“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?