"Yes, it was always so, from the time he was a mere infant. Dr.
Hamilton often noticed it, and said it was a good omen."
"I believe so," rejoined Mr. Cardross, earnestly. "I feel sure that if Lord Cairnforth lives, he will neither have a useless nor an unhappy life."
"Let us hope not. And yet—poor little fellow!—to be the last
Earl of Cairnforth, and to be—such as he is!"
"He is what God made him, what God willed him to be," said the minister, solemnly. "We know not why it should be so; we only know that it is, and we can not alter it. We can not remove from him his heavy cross, but I think we can help him to bear it."
"You are a good man, Mr. Cardross," replied the Edinburg writer, huskily, as he rose from his seat, and declining another glass of the claret, of which, under some shallow pretext, he had sent a supply into the minister's empty cellar, he crossed the grass-plot, and spent the rest of the evening beside his ward and Helen.
Chapter 5
Days, months, and years slip smoothly by on the shores of Loch Beg. Even now, though the cruelly advancing finger of Civilization has touched it, dotted it with genteel villas on either side, plowed it with smoky steam boats, and will shortly frighten the innocent fishes by dropping a marine telegraph wire across the mouth of the loch, it is a peaceful place still. But when the last Earl of Cairnforth was a child it was all peace. In summertime a few stray tourists would wander past it, wondering at its beauty; but in winter it had hardly any communication with the outer world. The Manse, the Castle, and the clachan, with a few outlying farm-houses, comprised the whole of the Cairnforth; and the little peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by hills, was sufficiently impregnable and isolated to cause existence to flow on there very quietly, in what townspeople call dullness, and country people repose.
For, whatever repose there may be in country life—real country— there is certainly no monotony. The perpetual change of seasons, varying the aspect of the outside world every month, every week—nay, almost every day, is a continual interest to observant minds, and especially so to intelligent children, who are as yet lying on the breast of Mother Nature only, nor have begun to feel or understand the darker and sadder interests of human passion and emotion.
The little Earl of Cairnforth was one of these; and many a time, through all the summers of his life; he recalled tenderly that first summer at Cairnforth, when, no longer pent up between walls and roofs, or dragged about in carriages, he learned, by Molcolm's aid and under Helen's teaching, to chronicle time in different ways; first by the hyacinths and primroses vanishing, and giving place to the wild roses—those exquisite deep-red roses which belong especially to this country-side; then by the woods—his own woods—growing fragrant with innumerable honeysuckles; and lastly by the heather on the moorland— Scotland's own flower—which clothes entire hillsides as with a garment of gorgeous purple, and fills the whole atmosphere with the scent of a spice-garden; and when it faded into a soft brown, dying delicately, beautiful to the last, there appeared the brambles, trailing every where, with their pretty yellowing leaves and their delicious berries. How blithe, even like a mere "callant," big Malcolm was, when, leaving the earl on the sunny hill-side under Miss Cardross's charge, he used to wander off, and come back with his hands all torn and scratched, to feed his young master with blackberries!
"He is not unhappy—I am sure the child is not unhappy," Helen often said to her father, when—as was his way—Mr. Cardross would get fits of uncertainty and downheartedness, and think he was killing his pupil with study, or wearying him, and risking his health by letting him do as much as his energetic mind, always dominant over the frail body, prompted him to do. "Only let him love his life, and put as much in it as he can, be it long or short, and then it will never be a sad life or a life thrown away."