Roy did not accept the offered seat. He stood in discomfiture, saying something to the effect that he'd change his mode of dealing with the men, would do all he could to give satisfaction to his master, Mr. Verner, if the latter would consent to continue him on.
"You must know, yourself, that I am not likely to do it," returned Lionel briefly. "But I do not wish to be harsh, Roy—I trust I never shall be harsh with any one—and if you choose to accept of work on the estate, you can do so."
"You'll not continue me in my post over the brick-yard, sir—over the men generally?"
"No," replied Lionel, "Perhaps the less we go into those past matters the better. I have no objection to speak of them, Roy; but, if I do, you will hear some home truths that may not be palatable. You can have work if you wish for it; and good pay."
"As one of the men, sir?" asked Roy, a shade of grumbling in his tone.
"As one of the superior men!"
Roy hesitated. The blow had fallen; but it was only what he feared. "Might I ask as you'd give me a day to consider it over, sir?" he presently said.
"A dozen days if you choose. The work is always to be had; it will not run away; if you prefer to spend time deliberating upon the point, it is your affair, not mine."
"Thank ye, sir. Then I'll think it over. It'll be hard lines, coming down to be a workman, where I've been, as may be said, a sort of master."
"Roy."
Roy turned back. He had been moving away. "Yes, sir."
"I shall expect you to pay rent for your cottage now, if you remain in it. Mr. Verner, I believe, threw it into your post; made it part of your perquisites. Mrs. Verner has, no doubt, done the same. But that is at an end. I can show no more favour to you than I do to others."
"I'll think it over, sir," concluded Roy, his tone as sullen a one as he dared let appear. And he departed.
Before the week was out, he came again to Verner's Pride, and said he would accept the work, and pay rent for the cottage; but he hoped Mr. Verner would name a fair rent.
"I should not name an unfair one, Roy," was the reply of Lionel. "You will pay the same that others pay, whose dwellings are the same size as yours. Mr Verner's scale of rents is not high, but low, as you know; I shall not alter it."
And so Roy continued on the estate.
CHAPTER XXXII.
"IT'S APPLEPLEXY."
A short period elapsed. One night Jan Verner, upon getting into bed, found he need not have taken the trouble, for the night-bell rang, and Jan had to get up again. He opened his window and called out to know who was there. A boy came round from the surgery door into view, and Jan recognised him for the youngest son of his brother's gamekeeper, a youth of twelve. He said his mother was ill.
"What's the matter with her?" asked Jan.
"Please, sir, she's took bad in the stomach. She's a-groaning awful. Father thinks she'll die."
Jan dressed himself and started off, carrying with him a dose of tincture of opium. When he arrived, however, he found the woman so violently sick and ill, that he suspected it did not arise simply from natural causes. "What has she been eating?" inquired Jan.
"Some late mushrooms out of the fields."
"Ah, that's just it," said Jan. And he knew the woman had been poisoned. He took a leaf from his pocket-book, wrote a rapid word on it, and ordered the boy to carry it to the house, and give it to Mr. Cheese.
"Now, look you, Jack," said he, "if you want your mother to get well, you'll go there and back as fast as your legs can carry you. I can do little till you bring me what I have sent for. Go past the Willow Pool, and straight across to my house."
The boy looked aghast at the injunction. "Past the Willow Pool!" echoed he. "I'd not go past there, sir, at night, for all the world."
"Why not?" questioned Jan.
"I'd see Rachel Frost's ghost, may be," returned Jack, his round eyes open with perplexity.
The conceit of seeing a ghost amused Jan beyond everything. He sat down on a high press that was in the kitchen, and grinned at the boy. "What would the ghost do to you?" cried he.
Jack Broom could not say. All he knew was that neither he, nor a good many more, had gone near that pond at night since the report had arisen (which, of course, it had, simultaneously with the death) that Rachel's ghost was to be seen there.
"Wouldn't you go to save your mother?" cried Jan.
"I'd—I'd not go to be made winner of the leg of mutton atop of a greased pole," responded the boy, in a mortal fright lest Jan should send him.
"You are a nice son, Mr. Jack! A brave young man, truly!"
"Jim Hook, he was a-going by the pond one night, and he see'd it," cried the boy earnestly. "It don't take two minutes longer to cut down Clay Lane, please, sir."
"Be off, then," said Jan, "and see how quick you can be. What has put such a thing into his head?" he presently asked of the gamekeeper, who was hard at work preparing hot water.
"Little fools!" ejaculated the man. "I think the report first took its rise, sir, through Robin Frost's going to the pond of a moonlight night, and walking about on its brink."
"Robert Frost did!" cried Jan. "What did he do that for?"
"What indeed, sir! It did no good, as I told him more than once, when I came upon him there. He has not been lately, I think. Folks get up a talk that Robin went there to meet his sister's spirit, and it put the youngsters into a fright."
Back came Mr. Jack in an incredibly short time. He could not have come much quicker, had he dashed right through the pool. Jan set himself to his work, and did not leave the woman until she was better. That was the best of Jan Verner. He paid every atom as much attention to the poor as he did to the rich. Jan never considered who or what his patients were: all his object was, to get them well.
His nearest way home lay past the pool, and he took it: he did not fear poor Rachel's ghost. It was a sharpish night, bright, somewhat of a frost. As Jan neared the pool, he turned his head towards it and half stopped, gazing on its still waters. He had been away when the catastrophe happened; but the circumstances had been detailed to him. "How it would startle Jack and a few of those timid ones," said he aloud, "if some night—"
"Is that you, sir?"
Some persons, with nerves less serene than Jan's, might have started at the sudden interruption there and then. Not so Jan. He turned round with composure, and saw Bennet, the footman from Verner's Pride. The man had come up hastily from behind the hedge.
"I have been to your house, sir, and they told me you were at the gamekeeper's, so I was hastening there. My mistress is taken ill, sir."
"Is it a fit?" cried Jan, remembering his fears and prognostications, with regard to Mrs. Verner.
"It's worse than that, sir; it's appleplexy. Leastways, sir, my master and Mrs. Tynn's afraid that it is. She looks like dead, sir, and there's froth on her mouth."
Jan waited for no more. He turned short round, and flew by the nearest path to Verner's Pride.
The evil had come. Apoplexy it indeed was, and Jan feared that all his efforts to remedy it would be of no avail.
"It was by the merest chance that I found it out, sir," Mrs. Tynn said to him. "I happened to wake up, and I thought how quiet my mistress was lying; mostly she might be heard ever so far off when she was asleep. I got up, sir, and took the rushlight out of the shade, and looked at her. And then I saw what had happened, and went and called Mr. Lionel."
"Can you restore her, Jan?" whispered Lionel.
Jan made no reply. He had his own private opinion; but, whatever that may have been, he set himself to the task in right earnest.
She never rallied. She lived only until the dawn of morning. Scarcely had the clock told eight, when the death-bell went booming over the village; the bell of that very church which had recently been so merry for the succession of Lionel. And when people came running from far and near to inquire for whom the passing-bell was ringing out, they hushed their voices and their footsteps when informed that it was for Mrs. Verner.
Verily, within the last year, Death had made himself at home at Verner's Pride!
CHAPTER XXXIII.
JAN'S REMEDY FOR A COLD
A cold bright day in mid-winter. Luncheon was just over at Deerham Court, and Lady Verner, Decima, and Lucy Tempest had gathered round the fire in the dining-room. Lucy had a cold. She laughed at it; said she was used to colds; but Lady Verner had insisted upon her wrapping herself in a shawl, and not stirring out of the dining-room—which was the warmest room in the house—for the day. So there reclined Lucy in state, in an arm-chair with cushions; half laughing at being made into an invalid, half rebelling at it.
Lady Verner sat opposite to her. She wore a rich black silk dress—the mourning for Mrs. Verner—and a white lace cap of the finest guipure. The white gloves on her hands were without a wrinkle, and her curiously fine handkerchief lay on her lap. Lady Verner could indulge her taste for snowy gloves and for delicate handkerchiefs now, untroubled by the thought of the money they cost. The addition to her income, which she had spurned from Stephen Verner, she accepted willingly from Lionel. Lionel was liberal as a man and as a son. He would have given the half of his fortune to his mother, and not said, "It is a gift." Deerham Court had its carriage and horses now, and Deerham Court had its additional servants. Lady Verner visited and received company, and the look of care had gone from her face, and the querulousness from her tone.
But it was in Lady Verner's nature to make a trouble of things; and if she could not do it in a large way, she must do it in a small. To-day, occurred this cold of Lucy's, and that afforded scope for Lady Verner. She sent for Jan as soon as breakfast was over, in defiance of the laughing protestations of Lucy. But Jan had not made his appearance yet, and Lady Verner waxed wroth.
He was coming in now—now, as the servant was carrying out the luncheon-tray, entering by his usual mode—the back-door, and nearly knocking over the servant and tray in his haste, as his long legs strode to the dining-room. Lady Verner had left off reproaching Jan for using the servants' entrance, finding it waste of breath: Jan would have come down the chimney with the sweeps, had it saved him a minute's time. "Who's ill?" asked he.
Lady Verner answered the question by a sharp reprimand, touching Jan's tardiness.
"I can't be in two places at once," good-humouredly replied Jan. "I have been with one patient since four o'clock this morning, until five minutes ago. Who is it that's ill?"
Lucy explained her ailments, giving Jan her own view of them, that there was nothing the matter with her but a bit of a cold.
"Law!" contemptuously returned Jan. "If I didn't think somebody must be dying! Cheese said they'd been after me about six times!"
"If you don't like to attend Miss Tempest, you can let it alone," said Lady Verner. "I can send elsewhere."
"I'll attend anybody that I'm wanted to attend," said Jan. "Where d'ye feel the symptoms of the cold?" asked he of Lucy. "In the head or chest?"
"I am beginning to feel them a little here," replied Lucy, touching her chest.
"Only beginning to feel them, Miss Lucy?"
"Only beginning, Jan."
"Well, then, you just wring out a long strip of rag in cold water, and put it round your neck, letting the ends rest on the chest," said Jan. "A double piece, from two to three inches broad. It must be covered outside with thin waterproof skin to keep the wet in; you know what I mean; Decima's got some; oil-skin's too thick. And get a lot of toast and water, or lemonade; any liquid you like; and sip a drop of it every minute, letting it go down your throat slowly. You'll soon get rid of your sore chest if you do this; and you'll have no cough."
Lady Verner listened to these directions of Jan's in unqualified amazement. She had been accustomed to the very professional remedies of Dr. West. Decima laughed. "Jan," said she, "I could fancy an old woman prescribing this, but not a doctor."
"It'll cure," returned Jan. "It will prevent the cough coming on; and prevention's better than cure. You try it at once, Miss Lucy; and you'll soon see. You will know then what to do if you catch cold in future."
"Jan," interposed Lady Verner, "I consider the very mention of such remedies beneath the dignity of a medical man."
Jan opened his eyes. "But if they are the best remedies, mother?"
"At any rate, Jan, if this is your fashion of prescribing, you will not fill your pockets," said Decima.
"I don't want to fill my pockets by robbing people," returned plain Jan. "If I know a remedy that costs nothing, why shouldn't I let my patients have the benefit of it, instead of charging them for drugs that won't do half the good?"
"Jan," said Lucy, "if it cost gold I should try it. I have great faith in what you say."
"All right," replied Jan. "But it must be done at once, mind. If you let the cold get ahead first, it will not be so efficacious. And now good-day to you all, for I must be off to my patients. Good-bye, mother."
Away went Jan. And, amidst much laughter from Lucy, the wet "rag," Jan's elegant phrase for it, was put round her neck, and covered up. Lionel came in, and they amused him by reciting Jan's prescription.
"It is this house which has given her the cold," grumbled Lady Verner, who invariably laid faults and misfortunes upon something or somebody. "The servants are for ever opening that side-door, and then there comes a current of air throughout the passage. Lionel, I am not sure but I shall leave Deerham Court."
Lionel leaned against the mantel-piece, a smile upon his face. He had completely recovered his good looks, scared away though they had been for a time by his illness. He was in deep mourning for Mrs. Verner. Decima looked up, surprised at Lady Verner's last sentence.
"Leave Deerham Court, mamma! When you are so much attached to it!"
"I don't dislike it," acknowledged Lady Verner. "But it suited me better when we were living quietly, than it does now. If I could find a larger house with the same conveniences, and in an agreeable situation, I might leave this."
Decima did not reply. She felt sure that her mother was attached to the house, and would never quit it. Her eyes said as much as they encountered Lionel's.
"I wish my mother would leave Deerham Court!" he said aloud.
Lady Verner turned to him. "Why should you wish it, Lionel?"
"I wish you would leave it to come to me, mother. Verner's Pride wants a mistress."
"It will not find one in me," said Lady Verner. "Were you an old man, Lionel, I might then come. Not as it is."
"What difference can my age make?" asked he.
"Every difference," said Lady Verner. "Were you an old man, you might not be thinking of getting married; as it is, you will be. Your wife will reign at Verner's Pride, Lionel."
Lionel made no answer.
"You will be marrying sometime, I suppose?" reiterated Lady Verner, with emphasis.
"I suppose I shall be," replied Lionel; and his eyes, as he spoke, involuntarily strayed to Lucy. She caught the look, and blushed vividly.
"How much of that do you intend to drink, Miss Lucy?" asked Lionel, as she sipped the tumbler of lemonade, at her elbow.
"Ever so many tumblers of it," she answered. "Jan said I was to keep sipping it all day long. The water, going down slowly, heals the chest."
"I believe if Jan told you to drink boiling water, you'd do it, Lucy," cried Lady Verner. "You seem to fall in with all he says."
"Because I like him, Lady Verner. Because I have faith in him; and if Jan prescribes a thing, I know that he has faith in it."
"It is not displaying a refined taste to like Jan," observed Lady Verner, intending the words as a covert reprimand to Lucy.
But Lucy stood up for Jan. Even at the dread of openly disagreeing with Lady Verner, Lucy would not be unjust to one whom she deemed of sterling worth.
"I like Jan very much," said she resolutely, in her championship. "There's nobody I like so well as Jan, Lady Verner."
Lady Verner made a slight movement with her shoulders. It was almost as much as to say that Lucy was growing as hopelessly incorrigible as Jan. Lionel turned to Lucy.
"Nobody you like so well as Jan, did you say?"
Poor Lucy! If the look of Lionel, just before, had brought the hot blush to her cheek, that blush was nothing compared to the glowing crimson which mantled there now. She had not been thinking of one sort of liking when she so spoke of Jan: the words had come forth in the honest simplicity of her heart.
Did Lionel read the signs aright, as her eyes fell before his? Very probably. A smile stole over his lips.
"I do like Jan very much," stammered Lucy, essaying to mend the matter. "I may like him, I suppose? There's no harm in it."
"Oh! no harm, certainly," spoke Lady Verner, with a spice of irony. "I never thought Jan could be a favourite before. Not being fastidiously polished yourself, Lucy—forgive my saying it—you entertain, I conclude, a fellow feeling for Jan."
Lucy—for Jan's sake—would not be beaten.
"Don't you think it is better to be like Jan, Lady Verner, than—than—like Dr. West, for instance?"
"In what way?" returned Lady Verner.
"Jan is so true," debated Lucy, ignoring the question.
"And Dr. West was not, I suppose," retorted Lady Verner. "He wrote false prescriptions, perhaps? Gave false advice?"
Lucy looked a little foolish. "I will tell you the difference, as it seems to me, between Jan and other people," she said. "Jan is like a rough diamond—real within, unpolished without—but a genuine diamond withal. Many others are but the imitation stone—glittering outside, false within."
Lionel was amused.
"Am I one of the false ones, Miss Lucy?"
She took the question literally.
"No; you are true," she answered, shaking her head, and speaking with grave earnestness.
"Lucy, my dear, I would not espouse Jan's cause so warmly, were I you," advised Lady Verner. "It might be misconstrued."
"How so?" simply asked Lucy.
"It might be thought that you—pray excuse the common vulgarity of the suggestion—were in love with Jan."
"In love with Jan!" Lucy paused for a moment after the words, and then burst into a merry fit of laughter. "Oh, Lady Verner! I cannot fancy anybody falling in love with Jan. I don't think he would know what to do."
"I don't think he would," quietly replied Lady Verner.
A peal at the courtyard bell, and the letting down the steps of a carriage. Visitors for Lady Verner. They were shown to the drawing-room, and the servant came in.
"The Countess of Elmsley and Lady Mary, my lady."
Lady Verner rose with alacrity. They were favourite friends of hers—nearly the only close friends she had made in her retirement.
"Lucy, you must not venture into the drawing-room," she stayed to say. "The room is colder than this. Come."
The last "come" was addressed conjointly to her son and daughter. Decima responded to it, and followed; Lionel remained where he was.
"The cold room would not hurt me, but I am glad not to go," began Lucy, subsiding into a more easy tone, a more social manner, than she ventured on in the presence of Lady Verner. "I think morning visiting the greatest waste of time! I wonder who invented it?"
"Somebody who wanted to kill time," answered Lionel.
"It is not as though friends, who really cared for each other, met and talked. The calls are made just for form's sake, and for nothing else, I will never fall into it when I am my own mistress."
"When is that to be?" asked Lionel, smiling.
"Oh! I don't know," she answered, looking up at him in all confiding simplicity. "When papa comes home, I suppose."
Lionel crossed over to where she was sitting.
"Lucy, I thank you for your partisanship of Jan," he said, in a low, earnest tone. "I do not believe anybody living knows his worth."
"Yes; for I do," she replied, her eyes sparkling.
"Only, don't you get to like him too much—as Lady Verner hinted," continued Lionel, his eyes dancing with merriment at his own words.
Lucy's eyelashes fell on her hot cheek. "Please not to be so foolish," she answered, in a pleading tone.
"Or a certain place—that has been mentioned this morning—might have to go without a mistress for good," he whispered.
What made him say it? It is true he spoke in a light, joking tone; but the words were not justifiable, unless he meant to follow them up seriously in future. He did mean to do so when he spoke them.
Decima came in, sent by Lady Verner to demand Lionel's attendance.
"I am coming directly," replied Lionel. And Decima went back again.
"You ought to take Jan to live at Verner's Pride," said Lucy to him, the words unconsciously proving that she had understood Lionel's allusion to it. "If he were my brother, I would not let him be always slaving himself at his profession."
"If he were your brother, Lucy, you would find that Jan would slave just as he does now, in spite of you. Were Jan to come into Verner's Pride to-morrow, through my death, I really believe he would let it, and live on where he does, and doctor the parish to the end of time."
"Will Verner's Pride go to Jan after you?"
"That depends. It would, were I to die as I am now, a single man. But I may have a wife and children some time, Lucy."
"So you may," said Lucy, filling up her tumbler from the jug of lemonade. "Please to go into the drawing-room now, or Lady Verner will be angry. Mary Elmsley's there, you know."
She gave him a saucy glance from her soft bright eyes. Lionel laughed.
"Who made you so wise about Mary Elmsley, young lady?"
"Lady Verner," was Lucy's answer, her voice subsiding into a confidential tone. "She tells us all about it, me and Decima, when we are sitting by the fire of an evening. She is to be the mistress of Verner's Pride."
"Oh, indeed," said Lionel. "She is, is she! Shall I tell you something, Lucy?"
"Well?"
"If that mistress-ship—is there such a word?—ever comes to pass, I shall not be the master of it."
Lucy looked pleased. "That is just what Decima says. She says it to Lady Verner. I wish you would go to them."
"So I will. Good-bye. I shall not come in again. I have a hundred and one things to do this afternoon."
He took her hand and held it. She, ever courteous of manner, simple though she was, rose and stood before him to say her adieu, her eyes raised to his, her pretty face upturned.
Lionel gazed down upon it, and, as he had forgotten himself once before, so he now forgot himself again. He clasped it to him with a sudden movement of affection, and left on it some fervent kisses, whispering tenderly—
"Take care of yourself, my darling Lucy!"
Leaving her to make the best of the business, Mr. Lionel proceeded to the drawing-room. A few minutes' stay in it, and then he pleaded an engagement, and departed.