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.