be answered for him before next spring.
Cherry himself felt that he had not taken a very favourable moment for putting forward his designs, for he was neither looking nor feeling well; and could hardly point to himself as a proof of the suitability of his native climate. Still the communication had given a certain point to look forward to, and was an individual interest apart from the confusing worry of affairs at Oakby. If, after the present crisis had subsided, Alvar still held to his intention of going to the sea with him, their old friendliness would soon supersede the present irritation. Then, afterwards, he would go to London, break up his arrangements there, and see the Stanforths, and would then spend Christmas with his grandmother. In the meantime he would be exceedingly prudent; and having regard both to the bad weather and to the charge of interference, would leave Alvar to go by himself to Hazelby to-morrow.
Alvar’s ride had been interrupted by an encounter with Edward Fleming, full of resentment, by no means unnatural, though it was by this time somewhat unreasonable, for he could hardly help believing that the accusation against Chris had been intentional. A very sturdy and recalcitrant north-countryman he showed himself, respectful indeed in word to the squire, but intensely conscious of his injuries, and giving the squire very plainly to understand that a full explanation before all the magistrates at Hazelby, not to say a full apology, was no more than his duty, and fully to be expected of him. It was an unfortunate meeting. An appeal to Alvar’s generosity and protection would have been instantly responded to; but the one form of pride roused the other, and stirred up the fear of dictation in his mind. He looked down at the sullen, resolute face of the young farmer with an expression of intense haughtiness, a look which, on the dark foreign face, seemed utterly hateful to Fleming, and said, as he made his horse move on,—
“That is as I shall please.”
“If you let my brother be wronged, sir,” said Fleming, “mark me, you’ll repent it. ’Tis not the way your father would treat an old tenant, nor your brother either. A dog had his rights at their hands.”
And in a rage, intensified by his consciousness of Alvar’s scorn, he flung off with a sense of injury which would have led an Irishman to fire a shot, but which, in the English farmer, meant opposing the squire in Church and State, disobliging him on every private and parochial question, taking on every occasion the other side, and carrying on this line of conduct till his dying day.
He was young, too, and, as he had remarked to Cheriton, had education, and he might confide his grievance to the county paper. But he was both too proud and too generous to appeal again to Cheriton; and, besides, he never supposed for a moment that the squire would withhold his evidence.