“My house is not far from the Castle, Ceddie,” she repeated each time the subject was referred to—“a very little way from yours, and you can always run in and see me every day, and you will have so many things to tell me! and we shall be so happy together! It is a beautiful place. Your papa has often told me about it. He loved it very much; and you will love it too.”
“I should love it better if you were there,” his small lordship said, with a heavy little sigh.
He could not but feel puzzled by so strange a state of affairs, which could put his “Dearest” in one house and himself in another.
The fact was that Mrs. Errol had thought it better not to tell him why this plan had been made.
“I should prefer he should not be told,” she said to Mr. Havisham. “He would not really understand; he would only be shocked and hurt; and I feel sure that his feeling for the Earl will be a more natural and affectionate one if he does not know that his grandfather dislikes me so bitterly. It would make a barrier between them, even though Ceddie is such a child.”
So Cedric only knew that there was some mysterious reason for the arrangement, some reason which he was not old enough to understand, but which would be explained when he was older. He was puzzled; but after many talks with his mother, in which she placed before him the bright side of the picture, the dark side of it gradually began to fade out, though now and then Mr. Havisham saw him sitting in some queer little old-fashioned attitude, watching the sea, with a very grave face, and more than once he heard an unchildish sigh rise to his lips.
The people who had been sea-sick had no sooner recovered from their sea-sickness, and come on deck to recline in their steamer-chairs and enjoy themselves, than every one seemed to know the romantic story of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and every one took an interest in the little fellow, who ran about the ship or walked with his mother or the tall, thin old lawyer, or talked to the sailors. Every one liked him, he made friends everywhere. He was ever ready to make friends. When the gentlemen walked up and down the deck, and let him walk with them, he stepped out with a manly, sturdy little tramp, and answered all their jokes with much gay enjoyment; when the ladies talked to him, there was always laughter in the group of which he was the centre; when he played with the children, there was always magnificent fun on hand. Among the sailors he had the heartiest friends; he heard miraculous stories about pirates and shipwrecks and desert islands; he learned to splice ropes and rig toy ships, and gained an amount of information concerning [“tops’les”] and [“mains’les,”] quite surprising. His conversation had, indeed, quite at times.
It was eleven days after he had said good-bye to his friend Dick before he reached Liverpool; and it was on the night of the twelfth day that the carriage, in which he and his mother and Mr. Havisham had driven from the station, stopped before the gates of Court Lodge.
Mary had come with them to attend her mistress, and she had reached the house before them. When Cedric jumped out of the carriage Mary stood in the doorway.
Lord Fauntleroy sprang at her with a gay little shout.