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.