Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/698

690 than he could have expressed, feeling that he could never repay all the kindness they seemed to be receiving. Equally inviting looked the dressing-room. The first thing that caught Lionel’s eye were some delicate paintings on the walls, done by Decima.

His gaze and his ruminations were interrupted. Violent sobs had struck on his ear from the bed-chamber; he hastened back, and found Sibylla extended at full length on the sofa, crying.

“It is such a dreadful change after Verner’s Pride!” she querulously complained. It’s not half as nice as it was there! Just this old bed-room and a mess of a dressing-room, and nothing else! And only that stupid Catherine to wait upon me!”

It was ungrateful. Lionel’s heart, in its impulse, resented it as such. But, ever considerate for his wife, ever wishing, in the line of conduct he had laid down for himself, to find excuses for her, he reflected the next moment that it was a grievous thing to be turned from a home as she had been. He leaned over her; not answering as he might have answered, that the rooms were all that could be wished, and far superior they, and all other arrangements made for them, to anything enjoyed by Sibylla until she had entered upon Verner’s Pride; but he took her hand in his, and smoothed the hair from her brow, and softly whispered:

“Make the best of it, Sibylla, for my sake.”

“There’s no ‘best’ to be made,” she replied, with a shower of tears, as she pushed his hand and his face away.

Catherine knocked at the door. Lionel called out “Come in,” and she entered, saying, Miss Decima had sent her, and dinner was on the point of being served. Sibylla sprang up from the sofa, and dried her tears.

“I wonder whether I can get at my gold combs?” cried she, all her grief flying away.

Lionel turned to Catherine: an active little woman with a high colour and a sensible countenance, looking much younger than her real age. That was not far off fifty; but in movement and lissomeness, she was young as she had been at twenty. Nothing vexed Catherine so much as for Lady Verner to allude to her “age.” Not from any notions of vanity, but lest she might be thought growing incapable of her work.

“Catherine, is not that my mother’s bed?”

“To think that you should have found it out, Mr. Lionel!” echoed Catherine, with a broad smile. “Well, sir, it is, and that’s the truth. We have been making all sorts of changes. Miss Lucy’s bed has gone in for my lady, and my lady’s has been brought here. See, what a big, wide bed it is!” she exclaimed, putting her arm on the counterpane. “Miss Lucy’s was a good-sized bed, but my lady thought it would be hardly big enough for two; so she said hers should come in here.”

“And what’s Miss Lucy sleeping on?” asked Lionel, amused. “The boards?”

Catherine laughed. “Miss Lucy has got a small bed now, sir. Not, upon my word, that I think she’d mind if we did put her on the boards. She is the sweetest young lady to have to do with, Mr. Lionel! I don’t believe there ever was one like her. She’s as easy satisfied as ever Mr. Jan was.”

“Lionel! I can’t find my gold combs!” exclaimed Sibylla, coming from the dressing-room, with a face of consternation. “They are not in the dressing-case. How am I to know which box Benoite has put them in?”

“Never mind looking for the combs now,” he answered. “You will have time to search for things to-morrow. Your hair looks nice without combs. I think nicer than with them.”

“But I wanted to wear them,” she fractiously answered. “It is all your fault! You should not have forced me to discharge Benoite.”

Leaving her in the hands of Catherine, Lionel went down. Lucy was in the drawing-room alone.

“Lady Verner,” she observed, “has stepped out to speak to Jan.”

“Lucy, I find that our coming here has turned you out of your room,” he gravely said. “I should earnestly have protested against it, had I known what was going to be done.”

“Should you?” said she, shaking her head quite saucily. “We should not have listened to you.”

“We! Whom does the we include?”

“Myself and Decima. We planned everything. I like the room I have now, quite as much as that. It is the room at the end, opposite the one Mrs. Verner is to have for her sitting-room.”

“The sitting-room again! What shall you and Decima do without it?” exclaimed Lionel, looking as he felt—vexed.

“If we never have anything worse to put up with, than the loss of a sitting-room that was nearly superfluous, we shall not grieve,” answered Lucy with a smile. “How did we do without it before—when you were getting better from that long illness? We had to do without it, then.”

“I think not, Lucy. So far as my memory serves me, you were sitting in it a great portion of your time—cheering me. I have not forgotten it, if you have.”

Neither had she—by her heightened colour.

“I mean that we had to do without it for our own purposes, our drawings and our work. It is but a little matter, after all: I wish we could do more for you and Mrs. Verner. I wish,” she added, her voice betraying her emotion, “that we could have prevented your being turned from Verner’s Pride.”

“Ay,” he said, speaking with affected carelessness, and turning about an ornament in his fingers, which he had taken from the mantel-piece, “it is not an every-day calamity.”

“What shall you do?” asked Lucy, going a little nearer to him, and dropping her voice to a tone of confidence.

“Do? In what way, Lucy?”

“Shall you be content to live on here with Lady Verner? Not seeking to retrieve your—your position in any way?”

“My living on here, Lucy, will be out of the question. That would never do, for more reasons than one.”

Did Lucy Tempest wonder what one of these reasons might be? She did not intend to look at