Ingleside; $b or, Without Christ and with HimLeslie, Madeline
Religion
Ingleside; $b or, Without Christ and with Him
Leslie, Madeline
Christian fiction, American; Christian life -- Fiction; Country life -- Fiction; Invalids -- Fiction; Rural churches -- Fiction
"Henreich, beautiful, bold, wilful, and unrestrained, became at last
a terror to both parents and servants. To me only was he loving and
gentle; but even when in a fury of rage, he would yield to my
entreaties and tears. I need not say that he was my idol. I loved him
as sister never loved brother before. What I suffered when, unable
longer to endure the anxieties and terror which his bold daring
continually occasioned my parents, he was sent to England to be
educated, I have no words to describe.
"It could scarcely be expected that a high-spirited lad, accustomed
to have his own way, would yield at once to authority; at least
Henreich did not, and soon fell into such disgrace that he was
expelled from the school. My uncle, to whose care he had been
committed, wrote, resigning the charge. He reproached my father
in the most unmeasured terms for neglecting to restrain the boy's
temper, which had led him in an ungovernable fit of fury to attempt
the life of one of his teachers, after which he fled, and nothing
could be heard from him. Father went to England at once. I never knew
what occurred there, but when he came home he said Henreich was dead
to us, and forbade that his name ever be mentioned.
"You will see later why I dwell so long on these sad events.
I mourned over my brother, and, not being allowed to speak of him,
I brooded over his troubles until at last I forgot that he had been
to blame for them. I even came to regard him as a hero, who had been
unjustly treated.
"All the fond pride which would have been cherished for both of us
was now lavished on me. I scarcely had a wish but it was gratified.
With the exception of my trouble at the separation from my brother,
I scarcely knew the meaning of the word, till in my fourteenth year
I accompanied my parents to England, and they left me to finish my
education.
"I was now in the same country where Henreich had been, but I never,
except on one occasion, heard his name mentioned. I asked my uncle
Douglass if he knew where my brother was, and was answered, with a
terrible frown,—
"'No, I do not. He may be dead, for all I care.'
"I never inquired again.
"I was in England two years, and returned to Spain 'finished,' as my
graduation from school with high honors was called. It was then
I entered on a course of gayety, such as I had never even imagined.
Though very young, my hand was asked frequently in marriage; but my
heart was never touched till one evening, at a gay assembly, I met
a young American, with whom I danced nearly all night. Only the third
time we met he told me he loved me, and asked me to be his wife.
I confessed that I returned his affection, and sent him to my father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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