CHAPTER XXVI.

REVERSES.

Meanwhile how fared it with poor Sybil, who knew not whether he was at home or abroad, or had already forgotten her, and married perhaps the more sparkling and showy Rose Trecarrel?

Re-addressing Audley's letter was fated to be the last action the right hand of Constance was to perform in this world.

For the two days subsequent to the episode just related she remained in bed, exhausted apparently, sadder and lower in spirit than usual; and on the morning of the third, Sybil, when drawing back the curtains to see if she were asleep or awake, to receive her daily kiss and join in prayer, was inexpressibly shocked and terrified to perceive a peculiar fixity in one eye, and that a corner of her still beautiful mouth was strangely drawn down on one side.

Paralysis had supervened, and poor Constance had totally lost the use of one half of her body!

Summoned in hot haste, the village doctor came, with his stereotyped professional expression of sympathy. He felt her pulse, repeater in hand, and ominously shook his head.

"Oh, sir, do you think there is danger?" asked Sybil, in intense agitation.

"Hush, child--come this way," said he, and led her from the room.

"God help me, sir--you have something terrible to tell me?"

"I have, indeed; but nerve yourself, for she has none to depend upon now but you."

"None, indeed, save One who is in Heaven."

Her disease, he said, was embalism; it came from the region of the heart, and had been gradually but rapidly forming in her system for some time past; anxiety and sorrow had doubtless induced it. and some recent excitement--that night affair, of which the doctor knew not--had brought it to a head. A second shock, he added, must inevitably prove fatal!

With dilated eyes and clasped hands, the unhappy girl listened to this sentence of death, for such it sounded in her overstrained ear and to her aching heart, as the doctor spoke it in an impressive and never-to-be-forgotten whisper, in a room adjoining that in which the sufferer lay. He then paused, and gazed with much of genuine sympathy into the pale face of the startled listener; perhaps he was mentally speculating upon the probable future of this lovely girl, with whose sad family history he was quite familiar now.

And what was embalism, she asked, in a low and intensely agitated voice.

A species of weed, or little fungus, that grew in the upper region of the heart, from whence it passed, by minute fibres, fine as a gossamer thread, through the blood-vessels, till, by choking the passage of one of them, there ensued the dire effect they had seen. And was it curable? No; yet the patient might linger for months; and, he added, that Sybil must control her grief, nor let the sufferer see by it that danger was apprehended.

The doctor was gone; but he was to come again, and for some minutes Sybil sat like one transformed to stone, unable even to weep, or reply to the excited questions, showered upon her by Winny Braddon, so stunning was the sense of this sudden and unrealisable calamity. She was, perhaps, on the very eve of losing her mamma--her sole relative and friend--that beautiful, and gentle, and loving mamma, to whom she had been quite as much like a sister and companion as a daughter; for, though a parent, Constance was still so young in appearance and manner, and, till their late calamities had come to pass, naturally so gay, happy, and buoyant in spirit, despite the secret of her wedded life.

She rushed to the bedroom, and clasped the sufferer in her arms, pillowing her head upon her bosom, and so for hours she hung about her, that she might have the melancholy joy of her society while yet spared to her; and for a time she almost forgot the grave warning given so recently, to control her emotions, nor excite the now passive and helpless Constance, who, ignorant alike of her own condition and danger, and propped up by cushions, could but gaze at her wistfully, and make efforts to speak that were intensely painful to the hearer.

The doctor had assured her, that "to expect an ultimate recovery was vain; that her mother's life was but a thing of time now--as it is with us all," he added; yet, hoping against hope and these sad words, Sybil was unremitting in her attentions to her parent. Days there were when she rallied a little, and could even move her right hand, but only to become worse subsequently, and to find her breathing more laborious and painful.

The doctor was an honest though not brilliant man, and did his best for the patient, without thinking of fee or reward. Sybil, in her intense anxiety, doubted his skill: but how was she to procure that of others? There were, she knew, great physicians in London and elsewhere, but she was destitute of the means for employing them. Times there were, when, in her desperation, she thought of writing to Audley; but she knew that her mother would never have approved of such a proceeding; and their parting had been so strange, that she shrunk from the idea as suddenly as it had been conceived, and she thought, as she whispered in her heart the words of a once familiar song, that hers was--

"A love that took an early root, And had an early doom, Like trees that never come to fruit, And early shed their bloom-- Of vanished hopes and sunny smiles, All lost for evermore; Like ships that sailed for sunny isles But never saw their shore."

She thought, too of the fatherly old soldier, General Trecarrel, and then as quickly remembered that he had been present during that humiliating interview at Rhoscadzhel; but any idea of writing to him for advice was crushed finally, when a stray newspaper announced one day, that the General "and his family" had sailed in the _Netley_ transport for India, his extra aide-de-camp, the Honourable Mr. Audley Trevelyan, having proceeded overland, to serve on his staff in the new campaign against the Afghans.

Something of secret satisfaction mingled with the sorrow and fear of the lonely girl, as she read this paragraph--which she did a great many times--satisfaction that Audley had not gone in the same vessel with these gay Trecarrels, which he could easily have done, if so disposed; sorrow, that they were so completely and hopelessly separated now, and fear for the events of the coming campaign in which he was to serve, and more than probably her brother Denzil, too. Sybil could little suppose that it was purposely to avoid being quizzed by the Trecarrels about herself, and to avoid the imputation, or too probable danger, consequent to a long voyage with two such handsome and enterprising flirts as Mabel and Rose were known to be, that he had, with a few brother officers, started for the East overland, a less easy and luxurious journey then than it is now.

But Sybil was soon compelled by the exigencies of their situation to exert herself beyond her years and experience, for creditors, we have said, had become clamorous. Everything that could be spared was to be turned into money, and they were to seek another and more humble home. All the beautiful art-treasures collected by the taste of her parents in their continental wanderings, the oak and marqueterie cabinets, the chaste china of Dresden and Sèvres, the quaint Majolica vases, and alabaster groups, with all the most valued household gods, were despatched to the nearest market town in charge of the useful Mr. Sharkly, and disposed of with a ruinous commission to that somewhat "seedy" personage! and a little time after saw the pretty villa, so long the abode of so much peaceful and sequestered happiness, in the possession of strangers, while Sybil and her mamma were content to locate them in a small cottage which they rented from old Michael Treherne, the miner, and furnished in the plainest manner; but all their debts were cleared, and even Denzil's Indian outfit paid.

To Constance all places were pretty much alike now, for she had become listless and indifferent to external objects; but times there were when much of exasperation mingled with Sybil's grief, at the thought that her mamma--she so gently bred and nurtured, and so petted by her drowned father--she, who should then be in Rhoscadzhel, surrounded by every appliance that wealth, luxury, skill, and rank could furnish, was now in her desolate widowhood, and sore extremity, the inmate of a poor and sordid cottage.

Thus day succeeded day, and weeks rolled on without any change, at least for the better--weeks which seemed so long, heavy and monotonous, that to Sybil the world and time appeared to stand still. No letters came from Denzil now, for he had marched up-country somewhere, and India was not then what it has been since the Great Mutiny of the Sepoys, intersected by railways and telegraph wires; but Denzil's last epistle was full of unusual interest to Sybil and her mamma.

He had, of course, been duly acquainted by the former of all that had occurred at home, with the startling revelations consequent to his father's journey to Montreal, and his death at sea; and now he should probably meet, ere long, this cousin of his, this Audley Trevelyan, for they belonged to the same regiment, and it was, perhaps, to form a portion of Trecarrel's brigade. And _how_ were they to meet--as friends and brother officers, as relations or enemies?--for Audley's father occupied _his_ (Denzil's) place in the world or in society, at least.

Relations--pshaw!--could they ever be aught but foes? was the young man's immediate thought, and his sister's boding fear. And so his father was gone--his good, kind father, his friend, companion, and preceptor in many a manly sport. How often had they rode and rambled, shot and fished together in Calabria, the Abruzzi, and Switzerland, and at home in sturdy Cornwall, so many thousand miles away! Only those who are so far from home--so far away as India, with all its strange external influences and objects--can know how keen, and strong, and tender, to the young at least, are the ties of home and kindred, especially as the home-ties decrease in number by distance, change, and death.

Dead--his father dead! The "governor," as he had styled him, like "other fellows" at Sandhurst, his "dear old dad," as he called him in the home that was a broken home now; and as the pleasant face, that he never more would look upon, with years of past affection, came back to memory, the lad had covered his face with his hands, and wept.

"It is only when we have been long at sea and have lost sight of Europe," wrote Denzil, "ay, dearest Sybil, even of Europe, which seems all one country and one home to us, that the Anglo-Indian feels his banishment has fairly begun, and he is to be, henceforth, as some fellow has it, 'among the dusky people of Ind, with whom we have no traditions, no religious, few domestic, and scarcely any moral sentiments in common, and whose very costume (want of it, sometimes, I should say) is only characteristic of a much greater difference of inward nature.' And so I am actually by birth a lord--a lord! I have thought, and many visions of future greatness have floated through my mind--and dear mamma is a lady---Dowager Lady Lamorna. How odd it sounds. Are we all losing our identity; and how is all this to be proved? The past mystery nearly cost me my life when I first joined, and in this fashion:--

"Bob Waller, one of ours, a pleasant but sometimes supercilious fellow, asked me one evening in the mess bungalow, if 'my people were from the Channel Islands?'

"'No,' replied I, colouring, for I always felt that some mystery existed about us; 'but why do you ask?'

"'The name sounds like a French one,' replied Waller.

"'We are connected somehow with Montreal.'

"'Oh, that explains it,' rejoined Waller.

"'There is nothing to explain,' said I, angrily.

"'Think not?--well--have a cigar?'

"I roughly, perhaps, declined it, so Waller returned to the charge by saying--

"'Your father was once in the Cornish Light Infantry, you say?'

"'Yes--a captain--some twenty years ago.'

"'Strange. I have looked all through the Army Lists, and can find no such name in the corps.'

"This assertion exasperated me (I afterwards found it correct), and I challenged him to meet me the next morning in a grove of peepul trees, outside the cantonments; but duelling days are over--the affair got wind, and each of us was placed under arrest within his own compound till we exchanged mutual promises. Bob Waller and I are excellent friends now, and at the moment I am writing, he is sitting opposite me in his shirt and drawers, for we are having a glass of brandy-pawnee--the alcohol with water--and a couple of Chinsworah cheroots together; and I must close now, to catch the dauk-boat--as we call the mail."

This was Denzil's last letter, and after its arrival the weeks continued to roll monotonously on, and still found Sybil watching, with unwearied and unrepining zeal, by what she knew to be a bed of death.

Constance could speak but little, and then only to murmur her fears and prayers for the future of her daughter.