'Honor! you have not been able to say that since I was a child! Do not spoil it. If this be right, leave it so.'
'Only one thing, Owen, are you sufficiently considering your son's good in taking him there, out of the way of a good education.'
'A working education is the good one for him,' said Owen, 'not the being sent at the cost of others-not even covertly at yours, Sweet Honey-to an expensive school. He is a working man's son, and must so feel himself. I mean to face my own penalties in him, and if I see him in a grade inferior to what was mine by birth, I shall know that though I brought it on him, it is more for his real good and happiness to be a man of the people, than a poor half- acknowledged gentleman. So much for my Americanisms, Honor!'
'But the dissent-the cant!'
'Not so much cant as real piety obtrusively expressed. Poor old thing! I have no fear but that little Giblets will go my way! he worships me, and I shall not leave his
'Well, Owen, I cannot but see that it may be your rightest course; I hope you may find yourself equal to it,' said Honor, struggling with a fresh sense of desertion, though with admiration and esteem returning, such as were well worth the disappointment.
'If not,' said Owen, smiling, to hide deeper feelings, 'I reserve to you the pleasure of maintaining me, nursing me, or what not! If my carcase be good for nothing, I hereby make it over to you. And now, Honor, I have not been without thought for you. I can tell you of a better successor for Brooks.'
'Well!' she said, almost crossly.
'Humfrey Charlecote Randolf,' said Owen, slowly, giving full effect to the two Christian names.
Honor started, gasped, and snatching at the first that occurred of her objections, exclaimed, 'But, my dear, he is as much an engineer as yourself.'
'From necessity, not choice. He farmed till last August.'
'Canadian farming! Besides, what nonsense to offer a young man, with all the world before him, to be bailiff of this little place.'
'It would, were he only to stand in Brooks's position; but if he were the acknowledged heir, as he ought to be- yes, I know I am saying a dreadful thing-but, my good Queen Elizabeth, your Grace would be far wiser to accept Jamie at once than to keep your subjects fretting over your partialities. He will be a worthy Humfrey Charlecote if you catch and pin him down young. He will be worthy any way, but if you let him go levelling and roaming over the world for the best half of his life, this same Holt will lose its charms for him and his heirs for ever.'
'But-but how can you tell that he would be caught and pinned?'
'There is a very sufficient pin at the Underwood.'
'My dear Owen, impossible!'
'Mind, no one has told me in so many words, but Mervyn Fulmort gave me such an examination on Randolf as men used to do when matrimony is in the wind; and since that, he inferred the engagement, when he came to me in no end of a rage, because my backwoodsman had conscientious scruples against partaking in their concoction of evil spirits.'
'Do you mean that Mervyn wants to employ him?'
'To take him into partnership, on the consideration of a certain thirty thousand. You may judge whence that was to come! And he, like Robert, declined to live by murdering bodies and souls. I am afraid Mervyn has been persecuting them ever since.'
'Ever since when?'
'This last conversation was some three weeks ago. I suspect the principal parties settled it on that snowy Twelfth-day-'
'But which of them, Owen?'
'Which?' exclaimed Owen, laughing. 'The goggle or the squint?'
'For shame, Owen. But I cannot believe that Phoebe would not have told me!'
'Having a sister like Lady Bannerman may hinder confidences to friends.'
'Now, Owen, are you sure?'
'As sure as I was that it was a moonstruck man that slept in my room in Woolstone-lane. I knew that Cynthia's darts had been as effective as though he had been a son of Niobe!'
'I don't believe it yet,' cried Honor; 'an honourable man-a sensible girl! Such a wild thing!'
'Ah! Queen Elizabeth! Queen Elizabeth! shut up an honourable man and a sensible girl in a cedar parlour every evening for ten days, and then talk of wild things! Have you forgotten what it is to be under twenty-five?'
'I hate Queen Elizabeth,' said Honor, somewhat tartly.
He muttered something of an apology, and resumed his book. She worked on in silence, then looking up said, rather as if rejoicing in a valid objection, 'How am I to know that this man is first in the succession? I am not suspecting him of imposition. I believe that, as you say, his mother was a Charlecote, but how do I know that she had not half-a-dozen brothers. There is no obligation on me to leave the place to any one, but this youth ought not to come before others.'
'That is soon answered,' said Owen. 'The runaway, your grandfather's brother, led a wild, Leather-Stocking life, till he was getting on in years, then married, luckily not a squaw, and died at the end of the first year, leaving one daughter, who married Major Randolf, and had this only son.'
'The same relation to me as Humfrey! Impossible! And pray how do you prove this?'
'I got Currie to make notes for me which I can get at in my room,' said Owen. 'You can set your lawyer to write to the places, and satisfy yourself without letting him know anything about it.'
'Has he any expectations?'
'I imagine not. I think he has never found out that our relationship is not on the Charlecote side.'
'Then it is the more-impertinent, I really must say, in him to pay his addresses to Phoebe, if he have done so.'
'I can't agree with you. What was her father but an old distiller, who made his fortune and married an heiress. You sophisticated old Honey, to expect him to be dazzled with her fortune, and look at her from a respectful distance! I thought you believed that 'a man's a man for a' that,' and would esteem the bold spirit of the man of progress.'
'Progress, indeed!' said Honor, ironically.
'Listen, Honor,' said Owen, 'you had better accuse me of this fortune-hunting which offends you. I have only obeyed Fate, and so will you. From the moment I met him, he seemed as one I had known of old. It was Charlecotism, of course; and his signature filled me with presentiment. Nay, though the fire and the swamp have become mere hearsay to me now, I still retain the recollection of the impression throughout my illness that he was to be all that I might have been. His straightforward good sense and manly innocence brought Phoebe before me, and Currie tells me that I had fits of hatred to him as my supplanter, necessary as his care was to me.'
Honor just stopped herself from exclaiming, 'Never!' and changed it into, 'My own dear, generous boy!'
'You forget that I thought it was all over with me! The first sensations I distinctly remember were as I lay on my bed at Montreal, one Sunday evening, and saw him sitting in the window, his profile clearly cut against the light, and retracing all those old silhouettes over the mantelshelf. Then I remembered that it had been no sick delusion, but truth and verity, that he was the missing Charlecote! And feeling far more like death than life, I was glad that you should have some one to lean on of your own sort; for, Honor, it was his Bible that he was reading!-one that he had saved out of the fire. I thought it was a lucid interval allowed me for the sake of giving you a better son and support than I had been, and looked forward to your being happy with him. As soon as I could get Currie alone, I told him how it stood, and made him take notes of the evidence of his identity, and promise to make you understand it if I were dead or childish. My best hope was to see him accepted as my expiation; but when I got back, and you wouldn't have him at any price, and I found myself living and lifelike, and had seen her again-'
'Her? Phoebe? My poor boy, you do not mean-'
'I do mean that I was a greater fool than you even took me for,' said Owen, with rising colour. 'First and last, that pure child's face and honest, plain words had an effect on me which nothing else had. The other affair was a mere fever by comparison, and half against my will.'
'Owen!'
'Yes, it was. When I was with that poor thing, her fervour carried me along; and as to the marriage, it was out
