Of that newly-found admirer whom she had been learning to love, Audley Trevelyan, she had totally ceased to think; her heart was wholly occupied by thoughts of her papa, her mamma, her brother Denzil—all of whom she might never, never see more!
Dread of falling headlong down the shaft of the ancient mine, more than a thousand feet, perhaps, made her, we have said, pause breathlessly, and lie on the sloping floor of rock, listening to her watery death coming nearer and nearer with a gurgling sound, that, to her nervous and excited imagination, seemed like the chuckle of a destroying fiend! The dark unspeakable himself was alleged by the peasantry to frequent the oozy recess of the Pixies' Hole, and the bottom of the old shaft was said, by the same veracious authorities, to be haunted by the unquiet spirits of ancient miners, who had perished there in the time of old.
Rapidly, yet terribly, through the mind of Sybil, then, as she fully believed herself to be, hovering on the verge of death, came back the eighteen years of her past life; at Como, in the old palace by the Arno; among the Apennines and the wild Abruzzi; Rome, Athens, and elsewhere, all passed before her like a rapid phantasmagoria—days and hours of happiness and pleasure. The faces and voices of her parents and her brother so beloved, came vividly amid those memories of their strange and aimless wandering in foreign lands. The secret of her mother—whatever it was—she should never learn now; but gleams of hope and the desire to live, mingled with the blackness of her despair, for existence seemed sweet, and she felt so young to die, when a long life should be before her.
At Porthellick she must long since have been missed, and her fancy pictured the agony of her lonely and tender mother; the wild, noisy grief of Winny Braddon, and the honest anxiety of those who might be fruitlessly seeking for her along the cliffs or through the bay by boats; seeking for her alive or dead.
All their search would be vain, for the tide was still rising, and now where she stood, not daring to go further, the water flowed above her knees. A little time, a very little time more, and she should be lying drowned, the sport of the waves within the Pixies' Hole, or borne by them in their reflux, into the mighty waste of sea that washes the rugged shore of Cornwall.
A shrill cry escaped her as the water flowed to her waist; and gaspingly she felt with her hands for a little ledge of rock, up which she clambered, being in her terror endued by unnatural strength; and then, dripping and despairing, she felt a numbness come over all her faculties, which prevented her responding to certain strange sounds, somewhat like those of human voices mingled with the barking of a dog, now coming out of the inner gloom, while again a superstitious dread, the result of Winny Braddon's teaching, began to mingle with her more solid fears and sufferings.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE TIDE IN!
For a little space we shall return to the pretty villa of Porthellick, and to the anxious life of her who dwelt there; her thoughts ever with her absent son and husband. In this instance we put Denzil before his father, for the return of Richard Lord Lamorna, was looked for daily, but that of his son might be the event of years to come; so Denzil's last fond glance ere he left her, and his calm aspect as he lay asleep and all unconscious that she hovered near his pillow, were deeply impressed on his poor mother's heart; and now an eternity of waters rolled between them, for his ship, she knew, must be ploughing the wide Indian Ocean.
To the wayfarer along the coast-road towards the quaint village of Endellion (with its weather-beaten church, and the ivied ruins of Rhoscarrock), that white-walled villa with its rose covered peristyle buried among the pale-green drooping willows from which the locality takes its Cornish name, no better example of peace, content and quiet could be given.