CHAPTER XXI.

HUMILIATION.

The statements made to Audley Trevelyan by his father as to the dubious position of the two ladies at Porthellick--artful statements which seemed, without collusion, to corroborate so much that Mabel and Rose Trecarrel hinted or openly advanced--had seriously grieved and perplexed him. Thus, while loving Sybil and longing for her society on one hand, with the selfishness or vacillation peculiar to many young men, on the other, he began to wish that he had not gone quite so far--that he had been less precipitate in his love-making; but his perplexity increased to utter bewilderment, not unmixed with indignation, when his usually languid mother, with considerable scorn and irritation of manner, informed him that "the person calling herself Mrs. Devereaux" was but an _intriguante_, who had sought to lure his foolish uncle Richard into marriage; and his father admitted that he and others had long suspected his brother of having some low and illicit entanglement.

Now Audley knew that this "_intriguante_" had a son, whose existence might endanger his own succession to a title.

Was this fair, slender and delicate girl, whose gentle image had wound itself about the heart of Audley, and on whose "engagement finger" he had so recently slipped a ring, actually a cousin; but one whom he could not acknowledge--a person whom he dared not marry, in dread of that trumpet-tongued bugbear called "Society"?

He had ceased for some days to write to her. In this he accused himself of gross selfishness; but his father's open threats of withdrawing every shilling of his allowance, of turning his back upon him for ever, and so forth, if he dared to countenance the Devereaux in any way; and his total inability to live anywhere on his subaltern's pay alone, together with the dread of compromising his cold, proud, and intensely aristocratic mother and sister--in fact, it would seem, his whole family too--made him strive to crush in his heart the young love it was so sweet to brood upon; but Audley strove in vain, and began to think that the sooner he was back to India the better for all.

He had been nervous, irritable, and "out of sorts" since he had returned to Rhoscadzhel, and obtaining a passing glimpse of the little white villa as the train passed it, en route, had made him worse. He had procured Champagne and various other vintages too freely from Jasper Funnel; he had broken the knees of a favourite horse; ripped up the green cloth of the new billiard table when practising alone, and more than once had angrily laid his whip across the back of unoffending Rajah.

On the afternoon of the visit which closes the preceding chapter, his mother who was seated languidly in a deep easy chair near the library fire, playing with a feather fan, while her daintily slippered little feet rested on a velvet tabourette, said in her soft and monotonous voice,--

"I do wish, Audley, that odious dog of yours was dead--shot or lost."

"Why, mother, it was poor Jack Delamere's dying legacy."

"It is such a shaggy, self-willed, huge and savage animal--always about one's skirts or in one's way."

"You are unusually energetic in your adjectives this evening, my lady mother," replied Audley; "poor Rajah is as gentle as a lamb, and I might have found a kind owner for him ere this, however," he added, as he thought sadly of the winning Sybil on whose skirts his splendid pet had been permitted to nestle unrebuked.

"Visitors, mamma!" exclaimed Gartha Trevelyan, a fair-haired and languid edition of her mother, and already, in her sixteenth year, the imitator of all her tones and ways; "who can they be--in a hired carriage, too?"

"Ladies in deep mourning," said General Trecarrel, glancing uneasily at Audley.

"By Jove!" muttered the latter, growing quite pale, as he recognised them from a bay window, and at once quitting the library, descended by a private staircase to where his horse and groom happened to be awaiting him.

"My cousin--he is my own cousin; this was the secret sympathy--the tie of blood that drew us to each other," Sybil was thinking softly, in her timid heart, to keep her courage up, at the very time when he who, without flinching, would have faced a Sikh gun-battery, or a horde of Afghans, was avoiding her, and galloping ingloriously away from what he deemed "a scene--a deuced family row," with a blush on his cheek, shame, pity, and anger mingling in his soul, with the half-formed wish that he had never met and never known her!

Advancing into the room, the mother and daughter bowed, and then stood irresolute. The former had expected to have seen Downie alone; but finding him thus, amid his family, and the General present too, all her pre-arranged and carefully considered explanations and remarks completely fled her memory, and her mind became blank as a sheet of unwritten paper, as Downie, after a rapid whisper to his wife, over whose colourless face there flashed a look of angry scorn, took the initiative.

His wife, with her everlasting smelling-bottle or vinaigrette and lace handkerchief; her newly-cut novel close by; her pale, dull eyes and unmeaning smile; her "company manners;" her soft white hands, smooth and unwrinkled as her forehead, yet cold and puerile as her heart, was always a kind of bore; but now her _tout-ensemble_ had all the impress of insipidity, animated by insolence; for weak though the lawyer's wife was in character, she felt that she was mistress of the situation; and at least _pro tem._, if not for life, Lady Lamorna.

She regarded the widow with a cold and supercilious stare, to which the former replied by a steady gaze, and each seemed to draw her conclusions of the other in an instant, for "to women alone pertains that marvellous freemasonry, which sees the character at a glance, and investigates the sincerity of a disposition or the value of a lace flounce with the same practised facility."

Downie, too, had his own peculiar acuteness and instincts, sharp and keen, wherever he went; he saw everything in a moment; whoever he met, he read their faces like a book, he marked all their features, deduced their personal characters, just as if he had been intimate with them for a life-time; and a very useful power this had proved to him, in the course of his legal career; and now, in his mourning suit, he looked like "one of those great crows that are to be seen, apparently asleep, in a meadow in autumn; but which, nevertheless, see everything that is going on around them." The gentle aspect, the forlorn bearing, and uncommon beauty of Constance and her daughter, would have softened any other heart than Downie's; but his was like Cornish granite--the oldest and stoniest of all stones.

General Trecarrel--somewhat nervously it must be owned--shook hands with the intruders, for as such they felt themselves viewed; but the dog, Rajah, alone gave them a welcome by fawning round Sybil, who trembled excessively, and could scarcely restrain her tears, while the dog's recognition of her did not escape the wife of Downie, who drew certain conclusions therefrom.

"Mrs. Devereaux, I believe?" said Downie Trevelyan, calmly, and with his professional smile, as he looked up from the table, which was literally heaped up with letters, many of them being unopened; "to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"

"You owe it to my sorrow, sir," replied Constance, gathering courage, as her eye caught a portrait of Richard Trevelyan, in his uniform, painted years ago, ere he went to America, and looking just as she had seen him in the early days of their happy loverhood; and now the pictured face seemed to smile upon her out of the past; "to the death of my husband--your brother, as you know, by drowning," she added.

He gave her a stare of cold enquiry, over, and finally, through his double gold eye-glass, which he specially wiped for the occasion, and then turning to his wife, said,--

"Gartha, my dear, take your namesake and the boys with you--retire, please, for we may have much to say that must not be said before you."

"Perhaps I--I too, am _de trop_?" said General Trecarrel, a little nervously, assuming his hat and malacca cane.

"Not at all--pray be seated," replied Downie.

"If--Mrs.--Mrs.----"

"Oh, yes; Mrs. Devereaux will excuse you, General, I am sure," answered Downie, as his wife, with her four younger children, sailed haughtily from the room, drawing in her skirts as she passed Constance, whose pretty lip only quivered a little with disdain.

To do him justice, the barrister looked on the widow with something of interest, mingling, momentarily, with his fear and anger--but momentarily only. She was slenderly and so beautifully formed, small featured, and dark haired, with much that was intense and unfathomable in her pleading eyes--pleading for her children's honour and her own: and there was Sybil, too, clad in the deepest mourning, her high black dress, with its pretty cuffs, and a small white collar round her delicate neck, made her fair skin seem fairer still, and appeared to become the darkness of her hair and eyes better than any other style of dress would have done; but, then, Sybil looked charming in everything!

The little interest died, and Downie regarded them with intense hostility, for he had all "that sublime philosophy which teaches us to bear with tranquillity the woes of others."

"Oh--ah--yes," he said, after a most harassing pause; "you are the lady who lives--in fact, who has lived for some time past, in a villa near Porthellick?"

"The same, sir."

Downie knit his brows, for she accorded him no title, and he was somewhat jealous on the point.

"It was a bold act of my brother to bring you here to Cornwall--a secluded place--almost under the eyes of his own family too!"

"Circumstanced as we were by the eccentricity of his late uncle, it was, perhaps, unwise," she replied, gently.

"I am glad that you admit so much: a little villa near St. John's Wood, or some such place, had been more appropriate for persons so situated."

The eyes of Constance began to flash dangerously.

"My son is Lord Lamorna!" she exclaimed; "and even on his cold-blooded uncle may punish this cruel insult to his mother!"

The General, to whom all this revelation was new and startling, began to feel uncomfortable, and to look quite perplexed; but Downie only smiled a crafty smile, as he said--

"Pooh, my good woman, you are out of your senses; what can be the object of this visit? I am busy--does your carriage wait?"

"Before scandals go forth in our name, I beseech you to consider well, and to read this letter, which will show you who I am and what I am, and why for years we have all borne the name of Devereaux," said Constance, making a prodigious effort to control her great grief and just indignation, as she held the document before Downie; "it is the last my dear, dear husband wrote me."

"Husband--absurd! This is the wildest of wild assertions," said Downie Trevelyan, as he took the letter from her hand, nevertheless; and as he did so, the words of her dead husband came back to her memory, when he said "that proofs of their marriage, beyond mere assertion, must be forthcoming;" and now those proofs were buried in the sea.

"You must recognise the handwriting," said Constance, in a tremulous tone; "and oh, sir," she added, as she eyed him doubtfully and wistfully, "you will restore it to me, and not destroy it?"

"Destroy!" said he, sternly; "what are you talking about? I hope I am too much of a lawyer to destroy any document."

"Before witnesses, at least," was the awkward addendum of the General.

Downie's legal eye quickly took in the situation, as detailed by his brother Richard in that letter, which stated that the little chapel of St. Mary, at Montreal, had been burned down three years after the regiment had left the city; that the Père Latour and the acolyte were both dead; that though the Registers had all perished in the flames, the signed copy of the marriage certificate was preserved by Latour's successor, and "is now in my possession," added the letter, the signature to which, "Lamorna," made the reader's eyes to gleam with secret rage; but he merely said,

"Suppose this letter were written by my brother--a supposition of which I do not admit the truth,--who are 'those at home' whom he doubts?"

"You, most probably," said the General, with soldierly candour.

"Absurd, my dear sir," replied Downie, tossing the letter contemptuously to Constance. "This is a fabrication, written to suit the occasion: the church burned; the Register destroyed; the witnesses dead, too! It is a strange story, and strange chapter of accidents. You lived with him long enough, I doubt not, madam, to learn how to feign my brother's handwriting. This document has not even an envelope--so where are the postal marks?"

"I lost it----"

"Bah! I thought so."

There was a peculiar basilisk flicker in the pale eyes of Downie Trevelyan, and he surveyed the shrinking widow of his brother pitilessly, with a glance of hate--a glance beyond all the eloquence of fury or wrath, for he felt in his heart--or what passed for such--that she spoke truth in all this matter, but a truth she would have difficulty in proving.

"Oh mamma--mamma, let us go," implored Sybil.

"And this Dick Braddon who accompanied my brother--the other witness--a worthless old Chelsea pensioner, and so he too is gone?"

"Gone with my husband," replied Constance, clasping her hands and looking upward.

"As my poor brother never yet, to my knowledge at least, prior to his luckless American tour, appended his name to any document as _Lamorna_, we have no means of testing or comparing the signature to your production, were such test necessary--which it is not."

Gathering courage, Constance was about to make some proud response, when Downie, in his (external) character pure and unspotted as his shirt front, said while turning to the General--

"My brother Richard picked up, of course, some of those dissipated habits which are peculiar to the army, and----"

"Oh, pardon me, my lord," began the General, in a deprecatory tone, while inserting his right hand in the breast of his closely buttoned surtout.

"It is true, Trecarrel; you redcoats are a sad set, and here we see the result of an unlucky liaison."

"Richard--Richard," wailed Constance, "how hard is all this to bear!"

"Yes, madam," said Downie; "but the way of transgressors is always hard."

"Transgressors, sir?"

"Against the laws of morality and society, madam. Do not misunderstand me, madam."

"Oh no--oh no," replied Constance, in a choking voice; "I quite understand you."

The General was deeply moved; he advanced a pace or two towards her, and lifted his hand with an air of entreaty; but Downie was pitiless, and added--

"Yes, madam, and not content with seeking to entrap my brother, there has actually been an attempt made, too, to entrap and delude my son!"

"Sir," said Constance, moving towards the door of the library, "I came in hope--I must own, half-desperate hope--of having an explanation from, or a compromise with you--perhaps a recognition of our just claims. Assertion, even backed by such a letter as this, is, I must own, but slender evidence; so a court of law shall prove the rest."

"As you please, madam," replied Downie, rising and ringing a hand-bell deliberately. "Show this--_lady_ out. So much for Mrs. Devereaux!" he added furiously, for he was greatly disturbed and ruffled.

A mist seemed before the eyes of both mother and daughter, as they quitted the stately room mechanically, to seek their vehicle at the porte-cochère. Constance kept her proud little head erect, however, so long as she was under observation; for though her heart was wrung with agony as she thought of her children, there was something of a Spartan matron in the outward bearing she affected, and in her perfect power of self-mastery then.

Stared at in the corridor by the wondering and mocking eyes of all the younger children of Downie, who had taken their cue from the manner in which their mamma had gathered her skirts in the library, as if to avoid pollution; stared at too in the vestibule and portal by Mr. Funnel the solemn Butler, by Boxer the rubicund coachman, and by a group of whiskered valets, who all saw that something, they knew not what, "was hup," they reached the hired carriage that was to take them back to Hayle; and Jeames in powder, wearing "the uniform" of the noble family, remarked to Chawles, a brother of the plush and shoulder-knot, quite audibly, that "they both seemed the lady, quite; but he feared they was only a couple of guv'nesses or companions out of place--a lot as miserable as curates and tutors, and all that sort o' thing."

Constance shivered as if with ague when she drew up the glasses of the carriage, and they took their departure from Rhoscadzhel.

Open war alone could save or sink them now!