Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/670

662 look out for all I met, for all to whom I chose to show myself: they met me unawares. Unprepared for the encounter, while they were recovering their astonishment, I was beyond reach. Last night I had been watching over the gate ever so long, when I darted out in front of Tynn, to astonish him. Jan”—lowering his voice—“has it put Sibylla in a fright?”

“I think it has put Lionel in a worse,” responded Jan.

“For fear of losing her?” laughed John Massingbird. “Wouldn’t it have been a charming prospect for some husbands, who are tired of their wives! Is Lionel tired of his?”

“Can’t say,” replied Jan. “There’s no appearance of it.”

“I should be, if Sibylla had been my wife for two years,” candidly avowed John Massingbird. “Sibylla and I never hit it off well as cousins: I’d not own her as wife, if she were dowered with all the gold mines in Australia. What Fred saw in her was always a puzzle to me. I knew what was going on between them, though nobody else did. But, Jan, I’ll tell you what astonished me more than everything else when I learnt it—that Lionel should have married her subsequently. I never could have imagined Lionel Verner taking up with another man’s wife.”

“She was his widow,” cried literal Jan.

“All the same. ’Twas another man’s leavings. And there’s something about Lionel Verner, with his sensitive refinement, that does not seem to accord with the notion. Is she healthy?”

“Who? Sibylla? I don’t fancy she has much of a constitution.”

“No, that she has not! There are no children, I hear. Jan, though, you need not have pinched so hard when you pounced upon me,” he continued, rubbing his arm. “I was not going to run away.”

“How did I know that?” said Jan.

“It’s my last night of fun, and when I saw you I said to myself, ‘I’ll be caught.’ How are old Deb and Amilly?”

“Much as usual. Deb’s in a fever just now. She has heard that Fred Massingbird’s back, and thinks Sibylla ought to leave Lionel on the strength of it.”

John laughed again.

“It must have put others in a fever, I know, besides poor old Deb. Jan, I can’t stop talking to you all night, I should get no more fun. I wish I could appear to all Deerham collectively, and send it into fits after Dan Duff! To-morrow, as soon as I genteely can after breakfast, I go up to Verner’s Pride and show myself. One can’t go at six in the morning.”

He turned off in the direction of Clay Lane as he spoke, and Jan made the best of his way to Verner’s Pride. From some cause or other they had dined unusually late there, and Lionel Verner was with his guests, making merry with the best heart he had. Now, he would rely upon the information given by Captain Cannonby; the next moment, he was feeling that the combined testimony of so many eye-witnesses must be believed, and that it could be no other than Frederick Massingbird. Tynn had been with the man face to face only the previous night; Roy had distinctly asserted that he was back, in life, from Australia. Whatever his anxiety may have been, his wife seemed at rest. Full of smiles and gaiety, she sat opposite to him, glittering gems in her golden hair, shining forth from her costly robes.

“Not out from dinner!” cried Jan, in his astonishment, when Tynn denied him to Lionel. “Why, it’s my supper-time! I must see him, whether he’s at dinner or not. Go and say so, Tynn. Something important, tell him.”

The message brought Lionel out. Thankful, probably, to get out. The playing the host with a mind ill at ease, how it jars upon the troubled and fainting spirit! Jan, disdaining the invitation to the drawing-room, had hoisted himself on the top of an old carved ebony cabinet that stood in the hall, containing curiosities, and sat there with his legs dangling. He jumped off when Lionel appeared, wound his arm within his, and drew him out on the terrace.

“I have come to the bottom of it, Lionel,” said he, without further circumlocution. “I dropped upon the ghost just now and pinned him. It is not Fred Massingbird.”

Lionel paused, and then drew a deep breath; like one who has been relieved from some great care.

“Cannonby said it was not!” he exclaimed. “Cannonby is here, Jan, and he assures me Frederick Massingbird is dead and buried. Who is it then? Have you found it out?”

“I pinned him, I say,” said Jan. “I was going down to Hook’s, and he crossed my path. He—”

“Is it somebody who has been doing it for a trick?” interrupted Lionel.

“Well—yes—in one sense. It is not Fred Massingbird, Lionel: he is dead, safe enough; but it is somebody from a distance; one who will cause you little less trouble. Not any less, in fact, putting Sibylla out of the question.”

Lionel stopped in his walk—they were pacing the terrace—and looked at Jan with some surprise; a smile, in his new security, lighting his face.

“There is nobody in the world, Jan, dead or alive, who could bring trouble to me, save Frederick Massingbird. Anybody else may come, so long as he does not.”

“Ah! You are thinking only of Sibylla.”

“Of whom else should I think?”

“Yourself,” replied Jan.

Lionel laughed in his gladness. How thankful he was for his wife’s sake alone knew.

“I am nobody, Jan: any trouble coming to me I can battle with.”

“Well, Lionel, the returned man is John Massingbird.”

“John—Mass—ingbird!”

Of all the birds in the air and the fishes in the sea—as the children say—he was the very last to whom Lionel Verner had cast a thought. That it was John who had returned, had not entered his imagination. He had never cast a doubt to the fact of his death. Bringing the name out slowly, he stared at Jan in very astonishment.