ALONE!
At last there came an evening which Sybil was never to forget.
She had been, for the tenth and last time, at the nearest
market-town, where, in the shop windows of a druggist, who combined
the dispensing of medicines with groceries, and the cares of a
circulating library with those of a post office, she had been fain to
display some of her sketches for sale, that she might procure certain
little comforts for her ailing mother in their penury. All had been
offered to the local public in succession, even to that one which
pourtrayed the lonely tarn and rock-pillar, where she had first met
Audley, when he came to apologise for his dog's intrusion (why keep
such a souvenir now?), and all had been offered in vain. Pleased
with the girl's beauty and sweetness of manner, the shopman willingly
enough displayed her productions (as decorations, perhaps) in his
windows; and there they had grown yellow, blistered, and fly-blown,
till they were completely spoiled. Each market-day she had hoped
that some enterprising Hobnail or Chawbacon might fancy one of her
sketches of some well-known locality, to ornament his dwelling, but
only to be disappointed, for art seemed to be sorely at a discount in
the land of Tre, Pol, and Pen.
On the evening of the day in question, Sybil was returning from the
town to their new home with a heavy heart. Not a sketch had been
sold, and her purse was almost empty; the rain was falling heavily,
and a cold, keen blast from the Bristol Channel swept over the
desolate and open moorland she had to traverse; and her tears were
mingling with the large drops that plashed on her delicate face and
sodden hair. She had resolved that on the morrow--come what
might--she should take means to dispose of Audley's farewell gift,
the returned engagement ring; the diamond, she knew, was a valuable
one, too much so to find a purchaser in their now humble
neighbourhood; but the doctor, or the friendly druggist, who had her
luckless sketches, would perhaps advise her in the matter; and with a
sigh, in which sorrow mingled with relief and hope, she hastened
onward.
The aspect of the district by which she had to pass to reach their
present abode, was but ill-calculated to raise her spirit on a wet,
stormy, and gloomy evening. In the distance rose the rough granite
summits of the Row Tor and Bron Welli, each nearly some fourteen
hundred feet in height, the sides of the former all covered by
enormous blocks, the mightiest in Cornwall, piled over each other a
very wilderness of spheroidal masses--
"Confusedly hurled,
The fragments of a former world."
Over these mountain summits, the descending evening mists, cold and
grey, had replaced the farewell rays of the red sun as he sunk beyond
the sea; the appearance of the former, made Sybil quicken her steps,
lest she should be overtaken on the moor, for then she should be able
to see but a few yards before her, so sudden and dense are those
floating vapours in Cornwall; and the bogholes were perilous. On
either side of the way--a mere cart track--stood those lines of
upright stones, which are ranged along it at regular distances, and
extend all the way from Watergate, over the moor, having been erected
at some remote period to mark the path in misty weather; and with a
new but not unaccountable foreboding in her heart, for like Constance
she was of a delicate organisation and had keen perceptions, Sybil
hastened on, till she experienced a kind of sad relief on seeing the
light that shone from the window of the little room where now her
ailing mother lay, and where kind old Winny Braddon sat and watched.
Pausing at the threshold, she threw aside her drenched cloak and hat,
and strove to smooth her wetted hair, ere she stealthily opened the
door.
"How is dear mamma now, Winny?" she whispered.
"She sleeps still."
"Still?"
"Yes--the poor darling; but in her sleep she has been muttering much
of the past--dreaming, I suppose; oh, my poor _chealveen_, you're
wet, and cold, and weary too."
"Please don't mind me, Winny; but tell me all about mamma."
"What more have I to tell you?" asked the old woman, mournfully; "but
you--you must have tea, or something warm; you will kill yourself at
this rate, and then I shall have two to nurse instead of one."
"No, no, I want nothing; let me but change these wet things, and then
I shall take your place beside mamma's bed."
Sad, sad indeed, was Sybil's heart on this night, for it was a
melancholy one in many ways. As she sat by the plain unornamented
bed wherein Constance lay, and surveyed, by the light of a single
candle, the humble little room, destitute of cornice and all
decoration, with its scanty furniture, she doubted at times her own
identity, or whether this was not all a dream, from which she must
awake to find herself at home in the villa--at home, in that pretty
room where Audley saw her last, and where the windows opened to a
beautiful flower garden.
And was this poor, wan and wasted invalid, so helpless and so passive
now, her once merry and handsome mamma, whose hands had so loved to
stray among her hair; who had hung over her little cot in infancy,
and whose nightly and morning kisses would never come again; whose
companionship she had shared like a younger sister, and with whom she
had spent so many happy years?
All was very still in that sick room.
In the hall, a great old-fashioned Dutch clock tick-tacked slowly and
monotonously; without, the night was wild, and prolonged and angry
blasts of wind swept over the desolate moor with a bellowing sound,
that made the sleeper stir uneasily; and lost in thought, the pale
girl sat there listening to the blast, the rain, and the clock,
sounds that repeated themselves over and over again in dreary
uniformity.
On this night she thought much of her absent brother. She had
written to him that very morning, imploring him, if he met with
Audley, to be friendly with him, as their secret claims to the name
of Trevelyan and the Lamorna peerage, could never be established now;
and thus she hoped and begged that he, like herself, would retain
their mother's name of Devereaux, as they had always been known by it
and by no other.
Sybil must have dropped asleep, for she started to find the old clock
wheezing and whirring as it struck the hour of three; and shivered,
for she was stiff and chilled; the candle had nearly burned down, and
what Winny Braddon would have called "a shroud" had guttered over the
side of it; and Sybil felt fully how cheerless and depressing is the
slow approach of morning in a sickroom--more than all, of a morning
so hopeless as each successive one proved now.
The rain and the wind were over; the clouds were divided in heaven,
and the stars shone out brightly; the weather was calm, and no sound
came to Sybil's ear save the tick-tack of the old clock, and the
breathing of the sufferer, which seemed laborious and irregular.
Shading the light with her hand, Sybil stole a glance at her mother's
face, and an alteration in its expression filled her with such
terror, that a cry almost escaped her. The mouth was more distorted,
and the eyes--for Constance was quite awake--were regarding her with
a strange, keen, sad and weird expression. At that moment, however,
Winny, hearing her young mistress stir, appeared at the door of the
room.
"Oh Winny!" whispered Sybil in an agony of alarm, "there is a change
come over mamma; go--go at once for the doctor, ere it is perhaps
too--too late! No, no; you are old and frail, and the moor is wet,"
she suddenly added; "get me my hat and cloak--I, myself, shall fly
for him."
"No, no, darling; stay by her side--she may not be long spared to
you, and I shall go. Past three in the morning, and dark as
midnight. I'll take a lantern and be off."
"Oh, thank you, Winny, thank you!" said the girl, kissing the old
woman's shrivelled cheek, and with hasty and trembling fingers
assisting to muffle her in a cloak, and to light a lantern; and then
seeing her issue forth upon her errand with all the speed her love
and charity inspired, and her old limbs could exert; and with clasped
hands, and a prayer upon her lips, Sybil at the door for a little
space watched the lantern (Winny's figure was soon lost amid the
gloom), as its fitful light fell in succession upon the grey, upright
blocks of the stone avenue that marked the desolate moorland road,
till at last it diminished to a spark, like an _ignis-fatuus_, and
then she stole back once more to her mother's side.
The left arm of the latter was outside the coverlet now, and her
hand, so snowy in its whiteness, rested on the edge of the bed. With
her eyes full of tears, and her heart full of earnest prayer, Sybil
knelt reverently down to kiss it, taking the hand between her own
caressingly.
How _heavy_ that little hand felt now!
Cold, too--its touch startled her. She threw back the curtain; her
mother lay motionless with jaw somewhat relaxed, her eyes still, and
staring upward. Death was too surely there, but Sybil had never
looked upon it, and only felt wildly startled and terrified. She
tried to raise the head, but felt powerless.
"Oh mamma--dear mamma, do not leave me! Come back to me, mamma--come
back to me!" she exclaimed, in a voice the tones of which seemed
discordant and shrill to her own ear. "Is this sleep or death? oh,
no! no, not death--NOT death!"
But it was so, and how terribly pale, serene and still, how calm and
peacefully she lay, with something of a smile gathering on her lips,
like one "who had ended the business of life before death, and who,
when the hour cometh, hath nothing to do but to die."
Bewildered and awe-struck, with a wild beating in her heart and in
her brain, Sybil drew back; then she stood still and listened.
There was no sound save the pulsations in her own breast, and the
odious ticking of the old wooden clock, which now seemed to have
become unnaturally loud. Then emotions which appeared to be stifling
came over her, and a craven terror which she could not describe, and
of which she was afterwards ashamed, as if it had been a sin or
crime, possessed her, and she fled from the room, and from the house
itself, for she could not remain alone with the dead; and so,
crouching down on the wet, damp soil near the entrance door, she
muffled her head in her shawl.
A ray of light was streaming out into the darkness, but she could not
look upon it, for it came where the dead was lying, and where the
light of life had passed away.
"Heaven help me--heaven help me! I am now alone; most utterly
alone!" she moaned, and bent her head between her hands, as if the
dark waves of thought were flowing over it.
Alas! how much may be condensed--how much felt, and yet never
expressed by that one little word--_alone_!
Sybil, however, fainted from excess of emotion, for she was
discovered there crouching in a heap by the doctor and Winny, when
they arrived together, more than one hour after, when the distant
horizon was grey with the coming dawn, and the white fog was rolling
along the sides of the Kow Tor and Bron Welli; and thus, in
insensibility, had she found, for a time, oblivion to all her sorrows.
END OF VOL. I.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.