“Very bad, Decima. Or I should not have sent you away while I told it.”
“I suppose there’s nothing left for mamma, or for Jan?”
“Mamma did not expect anything left for her, Decima. Don’t go away, Lucy,” he added, arresting Lucy Tempest, who, with good taste, was leaving them alone. “Stay and hear how poor I am: all Deerham knows it by this time.”
Lucy remained. Decima, her beautiful features a shade paler than usual, turned her serene eyes on Lionel. She little thought what was coming.
“Verner’s Pride is left away from me, Decima.”
“Left away from you! From you?”
“Frederick Massingbird inherits. I am passed over.”
“Oh, Lionel!” The words were not uttered angrily, passionately, as Lady Verner’s had been; but in a low, quiet voice, wrung from her, seemingly by intense inward pain.
“And so there will be some additional trouble for you in the housekeeping line,” went on Lionel, speaking gaily, and ignoring all the pain at his heart. “Turned out of Verner’s Pride, I must come to you here—at least, for a time. What shall you say to that, Miss Lucy?”
Lucy was looking up at him gravely, not smiling in the least. “Is it true that you have lost Verner’s Pride?”
“Quite true.”
“But I thought it was yours—after Mr. Verner.”
“I thought so, too, until to-day,” replied Lionel. “It ought to have been.”
“What shall you do without it?”
“What, indeed!” he answered. “From being a landed country gentleman—as people have imagined me—I go down to a poor fellow who must work for his bread and cheese before he eats it. Your eyes are laughing, Miss Lucy, but it is true.”
“Bread and cheese costs nothing,” said she.
“No? And the plate you put it on, and the knife you eat it with, and the glass of beer to help it go down, and the coat you wear during the repast, and the room it’s served in?—they cost something, Miss Lucy.”
Lucy laughed. “I think you will always have enough bread and cheese,” said she. “You look as though you would.”
Decima turned to them: she had stood buried in a reverie, until the light tone of Lionel aroused her from it. “Which is real, Lionel? this joking, or that you have lost Verner’s Pride?”
“Both,” he answered. “I am disinherited from Verner’s Pride: better perhaps that I should joke over it, than cry.”
“What will mamma do? What will mamma do?” breathed Decima. “She has so counted upon it. And what will you do, Lionel?”
“Decima!” came forth at this moment from the opposite room, in the imperative voice of Lady Verner.
Decima turned in obedience to it, her step less light than usual. Lucy addressed Lionel.
“One day at the rectory there came a gipsy woman, wanting to tell our fortunes: she accosted us in the garden. Mr. Cust sent her away, and she was angry, and told him his star was not in the ascendant. I think it must be the case at present with your star, Mr. Verner.”
Lionel smiled. “Yes, indeed.”
“It is not only one thing that you are losing; it is more. First, that pretty girl whom you loved; then, Mr. Verner; and now, Verner’s Pride. I wish I knew how to comfort you.”
Lucy Tempest spoke with the most open simplicity, exactly as a sister might have done. But the one allusion grated on Lionel’s heart.
“You are very kind, Lucy. Good bye. Tell Decima I shall see her sometime to-morrow.”
Lucy Tempest looked after him from the window as he paced the enclosed court-yard. “I cannot think how people can be unjust!” was her thought. “If Verner’s Pride was rightly his, why have they taken it from him?”
CHAPTER XIV.—A WHISPERED SUSPICION.
Certainly Lionel Verner’s star was not in the ascendant—though Lucy Tempest had used the words in jest. His love gone from him; his fortune and position wrested from him; all become the adjuncts of one man, Frederick Massingbird. Serenely, to outward appearance, as Lionel had met the one blow, so did he now meet the other: and none, looking on his calm bearing, could suspect what the loss was to him. But it is the silent sorrow that eats into the heart; the loud grief does not tell upon it.
An official search had been made; but no trace could be found of the missing codicil. Lionel had not expected that it would be found. He regarded it as a deed which had never had existence, and took up his abode with his mother. The village could not believe it; the neighbourhood resented it. People stood in groups to talk it over. It did certainly appear to be a most singular and almost incredible thing: that, in the enlightened days of the latter half of the nineteenth century, an official deed should disappear out of a gentleman’s desk, in his own well-guarded residence, in his habited chamber. Conjectures and thoughts were freely bandied about; while Dr. West and Jan grew nearly tired of the particulars demanded of them in their professional visits, for their patients would talk of nothing else.
The first visible effect that the disappointment had, was to stretch Lady Verner on a sick bed. She fell into a low, nervous state of prostration, and her irritability—it must be confessed—was great. But for this illness, Lionel would have been away. Thrown now upon his own resources, he looked steadily into the future, and strove to chalk out a career for himself; one by which—as he had said to Lucy Tempest—he might get bread and cheese. Of course, at Lionel Verner’s age, and reared to no profession, unfamiliar with habits of business, that was easier thought of than done. He had no particular talent for literature; he believed that, if he tried his hand at that, the bread might come, but the cheese would be doubtful—although he saw men with even less aptitude for it than he, turning to it and embracing it with all the confidence in the world, as if it were an ever-open resource for all, when other
