by Ellen Wood
“It is not about pains or physic,” she answered, drawing nearer to the counter. “Mr. Jan” — dropping her voice to a confidential whisper— “would you be so good as to tell me the truth of this story that is going about?”
Jan paused. “What story?” he rejoined.
“This ghost story. They are saying, I understand, that — that — they are saying something about Frederick Massingbird.”
“Did Cheese supply you with the information?” cried Jan, imperturbable as ever.
“He did. But I must beg you not to scold him for it — as he thought you might do. It was I who drew the story from him. He said you cautioned him not to speak of it to me or Amilly. I quite appreciate your motives, Mr. Jan, and feel that it was very considerate of you. But now that I have heard it, I want to know particulars from somebody more reliable than Master Cheese.”
“I told Lionel I’d say nothing to any soul in the parish,” said Jan, open and single-minded as though he had been made of glass. “But he’d not mind my making you an exception — as you have heard it. You are Sibylla’s sister.”
“You don’t believe in its being a ghost?”
Jan grinned. “I!” cried he. “No, I don’t.”
“Then what do you suppose it is that’s frightening people? And why should they be frightened?”
Jan sat himself down on the counter, and whirled his legs over to the other side, clearing the gallipots; so that he faced Miss Deborah. Not to waste time, he took the mortar before him. And there he was at his ease; his legs hanging, and his hands pounding.
“What should you think it is?” inquired he.
“How can I think, Mr. Jan? Until an hour or two ago, I had not heard of the rumour. I suppose it is somebody who walks about at night to frighten people. But it is curious that he should look like Frederick Massingbird. Can you understand it?”
“I am afraid I can,” replied Jan, pounding away.
“Will you tell me, please, what you think.”
“Can’t you guess at it, Miss Deb?”
Miss Deb looked at him, beginning to think his manner as mysterious as Master Cheese’s had been.
“I can’t guess at it at all,” she presently said. “Please to tell me.”
“Then don’t you go and drop down in a fit when you hear it,” was the rejoinder of Jan. “I suppose it is Fred himself.”
The words took her utterly by surprise. Not at first did she understand their meaning. She stared at Jan, her eyes and her mouth gradually opening.
“Fred himself?” she mechanically uttered.
“I suppose so. Fred himself. Not his ghost.”
“Do you mean that he has come to life again?” she rapidly rejoined.
“Well, you can call it so if you like,” said Jan. “I expect that, in point of fact, he has never been dead. The report of his death must have been erroneous; one of those unaccountable mistakes that do sometimes happen to astonish the world.”
Deborah West took in the full sense of the words, and sunk down on the big stone jar. She turned all over of a burning heat; she felt her hands beginning to twitch with emotion.
“You mean that he is alive? — that he has never been dead?” she gasped.
Jan nodded.
“Oh, Mr. Jan! Then, what is — what is Sibylla?”
“Ah,” said Jan, “that’s just it. She’s the wife of both of ’em — as you may say.”
For any petty surprise or evil, Miss Deborah would have gone off in a succession of screams, of pseudo-faints. This evil was all too real, too terrible. She sat with her trembling hands clasped to pain, looking hopelessly at Jan.
He told her all he knew; all that was said by others.
“Dan Duff’s nothing,” remarked he; “and Cheese is nothing; and others, who confess to have seen it, are nothing: and old Frost’s not much. But I’d back Bourne’s calmness and sound sense against the world, and I’d back Broom’s.”
“And they have both seen it?”
“Both,” replied Jan. “Both are sure that it is Frederick Massingbird.”
“What will Mr. Verner do?” she asked, looking round with a shudder, and not speaking above her breath.
“Oh, that’s his affair,” said Jan. “It’s hard to guess what he may do; he is one that won’t be dictated to. If it were some people’s case, they’d say to Sibylla, ‘Now you have got two husbands, choose which you’ll have, and keep to him.’”
“Good heavens, Mr. Jan!” exclaimed Miss Deb, shocked at the loose sentiments the words appeared to indicate. “And suppose she should choose the second? Have you thought of the sin? The second can’t be her husband; it would be as bad as those Mormons.”
“Looking at it in a practical point of view, I can’t see much difference, which of the two she chooses,” returned Jan. “If Fred was her husband once, Lionel’s her husband now; practically I say you know, Miss Deb.”
Miss Deb thought the question was going rather into metaphysics, a branch of science which she did not understand, and so was content to leave the controversy.
“Any way, it is dreadful for her,” she said, with another shiver. “Oh, Mr. Jan, do you think it can really be true?”
“I think that there’s not a doubt of it,” he answered, stopping in his pounding. “But you need not think so, Miss Deb.”
“How am I to help thinking so?” she simply asked.
“You needn’t think either way until it is proved. As I suppose it must be, shortly. Let it rest till then.”
“No, Mr. Jan, I differ from you. It is a question that ought to be sought out and probed; not left to rest. Does Sibylla know it?”
“Not she. Who’d tell her? Lionel won’t, I know. It was for her sake that he bound me to silence.”
“She ought to be told, Mr. Jan. She ought to leave her husband — I mean, Mr. Lionel — this very hour, and shut herself up until the doubt is settled.”
“Where should she shut herself?” inquired Jan, opening his eyes. “In a convent? Law, Miss Deb! If somebody came and told me I had got two wives, should you say I ought to make a start for the nearest monastery? How would my patients get on?”
Rather metaphysical again. Miss Deb drew Jan back to plain details — to the histories of the various ghostly encounters. Jan talked and pounded; she sat on her hard seat and listened, her brain more perplexed than it could have been with any metaphysics known to science. Eleven o’clock disturbed them, and Miss Deborah started as if she had been shot.
“How could I keep you until this time!” she exclaimed. “And you scarcely in bed for some nights!”
“Never mind, Miss Deb,” answered good-natured Jan. “It’s all in the day’s work.”
He opened the door for her, and then bolted himself in for the night. For the night, that is, if Deerham would allow it to him. Hook’s daughter was slowly progressing towards recovery, and Jan would not need to go to her.
Amilly was nodding over the fire, or, rather, where the fire had been, for it had gone out. She inquired with wonder what her sister had been doing, and where she had been. Deborah replied that she had been busy; and they went upstairs to bed.
But not to sleep — for one of them. Deborah West lay awake through the live-long night, tossing from side to side in her perplexity and thought. Somewhat strict in her notions, she deemed it a matter of stern necessity, of positive duty, that Sibylla should retire, at any rate for a time, from the scenes of busy life. To enable her to do this, the news must be broken to her. But how?
Ay, how? Deborah West rose in the morning with the difficulty unsolved. She supposed she must do it herself. She believed it was as much a duty laid upon her, the imparting these tidings to Sibylla, as the separating herself from all social ties, the instant it was so imparted, would be the duty of Sibylla herself. Deborah West went about her occupations that morning, one imperative sentence ever in her thoughts: “It must be done! it must be done!”
She carried it about with her, ever saying it, through th
e whole day. She shrank, both for Sibylla’s sake and her own, from the task she was imposing upon herself; and, as we all do when we have an unpleasant office to perform, she put it off to the last. Early in the morning she had said, I will go to Verner’s Pride after breakfast and tell her; breakfast over, she said, I will have my dinner first and go then.
But the afternoon passed on, and she did not go. Every little trivial domestic duty was made an excuse for delaying it. Miss Amilly, finding her sister unusually bad company, went out to drink tea with some friends. The time came for ordering in tea at home, and still Deborah had not gone.
She made the tea and presided at the table. But she could eat nothing — to the inward gratification of Master Cheese. There happened to be shrimps — a dish which that gentleman preferred, if anything, to pickled herrings; and by Miss Deborah’s want of appetite he was able to secure her share and his own, including the heads and tails. He would uncommonly have liked to secure Jan’s share also; but Miss Deborah filled a plate and put them aside, against Jan came in. Jan’s pressure of work caused him of late to be irregular at his meals.
Scarcely was the tea over, and Master Cheese gone, when Mr. Bourne called. Deborah, the one thought uppermost in her mind, closed the door, and spoke out what she had heard. The terrible fear, her own distress, Jan’s belief that it was Fred himself, Jan’s representation that Mr. Bourne also believed it. Mr. Bourne, leaning forward until his pale face and his iron-gray hair nearly touched hers, whispered in answer that he did not think there was a doubt of it.
Then Deborah did nerve herself to the task. On the departure of the vicar, she started for Verner’s Pride and asked to see Sibylla. The servants would have shown her to the drawing-room, but she preferred to go up to Sibylla’s chamber. The company were yet in the dining-room.
How long Sibylla kept her waiting there, she scarcely knew. Sibylla was not in the habit of putting herself to inconvenience for her sisters. The message was taken to her — that Miss West waited in her chamber — as she entered the drawing-room. And there Sibylla let her wait. One or two more messages to the same effect were subsequently delivered. They produced no impression, and Deborah began to think she should not get to see her that night.
But Sibylla came up at length, and Deborah entered upon her task. Whether she accomplished it clumsily, or whether Sibylla’s ill-disciplined mind was wholly in fault, certain it is that there ensued a loud and unpleasant scene. The scene to which you were a witness. Scarcely giving herself time to take in more than the bare fact hinted at by Deborah — that her first husband was believed to be alive — not waiting to inquire a single particular, she burst out of the room and went shrieking down the stairs, flying into the arms of Lionel, who at that moment had entered.
CHAPTER LXI.
MEETING THE NEWS.
Lionel Verner could not speak comfort to his wife; or, at the best, comfort of a most negative nature. He held her to him in the study, the door locked against intruders. They were somewhat at cross-purposes. Lionel supposed that the information had been imparted to her by Captain Cannonby; he never doubted but that she had been told Frederick Massingbird had returned and was on the scene; that he might come in any moment — even that very present one as they spoke — to put in his claim to her. Sibylla, on the contrary, did not think (what little she was capable of thinking) that Lionel had had previous information of the matter.
“What am I to do?” she cried, her emotion becoming hysterical. “Oh, Lionel! don’t you give me up!”
“I would have got here earlier had there been means,” he soothingly said, wisely evading all answer to the last suggestion. “I feared he would be telling you in my I absence; better that you should have heard of it from me.”
She lifted her face to look at him. “Then you know it!”
“I have known it this clay or two. My journey to-day—”
She broke out into a most violent fit of emotion, shrieking, trembling, clinging to Lionel, calling out at the top of her voice that she would not leave him. All his efforts were directed to stilling the noise. He implored her to be tranquil, to remember there were listeners around; he pointed out that, until the blow actually fell, there was no necessity for those listeners to be made cognisant of it. All that he could do for her protection and comfort, he would do, he earnestly said. And Sibylla subsided into a softer mood, and cried quietly.
“I’d rather die,” she sobbed, “than have this disgrace brought upon me.”
Lionel put her into the large arm-chair, which remained in the study still, the old arm-chair of Mr. Verner. He stood by her and held her hands, his pale face grave, sad, loving, bent towards her with the most earnest sympathy. She lifted her eyes to it, whispering —
“Will they say you are not my husband?”
“Hush, Sibylla! There are moments, even yet, when I deceive myself into a fancy that it may be somewhat averted. I cannot understand how he can be alive. Has Cannonby told you whence the error arose?”
She did not answer. She began to shake again; she tossed back her golden hair. Some blue ribbons had been wreathed in it for dinner; she pulled them out and threw them on the ground, her hair partially falling with their departure.
“I wish I could have some wine?”
He moved to the door to get it for her. “Don’t you let her in, Lionel,” she called out as he unlocked it.
“Who?”
“That Deborah. I hate her now,” was the ungenerous remark.
Lionel opened the door, called to Tynn, and desired him to bring wine. “What time did Captain Cannonby get here?” he whispered, as he took it from the butler.
“Who, sir?” asked Tynn.
“Captain Cannonby.”
Tynn paused, like one who does not understand. “There’s no gentleman here of that name, sir. A Mr. Rushworth called to-day, and my mistress asked him to stay dinner. He is in the drawing-room now. There is no other stranger.”
“Has Captain Cannonby not been here at all?” reiterated Lionel. “He left London this morning to come.”
Tynn shook his head to express a negative. “He has not arrived, sir.”
Lionel went in again, his feelings undergoing a sort of revulsion, for there now peeped out a glimmer of hope. So long as the nearly certain conviction on Lionel’s mind was not confirmed by positive testimony — as he expected Captain Cannonby’s would be — he could not entirely lose sight of all hope. That he most fervently prayed the blow might not fall, might even now be averted, you will readily believe. Sibylla had not been to him the wife he had fondly hoped for; she provoked him every hour in the day; she appeared to do what she could, wilfully to estrange his affection. He was conscious of all this; he was all too conscious that his inmost love was another’s, not hers. But he lost sight of himself in anxiety for her; it was for her sake he prayed and hoped. Whether she was his wife by law or not; whether she was loved or hated, Lionel’s course of duty lay plain before him now — to shield her, so far as he might be allowed, in all care and tenderness. He would have shed his last drop of blood to promote her comfort; he would have sacrificed every feeling of his heart for her sake.
The wine in his hand, he turned into the room again. A change had taken place in her aspect. She had left the chair, and was standing against the wall opposite the door, her tears dried, her eyes unnaturally bright, her cheeks burning.
“Lionel,” she uttered, a catching of the breath betraying her emotion, “if he is alive, whose is Verner’s Pride?”
“His,” replied Lionel, in a low tone.
She shrieked out, very much after the manner of a petulant child. “I won’t leave it! — I won’t leave Verner’s Pride! You could not be so cruel as to wish me. Who says he is alive? Lionel, I ask you who it is that says he is alive?”
“Hush, my dear! This excitement will do you a world of harm, and it cannot mend the matter, however it may be. I want to know who told you of this, Sibylla. I supposed it to be Cannonby; but Tynn says Cannonby
has not been here.”
The question appeared to divert her thoughts into another channel. “Cannonby! What should bring him here? Did you expect him to come?”
“Drink your wine, and then I will tell you,” he said, holding the glass towards her.
She pushed the wine from her capriciously. “I don’t want wine now. I am hot. I should like some water.”
“I will get it for you directly. Tell me, first of all, how you came to know of this?”
“Deborah told me. She sent for me out of the drawing-room where I was so happy, to tell me this horrid tale. Lionel” — sinking her voice again to a whisper— “is — he — here?”
“I cannot tell you—”
“But you must tell me,” she passionately interrupted. “I will know. I have a right to know it, Lionel.”
“When I say I cannot tell you, Sibylla, I mean that I cannot tell you with any certainty. I will tell you all I do know. Some one is in the neighbourhood who bears a great resemblance to him. He is seen sometimes at night; and — and — I have other testimony that he has returned from Australia.”
“What will be done if he comes here?”
Lionel was silent.
“Shall you fight him?”
“Fight him!” echoed Lionel. “No.”
“You will give up Verner’s Pride without a struggle! You will give up me! Then, are you a coward, Lionel Verner?”
“You know that I would give up neither willingly, Sibylla.”
Grievously pained was his tone as he replied to her. She was meeting this as she did most other things — without sense or reason; not as a thinking, rational being. Her manner was loud, her emotion violent; but deep and true her grief was not. Depth of feeling, truth of nature, were qualities that never yet had place in Sibylla Verner. Not once, throughout all their married life, had Lionel been so painfully impressed with the fact as he was now.
“Am I to die for the want of that water?” she resumed. “If you don’t get it for me I shall ring for the servants to bring it.”