Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/720

712 work. The insolvent court has got its friendly doors ever open.”

The colour came into the face of Lionel. A Verner there! He quietly shook his head. “I daresay I shall find a way of paying sometime, if the people will only wait.”

“Sibylla helped you to a good part of the score, didn’t she? People are saying so. Just like her!”

“When I complain of my wife, it will be quite time enough for other people to begin,” said Lionel. “When I married Sibylla, I took her with her virtues and her faults; and I am quite ready to defend both.”

“All right. I’d rather you had the right of defending them than I,” said incorrigible John. “Look here, Lionel: I got you up here to-day to talk about the estate. Will you take the management of it?”

“Of this estate?” replied Lionel, not understanding.

“Deuce a bit of any other could I offer you. Things are all at sixes and sevens already: they are chaos; they are purgatory. That’s our word out yonder, Lionel, to express the ultimatum of badness. Matiss comes and bothers; the tenants, one and another, come and bother; Roy comes and bothers. What with it all, I’m fit to bar the outer doors. Roy, you know, thought I should put him into power again! No, no, Mr. Roy: Fred might have done it, but I never will. I’ll pay him well for the services he has rendered me! but put him into power—no. Altogether things are getting into inextricable confusion; I can’t look to them, and I want a manager. Will you take it, Lionel? I’ll give you five hundred a year.”

The mention of the sum quite startled Lionel. It was far more than he should have supposed John Massingbird would offer to any manager. Matiss would do it for a fourth. Should he take it?

He sat, twirling his wine-glass round in his fingers. There was a soreness of spirit to get over, and it could not be done all in a moment. To become a servant (indeed it was no better) on the land that had once been his; that ought to be his now, by the law of right—a servant to John Massingbird!—could Lionel bend to it? John smoked, and sat watching him.

He thought of the position of his wife; he thought of the encumbrance on his mother; he thought of his brother Jan, and what he had done; he thought of his own very unsatisfactory prospects. Was this the putting his shoulder to the wheel, as he had resolved to do, thus to hesitate on a quibble of pride? Down, down with his rebellious spirit. Let him be a man, in the sight of Heaven!

He turned to John Massingbird, his brow clear, his eye serene.

“I will take it, and thank you,” he said in a steady, cheerful tone.

“Then let’s have some grog on the strength of it,” was that gentleman’s answer. “Tynn says the worry nearly took my mother’s life out of her, during the time she managed the estate; and it would take it out of mine. If I kept it in my own hands, it would go to the dogs in a twelvemonth. And you’d not thank me for that, Lionel. You are the next heir.”

“You may take a wife yet.”

“A wife for me!” he shouted. “No, thank, you. I know the value of ’em too well for that. Give me my liberty, and you may have the wives. Lionel, the office had better be in the study as it used to be: you can come up here of a day. I’ll turn the drawing-room into my smoke shop. If there are any leases or other deeds missing, you must get them drawn out again. I’m glad it’s settled.”

Lionel declined the grog; but he sat on, talking things over. John Massingbird, in a cloud of smoke, drinking Lionel’s share as well as his own, and listening to the rain, which had begun to patter against the window panes.

But it is necessary to pay a visit to Mrs. Peckaby, for great events were happening to her on that night.

When Lionel met her in the day, seated on the stump, all disconsolate, she had thrown out a hint that Mr. Peckaby was not habitually in quite so social a mood as he might be. The fact was, Peckaby’s patience had run out: and little wonder, either. The man’s meals made ready for him in any careless way, often not made ready at all, and his wife spending her time in sighing and moaning, and looking out for the white donkey! You, my readers, may deem this a rather far-fetched episode in the story; you may deem it next to impossible that any woman should be so ridiculously foolish, or could be so imposed upon: but I am only relating to you the strict truth. The facts occurred precisely as they are being narrated, and not long ago. I have neither added to the story, nor taken from it.

Mrs. Peckaby finished out her sitting on the stump. The skies were greyer than before when she rose to go home. She found Peckaby had been in to his tea; that is, he had been in, hoping to partake of that social meal; but, finding no preparation made for it, he had a little relieved his mind by pouring a pail of water over the kitchen fire, thereby putting the fire out and causing considerable damage to the fire-irons and appurtenances generally, which would cause Mrs. Peckaby some little work to remedy.

“The brute!” she ejaculated, putting her foot into the slop on the floor, and taking a general view of things. “Oh, if I was but off!”

“My patience, what a mess!” exclaimed Polly Dawson, who happened to be going by, and turned in for a gossip. “Whatever have done it?”

“Whatever have done it? why, that wretch, Peckaby,” retorted the aggrieved wife. “Don’t you never get married, Polly Dawson, if you want to keep on the right side of the men. They be the worst animals in all creation. Many a poor woman’s life has been aggrivated out of her.”

“If I do get married, I shan’t begin the aggrivation by wanting to be off to them saints at New Jerusalem,” impudently returned Polly Dawson.

Mrs. Peckaby received it meekly. What with the long-continued disappointment, the perpetual “aggravations” of Peckaby, and the prospect