"How do we treat him, sir?" inquired Hugh Brownlow and the rest, speaking slowly and gazing at Mr. Saumarez as if they had seen a ghost. "Why, as to that——"
"As to that," I said, appearing from the drawing-room with old Mr. Brownlow on my arm—for in deference to his expressed wish, after the departure of his sons, I had travelled with him by train to Ashcroft in order that he too might plead, and we had just arrived—"as to that, Mr. Saumarez, the father can best answer for himself. See if he is not still an honoured and reverend sire. Look at him yourself, sir; for before heaven I believe you are Arthur Brownlow."
"Yes," exclaimed the old man on my arm, his eyes streaming with tears, "it is my son, my own son Arthur, at last! My former ruin is nothing to my present joy, for I see the boy whom I have wronged, whose reproaching image has been present with me for years—I see him at last before me; I hold him in my arms; I ask pardon of him, profoundest pardon, for all the injustice I have done him; and I rejoice to think that at last my lifelong sorrow is at an end."
Arthur was weeping on his father's neck. The brothers stood around petrified with astonishment.
"It is true," said Arthur Brownlow in a voice choked with emotion; "it is true that, had my brothers been the only parties concerned, I might perhaps—nay, I am sure I should—without compunction have retaliated as the world retaliates. But I never knew—I never suspected—that you, my father, were among them. I have wept for you as dead, for such tidings reached me some time ago. I have mourned for the unjust opinion you held of me, mourned since my boyhood, and even as a man I mourned. But now I hold you in my arms—alive, God be thanked! and forgiving, Christ be praised! And greater happiness can I not know, save if one of my own children should bring me the same experience, and then my felicity might be as great."
The mystery of the lost identity of Arthur Brownlow was easily explained. He had prospered in the world as Arthur Brownlow, when my friend Harrowby knew him; but shortly after that date he had married a Miss Saumarez, who held large estates in Jamaica, and whose name he was compelled to take for the sake of securing the entail of her property to the children. He had lived in Jamaica for nearly ten years, and had recently come back, to find some property near Hambleton added to his possessions, and with it the mortgage over Brownlow's farm. His agent only knew that Brownlow's farm was managed by the young Brownlows, since the old father had long retired from active participation in it; and with this account of the place Arthur Brownlow was naturally satisfied, since he believed his father had died some years ago. He intended to punish his brothers for their treachery and cruelty, but it is questionable whether his intention would ever have gone beyond reading them a severe, salutary lesson and then reinstating them in their freehold. At any rate, as circumstances happened, it had no chance of doing so, for the sight of his father so overwhelmed poor Arthur with joy, that all was forgotten, all was forgiven, in that happy moment; and now in the whole of my parish there is not a happier or better conducted place than Brownlow's farm.
