The tone was hoarse, and the words a little abrupt; but the mother looked beneath the surface.
“Does that mean that you would miss the child if I were to take him away from you?”
The Squire started at the question, and looked keenly into the face before him. He forgot that the situation so very new to him had been faced in all its bearings for many long weeks by the two who had pierced together the history of the lost child, and who knew well the sad story of the Squire’s lonely lot.
“Miss him!” he ejaculated, almost harshly, as a strong man often does when under the influence of some sudden emotion. “If you had known what it was to lose five children and a wife within ten short days, to live fifteen long years alone and desolate, and then to adopt and make your own a child that seemed given to you by a special providence, one whom you had the right to make your own and love as your own. If your old age had been cheered by the presence of such a child, and then he too was taken from you”—
The Squire stopped short abruptly, and then in a gentler tone he added,—
“Forgive me, my dear madam; I have no right to say all this. I have been taken by surprise, and I live so much alone, that I fear I forget myself at times. You must bear with an old man whom you have taken unawares. I cannot rejoice at your news for my own sake, but I will endeavor to do so for yours and the child’s. I will not be more selfish than nature and habit made me.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot endeavored to speak, but her voice failed her, and she looked towards her husband.
“Squire,” said the young man, stepping forward, “my wife wishes me to explain to you that her gratitude would be but ill-displayed were she, in return for all your great goodness to her child, to bring a cloud upon your later life. But for you, no one can say what might by this time have befallen the little waif; but for you, it would hardly have been possible that mother and son could ever have met again this side of the grave. Your goodness in adopting him and in giving him a home has been, under God’s guiding, the means of bringing them together—the main link in the chain of circumstances that has led to this goal. You have been a father to him in his hour of extremest need. My wife will never be willing to requite such goodness by robbing you of what sunshine the child’s love can bring.”
The Squire looked steadily at the speaker, as if in doubt whither all this tended, and he glanced from one to the other, his face expressing more emotion than was its wont.
“I do not quite grasp your meaning,” he said.