At the very time when Mabel Trecarrel was singing to tease Audley, Sybil was beginning a song of a very different character and calibre to soothe or amuse her mamma. It was a grand old Hungarian ballad, with an accompaniment like a crash of trumpets at times; and was one she had picked up during their wanderings on the banks of the Danube; but she had only got the length of the first two verses, when her mother's tears arrested her.
"Was it the vine with clusters bright
That clung round Buda's stateliest tower?
No, 'twas a lady fair and white,
Who hung around an armed knight;
It was their sad, their parting hour.
"They had been wedded in their youth,
Together they had spent life's bloom;
That hearts so long entwined by truth
Asunder should be torn in ruth—
It was a cruel and boding doom!"
"Oh cease, Sybil," said Constance; "cease; it was your papa's favourite."
"Then why cease, mamma?"
"He is not here, and I feel I know not what—a foreboding—a superstition of the heart."
So Sybil closed her piano, and it was long, long ere she opened it again.
Three weeks had now elapsed since the Montreal steamer Admiral (his anticipated departure by which Richard Trevelyan fully notified to Constance) had been due at Blackwall, and yet there were no tidings of her, so insurances went up, and underwriters looked grave. No Atlantic cables had been laid as yet between Britain and America, though such things were talked of as being barely possible. The next steamer announced that the Admiral had duly sailed at her stated time; so, save the letter which contained the pleasant odds and ends concerning Montreal and their early lover days, poor Constance saw her husband's writing no more.
Her surmises were endless, and the worthy rector lent his inventive aid to add to them. Might not the ship have met with some accident to her engines, and put back slowly under canvas to Montreal, the Azores, or elsewhere?
Lost—was the word that hovered on her lips and trembled in her heart—LOST! Oh, that was not to be thought of. Yet if it were so, some must have survived to tell the terrible story; some might have been picked up, famished and weary, by a passing ship, and taken perhaps to a distant region, Heaven alone knew where. Such events happened every day on the mighty world of waters; so as week succeeded week, the familiarity with suspense, sorrow and horror seemed to become greater; till ideas began to confirm themselves, and probabilities to be steadily faced, that she would have shrunk from in utter woe but a month before!