AN APPEAL TO JOHN MASSINGBIRD.
Lionel Verner walked home with Dr. West, later in the evening. "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 the
endeavour 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," decisively 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, as you know. And the turning out has cost me
more than the world deemed."
"But surely you would go back to it if you could, for Sibylla's sake?"
"Were I a rich man, able to rent Verner's Pride from John Massingbird, I
might ask him to let it me, if it would gratify Sibylla. But, to return
there as its master, on sufferance, liable to be expelled again at any
moment--never! John Massingbird holds the right to Verner's Pride, and
he will exercise it, for me."
"Then you will not accept my offer--to try and get you back again; and
to make me a substantial honorarium if I do it?"
"I do not understand you, Dr. West. The question cannot arise."
"If I make it arise; and carry it out?"
"I beg your pardon--No."
It was an emphatic denial, and Dr. West may have felt himself foiled; as
he had been foiled by Jan's confession of empty pockets, earlier in the
evening.
"Nevertheless," observed he equably, as he shook hands with Lionel,
before entering his own house, "I shall see John Massingbird to-morrow,
and urge the hardship of the case upon him."
It was probably with that view that Dr. West proceeded early on the
following morning to Verner's Pride, after his night of search, instead
of sleep, astonishing John Massingbird not a little. That gentleman was
enjoying himself in a comfortable sort of way in his bedroom. A
substantial breakfast was laid out on a table by the bedside, while he,
not risen, smoked a pipe as he lay, by way of whetting his appetite. Dr.
West entered without ceremony.
"My stars!" uttered John, when he could believe his eyes. "It's never
you, Uncle West! Did you drop from a balloon?"
Dr. West explained. That he had come over for a few hours' sojourn. The
state of his dear daughter Sibylla was giving him considerable
uneasiness, and he had put himself to the expense and inconvenience of a
journey to see her, and judge of her state himself.
That there were a few trifling inaccuracies in this statement, inasmuch
as that his daughter's state had had nothing to do with the doctor's
journey, was of little consequence. It was all one to John Massingbird.
He made a hasty toilette, and invited the doctor to take some breakfast.
Dr. West was nothing loth. He had breakfasted at home; but a breakfast
more or less was nothing to Dr. West. He sat down to the table, and took
a choice morsel of boned chicken on his plate.
"John, I have come up to talk to you about Verner's Pride."
"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.