CHAPTER XXIII.

A LEGAL "FRIEND."

Constance never smiled again; yet in the presence of Sybil she never gave way to the paroxysms of passionate grief that came over her when she was alone or in the seclusion of her own chamber. Wealth and title, so long looked forward to in the years that were gone, seemed alike most worthless now, save that with the loss of these her children lost their position in life, and herself her name and honour! Ever present was the idea, Oh that her husband could look up from his grave, and see the impending ruin and desolation of their once-happy home! for, as we have already said, their means of subsistence died with him.

And now, how were they to live? The present time was agony; the future dark and gloomy.

Paragraphs, the tenour of which proved intensely annoying to Downie Trevelyan and all his family, and which were painful and degrading to Constance and Sybil (for such they felt them to be), began to find their way into the local and even the London papers, under exciting titles or headings, such as "Singular Case of Presumption," or "Insanity," "The Cornish Widow again," "The Lamorna Peerage," and so forth; and Messrs. Gorbelly and Culverhole, as "his Lordship's solicitors," in writing answers or contradictions to some of these effusions, were but too happy, by such legal advertisements, to mix their somewhat obscure and vulgar names with the affair.

Audley read those insulting notices, assertions, and contradictions with infinite sorrow and pain, for then Sybil's pleading and upbraiding eyes would come before him. Through such uncourted publicity, however, the mother and daughter began to find themselves coldly viewed by neighbours now. The rector ceased to come near the villa; the village doctor whipped up his horse as he passed the end of the willow avenue; and even the usually friendly Trecarrels left for town--rumour said correctly, for India--without paying another visit, though perhaps, as theirs had never been returned, they could not do otherwise.

All the charity and good they had performed, in all the necessities relieved, all the ailments alleviated, all the countless little kindnesses done, went for nothing now; for the world is a malevolent and censorious one; and that devilish maxim of Rochefoucauld, that people feel a strange satisfaction in the misfortunes of their best friends, was fully exemplified. Constance's new and startling assertion of rank and position, however meekly done, formed excellent food for the tongues of the malicious and vulgar, who exist everywhere. She had to bear unjustly the contempt of many, the ridicule of all; so that her pretty villa became daily less and less a home.

From the tenour of that horrible interview at Rhoscadzhel, where every word that passed seemed as if burned into her heart with letters of fire, Sybil felt a sure conviction that all must and should be at an end between herself and Audley Trevelyan. The treatment of her mother, of her absent brother's claims, of her own, and of her dead father's memory, his will and wishes, all required this sacrifice at her hands; so resolutely and calmly--though a few tears rolled silently down her cheek the while--she drew his diamond ring from her "engaged" finger--an engaged one now no longer--and making it up in a packet, together with a few letters he had written to her, she despatched it, addressed by her own trembling hand, and without a word of comment, to Rhoscadzhel; and this packet it was which we have just seen Jasper Funnel place in the hands of his excited young master.

Her mother's embraces, tenderness, and kisses were her sole but best reward for acting thus; yet poor Sybil seemed the very impersonation of beauty, grief, and girlhood bordering on womanhood. The buoyancy of the former was gone; a change had come over her soft and once bright face, which wore a sad and settled expression now. It was that white woe which someone styles "the deepest mourning features can put on."

Her pencil and her piano, each so much the solace of her lonely hours, were, of course, relinquished now; and it seemed as if she should never take to them again. She looked ill, and appeared to be pining: but, sooth to say, it was less the loss of Audley than her mother's grief that affected her. The doctor, when summoned, pocketed his guinea, but did nothing more; so Winny Braddon urged Constance, but in vain, that "their poor chealveen" should be taken to the nearest _Mean-tol_ (or Holed Stone) so that she might try the sovereign old Cornish cure for all mysterious ailments, by creeping through the orifice thereof; for in the ancient duchy, as in some parts of Ireland and the remote Scottish Isles, where such natural or artificial perforations were used of old by the Druids to initiate and dedicate their children to the offices of rock-worship, they are still regarded with superstition, as possessing the gift of effecting miraculous cures.

Constance, too, was ill, and in the excess of her grief and lowness of heart, she fancied herself worse than she really was; and ever present was the thought, how perilous the lonely path of life would be to a girl so beautiful as Sybil, if she--her mother--were taken away by the hand of death before another and fitting protector were provided. Morbid at times by sorrow, this reflection made the breast of Constance a prey to the most craving and clamorous anxiety.

But a short time before, and their worldly prospects had all been so different--so brilliant and happy. Now all was dark indeed! When she thought over all the baronial splendours of Rhoscadzhel, and the many mementoes of her husband which must be there, something of hatred for the invaders of her children's patrimony and her own marital rights began to mingle with her dull despair of ever proving that she had the latter; and with all her constitutional gentleness, when she recalled the glance bestowed upon her by Mr. Trevelyan on quitting the library, and the insinuations uttered by Downie against her, in presence of General Trecarrel, too, her blood boiled up within her.

"Oh, Sybil!" she exclaimed one day, after sitting long buried in thought, "some author says, 'there are wild beasts in the human race;' and truly your uncle Downie is one of these. Can it be possible that they had the same parents--he and your frank, generous, and open-hearted papa?--that they share the same blood, were nursed at the same breast, and nestled together, as I have heard, in the same little cot?"

Sybil was silent; she had, in this view of the matter, but one secret and reclaiming thought. Downie was Audley's father, and she would be merciful.

But it was when inspired by one of those gusts of indignation that Constance received, perhaps unfortunately, a visitor--an attorney from a neighbouring town--who stated that he had heard her strange and painful story, and had come to make a "friendly" offer of his legal services.

Now Mr. Sharkley--for such was his name--was exactly, in many respects, what Downie, in his rage, called him, and was an excellent specimen of perhaps the most dangerous character in society--a needy and unscrupulous lawyer. He was attired in rusty black garments, that seemed to have been made for a much taller man. The collar of his swallow-tailed coat rose above the nape of his neck, while the cuffs nearly reached to the points of his fingers, and the legs of his trousers flapped loosely over his instep. He had a low projecting forehead and keen eyes, the expression of which varied only between intense cunning and the lowest suspicion. His ears were enormous, set high upon his head; and the right one, from being long used as a pen-holder, projected from his skull more than the left. His features would have shocked Lavater, while Gall and Spurzheim would have augured the worst of his character by the development of his head.

His legal practice--though Constance was in blessed ignorance of the circumstance--was of the lowest kind, and had seldom proved beneficial in a monetary or any other sense to those for whom he unluckily acted as agent; but the fellow could be, when it suited him, suave, artful, and plausible when he had a purpose to serve, and a relentless bully when it was achieved; thus, seeing that though little or nothing could be made of the present case with the hope of success, much might be made of it in the way of money, perhaps, of notoriety certainly, and that in the end he might betray all he knew to Downie Trevelyan for a consideration--with these amiable views, he sought to worm himself as a friend and legal volunteer into the confidence of the otherwise friendless Constance.

Mr. Sharkley heard her story attentively, and committed it all to writing. That her marriage had been duly celebrated in a chapel at Montreal he doubted not, nor the reason for keeping it so secret--the absurd pride of old Lord Lamorna, whose aristocratic prejudices were a local proverb and hence her having, so unfortunately for her own honour, passed so long under her maiden name of Devereaux with her son and daughter.

But how was all this to be proved?

Père Latour was dead; the records of his chapel had been burned in one of the many conflagrations incident to the city; the certified extract from them had perished in the sea with her husband. Dick Braddon too had been drowned, and the acolyte, the other witness in the little French chapel, had been long since laid under a wooden cross in the little burial-ground that adjoined it. A few letters alone were not sufficient proof to upset in England--whatever they might have done in Scotland--the title and succession of a wealthy peer already in possession; yet nevertheless Mr. Sharkley talked about the instant institution of legal proceedings, having the matter brought before a select committee of privileges in the House of Lords, and so forth, quite as confidently and as pompously as if he was a Q.C. and high-class parliamentary lawyer; and poor Constance felt a glow of hope for her children's future rising in her heart, while he compiled a narrative, took away the letters of her husband, and, receiving in advance a handsome sum for certain imaginary fees and expenses, departed with nearly all the ready money she possessed.

He really attempted, however, to get up a case against "Lord Lamorna," and hence the bulky and presumptuous document which exasperated Downie; but from the weakness of her cause and the character of her legal adviser it speedily fell to the ground, only to fix a deeper stigma on the hapless and innocent Constance.

Rumours of misfortune and mystery brought all their creditors, now pretty numerous (for during her husband's lifetime they had lived in good style at the villa), down upon her in a pitiless horde.

Denzil, she knew, would now lose the liberal allowance his father had promised him after leaving Sandhurst on appointment; but with tentage, batta, and other allowance, a subaltern can live on his pay in India, when he might starve elsewhere. In her misery Constance gathered some comfort from this knowledge, though ruin and penury--or work for which they were both unfitted--were all that remained to her and Sybil now.