Chapter XX: Homeless

With Alison events were fated to follow each other fast now.

On the day subsequent to the dinner-party at Pembridge Square she felt too ill to leave her bed till the afternoon was well advanced. She was, however, visited by Miss De Jobbyns, who gave her a very inflated account of Goring's attentions to herself, how she completely 'snuffed out the three Le Robbynson girls,' and gave him credit for many flattering, and certainly peculiar, utterances that Alison thought very unlike the Goring that she knew. Still she was painfully uncertain what to think, and was very glad when her garrulous visitor, after readjusting her frizzled hair in the mirror and inspecting the few trifles that lay on the toilet-table, took her departure.

Alison, we have said, could not throw herself in Goring's way; her pride and delicacy, all love apart, revolted at the idea and she now actually trembled lest the chance mention of her not very common name by any of the De Jobbyns' family might lead to the discovery of her identity in her present humble position.

And now a letter, on the envelope of which a coronet figured, was, after being long inspected, and the cause of much surmise by Mrs. and Miss De Jobbyns, handed to her by a servant. She opened it and read. It would seem that, though Bevil Goring had failed to obtain from the vicar of Chilcote the London address of Alison and a clue to her circumstances, the 'Right Honourable Lord Cadbury' had succeeded in obtaining both, in virtue of his rank, we presume; and the result was this letter, most subtily and cunningly worded, and dated not from his club or from Cadbury Court, but from the villa of his 'lady friend' at St. John's Wood, offering her a home there, and containing what she conceived at first to be another offer of marriage; but, on re-reading it, the real meaning of and nature of the document came before her, in all its insulting form and truth, as it fell from her hand ere she tore it into minute fragments with trembling fingers. She grew deadly pale, but her lips became firm and set; her bosom heaved, and all the purity of her nature, her pride of old position and race, _l'esprit de famille_ which her father had inculcated rose within her, she covered her face with her hands as if to thrust back her tears, and exclaimed, in a low voice,

'Oh, papa, papa! It wanted but this insult to complete the humiliation of my life!'

So the parvenu peer sought--but in vain--to put a keystone to the edifice of his own innate rascality.

At last she rose from her bed and proceeded to dress herself with the intention of visiting the vicar without delay to beseech him to find her another home; but--on looking about her toilet-table, where she had certainly left it over night--she missed her locket--the locket with the likeness of Bevil in it!

She instituted a strict if hurried search over all her little room, but no trace of it could be found.

The servant who had brought breakfast to her on a covered salver had never approached the toilet-table she was certain; but Miss De Jobbyns had, as she remembered, lingered before the mirror, and trifled with the little etceteras that lay thereby.

Could she be the abstractor, the delinquent, the thief?

Impossible! Yet Alison had barely completed attiring herself for the street, with the intention of asking permission to go out for a little time, when a maid appeared, sent by Mrs. De Jobbyns, to request her presence in the drawing-room.

'In the drawing-room,' thought Alison; 'what does that import?'

On entering, the first object that caught her eye was her locket in that lady's hand, and she had a perfect conviction that the latter and her daughter were inflamed with keen resentment.

'Jealousy,' we are told, 'smacks of low life and the drama.' Be that as it may, Alison was now fated to a sample thereof.

'Is this your property, Miss Cheyne?' asked Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns, frigidly, yet tremulous with passion.

'It is; and how came it in your possession, I demand?' exclaimed Alison.

'You demand?'

'Yes.'

'That matters little.'

'It matters very much indeed,' said Alison, her spirit rising to the occasion; 'a theft has been committed, else my locket would have been where I left it, on my toilet-table.'

'Do not attempt to bandy words with me,' said the lady of the mansion, assuming a bullying tone. 'But how is it that the likeness of a friend of this family--of a gentleman visitor--a stranger to a person in your position, of course--is in your possession?'

'And how do you dare to wear it?' added Miss De Jobbyns, in a shrill voice of passion, as her mother tossed the locket to the feet of Alison, who regained it, and deliberately placed it in the bosom of her dress.

'What would he--what must we--think of you?' asked Mrs. De Jobbyns, in a louder key.

Alison disdained to make any reply.

'You are unfit to teach my darlings--if you have not corrupted their angel minds already--and I request you to quit Pembridge Square at once. The housekeeper will give you what is due in lieu of a month's notice.'

Alison had not been unprepared for this dictum. She had heard it without a shock, and, though certainly dismayed by the sudden turn her affairs had taken, at once prepared for and took her departure.

She kissed and bade adieu to her two little pupils, Irene and Iseulte, whose names had no doubt been suggested by the _London Journal_--a periodical much affected by Mrs. Slumpkin De Jobbyns in her youth, and then drove away.

The daughter of the house, enraged and bewildered, knew not precisely _what_ to think of the affair, but she had a gloomy fear that so far as Bevil Goring was concerned her hopes were vanishing into thin air, or on the eve of being shattered like the crystal in the basket of Alnaschar, of whom no doubt she never heard.

As the cab quitted the square, Alison shrank back on perceiving Sir Jasper Dehorsey (or 'Captain Smith,' as she supposed him to be) ambling his horse slowly along, and watching--as she had before known him to do--the windows of the house she had just quitted for ever; and this incident, with the memory of Cadbury's cruel and cowardly letter, filled her heart with horror, bitterness, and dismay. She felt so well-nigh penniless and helpless, too.

The summer sunshine was in all its brightness and glory, but Alison felt as if a mist surrounded her, and as if the surging of great waters was in her ears, and she feared that she might faint.

Almost at the same moment she quitted Pembridge Square, Bevil Goring entered it to leave his card, like a well-bred man, on the De Jobbyns family, whom he devoutly hoped to find 'not at home.' Indeed, he selected the time when he knew that the mother and daughter were generally 'hairing' themselves, as they called it, in the Row, and as he drew near the house he came suddenly upon a well-known form and figure.

'What, Archie! faithful old Archie Auchindoir--you here!' he exclaimed, as he shook the old man's hand with ardour. 'Can it be you?'

'By my certie it is, sir,' replied Archie, 'and pleased I am to see a kent face in this unco human wilderness o' brick wa's.'

'And what are you doing here now that poor Sir Ranald is dead?'

'Just what he wad hae dune--watching owre missie, sir.'

'And where is she, Archie--where is she?'

'Where her forbears wad little like to see her.'

'How--where--what?' asked Goring, impetuously.

'Governess to some brats in the square up bye.'

'What square?'

'Paimbrig Square,' replied Archie, adapting the name to his own vernacular.

'And whose children?'

'A Mrs. De Jobbyns she ca's hersel',' replied Archie, with a contemptuous smirk on his wrinkled visage.

'My God!' exclaimed Goring, growing red and pale alternately; 'my darling reduced to this, and all unknown to me! When came this about?'

'A week or two after the master gaed to his lang hame, sir. Puir Sir Ranald!' said Archie, with a break in his voice; 'after a' he had possest and tint, a kist and a sheet was a' he needed in the lang rin.'

'And you have been watching over her, you say?' asked Goring, again taking the old man's hand in his own.

'I had a wee pickle siller saved, and I thought--I thought--but never mind; a' the men in the Mearns can do nae mair than they may.'

'And she is in Pembridge Square now?'

'Yes, sir.'

He slipped a card with his address into Archie's hand, and hurried to the house, where the startling ring he gave the bell brought an indignant housemaid to the door speedily as a genii of the Lamp.

'Mrs. and Miss De Jobbyns,' she answered, 'was not at home, having just driven off to the park.'

'Thank heaven!--and Miss Cheyne!'

'The governess?'

'Yes--yes--is she at home?'

He was rather curtly informed that she had been dismissed from her 'sitivation,' and with her trunk had left the house a short time ago.

'Dismissed and gone--where?'

'No one in the house knew.'

He turned away in great agony of mind; and he had in his haste forgotten to ask Archie where he lived. He looked about him in every direction, but the old man was nowhere to be seen.

And so she would be utterly homeless now.

_Homeless_, and in London--and she so young, so tender, and beautiful!

Alas! more evils than ever the fatal Black Hound of Essilmont forebode might be in store for his Alison now.