UNPREMEDITATED WORDS.
Lucy was in the drawing-room alone when Lionel entered it. "Lady
Verner," she said to him, "has stepped out to speak to Jan."
"Lucy, I find that our coming here has turned you out of your room," he
gravely said. "I should earnestly have protested against it, had I known
what was going to be done."
"Should you?" said she, shaking her head quite saucily. "We should not
have listened to you."
"We! Whom does the 'we' include?"
"Myself and Decima. We planned everything. I like the room I have now,
quite as much as that. It is the room at the end, opposite the one Mrs.
Verner is to have for her sitting-room."
"The sitting-room again! What shall you and Decima do without it?"
exclaimed Lionel, looking as he felt--vexed.
"If we never have anything worse to put up with than the loss of a
sitting-room that was nearly superfluous, we shall not grieve," answered
Lucy, with a smile. "How did we do without it before--when you were
getting better from that long illness? We had to do without it then."
"I think not, Lucy. So far as _my_ memory serves me, you were sitting in
it a great portion of your time--cheering me. I have not forgotten it,
if you have."
Neither had she--by her heightened colour.
"I mean that we had to do without it for our own purposes, our drawings
and our work. It is but a little matter, after all. I wish we could do
more for you and Mrs. Verner. I wish," she added, her voice betraying
her emotion, "that we could have prevented your being turned from
Verner's Pride."
"Ay," he said, speaking with affected carelessness, and turning about an
ornament in his fingers, which he had taken from the mantel-piece, "it
is not an every-day calamity."
"What shall you do?" asked Lucy, going a little nearer to him, and
dropping her voice to a tone of confidence.
"Do? In what way, Lucy?"
"Shall you be content to live on here with Lady Verner? Not seeking to
retrieve your--your position in any way?"
"My living on here, Lucy, will be out of the question. That would never
do, for more reasons than one."
Did Lucy Tempest divine what one of these reasons might be? She did not
intend to look at him, but she caught his eyes in the pier-glass. Lionel
smiled.
"I am thinking what a trouble you must find me--you and Decima."
She did not speak at first. Then she went quite close to him, her
earnest, sympathising eyes cast up to his.
"If you please, you need not pretend to make light of it to me," she
whispered. "I don't like you to think that I do not know all you must
feel, and what a blow it is. I think I feel it quite as much as you can
do--for your sake and for Mrs. Verner's. I lie awake at night, thinking
of it; but I do not say so to Decima and Lady Verner. I make light of it
to them, as you are making light of it to me."
"I know, I know!" he uttered in a tone that would have been a passionate
one, but for its wailing despair. "My whole life, for a long while, has
been one long scene of acting--to you. I dare not make it otherwise.
There's no remedy for it."
She had not anticipated the outburst; she had simply wished to express
her true feeling of sympathy for their great misfortunes, as she might
have expressed it to any other gentleman who had been turned from his
home with his wife. She could not bear for Lionel not to know that he
had her deepest, her kindliest, her truest sympathy, and this had
nothing to do with any secret feeling she might, or might not, entertain
for him. Indeed, but for the unpleasant, latent consciousness of that
very feeling, Lucy would have made her sympathy more demonstrative. The
outbreak seemed to check her; to throw her friendship back upon herself;
and she stood irresolute; but she was too single-minded, too full of
nature's truth, to be angry with what had been a genuine outpouring of
his inmost heart, drawn from him in a moment of irrepressible sorrow.
Lionel let the ornament fall back on the mantel-piece, and turned to
her, his manner changing. He took her hands, clasping them in one of
his; he laid his other hand lightly on her fair young head, reverently
as any old grandfather might have done.
"Lucy!--my dear friend!--you must not mistake me. There are times when
some of the bitterness within me is drawn forth, and I say more than I
ought: what I never should say, in a calmer moment. I wish I _could_
talk to you; I wish I could give you the full confidence of all my
sorrows, as I gave it you on another subject once before. I wish I could
draw you to my side, as though you were my sister, or one of my dearest
friends, and tell you of the great trouble at my heart. But it cannot
be, I thank you, I _thank_ you for your sympathy. I know that you would
give me your friendship in all single-heartedness, as Decima might give
it me; and it would be to me a green spot of brightness in life's arid
desert. But the green spot might for me grow too bright, Lucy; and my
only plan is to be wise in time, and to forego it."
"I did but mean to express my sorrow for you and Mrs. Verner," she
timidly answered; "my sense of the calamity which has fallen upon you."
"Child, I know it; and I dare not say how I feel it; I dare not thank
you as I ought. In truth it is a terrible calamity. All its consequences
I cannot yet anticipate; but they may be worse than anybody suspects, or
than I like to glance at. It is a deep and apparently an irremediable
misfortune. I cannot but feel it keenly; and I feel it for my wife more
than for myself. Now and then, something like a glimpse of consolation
shows itself--that it has not been brought on by any fault of mine; and
that, humanly speaking, I have done nothing to deserve it."
"Mr. Cust used to tell us that however dark a misfortune might be,
however hopeless even, there was sure to be a way of looking at it, by
which we might see that it might have been darker," observed Lucy.
"_This_ would have been darker for you, had it proved to be Frederick
Massingbird, instead of John; very sadly darker for Mrs. Verner."
"Ay; so far I cannot be too thankful," replied Lionel. The remembrance
flashed over him of his wife's words that day--in her temper--she wished
it had been Frederick. It appeared to be a wish that she had already
thrown out frequently; not so much that she did wish it, as to annoy
him.
"Mr. Cust used to tell us another thing," resumed Lucy, breaking the
silence: "that these apparently hopeless misfortunes sometimes turn out
to be great benefits in the end. Who knows but in a short time, through
some magic or other, you and Mrs. Verner may be back at Verner's Pride?
Would not that be happiness?"
"I don't know about happiness, Lucy; sometimes I feel tired of
everything," he wearily answered. "As if I should like to run away for
ever, and be at rest. My life at Verner's Pride was not a bed of
rose-leaves."
He heard his mother's voice in the ante-room, and went forward to open
the door for her. Lady Verner came in, followed by Jan. Jan was going to
dine there; and Jan was actually in orthodox dinner costume. Decima had
invited him, and Decima had told him to be sure to dress himself; that
she wanted to make a little festival of the evening to welcome Lionel
and his wife. So Jan remembered, and appeared in black. But the gloss of
the whole was taken off by Jan having his shirt fastened down the front
with pins, where the buttons ought to be. Brassy-looking, ugly, bent
pins, as big as skewers, stuck in horizontally.
"Is that a new fashion coming in, Jan?" asked Lady Verner, pointing with
some asperity to the pins.
"It's to be hoped not," replied Jan. "It took me five minutes to stick
them in, and there's one of the pins running into my wrist now. It's a
new shirt of mine come home, and they have forgotten the buttons. Miss
Deb caught sight of it, when I went in to tell her I was coming here,
and ran after me to the gate with a needle and thread, wanting to sew
them on."
"Could you not have fastened it better than that, Jan?" asked Decima,
smiling as she looked at the shirt.
"I don't see how," replied Jan. "Pins were the readiest to hand."
Sibylla had been keeping them waiting dinner. She came in now, radiant
in smiles and in her gold combs. None, to look at her, would suppose she
had that day lost a home. A servant appeared and announced dinner.
Lionel went up to Lady Verner. Whenever he dined there, unless there
were other guests besides himself, he had been in the habit of taking
her in to dinner. Lady Verner drew back.
"No, Lionel. I consider that you and I are both at home now. Take Miss
Tempest."
He could only obey. He held out his arm to Lucy, and they went forward.
"Am I to take anybody?" inquired Jan.
That was just like Jan! Lady Verner pointed to Sibylla, and Jan marched
off with her. Lady Verner and Decima followed.
"Not there, not there, Lucy," said Lady Verner, for Lucy was taking the
place she was accustomed to, by Lady Verner. "Lionel, you will take the
foot of the table now, and Lucy will sit by you."
Lady Verner was rather a stickler for etiquette, and at last they fell
into their appointed places. Herself and Lionel opposite each other,
Lucy and Decima on one side the table, Jan and Sibylla on the other.
"If I am to have you under my wing as a rule, Miss Lucy, take care that
you behave yourself," nodded Lionel.
Lucy laughed, and the dinner proceeded. But there was very probably an
undercurrent of consciousness in the heart of both--at any rate, there
was in his--that it might have been more expedient, all things
considered, that Lucy Tempest's place at dinner had not been fixed by
the side of Lionel Verner.
Dinner was half over when Sibylla suddenly laid down her knife and fork,
and burst into tears. They looked at her in consternation. Lionel rose.
"That horrid John Massingbird!" escaped her lips. "I always disliked
him."
"Goodness!" uttered Jan, "I thought you were taken ill, Sibylla. What's
the good of thinking about it?"
"According to you, there's no good in thinking of anything," tartly
responded Sibylla. "You told me yesterday not to think about Fred, when
I said I wished he had come back instead of John--if one must have come
back."
"At any rate, don't think about unpleasant things now," was Jan's
answer. "Eat your dinner."