Cardross looked at him. He had never till then noticed, what other people began to notice, how exceedingly old the earl now looked, his small, delicate features withering up almost like those of an elderly man, though he was not much past forty.
"You don't, mean—oh no, not that! You must not be thinking of that. My mother's rule at Cairnforth is a long way off yet." And—big fellow as he was—the lad's eyes filled with tears.
After that day he refused all holiday excursions in which Lord Cairnforth could not accompany him. It was only by great persuasion that he agreed to go for a week to Edinburg, to revisit his old haunts there, to look on the ugly fields where he had sown his wild oats, and prove to even respectable and incredulous Uncle Alick that there was no fear of their ever sprouting up again. Also, Lord Cairnforth took the opportunity to introduce his cousin into his own set of Edinburg friends, to familiarize the young man with the society in which he must shortly take his place, and to hear from them, what he so warmly believed himself, that Cardross was fitted to be heir to any property in all Scotland.
"What a pity," some added, "that he could not be heir to the earldom also!" "No," said others, "better that 'the wee earl' (as old-fashioned folk still sometimes called him) should be the last Earl of Cairnforth."
With the exception of those two visits, during a whole twelvemonth the earl and his adopted son were scarcely parted for a single day. Years afterward, Cardross loved to relate, first to his mother, and then to his children, sometimes with laughter, and again with scarcely repressed tears, may an anecdote of the life they two led together at St. Andrew's —a real student life, yet filled at times with the gayest amusements. For the earl loved gayety—actual mirth; sometimes he and Cardross were as full of jests and pranks as two children, and at other times they held long conversations upon all manner of grave and earnest topics, like equal friends. It was the sort of companionship, free and tender, cheerful and bright, yet with all the influence of the elder over the younger, which, occurring to a young man of Cardross's age and temperament, usually determines his character for life.
Thus, day by day, Helen's son developed and matured, becoming more and more a thorough Cardross, sound to the core, and yet polished outside in a manner which had not been the lot of any of the earlier generation, save the minister. Also, he had a certain winning way with him—a power of suiting himself to every body, and pleasing every body— which even his mother, who only pleased those she loved or those that loved her, had never possessed.
"It's his father's way he has, ye ken," Malcolm would say—Malcolm, who, after a season of passing jealousy, had for years succumbed wholly to his admiration of "Miss Helen's bairn." "But it's the only bit o' the Bruces that the lad's gotten in him, thank the Lord!"
Though the earl did not say openly "thank the Lord," still he, too, recognized with a solemn joy that the qualities he and Helen dreaded had either not been inherited by Captain Bruce's son, or else timely care had rooted them out. And as he gradually relaxed his watch over the young man, and left him more and more to his own guidance, Lord Cairnforth, sitting alone in his house at St. Andrew's—almost as much alone as he used to sit in the Castle library—would think, with a strange consolation, that this year's heavy sacrifice had not been in vain.
Once Cardross, coming in from a long golfing match, broke upon one of these meditative fits, and was a little surprised to find that the earl did not rouse himself out of it quite so readily as was his wont; also that the endless college stories, which he always liked so much to listen to, fell rather blank, and did not meet Lord Cairnforth's hearty laugh, as gay as that of a young fellow could share and sympathize in them all.
"You are not well to-day," suddenly said the lad. "What have you been doing?"