“La, Master Roger, he be dead enough a’ready to all of us.”
Roger’s feelings toward his father were strangely contradictory. The boy had a tender and loving heart, and it warmed at the name of father. He admired his father’s portrait, taken in a splendid court dress, with long, dark locks flowing on his shoulders. And on the few and short visits of John Egremont at his home, the lad always ran to meet him with delight. But he was always received coldly and carelessly, and he always had, in consequence, a revulsion of feeling, very much like hatred. For his mother’s memory the boy had a fond affection, and loved to hear the story of her short life under the roof of Egremont.
So life went on until Roger was twelve years old, when one day he got a letter from his father,—the first in his life. He could not read it alone, and he would not take it to his tutor, so he went after little Dicky, who was an expert at reading and writing. And the news which Dicky read to him, sitting on the bench by the fish pond, was that John Egremont was coming home to live, and would bring with him a younger son, Hugo, the child of a second marriage made in Germany; and the father hoped the two brothers would be good friends.
The two lads gazed into each other’s eyes with consternation,—staggered and alarmed at the notion of the new boy. Roger, however, had a good courage, and spoke up sturdily.
“At least, I am the oldest and the biggest; and if he will not behave, I can trounce him, that I will.”
Some time after, one morning as Roger was returning to the house for breakfast after a gallop on his pony since daybreak, he was seized at the buttery door by Molly the housemaid, who burst out,—
“Your dad’s come, Master Roger, and another boy with him, as master told the housekeeper was two year younger nor you. It’s your new brother—ha! ha!”
Molly’s laughter was anything but merry, and her news made Roger an unresisting victim in her hands, while she scrubbed his face and hands violently, curled his long light hair, and whisked him into his best suit, she clacking angrily meanwhile about “lads as was said to be ten, and any fool could see warn’t a day under fourteen.”
And then Roger, very white and very straight, walked to the hall where his father and his newly arrived brother awaited him.
Some premonition of evil flashed into the boy’s young soul as he stood for five minutes outside the door, before he could screw his courage up to opening it, and he was not a boy of faint heart either. At the end of the hall, by the fireplace, sat his father and a strange boy. Roger advanced, still pale, but graceful and outwardly at ease. As he approached, his father rose, and said in the kindest tone that Roger had ever heard from his lips,—