Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/164

156 his hand. He had done his best to infect Lionel with a taste for rum-and-water—as a convenient beverage to be taken at any hour from seven o’clock in the morning onwards—but Lionel had been proof against it. John had the rum-drinking to himself, as he had the smoking. Lionel had behaved to him liberally. It was not in Lionel Verner’s nature to behave otherwise, no matter to whom. From the moment the codicil was found, John Massingbird had no further right to a single sixpence of the revenues of the estate. He was in the position of one who has nothing. It was Lionel who had found means for all: for his expenses; his voyage; for a purse when he should get to Australia. John Massingbird was thinking of this as he sat now, smoking and taking draughts of the rum-and-water.

“If ever I turn to work with a will and become a hundred-thousand-pound man, old fellow,” he suddenly broke out, “I’ll pay you back. This, and also what I got rid of while the estate was in my hands.”

Lionel, who had been looking from the window in a reverie, turned round and laughed. To imagine John Massingbird becoming a hundred-thousand-pound man through his own industry, was a marvellously comprehensive stretch of fancy.

“I have to make a clean breast of it to-night,” resumed John Massingbird, after puffing away for some minutes in silence. “Do you remember my saying to you, the day we heard news of the codicil’s being found, that I was in your debt?”

“I remember your saying it,” replied Lionel. “I did not understand what you meant. You were not in my debt.”

“Yes I was. I had a score to pay off as big as the moon. It’s as big still: for it’s one that never can be paid off; never will be.”

Lionel looked at him in surprise; his manner was so unusually serious.

“Fifty times, since I came back from Australia, have I been on the point of clearing myself of the secret. But, you see, there was Verner’s Pride in the way. You would naturally have said upon hearing it, ‘Give the place up to me; you can have no moral right to it.’ And I was not prepared to give it up: it seemed too comfortable a nest, just at first, after the knocking about over yonder. Don’t you perceive?”

“I don’t perceive, and I don’t understand,” replied Lionel. “You are speaking in an unknown language.”

“I’ll speak in a known one, then. It was through me that old Ste Verner left Verner’s Pride away from you.”

“What!” uttered Lionel.

“True,” nodded John with composure. “I told him a—a bit of scandal of you. And the strait-laced old simpleton took and altered his will on the strength of it. I did not know of that until afterwards.”

“And the scandal?” asked Lionel, quietly. “What may it have been?”

“False scandal,” carelessly answered John Massingbird. “But I thought it was true when I spoke it. I told your uncle that it was you who had played false with Rachel Frost.”

“Massingbird!”

“Don’t fancy I went to him open-mouthed, and said, ‘Lionel Verner’s the man.’ A fellow who could do such a sneaking trick would be only fit for hanging. The avowal to him was surprised from me in an unguarded moment: it slipped out in self-defence. I’d better tell you the tale.”

“I think you had,” said Lionel.

“You remember the bother there was, the commotion, the night Rachel was drowned. I came home and found Mr. Verner sitting at the inquiry. It never struck me, then, to suspect that it could be any one of us three who had been in the quarrel with Rachel. I knew that I had had no finger in the pie; I had no cause to think that you had; and, as to Fred, I’d as soon have suspected staid old Verner himself: besides, I believed Fred to have eyes only for Sibylla West. Not but what the affair appeared to me unaccountably strange; for, beyond Verner’s Pride, I did not think Rachel possessed an acquaintance.”

He stopped to take a few whiffs at his pipe, and then resumed, Lionel listening in silence.

“On the following morning by daylight I went down to the pond, the scene of the previous night. A few stragglers were already there. As we were looking about and talking, I saw on the very brink of the pond, partially hidden in the grass,—in fact trodden into it, as it seemed to me,—a glove. I picked it up, and was on the point of calling out that I had found a glove, when it struck me that the glove was yours. The others had seen me stoop, and one of them asked if I had found anything. I said ‘No.’ I had crushed the glove in my hand, and presently I transferred it to my pocket.”

“Your motive being good nature to me?” interrupted Lionel.

“To be sure it was. To have shown that, as Lionel Verner’s glove, would have fixed the affair on your shoulders at once. Why should I tell? I had been in scrapes myself. And I kept it, saying nothing to anybody. I examined the glove privately, saw it was really yours, and of course I drew my own conclusions—that it was you who had been in the quarrel. Though what cause of dispute you could have with Rachel, I was at a loss to divine. Next came the inquest, and the medical men’s revelation at it: and that cleared up the mystery. ‘Ho, ho,’ I said to myself, ‘so Master Lionel can do a bit of courting on his own account, steady as he seems.’ I—”

“Did you assume I threw her into the pond?” again interposed Lionel.

“Not a bit of it. What next, Lionel? The ignoring of some of the Commandments comes natural enough to the conscience; but the sixth—one does not ignore that. I believed that you and Rachel might have come to mutual loggerheads, and that she, in a passion, flung herself in. I held the glove still in my pocket: it seemed to be the safest place for it; and I intended, before I left, to hand it over to you, and to give you my word I’d keep counsel. On the night of the inquest, you were closeted in the study with Mr. Verner. I chafed at it, for I wished to be closeted with him myself. Unless I could get off from