CHAPTER XXVII.

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.