“If I am your cousin! Do you think I am making a false claim, Miss Joscelyn?” he said.
“—then you will soon know about Harry,” said Lydia, going on in the same breath. “I have a brother who went away a great many years ago. We don’t know where he is, or anything about him; but I am sure if I could go abroad I should find him—that is why I am always so anxious to talk to anyone who has been there.”
“Where?” he said.
“Abroad.” Lydia said the word with all simplicity. “Abroad” meant everything to her. It meant the place in which Harry was, and where she should certainly find him if she got there. When she said “Italy” she meant much the same thing. Not Italy, of which she knew little, except by the stories in the “Book of Beauty;” but a vague and beautiful place in which everything that was wonderful happened, and in which it would be natural that this should happen too.
But Brotherton, whose knowledge was more precise, was puzzled. He did not know whether to follow out this line of conversation, which promised to become intimate, or to go back to subjects personal to himself. He had no right to inquire into the story of the family prodigal, he thought; but still, as the door had been opened to him, how was he to turn from it? “I have gone abroad since ever I can remember,” he said; “my mother, as I tell you, is never so happy in England as out of it. She is rather an invalid, and she cannot bear the cold. When I was a boy I scarcely knew where my home was.”
“Are there many of you?” asked Liddy, full of interest. She did not understand a small family, and a vision came on her of sisters, girls like herself, companions such as she had never had; but this new idea was alarming as well as delightful, and she could not help fearing that young ladies who were equal to her new friend would think themselves above her; therefore it was almost a relief, though at the same time a disappointment, when he laughed and said, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too,”—words which she thought she had heard somewhere else, but was not clear about. And then they went on again quite silently for a time, the wide valley all about them, the air breathing in their faces, the great world all to themselves. Joan, driving in her steady way, was round the next corner, well ahead, and there was nothing but these two figures stalking on in the sunshine, with their shadows behind them. Liddy felt that she did not care to talk. The sensation was sweet, and tranquil, and friendly, and furnished all that was required, without any talking at all. It is impossible to describe what an interruption it was, a kind of outrage upon the quiet, when, as they went round that next corner, skirting the hedgerows, they were suddenly met face to face by young Selby, on his big brown horse. Even Lydia, not too favourably disposed towards him, had been obliged to admit on former occasions that Raaf Selby looked well on his big horse. But to-day he positively offended her by his appearance. There is no class of men in the world so delightful, so helpful, so kind, so modest about their own merits, and of so much service to all the rest of the world, as doctors; but yet there is a compound of rudeness, jauntiness, pretension, and vulgarity to be found now and then in a country practitioner, which can nowhere else be paralleled. Raaf Selby was not always like this, nor was it at all the impression which he made upon the general mind, or even upon Liddy’s, who, in other times, had considered him, as all the country did, “quite a gentleman.” But when he met them now he had a red face (which was not his fault) and the air of having been up all night (which, if it had been true, would have been a virtue in him), and looked altogether like a rural dandy trying to be something which he was not.
“Hullo, Miss Liddy,” he said, “I suppose you kept it up to all the hours last night after the rest of us were gone?”
“I don’t know what there was to keep up,” Liddy said, with an indignant blush; upon which young Selby laughed loudly.
“Ah, I daresay; but I know,” he said, with an open look at Brotherton, a look full of insolence and jealousy—and he gave a great laugh. “I was out of it last night; but I haven’t always been out of it,” he said.
Lydia was a girl not at all disposed in her own person to submit to any impertinence, but she got alarmed when she saw the gathering clouds on her companion’s face. “I think you are alluding to something I don’t understand,” she said, firmly, “but I need not ask what it is, to detain you. We have got to keep up with Joan. Did you see Joan? She has got the lead of us, and we are bound to make up to her now.”