''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?'