"You don't dislike me, then, because—because I am not like other boys?"
Mr. Cardross smiled, though his eyes were still dim, and his voice not clear; and with that smile vanished forever the slight repulsion he had felt to the poor child. He took him permanently into his good heart, and from his manner the earl at once knew that it was so.
He brightened up immediately.
"Now, Malcolm, carry me in; I'm quite ready," said he, in a tone which indicated that quality, discernible even at so early an age—a "will of his own." To see the way he ordered Malcolm about—the big fellow obeying him, with something beyond even the large limits of that feudal respect which his forbears had paid to the earl's forbears for many a generation, was a sight at once touching and hopeful.
"There—put me into the child's chair I had at dinner yesterday. Now fetch me a pillow—or rather roll up your plaid into one—don't trouble Miss Cardross. That will make me quite comfortable. Pull out my books from your pouch, Malcolm, and spread them out on the table, and then go and have a crack with your old friends at the clachan; you can come for me in two hours."
It was strange to see the little figure giving its orders, and settling itself with the preciseness of an old man at the study-table; but still this removed somewhat of the painful shyness and uncomfortableness from every body, and especially from Mr. Cardross. He sat himself down in his familiar arm-chair, and looked across the table at his poor little pupil, who seemed at once so helpless and so strong.
Lessons begun. The child was exceedingly intelligent—precociously, nay, preternaturally so, it appeared to Mr. Cardross, who, like many another learned father, had been blessed with rather stupid boys, who liked any thing better than study, and whom he had with great labor dragged through a course of ordinary English, Latin, and even a fragment of Greek. But this boy seemed all brains. His cheeks flushed, his eyes glittered, he learned as if he actually enjoyed learning. True, as Mr. Cardross soon discovered, his acquirements were not at all in the regular routine of education; he was greatly at fault in many simple things; but the amount of heterogeneous and out-of-the-way knowledge which he had gathered up, from all available sources, was quite marvelous. And, above all, to teach a boy unto whom learning seemed a pleasure rather than a torment, a favor instead of a punishment, was such an exceeding and novel delight to the good minister, that soon he forgot the crippled figure—the helpless hands that sometimes with fingers, sometimes even with teeth, painfully guided the ingeniously cut forked stick, and the thin face that only too often turned white and weary, but quickly looked up, as if struggling against weakness, and concentrating all attention on the work that was to be done.
At twelve o'clock Helen came in with her father's lunch—a foaming glass of new milk, warm from the cow. The little earl looked at it with eager eyes.
"Will I bring you one too?" said Helen.
"Oh—thank you; I am so thirsty. And, please, would you move me a little—just a very little; I don't often sit so long in one position. It won't trouble you very much, will it?"