CHAPTER IV.
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!’