Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/223

. 16, 1862.] “I have nothing to do with Peckaby. If public rumour is to be credited, the business is not Peckaby’s, but yours—”

“Them that says it is a pack of liars!” burst forth Roy.

“Possibly. I say I have nothing to do with that. If Peckaby—”

Lionel’s voice faltered. An awful pain—a pain, the like of which for acute violence he had never felt—had struck him in the head. He put his hand up to it, and fell against the pump.

“Are you ill, sir?” asked Roy.

“What can it be?” murmured Lionel. “A sudden pain has attacked me here, Roy,” touching his head: “an awful pain. I’ll get into Frost’s, and sit down.”

Frost’s cottage was but a minute’s walk, but Lionel staggered as he went to it. Roy attended him. The man humbly asked if Mr. Lionel would be pleased to lean upon him, but Lionel waved him off. Matthew Frost was sitting indoors alone: his grandchildren were at school, his son’s wife was busy elsewhere. Matthew no longer went out to labour. He had been almost incapable of it before Mr. Verner’s annuity dropped to him. Robin was away at work: but Robin was a sadly altered man since the death of Rachel. His very nature appeared to have changed.

“My head! my head!” broke from Lionel, as he entered, in the intensity of his pain. “Matthew, I think I must have got a sun-stroke.”

Old Matthew pulled off his straw hat, and lifted himself slowly out of his chair: all his movements were slow now. Lionel had sat himself down on the settle, his head clasped by both hands, and his pale face turned to fiery red: as deep a crimson as Mrs. Verner’s was habitually.

“A sun-stroke?” echoed old Matthew, leaning on his stick, as he stood before him, attentively regarding Lionel. “Ay, sir, for sure it looks like it. Have you been standing still in the sun, this blazing day?”

“I have been standing in it without my hat,” replied Lionel. “Not for long, however.”

“It don’t take a minute, sir, to do the mischief. I had one myself, years before you were born, Mr. Lionel. On a day as hot as this, I was out in my garden, here, at the back of this cottage. I had gone out without my hat, and was standing over my pig, watching him eat his wash, when I felt something take my head—such a pain, sir, that I had never felt before, and never wish to feel again. I went indoors, and Robin, who might be a boy of five, or so, looked frightened at me, my face was so red. I couldn’t hold my head up, sir; and when the doctor came, he said it was a sun-stroke. I think there must be particular moments and days when the sun has this power to harm us, though we don’t know which they are, nor how to avoid them,” added old Matthew, as much in self-soliloquy as to Lionel. “I had often been out before, without my hat, in as great heat; for longer, too; and it had never harmed me. Since then, sir, I have put a white handkerchief inside the crown of my hat in hot weather: the doctor told me to.”

“How long did the pain last?” asked Lionel, feeling his pain growing worse with every moment. “Many hours?”

“Hours?” repeated old Matthew, with a strong emphasis on the word. “Mr. Lionel, it lasted for days and weeks. Before the next morning came, sir, I was in a raging fever; for three weeks, good, I was in my bed, above here, and never out of it; hardly the clothes smoothed atop of me. Sun-strokes are not frequent in this climate, sir, but when they do come, they can’t be trifled with.”

Perhaps Lionel felt the same conviction. Perhaps he felt that with this pain, increasing as it was in intensity, he must make the best of his way home, if he would go at all. “Good day, Matthew,” he said, rising from the bench, “I’ll get home at once!”

“And send for Dr. West, sir, or for Mr. Jan, if you are no better when you get there,” was the parting salutation of the old man.

He stood at the door, leaning on his stick, and watched Lionel down Clay Lane. “A sun-stroke, for sure,” repeated he, slowly turning in, as the angle of the lane hid Lionel from his view.

his darkened chamber at Deerham Court, lay Lionel Verner. Whether it was a sun-stroke, or whether it was but the commencement of a fever which had suddenly struck him down that day, certain it was, that a violent illness attacked him, and he lay for many, many days—days and weeks as old Frost had called it—between life and death. Fever and delirium struggled with life, which should get the mastery.

Very little doubt, was there, that his state of mind increased the danger of his state of body. How bravely Lionel had struggled to do battle with his great pain, he might scarcely have known himself, in all its full intensity, save for this illness. He had loved Sibylla with the pure fervour of feelings young and fresh. He could have loved her to the end of life; he could have died for her. No leaven was mixed with his love; no base dross: it was refined as the purest silver. It is only these exalted, ideal passions, which partake more of heaven’s nature than of earth’s, that tell upon the heart when their end comes. Terribly had it told upon Lionel Verner’s. In one hour he had learnt that Sibylla was false to him, was about to become the wife of another. In his sensitive reticence, in his shrinking pride, he had put a smiling face upon it before the world. He had watched her marry Frederick Massingbird, and had “made no sign.” Deep, deep in his heart, fifty fathom deep, had he pressed down his misery, passing his days in what may be called a false atmosphere—showing a false side to his friends. It seemed false to Lionel, the appearing what he was not. He was his true self at night only, when he could turn, and toss, and groan out his trouble at will. But, when illness attacked him, and he had no strength of body to throw off his pain of mind, then he found how completely the blow had shattered him. It seemed to Lionel, in his sane moments, in the intervals of his delirium, that it would be far happier to die, than to wake up again to renewed life, to bear about within him that