Then there was a pause; nobody spoke to give any explanation. “Did you bring a doctor with you,” Joscelyn repeated, with a sudden excited burst of laughter, “all the way? or who may this be?”
Harry turned round and came forward into the light, holding out his hand. “You turned me out last time I was here, father,” he said, not able to forego the gratification of this taunt; “I ought to have asked your leave first before I came back now.”
Ralph Joscelyn stood and stared, a dark red colour coming over his face. He looked uncertainly from Liddy to the stranger. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said shortly; then, “Do you mean this is—Harry? that’s what your mother meant, shrieking out, disturbing everybody in the house. Look to your mother, Liddy! Well! you’ve been a long time coming back. You seem,” he said, looking at the new-comer from head to foot, “to have done well for yourself.”
“I have done very well for myself,” Harry said, shortly. “I want help from nobody now.”
“Well, my lad!” said Joscelyn, suddenly striking his hand into that of his son with another hoarse, unsteady laugh, “that’s the best of reasons why you should have whatever you want. You’re welcome home; and there’s a pretty property waiting for you. And it saves a confounded deal of trouble, I can tell you, that you should turn up now.”
All this time Liddy was kneeling by the chair, kissing her mother’s feeble hands and colourless face. There was no particular alarm about her among them; but she lay floating between life and death for a moment in the extremity of emotion which was too much for her feeble flesh and blood. Then the balance turned—the wrong way. If she died then, how happy for her! but instead she slowly came back, opened her eyes, and returned to life. “Is it a dream?” she said, feebly. “No—my Liddy, my darling, you are real; and the other—wasn’t there another?”
They all sat at breakfast half an hour after like people in a dream. Mrs. Joscelyn sat between her son and daughter, and looked at them alternately, and sipped a feeble cup of tea, and shed a tear or two of pure happiness. She was not strong enough yet to ask any questions; she put her hand now and then on Harry’s arm and patted it softly. She heard the story of how he was found out without understanding it in the least, and echoed feebly her husband’s loud but tremulous laugh at the name his son had taken. “Isaac Oliver—that’s the finest joke I ever heard in my life. Isaac—Oliver! Dang it, but that is the best joke——” And he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. The young people both sat by with the strangest sense of unreality. To go away across half a world, and then come back again to the same unchanging scene, even to ameliorations of the past which bring out more clearly the astounding difference between it and them—how strange it is! In all Harry’s knowledge of his father, he had never been so friendly or so amiable; but this only made the gentleman-peasant, the yeoman-horsedealer more extraordinary, as a father, to his son. Liddy had a far less shock to sustain in one sense, but a greater in another; for she had come home—and here was her natural place, love and duty and every tradition binding her; but, alas! her heart so far away.
The strange meal was still progressing, the whole family lingering over it; for the household table was a kind of natural centre and place of union; when wheels were heard again, and a carriage stopped at the door. “It will be Joan,” Mrs. Joscelyn said; “she would not lose a moment in coming; and what will she say when she sees—oh, Harry, my boy! She has always had a warm heart for you—the warmest heart for you; we’ll say nothing about old times; but her and me—Run out and meet your sister, Liddy, and say nothing, say nothing—let us see if she will know him.” Mrs. Joscelyn put her hand upon his sleeve. “It’s a pleasure to touch you—I like to touch you in case my eyes should be deceiving me. And did you ever think of your poor mother all these years?”
Liddy had run out—to meet her sister as she thought—and her father, not unwilling now that the meeting was over to leave his wife alone with her son, followed her, with the intent of taking another look, as he said to himself, of his pet, and making sure that he had really got her back. But Liddy, instead of running out to meet her sister, stood arrested in the doorway, watching the disembarkation from a rickety country coach of the strangest party that ever produced itself in the Fell-country. First came a little man with a high hat, a huge cloak with a faded lining of blue, which would have delighted a painter, flung over his shoulder, and a huge comforter round his neck; next a bundle of an old woman, wrapped in half-a-dozen shawls, one over the other, who rolled out of the quivering carriage, like something half benumbed and half asleep; lastly, a figure which sprang out as light as a bird, pushing aside both the companions who held out anxious hands to assist her, and flew along the little path between the two grass plats. Liddy clasped her hands together in wonder and dismay.
“Mrs. Harry!” she cried, with consternation. She was so much surprised that she made no step to meet her; but stood transfixed, her face pale with astonishment. Rita was all aglow with pleasure, and excitement, and triumph. She flung herself upon Lydia as if she had been her dearest friend in the world.