Queenie looked puzzled.
“You’re a very odd child, Bertie. I often say so, and so do other people.”
“Am I?” he answered, meekly. “I don’t know why.”
“I can’t explain quite,” returned Queenie, nodding her head, “but you are.”
Bertie, however, was not at all disturbed by this opinion, nor did he consider himself such an object of compassion as Queenie evidently did. He certainly missed his little companion when she was really gone, but he did not fret or worry himself over his loneliness, but quietly resumed the solitary habits that he had fallen into before he had found his new friends.
His mind was much clearer and more active now than when he had first recovered from his long sleep of unconsciousness, and, although his memory had not returned, he had lost for the most part that aching sense of loss and blankness that had weighed upon him like a leaden weight at first.
He was beginning to have a little past of his own, on which his thoughts could dwell. He had friends amongst the animals upon the place. A big black Newfoundland dog called Samson was a great source of delight to him, and an Alderney cow, and the Squire’s great bay horse were alike objects of deep interest and affection.
But the child’s love and admiration, as well as his imagination, were chiefly and mainly occupied with the Squire himself. Bertie’s was one of those natures that seem to require a central interest and object in life. He wanted something to think about, something to dream about, somebody to love in his quiet, undemonstrative fashion, somebody who would satisfy the imaginative and poetical side of his temperament. And this object,—strange as it might appear to some, he found in the quiet and matter-of-fact Squire of Arlingham.
During the lengthening autumn evenings, when the lamp in the nursery was lighted early, and the fire attracted Bertie to a cosey position upon the rug, when the kettle sang cheerily upon the hob, and the cat purred contentedly upon the child’s lap, and Mrs. Pritchard’s busy needles clicked together with the pleasant regularity of the practised knitter, then would come a time of deep enjoyment for Bertie, when his kind friend the housekeeper would tell him long stories of the Squire’s boyhood and youth, of his happy married life, and the deep sorrow that had fallen upon him and changed the proud and loving husband and father into the grave, stern, silent man, widowed and childless, that Arlingham knew so well now.
And Bertie listened to this story again and again, until it seemed absolutely to belong to his own past. It seemed to him as if he had always known the Squire. He studied the portraits in the long gallery until he knew each one by heart. He could see the Squire as a curly-headed boy, with his pony and his dog, as a tall, handsome man in his scarlet hunting-coat, with his great whip in his hand; he could see him a year or two later with a pair of fine lads beside him; and, best of all, he knew him as he now was, a white-headed, keen-eyed, silent man, very grave and rather severe, despite his kindness of heart, a man to be reverenced and perhaps a little feared, as well as loved, towards whom the child felt an increasing sense of attraction.