CHAPTER XVI.
''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'
A poet says:
'Not by appointment do we meet delight
And joy: they need not our expectancy.
But round some corner in the streets of life,
They on a sudden clasp us with a smile.'
Florian it was who stood before her, but though he gazed at her earnestly, wistfully, and with great pity in his tender eyes as he surveyed her pale face and deep mourning, he made no attempt to take the hands she yearningly extended towards him. She saw that he was in the uniform of a private soldier, over which he wore a light dust-coat as a sort of disguise, but there was no mistaking his glengarry—that head-dress which is odious and absurd for English and Irish regiments, and which in his instance bore a brass badge—the sphinx, for Egypt.
He looked thin, gaunt, and pale, and anon the expression of his eye grew doubtful and cloudy.
'Florian!' exclaimed Dulcie in a piercing voice, in which something of upbraiding blended with tones of surprise and grief; and yet the fact of his presence seemed so unreal that she lingered for a moment before she flung herself into his arms, and was clasped to his breast. 'Oh, what is the meaning of this dress?' she asked, lifting her face and surveying him again.
'It means that I am a soldier—like him whose son I thought myself—a soldier of the Warwickshire Regiment,' replied Florian with some bitterness of tone.
'Oh, my God, and has it come to this!' said Dulcie wringing her interlaced fingers. 'Could not Shafto—your cousin——'
'Shafto cast me off—seemed as if he could not get rid of me too soon.'
'How cruel, when he might have done so much for you, to use you so!'
'I had no other resort, Dulcie; I would not stoop to seek favours even from him, and our paths in life will never cross each other again; but a time may come—I know not when—in which I may seek forgiveness of enemies as well as friends—the bad and the good together—for a soldier's life is one of peril.'
'Of horror—to me!' wailed Dulcie, weeping freely on his breast.
'This tenderness is strange, Dulcie! Why did you cast me off in my utter adversity and return to me my locket?'
Dulcie looked up in astonishment.
'What do you mean, Florian—have you lost your senses?' she asked in sore perplexity. 'Where have you come from last?'
'Plymouth; in a paper there I saw a notice of your terrible loss, and resolved to see, even if I could not speak with you.'
'And you came——'
'To see you, my lost darling, once again. Oh, Dulcie, I thought I should die if I left England and sailed for Africa without doing so. I got a day's leave and am here.'
'But why have you done this?'
'This—what?'
'Soldiering!'
'Penniless, hopeless, what else could I do?—besides, I thought you had cast me off when you sent me back this locket,' he added, producing the gift referred to.
'That locket was stolen from me on the night you left Revelstoke—literally wrenched from my neck, as I told you in my letter—the letter you never answered.'
'I received no letter, Dulcie—but your locket was taken from you by whom?'
'Shafto.'
'The double villain! He must have intercepted that letter, and utilised the envelope with its postmarks and stamps to deceive me, and effect a breach between us.'
'Thank God you came, dearest Florian!'
'I thought you had renounced me, Dulcie, and now I almost wish you had.'
'Why?'
'It is little use to remember me now—I am so poor and hopeless.'
'After all,' said she, taking his face between her hands caressingly, 'what does poverty matter if we love each other still?'
'And you love me, Dulcie—love me yet!' exclaimed Florian passionately.
'And shall never, never cease to do so.'
'But I am so much beneath you now in position, Dulcie—and—and——' his voice broke.
'What, darling?'
'May never rise.'
'Would I be a true woman if I forsook you because you were unfortunate?'
'No; but you are more than a woman, Dulcie—you are a golden-haired angel!'
'My poor Florian, how gaunt and hollow your cheeks are! You have suffered——'
'Much since last we parted here in dear old Devonshire. But Shafto's villainy surpasses all I could have imagined!'
'And where is Shafto now?'
'With his grand relations, I suppose. I am glad that we have unravelled that which was to me a source of sorrow and dismay—the returned locket. So you cannot take back your heart, Dulcie, nor give me mine?' said Florian.
'Nor would I wish to do so,' she replied, sweetly and simply. 'Though poor, we are all the world to each other now.'
'Hard and matter-of-fact as our every-day existence is, there is—even in these railway times—much of strange and painful romance woven up with many a life; and so it seems to be with mine—with ours, Dulcie.'
'Oh that I were rich, Florian, or that you were so!' exclaimed the girl, as a great pity filled her heart, when she thought of her lover's blighted life, their own baffled hopes, and the humble and most perilous course that was before him in South Africa, where the clouds of war were gathering fast. 'I, too, am poor, Florian—very poor; dear papa died involved, leaving me penniless, and I must cast about to earn my own bread.'
'This is horrible—how shall I endure it?' said he fiercely, while regarding her with a loving but haggard expression in his dark eyes.
'What would you have done if you had not met me by chance here?'
'Loafed about till the last moment, and then done something desperate. I would have seen you, and after that—the Deluge! In two days we embark at Plymouth,' he added, casting a glance at the old church of Revelstoke and its burying-ground. 'There our parents lie, Dulcie—yours at least, and those that I, till lately, thought were mine. There is something very strange and mysterious in this change of relationship and position between Shafto and myself. I cannot understand it. Why was I misled all my life by one who loved me so well? How often have I stood with the Major by a gravestone yonder inscribed with the name of Flora MacIan and heard him repeat while looking at it—
'A thousand would call the spot dreary
Where thou takest thy long repose;
But a rude couch is sweet to the weary,
And the frame that suffering knows.
I never rejoiced more sincerely
Than at thy funeral hour,
Assured that the one I loved dearly
Was beyond affliction's power!
Why did he quote all this to me, and tell me never to forget that spot, or who was buried there, if she was only Shafto's aunt, and not my mother?'
Florian felt keenly for the position of Dulcie Carlyon, and the perils and mortifications that might beset her path now; but he was too young, too healthy and full of animal life and spirits, to be altogether weighed down by the thought of his humble position and all that was before him; and now that he had seen her again, restored to her bosom the locket, and that he knew she was true to him, and had never for a moment wavered in her girlish love, life seemed to become suddenly full of new impulses and hopes for him, and he thought prayerfully that all might yet be well for them both.
But when?
To Dulcie there seemed something noble in the hopeful spirit that, under her influence, animated her grave lover now. He seemed to become calm, cool, steadfast, and, hap what might, she felt he would ever be true to her.
He seemed brave and tender and true—'tender and true' as a Douglas of old, and Dulcie thought how pleasant and glorious it would be to have such a handsome young husband as he to take care of her always, and see that all she did was right and proper and wise.
A long embrace, and he was gone to catch the inexorable train. She was again alone, and for the first time she perceived that the sun had set, that the waves looked black as they rounded Revelstoke promontory, and that all the landscape had grown dark, desolate, and dreary.
What a hopeless future seemed to stretch before these two creatures, so young and so loving!
Florian was gone—gone to serve as a private soldier on the burning coast of Africa. It seemed all too terrible, too dreadful to think of.
'Every morning and evening I shall pray for you, Florian,' wailed the girl in her heart; 'pray that you may be happy, good, and rich, and—and that we shall yet meet in heaven if we never meet on earth.'
On the second morning after this separation, when Dulcie was pillowed in sleep, and the rising sun was shining brightly on the waves that rolled in Cawsand Bay and danced over the Mewstone, a great white 'trooper' came out of Plymouth Sound under sail and steam, with the blue-peter flying at its foremasthead, her starboard side crowded with red coats, all waving their caps and taking a farewell look at Old England—the last look it proved to many—and, led by Bob Edgehill, a joyous, rackety, young private of the Warwickshire, hundreds of voices joined chorusing:
'Merrily, my lads, so ho!
They may talk of a life at sea,
But a life on the land
With sword in hand
Is the life, my lads, for me!'
But there was one young soldier whose voice failed him in the chorus, and whose eyes rested on Stoke Point and the mouth of the Yealm till these and other familiar features of the coast melted into the widening Channel.
Dulcie was roused to exertion from the stupor of grief that had come upon her by tidings that a situation had been found for her as companion—one in which she would have to make herself useful, amiable, and agreeable in the family of a lady of rank and wealth, to whom she would be sent by influential friends of Mr. Pentreath in London.
The poor girl thought tearfully how desolate was her lot now, cast to seek her bread among utter strangers; and if she became ill, delicate, or unable to work, what would become of her?
Her separation from Florian seemed now greater than ever; but, as Heine has it:
'Tis but the old, old story,
Yet it ever abideth new;
And to whomsoever it cometh
The heart it breaks in two.'
To leave Revelstoke seemed another wrench.
Dulcie had been born and bred there, and all the villagers in Revelstoke loved and knew Lawyer Carlyon well, and were deeply interested in the future of his daughter; thus, on the day of her departure no one made any pretence of work or working. Heads were popping out and in of the windows of the village street all morning, and a cluster—a veritable crowd—of kindly folks accompanied Mr. Pentreath and the weeping girl to the railway station, for she wept freely at all this display of regard and sympathy, especially from the old, whom she might never see again.
When the train swept her away, and she lost sight of the last familiar feature of her native place, a strange and heavy sense of utter desolation came over poor Dulcie, and but for the presence of other passengers she would have stooped her head upon her hot hands and sobbed aloud, for she thought of her dead parents—when did she not think of them now?
'Oh!' exclaims a writer, 'if those who have loved and gone before us can see afar off those they have left, surely the mother who had passed from earth might tremble now for her child, standing so terribly alone in the midst of a seething sea of danger and temptations?’