The woods were almost bare; the few remaining leaves, fluttered brown and crisp on the bared twigs; the stackyards were full, and the produce of the potato fields was consigned to long brown pits of fresh earth and straw, for the coming winter; the uplands were covered with decaying stubble, or being ploughed, while, gorged with worms, the great crows sat sleepily in the shining furrows. Thick as gnats in summer, the dingy coloured sparrows twittered in the hedgerows, which were being lopped and trimmed; and the axes of the woodmen were heard in thicket and copse; while the smoke of the steam-engine that worked and drained the adjacent copper-mine, hung low in the frowsy air, adding at times to the gloom of the landscape.
Richard Trevelyan had sailed, and Denzil too; and Constance was aware that each of them had to traverse a wintry sea, the former before he returned and the latter before he reached his destination.
The public prints had duly announced that "the Right Hon. Lord Lamorna and suite (i.e. old Derrick Braddon) had gone for a tour in America;" and Denzil if his eyes ever saw the announcement—which is doubtful—could little have dreamed how nearly it concerned him, and the mother on whom he doted, and whom he still knew only as "Mrs. Devereaux."
The latter had to make many an excuse, even to Sybil, to account for her husband's protracted absence from the villa; and Downie Trevelyan, when he read the above announcement in the "Morning Post," wiped his gold eye-glass and read it again with much perplexity and secret annoyance, while surmising "what the deuce could take Richard so suddenly to America at this season of the year!"
The new task and anxiety of watching the shipping intelligence next occupied the attention of Constance. The steamer in which Richard sailed, had been seen, signalled and spoken with in sundry Atlantic latitudes and longitudes; and some seventeen days or so saw her safely at the end of her voyage; but the transport, a great Indiaman with Denzil on board, was seldom heard of, some at long dates; and at longer dates too, came his hastily written letters from St. Helena, and from Ascension, or by homeward-bound ships; few men, even of the most wealthy, thought then of proceeding to India by the scarcely developed overland route; and how fondly those letters were read over and over again, the last thing at night, and the first in the morning, the mother, situated as Constance was then, may imagine; for the loving little family circle was broken now.
CHAPTER IX.
FOREBODINGS.
If ever Constance left the villa, she sought the direction of the coast, and when there never wearied of watching the wide expanse of the Bristol Channel with its passing ships and steamers; for the changing ocean was the path by which her loved ones were to return to her; Richard, within a month perhaps, now; but their son Denzil—oh, years must elapse, her heart foreboded and knew, ere she should see him again.
And now as the season advanced, and storms and wrecks among the Scilly Isles and about the Land's End were not unfrequent, her soul became a prey to nervous fears, that were fed and fostered in spite of herself by Derrick's sister, Winny Braddon, a superstitious old Cornish woman, who had been Sybil's nurse.
Winny, a devout believer in dreams, visions, the virtues of miraculous wells and so forth, was wont to declare that when all specifics failed she had been cured of rheumatism by crawling through the famous Men-an-tol, or Holed Stone near Lanyon; and now she shook her grey head ominously when the wind blew a gale and rolled a heavy surf upon the shore, and averred that she could hear the wreck-bells booming under the sea at Boscastle.