“Look here, I can’t stand it any longer,” he cried. “Mother—is living then, and all right?” He seized her by the shoulders, looked her in the face, kissed her almost roughly, brushing his beard along her smooth cheek. “I knew you the first moment,” he said, “you little thing! I knew you the first moment. You were always a clever baby from your cradle. I have often thought the last baby was like you. You were the sharpest little thing! Of course I knew nobody else could be Liddy Joscelyn. And you thought I belonged to old Isaac, eh? that is the best joke I ever heard. Old Isaac—is the old fellow living? And father—stood out for me? Well he ought to, for it is along of him——” Here Harry stopped a minute, put Lydia away, and looked round him upon the two silent spectators who regarded this scene with an astonishment beyond words. He made a pause, pulling himself up all at once. “Poor old father,” he said, “after all he’s done more for me than anyone (I called the boy after him, you can tell him). It is along of him—that I found the best friend and the dearest wife that ever was.”
And Harry gathered his Rita—who had been standing by with a countenance swept by all manner of emotions: now angry, now melting, wondering, bewildered, indignant, always chill with that sense of being left out, which is the most terrible of sensations to such as she—into his arms and kissed her, and put his hand over her forehead as if clearing some veil away. “You are not Mrs. Oliver any longer,” he cried; “that’s a good thing over. You’re Rita Joscelyn, and the best and the sweetest that ever did honour to the name. Isn’t she a little beauty, Liddy? What will mother say to her, and to the children?” Here poor Harry, overmastered by excitement and pleasure, fairly burst out crying, and kissed his wife over and over, sobbing, and bedewed her hair with his tears.
“You might let her speak to me, Harry,” said Lydia, crying a little in sympathy, but brightening and beaming too.
“This is all very astonishing,” said Mr. Bonamy. “You have talked a great deal in an unknown tongue, and kissing is all very well, Harry; but you owe a fuller explanation to me.”
Then Lydia stepped forth. “We are the Joscelyns of Joscelyn Tower—the real old Joscelyns whom everybody knows in the Fell country,” she said. “We are not quite so rich as we once were (but father has been doing so well lately,” she added, in a parenthesis to Harry) “and we live in the White House. He ran away ten years ago, and never has written, never has sent a word (oh, shame, Harry! and poor mother breaking her heart) all this time. But when I left home in November,” Liddy said, holding her head high, “to come abroad, I told them I should find him, I should bring Harry home; nobody believed me of course, but I have done it; and now, Mr. Bonamy, you know why I said I loved you. We are relations,” she said, holding out her hand; “we all belong to the same family now.”
The Vice-Consul was greatly touched; and he was deeply relieved at the same time in his own mind (though, if truth were told, a little, just a little, disappointed too). He took the hand she offered to him very gallantly, with his old-fashioned, paternal grace. “Then, my dear, I may as well follow Harry’s good example,” he said, stooping over her to kiss her forehead. “I am very glad to receive you into my family.” Yet he would have liked to have had his daughter all to himself. The Isaac Oliver business, which had seemed such a terrible downfall an hour ago, looked a little, just a little, to be regretted now. It was an unworthy thought, and Mr. Bonamy felt that it was so. He in his turn held out his hand to his son-in-law. “When you are at leisure,” he said, plaintively, “perhaps you will shake hands with me in your new capacity. Harry Joscelyn—is that your name now? Well, it is preferable to that of Isaac Oliver one must allow.”
As for Rita she was crying a little on her husband’s shoulder. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I like all things as they were. I shall never know who people are speaking to when they say Mrs. Joscelyn; and how are we to explain to——. We are not going to tell everybody all the story, I hope.”
This was a little perversity not to be got over all at once. She had not said anything to Lydia; she could scarcely forgive Lydia for being her Harry’s sister, for finding him out, for resembling the baby: she saw that herself now, but was angry with Benedetta for having discovered it, and with Lydia for having in that disagreeable way announced a private claim upon her (Rita’s) family. No doubt Ralph would be like her too, for he and the baby had always been said to resemble each other. Poor little Ralfino—Rita, who up to this moment had called him Raaf in defiance of all Italianisms, instantly conferred upon him the softening vowel and diminutive: Ralfo, Ralfino he should be henceforward, she decided in a moment; and she took no notice of Lydia. Papa, she said to herself, was doing all that was necessary in that way.
Thus the scene of the discovery, the restoration of Harry to his family, and his inheritance to its right owner, which according to all dramatic precedent ought to have been ecstatic, was not at all so, and ended in embarrassment and mutual annoyance. The results would be very advantageous in every way to the hero himself and his wife and children, and would not be advantageous, but the reverse to Liddy, who was at once so much the poorer by Harry’s discovery. But it was she who gained, not she who lost, who took the revelation unpleasantly. “You will have to go—to England I suppose,” she said, looking askance at the new-found sister, and clasping the arm of her husband; and there was a grudge in her tone.
“Yes, my darling; I must go and see my mother.”