But Donal was not all the day with Davie, and latterly had begun to feel a little anxious about the time the boy spent away from him—partly with his brother, partly with the people about the stable, and partly with his father, who evidently found the presence of his younger son less irksome to him than that of any other person, and saw more of him than of Forgue: the amount of loneliness the earl could endure was amazing. But after what he had seen and heard, Donal was most anxious concerning his time with his father, only he felt it a delicate thing to ask him about it. At length, however, Davie himself opened up the matter.
“Mr. Grant,” he said one day, “I wish you could hear the grand fairy-stories my papa tells!”
“I wish I might!” answered Donal.
“I will ask him to let you come and hear. I have told him you can make fairy-tales too; only he has quite another way of doing it;—and I must confess,” added Davie a little pompously, “I do not follow him so easily as you.—Besides,” he added, “I never can find anything in what you call the cupboard behind the curtain of the story. I wonder sometimes if his stories have any cupboard!—I will ask him to-day to let you come.”
“I think that would hardly do,” said Donal. “Your father likes to tell his boy fairy-tales, but he might not care to tell them to a man. You must remember, too, that though I have been in the house what you think a long time, your father has seen very little of me, and might feel me in the way: invalids do not generally enjoy the company of strangers. You had better not ask him.”
“But I have often told him how good you are, Mr. Grant, and how you can’t bear anything that is not right, and I am sure he must like you—I don’t mean so well as I do, because you haven’t to teach him anything, and nobody can love anybody so well as the one he teaches to be good.”
“Still I think you had better leave it alone lest he should not like your asking him. I should be sorry to have you disappointed.”
“I do not mind that so much as I used. If you do not tell me I am not to do it, I think I will venture.”
Donal said no more. He did not feel at liberty, from his own feeling merely, to check the boy. The thing was not wrong, and something might be intended to come out of it! He shrank from the least ruling of events, believing man’s only call to action is duty. So he left Davie to do as he pleased.
“Does your father often tell you a fairy-tale?” he asked.