THE WHEELS OF FATE.
Two days afterward a shabby little chemist in a shabby shop on the
Euston road looked carelessly at a strange customer.
A tall, big-boned girl in a frock too short for her had asked for
laudanum for a toothache. She looked half-wild with pain--or despair;
the chemist never thought of the latter, and he sold her some. Her face
grew livid as he pushed a book toward her and requested her to sign her
name. It was always done, he explained, when people bought poisons.
With a frightened hand she scrawled something, but the name was so
outlandish to the man as he stood peering at it that he never noticed
with what haste his customer had left the shop. She had been a fool
ever to have entered it, yet in the new and dreadful knowledge that
two days of London streets had crowded on her she had felt there was
nothing else to do.
Perhaps her very innocence of the world had made her pass scatheless
through perils she only half-realized, but that half was enough. Behind
her lay the convent, and she could never go back to that; round her
were the awful streets where policemen kept hurrying her on, where
people passed her indifferent-eyed, or else--Beryl Corselas turned sick
and faint at the thought of those other people who had not passed on.
Her money had been stolen, all but the few shillings she had put in
the bodice of her frock, and when that was done, what in all the world
remained to her? No one had ever liked her. She had no belief in any
one’s charity, and the girl’s heart swelled as she answered her own
question.
“Only just death,” she thought, fingering the little bottle of laudanum
she had been forced to sign her name to get, “or Mother Felicitas--for
she’ll trace me by it. Well, I’d rather die out here than live in the
convent.” She had walked on aimlessly enough, and looked up to see
that she was in front of the entrance to a railway-station, where
people kept going in and out. With a sudden inspiration she followed
a woman inside, and stood behind her at the booking-office. A train
was waiting, ready to leave; on the carriage nearest her was a sign,
“For Blackpool.” She knew where that was, even with her badly learned
geography lessons; it was a long way off from London and Mother
Felicitas.
She bought a second-class ticket, imitating the woman in front of her.
At least she could rest in the train, since her tired feet would hardly
carry her. She had no money at all when she had paid for her ticket,
and could just manage to follow a porter and stumble into the carriage
marked Blackpool.
To her joy no one else entered it, and the train started.
The cushioned carriage was rapture to her tired body, but before she
stretched herself out on its scant luxury, she drained the little
bottle the chemist had sold her, and threw it away. Then she curled
herself up and slept; at first uneasily, with the unaccustomed sounds
of the moving train in her dreams, and then heavily, as people sleep
themselves to death.
There was no peace in the world for such as she, and at sixteen Beryl
Corselas had found it out. She had tried to get employment, but the
women at whose doors she had knocked wanted no such unearthly-looking
nursemaids, and she could do nothing else. To sleep her life away was
all she could do, and there would be plenty of time for that between
London and Blackpool.
Remorselessly as the wheels of fate the train rolled on, and
dreamlessly the girl slept.
If she had known two things she might have flung the laudanum from her
like a snake. The first was that Andria Heathcote had been longing for
her, yet not daring to visit her in the safe refuge of the convent. The
second, that if Mother Felicitas had known that her missing pupil had
gone to Blackpool she would have laughed silently, since that was the
only part of England Beryl Corselas had to avoid. But in ignorance and
despair the girl had drugged herself till a creepy warmth was in her
veins, and so, bound and helpless, would deliver herself to a worse
than Mother Felicitas, unless Death, like a quiet friend, called her
before such things could be.