After her flight from Craigengowan to London, Dulcie had found shelter in the same house wherein she had lodged after leaving Revelstoke, in a gloomy alley that opens northward off Oxford Street. The vicar, on whose protection and interest she relied, was not in London, and would be absent therefrom for fully a month; so she had written to Mr. Pentreath, who quietly, but firmly rebuked her for her folly in quitting Craigengowan, and expressed his dismay that she should be alone and unprotected in London, and urged her to come to him, in Devonshire, at once.
But Dulcie remembered his slender income, his pinched household, and notwithstanding all the dear and sad associations of Revelstoke, she remained in London, thinking that amid its mighty world something would be sure to turn up.
The solitude of her little room was so great that times there were when she thought she might go mad from pure inanition and loneliness; but greater still seemed the solitude of the streets, which, crowded as they were by myriads passing to and fro, were without one friend for her.
She was not without her occasional chateaux en Espagne—dreams of relations, rich but as yet unknown, who would seek her out and cast a sunshine on her life; but how sordid seemed all her surroundings after the comfort and luxury, the splendour and stateliness, of Craigengowan!
Dulcie had once had her girlish dreams of life in London, at a time when the chances of her ever being there were remote indeed—dreams that were as the glittering scenes in a pantomime; and now, in her loneliness, she was appalled by the great Babylon, so terrible in its vastness, so hideous in its monotony as a wilderness of bricks and bustle by day, bustle and gas by night, with its huge and dusky dome over all, with its tens upon thousands of vehicles of every kind—a whirling vortex, cleft in two by a river of mud and slime, where the corpses of suicides and the murdered are ploughed up by steamers and dredges—a river that perhaps hides more crime and dreadful secrets than any other in Europe; and amid the seething masses of the great Babylon she felt herself as a grain of sand on the seashore.
Our neighbours next door know us not, nor care to know; and to the postman, the milkman, and the message-boy we are only 'a number' as long as we pay—nothing more.
So times there were when Dulcie longed intensely for the home of her childhood, with its shady Devonshire lanes redolent of ripe apples, wild honeysuckle, and the sycamore-trees, and for the midges dancing merrily in the clear sunshine above the stream in which she and Florian were wont to fish together: and but for Shafto and Lady Fettercairn she would have gladly hailed Craigengowan, with its ghost-haunted Howe, its old gate of the legend, Queen Mary's Thorn, and all their lonely adjuncts, could she but share them with Finella; but she was all unaware that the latter was there no longer.
Her little stock of money was wearing out, with all her care and frugality, and her whole hope lay in the return of the vicar, who, too probably, would also reproach her with precipitation.
'Things will come right yet—they always do—if one knows how to wait and trust in God,' said Dulcie to herself, hopefully but tearfully; 'and when two love each other,' she added, thinking of Florian, 'they may beat Fate itself.'
Dulcie had not written to Finella, as she was yet without distinct plans; she only knew that she could not teach, and thus was not 'cut out' for a governess. Neither did she write to Florian, as she knew not where to address him, and, knowing not what a day might bring forth, she could not indicate where she was to send an answer. So week followed week; her sweet hopefulness began to leave her, and a presentiment came upon her that she would never see Florian again. So many misfortunes had befallen her that this would only be one more; and this presentiment seemed to be realised, and a dreadful shock was given, when by the merest chance she saw in a paper a few weeks old the same telegram concerning him which had so excited old Mr. Kippilaw, and which had found its way into print, as everything seems to do nowadays.
The transport with sick and wounded was on its homeward way; but when it arrived would he be with it, or sleeping under the waves?
It was a dreadful stroke for Dulcie; her only tie to earth seemed to be passing or to have passed away. She had no one to confide in, no one to condole with her, and for a whole day never quitted her pillow; but, 'at twenty, one must be constitutionally very unsound if grief is to kill one, or even to leave any permanent and abiding mark of its presence.' But she had to undergo the terrible mental torture of waiting—waiting, with idle hands, with throbbing head, and aching heart, for the bulletin that might crush her whole existence. He whom she loved with all her heart and soul, who had been woven up with her life, since childhood, was far away upon the sea, struggling it might be with death, and she was not by his pillow; and the lips, that had never aught but soft and tender words for her, might be now closed for ever!
Already hope had been departing, we have said. Her heart was now heavy as lead, and all the brightness of youth seemed to have gone out of her life. She began to feel a kind of dull apathetic misery, most difficult to describe, yet mingled with an aching, gnawing sense of mingled pain.
Florian dying, probably—that was the latest intelligence of him. How curt, how brief, how cruel seemed that item of news, among others!
She opened her silver locket, with the coloured photo of him. The artist had caught his best expression in a happy moment; and it was hard—oh, how hard! for the lonely girl to believe that the loving and smiling face, with its tender dark eyes and crisp brown hair, was now too probably a lifeless piece of clay, mouldering under the waves of the tropical sea.
She had made up her mind to expect the worst, and that she could never see him more.
'It seems to me,' she thought, 'as if I had ceased to be young, and had grown very old. God help me, now!' she added, as she sank heavily into a chair, with a deathly pale face, and eyes that saw nothing, though staring into the dingy brick street without; and though Dulcie's tears came readily enough as a general rule, in the presence of this new and unexpected calamity, nature failed to grant her the boon—the relief of weeping freely. 'There is a period in all our lives,' says a writer, 'when the heaviest grief will hardly keep us waking; we may sink to slumber with undried tears upon our face; we may sob and murmur through the long night; but still we have the happy power of losing consciousness and gaining strength to bear the next day's trial.'
So Dulcie, worn with heavy thought, could find oblivion for a time, and even slept with the roar of mighty London in her ears.
The vicar had not yet returned, so day followed day with her, aimlessly and hopelessly.
She thought the public prints could give her no further tidings now. She knew not where to seek for intelligence, and could but wait, dumbly, expectantly, and count the hours as they drifted wearily past, in the desperate longing that some tidings would reach her at some time of her dearest, it might be now her dead, one!
The Parks were completely empty then; the sunshine was pleasant and warm for the season; the grass was green and beautiful; and lured thereby one forenoon, the pale girl went forth for a little air, when there occurred an extraordinary catastrophe that, in her present weakened state of mind and body, was fully calculated to destroy her!
The afternoon passed—the evening and the night too, yet she did not as usual return to her humble lodging. The morning dawned without a trace of her; the landlady began to appraise her few effects; the landlord shook his head, winked knowingly, and said, 'She was far too pretty to live alone,' and deemed it the old story over again—a waif lost in London.