Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/586

 578 “She’ll see the shoes and the silk dress, and she’ll say you should have stopped at Verner’s Pride, as a well-trained young lady ought,” returned Lionel.

He took her safely to the back door, opened it, and sent her in.

“Thank you very much,” said she, holding out her hand to him. “I have given you a disagreeable walk, and now I must give you one back again.”

“Change your shoes at once, and don’t talk foolish things,” was Lionel’s answer.

A wet walk back he certainly had: but, wet or dry, it was all the same in his present distressed frame of mind. Arrived at Verner’s Pride, he found his wife dressed for dinner, and the centre of a host of guests, gay as she was. No opportunity, then, to question her about Frederick Massingbird’s death, and how far Captain Cannonby was cognisant of the particulars.

He had to change his own things. It was barely done by dinner-time, and he sat down to table, the host of many guests. His brow was smooth, his speech was courtly: how could any of them suspect that a terrible dread was gnawing at his heart? Sibylla, in a rustling silk dress and a coronet of diamonds, sat opposite to him in all her dazzling beauty. Had she suspected what might be in store for her, those smiles would not have chased each other so incessantly on her lips.

Sibylla went up to bed early. She was full of caprices as a wayward child. Of a remarkably chilly nature—as is the case sometimes where the constitution is delicate—she would have a fire in her dressing-room night and morning all the year round, even in the heat of summer. It pleased her this evening to desert her guests suddenly: she had the headache, she said.

The weather on this day appeared to be as capricious as Sibylla, as strangely curious as the great fear which had fallen upon Lionel. The fine morning had changed to the rainy, misty, chilly afternoon; the afternoon to a clear, bright evening; and that evening had now become overcast with portentous clouds.

Without much warning, the storm burst forth: peals of thunder reverberated through the air, flashes of forked lightning played in the sky. Lionel hastened upstairs: he remembered how these storms terrified his wife.

She had knelt down to bury her head amidst the soft cushions of a chair when Lionel entered her dressing-room. “Sibylla,” he said.

Up she started at the sound of his voice, and flew to him. There lay her protection; and in spite of her ill-temper and her love of aggravation, she felt and recognised it. Lionel held her in his sheltering arms, bending her head down upon his breast and drawing his coat over it, so that she might see no ray of light: as he had been wont to do in former storms. As a timid child was she at these times: humble, loving, gentle: she felt as if she were on the threshold of the next world, that the next moment might be her last. Others have been known to experience the same dread in a thunder-storm: and, to be thus brought, as it were, face to face with death, takes the spirit out of people.

He stood patiently, holding her. Every time the thunder burst above their heads, he could feel her heart beat against his. One of her arms was round him; the other he held; all wet it was with the fear. He did not speak: he only clasped her closer every now and then, that she might be reminded of her shelter.

Twenty minutes, or so, and the violence of the storm abated. The lightning grew less frequent, the thunder distant and more distant. At length the sound wholly ceased, and the lightning subsided into that harmless sheet lightning which is so beautiful to look at in the far-off horizon.

“It is over,” he whispered.

She lifted her head from its resting-place. Her blue eye was bright with excitement, her delicate cheek crimson, her golden hair fell in a dishevelled mass around. Her gala robes had been removed with the diamond coronet, and the storm had surprised her writing a note in her dressing-gown. In spite of the sudden terror which overtook her, she did not forget to put the letter—so far as had been written of it—safely away. It was not expedient that her husband’s eyes should fall upon it: Sibylla had many answers to write now to importunate creditors.

“Are you sure, Lionel?”

“Quite sure. Come and see how clear it is. You are not alarmed at the sheet-lightning.”

He put his arm round her, and led her to the window. As he said, the sky was clear again. Nearly all traces of the storm had passed away: there had been no rain with it; and, but for the remembrance of its sound in their ears, they might have believed that it had not taken place. The broad lands of Verner’s Pride lay spreading out before them; the lawns and the terrace underneath: the sheet-lightning illumined the heavens incessantly, rendering objects nearly as clear as in the day.

Lionel held her to his side, his arm round her. She trembled still; trembled excessively; her bosom heaved and fell beneath his hand.

“When I die, it will be in a thunder-storm,” she whispered.

“You foolish girl!” he said, his tone half a joking one, wholly tender. “What can have given you this excessive fear of thunder, Sibylla?”

“I was always frightened at a thunder-storm. Deborah says mamma was. But I was not so very frightened until a storm I witnessed in Australia. It killed a man!” she added, shivering and nestling nearer to Lionel.

“Ah!”

“It was only a few days before Frederick left me, when he and Captain Cannonby went away together,” she continued. “We had hired a carriage and had gone out of the town ever so far. There was something to be seen there; I forget what now; races perhaps. I know a good many people went; and an awful thunder-storm came on. Some ran under the trees for shelter; some would not: and the lightning killed a man. Oh, Lionel, I shall never forget it! I saw him carried past; I saw his face! Since then I have felt ready to die, myself, with the fear.”

She turned her face and hid it upon his bosom. Lionel did not attempt to soothe the fear; he