He felt as he had felt when he had
been required to come and be married to Christina- that he had been
going on for a long time quite nicely, and would much rather
continue things on their present footing. In the matter of getting
married he had been obliged to pretend he liked it; but times were
changed, and if he did not like a thing now, he could find a hundred
unexceptionable ways of making his dislike apparent.
It might have been better if Theobald in his younger days had kicked
more against his father: the fact that he had not done so encouraged
him to expect the most implicit obedience from his own children. He
could trust himself, he said (and so did Christina), to be more
lenient than perhaps his father had been to himself; his danger, he
said (and so again did Christina), would be rather in the direction of
being too indulgent; he must be on his guard against this, for no duty
could be more important than that of teaching a child to obey its
parents in all things.
He had read not long since of an Eastern traveller, who, while
exploring somewhere in the more remote parts of Arabia and Asia Minor,
had come upon a remarkably hardy, sober, industrious little
Christian community- all of them in the best of health- who had turned
out to be the actual living descendants of Jonadab, the son of Rechab;
and two men in European costume, indeed, but speaking English with a
broken accent, and by their colour evidently Oriental, had come
begging to Battersby soon afterwards, and represented themselves as
belonging to this people; they had said they were collecting funds
to promote the conversion of their fellow tribesmen to the English
branch of the Christian religion.
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