“Nelly, Nelly!” she cried; and she ran from him and seized her child, and held her up.
“She is ours, John! our little one! We have found papa, Nelly! There he is! There is Nelly’s papa! God has given him back to us—we were broken-hearted just now ... O husband! ... husband!”
She broke down; a dangerous excitement had up to this moment sustained her. She sank into a weeping, sobbing, fainting woman in a moment; but his arms received her, his breast pillowed her, and there she rested for many minutes, with no sound to break the holy silence that filled the room but his deep quivering sobs.
When we peep at them again, a half-hour has passed, and the wife is seated near the husband with her arm around him; and the child is on her father’s knee. The fear that threw a film upon the exquisite emotions of the girl has passed; she is listening to his story, interrupting him often with quick exclamations of distress, then fondling him and listening again, vibrating with eagerness, with love, with amazement, which makes her pale face kaleidoscopic with expression. He is telling her of his sufferings in the boat, of his rescue, of his friends in Australia, of his return to England, of his arrival at Southbourne; and as she hears him tell the story of his noble unselfishness—how, to save her from the sorrow and the shame that must have attended his disclosure, if made while Conway lived, he held his secret, but could not keep his love from going forth to his child—she knows that he has brought back to her the same grand heart he took with him five years ago; the same magnanimous qualities; the same pure impulses; the same heroical capacity of self-sacrifice.
And then she tells him her story; and now it is for him to soothe her with the love that has transformed his face and made it beautiful with a deeper and subtler beauty than it had ever before worn. For, as she recurs to those piteous times of her distress, her tears gush forth afresh and her eyes grow wild, as though she did not believe in the happiness that had come to her at last.
I see them sitting in that room while the bright morning sunshine pours upon the window and floods the floor with its radiance; I hear the birds singing merrily in the garden, and the cosy chucking of the hens and the sound of the fresh sweet wind as it sweeps through the pear-trees and sends the red-edged leaves rustling to the ground.
I see the child’s large deep eyes wandering from father to mother, from mother to father, with the small face busy with the unformed consciousness that struggles in it.
I see the mother careworn and pale, but with the light of rapture on her face that discloses all its secret sweetness, watching, ever watching, with soft eyes shining with happy tears, the dear one whose arm is around her.