THE SPURNED OFFER.
'The family agent from Edinburgh, Flora,' said Lennard, in answer to
her inquiring glance. 'Mrs. Melfort,' he added, introducing her to
their visitor, who bowed with a critical glance and appreciative
smile.
'I have been telegraphed for by your father, Captain Melfort,' said
Mr. Kippilaw, as they shook hands and he was motioned to a chair.
A hale, hearty, unpretentious, business-like man, about forty years
of age, Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw was too well-bred and too sensible to
begin the matter in hand by any remarks about youthful imprudence,
early marriages, or so forth, as he knew the pride and temperament of
the young man before him, but laid down his hat, and, after some of
that familiar weather talk which is the invariable prelude to any
conversation over all the British Isles, he gently approached the
object of his mission, which Flora, in the simplicity and terror of
her heart, never doubted was a separation of some kind between
herself and Lennard, so with a pallid face she bowed and withdrew.
'To what am I indebted for the pleasure of this--a--unexpected
interview?' asked Lennard, a little stiffly.
'Instructions just received from your father, Captain Melfort.'
'Then you have come from Craigengowan?'
'Straight.'
'Has he made up his mind to accept my wife as his daughter-in-law?'
'Quite the reverse, I regret to say.'
Lennard's face darkened with indignation, and he gave his moustache
an angry twist.
'Are my father and mother determined to ignore the fact that she is a
lady by birth?' asked Lennard after a gloomy pause.
'Yes--they know, of course, that she is a lady,' stammered Mr.
Kippilaw, feeling his mission an ungracious one, 'but poor--one who
has sunk into obscurity and dependence--pardon me, I but use their
own identical words.
'Well?'
'What is done in this instance unfortunately cannot be undone,
Captain Melfort; but his lordship, feeling, of course, keenly in the
matter, is willing to continue your allowance, and even to double it,
on one condition.
'Name it.'
Mr. Kippilaw sighed, for though, as a lawyer, considerably hardened,
he felt the delicacy of the whole situation, and Lennard's dark eyes
seemed to focus and pierce him.
'The condition--to the point!'
'Is--that you will return to India----'
'I mean to do so forthwith,' interrupted Lennard sharply.
'Or you may live anywhere out of Britain, but never attempt to
intrude Mrs. Melfort upon your family or their circle, and contrive,
if possible, to let that circle forget your existence.'
'Insolent--and cruel as insolent!' exclaimed Lennard Melfort as he
started from his chair and paced about the room, with his dark eyes
flashing and the veins in his forehead swollen like whip-cord.
'The words I speak are not my own,' said Mr. Kippilaw, deprecatingly.
'Return to Craigengowan, and tell my father that I reject his bribe
to insult my wife--for a bribe it is--with the scorn it merits. Not
a penny of his money will I accept while my sword and pay, or life
itself, are left me. Tell Lord and Lady Fettercairn that I view
myself as their son no more. As they discard me, so do I discard
them; and even their _very name_ I shall not keep--remember that!'
'Dear me--dear me, all this is very sad!'
'They have thrust me from them as if I had been guilty of a crime----'
'Captain Melfort!'
'A crime I say--yet a day may come when they will repent it; and from
this hour I swear----'
'Not in anger,' interrupted Mr. Kippilaw, entreatingly; 'take no
hasty vow in your present temper.'
'I swear that to them and theirs I shall be--from this hour--as one
in the grave!'
'But,' urged the lawyer, 'but suppose--which God forbid--that aught
happened to your elder brother, Mr. Cosmo Melfort?'
'I wish Cosmo well; but I care not for my interest in the title--it
may become dormant, extinct, for aught that I care. Neither I nor
any of mine shall ever claim it, nor shall I again set foot in
Craigengowan, or on the lands around it--no, never again, never
again!'
To every argument of the kind-hearted Mr. Kippilaw, who really loved
the Fettercairn family and esteemed the high-spirited Lennard, the
latter turned a deaf ear.
He departed in despair of softening matters between the rash son and
indignant parents. To them he greatly modified the nature of the
useless interview, but they heard of Lennard's determination with
perfect unconcern, and even with a grim smile of contempt, never
doubting that when money pressure came upon him they would find him
at their mercy. But that time never came.
Mr. Kippilaw returned to Edinburgh, and there the affair seemed to
end.
The parting words of Lord Fettercairn to him were said smilingly and
loftily:--
'The French have a little phrase, which in six words expresses all
our experiences in life.'
'And this phrase, my lord?'
'Is simply--_tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse_--that we outlive
everything in turn and in time--and so this matter of Lennard's pride
will be a matter of time only. Be assured we shall outlive the
indignation of our misguided son.'
'But will you outlive your own?'
'Never!'
'I can but hope that you will, my lord. Remember the hackneyed
quotation from Pope--"To err is human, to forgive divine."
'I never forgive!' replied his lordship bitterly.
The name of Lennard was never uttered again by his parents, nor even
by his brother Cosmo (then reading up at Oxford) till the hour for
forgiveness was past; and even Cosmo they contrived to innoculate
with their own cruel and unchristian sentiment of hostility.
Lennard's portrait was removed from its place of honour in the
dining-hall, and banished to the lumber-attic; the goods, chattels,
and mementoes he left at home were scattered and dispersed; even his
horses were sold, and the saddles he had used; and the Fettercairn
family would--could they have done so--have obliterated his name from
the great double-columned tome of Sir Bernard Burke.
Heedless of all that, the young husband and his dark-eyed girl-wife
were all the world to each other.
'After mamma followed papa to the grave, Lennard--for she never held
up her head after she heard of his death at Khooshab,' said Flora, as
she nestled her head in his neck, 'I seemed to be condemned to a life
of hardship, humiliation, and heartlessness, till I met you, dearest.
I felt that even the love of some dumb animal--a dog or a horse--was
better than the entire absence of affection in the narrow circle of
my life. I did so long for something or some one to love me
exclusively--I felt so miserably, so utterly alone in the world. Now
I have you--_you_ to love me. But in winning you I have robbed you
of the love of all your people.'
'Talk not of it, and think not of it, dearest Flora. We are now more
than ever all in all to each other.'
The money bribe, offered in such a way and for such a purpose,
exasperated Lennard still more against his family, and drew many a
tear of humiliation from Flora in secret.
She thought that she had wrought Lennard a great wrong by winning his
love for herself, and she was now burning with impatience to turn her
back on the shores of Britain and find a new home in India; and
there, by staff or other employments and allowances, Lennard knew
that he could gain more than the yearly sum his father so
mortifyingly offered him.
Flora wept much over it all, we say, and her appetite became
impaired; but she did not--like the heroine of a three-volume
novel--starve herself into a fright.
But a short time before she had been a childish and simple
maiden--one sorely tried, however, and crushed by evil fortune; but
with Lennard Melfort now, 'the prince had come into her existence and
awakened her soul, and she was a woman--innocent still--but yet a
woman.'
The scenery of the Mearns looked inexpressibly lovely in the purity
and richness of its verdure and varied artistic views, for the woods
were profusely tinted with gold, russet brown, and red, when Lennard
Melfort turned his back upon it and his native home for ever!
The birds were chirping blithly, and the voice of the corncraik, with
'The sweet strain that the corn-reapers sang,'
came on the evening breeze together. The old kirk bell was tolling
in the distance, and its familiar sound spoke to Lennard's heart of
home like that of an old friend. The river was rolling under its
great arch of some eighty feet in span, the downward reflection of
the latter in the water making a complete circle like a giant O. The
old castle of Halgreen, with its loopholed battlements of the
fourteenth century, stood blackly and boldly upon its wave-beaten
eminence, and the blue smoke of picturesque Gourdon, a fisher
village, curled up on the ambient air, as the scenery faded out in
the distance.
Flora became marvellously cheerful when their journey fairly began,
and laughingly she sung in Lennard's ear--
'The world goes up and the world goes down,
But _yesterday's_ smile and _yesterday's_ frown
Can never come back again, sweet friend--
Can never come back again!'
Means were not forgotten to support nurse Madelon in her native
place, where we shall leave her till she reappears in our narrative
again.
So Lennard and his girl-wife sailed for India, full of love for each
other and hope for their own lonely and unaided future, and both
passed for ever out of the lives and apparently out of the memory of
the family at Craigengowan.
Times there were when he hoped to distinguish himself, so that the
circle there--those who had renounced him--would be proud of him; but
in seeking that distinction rashly, he might throw away his life, and
thus leave his little Flora penniless on the mercy of a cold world
and a proverbially ungrateful Government.
But they could not forget home, and many a time and oft, where the
sun-baked cantonments of Meerut seemed to vibrate under the fierce
light of the Indian sun, where the temples of Hurdwar from their
steep of marble steps look down upon the Ganges, or where the
bungalows of Cawnpore or Etwah, garlanded with fragrant jasmine,
stand by the rolling Jumna amid glorious oleanders and baubool trees,
with their golden balls loading the air with perfume, while the giant
heron stalked by the river's bed, the alligator basked in the ooze,
and the Brahmin ducks floated overhead, Flora's sweet voice made
Lennard's heart thrill as she sang to him the songs of the land they
had resolved never to look upon again, even when that sound so
stirring to the most sluggish Scottish breast when far away, the
pipes of a Highland regiment, poured their notes on the hot sunny air.
At home none seemed to care or think of the discarded son but the
worthy lawyer Kenneth Kippilaw, who had loved him as a lad, and could
not get his hard fate out of his mind.
From time to time, inspired by kindness and curiosity, he watched his
name among the captains in the military lists of that thick
compendium which no Scottish business establishment is ever
without--'Oliver and Boyd's Almanack.' Therein, after a while, the
name of Lennard Melfort _disappeared_, but whether he was dead, had
sold out, or 'gone to the bad,' the worthy Writer to the Signet could
not discover, and he not unnaturally sighed over what he deemed a
lost life.
And here we end that which is a species of prologue to our story.