"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."