‘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.’