REVELSTOKE COTTAGE.
More than twenty years had elapsed after the episodes we have
described, and Lennard and Flora had found a new home, and she, her
_last one_, more than four hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies
from where Craigengowan looks down on the German Sea. But none that
looked on Lennard Melfort now would have recognised in the
prematurely aged man the handsome young fellow who in ire and disgust
had quitted his native land.
In two years after he had gone eastward a dreadful fever, contracted
in a place where he had volunteered on a certain duty to gain money
for the support of his wife and her little Indian establishment--the
Terrai of Nepaul, that miasmatic border of prairie which lies along
the great forest of the Himalayas, and has an evil repute even among
the natives of the country in the wet season when the leaves are
falling.
This fever broke Lennard's health completely, and so changed him that
his rich brown hair and moustache were grey at six-and-twenty, and
ere long he looked like a man of twice his age.
'Can that fellow really be Lennard Melfort of the Fusiliers? Why, he
is a veritable Knight of the Rueful Countenance!' exclaimed some old
friends who saw him at 'The Rag,' when he came home to seek a place
of quiet and seclusion in Devonshire, as it subsequently chanced to
be.
Amid the apple bowers of the land of cider, and near a beautiful
little bay into which the waters of the British Channel rippled,
stood the pretty and secluded cottage he occupied, as 'Major MacIan,'
with his son and a nephew.
The wooded hills around it were not all covered with orchards,
however, and the little road that wound round the bay ran under
eminences that, from their aspect, might make a tourist think he was
skirting a Swiss lake. Others were heath-clad and fringed at the
base by a margin of grey rocks.
Into the bay flowed a stream, blue and transparent always. Here
salmon trout were often found, and the young men spent hours at its
estuary angling for rock fish.
A Devonshire cottage is said by Mrs. Bray to be 'the sweetest object
that the poet, the artist, or the lover of the romantic could desire
to see,' and such a cottage was that of Major MacIan, the name now
adopted by Lennard--that of Flora's father--in fulfilment of the vow
he had made to renounce the name, title, and existence of his family.
Around it, and in front sloping down to the bay, was a beautiful
garden, teeming with the flowers and fruits of Devonshire. On three
sides was a rustic verandah, the trellis work of which was covered by
a woven clematis, sweetbriar, and Virginia creeper, which, in the
first year of her residence there, Flora's pretty hands, cased in
garden gloves, were never tired of tending; and now the Virginia
creeper, with its luxuriant tendrils, emerald green in summer, russet
and red in autumn, grew in heavy masses over the roof and around the
chimney stalks, making it, as Flora was wont to say exultingly,
'quite a love of a place!'
On one hand lay the rolling waters of the Channel, foaming about the
Mewstone Rock; on the other, a peep was given amid the coppice of the
ancient church of Revelstoke, and here the married pair lived happily
and alone for a brief time.
Save for the advent of a ship passing in sight of the little bay, it
was a sleepy place in which Lennard, now retired as a major, had
'pitched his tent,' as he said--the Cottage of Revelstoke. Even in
these railway times people thereabout were content with yesterday's
news. There was no gas to spoil the complexions of the young, and no
water rates to 'worrit' the old; and telegrams never came, in their
orange-tinted envelopes, to startle the hearts of the feeble and the
sickly.
No monetary transactions having taken place, and no correspondence
being necessary, between Lennard and his family or their legal agent,
Mr. Kippilaw, for more than twenty years now, he had quite passed
away from their knowledge, and almost from their memory; and many who
knew them once cared not, perhaps, whether he or his wife were in the
land of the living.
A son, we have said, had been born to them, and Lennard named the
child Florian, after his mother (here again ignoring his own family),
whom that event cost dear, for the sweet and loving Flora never
recovered her health or strength--injured, no doubt, in India--but
fell into a decline, and, two years after, passed away in the arms of
Lennard and her old nurse, Madelon.
Lonely, lonely indeed, did the former feel now, though an orphan
nephew of Flora--the son of her only sister--came to reside with
him--Shafto Gyle by name--one who will figure largely in our story.
Would Lennard ever forget the day of her departure, when she sank
under that wasting illness with which no doctor could grapple? Ever
and always he could recall the sweet but pallid face, the white,
wasted hands, the fever-lighted dark eyes, which seemed so
unnaturally large when, after one harrowing night of pain and
delirium, she became gentle and quiet, and lovingly told him to take
a little rest--for old-looking he was; old, worn, and wasted far
beyond his years--and he obeyed her, saying he would take a little
turn in the garden among the roses--the roses her hands would tend no
more--sick at heart with the closeness of the sick-chamber and all it
suggested, and maddened by the loud ticking of the watchful doctor's
repeater as it lay on a table littered with useless phials; and how,
ere he had been ten minutes in the sunny morning air, amid the
perfume of the roses, he was wildly summoned by Madelon Galbraith
with white cheeks and affrighted eyes, back to the chamber of death
it proved to be; for it was on the brow of Death he pressed his
passionate kisses, and to ears that could hear no more he uttered his
heartrending entreaties that she would not leave him, or would give
him one farewell word; and ever after would the perfume of roses be
associated in his mind with that morning--the most terrible one of
his life!
Beside Revelstoke Church--old, picturesque, and rendered comely by a
wealth of luxuriant ivy that Time has wreathed around its hoary walls
to flutter in the sea breeze--she was laid, and the heart of Lennard
seemed to be buried with her.
It is a lonely old building, spotted with lichens, worn by storms,
and perched upon the verge of a low, rocky cliff, up which the salt
spray comes at times to the burial-ground. It is near the end of
Mothcombe Bay, where the shore makes a turn to the southward.
Not a house is near it, the solitary hills and waves encompass it,
and it is said that its smouldering tombstones would furnish ample
matter for the 'meditations' of a Hervey. So there Flora was laid,
and there Lennard was to be laid by her side when the time came.
Her death hardened his heart more than ever against his own family,
and he began almost to forget that he ever bore any other name than
hers--his adopted one.
In the kindness of his heart the major, as the lads--his son and
nephew--grew up together, introduced both to neighbours and strangers
equally as his sons, but most unwisely, as we shall ere long have to
record.
Neither to Florian nor to Shafto Gyle did he reveal his real name, or
the story of the quarrel with his family and their work; thus in and
about Revelstoke all three passed under the name of MacIan now.
Madelon Galbraith, who had attended her mistress on her death-bed,
and nursed her baby into boyhood, had now gone back to her native
glen in the wilds of Ross. She proved, Lennard found, somewhat
unfitted for the locality of Revelstoke, as her ways and ideas were
foreign to those of the folks thereabouts; but she will have a
prominent place in our story in the future.
But long, long Madelon wept over Florian, and pressed him often to
her breast--'the baby of her bairn,' as she had called him--for as
she had nursed him, so had she nursed his mother before him in the
days when the victorious Ross-shire Buffs set up their tents at
Khooshab, on the plains of Persia.
'Gude-by, calf of my heart,' were her parting words; 'I'll see ye yet
again, Florian. If it were na for hope, the heart wad break!'