CHAPTER XIX.

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?"