A Noble Life

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

"Helen, you're not clever, but you're a wise little woman, my dear," the minister would say, patting the flaxen curls or the busy hands—large and brown, yet with a certain grace about them, too—helpful hands, made to hold children, or tend sick folk, or sustain the feeble steps of old age. She was "no bonnie" Helen Cardross; it was just a round, rosy, sonsie face, with no features in particular, but she was pleasant to look upon, and inexpressibly pleasant to live with; for it was such a wholesome nature, so entirely free from moods, or fancies, or crochets of any kind—those sad vagaries of ill-health, ill-humor, and ill-conditionedness of every sort, which are sometimes only a misfortune, caused by an unhappy natural temperament, but oftener arise from pure egotism, of which there was not an atom in Helen Cardross. Her life was like the life of a flower—as natural, unconscious, fresh, and sweet: she took in every influence about her, and gave out freely all she had to give; desired no better things than she possessed, and where she was planted there she grew.

It was not wonderful that the little earl loved her, and that under her sunshiny soul his life too blossomed out as it might never otherwise have done, but have drooped and faded, and gone back into the darkness, imperfect and unfulfilled; for, though each human life is, in a sense, complete to itself, and must work itself out independently, clinging to no other, still there is a great and beautiful mystery in the way one life seems to influence an other, sometimes for ill, but far, far oftener for good.

Lord Cairnforth was not much with the Cardross boys. He liked them, and evidently craved after their company, but they were very shy of him. Sometimes they let Malcolm bring him into their boat, and condescended to row him up and down the loch, a mode of locomotion in which he greatly delighted, for, at best, the shaking of the great lumbering coach was not easy to him, and he always begged to be carried in Malcolm's arms till he found how pleasantly he could lie in the stern of the Manse boat, and float about on the smooth water, watching the mountains and the shores.

True, he could not stir an inch from where he was laid down, but he lay there so contentedly, enjoying everything, and really looked, what he often said he was, "as happy as a king."

And by degrees, with a little home persuasion from Helen, the boys got reconciled to his company—found, indeed, that he was not such bad company after all; for often, when they were tired of pulling, and let the boat drift into some quiet little bay, or rock lazily in the middle of the loch, the little earl would begin talking—telling stories, which soon caught the attention of the minister's boys. These were either fragments out of the books he had read, which seemed countless to the young Cardrosses, or, what they liked still better, tales "out of his own head;" and these tales were always the last that they would have expected from one like him—wild exploits; wanderings over South American prairies, or shipwrecks on desert islands; astonishing feats of riding, or fighting, or traveling by land and sea—every thing, in short, belonging to that sort of active, energetic, adventurous life, of which the relator could never have had the least experience, and never would have in this world. Perhaps for that very reason his fancy delighted therein the more.

And his stories were enjoyed by others as much as by himself, which no doubt added to the charm of them. When winter came, and all the boating days were done, many a night, round the fire of the Manse parlor, or in the "awful eerie" library at the Castle, the earl used to have a whole circle of young people, and some elder ones too, gathered round his wheel-chair, listening to his wonderful tales of adventure by flood and field.

"Why don't you write them out properly?" the boys would ask sometimes, forgetting—what Helen would never have forgotten. But he only looked down on his poor helpless fingers and smiled.

However, he had, with great difficulty and pains, managed to learn to write—that is, to sign his name, or indite any short letter to Mr. Menteith or others, which, as he grew older, sometimes became necessary. But writing was always a great trouble to him; and, fortunately, people were not expected to write much in those days. Had he been born a little later in his century, the Earl of Cairnforth might have brightened his sad life by putting his imagination forth in print, and becoming a great literary character; as it was, he merely told his tales for his own delight and that of those about him, which possibly was a better thing than fame.

Then he made jokes, too. Sometimes, in his quiet, dry way, he said such droll things that the Cardross boys fell into shouts of laughter. He had the rare quality of seeing the comical side of things, without a particle of ill-nature being mixed up with his fun. His wit danced about as brilliantly and harmlessly as the Northern lights that flashed and flamed of winter nights over the mountains at the head of the loch; and the solid, somewhat heavy Manse boys, gradually growing up to men, often wondered why it was that, miserable as the earl's life was, or seemed to them, they always felt merrier instead of sadder when they were in his company.

But sometimes when with Helen alone, and more especially as he grew to be a youth in his teens, and yet no bigger, no stronger, and scarcely less helpless than a child, the young earl would let fall a word or two which showed that he was fully and painfully aware of his own condition, and all that it entailed. It was evident that he had thought much and deeply of the future which lay before him. If, as now appeared probable, he should live to man's estate, his life must, at best, be one long endurance, rendered all the sharper and harder to bear because within that helpless body dwelt a soul, which was, more than that of most men, alive to every thing beautiful, noble, active, and good.