“The boy wants a nurse, not a doctor,” said Beattie. “A little care and generous diet would soon bring him round; but they are a strange race, these Lendricks. They have all the stern qualities that brave danger, and they are terribly sensitive to some small wound to their self-love. Let that young fellow, for instance, only begin to feel that he is forgotten or an outcast, and he 'll droop at once. A few kind words, and a voice he loved, now, will do more than all my art could replace a little later.”
“You mean that we ought to have him back here?” asked Haire, bluntly.
“I mean that he ought to be where he can be carefully and kindly treated.”
“I 'll tell the Chief you think so. I 'll say that you dropped the remark to myself, of course,—never meaning to dictate anything to him.”
Beattie shook his head in sign of doubt.
“I know him well, better perhaps than any one, and I know there's no more generous man breathing; but he must not be coerced,—he must not be even influenced, where the question be one for a decision. As he said to me one day, 'I want the evidence, sir, I don't want your speech to it.'”
“There 's the evidence, then,” said Beattie,—“that note with its wavering letters, weak and uncertain as the fingers that traced them,—show him that. Say, if you like, that I read it and thought the lad's case critical. If, after that, he wishes to talk to me on the subject, I 'm ready to state my opinion. If the boy be like his father, a few tender words and a little show of interest for him will be worth all the tonics that ever were brewed.”
“It's the grandfather's nature too; but the world has never known it,—probably never will know it,” said Haire.
“In that I agree with you,” said Beattie, dryly.
“He regards it as a sort of weakness when people discover any act of generosity or any trait of kindliness about him; and do you know,” added he, confidentially, “I have often thought that what the world regarded as irritability and sharpness was nothing more nor less than shyness,—just shyness.”