So what she said was, “I suppose Dr. Sinclair is always very busy?”
“Oh, yes—always working away at his stocks and his chickens,” said Nanny placidly, holding a small hole up to the light. “He’s managed to get that bit of ground behind the garden, and he’s planted it with nothing but stocks. He lets Anna help him with the chickens. She’s becoming quite a little companion to her Daddy.”
“That is delightful,” purred the Doña; then, after a pause, “He must be terribly lonely, poor man.”
“Oh, yes, he frets a lot, I’m sure; but, of course, gentlemen don’t show it so much.”
“Ah?” and there was a note of suppressed eagerness in the interjection.
As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that of the masters.
At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.
Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.
Yes; but it was quite another matter to be pumped, even by “Granny,” or to admit to any one but her own most secret heart that “Daddy” could, under any circumstances, behave otherwise than as the model of all the nursery virtues.
There was a short silence; then the Doña said, “Yes, poor man! It must be very dull for him. But I suppose he is beginning to see his friends?”
“Oh, yes, madam, the College gentlemen sometimes come to talk over his work with him,” and Nanny pursed up her lips, and accelerated the speed with which she was threading her needle through her warp. “It’s a blessing, I’m sure,” she added, “that he has his work to take off his thoughts sometimes.”