‘Has he any expectations?’
‘I imagine not. I think he has never found out that our relationship is not on the Charlecote side.’
‘Then it is the more—impertinent, I really must say, in him to pay his addresses to Phœbe, if he have done so.’
‘I can’t agree with you. What was her father but an old distiller, who made his fortune and married an heiress. You sophisticated old Honey, to expect him to be dazzled with her fortune, and look at her from a respectful distance! I thought you believed that “a man’s a man for a’ that,” and would esteem the bold spirit of the man of progress.’
‘Progress, indeed!’ said Honor, ironically.
‘Listen, Honor,’ said Owen, ‘you had better accuse me of this fortune-hunting which offends you. I have only obeyed Fate, and so will you. From the moment I met him, he seemed as one I had known of old. It was Charlecotism, of course; and his signature filled me with presentiment. Nay, though the fire and the swamp have become mere hearsay to me now, I still retain the recollection of the impression throughout my illness that he was to be all that I might have been. His straightforward good sense and manly innocence brought Phœbe before me, and Currie tells me that I had fits of hatred to him as my supplanter, necessary as his care was to me.’
Honor just stopped herself from exclaiming, ‘Never!’ and changed it into, ‘My own dear, generous boy!’
‘You forget that I thought it was all over with me! The first sensations I distinctly remember were as I lay on my bed at Montreal, one Sunday evening, and saw him sitting in the
window, his profile clearly cut against the light, and retracing all those old silhouettes over the mantelshelf. Then I remembered that it had been no sick delusion, but truth and verity, that he was the missing Charlecote! And feeling far more like death than life, I was glad that you should have some one to lean on of your own sort; for, Honor, it was his Bible that he was reading!—one that he had saved out of the fire. I thought it was a lucid interval allowed me for the sake of giving you a better son and support than I had been, and looked forward to your being happy with him. As soon as I could get Currie alone, I told him how it stood, and made him take notes of the evidence of his identity, and promise to make you understand it if I were dead or childish. My best hope was to see him accepted as my expiation; but when I got back, and you wouldn’t have him at any price, and I found myself living and lifelike, and had seen her again—’
‘Her? Phœbe? My poor boy, you do not mean—’