"I may die," she said to the earl—"die before yourself; and if my boy grows up, you may not love him, or he may not deserve your love, in which case you must choose another heir. No, you shall be bound in no way externally; let all go on as heretofore. I will have it so."
And of all Lord Cairnforth's generosity she would accept of nothing for herself except a small annual sum, which, with her widow's pension from the East India Company, sufficed to make her independent of her father; but she did not refuse kindness to her boy.
Never was there such a boy. "Boy" he was called from the first, never "baby;" there was nothing of the baby about him. Before he was a year old he ruled his mother, grandfather, and Uncle Duncan with a rod of iron. Nay, the whole village were his slaves. "Miss Helen's bairn" was a little king every where. It might have gone rather hard for the poor wee fellow thus allegorically
"Wearing on his baby brow the round
And top of sovereignty"
That dangerous sovereignty—any human being—to wield, had there not been at least one person who was able to assume authority over him.
This was, strange to say—and yet not strange—the Earl of
Cairnforth.
From his earliest babyhood Boy had been accustomed to the sight of the sight of the motionless figure in the moving chair, who never touched him, but always spoke so kindly and looked around so smilingly; whom, he could perceive—for children are quicker to notice things than we some times think—his mother and grandfather invariably welcomed with such exceeding pleasure, and treated with never-failing respect and tenderness. And, as soon as he could crawl, the footboard of the mysterious wheeled chair became to the little man a perfect treasure-house of delight. Hidden there he found toys, picture-books, "sweeties"—such as he got nowhere else, and for which, before appropriating them, he was carefully taught to express thanks in his own infantile way, and made to understand fully from whom they came.
"It's bribery, and against my principles," the earl would say, half sadly. "But, if I did not give him things, how else could Boy learn to love me?"
Helen never answered this, no more than she used answer many similar speeches in the earl's childhood. She knew time would prove them all to be wrong.
What sort of idea the child really had of this wonderful donor, the source of most of his pleasures, who yet was so different externally from every body else; who never moved from the wheel-chair; who neither caressed him nor played with him, and whom he was not allowed to play with, but only lifted up sometimes to kiss softly the kind face which always smiled down upon him with a sort of "superior love"—what the child's childish notion of his friend was no one could of course discover. But it must have been a mingling of awe and affectionateness; for he would often—even before he could walk—crawl up to the little chair, steady himself by it, and then look into Lord Cairnforth's face with those mysterious baby eyes, full of questioning, but yet without the slightest fear. And once, when his mother was teaching him his first hymn—