about yonder, when I might have been living in clover here. I’d get up an Ever-perpetual philanthropic benefit-my-fellow-creature society, if I were you, Jan, and hold meetings at Exeter Hall!”
“Not in my line,” said Jan, swaying himself about on the bough.
“Isn’t it! I should say it was. Why don’t you invite Sibylla to your house, if you are so fond of her?”
“She won’t come,” said Jan.
“Perhaps you have asked her!”
“I was beginning to ask her, but she flew at me and ordered me to hold my tongue. No, I see it,” Jan added, in self-soliloquy, “she’ll never come there. I thought she might: and I got Miss Deb to think so. She’ll—she’ll—”
“She’ll what?” asked John Massingbird.
“She’ll be a thorn in Lionel’s side, I’m afraid.”
“Nothing more likely,” acquiesced easy John. “Roses and thorns go together. If gentlemen will marry the one, they must expect to get their share of the other.”
Jan jumped off his bough. His projects all appeared to be failing. The more he had dwelt upon his suddenly-thought-of scheme, that Dr. West’s house might afford an asylum for Lionel and his wife, the more he had become impressed with its desirability. Jan Verner, though the most unselfish, perhaps it may be said the most improvident of mortals, with regard to himself, had a considerable deal of forethought for the rest of the world. It had struck him, even before it struck Lionel, that, if turned out of Verner’s Pride, Lionel would want a home; want it in the broadest acceptation of the word. It would have been Jan’s delight to give him one. He, Jan, went home, told Miss Deb the news that it was John Massingbird who had returned, not Frederick, and imparted his views of future arrangements.
Miss Deb was dubious. For Mr. Verner of Verner’s Pride to become an inmate of their home, dependent on her housekeeping, looked a formidable affair. But Jan pointed out that, Verner’s Pride gone, it appeared to be a choice of cheap lodgings: their house would be an improvement upon that. And Miss Deb acquiesced: and grew to contemplate the addition to her family, in conjunction with the addition Jan proposed to add to her income, with great satisfaction.
That failed. Failed upon Jan’s first hint of it to Mrs. Verner. She—to use his own expression—flew out at him, at the bare thought: and Sibylla Verner could fly out in an unseemly manner when she choose.
Jan’s next venture had been with John Massingbird. That was failure the second.
“Where are they to go?” thought Jan.
It was a question that Lionel Verner may also have been asking in his inmost heart. As yet he could not look his situation fully in the face. Not from any want of moral courage, but because of the inextricable confusion that his affairs seemed to be in. And, let his moral courage be what it would, the aspect they bore might have caused a more hardy heart than Lionel’s to shrink. How much he owed he could not tell; nothing but debt stared him in the face. He had looked to the autumn rents of Verner’s Pride to extricate him from a portion of his difficulties; and now those rents would be received by John Massingbird. The furniture in the house, the plate, the linen, none of it was his: it had been left by the will with Verner’s Pride. The five hundred pounds, all that he had inherited by that will, had been received at the time—and was gone. One general sinking fund seemed to have swallowed up everything; that, and all else, leaving a string of debts a yard long in its place.
Reproaches now would be useless; whether self-reproach, or reproach to his wife. The latter, Lionel would never have given. And yet, when he looked back, and thought how free from debt he might have been, nothing but reproach, however vaguely directed, reproach of the past generally, seemed to fill his heart. To turn out in the world, a free man, though penniless, would have been widely different from turning out, plunged over head and ears in difficulties.
In what quarter did he not owe money? He could not say. He had not been very provident, and Sibylla had not been provident at all. But this much might be said for Lionel: that he had not wasted money on useless things, or self-indulgence. The improvements he had begun on the estate had been the chief drain, so far as he went; and the money they took had caused him to get backward with the general expenses. He had also been over liberal to his mother. Money was owing on all sides; for large things and for great: how much, Lionel did not yet know. He did not know—he was afraid to guess—what private debts might have been contracted by his wife. There had been times lately, when, in contemplating the embarrassment growing so hopelessly upon him, Lionel had felt inclined to wish that some climax would come and end it; but he had never dreamt of such a climax as this. A hot flush dyed his cheeks as he remembered there was nearly a twelvemonth’s wages owing to most of his servants; and he had not the means now of paying them.
“Stop on a bit if you like,” said John Massingbird, in a hearty tone; “stop a month, if you will. You are welcome. It will be only changing your place from master to guest.”
From master to guest! That same day John Massingbird assumed his own place, unasked, at the head of the dinner-table. Lionel went to the side with a flushed face. John Massingbird had never been remarkable for delicacy, but Lionel could not help thinking that he might have waited until he was gone, before assuming the full mastership. Captain Cannonby made the third at the dinner, and he, by John Massingbird’s request, took the foot of the table. It was not the being put out of his place that hurt Lionel, so much as the feeling of annoyance that John Massingbird could behave so unlike a gentleman. He felt ashamed for him. Dinner over, Lionel went up to his wife, who was keeping her room, partly from temper, partly from illness.
“Sibylla, I’ll not stop here another day,” he said. “I see that John Massingbird wants us gone. Now, what shall I do? Take lodgings?”
Sibylla looked up from the sofa, her eyes red with crying, her cheeks inflamed.
