Verner's Pride. Mrs. Henry Wood
"Perhaps you would prefer this?"
"This" was a very low seat indeed—in point of fact, Lady Verner's footstool. He had spoke in jest, but she waited for no second permission, drew it close to the fire, and sat down upon it. Lionel looked at her, his lips and eyes dancing.
"Possibly you would have preferred the rug?"
"Yes, I should," answered she frankly, "It is what we did at the rectory. Between the lights, on a winter's evening, we were allowed to do what we pleased for twenty minutes, and we used to sit down on the rug before the fire, and talk."
"Mrs. Cust, also?" asked Lionel.
"Not Mrs. Cust; you are laughing at me. If she came in, and saw us, she would say we were too old to sit there, and should be better on chairs. But we liked the rug best."
"What had you used to talk of?"
"Of everything, I think. About the poor; Mr. Cust's poor, you know; and the village, and our studies, and—But I don't think I must tell you that," broke off Lucy, laughing merrily at her own thoughts.
"Yes, you may," said Lionel.
"It was about that poor old German teacher of ours. We used to play her such tricks, and it was round the fire that we planned them. But she is very good," added Lucy, becoming serious, and lifting her eyes to Lionel, as if to bespeak his sympathy for the German teacher.
"Is she?"
"She was always patient and kind. The first time Lady Verner lets me go to a shop, I mean to buy her a warm winter cloak. Hers is so thin. Do you think I could get her one for two pounds?"
"I don't know at all," smiled Lionel. "A greatcoat for me would cost more than two pounds."
"I have two sovereigns left of my pocket-money, besides some silver. I hope it will buy a cloak. It is Lady Verner who will have the management of my money, is it not, now that I have left Mrs. Cust's?"
"I believe so."
"I wonder how much she will allow me for myself?" continued Lucy, gazing up at Lionel with a serious expression of inquiry, as if the question were a momentous one.
"I think cloaks for old teachers ought to be apart," cried Lionel. "They should not come out of your pocket-money."
"Oh, but I like them to do so. I wish I had a home of my own!—as I shall have when papa returns to Europe. I should invite her to me for the holidays, and give her nice dinners always, and buy her some nice clothes, and send her back with her poor old heart happy."
"Invite whom?"
"Fraulein Müller. Her father was a gentleman of good position, and he somehow lost his inheritance. When he died she found it out—there was not a shilling for her, instead of a fortune, as she had always thought. She was over forty then, and she had to come to England and begin teaching for a living. She is fifty now, and nearly all she gets she sends to Heidelberg to her poor sick sister. I wonder how much good warm cloaks do cost?"
Lucy Tempest spoke the last sentence dreamily. She was evidently debating the question in her own mind. Her small white hands rested inertly upon her pink dress, her clear face with its delicate bloom was still, her eyes were bent on the fire. But that Lionel's heart was elsewhere, it might have gone out, there and then, to that young girl and her attractive simplicity.
"What a pretty child you are!" involuntarily broke from him.
Up came those eyes to him, soft and luminous, their only expression being surprise, not a shade of vanity.
"I am not a child; why do you call me one? But Mrs. Cust said you would all be taking me for a child, until you knew me."
"How old are you?" asked Lionel.
"I was eighteen last September."
"Eighteen!" involuntarily repeated Lionel.
"Yes; eighteen. We had a party on my birthday. Mr. Cust gave me a most beautifully bound copy of Thomas à Kempis; he had had it bound on purpose. I will show it to you when my books are unpacked. You would like Mr. Cust, if you knew him. He is an old man now, and he has white hair. He is twenty years older than Mrs. Cust; but he is so good!"
"How is it," almost vehemently broke forth Lionel, "that you are so different from others?"
"I don't know. Am I different?"
"So different—so different—that—that—"
"What is the matter with me?" she asked timidly, almost humbly, the delicate colour in her cheeks deepening to crimson.
"There is nothing the matter with you," he answered, smiling; "a good thing if there were as little the matter with everybody else. Do you know that I never saw any one whom I liked so much at first sight as I like you, although you appear to me only as a child? If I call here often I shall grow to love you almost as much as I love my sister Decima."
"Is not this your home?"
"No. My home is at Verner's Pride."
CHAPTER XII.
DR. WEST'S HOME.
The house of Dr. West was already lighted up. Gas at its front door, gas at its surgery door, gas inside its windows: no habitation in the place was ever so extensively lighted as Dr. West's. The house was inclosed with iron railings, and on its side—detached—was the surgery. A very low place, this surgery; you had to go down a step or two, and then plunge into a low door. In the time of the last tenant it had been used as a garden tool-house. It was a tolerably large room, and had a tolerably small window, which was in front, the door being on the side, opposite the side entrance of the house. A counter ran along the room at the back, and a table, covered with miscellaneous articles, stood on the right. Shelves were ranged completely round the room aloft, and a pair of steps, used for getting down the jars and bottles, rested in a corner. There was another room behind it, used exclusively by Dr. West.
Seated on the counter, pounding desperately away at something in a mortar, as if his life depended on it, was a peculiar-looking gentleman in shirt-sleeves. Very tall, very thin, with legs and arms that bore the appearance of being too long even for his tall body, great hands and feet, a thin face dark and red, a thin aquiline nose, black hair, and black prominent eyes that seemed to be always on the stare—there sat he, his legs dangling and his fingers working. A straightforward, honest, simple fellow looked he, all utility and practicalness—if there is such a word. One, plain in all ways.
It was Janus Verner—never, in the memory of anybody, called anything but "Jan"—second and youngest son of Lady Verner, brother to Lionel. He brother to courtly Lionel, to stately Decima, son to refined Lady Verner? He certainly was; though Lady Verner in her cross moods would declare that Jan must have been changed at nurse—an assertion without foundation, since he had been nursed at home under her own eye. Never in his life had he been called anything but Jan; address him as Janus, or as Mr. Verner, and it may be questioned if Jan would have answered to it. People called him "droll," and, if to be of plain, unvarnished manners and speech is to be droll, Jan decidedly was so. Some said Jan was a fool, some said he was a bear. Lady Verner did not accord him any great amount of favour herself. She had tried to make Jan what she called a gentleman, to beat into him suavity, gracefulness, tact, gloss of speech and bearing, something between a Lord Chesterfield and a Sir Roger de Coverley; and she had been obliged lo give it up as a hopeless job. Jan was utterly irreclaimable: Nature had made him plain and straightforward, and so he remained. But there was many a one that the world would bow down to as a model, whose intrinsic worth was poor compared to unoffending Jan's. Lady Verner would tell Jan he was undutiful. Jan tried to be as dutiful to