that perhaps some friend or other of his prosperity might procure for him a government situation. A consulship, or vice-consulship abroad, for instance. Any thing abroad: not to avoid the payment of his creditors, for, whether abroad or at home, Lionel would be sure to pay them, if by dint of pinching himself he could find the means: but that he might run away from home and mortification, take his wife, and make the best of her. But consulships and other government appointments are more easily talked of than obtained: as anybody, who has tried for them under difficulties, knows. Moreover, although Lionel had never taken a prominent part in politics, the Verner interest had always been given against the government party, then in power. He did not see his way at all clear before him: and he found that it was to be still further obstructed on another score.
After thinking and planning and plotting till his brain was nearly bewildered, he at length made up his mind to go to London, and see whether anything could be done. With regard to his creditors, he must lay the state of the case frankly before them, and say: “Will you leave me my liberty, and wait? You will get nothing by putting me in prison, for I have no money of my own, and no friend to come forward and advance it to clear me. Give me time, accord me my liberty, and I will endeavour to pay you off by degrees.” It was, at any rate, a straightforward mode of going to work, and Lionel determined to adopt it. Before mentioning it to his wife, he spoke to Lady Verner.
And then occurred the obstruction. Lady Verner, though she did not oppose the plan, declined to take charge of Sibylla, or to retain her in her house during Lionel’s absence.
“I could not take her with me,” said Lionel. “There would be more objections to it than one. In the first place, I have not the means; in the second—”
He came to an abrupt pause, and turned the words off. He had been about incautiously to say, “She would most likely, once in London, run me into deeper debt.” But Lionel had kept the fact of her having run him into debt at all, a secret in his own breast. Whatever may have been his wife’s faults and failings, he did not make it his business to proclaim them to the world. She proclaimed enough herself, to his grievous chagrin, without his helping.
“Listen, Lionel,” said Lady Verner. “You know what my feeling always was with regard to your wife. A closer intercourse has not tended to change that feeling, or to lessen my dislike of her. Now you must forgive my saying this; it is but a passing allusion. Stay on with me as long as you like; stay on for ever, if you will, and she shall stay; but if you leave, she must leave. I should be sorry to have her here, even for a week, without you. In fact, I would not.”
“It would be quite impossible for me to take her to London,” deliberated Lionel. “I can be there alone at a very trifling cost; but a lady involves so much expense. There must be lodgings, which are dear; and living, which is dear; and attendance, and—and—many other sources of outlay.”
“And pray what should you do, allowing that you went alone, without lodgings and living and attendance, and all the rest of it?” asked Lady Verner. “Take a room at one of their model lodging-houses, at half-a-crown a week, and live upon the London air?”
“Not very healthy air for fastidious lungs,” observed Lionel with a smile. “I don’t quite know how I should manage for myself, mother; except that I should take care to condense my expenses into the very narrowest nucleus that man ever condensed them yet.”
“Not you, Lionel. You never were taught that sort of close economy.”
“True,” he answered. “But the most efficient of all instructors has come to me now—necessity. I wish you would increase my gratitude and my obligation to you by allowing Sibylla to remain here. In a little time, if I have luck, I may make a home for her in London.”
“Lionel, it cannot be,” was the reply of Lady Verner. And he knew when she spoke in that quiet tone of emphasis, that it could not be. “Why should you go to London?” she resumed. “My opinion is, that you will do no good by going; that it is a wild-goose scheme you have got in your head altogether. I think I could tell you a better.”
“What is yours?”
“Remain contentedly here with me until the return of Colonel Tempest. He may even now be on his road. He will no doubt be able to get you some civil appointment in one of the Presidencies; he has influence here with the people that have to do with India. That will be the best plan, Lionel. You are always wishing you could go abroad. Stay here quietly until he comes; I should like you to stay, and I will put up with your wife.”
Some allusion, or allusions, in the words brought the flush to Lionel’s cheeks.
“I cannot reconcile it to my conscience, mother, to remain on here, a burthen upon your small income.”
“But it is not a burthen, Lionel,” she said. “It is rather a help.”
“How can that be?” he asked.
“So long as Jan pays.”
“So long as Jan pays!” echoed Lionel, in astonishment. “Does Jan—pay?”
“Yes he does. I thought you knew it? Jan came here the day you arrived—don’t you remember it, when he had the pins in his shirt? Decima had invited him to dinner, and he came in ten minutes before it, and called me out of the room here, where I was with Lucy. The first thing he did was to tumble into my lap a roll of bank-notes, which he had been to Heartburg to get. A hundred and forty pounds, it was; the result of his savings since he joined Dr. West in partnership. The next thing he said was, that all his own share of the profits of the practice, he should bring to me to make up for the cost of you and Sibylla. Jan said he had wanted you to go to him; but Sibylla would not consent to it.”
Lionel’s veins coursed on with a glow. Jan slaving and working for him!
“I never knew this,” he cried.
