CHAPTER XXI.—ETHEL FINDS A FRIEND.
‘It was all one property once,’ said Lady Maud, as she sat by Ethel’s side in the open window of the school-room, while Ethel’s pupil, Lady Alice, was busily engaged in copying a sketch. The window commanded across the park a view of Carbery, with its Elizabethan gables and vanes glinting back the sun. Lady Maud was fond of spending her spare hours in the society of the new governess, and she and Ethel were, in spite of the difference of their position, fast friends.
‘It is seldom,’ said Ethel Gray, ‘that two such grand houses are so close together.’
‘They belonged, as I said, to one owner,’ returned Lady Maud; ‘and the builder of Carbery was a De Vere and lived at High Tor, long ago. He was an ancestor of ours; but I don’t know exactly how it was that the properties came to be divided. I do know how Sir Sykes came to be master of the Chase; and if you like, I will tell you the story. It is no secret. I wonder that none of the village gossips have been beforehand with me.’
‘I always imagined Sir Sykes to be a relation of yours,’ said Ethel, with another glance at the stately mansion, gleaming in the mellow sunshine.
‘No more than you are, dear,’ answered Lady Maud; ‘and indeed he never could have expected to be the owner of that fine place, when he was a boy. He was poor enough. His father, old Sir Harbottle, had been a sad spendthrift, and died abroad; and when Sir Sykes, then a captain of infantry, came back from India, he had nothing to inherit but the baronetcy. They are Yorkshire people, the Denzils, not Devonshire; but there was a connection by marriage between Sir Sykes and old Lord Harrogate, who had married Sir Harbottle’s sister.
‘This old Lord Harrogate was the master of Carbery Chase, and a kinsman of ours, and head of all the De Veres; but how, I cannot exactly tell you, for we titled people I suspect often remember as little of our pedigree as if our names were Jones or Robinson. I only know that he was a rich, lonely, furious-tempered old man, a widower without any children or nephews, and had quarrelled with all his relations, with Papa most of all, about some tiresome election business. They say lords are forbidden by law to meddle with elections, but they do meddle; and the Earl went on one side, and old Lord Harrogate, who was of different politics, on the other. The end of it was that Sir Sykes was sent for, and that Lord Harrogate made his will, giving every acre to his wife’s nephew; just, as he said, that no De Vere should be the better for his death.
‘What was the oddest thing of all,’ pursued Lady Maud, ‘was that the old lord did not like Sir Sykes at all, and told him so, they say; but made him his heir exactly because he thought it would be gall and wormwood to his own kith and kin. And it was supposed that Lord Harrogate’s anger and violent emotions brought on the fatal fit of apoplexy by which he was carried off. At anyrate he died suddenly only a few hours after the signing of the will; and that was how Sir Sykes became master of Carbery.’
‘I should not think it could have made him very happy,’ said Ethel thoughtfully.
‘I am sure I don’t know why it should not,’ said the more practical Lady Maud. ‘It was no fault of his, after all, that Lord Harrogate had the whim to will it away as he did; and Papa owed him no grudge for it; and we have always been on neighbourly terms, if not very intimate. But it did not make him happy. Sir Sykes,’ she added laughingly, ‘had, you must know, a most romantic love-affair in his youth, unlikely as such a thing seems to those who see him now.’
Ethel Gray asked, with more interest than before, if it were Sir Sykes Denzil’s love-affair which had prevented his enjoying the material prosperity which was his.
‘I have always thought so,’ said Lady Maud confidently; ‘though people ascribe his sad looks and retired life to a different cause. But there is no doubt that he was very much in love with a certain Miss De Vere, an exceedingly pretty girl, whom Papa and Mamma always speak of as Cousin Clare, and whose picture I will shew you this evening, if you like, in the Green Room. Cousin Clare was an orphan, with no money, and she lived in Papa’s house when he was first married; and poor as she was, she was to be Lady Harrogate when the old lord died.’
‘I thought your brother’—— said Ethel wonderingly.
‘O yes; it has come to us now, the title,’ said Lady Maud, smiling. ‘But Miss Clare De Vere, who was a distant cousin, came next in succession, and was to have the Barony, and be a peeress in her own right, when the old lord died. Harrogate is one of the oldest English titles, and goes, as they call it, to heirs-female; so that it was a standing joke that poor Miss De Vere would be a peeress without income enough to pay her milliner; only every one hoped she would marry well, since she was very lovely, as I told you. Now Sir Sykes was desperately in love with her; but the Earl did not approve of his suit, nor did Mamma, for he was badly off and in debt, and had been married before.’
‘I did not know that. I noticed Lady Denzil’s monument in the church only a month ago,’ rejoined Ethel.
‘That was the second wife,’ said Lady Maud. ‘Jasper and the girls were not her children. No. Sir Sykes married very young, when a subaltern in India, and there his wife died; and when he came home a widower, he had these three children to provide for, and scarcely any means at all. He was a handsome man—that I think one can see. But Cousin Clare did not like him; still she was of a gentle yielding nature, and when Sir Sykes became owner of Carbery, and a very good match indeed, and Papa thought Clare had better accept him, somehow she allowed herself to be talked into an engagement. Well, the baronet was very urgent, and he had got the Earl and Countess on his side; and poor Cousin Clare I’m afraid was not very strong-minded, so she promised to marry Sir Sykes; though the man she really cared for was a needy cousin of hers and ours, Colonel Edward De Vere of the Guards; and the wedding things were all got ready, and the lawyers had drawn the settlements; when, to the surprise of all, Cousin Clare was missing. She had eloped with her cousin Edward, and was married to him in Scotland.’
‘Sir Sykes must have felt that very much?’ said Ethel, looking across the park towards the distant mansion of Carbery.
‘He did,’ returned Lady Maud. ‘But I don’t pity him, because, as you shall hear, he behaved very ill. It was Papa who broke the news to him; and I have heard the Earl say that the passion of uncontrolled rage with which he received it was absolutely horrible. Some anger was natural of course; but he was more like a fiend than a man. He swore that he would be revenged; that he would never rest until he had found some means of stabbing Clare’s heart, as she had stabbed his, and of making her bitterly rue the day when she had cast him off. He was, in fact, dreadfully violent, and it seemed the more shocking in a polite smooth-spoken man like him; but of course people excused him on account of the excitement of his feelings.
‘Men who are jilted do odd things, they say. In half a year after Clare’s elopement, Sir Sykes married a Manchester heiress with a large fortune; and three years later the second Lady Denzil died at Tunbridge Wells; and soon after, her only child, a little girl of about three years old, died too. From that time it was that Sir Sykes’s melancholy was supposed to date. It was supposed that he never got over the loss of this baby daughter, and that was the odder, because he seemed the very last man to mourn always over a little child. It was not the loss of his wife; he cared very little for her. And he never seemed a devoted father to his surviving children. Yet since that tiny mite of a girl was buried, he never held up his head as he had been used to do.’
‘And Miss Clare, Miss De Vere?’ asked Ethel, with a feminine interest in the heroine of the story.
‘Ah! poor Cousin Clare!’ said Lady Maud seriously: ‘she suffered enough, poor thing, to expiate her breach of faith to Sir Sykes tenfold. Very, very short was her time of happy married life before’——
‘I wish, Maud, please, you would look at this sketch for me, and help me with the foreground. I’ve made the figures too big, I’m afraid, and can’t get in the rest of it,’ said young Lady Alice, from amid her pencils and colour-boxes.
‘I will; I’ll come and try what I can make of it, as soon as I have told Miss Gray the rest of the story—the saddest part of it, I am sorry to say,’ said good-natured Lady Maud. ‘Sir Sykes’s vengeance was realised, terribly realised, without his having to stir a finger in the matter, for little more than three years after Cousin Clare’s marriage, her husband, whom she almost idolised, was brought home to the house a corpse. He had, like many other heroes both in romance and reality, been thrown from his horse in the hunting-field and killed on the spot.
‘The young Baroness Harrogate—I have already told you that Clare was heir-female to the title at the death of the old lord—was all but killed too, as I have heard, by the shock of her husband’s death; but for the sake of her child, the only earthly consolation left to her, the poor thing bore up under her great affliction. Yet Papa said that when he went to see her, her mournful eyes quite haunted him for weeks and months afterwards, and that, beautiful as she still was, she looked but the ghost of her former self. Then, when the next summer came round—— I hardly like to tell it!’ said Lady Maud, as the tears rose thickly in her eyes.
‘Do not tell me any more,’ said Ethel gently, ‘if it gives you pain.’
‘No; I was foolish,’ returned her friend, smiling; ‘for what I am speaking of happened long, long ago, when you and I were in the nursery, and I have heard it related very often, though I never told it until to-day. Well, the young widow lived on in the house she had inhabited since the first days of her marriage, a pretty cottage beside the Thames, and there she dwelt alone with her child, a sweet little creature, a girl of three years of age, who promised to be nearly as beautiful as her beautiful mother. And then this last hope was snatched away.’
‘Did the child die?’ asked Ethel falteringly.
‘It was worse than that,’ answered Lady Maud, whose lip trembled as she spoke. ‘She had been with the child in the garden, which bordered the river. Little Helena—that was her name—was playing among the flowers when her mother was called away, and as she was entering the house, she heard a faint cry or scream, in what seemed to be the child’s voice. She ran back to the garden, and to the grassy terrace where she had left her young treasure; but the child was not to be seen. She called; but there was no answer. Trembling, she neared the water’s edge, and there she saw the child’s tiny straw-hat with its broad black ribbon, floating down the river; but of the body—for no one could doubt but that the poor little lamb had been drowned—there were no signs; and when aid was summoned and a search begun, it proved fruitless.’
‘Was the poor little child never found then?’ asked Ethel, more moved than she had expected to be by these details.
‘Never found,’ replied Lady Maud. ‘No rewards, no entreaties availed, though men examined every creek and shoal of the river. No trace of the lost one was ever discovered except the little straw-hat. With that the miserable young mother never would part. On her own death-bed—and she died very soon after, utterly broken down by this double bereavement—it was the last object on which her dying eyes looked as her feeble fingers clung to it, that little hat of the child’s. We talk lightly of broken hearts. And yet, such things can be. Poor Cousin Clare died of one. Hers was a sad, sad story.’
Both Lady Maud and Ethel were weeping now. The former was the first to dry her eyes.
‘We are very silly,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘to cry in this way over an old history concerning people that we never, to our knowledge, saw; for though I was alive when Cousin Clare married, I don’t remember her at all. I was too young for that. Only it struck me often that Sir Sykes Denzil’s sadness may have more to do with the desertion of his betrothed bride and her brief career and early ending, than with the cause to which it is generally assigned. Don’t you think so too?’
Ethel did think so; but she did not speak for a moment, and then she said: ‘I pity Sir Sykes too. How bitterly his own cruel words, as to the revenge he threatened, must have come back to his memory when he heard the news of that great misfortune—of the child’s being drowned.’
‘Idle threats, dear! Perhaps he hardly remembered having spoken so foolishly in his excitement,’ answered Lady Maud indifferently. ‘It was after all about that time that he lost his own little daughter. Cousin Clare’s title came to Papa, and our brother Harrogate bears it by courtesy, as you know. There was no property. The poor little child, had she lived, would have been Helena, Lady Harrogate.’
‘The body was never found at all?’ asked Ethel.
‘Never found!’ said Lady Maud.—‘Now Alice, I’ll help you with your drawing.’ And the conversation ceased.