by Ellen Wood
“What about it?” asked John, speaking with his mouth full of devilled kidneys.
“The place is Lionel Verner’s.”
“How d’ye make out that?” asked John.
“That codicil revoked the will which left the estate to you. It gave it to him.”
“But the codicil vanished,” answered John.
“True. I was present at the consternation it excited. It disappeared in some unaccountably mysterious way; but there’s no doubt that Mr. Verner died, believing the estate would go in its direct line — to Lionel. In fact, I know he did. Therefore you ought to act as though the codicil were in existence, and resign the estate to Lionel Verner.”
The recommendation excessively tickled the fancy of John Massingbird. It set him laughing for five minutes.
“In short, you never ought to have attempted to enter upon it,” continued Dr. West. “Will you resign it to him?”
“Uncle West, you’ll kill me with laughter, if you joke like that,” was the reply.
“I have little doubt that the codicil is still in existence,” urged Dr. West. “I remember my impression at the time was that it was only mislaid, temporarily lost. If that codicil turned up, you would be obliged to quit.”
“So I should,” said John, with equanimity. “Let Lionel Verner produce it, and I’ll vacate the next hour. That will never turn up: don’t you fret yourself, Uncle West.”
“Will you not resign it to him?”
“No, that I won’t. Verner’s Pride is mine by law. I should be a simpleton to give it up.”
“Sibylla’s pining for it,” resumed the doctor, trying what a little pathetic pleading would do. “She will as surely die, unless she can come back to Verner’s Pride, as that you and I are at breakfast here.”
“If you ask my opinion, Uncle West, I should say that she’d die, any way. She looks like it. She’s fading away just as the other two did. But she won’t die a day sooner for being away from Verner’s Pride; and she would not have lived an hour longer had she remained in it. That’s my belief.”
“Verner’s Pride never was intended for you, John,” cried the doctor. “Some freak caused Mr. Verner to will it away from Lionel; but he came to his senses before he died, and repaired the injury.”
“Then I am so much the more obliged to the freak,” was the good-humoured but uncompromising rejoinder of John Massingbird.
And more than that Dr. West could not make of him. John was evidently determined to stand by Verner’s Pride. The doctor then changed his tactics, and tried a little business on his own account — that of borrowing from John Massingbird as much money as that gentleman would lend.
It was not much. John, in his laughing way, protested he was always “cleaned out.” Nobody knew but himself — but he did not mind hinting it to Uncle West — the heaps of money he had been obliged to “shell out” before he could repose in tranquillity at Verner’s Pride. There were back entanglements and present expenses, not to speak of sums spent in benevolence.
“Benevolence?” the doctor exclaimed.
“Yes, benevolence,” John replied with a semi-grave face; he “had had to give away an unlimited number of bank-notes to the neighbourhood, as a recompense for having terrified it into fits.” There were times when he thought he should have to come upon Lionel Verner for the mesne profits, he observed. A procedure which he was unwilling to resort to for two reasons: the reason was that Lionel possessed nothing to pay them with; the other, that he, John, never liked to be hard.
So the doctor had to content himself with a very trifling loan, compared with the sum he had fondly anticipated. He dropped some obscure hints that the evidence he could give, if he chose, with reference to the codicil, or rather what he knew to have been Mr. Verner’s intentions, might go far to deprive his nephew John of the estate. But his nephew only laughed at him, and could not by any manner of means be induced to treat the hints as serious. A will was a will, he said, and Verner’s Pride was indisputably his.
Altogether, taking one thing with another, Dr. West’s visit to Deerham had not been quite so satisfactory as he had anticipated it might be made. After quitting John Massingbird, he went to Deerham Court and remained a few hours with Sibylla. The rest of the day he divided between his daughters in their sitting-room, and Jan in the surgery, taking his departure again from Deerham by the night train.
And Deborah and Amilly, drowned in tears, said his visit could be compared only to the flash of a comet’s tail; no sooner seen than gone again.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
A SIN AND A SHAME.
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 that were singled 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 Austra
lia; 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 have taken him to be a stable helper, rather than 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,” continued Lionel. “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 instant 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 learned 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 to this day. Fred, at the end of a twelvemonth’s time, had got his half-crown still snug in his pocket. Had Fred come into Verner’s Pride, he’d have lived in style on a thousand of his income yearly, and put by the rest.”
He never would, Sibylla being his wife, thought Lionel. But he did not say it to John Massingbird.
“An estate, such as this, brings its duties with it, John,” said he. “Remember those poor people down with sickness.”
“Bother duty,” returned John. “Look here, Lionel; you waste your breath and your words. I have not got the money to spend upon it; how do you know, old fellow, what my private expenses may be? And if I had the money, I should not do it,” he continued. “The present state of the property was deemed good enough by Mr. Verner; it was so deemed (if we may judge by facts) by Mr. Lionel Verner; and it is deemed good enough by John Massingbird. It is not he who’s going to have the cost thrown upon him. So let it drop.”
There was no resource but to let it drop; for that he was in full earnest, Lionel saw. John continued —
“You can save up the alterations for yourself, to be commenced when you come into the property. A nice bonne bouche of outlay for you to contemplate.”
“I don’t look to come into it,” replied Lionel.
“The probabilities are that you will come into it,” returned John Massingbird, more seriously than he often spoke. “Barring getting shot, or run over by a railway train, you’ll make old bones, you will. You have never played with your constitution; I have, in more ways than one: and in bare years I have considerably the advantage of you. Psha! when I am a skeleton in my coffin, you’ll still be a young man. You can make your cherished alterations then.”
“You may well say in more ways than one,” returned Lionel, half joking, half serious. “There’s smoking among the catalogue. How many pipes do you smoke in a day? Fifty?”
“Why didn’t you say day and night? Tynn lives in perpetual torment lest my bed should ignite some night, and burn up him, as well as Verner’s Pride. I go to sleep sometimes with my pipe in my mouth as we do at the diggings. Now and then I feel half inclined to make a rush back there. It suited me better than this.”
Lionel bent over some papers that were before him — a hint that he had business to do. Mr. Massingbird did not take it. He began filling his pipe again, scattering the tobacco on the ground wholesale in the process, and talking at the same time.
“I say, Lionel, why did old Verner leave the place away from you? Have you ever wondered?”
Lionel glanced up at him in surprise.
“Have I ever ceased wondering, you might have said. I don’t know why he did.”
“Did he never give you a reason — or an explanation?”
“Nothing of the sort. Except — yes, except a trifle. Some time after his death, Mrs. Tynn discovered a formidable-looking packet in one of his drawers, sealed and directed to me. She thought it was the missing codicil; so did I, until I opened it. It proved to contain nothing but a glove; one of my old gloves, and a few lines from my uncle. They were to the effect that when I received the glove I should know why he disinherited me.”
“And did you know?” asked John Massingbird, applying a light to his pipe.
“Not in the least. It left the affair more obscure, if possible, than it had been before. I suppose I never shall know now.”
“Never’s a long day,” cried John Massingbird. “But you told me about this glove affair before.”
“Did I? Oh, I remember. When you first returned. That is all the explanation I have ever had.”
“It was not much,” said John. “Dickens take this pipe! It won’t draw. Where’s my knife?”
Not finding his knife about him, he went off to look for it, dragging his slippers along the hall in his usual lazy fashion. Lionel, glad of the respite, applied himself to his work.
CHAPTER LXXX.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A NIGHT GONE BY.
One was dying in Deerham, but not of ague, and that was old Matthew Frost. Matthew was dying of old age, to which we must all succumb, if we live long enough.
April was in, and the fever and ague were getting better. News was brought to Lionel one morning that old Matthew was not expected to last through the day. Jan entered the breakfast-room at Deerham Court and told him so. Lionel had been starting to Verner’s Pride; but he changed his course towards Clay Lane.
“Jan,” said he, as he was turning away, “I wish you’d go up and see Sibylla. I am sure she is very ill.”
“I’ll go if you like,” said Jan. “But there’s no use in it. She won’t listen to a word I say, or attend to a single direction that I give. Hayes told me, when he came over last week, that it was the same with him. She persists to him, as she does to me, that she has no need of medicine or care; that she is quite well.”
“I am aware she persists in it,” replied Lionel, “but I feel sure she is very ill.”
“I know she is,” said Jan, “She’s worse than folks think for. Perhaps you amongst them, Lionel. I’ll go up to her.” He turned back to the house as he spoke, and Lionel went on to Clay Lane.
Old Matthew was lying on his bed, very peaceful — peaceful as to his inward and his outward state. Though exceedingly weak, gradually sinking, he retained both speech and intellect: he was passing away without pain, and with his faculties about him. What a happy death-bed, when all is peace within! His dim eyes lighted up with pleasure when he saw Mr. Verner.
“Have you come to see the last of me, sir?” he asked, as Lionel took his hand.
“Not quite the last yet, I hope, Matthew.”
“Don’t hope it, sir; nor wish it, neither,” returned the old man, lifting his hand with a deprecatory movement. “I’m on the threshold of a better world, sir, and I’d not turn back to this, if God was to give me the choice of it. I’m going to my rest, sir. Like as my bed has waited for me and been welcome to me after a hard day’s toil, so is my rest now at hand after my life’s toil. It is as surely waiting for me as ever was my bed; and I am longing to get to it.”
Lionel looked down at the calm, serene face, fair and smooth yet. The skin was drawn tight over it, especially over the well-formed nose, and the white locks
fell on the pillow behind. It may be wrong to say there was a holy expression pervading the face; but it certainly gave that impression to Lionel Verner.
“I wish all the world — when their time comes — could die as you are dying, Matthew!” he exclaimed, in the impulse of his heart.
“Sir, all might, if they’d only live for it. It’s many a year ago now, Mr. Lionel, that I learned to make a friend of God: He has stood me in good need. And those that do learn to make a friend of Him, sir, don’t fear to go to Him.”
Lionel drew forward a chair and sat down in it. The old man continued —
“Things seemed to have been smoothed for me in a wonderful manner, sir. My great trouble, of late years, has been Robin. I feared how it might be with him when I went away and left him here alone; for you know the queer way he has been in, sir, since that great misfortune; and I have been a bit of a check on him, keeping him, as may be said, within bounds. Well, that trouble is done away for me, sir; Robin he has got his mind at rest, and he won’t break out again. In a short while I am in hopes he’ll be quite what he used to be.”
“Matthew, it was my firm intention to continue your annuity to Robin,” spoke Lionel. “I am sorry the power to do so has been taken from me. You know that it will not rest with me now, but with Mr. Massingbird. I fear he is not likely to continue it.”
“Don’t regret it, sir. Robin, I say, is growing to be an industrious man again, and he can get a living well. If he had stopped a half-dazed-do-nothing, he might have wanted that, or some other help; but it isn’t so. His trouble’s at rest, and his old energies are coming back to him. It seems to have left my mind at leisure, sir; and I can go away, praying for the souls of my poor daughter and of Frederick Massingbird.”
The name — his — aroused the attention of Lionel; more, perhaps, than he would have cared to confess. But his voice and manner retained their quiet calmness.
“What did you say, Matthew?”