Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/142

 134 rank, and station to herself. Altogether, the moment brought to her a great amount of shame and confusion.

“Answer me one question: I demand it of you,” reiterated Lionel. “Have you ever mistaken my sentiments towards you in the least degree?”

“How—I—I don’t know,” she faltered.

“No equivocation,” burst forth Lionel. “Have you not known that I loved you? That I was only waiting my uncle’s death to make you my wife?—Heaven forgive me that I should thus speak as though I had built upon it!”

Sibylla let fall some tears.

“Which have you loved?—all this while! Me?—or him?”

“Oh! don’t speak to me like that,” sobbed Sibylla. “He asked me to marry him, and—and—papa said yes.”

“I ask you,” said Lionel in a low voice, “which is it that you love?”

She did not answer. She stood before him the prettiest picture of distress imaginable: her hands clasped, her large blue eyes filled with tears, her shower of golden hair shading her burning cheeks.

“If you have been surprised or terrified into this engagement, loving him not, will you give him up for me?” tenderly whispered Lionel. “Not—you understand—if your love be his. In that case, I would not ask it. But, without reference to myself at all, I doubt—and I have my reasons for it—if Frederick Massingbird be worthy of you.”

Was she wavering in her own mind? She stole a glance upward—at his tall fine form, his attractive face, its lineaments showing out, in that moment, all the pride of the Verners. A pride that mingled with love.

Lionel bent to her:

“Sibylla, if you love him I have no more to say; if you love me, avow it, as I will then avow my love, my intentions, in the face of day. Reflect before you speak. It is a solemn moment,—a moment which holds alike my destiny and yours in its hands.”

A rush of blood to her heart; a rush of moisture to her forehead, for Sibylla West was not wholly without feeling, and she knew, as Lionel said, that it was a decision fraught with grave destiny. But Frederick Massingbird was more to her than he was.

“I have given my promise. I cannot go from it,” was her scarcely breathed answer.

“May your falsity never come home to you!” broke from Lionel, in the bitterness of his anguish. And he strode from the room without another word or look, and quitted the house.

Deerham could not believe the news. Verner’s Pride could not believe it. Nobody believed it, save Lady Verner, and she was only too thankful to believe it and hug it. There was nothing surprising in Sibylla’s marrying her Cousin Fred, for many had shrewdly suspected that the favour between them was not altogether cousinly favour; but the surprise was given to the hasty marriage. Dr. West vouchsafed an explanation. Two of his daughters, aged respectively one year and two years younger than Amilly, had each died of consumption, as all Deerham knew. On attaining her twenty-fifth year, each one had shown rapid symptoms of the disease, and had lingered but a few weeks. Sibylla was only one-and-twenty yet; but Dr. West fancied he saw, or said he saw, grounds for fear. It was known of what value a sea-voyage was in these constitutions; hence his consent to the departure of Sibylla. Such was the explanation of Dr. West.

“I wonder whether the stated ‘fear of consumption’ has been called up by himself for the occasion?” was the thought that crossed the mind of Decima Verner. Decima did not believe in Dr. West.

Verner’s Pride, like the rest, had been taken by surprise. Mrs. Verner received the news with equanimity. She had never given Fred a tithe of the love that John had had, and she did not seem much to care whether he married Sibylla, or whether he did not,—whether he went out to Australia or whether he staid at home. Frederick told her of it in a very off-hand manner: but he took pains to bespeak the approbation of Mr. Verner.

“I hope my choice is pleasant to you, sir? That you will cordially sanction it.”

“Whether it is pleasant to me or not, I have no right to say it shall not be,” was the reply of Mr. Verner. “I have never interfered with you, or with your brother, since you became inmates of my house.”

“Do you not like Sibylla, sir?”

“She is a pretty girl. I know nothing against her. I think you might have chosen worse.”

Coldly, very coldly, were the words delivered; and there was a strangely keen expression of anguish on Mr. Verner’s face: but that was nothing unusual now. Frederick Massingbird was content to accept the words as a sanction of approval.

A few words—I don’t mean angry ones—passed between him and Lionel on the night before the wedding. Lionel had not condescended to speak to Frederick Massingbird upon the subject at all: Sibylla had refused him, for the other, of her own free will; and there he let it rest. But the evening previous to the marriage-day, Lionel appeared strangely troubled; indecisive, anxious, as if he were debating some question with himself. Suddenly he went straight up to Frederick Massingbird’s chamber, who was deep in the business of packing, like his unfortunate brother John had been, not two short years before.

“I want to speak to you,” he began. “I have thought of it these several days past, but I was unwilling to do so, for you may deem that it is no business of mine. However, I cannot get it off my mind, that it may be my duty; and I have come to do it.”

Frederick Massingbird was half buried amid piles of things, but he turned round at this strange address and looked at Lionel.

“Is there nothing on your conscience that should prevent your marrying that girl?”