ruffled manner spoke he, smiling carelessly. Only for a moment had his self-control been shaken. “Will you take a biscuit, Dr. West?” he asked.
“Lucy, my dear, will you step here to me?”
The request came from the other end of the room, from Lady Verner. Lionel, who was about to place the cake-basket on the table, stopped and held out his arm to Lucy, to conduct her to his mother. They went forward, utterly unconscious that Sibylla was casting angry and jealous glances at them; conscious only that those sacred feelings in either heart, so well hid from the world, had been stirred to their very depths.
The door opened, and one of the servants entered. “Mr. Jan is wanted.”
“Who’s taken ill now, I wonder?” cried Jan, descending from the arm of his mother’s sofa, where he had been perched.
In the ante-room was Master Cheese, looking rueful.
“There’s a message come from Squire Pidcock’s,” cried he, in a most resentful tone. “Somebody’s to attend immediately. Am I to go?”
“I suppose you’d faint at having to go, after being up to Miss Hautley’s,” returned Jan. “You’d never survive the two, should you?”
“Well, you know, Jan, it’s a good mile and a half to Pidcock’s, and I had to go to the other place without my tea,” remonstrated Master Cheese.
“I dare say Miss Deb has given you your tea since you came home.”
“But it’s not like having it at the usual hour. And I couldn’t finish it in comfort, when this message came.”
“Be off back and finish it now, then,” said Jan. And the young gentleman departed with alacrity.
Returning to the drawing-room, Jan told them that he was called out. Lionel had resumed his seat then, by Sibylla and Dr. West. Jan departed, and, later in the evening, as he did not return, Lionel walked home with the doctor.
“What do you think of Sibylla?” was his first question, before they had well quitted the gates.
“My opinion is not a favourable one, so far as I can judge at present,” replied Dr. West. “She must not be crossed, Mr. Verner.”
“Heaven is my witness that she is not crossed by me, Dr. West,” was the reply of Lionel, given more earnestly than the occasion seemed to call for. “From the hour I married her, my whole life has been spent in striving to shield her from crosses, so far as lies in the power of man; to cherish her in all care and tenderness. There are few husbands would bear with her—her peculiarities—as I have borne: as I will still bear. I say this to you, her father; I would say it to no one else. My chief regret, at the wrenching from me of Verner’s Pride, is for Sibylla’s sake.”
“My dear sir, I honestly believe you. I know what Sibylla was at home, fretful, wayward, and restless; and those tendencies are not likely to be lessened, now disease has shown itself. I always feared it was in her constitution; that, in spite of all our care, she would follow her sisters. They fell off and died, you may remember, when they seemed most blooming. People talked freely—as I understood at the time—about my allowing her so suddenly to marry Frederick Massingbird; but my course was dictated by one sole motive—that it would give her the benefit of a sea voyage, which might prove invaluable to her constitution.”
Lionel believed just as much of this as he liked. Dr. West was his wife’s father, and, as such, he deferred to him. He remembered what had been told him by Sibylla; and he remembered the promise he had given her.
“It’s a shocking pity that you are turned from Verner’s Pride!” resumed the doctor.
“It is. But there’s no help for it.”
“Does Sibylla grieve after it very much? Has it any real effect, think you, upon her health?—as she seemed to intimate.”
“She grieves, no doubt. She keeps up the grief, if you can understand it, Dr. West. Not a day passes, but she breaks into lamentations over the loss, complaining loudly and bitterly. Whether her health would not equally have failed at Verner’s Pride, I am unable to say. I think it would.”
“John Massingbird, under the circumstances, ought to give it up to you. It is rightfully yours. Sibylla’s life—and she is his own cousin—may depend upon it: he ought not to keep it. But for the loss of the codicil, he would never have come to it.”
“Of course he could not,” assented Lionel. “It is that loss which has upset everything.”
Dr. West fell into silence, and continued in it until his house was in view. Then he spoke again.
“What will you undertake to give me, Mr. Verner, if I can bring John Massingbird to hear reason, and re-establish you at Verner’s Pride?”
“Not anything,” answered Lionel. “Verner’s Pride is John Massingbird’s according to the law; therefore it cannot be mine. Neither would he resign it.”
“I wonder whether it could be done by stratagem?” mused Dr. West. “Could we persuade him that the codicil has turned up?—or something of that? It would be very desirable for Sibylla.”
“If I go back to Verner’s Pride at all, sir, I go back by right; neither by purchase nor by stratagem,” was the reply of Lionel. “Rely upon it, things set about in an underhand manner never prosper.”
“I might get John Massingbird to give it up to you,” continued the doctor, nodding his head thoughtfully, as if he had some scheme afloat in it. “I might get him to resign it to you, rents, and residence and all, and betake himself off. You would give me a per centage?”
“Were John Massingbird to offer such to me to-morrow, of his own free will, I should decline it,” forcibly returned Lionel. “I have suffered too much from Verner’s Pride ever to take possession of it again, except by indisputable right—a right in which I cannot be disturbed. Twice have I been turned from it, you know, sir. And the turning out has cost me more than the world deemed.”
