THE GREATER SORROW.
At the very time when Mabel Trecarrel was singing to tease Audley,
Sybil was beginning a song of a very different character and calibre
to soothe or amuse her mamma. It was a grand old Hungarian ballad,
with an accompaniment like a crash of trumpets at times; and was one
she had picked up during their wanderings on the banks of the Danube;
but she had only got the length of the first two verses, when her
mother's tears arrested her.
"Was it the vine with clusters bright
That clung round Buda's stateliest tower?
No, 'twas a lady fair and white,
Who hung around an armed knight;
It was their sad, their parting hour.
"They had been wedded in their youth,
Together they had spent life's bloom;
That hearts so long entwined by truth
Asunder should be torn in ruth--
It was a cruel and boding doom!"
"Oh cease, Sybil," said Constance; "cease; it was your papa's
favourite."
"Then why cease, mamma?"
"He is not here, and I feel I know not what--a foreboding--a
superstition of the heart."
So Sybil closed her piano, and it was long, long ere she opened it
again.
Three weeks had now elapsed since the Montreal steamer _Admiral_ (his
anticipated departure by which Richard Trevelyan fully notified to
Constance) had been due at Blackwall, and yet there were no tidings
of her, so insurances went up, and underwriters looked grave. No
Atlantic cables had been laid as yet between Britain and America,
though such things were talked of as being barely possible. The next
steamer announced that the _Admiral_ had duly sailed at her stated
time; so, save the letter which contained the pleasant odds and ends
concerning Montreal and their early lover days, poor Constance saw
her husband's writing no more.
Her surmises were endless, and the worthy rector lent his inventive
aid to add to them. Might not the ship have met with some accident
to her engines, and put back slowly under canvas to Montreal, the
Azores, or elsewhere?
Lost--was the word that hovered on her lips and trembled in her
heart--LOST! Oh, that was not to be thought of. Yet if it were so,
some must have survived to tell the terrible story; some might have
been picked up, famished and weary, by a passing ship, and taken
perhaps to a distant region, Heaven alone knew where. Such events
happened every day on the mighty world of waters; so as week
succeeded week, the familiarity with suspense, sorrow and horror
seemed to become greater; till ideas began to confirm themselves, and
probabilities to be steadily faced, that she would have shrunk from
in utter woe but a month before!
Then came those cruel and shadowy rumours, by which the public are
usually tantalised, and the relatives of the missing are
tortured--stories of wrecks passed, steamers abandoned--the masts
gone, funnel standing, and so forth, in this, that or the other
latitude; but all vague and never verified. How many stately ships
have perished at sea, of which such stories have been told! In those
days, it was the _President_, the great, "the lost Atlantic steamer,"
on the fate of which at least one novel and several dramas and songs
have been written; and but lately it was the turret ship _Captain_,
with her five hundred picked British seamen, that went down into the
deep, a few loose spars alone remaining to tell of their sorrowful
fate.
Constance and her daughter were inspired by successive hope that he
might have survived, and fear that he had perished--too surely
perished; and these alternations were agony, for "the promises of
Hope are sweeter than roses in the bud, and far more flattering to
expectation; but the threatenings of Fear are a terror to the heart."
At last there came a fatal day, when a passage cut from a London
newspaper was enclosed to Constance by Audley Trevelyan, who had been
constrained to visit and remain in town with his family.
It contained distinct details of the total wreck of the _Admiral_,
which had foundered in a gale. She had been heavily pooped by
successive seas, and had gone down with all on board, save the watch
on deck, who had effected their escape in one of the quarter-boats,
and been picked up in a most exhausted state, by one of Her Majesty's
ships. All the passengers had been drowned in their cabins, and to
this account a list of their names was appended.
"It is very remarkable, my dear madam," wrote the unconscious Audley,
"that I do not find the name of Captain Devereaux borne in this list;
though we have all the sorrow to see that of my uncle Richard, Lord
Lamorna, whose American trip has been to us all a source of mystery."
Constance read the printed list with staring stony eyes, and a heart
that stood still!
Mr. Downie Trevelyan had perused it carefully too, with the aid of
his gold double-eye-glass, and an unfathomable smile had spread over
his sleek legal visage while he did so.
"Oh, my husband--my Richard--so innocent and true! Gone--gone, and
your children and I are left--doomed to shame and
sorrow--doomed--doomed!" wailed Constance in a piercing voice, as
with her fingers interlaced across her face she cast herself upon a
sofa in despair.
"Mamma," urged the terrified Sybil, "what _do_ you mean? Does not
dear Audley write that papa's name is _not_ in the list; so he cannot
have sailed in that unhappy ship."
"My poor child, you know not what you say," moaned Constance, without
looking or altering her position, for dark and bitter was the
desolation of the heart which fell on her.
In vain did poor Sybil caress and hang over her in utter
bewilderment, and read and re-read Audley's letter without being able
to comprehend the agitation of her mother, who answered nothing. For
the time she was overwhelmed by the immensity of their calamity--by
gloom and speechless sorrow.
But one thought was ever present--there was a face she should never
more behold--a voice she never more should hear; the great ship going
down in the dark; "the passengers drowned in their cabins," by the
furious midnight sea; and he who loved her so well, who had crossed
the Atlantic to bring back the full and legal proofs of their
nuptials, was now in the shadowy land--the Promised Land--where there
are neither marriages nor giving in marriage; and where there can be
no graves either in the soil or in the sea.
With this calamity must many others come!
Richard's means died with him; the proofs of her marriage and of her
children's position had perished with him too. Even the newspapers
in their notices of the event, were careful to record that "as Lord
Lamorna (who had so lately succeeded to that ancient title) died a
bachelor, he would be heired by his brother, the eminent barrister,
Mr. Downie Trevelyan, now twelfth Lord Lamorna of Rhoscadzhel, in the
duchy of Cornwall."
There was the usual obituary notice in a popular illustrated paper,
with a wood-cut of the late lord's arms, the demi-horse _argent_
issuing from the sea, the coronet, the wild cat, and the motto _Le
jour viendra_.
Even Derrick Braddon's name was recorded as among the list of the
drowned; so the sole surviving witness of the hasty and secret
marriage had perished with his master.
Sybil had answered Audley's letter--Constance was quite incapable of
doing so--urging him piteously, for the love he bore her, to make
what other inquiries he could at Lloyd's, the shipping offices and
elsewhere, as her mamma seemed to be distracted; and promptly a reply
came, but not in Audley's handwriting, though it bore the London
post-mark. It was addressed to her mamma, who in a weak and
breathless voice desired her to read it; and great were the terror
and perplexity of the girl, when she perused the following
sentence--for one contained the whole matter.
"CHAMBERS, TEMPLE.
"MADAM,
"A letter written by your daughter and bearing the Porthellick
postmark, has just fallen into my hands; so I hereby beg to intimate
to you that my eldest son and heir, the Hon. Mr. Audley Trevelyan,
can hold no such intercourse as that document would seem to import,
or be on such terms of intimacy with a young woman who is destitute
of position, who has not a shilling in the world, and whose
parentage, family, and so forth--you cannot fail to understand
me--are matters of such extreme uncertainty, not to say worse; thus
you must endeavour to control her actions, as I shall those of my
son, who goes at once to join his regiment in India.
"I am yours, &c.
"LAMORNA.
"A copy kept."
"How dare this Lord Lamorna write to you thus, mamma?" asked Sybil,
her dark eyes flashing with unusual light; but the pale mother
answered only with her tears, and recalling now certain broken
sentences which had escaped her--sentences that seemed somewhat to
correspond painfully with the insulting tenor of the letter. Sybil,
after the first hours of excessive grief were past, said in a
composed voice, yet with tremulous lips,
"What does Lord Lamorna mean? Who are we, mamma? and what are we?"
Constance was silent, though each pulsation of her heart was a
veritable pang.
"Are we not Devereaux?"
"No."
"Who then?" urged Sybil, her pallor increasing while the silence or
pause that ensued was painful to both; to none more than the innocent
mother, the guarded secret of whose blameless life was now about to
be laid bare before her own child--a secret that seemed now to assume
the magnitude of a crime! All the care, doubt, anxiety, and mystery
of the past years had gone for nothing, and the sacrifice she had
made of herself, was now likely to recoil fearfully upon her, and
more than all upon her children.
In broken accents, with her aching head reclined on Sybil's breast,
she told all that the reader already knows; the insane pride of birth
and family which inspired the old lord, his suspicions and threats,
the long necessity for consequent secrecy; and Sybil heard all this
strange story with intense bewilderment.
Could she realise it--take it all into her comprehension? Her mother
was a lady of title--her brother Denzil was the real Lord Lamorna,
she herself was not a Devereaux, but a Trevelyan like Audley--and he,
Audley, who loved her so, was her own cousin!
This revelation then explained all to Sybil; all of their wanderings
in strange places, and sudden departures from them, when unwelcome
tourists who might have recognised Richard Trevelyan came, their
secluded life at Porthellick, their marked avoidance of the
Trecarrels and others, and on the whole poor Sybil felt cut to the
heart, and inspired by not an atom of pride; yet she tenderly and
fondly embraced her mother with greater fervour than ever, for more
than ever did she feel that she must love her now.
"My poor papa drowned--drowned, unburied in the sea--passing away
from us without even the name by which we have known and loved him!"
exclaimed Sybil. "Oh why is God so cruel to us?"
"Alas, Sybil, we can but adore the decrees of Heaven, without seeking
to know more of them. This stroke is hard to bear, child--all the
harder that I have reason to fear--to dread, oh, my God, that more
than your papa's life has perished with him."
"More mamma; what can be more?"
"That which was dearer to him than life; the succession of
Denzil--the honour of us all!"
After a long pause, with a vague expression in her eyes, as if her
thoughts were travelling back into the years of the past, Sybil said,
"I had begun to suspect there was some unpleasant mystery about us."
"But affection and delicacy----"
"Both, dearest mamma sealed my lips and I was silent; but oh, to what
good end or purpose has it all been? By this, too surely is Audley
also lost to me."
"My poor child, he was your lover, and through me you think you lose
him. Oh pardon me, Sybil, darling, for I, your hapless mother, am
the cause of all this! Had your papa never seen, or known, or loved
me----"
"Do not say so, mamma dear," whispered Sybil as her mother's
tremulous lips were pressed on her throbbing brow.
"It was a plan your papa formed to save his inheritance for you and
Denzil, and already his brother claims all."
"It was a false plan, and see how it may fail us--nay already, to all
appearance has failed us."
"He is in his grave--if indeed the ocean can be called a grave."
"True, my darling papa--and I must not upbraid him, even in thought."
"If it is the will of God that I should suffer, His will be done!
But my children--my children!" cried the widow wildly, and she raised
her hands and her dark and beautiful but bloodshot eyes to Heaven;
"my brave and handsome Denzil, and my soft sweet Sybil, of what have
they been guilty, that shame and ruin, should fall on them?"
"Mamma," whispered Sybil, embracing her closely, "we must learn to
bear with resignation the woes we cannot help. But oh," added the
girl in her heart, "how am I to write to Denzil of all this sorrow,
and probably worse than sorrow and poverty?"