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THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1873.

CLYTIE.

A NOVEL OF MODERN LIFE.

BY JOSEPH HATTON.

CHAPTER XII.

ALONE IN LONDON.

O adviser, no protector, no guide, no friend; alone in London. Alone in the great city, alone amidst thousands; alone in the streets; alone when the clocks repeat the hour at midnight.

To the brave man the solitude of a vast city is appalling. What, then, must it be to a simple girl, standing alone, for the first time, in the great Babylon? The desolation of the smitten mariner was comparable in its way to the loneliness of Clytie, though a world dashed its mighty waves at her feet.

Alone on a wide, wide sea,

So lonely 'twas that God Himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.

Can you not picture her?

Can you not imagine the dazed anxious face of the wilful beauty? Can you not see the startled eyes as they meet the great cruel crowd? She waits now and then, as if she waited for the throng to pass by and leave room for her.

Can you not see the sweet face of the country belle, full of surprise and wonder, full of fear and timidity; suffused now and then with hot burning blushes, unsophisticated responses to the rude stare of cads and ruffians?

VOL. X., N.S. 1873.

T T

He is not confined to any particular class of society, the cad, though Clytie rarely encountered but one representative of the great lying, sneaking, selfish family. You meet the thing, which pestered Clytie, most frequently west of Temple Bar. He delights to walk in Belgravia. Bond Street and the Row are his special haunts. The most despicable form of the cad is the two-legged animal that walks from the hips, with rounded arms and insolent swagger, and seems devoted to the amusement of annoying respectable women and girls who find themselves alone in the West End streets. Poor Clytie! this eye-glassed, stay-laced thing, called a fashionable man; this hawhawing, blue-eyed nonentity, sorely beset her, filling her with fear, and bringing the tears into her eyes. It is true she had been accustomed to admiration in Dunelm, but the rude, vulgar, leering stare of the London cad in stays was a new and terrible sensation to her. It almost frightened her as much as the otter scared Mr. Kingsley's water-baby. I wonder honest men with wives and sisters, honest men who honour their mothers, have not long ago united themselves in a vow to exterminate this creeping vermin of the streets, which is a blot upon manhood and a curse to society.

Alone in London !

Alone, and with everybody against her; this soft-eyed, dimpled beauty of the Cathedral city! Yes, with everybody against her-men because of her loveliness, women for the same reason; both on account of the money she had in her purse. It was not much gold that she brought away from Dunelm; but many a woman has been murdered for less.

Thousands of arms seemed to be extended towards her, but none to help. Hands clutched at her on all sides: some for her purse, some for her watch-chain, some with intent more base and wicked still.

The great city hemmed her in everywhere with its rush and roar, with its ebb and flow of human life, with its pomp and glitter, with its rags and wretchedness; the great city was all around her, hot and seething, rattling over the streets, shuffling along the pavements, screeching on iron rails above and below her; the great dusty city, hot with the June sun that made a pulsation in the air, and fell in burning beams upon the pavements. London was everywhere. She could not move for it, she could not get away from it. No fields, no brooks, no quiet lanes and corners; brick and stone, stone and brick, shops, cabs, houses, people without end-the great whirling, turbu lent, reckless city of cities; the city of love and hate, of poverty and wealth, the world's emporium, the centre of civilisation, the giant

among capitals, the Goliath of towns, the city of work and pleasure, of brave deeds, of cruel persecution, the city of conglomerate humanity in all its phases, the city of constant action, where to halt is to stumble, to stumble is to fall, to fall is to be trodden on ruthlessly, to be crushed and trampled upon and left in the gutter.

Oh, the hard, time-serving city!-the monster that is cruel if he may be; servile if you stand up to him manfully; a bully and a brute where he dare; a cringing, fawning sycophant if you take him by the throat and grapple with him. And she, Clytie, was in his power: the wolf and the lamb; the lark and the hawk; the dove and the eagle; the gazelle and the tiger. The odds were enormously against the Dunelm beauty in her pretty bonnet and her light lilac silk. Poor child, it were enough to make the angels weep to think of this wayward, frivolous, pretty creature alone in London, with nothing but memories of country lanes, cathedral chimes, and mild flirtations under the jealous eyes of her poor old grandfather.

It was the height of the London season; but Clytie knew nothing of this. She had in her mind dim shadowy pictures of ball and rout; of gay cavalcades of horsewomen in parks of trees and flowers; of theatres and halls of dazzling light, limned by the artful hand of Phil Ransford. These had equally dim and shadowy companion pictures, done by Grandfather Waller, as accessories to the grand figure of her mother, whom London had somehow snared and deceived, and cast upon a foreign shore to die miserably.

Clytie's little mind was a chaos of doubt and fear and anxiety. When she reconnoitred the city of love and pleasure which Phil Ransford had drawn, she found nothing but a vast struggling crowd, in which rags and misery were so mixed up with pomp and purple that she wondered in her own vague way how Lazarus could stand by and bear the proud man's contumely; how the beggar could go on tolerating the prancing horses, and the fat scornful servitors of the rich. She realised Grandfather Waller's pictures more successfully than Phil Ransford's; but she did an injustice to both. How was she to know where to look for the flowers? she had no guide, no protector. How was she to know where to find the beauties of the London season? As well might a stranger attempt to go straight to the woodland nooks and river-side haunts which Clytie knew in Dunelm.

Alone, all alone, Clytie stood panting like a timid hart, in the city of her dreams, the city whose very name is a charm to conjure with; but the fugitive from slander and calumny, the pretty wilful country belle found it, so far as her little fluttering sensations could fathom it,

so far as her own sympathies were concerned, a vast solitude; and when night came her soul could only find vent in the sad cry of the Psalmist, "Have mercy on me, for I am desolate!"

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SHE tried to put the past aside for the present. It was wonderful how the poor simple girl fought in her quiet unobtrusive way. The courage of her mother, with a small but active and gradually developing love of change, was stirring within her; while the pride of innocence nerved and sustained her. But she little knew the battle upon which she had entered.

Several days were consumed in a fruitless search for lodgings. She was seeking her new home. A quiet respectable hotel near the station had sheltered her hitherto, but she was not rich enough to remain there, even had the place suited her plans. Yes, she had plans; they were somewhat vague and uncertain, but she had plans nevertheless.

She nearly broke down, however, in less than a week; for it seemed as if she were doomed indeed to be houseless. The people who had apartments to let would not, as a rule, have anything to do with her. "Are you alone?" they said. "Yes," was Clytie's sad reply; for had she not felt her utter loneliness? "No, we do not let our rooms to single young persons," was the invariable reply.

Even the hotel-keeper did not seem to care for her custom, though she paid for what she had; paid promptly every day. She was an object of curious interest on all hands. Men (not the things with stays and hips) smiled at her innocent manner; women suspected it. If they had heard of the Dunelm scandal they could not have treated her with more suspicion. Clytie thought sometimes that they really would break her heart between them. Once she wished that she had submitted to the scorn of the Dunelm women rather than have fled to this sanctuary of London, that was no sanctuary, that offered her no protection further than a hiding-place from the cruel threats of her grandfather and the bitter taunts of the Cathedral daws.

She had fled to London for sanctuary, for protection, for safety, for comfort; she. found it a trap, a snare, a mockery. It was necessary for her to imagine that other city in which she might have suffered the martyrdom of calumny. She saw herself a thing to point at; she saw herself the scorn of Dunelm; she saw the vacant

stare of friends, the contemptuous gaze of enemies; she saw the flash of triumph in eyes which before had only looked enviously upon her; she saw her old grandfather pointing at her, and telling her story to the curious throng of jabbering gossips; she read in fancy the paragraph of the local reporter; she heard the loudwhispered lie as she passed along the streets; she saw the pained look of Tom Mayfield, who would not even respect her now. Amidst all the throng, the one kindly smile of recognition was on the face of Phil Ransford; but this made her shudder. He seemed to have established a sort of claim upon her; he seemed to have an influence over her; she trembled when she thought that for a moment his letter had tempted her. But she thanked God that it was only for a moment.

After looking at her position in this wise she would become a little more reconciled to it, and, for a minute or two at least, would be thankful that she was alone in London.

On the fifth day after her flight it seemed as if Fate were cruel only to be kind to her. One of the things on two legs which crawl with the gait of the lobsters in the Brighton Aquarium followed her to the hotel, and spoke to her in the hall. The next morning the landlord's sister, a spinsterial Scotchwoman, informed her that she could nae stay there any longer; her room was let, and she must jest seek lodgings elsewhere, ye ken. Clytie simply acquiesced. For a moment a spark of her mother's spirit shot into her eyes. She was going to reply to this haughty piece of hard-grained virtue; but the next moment the self-denial and patience of the martyr held her tongue. She was already growing a trifle stronger under persecution. With time she might yet be strong; she had much to bear and to suffer, whatever the result might be.

She paid her bill, packed up her little bag, and then knelt down at the dingy bedside of the railway hotel and prayed-prayed in her own simple way; there was something like a protest in the petition which she offered up, but that was quite unintentional. She prayed that God would help her, that He would guide her in this great world of London, that He would comfort her poor dear grandfather, and that He who knew her heart, its weakness and its strength, and all its secrets, would not continue to let her be punished for sins she had not committed.

out to get into an We give instinct to

Somehow it occurred to her when she went omnibus. It was the prompting of her instinct. dogs and deny it to ourselves, though we act upon it as often as we do upon reason. Down Oxford Street, up Baker Street, sped the

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