Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/613

 . 22, 1862.] have seen it, are nothing: and old Frost’s not much. But I’d back Bourne’s calmness and sound sense against the world, and I’d back Broom’s.”

“And they have both seen it?”

“Both,” replied Jan. “Both are sure that it is Frederick Massingbird.”

“What will Mr. Verner do?” she asked, looking round with a shudder, and not speaking above her breath.

“Oh, that’s his affair,” said Jan. “It’s hard to guess what he may do: he is one that won’t be dictated to. If it were some people’s case, they’d say to Sibylla, ‘Now you have got two husbands, choose which you’ll have, and keep to him. ”

“Good heavens, Mr. Jan!” exclaimed Miss Deb, shocked at the loose sentiments the words appeared to indicate. “And suppose she should choose the second? Have you thought of the sin? The second can’t be her husband: it would be as bad as those Mormons.”

“Looking at it in a practical point of view, I can’t see much difference, which of the two she chooses,” returned Jan. “If Fred was her husband once, Lionel’s her husband now: practically I say, you know, Miss Deb.”

Miss Deb thought the question was going rather into metaphysics, a branch of science which she did not understand, and so was content to leave the controversy.

“Any way, it is dreadful for her,” she said, with another shiver. “Oh, Mr. Jan, do you think it can really be true?”

“I think that there’s not a doubt of it,” he answered, stopping in his pounding. “But you need not think so, Miss Deb.”

“How am I to help thinking so?” she simply asked.

“You needn’t think either way until it is proved. As I suppose it must be, shortly. Let it rest till then.”

“No, Mr. Jan, I differ from you. It is a question that ought to be sought out and probed; not left to rest. Does Sibylla know it?”

“Not she. Who’d tell her? Lionel won’t, I know. It was for her sake that he bound me to silence.”

“She ought to be told, Mr. Jan. She ought to leave her husband—I mean Mr. Lionel—this very hour, and shut herself up until the doubt is settled.”

“Where should she shut herself?” inquired Jan, opening his eyes. “In a convent? Law, Miss Deb! If somebody came and told me I had got two wives, should you say I ought to make a start for the nearest monastery? How would my patients get on?”

Rather metaphysical again. Miss Deb drew Jan back to plain details—to the histories of the various ghostly encounters. Jan talked and pounded: she sat on her hard seat and listened: her brain more perplexed than it could have been with any metaphysics, known to science. Eleven o’clock disturbed them, and Miss Deborah started as if she had been shot.

“How could I keep you till this time!” she exclaimed. “And you, scarcely in bed for some nights!”

“Never mind, Miss Deb,” answered goodnatured Jan. “It’s all in the day’s work.”

He opened the door for her, and then bolted himself in for the night. For the night, that is, if Deerham would allow it to him. Hook’s daughter was slowly progressing towards recovery, and Jan would not need to go to her.

Amilly was nodding over the fire, or, rather, where the fire had been, for it had gone out. She inquired with wonder what her sister had been doing, and where she had been. Deborah replied that she had been busy: and they went up-stairs to bed.

But not to sleep—for one of them. Deborah West lay awake through the live-long night, tossing from side to side in her perplexity and thought. Somewhat strict in her notions, she deemed it a matter of stern necessity, of positive duty, that Sibylla should retire, at any rate for a time, from the scenes of busy life. To enable her to do this, the news must be broken to her. But how?

Ay, how? Deborah West rose in the morning with the difficulty unsolved. She supposed she must do it herself. She believed it was as much a duty laid upon her, the imparting these tidings to Sibylla, as the separating herself from all social ties, the instant it was so imparted, would be the duty of Sibylla herself. Deborah West went about her occupations that morning, one imperative sentence ever in her thoughts: “It must be done! it must be done.”

She carried it about with her, ever saying it, through the whole day. She shrank, both for Sibylla’s sake and her own, from the task she was imposing upon herself; and, as we all do when we have an unpleasant office to perform, she put it off to the last. Early in the morning she had said I will go to Verner’s Pride after breakfast and tell her; breakfast over, she said I will have my dinner first and go then.

But the afternoon passed on, and she did not go. Every little trivial domestic duty was made an excuse for delaying it. Miss Amilly, finding her sister unusually bad company, went out to drink tea with some friends. The time came for ordering in tea at home, and still Deborah had not gone.

She made the tea and presided at the table. But she could eat nothing—to the inward gratification of Master Cheese. There happened to be shrimps: a dish which that gentleman preferred, if anything, to pickled herrings, and by Miss Deborah’s want of appetite he was able to secure her share and his own, including the heads and tails. He would uncommonly have liked to secure Jan’s share also; but Miss Deborah filled a plate and put them aside against Jan came in. Jan’s pressure of work caused him of late to be irregular at his meals.

Scarcely was the tea over, and Master Cheese gone, when Mr. Bourne called. Deborah, the one thought uppermost in her mind, closed the door, and spoke out what she had heard. The terrible fear, her own distress, Jan’s belief that it was Fred himself, Jan’s representation that Mr. Bourne also believed it. Mr. Bourne, leaning forward until his pale face and his iron-grey hair