‘Did the child die?’ asked Ethel falteringly.
‘It was worse than that,’ answered Lady Maud, whose lip trembled as she spoke. ‘She had been with the child in the garden, which bordered the river. Little Helena—that was her name—was playing among the flowers when her mother was called away, and as she was entering the house, she heard a faint cry or scream, in what seemed to be the child’s voice. She ran back to the garden, and to the grassy terrace where she had left her young treasure; but the child was not to be seen. She called; but there was no answer. Trembling, she neared the water’s edge, and there she saw the child’s tiny straw-hat with its broad black ribbon, floating down the river; but of the body—for no one could doubt but that the poor little lamb had been drowned—there were no signs; and when aid was summoned and a search begun, it proved fruitless.’
‘Was the poor little child never found then?’ asked Ethel, more moved than she had expected to be by these details.
‘Never found,’ replied Lady Maud. ‘No rewards, no entreaties availed, though men examined every creek and shoal of the river. No trace of the lost one was ever discovered except the little straw-hat. With that the miserable young mother never would part. On her own death-bed—and she died very soon after, utterly broken down by this double bereavement—it was the last object on which her dying eyes looked as her feeble fingers clung to it, that little hat of the child’s. We talk lightly of broken hearts. And yet, such things can be. Poor Cousin Clare died of one. Hers was a sad, sad story.’
Both Lady Maud and Ethel were weeping now. The former was the first to dry her eyes.
‘We are very silly,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘to cry in this way over an old history concerning people that we never, to our knowledge, saw; for though I was alive when Cousin Clare married, I don’t remember her at all. I was too young for that. Only it struck me often that Sir Sykes Denzil’s sadness may have more to do with the desertion of his betrothed bride and her brief career and early ending, than with the cause to which it is generally assigned. Don’t you think so too?’
Ethel did think so; but she did not speak for a moment, and then she said: ‘I pity Sir Sykes too. How bitterly his own cruel words, as to the revenge he threatened, must have come back to his memory when he heard the news of that great misfortune—of the child’s being drowned.’
‘Idle threats, dear! Perhaps he hardly remembered having spoken so foolishly in his excitement,’ answered Lady Maud indifferently. ‘It was after all about that time that he lost his own little daughter. Cousin Clare’s title came to Papa, and our brother Harrogate bears it by courtesy, as you know. There was no property. The poor little child, had she lived, would have been Helena, Lady Harrogate.’
‘The body was never found at all?’ asked Ethel.
‘Never found!’ said Lady Maud.—‘Now Alice, I’ll help you with your drawing.’ And the conversation ceased.