Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

was not long before he learned that the poor people knew her very well indeed. When there was sickness or sorrow or poverty in any house, the little brougham often stood before the door.

“Do you know,” said Fauntleroy once, “they all say, ‘God bless you!’ when they see her, and the children are glad. There are some who go to her house to be taught to sew. She says she feels so rich now that she wants to help the poor ones.”

It had not displeased the Earl to find that the mother of his heir had a beautiful young face and looked as much like a lady as if she had been a duchess; and in one way it did not displease him to know that she was popular and beloved by the poor. And yet he was often conscious of a hard, jealous pang when he saw how she filled her child’s heart and how the boy clung to her as his best beloved. The old man would have desired to stand first himself and have no rival.

That same morning he drew up his horse on an elevated point of the moor over which they rode, and made a gesture with his whip, over the broad, beautiful landscape spread before them.

“Do you know that all that land belongs to me?” he said to Fauntleroy.

“Does it?” answered Fauntleroy. “How much it is to belong to one person, and how beautiful!”

“Do you know that some day it will all belong to you⁠—that and a great deal more?”

“To me!” exclaimed Fauntleroy in rather an awestricken voice. “When?”

“When I am dead,” his grandfather answered.

“Then I don’t want it,” said Fauntleroy; “I want you to live always.”

“That’s kind,” answered the Earl in his dry way; “nevertheless, some day it will all be yours⁠—some day you will be the Earl of Dorincourt.”

Little Lord Fauntleroy sat very still in his saddle for a few moments. He looked over the broad moors, the green farms, the beautiful copses, the cottages in the lanes, the pretty village, and over the trees to where the turrets of the great castle rose, gray and stately. Then he gave a queer little sigh.

“What are you thinking of?” asked the Earl.

“I am thinking,” replied Fauntleroy, “what a little boy I am! and of what Dearest said to me.”

“What was it?” inquired the Earl.

“She said that perhaps it was not so easy to be very rich; that if anyone had so many things always, one might sometimes forget that everyone else was not so fortunate, and that one who is rich should always be careful and try to remember. I was talking to her about how good you were, and she said that was such a good thing, because an earl had so much power, and if he cared only about his own pleasure and never thought about the people who lived on his lands, they might have trouble that he could help⁠—and there were so many people, and it would be such a hard thing. And I was just looking at all those houses, and thinking how I should have to find out about the people, when I was an earl. How did you find out about them?”

As his lordship’s knowledge of his tenantry consisted in finding out which of them paid their rent promptly, and in turning out those who did not, this was rather a hard question. “Newick finds out for me,” he said, and he pulled his great gray mustache, and looked at his small questioner rather uneasily. “We will go home now,” he added; “and when you are an earl, see to it that you are a better earl than I have been!”

He was very silent as they rode home. He felt it to be almost incredible that he who had never really loved anyone in his life, should find himself growing so fond of this little fellow⁠—as without doubt he was. At first he had only been pleased and proud of Cedric’s beauty and bravery, but there was something more than pride in his feeling now. He laughed a grim, dry laugh all to himself sometimes, when he thought how he liked to have the boy near him, how he liked to hear his voice, and how in secret he really wished to be liked and thought well of by his small grandson.

“I’m an old fellow in my dotage, and I have nothing else to think of,” he would say to himself; and yet he knew it was not that altogether. And if he had allowed himself to admit the truth, he would perhaps have found himself obliged to own that the very things which attracted him, in spite of himself, were the qualities he had never possessed⁠—the frank, true, kindly nature, the affectionate trustfulness which could never think evil.

It was only about a week after that ride when, after a visit to his mother, Fauntleroy came into the library with a troubled, thoughtful face. He sat down in that high-backed chair in which he had sat on the evening of his arrival, and for a while he looked at the embers on the hearth. The Earl watched him in silence, wondering what was coming. It was evident that Cedric had something on his mind. At last he looked up. “Does Newick know all about the people?” he asked.

“It is his business to know about them,” said his lordship. “Been neglecting it⁠—has he?”

Contradictory as it may seem, there was nothing which entertained and edified him more than the little fellow’s interest in his tenantry. He had never taken any interest in them himself, but it pleased him well enough that, with all his childish habits of thought and in the midst of all his childish amusements and high spirits, there should be such a quaint seriousness working in the curly head.

“There is a place,” said Fauntleroy, looking up at him with wide-open, horror-stricken eye⁠—“Dearest has seen it; it is at the other end of the village. The