She had been forced to leave
London, as we have seen, by the pressure of certain facts in her past
history so ancient and far removed when their true punishment began that
she no doubt felt it highly unjust that she should be punished for them
at all. Her London debts had swallowed up what then remained to her of
fortune; and, afterwards, the allowance from the Ashes was all she had
to depend on. Banished to Paris, she fell into a lower stratum of life,
at a moment when her faithful and mysterious friend, Markham Warington,
was held in Scotland by the first painful symptoms of his sister's last
illness, and could do but little for her. She had, in fact, known the
sordid shifts and straits of poverty, though the smallest moral effort
would have saved her from them. She had kept disreputable company, she
had been miserable, and base; and although shame is not easy to persons
of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this
period of her existence. Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and
Warington seemed to have forsaken her. She awoke at last to a
panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than
any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed
physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of
mingled reproach and despair.
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