VERNER’S PRIDE.
BY THE AUTHORESS OF “EAST LYNNE.”
CHAPTER LV. RECOLLECTIONS OF A NIGHT GONE BY.
As the spring advanced, sickness began to prevail in Deerham. The previous autumn, the season when the enemy chiefly loved to show itself, had been comparatively free, but he appeared to be about taking his revenge now. In every third house people were down with ague and fever. Men who ought to be strong for their daily toil, women whose services were wanted for their households and their families, children whose young frames were unfitted to battle with it, were indiscriminately attacked. It was capricious as a summer’s wind. In some dwellings it would be the strongest and bravest signalled out; in some the weakest and most delicate. Jan was worked off his legs. Those necessary appendages to active Jan generally were exercised pretty well; but Jan could not remember the time when they had been worked as they were now. Jan grew cross. Not at the amount of work: it may be questioned whether Jan did not rather prefer that, than the contrary; but at the prevailing state of things. “It’s a sin and a shame that precautions are not taken against this periodical sickness,” said Jan, speaking out more forcibly than was his wont. “If the place were drained and the dwellings improved, the ague would run away to more congenial quarters. I’d not own Verner’s Pride, unless I could show myself fit to be its owner.”
The shaft may have been levelled at John Massingbird, but Lionel Verner took it to himself. How full of self-reproach he was, he alone knew. He had had the power in his own hands to make these improvements, and in some manner or other he had let the time slip by: now, the power was wrested from him. It is ever so. Golden opportunities come into our hands, and we look at them complacently, and—do not use them. Bitter regrets, sometimes remorse, take their places when they have flitted away for ever; but neither the regret nor the remorse can recall the opportunity lost.
Lionel pressed the necessity upon John Massingbird. It was all he could do now. John received it with complacent good-humour, and laughed at Lionel for making the request. But that was all.
“Set about draining Clay Lane, and build up new tenements in place of the old?” cried he. “What next, Lionel?”
“Look at the sickness the present state of things brings,” returned Lionel. “It is what ought to have been altered years ago.”
“Ah!” said John. “Why didn’t you alter it, then, when you had Verner’s Pride?”
“You may well ask! It was my first thought when I came into the estate. I would set about that; I would set about other improvements. Some I did carry out, as you know; but these, the most needful, I left in abeyance. It lies on my conscience now.”
They were in the study. Lionel was at the desk, some papers before him; John Massingbird had lounged in for a chat—as he was fond of doing, to the interruption of Lionel. He was leaning against the door-post; his attire not precisely such that a gentleman might choose who wished to send his photograph to make a morning call. His pantaloons were hitched up by a belt—braces, John said, were not fashionable at the Diggings, and he had learned the comfort of doing without them; a loose sort of round drab coat without tails; no waistcoat; a round brown hat, much bent, and a pair of slippers. Such was John Massingbird’s favourite costume, and he might be seen in it at all hours of the day. When he wanted to go abroad, his toilette was made, as the French say, by the exchanging of the slippers for boots, and the taking in his hand a club stick. John’s whiskers were growing again, and promised to be as fine a pair as he had worn before going out to Australia: and now he was letting his beard grow, but it looked very grim and stubbly. Truth to say, a stranger passing through the village and casting his eyes on Mr. John Massingbird, would not have taken him to be the master of that fine place, Verner’s Pride. Just now he had a clay pipe in his mouth, its stem little more than an inch long.
“Do you mean to assert that you’d set about these improvements, as you call them, were you to come again into Verner’s Pride?” asked he of Lionel.
“I believe I should. I would say unhesitatingly that I should, save for past experience. Before my uncle died, I knew how necessary it was that they should be made, and I as much believed that I should set about them the first thing when I came into the estate, as that I believe I am now talking to you. But you see I did not begin them. It has taught me to be chary of making assertions beforehand.”
“I suppose you think you’d do it.”
“If I know anything of my own resolution I should do it. Were Verner’s Pride to lapse to me to-morrow, I believe I should set about it the next day. But,” Lionel added, after a short pause, “there’s no probability of its lapsing to me. Therefore I want you to set about it in my place.”
“I can’t afford it,” replied John Massingbird.
“Nonsense! I wish I could afford things a quarter as well as you.”
“I tell you I can’t,” reiterated John, taking his pipe from his mouth to make a spittoon of the carpet, another convenience he had learnt at the Diggings. “I’m sure I don’t know how on earth my money goes; I never did know all my life how money went: but, go it does. When Fred and I were little chaps, some benevolent old soul tipped us half-a-crown apiece. Mine was gone by middle-day, and I could not account for more than ninepence of it: never could till this day. Fred at the end of a twelvemonth’s time had got his half-crown still snug in his pocket. Had Fred