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 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 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.