“I shall certainly bring her if you think you can really have us. How kind to think of it!” Lady Brotherton said. “But the Bonamys were always kind. I remember your wife’s mother, Mr. Oliver. She was the prettiest creature——”
“I flatter myself you will think the same of her daughter,” he said, with a smile (“But if he thinks so much of his wife what business had he to stare so much at Liddy?” Lady Brotherton said after. “Liddy is a very pretty girl, and of course with young men one knows what one must expect—but a man with a family of children! I don’t think I quite like it.”). He spoke to the elder lady, but his eyes were on the younger—not so much admiringly as curiously, anxiously. Was it? could it be? A sort of brotherly impulse came over him. “I think I must have met—some of Miss Joscelyn’s family—from the Fell-country?—from the North of England?” he said, a rush of colour coming to his face.
“Oh!” cried Lydia, paling as he reddened, “none of my family were ever abroad except one. Oh, I wonder if you can have met my brother. I am looking for him. I came to look for him. Harry Joscelyn? We have people of your name,” she added hastily, “in our village too.”
“I come from—Lancashire,” he said, with a sort of hurried abandonment of the subject. Lionel Brotherton had begun to stare at him too. He felt himself in an atmosphere charged with electricity of some sort, and thought with alarm, that some one or other of this dangerous party might put a moral pistol to his head and accuse him at any moment of his false name. He returned to the subject of his wife and family, which was safer in every way. “You know that Mr. Bonamy will not let his daughter go to England,” he said, “because it was fatal to her mother. It is her great grievance; by dint of being debarred from it there is nothing she wants so much to do.”
“And you—have you nothing to say? Is she so delicate?” Lady Brotherton asked.
“Not delicate at all, thank heaven! I have a great deal to say; but I agree. I came under a solemn promise before I was allowed to marry her, and then I have no wish to take her to England—England—” he said, with a little sternness, “has no particular attraction to me. All the happiness of my life is here.”
“But that is a hard thing to say of your home, Mr. Oliver.”
“My home—is here,” he said. What did that girl mean by watching him so? He felt that he was talking vindictively at her, though all that he desired was to ignore her, and escape the scrutiny of her eyes, which made him angry and alarmed, both together. All this time Sir John had been breaking in at intervals, expressing with a great many sibillations his pleasure in the prospect of dining with “Old Bonamy.”
“Old Bonamysh sh’a very old friend; alwaysh liked him, and hish father before him,” the old man cried. “N’ash for bein’ able to dine out, never wash better, never wash better.” This came in at intervals as a kind of chorus, while Lady Brotherton kept up the central strain of friendly commonplace, as unconscious of Lydia’s eager eyes over her shoulder, as of the vague, alarmed curiosity and anxiety that had roused the girl out of herself.
“It was startling to hear his name,” said Lionel, when after awhile, as quickly as politeness permitted, the visitor took his leave.