“Some of your ancestors,” answered the Earl, “who lived a few hundred years ago.”
“Perhaps,” said Lord Fauntleroy, regarding them with respect, “perhaps I got my spelling from them.” And then he proceeded to find his place in the [church service.] When the music began, he stood up and looked across at his mother, smiling. He was very fond of music, and his mother and he often sang together, so he joined in with the rest, his pure, sweet, high voice rising as clear as the song of a bird. He quite forgot himself in his pleasure in it. The Earl forgot himself a little too, as he sat in his [curtain-shielded] corner of the pew and watched the boy. His mother, as she looked at him across the church, felt a thrill pass through her heart, and a prayer rose in it too; a prayer that the pure, simple happiness of his childish soul might last, and that the strange, great fortune which had fallen to him might bring no wrong or evil with it. There were many soft anxious thoughts in her tender heart in those new days.
“Oh, Ceddie!” she had said to him the evening before, as she hung over him in saying good-night, before he went away; “Oh, Ceddie, dear, I wish for your sake I was very clever and could say a great many wise things! But only be good, dear, only be brave, only be kind and true always, and then you will never hurt any one so long as you live, and you may help many, and the big world may be better because my little child was born.”
And on his return to the Castle, Fauntleroy had repeated her words to his grandfather.
“And I thought about you when she said that,” he ended; “and I told her that was the way the world was because you had lived, and I was going to try if I could be like you.”
“And what did she say to that?” asked his lordship, a trifle uneasily.
“She said that was right, and we must always look for good in people and try to be like it.”
Perhaps it was this the old man remembered as he glanced through the divided folds of the red curtain of his pew to where his son’s wife sat.
As they came out of the church, many of those who had attended the service stood waiting to see them pass. As they neared the gate, a man who stood with his hat in his hand made a step forward and then hesitated. He was a middle-aged farmer, with a [careworn] face.
“Well, Higgins,” said the Earl.