CHAPTER XVI.
A CLOUD DISPELLED.
September was creeping on, and in London then the weather is often steady and pleasant, though in the mornings and evenings the first chills of the coming winter begin to be felt. The summer-parched and dust-laden foliage of the trees droops in Park and square, and the great gorse-bushes are all in golden bloom at Wimbledon, at Barnes Common, and other fern and heath-covered wastes.
The Row and other favourite promenades were now empty; Parliament was not sitting; and shooting and cub-hunting were in full force in the country.
Sooner or later one runs up against every one in this whirligig world of ours; thus Hammersley, still lingering aimlessly in London, coming one day from the Horse Guards, in crossing the east end of the Mall, found himself suddenly face to face with her of whom his thoughts were full—Finella Melfort!
Finella, in a smart sealskin jacket, with her muff slung by a silken cord round her slender neck, a most becoming hat, the veil of which was tied tightly and piquantly across her short upper lip.
'Finella!'
'Oh, Vivian!'
Their exclamations and joyful surprise were mutual, but 'the horns and hoofs of the green-eyed monster' were still obtruding amid the thoughts of Hammersley, though she frankly gave him both her plump little tightly gloved hands, which after a caressing pressure he speedily dropped, rather to the surprise of the charming proprietor thereof.
'Did you know I was in London?' she asked.
'Yes—too well.'
'And yet made no effort to see—to write to me!'
'I knew not where to find you.'
'You might have inquired—that is, if you cared to know.'
'Cared—oh, Finella!'
'And your wound—your cruel wound! Have you recovered from it?'
'Nearly so—thus I have just been at the Horse Guards about going on foreign service again.
'Foreign service—again?'
'Yes; there are wounds deeper and more lasting than any an enemy can inflict.'
She evidently did not understand his mood.
'Are you not rash, Vivian, to be out in a day so chill as this?' she said.
'A little chill, fog, or rain, more or less, are trifles to one whose thoughts are all of sad and bitter things.'
'Vivian?—your wound, was it a severe one?'
'Very. I received a shot that was meant for the assassination of another.'
'Who?'
'Florian; your friend Miss Carlyon's lover, who, poor fellow, I hear sailed from Durban in a bad way.'
'Why do you look and speak so coldly, Vivian—Vivian?' she asked, with her slender fingers interlaced, while he certainly eyed her wistfully, curiously, and even angrily.
'Why?'
'Yes,' said she, impetuously. 'Why are you so cruel—so hard to me?' she added, with a sob in her voice, as she placed a hand on his arm and looked earnestly up in his face. 'Surely it is not for me to plead thus?'
'Why are you so touched?'
'Can you ask, while treating me thus?'
'Like a thorough Scotch girl, you answer one question by asking another.'
'Well, in constancy men certainly do not bear the palm,' said she, drawing back a pace, and inserting her hands in her muff.
'I think you should be the last to taunt me, at all events, as appearances go.'
There was a moment's silence, for both were too honest and true to have acquired what has been termed 'the useful and social art of talking platitudes' when their hearts were full.
'And this is our long-looked-forward-to meeting?' she said, reproachfully.
'Yes—alas!'
'Why do you regard me—not with the furious rage that possessed you on quitting Craigengowan—but with coldness, doubt, indifference?'
'Indifference! Oh, no, Finella.'
'Doubt—suspicion, then?'
'It may be,' he replied with a doggedness that certainly was not natural to him.
'What have I done?' asked the girl, sorely piqued now.
'Nothing, perhaps,' he replied shrinking from putting his thoughts into words.
'Can it be that you are changeable and inconstant? When you saw me, and knew that I was in London, why did you not come to me at once?'
'Because I knew not where or with whom you were residing.'
'Did you go to Fettercairn House?'
'No.'
'Why?' she asked curtly, for her suspicions were being kindled now.
'I knew the family were not in town.'
'Then you might have asked for Lady Drumshoddy, and, if not, somehow have heard——'
'By tipping the butler or Mr. James Plush?'
'If I wanted to do anything I would grasp at the first chance of achieving it,' said Finella, her dark eyes sparkling now.
'Men are seldom creatures of impulse. I reasoned over the matter, and put two and two together.'
'Reason generally urges men to do what they wish. But what do you mean by putting two and two together?'
'Well, frankly, I referred to you and Major Garallan.'
'Do you make four of us? Vivian, you are absurd,' said Finella, after a little pause, during which she coloured and stamped a little foot impatiently on the ground.
'Perhaps,' said he sadly and wearily; 'but I heard so much at the Clubs and elsewhere that I knew not what to think.'
'About us you mean—Cousin Ronald and me?'
'Yes.'
'You heard—what?'
'That you were about to be married—that is the long and the short of it.'
His face crimsoned with annoyance as he spoke; but hers grew pale.
'And you, Vivian—you believed this?' she asked mournfully and reproachfully.
'Much that I saw seemed to confirm it. You and he were so much together.'
'How unfortunate I am to have been suspected by you twice! Ronald is only my cousin.'
'So was that precious Shafto!'
'Why hark back upon that episode?' she asked, piteously. 'Have I offended you? Misunderstanding between us seems to have become our normal state.'
'Your cousin may—nay, I doubt not, loves you, Finella; but why do you permit him to do so?'
'Can I help it? Ronald was a kind of brother to me—nothing more,' she continued, ignoring—perhaps at that moment forgetting—his recent proposal; 'but my heart has never for a moment wandered from you. See!' she added, while quickly and nervously stripping the kid glove from her right hand, 'your engagement ring has never, for a second even, been off my finger since first you placed it there.'
'My darling—my darling!' he exclaimed, as all his heart went forth towards her. 'Oh, Finella! what I suffered when I thought I had again lost you! Yet I would almost undergo it all again—for this!' he added, as he passionately kissed her, after a swift glance round to see that no one was nigh.
So the reconciliation was complete; all doubts were dissipated, and they lingered long together, talking of themselves and a thousand kindred topics, in which foreign service was not included; and more complete it was, when, after escorting her home (Lady Drumshoddy being absent at Exeter Hall), in the solitude of the drawing-room, they had a sweeter lingering still, Finella's head resting on his shoulder, the touch of her cheek thrilling through him, and like some tender and tuneful melody her soft cooing voice seemed to vibrate in his head and heart together.
So they were united again after all!
At last they had to separate, and looking forward to a visit on the morrow, Hammersley, seeming to tread on air, in a state of radiance, both in face and mind, hurried across the square to the Club, where he came suddenly upon Villiers, whom he had not seen for some days, and who seemed rather curiously to resent his evident state of high spirits.
'Well, Villiers,' said he, 'you do look glum, by Jove! What is the matter now—the Wolseley ring, and all that—the service going to the dogs!'
'You know deuced well that it has gone—went with the regimental system. No; it is a cursed affair of my own. I have been robbed.'
'Robbed—how—and of what?'
'My pocket-book, containing some valuable papers and more than £500 in Bank of England notes.'
'Good heavens! I hope you have the numbers?'
'No—never noted such a thing in my life. Who but a careful screw would do so?'
'How came it about?'
'Well, you see,' said Villiers slowly, while manipulating a cigar, 'I took a run over to Ostend, and there, as the devil would have it, at the Casino, and afterwards in the mail boat to Dover, I fell in with a charming Belgienne, an awfully pretty and seductive creature, who was on her way to London and quite alone. We had rather a pronounced flirtation, and exchanged photos—an act of greater folly on her part than on mine, as the event proved; for, after taking mine from my pocket-book (which she could see was full of notes), I never saw the latter again. I dropped asleep, but awoke when the tickets were collected—awoke to find that she had slipped out at some intermediate station, and the pocket-book, which I had placed in my breast-pocket, was gone too! There had been no one else in the carriage with me—indeed I had quietly tipped the guard to arrange it so. Thus, as no trace of it could be found, after the most careful search, she must have deftly abstracted it. Here is her photo—a deuced dear work of art to me!'
'She is pretty, indeed!' exclaimed Hammersley; 'such a quantity of beautiful fair hair!'
'It was dark golden.'
'Surely it was rash of her to give you this?'
'It was vanity, perhaps, when the idea of theft had not occurred to her.'
'Throw it in the fire.'
'Not at all.'
'What do you mean to do with it—preserve the likeness of a mere adventuress?'
'I shall give it to the police as a clue. It may lead to the recovery of my money, and, what is of more consequence to me, my correspondence.'
So the photo of the pretty Belgienne was handed over to the authorities; but neither Villiers nor Hammersley could quite foresee what it was to lead to.
CHAPTER XVII.
FLORIAN DYING.
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.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TERRIBLE MISTAKE.
Dulcie had thought that no possible harm could accrue to her from rambling or sitting in that beautiful Park alone, and watching the children playing with their hoops along the gravelled walk. With whom could she go? She had no one to escort her. She knew not that it was not quite etiquette for a young lady to be there alone and unattended; but the event that occurred to her was one which she could never have anticipated.
She had sat for some time, absorbed in her own thoughts, on one of the rustic sofas not far from Stanhope Gate, all unaware that an odd-looking and mean-looking, but carefully dressed little man had been hovering near her, and observing her closely with his keen small ferret-like eyes, and with an expression of deep interest, destitute, however, of the slightest admiration, and with a kind of sardonic and stereotyped smile in which mirth bore no part.
He scanned her features from time to time, grinned to himself, and ever and anon consulted something concealed in his hand.
'Golden hair—sealskin jacket—sable muff—hat and feather—a silver necklet—all right,' he muttered, and then he advanced close towards her.
Dulcie looked up at him with surprise, and then with an emotion of alarm, mingled with confusion, which he was neither slow to see nor misinterpret—
'May I ask your name?' said he in a mild tone.
'Miss Carlyon—Dulcie Carlyon.'
'Ah! you speak good English.'
'I am English.'
'And not a furriner?'
'No,' replied Dulcie in growing alarm.
'But you reside in London, just now?'
'Just now—yes,' said Dulcie, seeing that he was comparing her face with that of a photo in his hand.
'With your family—friends?'
'I have no family—no friends,' said Dulcie, with a sob in her throat, and starting up to withdraw in great alarm.
'Just so—not here, but at Ostend, perhaps.'
Thinking her questioner was mad or intoxicated, Dulcie, in growing terror, was about to move away when he laid a hand very decidedly on her left arm.
'Leave me,' she exclaimed, and on looking around her terror increased on seeing that no male aid was near her; 'who are you that ask these questions—that dare to molest me?'
'My name is Grabbley—Mr. Gilpin Grabbley, of Scotland Yard—oh, you'll know enough o' me, my dear, before I'm done with you. Come along: you're wanted partiklar—you are. Will you walk with me quietly?'
Perceiving that she was about to utter a shriek, he grasped her arm more tightly, even to the bruising of her soft tender skin, and said in a sharp hissing tone:
'Don't—don't make a row: 'taint no use, my beauty—you must come along with me.'
'Oh, what do you mean?' moaned Dulcie, almost incapable of standing now.
'Mean—why, that you are my prisoner, that is all.'
'Am I mad or dreaming? Oh, sir, this is some dreadful mistake.'
'No mistake at all,' said Mr. Grabbley tauntingly.
They were out in Park Lane now, and Dulcie cast a despairing glance at the many closed and shuttered windows of the mansions there, as if she would summon aid.
'Look here, gal,' said the detective, for such Mr. Grabbley was, 'I have orders to arrest the original of this fotygraf—you are that original—look! don't you see yourself, as if in a looking-glass?'
Dulcie did look, with a kind of horrible fascination, and recognised in it a very striking resemblance to her face and dress—even to the luckless silver locket and chain.
Mr. Grabbley utilised the moments of her bewilderment. He stopped a passing cab—half lifted, half thrust her in.
'Marlborough Street,' said he to the driver, and they were driven off.
'Of what am I accused?' said Dulcie, driven desperate now.
'Robbery on a railway—that's all; and you knows all about it—the when and the where.'
If not the victim of some deliberate outrage, she was certainly the victim of some inexplicable mistake which might yet be explained; anyway in her ignorance and in her wild fear she strove to elicit succour from passers-by, till Mr. Grabbley closed the rattling glasses of the cab and held her firmly, while, like one in a dreadful dream, she was rapidly driven through Berkley Square, across Bond Street and Regent Street, to their destination, where, when the cab stopped, she was quickly taken indoors, through a passage, in which several police officers and odd, repulsive-looking people of both sexes were loitering about, and whence she was conveyed by the inexorable Grabbley, to whom all appeals were vain, and left in a state of semi-stupefaction—after being led down a long corridor, having many doors opening on each side thereof—in a small bare room—a den it seemed, and if not quite a prison cell, yet dreary, cold, and comfortless enough to suggest the idea of being one.
She heard a key turned upon her, and felt that now—more than ever—she was a prisoner!
She had no sense of indignation as yet—only a wild and clamorous one of fear, or dread, she knew not of what—of being disgraced, and, it might be, the victim of a mad-man's freak. She was in utter solitude, and no sound seemed to be there but the loud beating of her heart.
Past grief and anxiety had rendered her very weak and unable to withstand the tension on her nerves caused by this astounding accusation and catastrophe, of which she could neither calculate nor see the end. Then an exhaustion that was utter and complete followed, and for a time she was physically and mentally prostrate—in that awful sense of desolation and heart-broken grief that God in His mercy permits few to suffer.... So passed the night.
'A person—a gentleman,' said a commissionaire at the Rag doubtfully to Villiers as he entered the vestibule, 'has been waiting here for nearly an hour for you, sir.'
'Oh—it is you, Mr.—Mr.——'
'Grabbley, sir,' said the little man affably, his ferret eyes twinkling, and his vulgar face rippling over with a smile.
'You have some news, I suppose?'
'Yes, sir, I've nabbed her.'
'When?'
'Yesterday morning.'
'Where?'
'In Hyde Park—nigh Stanhope Gate. She speaks English uncommonly well to be a furriner.'
'That's sharp work! You are a clever fellow, Grabbley. Was my pocket-book found upon her?'
'We did not search her, but she is locked up at Marlborough Street, where I would like you to see and identify her before making out the matter in the charge sheet.'
'All right—get a cab. Come with me, Hammersley, and I'll show you my little Belgienne.'
Hammersley went unwillingly, as it was pretty close on the time he had now begun to visit Finella at her grandmother's residence, and he cast longing eyes at the windows of the latter as he and his two companions were driven out of the square.
'A horrid atmosphere, and a horrid place in all its details,' he muttered, when the scene of Dulcie's detention was reached, and throwing away the fag end of a cheap cigar Mr. Grabbley, with an expression of no small satisfaction, puckering his visage, unlocked and threw open the door—a sound which roused Dulcie from her stupefied state—and starting up she stood before them, trembling in every fibre, with a hunted expression in her dark blue eyes and a gathering hope in her breast, to find herself confronted by two such men of unexceptionable appearance and bearing as Hammersley and Villiers, who raised his hat, and turning with astonishment and some dismay to the police official said sharply:
'This is some great—some truly infernal mistake!'
'A mistake—how, sir?' asked Grabbley.
'This young lady is not the person whose photo I gave you.'
'They seems as like as two peas.'
'The likeness, I admit, is great, but the Belgian girl, I told you, could not speak a word of English, or scarcely so. I have to offer you a thousand apologies, though the mistake is not mine, but that of this man,' said Villiers, bowing low to Dulcie, greatly impressed by the sweetness of her beauty and terror of the predicament in which she had been placed.
'So it's a mistake after all, young gal,' growled Mr. Grabbley, with intense disappointment and reluctance to relinquish his prey.
'And may I go, sir?' said Dulcie piteously to Villiers.
'Most certainly—you are free,' replied Villiers, who was again about to apologize and explain, but the girl, like a hunted creature, drew her veil tightly across her tear-blotched face, rushed along the dingy corridor, and gained the street in an instant.
That she was a lady in every sense of tone and bearing was evident, and Villiers felt overcome with shame and contrition, and swore in pretty round terms at the crestfallen Grabbley.
'This is a devil of a mistake!' said the latter as he scratched his head in dire perplexity.
'A mistake we have not, perhaps, heard the end of. Who is she?' asked Villiers.
'I don't know.'
'Did she give you no name?'
'Yes—here it is,' said Grabbley, producing a dirty note-book; 'Dulcie Carlyon.'
'A curious and uncommon name.'
'Who do you say—Dulcie Carlyon?' exclaimed Hammersley, who had hitherto been silent, starting forward; and on the name being repeated to him once or twice, 'Great Heaven!' he exclaimed, 'if it should be the same!'
'Same what—or who?'
'The girl to whom Florian is engaged: you remember Florian of ours.'
'Of course I do.'
'Golden hair, blue eyes, under middle height (how often he has described her to me), and then the name—Dulcie Carlyon; it must be she—let us overtake her! What an astounding introduction!'
But that was easier proposed than accomplished. On gaining the street the two officers saw not a trace of Dulcie Carlyon, so all hope of discovering her address was gone.
How Dulcie made her way back to her obscure lodgings she scarcely knew; but she was long and seriously ill after this startling event.
There she felt as much at home as a creature so poor and friendless could feel. Often she lay abed and seemed unconscious, but she was not so. Her eyes were wide open, and their gaze wandered about; her lips were generally dry and quivering. She was in the state which generally comes after a severe mental shock; her mind refused to grasp the situation.
Until a drink was given her by Ellen, the kind little maid of all work, she sometimes knew not how parched her throat was—how sorely athirst she had been.
She was afraid to be left alone after that horrible accusation. In her nervousness she feared that she might see her double—feel a touch, and on turning find herself face to face with her own likeness, as that evil Lord of Fettercairn did who sold his country.
Finella's astonishment to hear from Hammersley the story of where and under what circumstances he had met Dulcie Carlyon was only equalled by his own on learning that Florian, his comrade and brother-officer in the Zulu war, and whilom private soldier in his company of the 24th, was heir to a peerage, and the cousin of his affianced wife, Finella Melfort.
For so it was. Lord and Lady Fettercairn had undergone so much in the mismanagement of family matters latterly, and in years long past, that they were now well disposed to let Finella alone, and in all conscience they could not expect her to give to Florian (if he ever returned) the love she had never given to the now vanished Shafto.
'Vivian, you must find out the address of dear Dulcie,' said she.
'If I can.'
'You must. I shall want her as one of my bridesmaids.'
From this we may presume that matters between these two were all in fair training now.
'Your wish would delight Villiers, my groomsman, who has been sorrowing about her ever since the time of that terrible mistake.'
CHAPTER XIX.
DULCIE'S VISITOR.
On an afternoon subsequent to this episode Dulcie was lost in a day-dream, born of her own sad thoughts, her soft blue eyes fixed vacantly on the hideous and dingy brick edifices of the thoroughfare in which she dwelt; and when roused therefrom by the little maid of all work, she gazed at her with a somewhat dazed expression.
'What is it, Ellen?' she asked.
'A gentleman, miss, wishes to see you.'
Alarm—dread, she knew not of what, was her first idea now.
'Who is he?' she asked.
'I don't know, miss.'
'Is he old or young?'
'Young.'
'Then he can't be the vicar?'
'Oh, lawk, no, miss, he ain't a bit like a clergyman,' replied the housemaid, laughing.
'Ask his business, Ellen.'
She was almost relapsing into her dream again, when she was startled by seeing a man appear beside her.
'Dulcie?' said a voice, that made her heart thrill.
She sprang up to find herself confronted by a gentleman, whose face, though thin and worn, seemed deeply tanned by the sun, so that his scorched neck was absolutely red; his dark moustache was thick and heavy, his shoulders broad and square.
'Dearest Dulcie, don't you know me?' said he, holding out his hands and arms.
'Florian—is this you—really you?'
'I thought you would not quite forget me.'
'Forget you!' said Dulcie, in a low and piercing voice, as she fell upon his breast, and his loving arms went closely round her.
'Oh, Florian, I did not know you were in England!'
'We were landed at Plymouth three days ago. I got your address from good old Paul Pentreath, procured leave of absence, and came on here without a moment's delay, my own darling.'
For some minutes neither could find words to speak, so supreme was the mutual happiness of the sudden reunion.
'How brown you are! but how thin, and how much older you look!' said Dulcie, surveying him with bright but tearful eyes. 'I can scarcely believe you to be the same Florian that left me only a year ago or so.'
'Ay, Dulcie, pet; but soldiering, especially soldiering in the ranks, takes a lot out of a fellow. But I am the same Florian that left you then, with a heavy and hopeless heart indeed.'
'And now——'
'Now I shall leave you no more.'
'What dreadful places you must have been in, Florian; what dangers you have faced; what sufferings undergone, my love!'
'The thought of you lightened and brightened them all to me, Dulcie,' said he, while into her bright little English face came that wonderful and adoring smile only possible on the lips and in the eyes of a woman who is in love, and for the object of her love.
She told him of her simple plans and humble prospects, of her hope in the vicar, why she had left Craigengowan, and how she came to be in that poor and cheap lodging-room near Oxford Street.
'We must not lose sight of each other now, my darling,' said he, as she nestled her face on his breast. 'Let us get married at once, love, and then it must be service in India for me. Are you ready to face heat, it may be fever, and Heaven knows what more, Dulcie?'
'Every peril, if with you!'
'My brave little soldier's wife! But suppose we grow tired of each other?'
'You wicked wag!—why think of such a thing?'
'Married folks do sometimes,' said he, laughing.
'Then we should part—I would run away.'
'As a preliminary to that we must be united, Dulcie; so when will you be ready to marry me?'
'Oh, Florian!'
'You must say—we have little time to lose.'
'I have no trousseau to get—and no money for it—we are so poor, Florian.'
'But rich in love—well then—when?'
'I don't know,' was the shy, coy answer.
'This day three weeks—I can afford even a special license, Dulcie.'
'So be it, dear Florian.'
'Then I shall write to good old Paul Pentreath about it, and then we must resolutely think of turning our steps to India. We could not afford to live at home.'
Their little plans—little, though of vast importance to them—were all arranged, and discussed so sweetly, so lovingly, again and again, and at last he left her for his hotel, which was not far off, in Oxford Street, with a promise to call for her again betimes on the morrow; and to Dulcie it seemed as if the sun had come with a glorious burst of radiance at last into the cloudy atmosphere of her life; that joy had come with it; and that, sorrow and tears—save those of happiness—had gone for ever.
So, in three weeks the life of Dulcie Carlyon would be over; and the life of Dulcie MacIan would begin.
Dulcie MacIan—how odd it seemed to sound!
And so, at the appointed time, Mr. Paul Pentreath, summoned to London for the special occasion, tied the 'fatal knot' of the matrimonial noose for these two young people; and Dulcie, as in a dream, heard him ask:
'Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband, to live together after God's ordinance, in the holy estate of matrimony?'
And in a clear and confident tone little Dulcie said, 'I will,' as she loved, frankly—loved 'as a fair honest English maiden may with her heart on her lips, and all her soul shining out of her truthful eyes.'
So the marriage passed quietly; there were no lawyers, dressmakers, outfitters, and all those other folks who never keep time; no attendants, save Dulcie's landlady, the clerk, and honest Tom Tyrrell, whose 'time being out,' contrived to turn up about this crisis to wish, with all the ardour of his gallant heart, his whilom comrade and officer, with his fair young bride, 'God speed;' and after a quiet little honeymoon at Richmond—no further off—Florian set forth to the Horse Guards for the purpose of effecting an exchange to a regiment in India; but a letter that came to him altered all his views and plans.
It was from Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, W.S., who had seen the marriage announced in a public print, and had written at once to Florian and to Lord Fettercairn.
When Abou Hassan, the merchant of Bagdad, woke up on that remarkable morning, and he found himself in the palace of Haroun al Raschid, and treated as the latter by all the beautiful ladies of the Court, and the black slaves around his couch, he was scarcely more astonished than our poor Lieutenant of Infantry, when he found himself to be the heir of Craigengowan and Fettercairn!
He then knew all about Shafto's villainy, yet in the gentleness of his spirit he joined with Dulcie in saying:
'Poor creature! God help and forgive him, as freely as I do.'
Sooth to say, Dulcie was perhaps less astonished on finding Florian was the true heir; she had ever thought there was some mystery in the new position and new relationship, so suddenly assumed by the wily Shafto, whose tissue of falsehoods had, as usual in such cases, broken down by an unthought-of point.
Amid the sudden splendour of his prospects, such was his simplicity of character, that one of Florian's first thoughts was of a cosy cottage at Craigengowan for his comrade Tom Tyrrell!
The news spread like wildfire through all the Mearns, Angus, and everywhere else. It proved a great godsend, and the vicinity of Inverbervie was besieged by folks connected with the press, all eager to glean the last authentic information from Craigengowan, and even Grapeston, the butler, and MacCrupper, the head groom, were interviewed and treated—the former with wine, and the latter copiously with whisky and water—on the subject.
To Lady Fettercairn the marriage of Florian proved, of course, a cause of bitter mortification.
'Another mesalliance—like father, like son!' she exclaimed; 'now indeed we shall be associated with Freethinkers, franchise folks, dynamiters, and all kinds of dreadful people!' she wailed out.
The first alleged and hurriedly accepted heir had proved a ruinous blackleg; the second and true one was Flora MacIan's son beyond all doubt—a gallant young fellow, who had 'gone through the ranks to a commission!' but, alas! he had married Dulcie Carlyon—the Devonshire lawyer's daughter—her 'companion,' whom she had treated with no small contumely at Craigengowan, where she was now to be welcomed as a bride and the future Lady Fettercairn!
It was all too much for the aristocratic brain of the present holder of that rank.
She sat in her boudoir at Craigengowan; it was small, but wonderfully pretty; the chairs were all of ivory and gilt; the walls hung with pale blue silk, embroidered with flowers; and she thought ruefully of the time when—if her Lord predeceased her—she would have to quit all that, and take up her abode at Finella Lodge, the humble dower-house—giving place to Dulcie Carlyon. It was all too horrible to think of!
But the couple were coming, and already she could hear the distant cheers of the tenantry.
Several young ladies—among them the daughters of Mr. Kippilaw—were seated about the room in expectation and in lounging attitudes, their garden bonnets or riding habits showing how they had been recently occupied.
A distant sound—was it of carriage-wheels—made her lapdog bark.
'Down, Snap—be quiet,' said Lady Fettercairn with more asperity than was her wont to that plethoric and pampered cur.
The volunteers were under arms on the lawn to salute Florian Melfort as a hero from Zululand; and a salute to his bride was boomed forth from an old battery of 6-pounders on the terrace; a banner was flaunting on the old tower, above all the vanes and turrets; bells were clashing in the distant kirk spire, and the cheers of the Craigengowan tenantry rang up amid the ancient trees in welcome to the heir of Fettercairn and his winsome young wife.
Lord Fettercairn received them at the door with what grace he might; but the hands of many others were held forth to him, among others those of old Kenneth Kippilaw, Madelon Galbraith, the aged butler, and Sandy MacCrupper.
All shadows had fled away, and the bright sunshine of heaven was over Craigengowan and in the hearts of all there.
Even Lady Fettercairn, when she met Florian and saw how like her youngest son and his portrait he looked, felt all that she had of a mother's heart go forth to him as it had never done to the vanished Shafto; while Florian, modest and gentle Florian, whose heart had never quailed before the enemy, now felt, as he said to Dulcie, somewhat 'dashed' on being confronted by this tall and aristocratic grandmother amid such splendid surroundings.
Dulcie recalled with wonder the humble position she had held at Craigengowan, and the many fears and mortifications to which she had been subjected by Lady Fettercairn and Shafto till the eventful morning of her flight, and how strange it seemed to her to be able to act as guide and cicerone over his own patrimony to Florian, and to show him that she was quite at home in that hitherto unknown land to him—the Howe of the Mearns!
And in a week or two more Finella and Hammersley were coming thither on their honeymoon trip.
THE END.
BILLING & SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.