Son and Heir by Edith Nesbit

SIR JASPER was always the best of masters to me and to all of us; / and he had that kind of way with him, masterful and gentle at the / same time, like as if he was kind to you for his own pleasure, and / ordering you about for your own good, that I believe any of us would / have cut our hand off at the wrist if he had told us to.

Lady Breynton had been dead this many a year. She hadn't come to her / husband with her hands empty. They say that Sir Jasper had been very / wild in his youth, and that my Lady's money had come in very handy / to pull the old place together again. She worshipped the ground Sir / Jasper walked on, as most women did that he ever said a kind word / to. But it never seemed to me that he took to her as much as you / might have expected a warm-hearted gentleman like him to do. But he / took to her baby wonderful. I was nurse to that baby from the first, / and a fine handsome little chap he was, and when my Lady died he was / wholly given over to my care. And I loved the child; indeed, I did / love him, and should have loved him to the end but for one thing, / and that comes in its own place in my story. But even those who / loved young Jasper best couldn't help seeing he hadn't his father's / winning ways. And when he grew up to man's estate, he was as wild as / his father had been before him. But his wild ways were the ways that / make young men enemies, not friends, and out of all that came to the / house, for the hunting, or the shooting, or what not, I used to / think there wasn't one would have held out a hand to my young master / if he had been in want of it. And yet I loved him because I had / brought him up, and I never had a child of my own. I never wished to / be married, but I used to wish that little Jasper had been my own / child. I could have had an authority over him then that I hadn't as / his nurse, and perhaps it might have all turned out differently.