Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/336

 328 months, that she was forgotten? Truly the present moment rudely undeceived him. Tynn shut the door, leaving them alone.

Lionel was not so agitated as to forget the courtesies of life. He shook hands with her, and, in the impulse of the moment called her Sibylla: and then bit his tongue for doing it.

She burst into tears. There, as he held her hand. She lifted her lovely face to him with a yearning, pleading look.—“Oh, Lionel! you will give me a home, won’t you?”

What was he to say? He could not, in that first instant, abruptly say to her—no, you cannot have a home here. Lionel could not hurt the feelings of any one. “Sit down, Mrs. Massingbird,” he gently said, drawing an easy chair to the fire. “You have quite taken me by surprise. When did you land?”

She threw off her bonnet, shook back those golden curls, and sat down in the chair, a large heavy shawl on her shoulders. “I will not take it off yet,” she said, in a plaintive voice. “I am very cold.”

She shivered slightly. Lionel drew her chair yet nearer the fire, and brought a footstool for her feet. Repeating his question as he did so.

“We reached Liverpool late yesterday, and I started for home this morning,” she answered, her eyelashes wet still, as she gazed into the fire. “What a miserable journey it has been!” she added, turning to Lionel. “A miserable voyage out; a miserable ending!”

“Are you aware of the changes that have taken place since you left?” he asked. “Your aunt is dead.”

“Yes, I know it,” she answered. “They told me at the station just now. That lame porter came up and knew me; and his first news to me was, that Mrs. Verner was dead. What a greeting! I was coming home here to live with her.”

“You could not have received my letter: one which I wrote at the request of Mrs. Verner in answer to yours.”

“What was in it?” she asked. “I received no letter from you.”

“It contained remittances. It was sent, I say, in answer to yours, in which you requested money should be forwarded for your home passage. You did not wait for it?“

“I was tired of waiting. I was sick for home. And one day, when I had been crying more than usual, Mrs. Eyre said to me, that if I were so anxious to go, there need be no difficulty about the passage money. That they would advance me any amount I might require. Oh, I was so glad! I came away by the next ship.”

“Why did you not write, saying that you were coming?”

“I did not think it mattered—and I knew I had this home to come to. If I had had to go to my old home again at papa’s, then I should have written. I should have seemed like an intruder arriving at their house, and have deemed it necessary to warn them of it.”

“You heard in Australia of Mr. Verner’s death, I presume?”

“I heard of that, and that my husband had inherited Verner’s Pride. Of course I thought I had a right to come to this home, though he was dead. I suppose it is yours now?”

“Yes.”

“Who lives here?”

“Only myself.”

“Have I a right to live here—as Frederick’s widow?” she continued, lifting her large blue eyes anxiously at Lionel. “I mean would the law give it me?”

“No,” he replied, in a low tone. He felt that the truth must be told to her without disguise.

She was placing both him and herself in an embarrassing situation. “Was there any money left to me?—or to Frederick?”

“None to you. Verner’s Pride was left to your husband. But at his demise it came to me.”

“Did my aunt leave me nothing?”

“She had nothing to leave, Mrs. Massingbird. The settlement which Mr. Verner executed on her, when they married, was only for her life. It lapsed back to the Verner’s Pride revenues when she died.”

“Then I am left, without a shilling, to the mercy of the world!”

Lionel felt for her—felt for her rather more than was safe. He began planning in his own mind how he could secure to her an income from the Verner’s Pride estate, without her knowing whence it came. Frederick Massingbird had been its inheritor for a short three or four months, and Lionel’s sense of justice revolted against his widow being thrown on the world, as she expressed it, without a shilling.

“The revenues of the estate, during the short time that elapsed between Mr. Verner’s death and your husband’s, are undoubtedly yours, Mrs. Massingbird,” he said. “I will see Matiss about it, and they shall be paid over.”

“How long will it be first?”

“A few days, possibly. In a note which I received, just now, from Matiss, he tells me he is starting for London, but will be home the beginning of the week. It shall be arranged on his return.”

“Thank you. And, until then, I may stay here?“

Lionel was at a nonplus. It is not a pleasing thing to tell a lady that she must quit your house, in which, like a stray lamb, she has taken refuge. Even though it be, for her own fair sake, expedient that she should go.

“I am here alone,” said Lionel, after a pause. “Your temporary home had better be with your sisters.”

“No, that it never shall,” returned Sibylla in a hasty tone of fear. “I will never go home to them, now papa’s away. Why did he go? They told me at the station that he was gone, and Jan was doctor.”

“Dr. West is travelling on the continent, as medical attendant and companion to a nobleman. At least—I think I heard it was a nobleman,” continued Lionel. “I am really not sure.”

“And you would like me to go home to those two cross, fault-finding sisters!” she resumed. “They would reproach me all day long with coming home to be kept. As if it were my fault