CHAPTER III.
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.