“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.