‘Rushed off to look at St. Paul’s through the shaking of doormats, and pay his respects to the Thames. He has none of the colonial nil admirari spirit, but looks at England as a Greek colonist would have looked at Athens. I only regret that the reality must tame his raptures. I told him to come back by breakfast-time.’
‘He will lose his way.’
‘Not he! You little know the backwood’s power of topography! Even I could nearly rival some of the Arab stories, and he could guide you anywhere—or after any given beast in the Newcastle district. Honor, you must know and like him.
He really is the New World Charlecote whom you always held over our heads.’
‘I thought you called him Randolf?’
‘That is his surname, but his Christian name is Humfrey Charlecote, from his grandfather. His mother was the lady my father told you of. He saved an old Bible out of the fire, with it all in the fly-leaf. He shall show it to you, and it can be easily confirmed by writing to the places. I would have gone myself, if I had not been the poor creature I am.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ said Honora, ‘I dare say it is so. I am very glad you found so attentive a friend. I am most thankful to him for his care of you.’
‘And you accept him as a relation,’ said Owen, anxiously.
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ said Honor. ‘Would you like anything before breakfast?’
Owen answered with a little plaintiveness. Perhaps he was disappointed at this cold acquiescence; but it was not a moment at which Honor could face the thought of a colonial claimant of the Holt. With Owen helpless upon her hands, she needed both a home and ample means to provide for him and his sister and child; and the American heir, an unwelcome idea twenty years previously, when only a vague possibility, was doubly undesirable when long possession had endeared her inheritance to her, when he proved not even to be a true Charlecote, and when her own adopted children were in sore want of all that she could do for them. The evident relinquishment of poor Owen’s own selfish views on the Holt made her the less willing to admit a rival, and she was sufficiently on the borders of age to be pained by having the question of heirship brought forward. And she knew, what Owen did not, that, if this youth’s descent were indeed what it was said to be, he represented the elder line, and that even Humfrey had wondered what would be his duty in the present contingency.