Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/196

188 trades failed. There were the three professions: but they were not available. Lionel felt no inclination to become a working drudge like poor Jan; and the Church, for which he had not any liking, he was by far too conscientious to embrace only as a means of living. There remained the Bar; and to that he turned his attention, and resolved to qualify himself for it. That there would be grinding, and drudgery, and hard work, and no pay for years, he knew; but, so there might be, go to what he would. The Bar did hold out a chance of success, and there was nothing in it derogatory to the notions in which he had been reared—those of a gentleman.

Jan came to him one day about the time of the decision, and Lionel told him that he should soon be away; that he intended to enter himself at the Middle Temple, and take chambers.

“Law!” said Jan. “Why, you’ll be forty, may be, before you ever get a brief. You should have entered earlier.”

“Yes. But how was I to know that things would turn out like this?”

“Look here,” said Jan, tilting himself in a very uncomfortable fashion on the high back of an arm-chair, “there’s that five hundred pounds. You can have that.”

“What five hundred pounds?” asked Lionel.

“The five hundred that Uncle Stephen left me. I don’t want it. Old West gives me as much as keeps me in clothes and that, which is all I care about. You take the money and use it.”

“No, Jan. Thank you warmly, old boy, all the same; but I’d not take your poor little bit of money if I were starving.”

“What’s the good of it to me?” asked Jan, swaying his legs about. “I can’t use it: I have got nothing to use it in. I have put it in the bank at Heartburg, but the bank may go smash, you know, and then who’d be the better for the money? Better take it and make sure of it, Lionel.”

Lionel smiled at him. Jan was as simple and single-hearted in his way as Lucy Tempest was in hers. But he must want money very grievously indeed, before he would have consented to take honest Jan’s.

“I have five hundred of my own, you know, Jan,” he said. “More than I can use yet awhile.”

So he fixed upon the Bar, and would have hastened to London, but for Lady Verner’s illness. In the weak, low state to which disappointment and irritability had reduced her, she could not bear to lose sight of Lionel, or permit him to depart. “It will be time enough when I am dead, and that won’t be long first,” was the constant burden of her song to him.

He believed his mother to be little more likely to die than he was, but he was too dutiful a son to cross her in her present state. He gathered certain ponderous tomes about him, and began studying law on his own account, shutting himself up in his room all day to do it. Awfully dry work he found it; not in the least congenial; and many a time did he long to pitch the whole lot into the pleasant rippling stream, running through the grounds of Sir Rufus Hautley, which danced and glittered in the sun in view of Lionel’s window.

He could not remain at this daily study without interruptions. They were pretty frequent. People,—tenants, workmen, and others,—would persist in coming, for orders, to Mr. Lionel. In vain Lionel told them that he could not give orders, could not interfere; that he had no longer anything to do with Verner’s Pride. They could not be brought to understand why he was not their master as usual—at any rate, why he could not act as one, and interpose between them and the tyrant, Roy. In point of fact, Mr. Roy was head and master of the estate just now, and a nice head and master he made! Mrs. Verner, shut up in Verner’s Pride with her ill health, had no conception what games were being played. “Let be, let be,” the people would say. “When Mr. Fred Massingbird comes home, Roy ’ll get called to account, and receive his deserts.” A fond belief in which all did not join: many entertained a shrewd suspicion that Mr. Fred Massingbird was too much inclined to be a tyrant on his own account, to disprove the acts of Roy. Lionel’s blood often boiled at what he saw and heard, and he wished he could put miles between himself and Deerham.

“How long will my mother remain in this state?” he inquired of Dr. West, waylaying the physician one morning as he was leaving the house, and accompanying him across the courtyard.

Dr. West lifted his arched eyebrows.

“It is impossible to say, Mr. Lionel. These cases of low nervous fever are sometimes very much protracted.”

“Lady Verner’s is not nervous fever,” dissented Lionel.

“It approaches near to it.”

“The fact is, I want to be away,” said Lionel.

“There is no reason why you should not be away if you wish it. Lady Verner is not in any danger, she is sure to recover eventually.”

“I know that. At least, I hope it is sure,” returned Lionel. “But in the state she is I cannot reason with her, or talk to her of the necessity of my being away. Any approach to the topic irritates her.”

“I should go, and say nothing to her beforehand,” observed Dr. West. “When she found you were really off, and that there was no remedy for it, she must perforce reconcile herself to it.”

Every fond feeling within Lionel revolted at the suggestion. “We are speaking of my mother, doctor,” was his courteously-uttered rebuke.

“Well, if you don’t like that, there’s nothing for it but patience,” was the doctor’s rejoinder, as he drew open one of the iron gates. Lady Verner may be no better than she is now for weeks to come. Good day, Mr. Lionel.”

Lionel paced into the house with a slow step, and went up to his mother’s chamber. She was lying on a couch by the fire, her eyes closed, her pale features contracted as if with pain. Her maid Thérèse appeared to be busy with her, and Lionel called out Decima.

“There’s no improvement, I hear, Decima.”

“No. But, on the other hand, there’s no danger. There’s nothing even very serious, if