Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/109

19, 1862.] to the right, and entered the great iron gates which enclosed the court-yard of Deerham Court. A very unpretending entrance admitted him into a spacious hall, the hall being the largest and best part of the house. Those great iron gates and the hall would have done honour to a large mansion; and they gave an appearance of pretension to Deerham Court which it did not deserve.

Lionel opened a door on the left and entered a small ante-room. This led him into the only really good room the house contained. It was elegantly furnished and fitted up, and its two large windows looked towards the open country, and to Deerham Hall. Seated by the fire, in a rich violet dress, a costly white lace cap shading her delicate face, that must once have been so beautiful—indeed, that was beautiful still—was a lady of middle age. Her seat was low: one of those chairs that we are pleased to call, commonly and irreverently, a prie-dieu. Its back was carved in arabesque foliage, and its stuffing was of rich violet velvet. On a small, inlaid table, whose carvings were as beautiful, and its top inlaid with mosiacmosaic [sic]-work, lay a dainty handkerchief of lace, a bottle of smelling-salts, and a book turned with its face downwards, all close at the lady’s elbow. She was sitting in idleness just then: she always did sit in idleness: her face bent on the fire, her small hands, cased in white gloves, lying motionless on her lap—ay, a beautiful face once, though it had grown habitually peevish and discontented now. She turned her head when the door opened, and a flush of bloom rose to her cheeks when she saw Lionel.

He went up and kissed her. He loved her much. She loved him, too, better than she loved anything in life; and she drew a chair close to her, and he sat down, bending towards her. There was not much likeness between them, the mother and the son: both were very good-looking, but not alike.

“You see, mother mine, I am not late, as you prophesied I should be,” said he, with one of his sweetest smiles.

“You would have been, Lionel, but for my reminding you not. I’m sure I wish—I wish she was not coming! She must remember the old days in India, and will contrast the difference.”

“She will scarcely remember India, when you were there. She is only a child yet, is she?”

“You know nothing about it, Lionel,” was the querulous answer. “Whether she remembers or not, will she expect to see me in such a house, such a position as this. It is at these seasons, when people are coming here, who know what I have been and ought to be, that I feel all the humiliation of my poverty. Lucy Tempest is nineteen.”

Lionel Verner knew that it was of no use to argue with his mother, when she began upon that most unsatisfactory topic, her position; which included what she called her “poverty” and her “wrongs.” Though, in truth, not a day passed but she broke out upon it.

“Lionel,” she suddenly said.

He had been glancing over the pages of the book—a new work on India. He laid it down as he had found it, and turned to her.

“What shall you allow me, when you come into Verner’s Pride?”

“Whatever you shall wish, mother. You shall name the sum, not I. And if you name too modest a one,” he added laughing, “I shall double it. But Verner’s Pride must be your home then, as well as mine.”

“Never!” was the emphatic answer. “What! to be turned out of it again by the advent of a young wife? No, never, Lionel.”

Lionel laughed: constrainedly this time.

“I may not be bringing home a young wife for this many and many a year to come.”

“If you never brought one, I would not make my home at Verner’s Pride,” she resumed, in the same impulsive voice. “Live in the house by favour, that ought to have been mine by right? You would not be my true son, to ask me, Lionel. Catherine, is that you?” she called out, as the movements of some one were heard in the anteroom.

A woman-servant put in her head.

“My lady?”

“Tell Miss Verner that Mr. Lionel is here.”

“Miss Verner knows it, my lady,” was the woman’s reply. “She bade me ask you, sir,” addressing Lionel, “if you’d please to step out to her.”

“Is she getting ready, Catherine?” asked Lady Verner.

“I think not, my lady.”

“Go to her, Lionel, and ask her if she knows the time. A pretty thing if you arrive at the station after the train is in!”

Lionel quitted the room. Outside in the hall stood Catherine, waiting for him.

“Miss Verner has met with a little accident and hurt her foot, sir,” she whispered. “She can’t walk.”

“Not walk!” exclaimed Lionel. “Where is she?”

“She is in the store-room, sir; where it happened.”

Lionel went to the store-room, a small boarded room at the back of the hall. A young lady sat there; a very pretty white foot in a wash-hand basin of warm water, and a shoe and stocking lying near, as if hastily thrown off.

“Why, Decima! what is this?”

She lifted her face. A face whose features were of the highest order of beauty, regular as if chiselled from marble, and little less colourless. But for the large, earnest, dark-blue eyes, so full of expression, it might have been accused of coldness. In sleep, or in perfect repose, when the eyelids were bent, it looked strangely cold and pure. Her dark hair was braided; and she wore a dress something the same in colour as Lady Verner’s.

“Lionel, what shall I do? And to-day of all days! I shall be obliged to tell mamma: I cannot walk a step.”

“What is the injury? How did you do it?”

“I got on a chair. I was looking for some old Indian ornaments that I know are in that high cupboard, wishing to put them in Miss Tempest’s room, and somehow the chair tilted with me, and