"ElizabethGaskell-TheHalfBrothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

she had acted through life. One of her last requests was to have
Gregory laid in her bed by my side, and then she made him take hold
of my little hand. Her husband came in while she was looking at us
so, and when he bent tenderly over her to ask her how she felt now,
and seemed to gaze on us two little half-brothers, with a grave sort
of kindness, she looked up in his face and smiled, almost her first
smile at him; and such a sweet smile! as more besides aunt Fanny have
said. In an hour she was dead. Aunt Fanny came to live with us. It
was the best thing that could be done. My father would have been
glad to return to his old mode of bachelor life, but what could he do
with two little children? He needed a woman to take care of him, and
who so fitting as his wife's elder sister? So she had the charge of
me from my birth; and for a time I was weakly, as was but natural,
and she was always beside me, night and day watching over me, and my
father nearly as anxious as she. For his land had come down from
father to son for more than three hundred years, and he would have
cared for me merely as his flesh and blood that was to inherit the
land after him. But he needed something to love, for all that, to
most people, he was a stern, hard man, and he took to me as, I fancy,
he had taken to no human being before--as he might have taken to my
mother, if she had had no former life for him to be jealous of. I
loved him back again right heartily. I loved all around me, I
believe, for everybody was kind to me. After a time, I overcame my
original weakness of constitution, and was just a bonny, strong-
looking lad whom every passer-by noticed, when my father took me with
him to the nearest town.

At home I was the darling of my aunt, the tenderly-beloved of my
father, the pet and plaything of the old domestics, the "young
master" of the farm-labourers, before whom I played many a lordly
antic, assuming a sort of authority which sat oddly enough, I doubt
not, on such a baby as I was.

Gregory was three years older than I. Aunt Fanny was always kind to
him in deed and in action, but she did not often think about him, she
had fallen so completely into the habit of being engrossed by me,
from the fact of my having come into her charge as a delicate baby.
My father never got over his grudging dislike to his stepson, who had
so innocently wrestled with him for the possession of my mother's
heart. I mistrust me, too, that my father always considered him as
the cause of my mother's death and my early delicacy; and utterly
unreasonable as this may seem, I believe my father rather cherished
his feeling of alienation to my brother as a duty, than strove to
repress it. Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him
anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the
bond when he had wedded my mother. Gregory was lumpish and loutish,
awkward and ungainly, marring whatever he meddled in, and many a hard
word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm,
who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated
the stepson. I am ashamed--my heart is sore to think how I fell into