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Title: Dulcie Carlyon: A novel. Volume 1 (of 3)

Author: James Grant

Release date: June 12, 2022 [eBook #68293]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Ward and Downey

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DULCIE CARLYON: A NOVEL. VOLUME 1 (OF 3) ***

  DULCIE CARLYON.


  A Novel.



  BY

  JAMES GRANT,

  AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMANCE OF WAR,' ETC.


  IN THREE VOLUMES.

  VOL. I.



  LONDON:
  WARD AND DOWNEY,
  12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

  1886.

  [_All Rights Reserved._]




NEW NOVELS AT EVERY LIBRARY.


FROM THE SILENT PAST.  By Mrs. HERBERT MARTIN.  2 Vols.

COWARD AND COQUETTE.  By the Author of 'The Parish of Hilby.'  1 vol.

MIND, BODY, AND ESTATE.  By the Author of 'Olive Varcoe.'  3 vols.

AT THE RED GLOVE.  By KATHARINE S. MACQUOID.  3 vols.

WHERE TEMPESTS BLOW.  By the Author of 'Miss Elvester's Girls.'  3
vols.

IN SIGHT OF LAND.  By Lady DUFFUS HARDY.  3 vols.

AS IN A LOOKING-GLASS.  By F. C. PHILIPS.  1 vol.

LORD VANECOURT'S DAUGHTER.  By MABEL COLLINS.  3 vols.


WARD AND DOWNEY, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.




In Loving Memory

OF

MY ELDEST SON,

JAMES SIMPSON GRANT,

_Captain Cheshire Regiment,_

I INSCRIBE

THIS MILITARY STORY.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


CHAPTER

I. IN THE HOWE OF THE MEARNS

II. WEDDED

III. THE SPURNED OFFER

IV. REVELSTOKE COTTAGE

V. DULCIE

VI. THE SECRET PACKET

VII. A FAREWELL

VIII. THE SILVER LOCKET

IX. MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

X. ALONE IN THE WORLD

XI. SHAFTO IN CLOVER

XII. VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY

XIII. AMONG THE GROUSE

XIV. THE TWO FINELLAS

XV. AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN

XVI. ''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY'

XVII. AT CRAIGENGOWAN

XVIII. AT THE BUFFALO RIVER

XIX. ELANDSBERGEN

XX. BAFFLED!




DULCIE CARLYON.



CHAPTER I.

IN THE HOWE OF THE MEARNS.

'This will end in a scene, Fettercairn, and you know how I hate
scenes.'

'So do I, they are such deuced bad form.'

'I shall need all my self-possession to get over the _esclandre_ this
affair may cause,' exclaimed the lady, fanning herself violently.

'Well, life is made up of getting over things,' responded her husband.

'But not things so disgraceful as this, Fettercairn!'

'Is this son of yours in his senses?'

'Who is that loves? it has been asked,' said the culprit referred to.

'A marriage between you and a penniless girl in her rank of life is
not to be thought of, Lennard.'

'Her rank of life, father?'

'Yes!'

'Her father's rank was superior to that of the first of our family,
when life began with him.'

'What is that to you or to me now?'

'Much to me.'

'Too much, it would seem.'

The excited speakers were a Peer, Cosmo, Lord Fettercairn, his wife,
the Lady thereof, and their youngest son, Lennard Melfort, a captain
of the line, home on leave from India, who had been somewhat timidly
venturing to break--knowing the inordinate family vanity of his
parents--we say to break the news of his love for a girl possessed of
more beauty than this world's goods; and, in his excitement and
indignation, his lordship's usual easy, indolent, and drawling way
was forgotten now when addressing his son.

Cosmo, Lord Fettercairn of that Ilk (and Strathfinella in the Mearns)
was by nature a proud, cold, selfish, and calculating man, whose
chief passion in life was a combined spirit of enormous vanity and
acquisitiveness, which he inherited from his predecessors, whom he
resembled in political caution and selfishness, and also in personal
appearance, to judge from the portraits of three generations, by Sir
John de Medina, Aikman, and Raeburn, adorning the walls of the
stately room in the house of Craigengowan, where this rather stormy
interview took place.

Tall and thin in figure, with flat square shoulders and
sandy-coloured hair, cold grey eyes, and irregular features, he was
altogether a contrast to his son Lennard, who inherited his slightly
aquiline nose and perfect face from his mother, but his firm dark
eyes and rich brown hair from a previous generation; and these,
together with an olive complexion, rendered more dusky by five years'
exposure to an Indian sun, made his aspect a very striking one.

My Lady Fettercairn's birth and breeding were, as Sir Bernard Burke
had recorded, irreproachable, and she certainly seemed a _grande
dame_ to the tips of her long slender fingers.  She was about
forty-five years of age, but looked ten younger.  The upper part of
her aristocratic face was strikingly handsome; but the lower, with
its proud and firm lips, was less pleasant to look at.  Her
complexion was almost colourless, her hair of the lightest brown,
like her eyebrows and lashes; while her eyes were clear and blue as
an Alpine sky, and, as Lennard often thought with a sigh, they seemed
quite as--cold.

Her manner was always calm, assured, and self-possessed.  She would
smile, but that smile never degenerated into honest laughter, while
her pale and impressive face was without a line--especially on her
forehead--that seemed to indicate either thought or reflection, and
certainly she had never known care or sorrow or even annoyance until
now.

'She is beautiful, mother,' urged the young man, breaking an ominous
silence, with reference to the object of his love.

'Perhaps; but she is not one of us,' exclaimed Lady Fettercairn,
cresting up her handsome head haughtily, and a whole volume of
intense pride and hauteur was centred in the last word she spoke.

'Who is this Flora MacIan, as she calls herself?' asked his father in
a similar tone; 'but I need not ask.  You have already told us she is
the governess in a house you have been recently visiting--that of
Lady Drumshoddy--a governess, with all her beauty, poor and obscure.'

'Not so obscure,' said Lennard, a wave of red passing under the tan
of his olive cheek; 'her father was a gallant old officer of the
Ross-shire Buffs, who earned his V.C. at the battle of Khooshab, in
Persia, and her only brother and support fell when leading on his
Grenadiers at the storming of Lucknow.  The old captain was, as his
name imports, a cadet of the Macdonalds of Glencoe.'

'With a pedigree of his family, no doubt, from the grounding of the
Ark to the battle of Culloden,' sneered his father.

'Then his family would end soon after ours began,' retorted the son,
becoming greatly ruffled now.  'You know, father, we can't count much
beyond three generations ourselves.'

Lord Fettercairn, wounded thus in his sorest point, grew white with
anger.

'We always suspected you of having some secret, Lennard,' said his
mother severely.

'Ah, mother, unfortunately, as some one says, a secret is like a hole
in your coat--the more you try to hide it, the more it is seen.'

'An aphorism, and consequently vulgar; does _she_ teach you this
style of thing?' asked the haughty lady, while Lennard reddened again
with annoyance, and gave his dark moustache a vicious twist, but
sighed and strove to keep his temper.

'I have found and felt it very bitter, father, to live under false
colours,' said he gently and appealingly, 'and to keep that a secret
from you both, which should be no secret at all.'

'We would rather not have heard this secret,' replied Lord
Fettercairn sternly, while tugging at his sandy-coloured mutton-chop
whiskers.

'Then would you have preferred that I should be deceitful to you, and
false to the dear girl who loves and trusts me?'

'I do not choose to consider _her_,'  was the cold reply.

'But I do, and must, now!'

'Why?'

'Because we are already married--she is my wife,' was the steady
response.

'Married!' exclaimed his father and mother with one accord, as they
started from their chairs together, and another ominous silence of a
minute ensued.

'My poor, lost boy--the prey of an artful minx!' said Lady
Fettercairn, looking as if she would like to weep; but tears were
rather strangers to her cold blue eyes.

'Mother, dear mother, if you only knew her, you would not talk thus
of Flora,' urged Lennard almost piteously.  'If we had it in our
power to give love and to withhold it, easy indeed would our progress
be through life.'

'Love--nonsense!'

'Save to the two most interested, who are judges of it,' said
Lennard.  'Surely you loved my father, and he you.'

'Our case was very different,' replied Lady Fettercairn, in her anger
actually forgetting herself so far as to bite feathers off her fan
with her firm white teeth.

'How, mother dear?'

'In rank and wealth we were equal.'

Lennard sighed, and said:

'I little thought that you, who loved me so, would prove all but one
of the mothers of Society.'

'What do you mean, sir?' demanded his father.

'What a writer says.'

'And what the devil does he say?'

'That "love seems such a poor and contemptible thing in their eyes in
comparison with settlements.  Perhaps they forget their own youth;
one does, they say, when he outlives romance.  And I suppose bread
and butter is better than poetry any day."'

'I should think so.'

'We had other and brilliant views for you,' said his mother in a tone
of intense mortification, 'but now----'

'Leave us and begone, and let us look upon your face no more,'
interrupted his father in a voice of indescribable sternness, almost
hoarse with passion, as he pointed to the door.

'Mother!' said Lennard appealingly, 'oh, mother!'  But she averted
her face, cold as a woman of ice, and said, 'Go!'

'So be it,' replied Lennard, gravely and sadly, as he drew himself up
to the full height of his five feet ten inches, and a handsome and
comely fellow he looked as he turned away and left the room.

'Thank God, his elder brother, Cosmo, is yet left to us!' exclaimed
Lady Fettercairn earnestly.

It was the last time in this life he ever heard his mother's voice,
and he quitted the house.  On the terrace without, carefully he
knocked the ashes out of his cherished briar-root, put it with equal
care into its velvet-lined case, put the case into his pocket, and
walked slowly off with a grim and resolute expression in his fine
young face, upon which from that day forth his father and mother
never looked again.

Then he was thinking chiefly of the sweet face of the young girl who
had united her fortunes with his, and who was anxiously awaiting the
result of the interview we have described.

Sorrow, mortification, and no small indignation were in the heart of
Lennard Melfort at the result of the late interview.

'I have been rash,' he thought, 'in marrying poor Flora without their
permission, but that they would never have accorded, even had they
seen her; and none fairer or more beautiful ever came as a bride to
Craigengowan.'

Pausing, he gave a long and farewell look at the house so named--the
home of his boyhood.

It stands at some distance from the Valley of the Dee (which forms
the natural communication between the central Highlands and the
fertile Lowlands) in the Hollow or Howe of the Mearns.  Situated amid
luxuriant woods, glimpses of Craigengowan obtained from the highway
only excite curiosity without gratifying it, but a nearer approach
reveals its picturesque architectural features.

These are the elements common to most northern mansions that are
built in the old Scottish style--a multitude of conical turrets,
steep crowstepped gables and dormer gablets, encrusted with the
monograms and armorial bearings of the race who were its lords when
the family of Fettercairn were hewers of wood and drawers of water.

The turrets rise into kindred forms in the towers and gables, and are
the gradual accumulation of additions made at various times on the
original old square tower, rather than a part of the original design,
but the effect of the whole is extremely rich and picturesque.

In the old Scottish garden was an ancient sun and moon dial, mossy
and grey, by which many a lover had reckoned the time in the days of
other years.

Of old, Craigengowan belonged to an exiled and attainted Jacobite
family, from whom it passed readily enough into the hands of the
second Lord Fettercairn, a greedy and unscrupulous Commissioner on
the forfeited estates of the unfortunate loyalists.  It had now many
modern comforts and appliances; the entrance-hall was a marble-paved
apartment, off which the principal sitting-rooms opened, and now a
handsome staircase led to the upper chambers, whilom the abode of
barons who ate the beef and mutton their neighbours fed in the valley
of the Dee.

The grounds were extensive and beautiful, and Lord Fettercairn's
flower gardens and conservatories were renowned throughout Angus and
the Mearns.

To the bitter storm that existed in his own breast, and that which he
had left in those of his parents, how peaceful by contrast looked the
old house and the summer scenery to Lennard--the place on which he
probably would never gaze again.

There was a breeze that rustled the green leaves in the thickets, but
no wind.  Beautiful and soft white clouds floated lazily in the deep
blue sky, and a recent shower had freshened up every tree, meadow,
and hedgerow.  The full-eared wheat grew red or golden by the banks
of the Bervie, and the voice of the cushat dove came from the autumn
woods from time to time as with a sigh Lennard Melfort turned his
back on Craigengowan for ever, cursing, as he went, the pride of his
family, for, though not an old one, by title or territory, they were
as proud as they were unscrupulous in politics.

The first prominent member of the family, Lennard Melfort, had been a
Commissioner for the Mearns in the Scottish Parliament, and for
political services had been raised to the peerage by Queen Anne as
Lord Fettercairn and Strathfinella, and was famous for nothing but
selling his Union vote for the same sum as my Lord Abercairnie, £500,
and for having afterwards 'a rug at the compensation,' as the English
equivalent money was called.  After the battle of Sheriffmuir saw
half the old peerages of Scotland attainted, he obtained
Craigengowan, and was one 'who,' as the minister of Inverbervie said,
'wad sell his soul to the deil for a crackit saxpence.'

With the ex-Commissioner the talent--such as it was--of the race
ended, and for three generations the Lords of Fettercairn had been
neither better nor worse than peers of Scotland generally; that is,
they were totally oblivious of the political interests of that
country, and of everything but their own self-aggrandisement by
marriage or otherwise.

Lennard Melfort seemed the first of the family that proved untrue to
its old instincts.

'And I had made up my mind that he should marry Lady Drumshoddy's
daughter--she has a splendid fortune!' wailed Lady Fettercairn.

'Married my governess--the girl MacIan!' snorted my Lady Drumshoddy
when she heard of the dreadful mésalliance.  'Why marry the creature?
He might love her, of course--all men are alike weak--but to marry
her--oh, no!'

And my Lady Drumshoddy was a very moral woman according to her
standard, and carried her head very high.

When tidings were bruited abroad of what happened, and the split in
the family circle at Craigengowan, there were equal sorrow and
indignation expressed in the servants' hall, the gamekeepers' lodges,
and the home farm, for joyous and boyish Captain Melfort was a
favourite with all on the Fettercairn estates; and Mrs. Prim, his
mother's maid, actually shed many tears over the untoward fate he had
brought upon himself.




CHAPTER II.

WEDDED.

'And you will love me still, Flora, in spite of this bitter affront
to which you are subjected for my sake?' said Lennard.

'Yes,' said the girl passionately, 'I love you, Lennard--love you so
much,' she added, while her soft voice broke and her blossom-like
lips quivered, 'that were I to lose you I would die!'

'My darling, you cannot lose me now,' he responded, while tenderly
caressing her.

'Are we foolish to talk in this fashion, Lennard?'

'Foolish?'

'Yes--or rash.  I have heard that it is not lucky for people to love
each other so much as we do.'

'Could we love each other less?'

'I don't think so,' said she simply and sweetly, as he laid her cheek
on his breast with her upturned eyes gazing into his.

The girl was slight and slender, yet perfect was every curve of her
shapely figure, which was destitute of any straight line; even her
nose was, in the slightest degree, aquiline.  Her beautifully arched
mouth, the scarlet line of her upper lip, and the full round of the
nether one were parted in a tender smile, just enough to show her
teeth, defied all criticism; her complexion was pure and soft, and
her eyes were of the most liquid hazel, with almost black lashes.
Her hair was of the same tint, and Flora seemed a lady to perfection,
especially by the whiteness and delicacy of her beautifully shaped
little hands.

When she walked she did so gracefully, as all Highland women do, and
like them held her head poised on her slender neck so airily and
prettily that her nurse, Madelon, called her 'the swan.'

'How I trembled, Lennard,' said she, after a pause, 'as I thought of
the _mauvais quart d'heure_ you were undergoing at Craigengowan.'

'It was a _mauvais_ hour and more, darling.'

'And ever and anon I felt that strange chill, or shudder, which Nurse
Madelon says people feel when some one crosses the place where their
grave is to be.  How can your parents be so cruel to you?'

'And to you, Flora!'

'Ah, that is different,' she replied, with her eyes full of unshed
tears, and in a pained voice.  'Doubtless they consider me a very
designing girl; but in spite of that, you will always care for me as
much as you do now?'

'Why such fears?  Ever and always--ever and always, my darling,' said
Lennard Melfort, stopping her questioning lips most effectually for a
time.

'Oh, if you should ever come to regret, and with regret to love me
less!' said she, in a low voice, with her eyes for a moment fixed on
vacancy.

'Why that boding thought, Flora?'

'Because, surely, such great love never lasts.'

He kissed her again as the readiest response.

But the sequel proved that his great love outlasted her own life,
poor girl!

Then they sat long silent, hand locked in hand, while the gloaming
deepened round them, for words seem poor and feeble when the heart is
very full.

'How long will they continue to despise me?' said Flora suddenly,
while across her soft cheeks there rushed the hot blood of a long and
gallant line of Celtic ancestors.

An exclamation of bitterness--almost impatience, escaped Lennard.

'Let us forget them--father, mother, all!' said he.

The girl looked passionately into the face of her lover-husband--the
husband of a month; and never did her bright hazel eyes seem more
tender and soft than now, with all the fire of love and pride
sparkling in their depths, for her Highland spirit and nature
revolted at the affront to which she was subjected.

The bearing of Lennard Melfort and the poise of his close-shorn head
told that he was a soldier, and a well-drilled one; and the style of
his light grey suit showed how thoroughly he was a gentleman; and to
Flora's loving and partial eye he was every-way a model man.

They had been married just a month, we have said, a month that very
day, and Lennard had brought his bride to the little burgh town,
within a short distance of Craigengowan, and left her in their
apartments while he sought with his father and mother the bootless
interview just narrated.

For three days before he had the courage to bring it about, they had
spent the time together, full of hopeful thoughts, strolling along
the banks of the pretty Bervie, from the blue current of which ever
and anon the bull-trout and the salmon rise to the flies; or in the
deep and leafy recourses of the adjacent woods, and climbing the
rugged coast, against which the waves of the German Sea were rolling
in golden foam; or ascending Craig David, so called from David II. of
Scotland--a landmark from the sea for fifteen leagues--for both had a
true and warm appreciation and artistic love of Nature in all her
moods and aspects.

The sounds of autumn were about them now; the hum of insects and the
song of the few birds that yet sang; the fragrance of the golden
broom and the sweet briar, with a score of other sweet and
indefinable scents and balmy breaths.  All around them was scenic
beauty and peace, and yet with all their great love for each other,
their hearts were heavy at the prospect of their future, which must
be a life of banishment in India, and to the heaviness of Lennard was
added indignation and sorrow.  But he could scarcely accuse himself
of having acted rashly in the matter of his marriage, for to that his
family would never have consented; and he often thought could his
mother but see Flora in her beauty and brightness, looking so
charming in her smart sealskin and bewitching cap and feather, and
long skirt of golden-brown silk that matched her hair and eyes--every
way a most piquante-looking girl!

Young though he was, and though a second son, Lennard Melfort had
been a favourite with more than one Belgravian belle and her mamma,
and there were few who had not something pleasant or complimentary to
say of him since his return from India.  At balls, fêtes, garden and
water parties, girls had given him the preference to many who seemed
more eligible, had reserved for him dances on their programmes, sang
for him, made unmistakable _œillades_, and so forth; for his
handsome figure and his position made him very acceptable, though he
had not the prospects of his elder brother, the Hon. Cosmo.

Lady Fettercairn knew how Lennard was regarded and valued well, and
nourished great hopes therefrom; but this was all over and done with
now.

To her it seemed as if he had thrown his very life away, and that
when his marriage with a needy governess--however beautiful and well
born she might be--became known, all that charmed and charming circle
in Belgravia and Tyburnia would regard him as a black sheep indeed;
would shake their aristocratic heads, and pity poor Lord and Lady
Fettercairn for having such a renegade son.

Flora's chief attendant--a Highland woman who had nursed her in
infancy--was comically vituperative and indignant at the affront put
by these titled folks upon 'her child' as she called her.

Madelon Galbraith was strong, healthy, active, and only in her
fortieth year, with black eyes and hair, a rich ruddy complexion, a
set of magnificent white teeth, and her manner was full of emphatic,
almost violent, gesticulation peculiar to many Highlanders, who seem
to talk with their hands and arms quite as much as the tongue.

Sometimes Madelon spoke in her native Gaelic, but generally in the
dialect of the Lowlands.

'Set them up indeed,' she muttered; 'wha are the Melforts o'
Fettercairn, that they should slight you--_laoghe mo chri_?' she
added, softly (calf of my heart).  'What a pity it is ye canna fling
at their heads the gold they love, for even a Lowland dog winna yowl
gin ye pelt him wi' banes.  But you've begun wi' love and marriage,
and a gude beginning mak's a gude ending.'

'But we shall be so poor, Nursie Madelon, and I have ruined my poor
Lennard,' urged Flora, as the kind woman caressed her.

'They say a kiss and a cup of water mak' but a wersh breakfast,'
laughed Madelon; 'but you're no sae puir as that comes to, my
darling.'

'Not quite' said Flora, laughing faintly, in turn.  'Yet I have
sorely injured my husband's prospects.'

'Tut, tut, my bairn.  Ony man can woo, but he weds only whar his
weird lies; and so Captain Melfort wedded you, and wha better?  Then
what is a Lord that we should _lippen_ to _him_?  As long as ye serve
a tod ye maun carry his tail?  And your father's daughter may carry
her head wi' the highest.'

Lennard Melfort now resolved neither verbally nor by letter to have
further intercourse with his family at Craigengowan or elsewhere, but
before he could make up his mind what to do or could betake him
south, as he meant to quit Scotland without delay, on the day
subsequent to the stormy interview Madelon announced a visitor, and
on a salver brought in a card inscribed--'MR. KENNETH KIPPILAW, W.S.'




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.




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!'




CHAPTER V.

DULCIE.

All trace of Lennard Melfort had been obliterated at Craigengowan, we
have said.  He was never mentioned there, and though his family tried
to think of him as dead, they did not quite succeed; but the
disappearance of his name from the Army List first excited a little
speculation, but no inquiry, until a terrible event occurred.

The eldest son, the Hon. Cosmo, married the daughter of Lady
Drumshoddy, thus securing her thousands, and did his best to console
Lord and Lady Fettercairn for 'the disgrace' brought upon them by
Lennard, and they regarded him quite as a model son.

He shone as Chairman at all kinds of county meetings; became M.P. for
a cluster of northern burghs, and was a typical Scottish member,
mightily interested when such grand Imperial matters as the
gravelling of Park Lane, the ducks on the Serpentine, and the
improvements at Hyde Park Corner were before the House, but was
oblivious of all Scottish interests, or that such a place as Scotland
existed.  When she wanted--like other parts of the empire--but never
got them--grants for necessary purposes, the Hon. Cosmo was mute as a
fish, or if he spoke it was to record his vote against them.

Lennard saw in a chance newspaper, and with natural grief and dismay,
that Cosmo had come to an untimely end when deer-stalking near
Glentilt.  He had wounded a large stag, the captain of its herd, and
approached rashly or incautiously when the infuriated animal was at
bay.  It broke its bay, attacked him in turn, and ere the great
shaggy hounds could tear it down, Cosmo was trampled under foot and
gored to death by its horns.

As Lennard read, his sad mind went to the scene where that death must
have happened, under mighty Ben-y-gloe, where the kestrel builds his
nest and the great mountain eagle has his eyry, and the Tilt comes
thundering down over its precipices of grey rock.  Never again would
his eyes rest on such glorious scenes as these.

Cosmo had left a little daughter, Finella, who took up her abode with
her grandparents at Craigengowan, but no son, and Lennard knew that
by this tragedy he was now the heir to the peerage, but he only gave
a bitter sigh as he thought of Flora in her grave and made no sign.

'Poor Cosmo,' he muttered, and forgetting for a time much that had
occurred, and how completely Cosmo had leagued with father and mother
against him, his memory went back to the pleasant days of their happy
boyhood, when they rode, fished, and shot together, shared the same
bedroom in Craigengowan, and conned their tasks from the same books.

'Well, well,' he added, 'all that is over and done with long, long
ago.'

He made no sign, we say, but let time pass by, not foreseeing the
complications that were eventually to arise by his doing so.

Florian, born two years after the adoption of Shafto Gyle in his
infancy, always regarded and looked up to the latter as a species of
elder brother and undoubted senior.

In his twentieth year Florian was really a handsome fellow, and if,
without absurdity, the term 'beautiful' could be applied to a young
man, he was so, in his perfect manliness.  Tall in figure, hard and
well developed in muscle, regular in features, he had clear, dark,
honest eyes, with lashes like a girl's, and a dark, silky moustache.

Shafto's face was in some respects handsome too, but an evil one to
look at, in one way.  His fair eyebrows were heavy, and had a way of
meeting in a dark frown when he was thinking.  His pale grey eyes
were shifty, and were given him, like his tongue, to conceal rather
than express his thoughts, for they were sharp and cunning.  His
nostrils were delicate, and, like his thin lips, suggestive of
cruelty, while his massive jaw and thick neck were equally so--we
must say almost to brutality.

They were rather a contrast, these two young men--a contrast no less
great in their dispositions and minds than in their outward
appearance.  They were so dissimilar--one being dark and the other
fair--that no one would have taken them for brothers, as they were
generally supposed to be, so affectionate was the Major to both, and
both bearing his name in the locality.

As a schoolboy Shafto had won an unpleasant reputation for jockeying
his companions, 'doing' them out of toys, sweetmeats, marbles, and
money, and for skilfully shifting punishments on the wrong shoulders
when opportunity offered, and not unfrequently on those of the
unsuspecting Florian.

From some of his proclivities, the Major thought Shafto would make a
good attorney, and so had him duly installed in the office of
Lewellen Carlyon, the nearest village lawyer, while for his own boy,
Florian, he had higher hopes and aspirations, to make him, like
himself, a soldier; but though far from idle, or lacking application,
Florian failed, under the insane high-pressure system of 'cramming,'
to pass, and not a few--Shafto particularly--laid it to the account
of a certain damsel, Dulcie by name, who was supposed, with some
truth, to occupy too much of his thoughts.

Disgusted by the result of his last 'exam.,' Florian would at once
have enlisted, like so many others, who rush as privates for
commissions nowadays; but his father's fast-failing health, his love
for Dulcie Carlyon, and the desperate but 'Micawber'-like hope that
'something would turn up,' kept him hanging on day by day aimlessly
at Revelstoke, without even the apparent future that had opened to
Shafto when elevated to a high stool in Lawyer Carlyon's office.

As time went on, Lennard Melfort (or MacIan as he called himself),
though he had a high appreciation of Shafto's sense, turn for
business to all appearance, cleverness, and strength of character,
turned with greater pleasure to his own son Florian, whose clear open
brow and honest manly eyes bore nature's unmistakable impress of a
truer nobility than ever appertained to the truculent and
anti-national lords of Fettercairn.

Though to all appearance the best of friends before the world, the
cousins were rivals; but as Florian was the successful lover, Shafto
had a good basis for bitterness, if not secret hate.

In common with the few neighbours who were in that sequestered
quarter, the lawyer liked the Major--he was so gentle, suave,
retiring in manner, and courteously polite.  He liked Florian too,
but deemed him idle, and there his liking ended.

He took Shafto into his office at the Major's urgent request, as a
species of apprentice, but he--after the aphorism of 'Dr. Fell'--did
not much affect the young man, though he found him sharp enough--too
sharp at times; and, like most of the neighbours, he never cared to
inquire into the precise relationship of the Major and the two lads,
both of whom from boyhood had called the latter 'Papa.'

Dulcie Carlyon was the belle of the limited circle in which she
moved, and a very limited circle it was; but she was pretty enough to
have been the belle of a much larger orbit; for she was the very
ideal of a sweet, bright English girl, now nearly in her eighteenth
year, and the boy and girl romance in the lives of her and Florian
had lasted since they were children and playmates together, and they
seemed now to regard each other with 'the love that is given once in
a lifetime.'

'Could I but separate these two!' muttered Shafto, as with eyes full
of envy and evil he watched one of their meetings, amid the bushes
that fringed an old quarry not far from Revelstoke Church.

From the summit where he lurked there was a magnificent view of the
sea and the surrounding country.  On one hand lay the lonely old
church and all the solitary hills that overlook its wave-beaten
promontory; on the other were the white-crested waves of the British
Channel, rolling in sunshine; but Shafto saw only the face and figure
of Dulcie Carlyon, who was clad just as he was fond of picturing her,
in a jacket of navy blue, fastened with gilt buttons, and a skirt
with clinging folds of the same--a costume which invests an English
girl with an air equally nautical and coquettish.  Dulcie's dresses
always fitted her exquisitely, and her small head, with smart hat and
feather, set gracefully on her shapely shoulders, had just a
_soupçon_ of pride in its contour and bearing.

Slender in figure, with that lovely flower-like complexion which is
so peculiarly English, Dulcie had regular and delicate features, with
eyes deeply and beautifully blue, reddish-golden hair, a laughing
mouth that some thought too large for perfect beauty, but it was
fully redeemed by its vivid colour and faultless teeth.

'Could I but separate them!' muttered Shafto, through his clenched
teeth, while their murmured words and mutual caresses maddened him.

Dulcie was laughingly kissing a likeness in an open locket which
Florian had just given her--a likeness, no doubt, of himself--and she
did so repeatedly, and ever and anon held it admiringly at arm's
length.  Then she closed it, and Florian clasped the flat silver
necklet to which it was attached round her slender white throat; and
with a bright fond smile she concealed it among the lace frilling of
her collarette, and let the locket, for security, drop into the cleft
of her bosom, little foreseeing the part it was yet to play in her
life.

Shafto's face would not have been pleasant to look upon as he saw
this episode, and his shifty grey eyes grew pea-green in hue as he
watched it.

'Oh, Dulcie!' exclaimed Florian, with a kind of boyish rapture, as he
placed a hand on each of her shoulders and gazed into her eyes, 'I am
most terribly in love with you.'

'Why should there be any terror in it?' asked Dulcie, with a sweet
silvery laugh.

'Well, I feel so full of joy in having your love, and being always
with you, that--that a fear comes over me lest we should be some day
parted.'

'Who can part us but ourselves?' said she with a pretty pout, while
her long lashes drooped.

'Dulcie,' said he, after a little pause, 'have you ever had an
emotion that comes uncalled for--that which people call a
presentiment?'

'Yes; often.'

'Has it ever come true?'

'Sometimes.'

'Well--I have a presentiment this evening which tells me that
something is about to happen to me--to us--and very soon too!'

'What can happen to us--we are so happy?' said Dulcie, her blue eyes
dilating.

Did the vicinity of Shafto, though unknown to Florian, mysteriously
prompt this thought--this boding fear.  Shafto heard the words, and a
strange smile spread over his face as he shook his clenched hand at
the absorbed pair, and stole away from his hiding-place, leaving two
foolish hearts full of a foolish dream from which they might be
roughly awakened--leaving the happy Florian, with that sweet and
winsome Dulcie whom he loved, and with whom he had played even as a
child; with whom he had shared many a pot of clotted cream; with whom
he had fished for trout in the Erme and Yealm; explored with fearful
steps and awe-stricken heart the cavern there, where lie thick the
fossil bones of the elephant, hyæna, and wolf; and wandered for hours
by the moors, among mossy rocks and mossy trees, and in woody
labyrinthine lanes, and many a time and oft by the sea shore, where
the cliffs are upheaved and contorted in a manner beyond description,
but so loosely bound together that waves rend them asunder, and shape
them into forms like ruined castles and stranded ships; till, as
years went on, heart had spoken to heart; boy and girl life had been
left behind; and that dream-time came in which they seemed to live
for years.

No one could accuse Dulcie Carlyon of coquetry, her nature was too
truthful and open for that; thus she had never for a moment wavered
in her preference between Florian and Shafto, and spent with the
former those bright and hopeful hours that seldom come again with the
same keen intensity in a lifetime, though often clouded by vague
doubts.

As yet they had led a kind of Paul and Virginia life, without very
defined ideas of their future; in fact, perhaps scarcely considering
what that future might be.

They only knew, like the impassioned boy and girl in the beautiful
story of Bernardin St. Pierre, that they loved each other very
dearly, and for the sweet present that sufficed; while cunning Shafto
Gyle looked darkly, gloomily, and enviously on them.

Perhaps it was his fast failing health that prevented Lennard Melfort
from looking more closely into this matter, or it may be that he
remembered the youthful love of his own heart; for he could never
forget her whom he was so soon to join now, and who, 'after life's
fitful fever,' slept by the grey wall of Revelstoke, within sound of
the restless sea.

Dulcie's father, Lawyer Carlyon, heard rumours of these meetings and
rambles, and probably liked them as little as the Major did; but he
was a busy man absorbed in his work, and had been used to seeing the
pair together since they were toddling children.  Lennard, perhaps,
thought it was as well to let them alone, as nothing would come of
it, while the lawyer treated it surlily as a kind of joke.

'Why, Dulcie, my girl,' said he one day, 'what is to be the end of
all this philandering but spoiling your own market, perhaps?  Do you
expect a young fellow to marry you who has no money, no prospects, no
position in the world?'

'Position he has,' said poor Dulcie, blushing painfully, for though
an only and motherless child she stood in awe of her father.

'Position--a deuced bad one, I think!'

'The other two items will come in time, papa,' said Dulcie, laughing
now.

'When?'

Dulcie was silent, and--for the first time in her life--thought
sadly, 'Yes, when!'  But she pressed a pretty white hand upon the
silver locket in her bosom, as if to draw courage therefrom as from
an amulet.

'Why, lass, he can't keep even the roof of a _cob_ cottage over your
head.'

'Well, papa, remember our hopeful Devonshire proverb--a good cob, a
good hat and shoes, and a good heart last for ever.'

'Right, lass, and a good heart have you, my darling,' said Mr.
Carlyon, kissing her peach-like cheek, for he was a kind and
good-hearted man, though somewhat rough in his exterior, and more
like a grazier than a lawyer.  'You are both too young to know what
you are talking about.  He'll be going away, however--can't live
always on his father, and _he_, poor fellow, won't last long.  The
fancy of you both will wear itself out, like any other summer
flirtation--I had many such in my time,' he added, with a chuckle,
'and got safely over them all.  So will you, lass, and marry into
some good family, getting a husband that will give you a comfortable
home--for instance, Job Holbeton, with his pits of Bovey coal.'

Poor little Dulcie shivered, and could scarcely restrain her tears at
the hard, practical suggestions of her father.  Hard-featured, stout,
and grizzled Joe Holbeton versus her handsome Florian!

Her father spoke, too, of his probable 'going away.'  Was this the
presentiment to which her lover had referred?  It almost seemed so.

In the sunset she went forth into the garden to work with her wools,
and even to have a 'good cry' over what her father had said; but in
this she was prevented by suddenly finding Shafto stretched on the
grass at her feet under a pine chestnut-tree--Shafto, whom she could
only tolerate for Florian's sake.

'Why do you stare at me so hard, Shafto,' she asked, with unconcealed
annoyance.

'Staring, was I?'

'Yes, like an owl.'

'I always like to see girls working.'

'Indeed!'

'And the work, what do you call it?'

'Crewel work.  And you like to see us busy?'

'Yes, especially when the work is done by hands so pretty and white.'

'As mine, you mean, of course?'

'Yes, Dulcie.  How you do bewilder a fellow!'

'Don't begin as usual to pay me clumsy compliments, Shafto, or I
shall quit the garden,' said Dulcie, her blue eyes looking with a
half-frightened, half-defiant expression into the keen, shifty, and
pale grey ones of Shafto, who was somewhat given to persecuting her.

He could see the outline of the locket with every respiration of her
bosom.  Could he but possess himself of it, thought he, as he
proceeded to fill his meerschaum pipe.

'I thought gentlemen did not smoke in ladies' society unless with
permission,' said Dulcie.

'Never bother about that, little one, please.  But may I smoke?'

'Yes.'

'Thanks; this is jolly,' said he, looking up at her with eyes full of
admiration.  'I feel like Hercules at the feet of Omphale.'

'I don't know who he was, or what you feel, but do you know what you
look like?'

'No.'

'Shall I tell you?' asked Dulcie, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

'Yes.'

'Well, like the Athenian weaver, Bottom, with his ass's head, at the
feet of Titania.  "Dost like the picture?"'

Shafto eyed her spitefully, all the more so that Dulcie laughed
merrily, showing all her pearly teeth at her reply.

'Oho, this comes of rambling in quarries,' said he, bluntly and
coarsely; 'doing the Huguenot business, the _pose_ of Millais'
picture.  Bosh!  What can you and he mean?'

'Millais and I?'

'No; you and Florian!'

'Mean!' exclaimed Dulcie, her sweet face growing very pale in spite
of herself at the bluntness of Shafto, and the unmistakable anger of
his tone and bearing.

'Yes--with your tomfoolery.'

'How?--why?'

'Penniless as you are--he at least.'

'Good evening, Shafto; you are very unpleasant, to say the least of
it,' said Dulcie, as she gathered up her wools and sailed into the
house, while his eyes followed her with a menacing and very ugly
expression indeed.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SECRET PACKET.

The broken health brought by Lennard from the miasmatic Terai of
Nepaul was rapidly becoming more broken than ever, and, though not
yet fifty, he was a premature old man, and it seemed as if the first
part of Florian's presentiment or prevision of coming sorrow would
soon be fulfilled.

His steps became very feeble, and he could only get about, in the
autumn sunshine, with the aid of a stick and Florian's arm; and the
latter watched him with grief and pain, tottering like the aged,
panting and leaning heavily on his cane, as ever and anon he insisted
on being led up a steep slope from which he could clearly see the old
church of Revelstoke on its wave-beaten promontory, overlooked by sad
and solitary hills, and his hollow eyes glistened as he gazed on it,
with a kind of yearning expression, as if he longed to be at peace,
and by the side of her he had laid there, it seemed long years ago--a
lifetime ago.

Poor Lennard was certainly near his tomb, and all who looked upon him
thought so; yet his calm eye, ever looking upward, betrayed no fear.

One day when Florian was absent--no doubt sketching, boating with
Dulcie on the Yealm, or idling with her on the moors--Lennard
besought Shafto to stay beside him as he sat feeble and languid in
his easy chair, sinking with the wasting and internal fever, with
which the country practitioners were totally incapable of grappling;
and on this day, for the first time, he began to speak to him of
Scotland and the home he once had there; and he was listened to with
the keenest interest by Shafto, who had ever--even as a child--been
cunning, selfish, and avaricious, yet wonderfully clever and
complaisant in his uncle's prejudiced eyes, as he remembered only
Flora's dead and devoted sister.

'I have been thinking over old times and other days, Shafto,' said
he, with his attenuated hands crossed on the head of his bamboo cane;
'and, all things considered, it seems an occupation I had better
avoid did the memory concern myself alone: but I must think of others
and their interests--of Florian and of you--so I can't help it, boy,
in my present state of health, or rather want of health,' he added,
as a violent fit of spasmodic coughing came upon him.

After a pause he spoke again.

'You, Shafto, are a couple of years older than Florian, and are, in
many ways, several years older in thought and experience by the short
training you have received in Carlyon's office.'

The Major paused again, leaving Shafto full of wonder and curiosity
as to what this preamble was leading up to.

The former had begun to see things more clearly and temperately with
regard to the sudden death of Cosmo, and to feel that, though he had
renounced all family ties, name, and wealth, so far as concerned
himself, to die, with the secret of all untold, would be to inflict a
cruel wrong on Florian.  At one time Lennard thought of putting his
papers and the whole matter in the hands of Mr. Lewellen Carlyon, and
it was a pity he did not do so instead of choosing to entrust them to
his long-headed nephew.

'Hand here my desk, and unlock it for me--my hands are so tremulous,'
said he.

When this was done he selected a packet from a private drawer, and
briefly and rapidly told the story of his life, his proper name, and
rank to Shafto, who listened with open-eyed amazement.

When the latter had thoroughly digested the whole information, he
said, after a long pause:

'This must be told to Florian!'

And with Florian came the thought of Dulcie, and how this sudden
accession of her lover to fortune and position would affect her.

'Nay, Shafto--not yet--not till I am gone--a short time now.  I can
trust you, with your sharpness and legal acumen, with the handling of
this matter entirely.  When I am gone, and laid beside your aunt
Flora, by the wall of the old church yonder,' he continued with a
very broken voice--one almost a childish treble, 'you will seek the
person to whom this packet is addressed, Kenneth Kippilaw, a Writer
to the Signet in Edinburgh--he is alive still; place these in his
hands, and he will do all that is required; but treasure them,
Shafto--be careful of them as you would of your soul's salvation--for
my sake, and more than all for the sake of Florian!  Now, my good
lad, give me the composing draught--I feel sleepy and so weary with
all this talking, and the thoughts that have come unbidden--unbidden,
sad, bitter, and angry thoughts--to memory.'

Shafto locked the desk, put it aside, and, giving his uncle the
draught, stole softly away to his own room with the papers, to con
them over and to--think!

He had not sat at a desk for three years in Lawyer Carlyon's office
without having his wits sharpened.  He paused as he put the documents
away.

'Stop--stop--let me think, let me consider!' he exclaimed to himself,
and he certainly did consider to some purpose.  He was cold and
calculating; he was never unusually agitated or flustered, but he
became both with the thoughts that occurred to him now.

Among the papers and letters entrusted to him were the certificates
of the marriage of Lennard and Flora, and another which ran thus:

'Certificate of entry of birth, under section 37 of 17 and 18 Vict.,
cap. 80.'  It authenticated the birth of their child Florian at
Revelstoke, with the date thereof to a minute.

These documents were enclosed in a letter written in a tremulous and
uncertain hand by Lennard Melfort to Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, part of
which was in these terms:

The child was baptized by a neighbouring clergyman--the Rev. Paul
Pentreath--who has faithfully kept the promise of secrecy he gave me,
and, dying as I now feel myself to be, I pray earnestly that my
father and mother will be kind to my orphan son.  Let them not--as
they one day hope for mercy at that dread throne before which I am
soon to appear--visit upon his innocent head my supposed and most
heavily punished offence.  Let him succeed in poor Cosmo's place to
that which is his due; let him succeed to all I renounced in
anger--an anger that has passed away, for now, my dear old friend, I
am aged beyond my years, and my hair is now white as snow through
ill-health contracted in India, where, to procure money necessary for
my poor Flora, I volunteered on desperate service, and in seasons
destructive to existence.  In your hands I leave the matter with
perfect hope and confidence.  The bearer will tell you all more that
may be necessary.'

After having read, reread, and made himself thoroughly master of the
contents of this to him certainly most astounding packet, he
requested the Major to re-address it in his own tremulous and all but
illegible handwriting, and seal it up with his long-disused signet
ring, which bore the arms of Fettercairn.

Prior to having all this done, Shafto had operated on one of the
documents most dexterously and destructively with his pen-knife!

'A peerage! a peerage!--rank, wealth, money, mine--all mine!' he
muttered under his breath, as he stored the packet away in a sure and
secret place, and while whistling softly to himself, a way he had
when brooding (as he often did) over mischief, he recalled the lines
of Robert Herrick:

  'Our life is like a narrow raft,
    Afloat upon the hungry sea;
  Hereon is but a little space,
  And all men, eager for a place,
    Do thrust each other in the sea.'

'So why should I not thrust him into the hungry briny?  If life is a
raft--and, by Jove, I find it so!--why should one not grasp at all
one can, and make the best of life for one's self, by making the
worst of it for other folks?  Does such a chance of winning rank and
wealth come often to any one's hands?  No! and I should be the
biggest of fools--the most enormous of idiots--not to avail myself to
the fullest extent.  I see my little game clearly, but must play
warily.  "Eat, drink, and be merry," says Isaiah, "for to-morrow we
die."  They say the devil can quote Scripture, and so can Shafto
Gyle.  But I don't mean to die to-morrow, but to have a jolly good
spell for many a year to come!'

And in the wild exuberance of his spirits he tossed his hat again and
again to the ceiling.

From that day forward the health of Lennard Melfort seemed to decline
more rapidly, and erelong he was compelled by the chill winds of the
season to remain in bed, quite unable to take his place at table or
move about, save when wheeled in a chair to the window, where he
loved to watch the setting sun.

Then came one evening when, for the last time, he begged to be
propped up there in his pillowed chair.  The sun was setting over
Revelstoke Church, and throwing its picturesque outline strongly
forward, in a dark indigo tint, against the golden and crimson flush
of the west, and all the waves around the promontory were glittering
in light.

But Lennard saw nothing of all this, though he felt the feeble warmth
of the wintry sun as he stretched his thin, worn hands towards it;
his eyesight was gone, and would never come again!  There was
something very pathetic in the withered face and sightless eyes, and
the drooping white moustache that had once been a rich dark-brown,
and waxed _à l'Empereur_.

His dream of life was over, and his last mutterings were a prayer for
Florian, on whose breast his head lay as he breathed his last.

The two lads looked at each other in that supreme moment--but with
very different thoughts in their hearts.  Florian felt only
desolation, blank and utter, and even Shafto, in the awful presence
of Death, felt alone in the world.




CHAPTER VII.

A FAREWELL.

As he lay dead, that old-looking, wasted, and attenuated man, whose
hair was like the thistledown, none would have recognised in him the
dark-haired, bronzed, and joyous young subaltern who only twenty-four
years before had led his company at the storming of the Redan, who
had planted the scaling-ladder against the scarp, and shouted in a
voice heard even amid the roar of the adverse musketry:

'Come on, men! ladders to the front, eight men per ladder; up and at
them, lads, with the bayonet,' and fought his way into an embrasure,
while round-shot tore up the earth beneath his feet, and men were
swept away in sections of twenty; or the hardy soldier who faced
fever and foes alike in the Terai of Nepaul.

How still and peaceful he lay now as the coffin-lid was closed over
him.

Snow-flakes, light and feathery, fell on the hard ground, and the
waves seemed to leap and sob heavily round the old church of
Revelstoke, when Lennard Melfort was laid beside the now old and
flattened grave of Flora, and keen and sharp the frosty wind lifted
the silver hair of the Rev. Paul Pentreath, whistled among the ivy or
on the buttresses, and fluttered the black ribbon of the pall held by
Florian, who felt as one in a dreadful dream--amid a dread and unreal
phantasmagoria; and the same wind seemed to twitch angrily the
pall-ribbon from the hand of Shafto, nor could he by any effort
recover it, as more than one present, with their Devonian
superstition, remarked, and remembered when other things came to pass.

At last all was over; the mourners departed, and Lennard Melfort was
left alone--alone with the dead of yesterday and of ages; and
Florian, while Dulcie was by his side and pressed his hand, strove to
commit to memory the curate's words from the Book of Revelation,
'There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor sighing; for God
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'

Shafto now let little time pass before he proceeded to inform Florian
of what he called their 'relative position,' and of their journey
into Scotland to search out Mr. Kippilaw.

It has been said that in life we have sometimes moments so full of
emotion that they seem to mark a turn in it we can never reach again;
and this sharp turn, young and startled Florian seemed to pass, when
he learned that since infancy he had been misled, and that the man,
so tender and so loving, whom he had deemed his father was but his
uncle!

How came it all to pass now?  Yet the old Major had ever been so kind
and affectionate to him--to both, in fact, equally so, treating them
as his sons--that he felt only a stunning surprise, a crushing grief
and bitter mortification, but not a vestige of anger; his love for
the dead was too keen and deep for that.

The packet, sealed and addressed to Mr. Kippilaw, though its contents
were as yet unknown to him, seemed to corroborate the strange
intelligence of Shafto; but the question naturally occurred to
Florian, 'For what end or purpose had this lifelong mystery and
change in their positions been brought about?'

He asked this of Shafto again and again.

'It seems we have been very curiously deluded,' said that personage,
not daring to look the sorrowful Florian straight in the face, and
pretended to be intent on stuffing his pipe.

'Deluded--how?'

'How often am I to tell you,' exclaimed Shafto, with petulance and
assumed irritation, 'that the contents of this packet prove that _I_
am the only son of Major Melfort (not MacIan at all), and that
you--you----'

'What?'

'Are Florian Gyle, the nephew--adopted as a son.  Mr. Kippilaw will
tell you all about it.'

'And you, Shafto?' queried Florian, scarcely knowing, in his
bewilderment, what he said.

'Mean to go in for my proper position--my title, and all that sort of
thing, don't you see?'

'And act--how!'

'Not the proverbial beggar on horseback, I hope.  I'll do something
handsome for you, of course.'

'I want nothing done for me while I have two hands, Shafto.'

'As you please,' replied the latter, puffing vigorously at his pipe.
'I have had enough of hopeless drudgery for a quarterly pittance in
the dingy office of old Carlyon,' said he, after a long pause; 'and,
by all the devils, I'll have no more of it now that I am going to be
rich.'

Indeed, from the day of Lennard Melfort entrusting him with the
packet, Shafto had done little else at the office but study the laws
of succession in Scotland and England.

'How much you love money, Shafto!' said Florian, eying him wistfully.

'Do I?  Well, I suppose that comes from having had so precious little
of it in my time.  I am a poor devil just now, but,' thought he
exultantly, 'this "plant" achieved successfully, how many matrons
with daughters unmarried will all be anxious to be mother to me!  And
Dulcie Carlyon I might have for asking; but I'll fly at higher game
now, by Jove!'

As further credentials, Shafto now possessed himself of Major
Melfort's sword, commissions, and medals, while Florian looked in
blank dismay and growing mortification--puzzled by the new position
in which he found himself, of being no longer his father's son--a
source of unfathomable mystery.

Shafto was in great haste to be gone, to leave Revelstoke and its
vicinity behind him.  It was too late for regrets or repentance now.
Not that he felt either, we suppose; and what he had done he would do
again if there was no chance of being found out.  In the growing
exuberance of his spirits, he could not help, a day or two after,
taunting Florian about Dulcie till they were on the verge of a
quarrel, and wound up by saying, with a scornful laugh:

'You can't marry her--a fellow without a shilling in the world; and I
wouldn't now, if she would have me, which I don't doubt.'

Poor Dulcie!  She heard with undisguised grief and astonishment of
these events, and of the approaching departure of the cousins.

The cottage home was being broken up; the dear old Major was in his
grave; and Florian, the playmate of her infancy, the lover of her
girlhood, was going away--she scarcely knew to where.  They might be
permitted to correspond by letter, but when, thought Dulcie--oh, when
should they meet again?

The sun was shedding its light and warmth around her as usual, on
woodland and hill, on wave and rock; but both seemed to fade out, the
perfume to pass from the early spring flowers, the glory from land
and sea, and a dim mist of passionate tears clouded the sweet and
tender blue eyes of the affectionate girl.

He would return, he said, as he strove to console her; but how and
when, and to what end? thought both so despairingly.  Their future
seemed such a vague, a blank one!

'I am penniless, Dulcie--a beggar on the face of the earth--twice
beggared now, I think!' exclaimed Florian, in sorrowful bitterness.

'Don't speak thus,' said she imploringly, with piteous lips that were
tremulous as his own, and her eyes drowned in tears.

They had left the road now, and wandered among the trees in a
thicket, and seated themselves on a fallen trunk, a seat and place
endeared to them and familiar enough in past time.

He gazed into her eyes of deep pansy-blue, as if his own were
striving to take away a memory of her face--a memory that would last
for eternity.

'And you really go to-night?' she asked, in piteous and broken
accents.

'Yes--with Shafto.  I am in a fever, darling, to seek out a position
for myself.  Surely Shafto may assist me in that--though I shrink
from asking him.'

'Your own cousin?'

'Yes--but sometimes he looks like a supplanter now, and his bearing
has been so unpleasant to me, especially of late,' said Florian.
'But you will wait for me, Dulcie, and not be persuaded to marry
anyone else?' he added imploringly, as he clasped each of her hands
in his.

'I shall wait for you, Florian, if it should be for twenty years!'
exclaimed the girl, in a low and emphatic voice, scarcely considering
the magnitude and peril of such a promise.

'Thank you, darling Dulcie!' said he bending down and kissing her
lips with ardour, and, though on the eve of parting, they felt almost
happy in the confidence of the blissful present.

'How often shall I recall this last meeting by the fallen tree, when
you are far, far away from Revelstoke and--me,' said Dulcie.

'You will often come here to be reminded of me?'

'Do you think, Florian, I will require to be reminded of you?' asked
the girl, with a little tone of pain in her sweet voice, as she
kissed the silver locket containing his likeness, and all the sweet
iteration of lover-talk, promises, and pledges went on for a time,
and new hopes began to render this last interview more bearable to
the young pair who were on the eve of separation, without any very
distinct arrangement about correspondence in the interval of it.

The sun was setting now redly, and amid dun winter clouds, beaming on
each chimney-head, on Revelstoke Church, and the leafless tree-tops
his farewell radiance.

Florian took a long, long kiss from Dulcie, and with the emotion of a
wrench in his heart, was gone, and she was alone.

A photo and a lock of red-golden hair were all that remained to him
of her--both to be looked upon again and again, till his eyes ached,
but never grew weary.

Dulcie's were very red with weeping, and the memory of that parting
kiss was still hovering on her quivering lips when, in a lonely lane
not far from her home, she found herself suddenly face to face with
Shafto.

She had known him from his boyhood, ever since he came an orphan to
Lennard Melfort's cottage; and although she always distrusted and
never liked him, his face was a familiar one she might never see
more; thus she resolved to part with him as with the best of friends,
and to remember that he was the only kinsman of Florian, whose
companion and fellow-traveller he was to be on a journey the end of
which she scarcely understood.  So, frankly and sweetly, with a sad
smile in her eyes, she proffered her pretty hand, which Shafto
grasped and retained promptly enough.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE SILVER LOCKET.

Shafto had just been with her father.  How contemptuously he had eyed
the corner and the high old stool on which he had sat in the latter's
legal establishment, and all its surroundings; the fly-blown county
maps of Devon and Cornwall; advertisements of sales--property,
mangold wurzel, oats and hay, Thorley's food for cattle, and so
forth; the tin boxes of most legal aspect; dockets of papers in red
tape; the well-thumbed ledgers; day and letter books, and all the
paraphernalia of a country solicitor's office.

Ugh!  How well he knew and loathed them all.  Now it was all over and
done with.

The three poor lads in the office, whose cheap cigars and beer he had
often shared at the Ashburton Arms, he barely condescended to notice,
while they regarded him with something akin to awe, as he gave Lawyer
Carlyon his final 'instructions' concerning the disposal of the lease
of the Major's pretty cottage, and of all the goods and chattels that
were therein.

Had Florian been present he would have felt only shame and abasement
at the tone and manner Shafto adopted on this occasion; but worthy
Lawyer Carlyon, who did not believe a bit in the rumoured accession
of Shafto to family rank and wealth, laughed softly to himself, and
thought his 'pride would have a sore fall one of these fine days.'

And even now, when face to face with Dulcie, his general bearing, his
coolness and insouciance, rendered her, amid all her grief, indignant
and defiant ultimately.

How piquant, compact, and perfect the girl looked, from the smart
scarlet feather in her little hat to her tiny Balmoral boots.  Her
veil was tightly tied across her face, showing only the tip of her
nose, her ripe red lips, and pretty white chin--its point, like her
cheeks, reddened somewhat by the winter breeze from the Channel.  Her
gloved hands were in her small muff, and the collar of her sealskin
jacket was encircled by the necklet at which her silver locket
hung--the locket Shafto had seen her kiss when Florian had bestowed
it on her, while he looked close by, with his heart full of envy,
jealousy, and hatred, and now it was the first thing that attracted
his eye.

'And you actually leave us to-night, Shafto?' she said softly.

'Yes, Dulcie, by the train for Worcester and the north.  My estates,
you know, are in Scotland.'

'These changes are all strange and most startling,' said she, with a
sob in her slender throat.

'We live in whirligig times, Dulcie; but I suppose it is the result
of progress,' he added sententiously.  'I wonder how our grandfathers
and grandmothers contrived to mope over and yawn out their dull and
emotionless existence till they reached threescore and ten years.'

'I shall never see that age, Shafto.'

'Who knows; though life, however sweet now, won't be worth living for
then, I fancy.'

Dulcie sighed, and he regarded her in admiring silence, for he had a
high appreciation of her bright and delicate beauty, and loved
her--if we may degrade the phrase--in his own selfish and peculiar
way, though now resolved--as he had often thought vainly--to 'fly at
higher game;' and so, full of ideas, hopes, and ambitions of his own,
if he had ceased to think of Dulcie, he had, at least, ceased for a
space to trouble her.

'Florian will be writing to you, of course?' said he, after a pause.

'Alas! no, we have made no arrangement; and then, you know, papa----'

'Wouldn't approve, of course.  My farewell advice to you, Dulcie,
is--Don't put off your time thinking of Florian--his ship will never
come home.'

'Nor yours either, perhaps,' said Dulcie, angrily.

'You think so--but you are wrong.'

'Ah!  I know these waited for ships rarely do.'

'I have read somewhere that ships of the kind rarely do come home in
this prosaic and disappointing world; that some get wrecked almost
within sight of land; others go down without the flapping of a sail,
and sometimes after long and firm battling with adverse winds and
tides; but _my ship_ is a sure craft, Dulcie,' he added, as he
thought of the packet in his possession--that precious packet on
which all his hopes rested and his daring ambition was founded.

Dulcie looked at him wistfully and distrustfully, and thought--

'Why is he so sure?  But his ideas were always selfish and evil.
Tide what may,' she added aloud, 'I shall wait twenty years and more
for Florian.'

'The more fool you, then!  And so die an old maid?'

'I am, perhaps, cut out for an old maid.'

'And if he never can marry you--or marries some one else when he
can?' asked Shafto viciously.

'Oh, then I'll take to æstheticism, or women's rights, and all that
sort of thing,' said the poor girl, with a ghastly and defiant
attempt at a jest, which ended in tears, while Shafto eyed her
angrily.

'How fond you are of that silver locket--you never wear any other!'

'I have so few ornaments, Shafto.'

'And none you prize so much?'

'None!' said Dulcie, with a sweet, sad smile.

'Is that the reason you wear it with all kinds of dresses?  What is
in it--anything?'

'That is my secret,' replied Dulcie, putting her right hand on it and
instinctively drawing back a pace, for there was a menacing
expression in the cold grey eyes of Shafto.

'Allow me to open it,' said he, taking her hand in his.

'No.'

'You shall!'

'Never!' exclaimed Dulcie, her eyes sparkling now as his grasp upon
her hand tightened.

An imprecation escaped Shafto, and with his eyes aflame and his
cheeks pale with jealousy and rage he tore her hand aside and
wrenched by brutal force the locket from her, breaking the silver
necklet as he did so.

'Coward!' exclaimed Dulcie; 'coward and thief--how dare you?
Surrender that locket instantly!'

'Not if I know it,' said he, mockingly, holding the prized trinket
before her at arm's length.

'But for Florian's sake, I would at once apply to the police.'

'A vulgar resort--no, my pretty Dulcie, you wouldn't.'

'Why?'

'Not for Florian's sake?'

'Whose, then?'

'Your own, for you wouldn't like to have your old pump of a father
down on you; and so you dare not make a row about it, my pretty
little fury.'

'Shafto, I entreat you, give me back that photo,' said Dulcie, her
tears welling forth.

'No; I won't.'

'Of what interest or use can it be to you?'

'More than you imagine,' said Shafto, to whom a villainous idea just
then occurred.

'I entreat you,' said Dulcie, letting her muff drop and clasping her
slim little hands.

'Entreat away!  I feel deucedly inclined to put my heel upon it--but
I won't.'

'This robbery is cruel and infamous!' exclaimed Dulcie, trembling
with grief and just indignation; but Shafto only laughed in anger and
bitterness--and a very hyena-like laugh it was, and as some one was
coming down the secluded lane, he turned away and left her in the
twilight.

He felt himself safe from opprobrium and punishment, as he knew well
she was loth to make any complaint to her father on the subject; and
just then she knew not how to communicate with Florian, as the
darkness was falling fast, and the hour of his departure was close at
hand.  She thought it not improbable that Shafto would relent and
return the locket to her; but the night was far advanced ere that
hope was dissipated, and she attained some outward appearance of
composure, though her father's sharp and affectionate eyes detected
that she had been suffering.

He had heard from her some confused and rambling story about the
family secret, the packet, and the peerage, a story of which he could
make nothing, though Shafto's bearing to himself that evening seemed
to confirm the idea that 'there was something in it.'  Anyway, Mr.
Carlyon was not indisposed to turn the event to account in one sense.

'Likely--likely enough, Dulcie lass,' said he; 'and so you'll hear no
more of these two lads, if they are likely to become great folks, and
belong to what is called the upper ten; they'll never think again of
a poor village belle like you, though there is not a prettier face in
all Devonshire than my Dulcie's from Lyme Regis to Cawsand Bay.'

He meant this kindly, and spoke with a purpose; and his words and the
warning they conveyed sank bitterly into the tender heart of poor
Dulcie.

By this time the cousins were sweeping through the darkness in the
express train by Exeter, Taunton, and so forth; both were very
silent, and each was full of his own thoughts, and what these were
the reader may very well imagine.

Heedless of the covert and sneering smiles of Shafto, Florian, from
time to time, drew forth the photo of Dulcie, and her shining lock of
red-golden hair, his sole links between the past and the present; and
already he felt as if a score of years had lapsed since they sat side
by side upon the fallen tree.

Then, that he might give his whole thoughts to Dulcie, he affected to
sleep; but Shafto did not sleep for hours.  He sat quietly enough
with his face in shadow, his travelling-cap of tweed-check pulled
well down over his watchful and shifty grey-green eyes, the lamp
overhead giving a miserable glimmer suited to the concealment of
expression and thought; and as the swift train sped northward, the
cousins addressed not a word to each other concerning those they had
left behind, what was before them, or anything else.

After a time, Shafto really slept--slept the slumber which is
supposed to be the reward of the just and conscientious, but which is
much more often enjoyed by those who have no conscience at all.

Dulcie contrived to despatch a letter to Florian detailing the
outrage to which she had been subjected by Shafto; but time passed
on, and, for a reason we shall give in its place, the letter never
reached him.

Again and again she recalled and rehearsed her farewell with Florian,
and thought regretfully of his passionate pride, and desperate
poverty too probably, if he quarrelled with Shafto; and she still
seemed to see his beautiful dark eyes, dim with unshed tears, while
her own welled freely and bitterly.

When could they meet again, if ever, and where and how?  Her heart
and brain ached with these questions.

Dulcie did not bemoan her fate, though her cheek paled a little, and
she felt--even at her early years--as if life seemed over and done
with, and in her passionate love for the absent, that existence alone
was left to her, and so forth.

And as she was her father's housekeeper now, kept the keys and paid
all the servants, paid all accounts and made the preserves, he was in
no way sorry that the young men were gone; that the 'aimless
philandering,' as he deemed it, had come to an end; and that much
would be attended to in his cosy little household which he
suspected--but unjustly--had been neglected hitherto.

To Dulcie, the whole locality of her native place, the breezy moors,
the solitary hills, the mysterious Druid pillars and logan stones,
the rocky shore, and the pretty estuary of the Yealm, where they had
been wont to boat and fish for pilchards in summer and autumn, were
all full of the haunting presence of the absent--the poor but proud
and handsome lad who from boyhood, yea from infancy, had loved her,
and who now seemed to have slipped out of her existence.

Spring melted into summer; golden sunshine flooded hill and dale, and
lit up the waters of the Erm, the Yealm, and the far-stretching
Channel, tinting with wondrous gleams and hues the waves that rolled
upon the shore, or boiled about the Mewstorre Rock, and the
sea-beaten promontory of Revelstoke; but to Dulcie the glory was gone
from land and water: she heard no more, by letter or otherwise, of
the love of her youth; he seemed to have dropped utterly out of her
sphere; and though mechanically she gathered the fragrant leaves of
the bursting June roses--the Marshal Neil and Gloire de Dijon--and
treasured them carefully in rare old china jars and vases, a task in
which she had often been assisted by Florian, she felt and
thought--'Ichabod!  Ichabod! the glory has departed!'




CHAPTER IX.

MR. KIPPILAW, W.S.

Shafto found himself a little nervous when he and Florian were
actually in Edinburgh, a city in its beauty, boldness and grandeur of
rock and mountain, fortress, terrace, and temple, so foreign-looking
to English eyes, and so utterly unlike everything they had ever seen
or conceived before.

Florian's thoughts were peculiarly his own.  His father's
death--though called an uncle now, but Florian always felt for and
thought of him as a parent--the loss of Dulcie, their abrupt
departure from Devonshire, and rough uprootal of all early
associations, had made a kind of hiatus in the young fellow's life,
and it was only now when he found himself amid the strange streets
and picturesque splendour of Edinburgh that he began--like one
recovering consciousness after a long illness--to gather up again the
ravelled threads of thought, but with curious want of concern and
energy; while Shafto felt that he personally had both, and that now
he required to have all his wits about him.

Florian stood for a time that night at the door of their hotel in
Princes Street looking at the wonderful lights of the Old Town
sparkling in mid air, and some that were in the Castle must, he
thought, be stars, they were so high above the earth.  Scores of cabs
and carriages went by, eastward and westward, but no carts or wains
or lorries, such as one sees in London or Glasgow--vehicles with
bright lamps and well muffled occupants, gentlemen in evening suits,
and ladies in ball or dinner dresses, and crowds of pedestrians,
under the brilliant gas lights and long boulevard-like lines of
trees--the ever-changing human panorama of a great city street before
midnight.

How odd, how strange and lonely poor Florian felt; he seemed to
belong to no one, and, like the Miller o' Dee, nobody cared for him;
and ever and anon his eyes rested on the mighty castled rock that
towers above streets, monuments, and gardens, with a wonderous
history all its own, 'where treasured lie the monarchy's last gems,'
and with them the only ancient crown in the British Isles.  'Brave
kings and the fairest of crowned women have slept and been cradled in
that eyrie,' says an enthusiastic English writer; 'heroes have fought
upon its slopes; English armies have stormed it; dukes, earls, and
barons have been immured in its strong dungeons; a sainted Queen
prayed and yielded up her last breath there eight centuries ago.  It
is an imperishable relic--a monument that needs no carving to tell
its tale, and it has the nation's worship; and the different church
sects cling round its base as if they would fight again for the
guardianship of a venerable mother.....  And if Scotland has no
longer a king and Parliament all to herself, her imperial crown is at
least safely kept up there amid strong iron stanchions, as a sacred
memorial of her inextinguishable independence, and, if need were, for
future use.'

Florian was a reader and a thinker, and he felt a keen interest in
all that now surrounded him; but Shafto lurked in a corner of the
smoke-room, turning in his mind the task of the morrow, and unwisely
seeking to fortify himself by imbibing more brandy and soda than
Florian had ever seen him take before.

After a sound night's rest and a substantial Scottish breakfast had
fitted Shafto, as he thought, for facing anything, a cab deposited
him and Florian (who was now beginning to marvel why he had travelled
so far in a matter that concerned him not, in reality) at the
residence of Mr. Kenneth Kippilaw, W.S., in Charlotte Square--a noble
specimen of Adams Street architecture, having four stately
symmetrical corresponding façades, overlooked by the dome of St.
George's Church.

'Lawyers evidently thrive in Scotland,' said Shafto, as he looked at
the mansion of Mr. Kippilaw, and mentally recalled the modest
establishment of Lawyer Carlyon; 'but foxes will flourish as long as
there are geese to be plucked.'

Mr. Kippilaw was at home--indeed he was just finishing breakfast,
before going to the Parliament House--as they were informed by the
liveried valet, who led them through a pillared and marble-floored
vestibule, and ushered them into what seemed a library, as the walls
from floor to ceiling were lined with handsome books; but every
professional man's private office has generally this aspect in
Scotland.

In a few minutes Mr. Kippilaw appeared with a puzzled and perplexed
expression in his face, as he alternatively looked at his two
visitors, and at Shafto's card in his hand.

Mr. Kippilaw was now in his sixtieth year; his long since grizzled
hair had now become white, and had shrunk to two patches far apart,
one over each ear, and brushed stiffly up.  His eyebrows were also
white, shaggy, and under them his keen eyes peered sharply through
the rims of a gold pince-nez balanced on the bridge of his long
aquiline nose.

Shafto felt just then a strange and unpleasant dryness about his
tongue and lips.

'_Mr. Shafto Melfort?_' said Mr. Kippilaw inquiringly, and referring
to the card again.  'I was not aware that there was a Mr. Shafto
Melfort--any relation of Lord Fettercairn?'

'His grandson,' said Shafto unblushingly.

'This gentleman with the dark eyes?' asked Mr. Kippilaw, turning to
the silent Florian.

'No--myself,' said Shafto sharply and firmly.

'You are most unlike the family, who have always been remarkable for
regularity of features.  Then you are the son--of--of--'

'The late Major Lennard Melfort who died a few weeks ago----'

'Good Heavens, where?'

'On the west coast of Devonshire, near Revelstoke, where he had long
resided under the assumed name of MacIan.'

'That of his wife?'

'Precisely so--my mother.'

'And this young gentleman, whose face and features seem curiously
familiar to me, though I never saw him before, he is your brother of
course.'

'No, my cousin, the son of my aunt Mrs. Gyle.  I am an only son, but
the Major ever treated us as if he had been the father of both, so
great and good was his kindness of heart.'

'Be seated, please,' said the lawyer in a breathless voice, as he
seated himself in an ample leathern elbow chair at his writing-table,
which was covered with documents and letters all arranged by his
junior clerk in the most orderly manner.

'This is very sudden and most unexpected intelligence,' said he,
carefully wiping his glasses, and subjecting Shafto's visage to a
closer scrutiny again.  'Have you known all these years past the real
name and position of your father, and that he left Kincardineshire
more than twenty years ago after a very grave quarrel with his
parents at Craigengowan?'

'No--I only learned who he was, and who we really were, when he was
almost on his deathbed.  He confided it to me alone, as his only son,
and because I had been bred to the law; and on that melancholy
occasion he entrusted me with this important packet addressed to
_you_.'

With an expression of the deepest interest pervading his well-lined
face, Mr. Kippilaw took the packet and carefully examined the seal
and the superscription, penned in a shaky handwriting, with both of
which he was familiar enough, though he had seen neither for fully
twenty years, and finally he examined the envelope, which looked old
and yellow.

'If all be true and correct, these tidings will make some stir at
Craigengowan,' he muttered as if to himself, and cut round the seal
with a penknife.

'You will find ample proofs, sir, of all I have alleged,' said
Shafto, who now felt that the crisis was at hand.

Mr. Kippilaw, with growing interest and wonder, drew forth the
documents and read and re-read them slowly and carefully, holding the
papers, but not offensively, between him and the light to see if the
dates and water-marks tallied.

'The slow way this old devil goes on would exasperate an oyster!'
thought Shafto, whose apparently perfect coolness and self-possession
rather surprised and repelled the lawyer.

There were the certificate of Lennard's marriage with Flora MacIan,
which Mr. Kippilaw could remember he had seen of old; the
'certificate of entry of birth of their son, born at Revelstoke at 6
h. 50 m. on the 28th October P.M., 18--,' signed by the Registrar,
and the Major's farewell letter to his old friend, entrusting his son
and his son's interests to his care.

'But, hallo!' exclaimed Mr. Kippilaw, after he had read for the
second time, and saw that the letter of Lennard Melfort was
undoubtedly authentic, 'how comes it that the whole of your Christian
name is _torn out_ of the birth certificate, and the surname
_Melfort_ alone remains?'

'Torn out!' exclaimed Shafto, apparently startled in turn.

'There is a rough little hole in the document where the name _should
be_.  Do you know the date of your birth?' asked Mr. Kippilaw, partly
covering the document with his hand, unconsciously as it were.

'Yes--28th October.'

'And the year?'

Shafto gave it from memory.

'Quite correct--as given here,' said Mr. Kippilaw; 'but you look old
for the date of this certificate.'

'I always looked older than my years,' replied Shafto.

Florian, who might have claimed the date as that of his own birth,
was--luckily for Shafto--away at a window, gazing intently on a party
of soldiers marching past, with a piper playing before them.

'Another certificate can be got if necessary,' said Mr. Kippilaw, as
he glanced at the Registrar's signature, a suggestion which made
Shafto's heart quake.  'It must have come from the Major in this
mutilated state,' he added, re-examining with legal care and
suspicion the address on the envelope and the seal, which, as we have
said, he had cut round; 'but it is strange that he has made no
mention of it being so in his letter to me.  Poor fellow! he was more
of a soldier than a man of business, however.  Allow me to
congratulate you, Mr. Melfort, on your new prospects.  Rank and a
very fine estate are before you.'

He warmly shook the hand of Shafto, who began to be more reassured;
and saying, 'I must carefully preserve the documents for the
inspection of Lord Fettercairn,' he locked them fast in a drawer of
his writing-table, and spreading out his coat-tails before the fire,
while warming his person in the fashion peculiar to the genuine
'Britisher,' he eyed Shafto benignantly, and made a few pleasant
remarks on the Fettercairn family, the fertility and beauty of
Craigengowan, the stables, kennels, the shootings, and so forth, and
the many fine qualities of 'Leonard'--as he called him--and about
whom he asked innumerable questions, all of which Shafto could answer
truly and with a clear conscience enough, as he was master of all
that.

The latter was asked 'what he thought of Edinburgh--if he had ever
been there before,' and so forth.  Shafto remembered a little 'Guide
Book' into which he had certainly dipped, so as to be ready for
anything, and spoke so warmly of the picturesque beauties and
historical associations of the Modern Athens that the worthy lawyer's
heart began to warm to so intelligent a young man, while of the
silent Florian, staring out into the sun-lit square and its beautiful
garden and statues, he took little notice, beyond wondering _where_
he had seen his eyes and features before!




CHAPTER X.

ALONE IN THE WORLD.

'And you were bred to the law, you say, Mr. Melfort?' remarked the
old Writer to the Signet after a pause.

'Yes, in Lawyer Carlyon's office.'

'Very good--very good indeed; that is well!  We generally think in
Scotland that a little knowledge of the law is useful, as it teaches
the laird to haud his ain; but I forgot that you are southland bred,
and born too--the more is the pity--and can't understand me.'

Shafto did not understand him, but thought that his time spent in
Lawyer Carlyon's office had not been thrown away now; experience
there had 'put him up to a trick or two.'

'I shall write to Craigengowan by the first post,' said Mr. Kippilaw
after another of those thoughtful pauses during which he attentively
eyed his visitor.  'Lord and Lady Fettercairn--like myself now
creeping up the vale of years--(Hope they may soon see the end of it!
thought Shafto) will, I have no doubt, be perfectly satisfied by the
sequence and tenor of the documents you have brought me that you are
their grandson--the son of the expatriated Lennard--and when I hear
from them I shall let you know the result without delay.  You are
putting up at--what hotel?'

'At the Duke of Rothesay, in Princes Street.'

'Ah! very well.'

'Thanks; I shall be very impatient to hear.'

'And your cousin--he will, of course, go with you to Craigengowan?'

Shafto hesitated, and actually coloured, as Florian could detect.

'What are your intentions or views?' Mr. Kippilaw asked the latter.

'He failed to pass for the army,' said Shafto bluntly and glibly, 'so
I don't know what he means to do _now_.  I believe that he scarcely
knows himself.'

'Have you no friends on your mother's side, Mr. Florian?'

'None!' said Florian, with a sad inflection of voice.

'Indeed! and what do you mean to do?'

'Follow the drum, most probably,' replied Florian bitterly and a
little defiantly, as Shafto's coldness, amid his own great and good
fortune, roused his pride and galled his heart, which sank as he
thought of Dulcie Carlyon, sweet, golden-haired English Dulcie, so
far away.

Mr. Kippilaw shook his bald head at the young man's answer.

'I have some little influence in many ways, and if I can assist your
future views you may command me, Mr. Florian,' said he with fatherly
kindness, for he had reared--yea and lost--more than one fine lad of
his own.

It has been said that one must know mankind very well before having
the courage to be solely and simply oneself; thus, as Shafto's
knowledge of mankind was somewhat limited, he felt his eye quail more
than once under the steady gaze of Mr. Kippilaw.

'It is a very strange thing,' said the latter, 'that after the death
of Mr. Cosmo in Glentilt, when Lord and Lady Fettercairn were so
anxious to discover and recall his younger brother as the next and
only heir to the title and estates, we totally failed to trace him.
We applied to the War Office for the whereabouts of Major Lennard
Melfort, but the authorities there, acting upon a certain principle,
declined to afford any information.  Advertisements, some plainly
distinct, others somewhat enigmatical, were often inserted in the
_Scotsman_ and _Times_, but without the least avail.

'As for the _Scotsman_,' said Shafto, 'the Major----'

'Your father, you mean?'

'Yes,' said he, reddening, 'was no more likely to see such a
provincial print in Devonshire than the Roman _Diritto_ or the
Prussian _Kreuz Zeitung_; and the _Times_, if he saw it--which I
doubt--he must have ignored.  Till the time of his death drew near,
his feelings were bitter, his hostility to his family great.'

'I can well understand that, poor fellow!' said Mr. Kippilaw,
glancing at his watch, as he added--'You must excuse me till
to-morrow: I am already overdue at the Parliament House.'

He bowed his visitors out into the sun-lit square.

'You seem to have lost your tongue, Florian, and to have a
disappointed look,' said Shafto snappishly, as they walked slowly
towards the hotel together.

'Disappointed I am in one sense, perhaps, but I have no reason to
repine or complain save at our change of relative positions, but
certainly not at your unexpected good fortune, Shafto.  It is only
right and just that your father's only son should inherit all that is
legally and justly his.'

Even at these words Shafto never winced or wavered in plans or
purpose.

It was apparent, however, to Florian, that he had for some time past
looked restless and uneasy, that he started and grew pale at any
unusual sound, while a shadow rested on his not usually very open
countenance.

Betimes next morning a note came to him at the Duke of Rothesay Hotel
from Mr. Kippilaw, requesting a visit as early as possible, and on
this errand he departed alone.

He found the old lawyer radiant, with a letter in his hand from Lord
Fettercairn (in answer to his own) expressive of astonishment and joy
at the sudden appearance of this hitherto unknown grandson, whom he
was full of ardour and anxiety to see.

'You will lose no time in starting for Craigengowan,' said Mr.
Kippilaw.  'You take the train at the Waverley Station and go _viâ_
Burntisland, Arbroath, and Marykirk--or stay, I think we shall
proceed together, taking your papers with us.'

'Thanks,' said Shafto, feeling somehow that the presence of Mr.
Kippilaw at the coming interview would take some of the
responsibility off his own shoulders.

'Craigengowan, your grandfather says, will put on its brightest smile
to welcome you.'

'Very kind of Craigengowan,' said Shafto, who felt but ill at ease in
his new role of adventurer, and unwisely adopted a free-and-easy
audacity of manner.

'A cheque on the Bank of Scotland for present emergencies,' said Mr.
Kippilaw, opening his cheque-book, 'and in two hours we shall meet at
the station.'

'Thanks again.  How kind you are, my dear sir.'

'I would do much for your father's son, Mr. Shafto,' said the lawyer,
emphatically.

'And what about Florian?'

'The letter ignores him--a curious omission.  In their joy, perhaps
Lord and Lady Fettercairn forgot.  But, by the way, here is a letter
for him that came by the London mail.'

'A letter for him!' said Shafto, faintly, while his heart grew sick
with apprehension, he knew not of what.

'Mr. Florian's face is strangely familiar to me,' said Mr. Kippilaw
aloud; but to himself, 'Dear me, dear me, where can I have seen
features like his before?  He reminds me curiously of Lennard
Melfort.'

Shafto gave a nervous start.

The letter was a bulky one, and bore the Wembury and other
post-marks, and to Shafto's infinite relief was addressed in the
familiar handwriting of Dulcie Carlyon.

He chuckled, and a great thought worthy of himself occurred to him.

In the solitude of his own room at the hotel, he moistened and opened
the gummed envelope, and drew forth four closely written sheets of
paper full of the outpourings of the girl's passionate heart, of her
wrath at the theft of her locket by Shafto, and mentioning that she
had incidentally got the address of Mr. Kippilaw from her father, and
desiring him to write to her, and she would watch for and intercept
the postman by the sea-shore.

'Bosh,' muttered Shafto, as he tore up and cast into the fire
Dulcie's letter, all save a postscript, written on a separate scrap
of paper, and which ran thus:--

'You have all the love of my heart, Florian; but, as I feel and fear
we may never meet again, I send you this, which I have worn next my
heart, to keep.'

_This_ was a tiny tuft of forget-me-nots.

'Three stamps on all this raggabash!' exclaimed Shafto, whom the
girl's terms of endearment to Florian filled with a tempest of
jealous rage.  He rolled the locket he had wrenched from Dulcie's
neck in soft paper, and placed it with the postscript in the
envelope, which he carefully closed and re-gummed, placed near the
fire, and the moment it was perfectly dry he gave it to Florian.

If the latter was surprised to see a letter to himself, addressed in
Dulcie's large, clear, and pretty handwriting, to the care of 'Lawyer
Kippilaw,' as she called him, he was also struck dumb when he found
in the envelope the locket, the likeness, and the apparently curt
farewell contained in one brief sentence!

For a time he stood like one petrified.  Could it all be real?  Alas!
there was no doubting the postal marks and stamps upon this most
fatal cover; and while he was examining it and passing his hand
wildly more than once across his eyes and forehead, Shafto was
smoking quietly at a window, and to all appearance intent on watching
the towering rock and batteries of the Castle, bathed in morning
sunshine--batteries whereon steel morions and Scottish spears had
often gleamed of old.

Though his soul shrank from doing so, Florian could not resist taking
Shafto into his confidence about this unexplainable event; and the
latter acted astonishment to the life!

Was the locket thus returned through the post in obedience to her
father's orders, after he had probably discovered the contents of it?

But Shafto demolished this hope by drawing his attention to the tenor
of the pithy scrap of paper, which precluded the idea that it had
been done under any other influence than her own change of mind.

'Poor Florian!' sneered Shafto, as he prepared to take his departure
for Craigengowan; 'now you had better proceed at once to cultivate
the wear-the-willow state of mind.'

Florian made no reply.  His ideas of faith and truth and of true
women were suddenly and cruelly shattered now!

'She has killed all that was good in me, and the mischief of the
future will be at her door!' he exclaimed, in a low and husky voice.

'Oh, Florian, don't say that,' said Shafto, who actually did feel a
little for him; and just then, when they were on the eve of
separation, even his false and artful heart did feel a pang, with the
sting of fear, at the career of falsehood to which he had committed
himself; but his ambition, innate greed, selfishness, and pride urged
him on that career steadily and without an idea of flinching.

After Mr. Kippilaw's remarks concerning how the face of Florian
interested him, and actually that he bore a likeness to the dead
Major--to his own father, in fact--Shafto became more than desirous
to be rid of him in any way.  He thought with dread of the discovery
and fate of 'the Claimant,' and of the fierce light thrown by the law
on that gigantic imposture; but genuine compunction he had none!

'Well,' he muttered, as he drove away from the hotel with his
portmanteau, 'I must keep up this game at all hazards now.  I have
stolen--not only Florian's name--but his place, so let him paddle his
own canoe!'

'I'll write you from Craigengowan,' were his parting words--a promise
which he never fulfilled.  Shafto, who generally held their mutual
purse now, might have offered to supply the well-nigh penniless lad
with money, but he did not.  He only longed to be rid of him--to hear
of him no more.  He had a dread of his presence, of his society, of
his very existence, and now had but one hope, wish, and desire--that
Florian Melfort should cross his path never again.  And now that he
had achieved a separation between him and Dulcie, he conceived that
Florian would never again go near Revelstoke, of which
he--Shafto--had for many reasons a nervous dread!

Full of Dulcie and her apparently cruel desertion of him, which he
considered due to calm consideration of his change of fortune--or
rather total want of it--Florian felt numbly indifferent to the
matter Shafto had in hand and all about himself.

While very nearly moved to girlish tears at parting from one with
whom he had lived since infancy--with whom he had shared the same
sleeping-room, shared in the same sports and studies--with whom he
had read the same books to some extent, and had ever viewed as a
brother--Florian was rather surprised, even shocked, by the
impatience of that kinsman, the only one he had in all the wide
world, to part from him and begone, and to see he was calm and hard
as flint or steel.

'Different natures have different ways of showing grief, I suppose,'
thought the simple Florian; 'or can it be that he still has a grudge
at me because of the false but winsome Dulcie?  If affection for me
is hidden in his heart, it is hidden most skilfully.'  No letter ever
came from Craigengowan.  The pride of Florian was justly roused, and
he resolved that he would not take the initiative, and attempt to
open a correspondence with one who seemed to ignore him, and whose
manner at departing he seemed to see more clearly and vividly now.

The fact soon became grimly apparent.  He could not remain idling in
such a fashionable hotel as the Duke of Rothesay, so he settled his
bill there, and took his portmanteau in his hand, and issued into the
streets--into the world, in fact.




CHAPTER XI.

SHAFTO IN CLOVER.

About six months had elapsed since Shafto and Florian parted, as we
have described, at Edinburgh.

It was June now.  The luxurious woods around Craigengowan were in all
their leafy beauty, and under their shadows the dun deer panted in
the heat as they made their lair among the feathery braken; the
emerald green lawn was mowed and rolled till it was smooth as a
billiard-table and soft as three-pile velvet.

The air was laden with the wafted fragrance of roses and innumerable
other flowers; and the picturesque old house, with its multitude of
conical turrets furnished with glittering vanes, its crow-stepped
gables and massive chimneys, stood boldly up against the deep blue
sky of summer; and how sweetly peaceful looked the pretty village,
seen in middle distance, through a foliated vista in the woodlands,
with the white smoke ascending from its humble hearths, the only
thing that seemed to be stirring there; and how beautiful were the
colours some of its thatched roofs presented--greenest moss, brown
lichen, and stonecrop, now all a blaze of gold, while the murmur of a
rivulet (a tributary of the Esk), that gurgled under its tiny arch,
'the auld brig-stane' of Lennard's boyhood, would be heard at times,
amid the pleasant voices of some merrymakers on the lawn, amid the
glorious shrubberies, and belts of flowers below the stately terrace,
that had long since replaced the moat that encircled the old
fortified mansion, from whence its last Jacobite lord had ridden
forth to fight and die for James VIII., on the field of
Sheriffmuir--King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, as the
unflinching Jacobites had it.

A gay and picturesquely dressed lawn-tennis party was busy tossing
the balls from side to side among several courts; but apart from all,
and almost conspicuously so--a young fellow, in a handsome light
tennis suit of coloured flannels, and a beautiful girl were carrying
on a very palpable flirtation.

The gentleman was Shafto, and his companion was Finella Melfort,
Cosmo's orphan daughter (an heiress through her mother), who had
returned a month before from a protracted visit in Tyburnia.  They
seemed to be on excellent terms with each other, and doubtless the
natural gaiety of the girl's disposition, her vivacity of manner, and
their supposed mutual relationship, had opened the way to speedy
familiarity.

She was a dark-haired and dark-eyed, but very white-skinned little
beauty, with a perfect _mignonne_ face, a petite but round and
compact figure, gracefully formed, and very coquettish and
_spirituelle_ in all her ways.

She had received her peculiar Christian name at the special request
of her grandfather, that silly peer being desirous that her name
might go down in the peerage in connection with that of the famous
Finella of Fettercairn.

'A winsome pair they would make,' was the smiling remark of Mr.
Kenneth Kippilaw, who was of the party (with three romping daughters
from Edinburgh), to Lord Fettercairn, who smirked a grim assent, as
if it was a matter of indifference to him, which it was not, as his
legal adviser very well knew; and my Lady Drumshoddy, who heard the
remark, bestowed upon him a bright and approving smile in return for
a knowing glance through the glasses of his gold _pince-nez_.

In Craigengowan the adventurous Shafto Gyle had found his veritable
Capua--he was literally 'in clover.'  Yet he never heard himself
addressed by his assumed name without experiencing a strange sinking
and fluttering of the heart.

The once-despised Lennard Melfort's sword, his commission, and his
hard-won medals earned in Central India and the Terai of Nepaul were
now looked upon as precious relics in his mother's luxurious boudoir
at Craigengowan, and reclaimed from the lumber-attic, his portrait,
taken in early life, was again hung in a place of honour in the
dining-hall.

'What a fool my old uncle was to lose his claim on such a place as
this, and all for the face of a girl!' was the exclamation of Shafto
to himself when first he came to Craigengowan, and then he looked
fearfully around him lest the word _uncle_ might have been overheard
by some one; and he thought--'If rascally the trick I have played my
simple and love-stricken cousin--and rascally it was and is--surely
it was worth while to be the heir of this place, Craigengowan.  To
reckon as mine in future all this grand panorama of heath-clad hills,
of green and golden fields, of purple muirland, and stately woods of
oak and pine where the deer rove in herds; as mine the trout-streams
that flow towards the Bervie; the cascades that roar down the cliffs;
the beautiful old house, with its stables, kennels, and terrace; its
cellars, pictures, plate, and jewellery, old china and vases of
marble and jasper, china and Japanese work; and I possess all that
rank and wealth can give!' and so thought this avaricious rascal,
with a capacity for evil actions far beyond his years.

To the fair inheritance he had come to steal he could not, however,
add as his the blue sky above it, or the waves of the German Sea,
which the North Esk flowed to join; but he was not without sense
appreciative enough to enjoy the fragrance of the teeming earth, of
the pine forests where the brown squirrels leaped from branch to
branch, and on the mountain side the perfume of the golden whin and
gorse.

Appraising everything, these ideas were ever recurring to his mind,
and it was full of them now as he looked around him, and at times,
like one in a dream, heard the pretty babble of the high-bred,
coquettish girl, who, to amuse herself, made _œillades_ at him;
who called him so sweetly 'Cousin Shafto,' and who, with her splendid
fortune, he was now beginning to include among the many goods and
chattels which must one day accrue to him.

Lord and Lady Fettercairn were, of course, fully twenty years older
than when we saw them last, full of wrath and indignation at Lennard
for his so-called _mésalliance_.  Both were cold in heart and
self-absorbed in nature as ever.  The latter was determined to be a
beauty still, though now upon the confines of that decade 'when the
cunning of cosmetics can no longer dissemble the retribution of Time
the avenger.'  The former was bald now, and the remains of his once
sandy-coloured hair had become grizzled, and a multitude of puckers
were about his cold, grey eyes, while there was a perceptible stoop
in his whilom flat, square shoulders.

He was as full of family pride as ever, and the discovery of an
unexpected and authentic heir and grandson to his title, that had
never been won in the field or cabinet, but was simply the reward of
bribery and corruption, and for which not one patriotic act had been
performed by four generations, had given him intense satisfaction,
and caused much blazing of bonfires and consumption of alcohol about
the country-side; and smiles that were bright and genuine frequently
wreathed the usually pale and immobile face of Lady Fettercairn when
they rested on Shafto.

We all know how the weak and easy adoption of a pretender by a titled
mother in a famous and most protracted case not many years ago caused
the most peculiar complications; thus Lady Fettercairn was more
pardonable, posted up as she was with documentary evidence, in
accepting Shafto Gyle as her grandson.

We have described her as being singularly, perhaps aristocratically,
cold.  As a mother, she had never been given to kissing, caressing,
or fondling her two sons (as she did a succession of odious pugs and
lap-dogs), but, throwing their little hearts back upon themselves,
left nurses and maids to 'do all that sort of tiresome thing.'

So Finella, though an heiress, came in for very little of it either,
with all her sweetness, beauty, and pretty winning ways, even from
Lord Fettercairn.  In truth, the man who cared so little for his own
country and her local and vital interests was little likely to care
much for any flesh and blood that did not stand in his own boots.

Lady Fettercairn heard from her 'grand-son' from time to time
with--for her--deep apparent sympathy, and much genuine aristocratic
regret and indignation, much of the obscure story of his boyhood and
past life, at least so much as he chose to tell her; and she bitterly
resented that Lennard Melfort should have sought to put the 'nephew
of that woman, Flora MacIan,' into the army, while placing 'his own
son' Shafto into the office of a miserable village lawyer, and so
forth--and so forth!

Fortunate it was, she thought, that all this happened in an obscure
village in Devonshire, and far away from Craigengowan and all its
aristocratic surroundings.

She also thought it strange that Shafto--('Whence came that name?'
she would mutter angrily)--should be so unlike her dark and handsome
Lennard.  His eyebrows were fair and heavy; his eyes were a pale,
watery grey; his lips were thin, his neck thick, and his hair
somewhat sandy in hue.  Thus, she thought, he was not unlike what her
husband, the present Lord Fettercairn, must have been at the same age.

As for the Peer himself, he was only too thankful that an heir had
turned up for his ill-gotten coronet, and that now--so far as one
life was concerned--Sir Bernard Burke would not rate it among the
dormant and attainted titles--those of the best and bravest men that
Scotland ever knew.

As for their mutual scheme concerning Shafto and their granddaughter
Finella, with her beauty and many attractive parts, the former was
craftily most desirous of furthering it, knowing well that, _happen
what might_ in the future, she was an heiress; that marriage with her
would give him a firm hold on the Fettercairn family, though the
money of her mother was wisely settled on the young lady herself.

Indeed, Finella had not been many weeks home from London, at
Craigengowan, before Lady Fettercairn opened the trenches, and spoke
pretty plainly to him on the subject.

Waving her large fan slowly to and fro, and eyeing Shafto closely
over the top of it, she said:

'I hope, my dearest boy, that you will find your cousin Finella--the
daughter of my dead darling Cosmo--a lovable kind of girl.  But even
were she not so--and all say she is--you must not feel a prejudice
against her, because--because----'

'What, grandmother?'

'Because it is our warmest desire that you may marry her.'

'Why, haven't I money enough?' asked Shafto, with one of his
dissembling smiles.

'Of course, as the heir of Fettercairn; but one is always the better
to have more, and you must not feel----'

'What?' asked Shafto, with affected impatience.

'Please not to interrupt me thus.  I mean that you must not be
prejudiced against her as an expected_ parti_.'

'Why should I?'

'One hears and reads so much of such things.'

'In novels, I suppose; but as she is so pretty and eligible, why the
dickens----'

'Shafto!'

'What now?' he asked, with some irritability, as she often took him
to task for his solecisms.

'Dickens is not a phrase to use.  Exclamations that were suited to
the atmosphere of Mr. Carlyon's office in Devonshire will not do in
Craigengowan!'

'Well--she won't look at me with your eyes, grandmother.'

'How--her eyes----'

'They will never seem so bright and beautiful.'

'Oh, you flattering pet!' exclaimed my Lady Fettercairn, with a smile
and pleased flush on her old wrinkled face, for her 'pet' had soon
discovered that she was far from insensible to adulation.

Shafto certainly availed himself of the opportunities afforded by
'cousinship,' propinquity, and residence together in a country house,
and sought to gain a place in the good graces or heart of Finella;
but with all his cunning and earnest wishes in the matter--apart from
the wonderful beauty of the girl--he feared that he made no more
progress with her than he had done with Dulcie Carlyon.

She talked, played, danced, and even romped with him; they rambled
and read together, and were as much companions as any two lovers
would be; but he felt nearly certain that though she flirted with
him, because it was partly her habit to appear to do so with most
men, whenever he attempted to become tender she openly laughed at him
or changed the subject skilfully; and also that if he essayed to
touch or take her hand it was very deliberately withdrawn from his
reach, and never did she make him more sensible of all this than when
he contrived to draw her aside to the terrace on the afternoon of the
lawn-tennis party.

She had long ere this been made perfectly aware that love and
marriage were objects of all his attention, yet she amused herself
with him by her coquettish _œillades_ and waggish speeches.

'Finella,' said he, in a low and hesitating voice, as he stooped over
her, 'I hope that with all your flouting, and pretty, flippant mode
of treating me, you will see your way to carry out the fondest desire
of my heart and that of our grandparents.'

'Such a fearfully elaborate speech!  And the object to which I am to
see my way is to marry you, cousin Shafto?'

'Yes,' said he, bending nearer to her half-averted ear.

'Thanks very much, dear Shafto; but I couldn't think of such a thing.'

'Why?  Am I so distasteful to you?'

'Not at all; but for cogent reasons of my own.'

'And these are?'

'Firstly, people should marry to please themselves, not others.
Grandpapa and grandmamma did, and so shall I; and I am quite
independent enough to do as I please and choose.'

'In short, you will not or cannot love me?'

'I have not said so, you tiresome Shafto!' said she, looking upward
at him with one of her sweetest and most bewitching smiles.

'Then I have some hope, dear Finella?'

'I have not said that either.'

'You may yet love me, then?'

'No; not as you wish it.'

'But why?'

'You have no right to ask me.'

His fair beetling eyebrows knit, and a gleam came into his cold, grey
eyes as he asked, after a pause:

'Is there anyone else you prefer?'

'You have no right to inquire,' replied she, and a keener observer
might have detected that his question brought a tiny blush to her
cheek and a fond smile to her curved lips; 'so please to let this
matter drop, once and for ever, dear Shafto, and we can be such
delightful friends--such jolly cousins.'

And so ended one of many such conversations on this
topic--conversations that developed indifference, if not quite
aversion, on the part of Finella, the clue to which Shafto was fated
to find in a few weeks after.




CHAPTER XII.

VIVIAN HAMMERSLEY.

The persistent attentions of Shafto were alternately a source of
amusement and worry to Finella Melfort; and when she found them
become the latter, she had more than once retreated to the residence
of her maternal grandmother, Lady Drumshoddy, though she infinitely
preferred being at Craigengowan, where the general circle was more
refined and of a much better style; for Lady Drumshoddy--natheless
her title--was not quite one of the 'upper ten,' being only the widow
of an advocate, who, having done without scruple the usual amount of
work to please his party and the Lord Advocate, had been rewarded
therefor by an appointment (and knighthood) in Bengal, where he had
gone, at a lucky time, with the old advice and idea--

  'They bade me from the Rupee Tree
    Pluck India's endless riches,
  And then I swore that time should see
    Huge pockets in my breeches.'

Thus Sir Duncan Drumshoddy's pockets were so well filled that when he
came home to die, his daughter was heiress enough to be deemed a
'great catch' by the Fettercairn family, though her grandfather had
been--no one knew precisely what.

And now Finella, by education, careful training, and by her own habit
of thought, was naturally so refined that, with all her waggery and
disposition to laughter and merriment, Shafto's clumsy love-speeches
occasionally irritated her.

'I have somewhere read,' said he, 'that a man may get the love of the
girl he wants, even if she cares little for him, if he only asks her
at the right time; but, so far as you are concerned, Finella, the
right moment has not come for me, I suppose.'

'Nor ever will come, I fear, cousin Shafto,' she replied, fanning
herself, and eyeing him with mingled fun and defiance sparkling in
her dark eyes.

Ere Shafto could resume on this occasion Lord Fettercairn came
hurriedly to him, saying,

'Oh, by-the-bye, young Hammersley, from London, will arrive here
to-morrow for a few weeks' grouse-shooting before he leaves for his
regiment in Africa.  You will do your best to be attentive to him,
Shafto.'

'Of course,' said the latter, rather sulkily, however, all the more
so that he was quick enough to detect that, at the mention of the
visitor's name, a flush like a wave of colour crossed the cheek of
Finella.

Something in his tone attracted the attention of Lord Fettercairn,
who said,

'After the 12th I hope you will find a legitimate use for your
gun--you know what I mean.'

Shafto coloured deeply with annoyance, as his grandfather referred to
a mischievous act of his, which was deemed a kind of outrage in the
neighbourhood.

In the ruins of Finella's Castle at Fettercairn a pair of majestic
osprey had built their nest, guarded by the morass around them, and
there they bred and reared a pair of beautiful eaglets.  No one had
been allowed to approach them, so that nothing should occur to break
the confidence of safety which the pair of osprey acquired in their
lonely summer haunt, till soon after Shafto came to Craigengowan, and
by four rounds from his breech-loader he contrived to shoot them all,
to the indignation of the neighbourhood and even of my Lord
Fettercairn.

Not that the latter cared a straw about these eagles as objects of
natural history; but the fact of their existence formed the subject
of newspaper paragraphs, and his vanity was wounded on finding that
one of his family had acted thus.

So on the morrow, at luncheon, the family circle at Craigengowan had
two or three accessions to its number--friends invited for the 12th
of August--among others Mr. Kippilaw the younger, a spruce and dapper
Edinburgh Writer to the Signet, 'who,' Shafto said, 'thought no small
beer of himself;' and Vivian Hammersley, a captain of the
Warwickshire regiment, a very attractive and, to one who was present,
most decided addition to their society.

His regular features were well tanned by the sun in Natal; his dark
hair was shorn short; his moustaches were pointed well out; and his
dark eyes had a bright and merry yet firm and steady expression, as
those of a man born to command men, who had more than once faced
danger, and was ready to face it again.

He was in his twenty-seventh year, and was every way a courteous and
finished English gentleman, though Shafto, in his secret heart, and
more than once in the stables, pronounced him to be 'a conceited
beast.'

Hammersley had fished in Norway, shot big game in Southern Africa,
hunted in the English shires, taking his fences--even double
ones--like a bird; he had lost and won with a good grace at Ascot and
the Clubs, flirted 'all round,' and, though far from rich, was a good
specimen of a handsome, open-handed, and open-hearted young officer,
a favourite with all women, and particularly with his regiment.

After luncheon he was seated beside Lady Fettercairn; he was too wise
in his generation to have placed himself where he would have wished,
beside Finella, whose little hand, on entering, Shafto thought he
retained in his rather longer than etiquette required; for if
Shafto's eyes were shifty, they were particularly sharp, and he soon
found that though Finella, to a certain extent, had filled up her
time by flirting in a cousinly way with himself, 'now that this
fellow Hammersley had come,' he was 'nowhere' as he thought, with a
very bad word indeed.

We have said that Finella had paid a protracted and--to her--most
enjoyable visit to Tyburnia.  There at balls, garden parties, and in
the Row she had met Vivian Hammersley repeatedly; and these meetings
had not been without a deep and tender interest to them both; and
when they were parted finally by her return to Craigengowan, though
no declaration of regard had escaped him, he had been burning to
speak to her in that sweet and untutored language by which the inmost
secrets of the loving heart can be read; and now that they had met
again, they had a thousand London objects to talk about safely in
common, which made them seem to be what they were, quite old friends
in fact, and erelong Lady Fettercairn began, like Shafto, to listen
and look darkly and doubtfully on.

But when they were alone, which was seldom, or merely apart from
others, there was between them a new consciousness now--a secret but
sweet understanding, born of eye speaking to eye--all the sweeter for
its secrecy and being all their own, a conscious emotion that
rendered them at times almost afraid to speak or glance lest curious
eyes or ears might discover what that secret was.

What was to be the sequel to all this?  Hammersley was far from rich
according to the standard of wealth formed by Lady Fettercairn, and
the latter had destined her granddaughter with all her accumulated
wealth to be the bride of Shafto.  Hammersley knew nothing of this;
he only knew his own shortcoming in the matter of 'pocketability;'
but then youth, we are told, 'is sanguine and full of faith and hope
in an untried future.  It looks out over the pathway of life towards
the goal of its ambition, seeing only the end desired, and giving
little or no heed to hills and dales, storms and accidents, that may
be met with on the way.'  So, happy in the good fortune that threw
him once more in the sweet society of bright Finella Melfort, Captain
Hammersley gave full swing in secret to the most delightful of
day-dreams.

In all this, however, we are somewhat anticipating our narrative.

But, like a wise man, while the luncheon lasted he was most attentive
to his hostess, from whose old but still handsome face, like that of
Tennyson's Maud, 'so faultily faultless, icily regular, and
splendidly null,' he ever and anon turned to that of Finella--that
_mignonne_ face, which was so full of varying expression, warmth,
light, and colour.

'Try that Madeira, Captain Hammersley,' said Lord Fettercairn.  'You
will scarcely credit how long I have had it in the cellar.  I bought
a whole lot of it--when was it, Grapeston?' he asked, turning to the
solemn old butler behind him.

'The year Mr. Lennard left home, my Lord.'

'Everything at Craigengowan seems to take date before or after that
event,' said Lord Fettercairn, with knitted brow.  'Do you mean for
India, Grapeston?'

'Yes, my lord,' replied the butler, who had carried 'Master Lennard'
in his arms as a baby.

'Such a rich flavour it has, and just glance at the colour.'

Hammersley affected to do so, but his eyes were bent on the face of
Finella.

'I hope you won't find Craigengowan dull, but every place is so after
London.'

'True, we live so fast there that we never seem to have time to do
anything.'

And now, understanding that Shafto was to be his chief companion at
the covies on the morrow, Hammersley talked to him of hammerless
guns, of central fire, of the mode of breaking in dogs, training
setters, and so forth; and as these subjects had not been included in
Shafto's education at Lawyer Carlyon's office, he almost yawned as he
listened with irritation to what he could not comprehend.

'If you care for fishing, Hammersley,' said Lord Fettercairn, 'the
Bervie yields capital salmon, sea and yellow trout.  Finella has
filled more than one basket with the latter, but Shafto is somewhat
of a duffer with his rod--he breaks many a rod, and has never landed
a salmon yet.'

'And the shootings?' said Hammersley inquiringly.

'Well, the best in the county are Drumtochty, Fasque, Hobseat, and my
own, as I hope you will find to-morrow.'

'Thanks--indeed, I am sure I shall.'

'I have close on 5,000 acres, and the probable bag of grouse and
black game is from 400 to 500 brace.'

After dinner that evening Finella was found singing at the
piano--singing, as she always did, without requiring pressure and
apparently for the mere pleasure of it, as a thrush on a rose bush
sings; but now she sang for Vivian Hammersley, Shafto felt
instinctively that she did so, and his bitterness was roused when he
heard her, in a pause, whisper:

'Please, Captain Hammersley, let Shafto turn the leaves.  He likes to
do it, though he can do little else in the way of music.'

This kind of confidence seemed to imply foregone conclusions and a
mutual understanding, however slight; but, to some extent, Finella
had a kind of dread of Shafto.

Hammersley smiled and drew back, after placing a piece of music
before her; but not before remarking:

'This song you are about to sing is not a new one.'

'No--it is old as the days when George IV. was king--it is one you
gave me some weeks ago in London, you remember?'

'Am I likely to forget?'

'Turn the leaves, Shafto, please,' said Finella, adjusting her dress
over the music-stool; 'but don't talk to me.'

'Why?'

'It interrupts one so; but turn the leaves at the proper time.'

'Captain Hammersley will do that better than I,' said Shafto, drawing
almost sulkily away, while the former resumed his place by Finella,
with an unmistakable smile rippling over his face.

This song, which, it would seem, Hammersley had given her, was an old
one, long since forgotten, named the 'Trysting Place,' and jealous
anger gathered in Shafto's heart as he listened and heard
Hammersley's voice blend with Finella's in the last line of each
verse:

  'We met not in the sylvan scene
    Where lovers wish to meet,
  Where skies are bright and woods are green,
    And bursting blossoms sweet;
  But in the city's busy din,
    Where Mammon holds his reign,
  Sweet intercourse we sought to win
    'Mid fashion, guile, and gain;
  Above us was a murky sky,
    Around a crowded space,
  Yet dear, my love, to thee and me,
    Was this, our _trysting place_.'

  'They are who say Love only dwells
    'Mid sunshine, light, and flowers;
  Alike to him are gloomy cells
    Or gay and smiling bowers;
  Love works not on insensate things
    His sweet and magic art;
  No outward shrine arrests his wings,
    His home is in the heart;
  And dearest hearts like _thine_ and _mine_,
    With rapture must retrace--
  How often Love has deigned to shine
    On this our _trysting place_.'


'Miss Melfort, you have sung it more sweetly than ever!' said
Hammersley in a low voice as he bent over her.

'Confound him!' muttered Shafto to himself; 'where was this trysting
place?  I feel inclined to put a charge of shot into him to-morrow.
I will, too, if the day is foggy!'

Finella, though pressed, declined to sing more, as the Misses
Kippilaw, who were rather irrepressible young ladies, now proposed a
carpet-dance, and she drew on her gloves; and while she fumbled away,
almost nervously, with the buttoning of one, she knew that
Hammersley's eyes were lovingly and admiringly bent on her, till he
came to the rescue, and did the buttoning required; and to Shafto it
seemed the process was a very protracted one, and was a pretty little
connivance, as in reality it was.

Miss Prim, Lady Fettercairn's companion, was summoned, and she--poor
creature--had to furnish music for the occasion, till at last Finella
good-naturedly relieved her.

So a carpet-dance closed the evening, and then Shafto, though an
indifferent waltzer, thought he might excel in a square dance with
Finella; but he seldom shone in conversation at any time, and on this
occasion his attempts at it proved a great failure, and when he
compared this with the animation of Hammersley and Finella in the
Lancers, he was greatly puzzled and secretly annoyed.  The former did
not seem to undergo that agony so often felt by Shafto, of having
out-run all the topics of conversation, or to have to rack his brain
for anecdotes or jokes, but to be able to keep up an easy flow of
well-bred talk on persons, places, and things, which seemed to amuse
Finella excessively, as she smiled brightly and laughed merrily while
fanning herself, and looking more sparkling and piquante than ever.

'What the deuce can he find to say to her?' thought Shafto; but
Hammersley was only finding the links--the threads of a dear old
story begun in London months ago.

So passed the first day of Hammersley's arrival at Craigengowan, and
Finella laid her head on her pillow full of bright and happy
thoughts, in which 'Cousin Shafto' bore no share.

But while these emotions and events were in progress, where, in the
meantime, was Florian?  Ay, Shafto Gyle, where?




CHAPTER XIII.

AMONG THE GROUSE.

Nathless the vengeful thoughts of the unamiable Shafto and his
threats muttered in secret, the shooting next day passed off without
any peril being encountered by the unconscious
Hammersley--unconscious at least of the enmity his presence was
inspiring.  However, it was not so the second; and Finella and her
fair friends agreed that if he looked so well and handsome in his
heather-coloured knickerbocker shooting-dress, with ribbed stockings
of Alloa yarn, his gun under his arm, and shot-belt over his
shoulder, how gallant must he look when in full uniform.

In the field the vicinity of Shafto was avoided as much as possible,
as he shot wildly indeed.  By the gamekeepers, servants, and people
generally on the estate he was simply detested for the severity of
his manner, his tyranny, his disposition to bully, and meanness in
every way; though at first, when he came to Craigengowan, they had
laboured in vain, and vied with each other in their attempts to
initiate him into those field-sports so dear to Britons generally,
and to the Scots in particular; but when shooting grouse especially,
the beaters or 'drivers' had genuine dread of him, and, when fog was
on, sometimes refused to attend him, and he was, as they said among
themselves, 'a new experience i' the Howe o' the Mearns.'

'I've seen as fu' a haggis toomed on a midden,' said the old
head-gamekeeper wrathfully, as he drew his bonnet over his beetling
brows, 'but I'll keep my mind to mysel', and tell my tale to the wind
that blaws o'er Craigengowan.'

Though well past sixty now, Lord Fettercairn, hale and hearty, was in
the field with his central-fire gun with fine Damascus barrels.
Shafto, Hammersley, young Kippilaw, and four others made up the party.

The morning was a lovely one, and lovely too was the scenery, for
August is a month richly tinted with the last touches of summer,
blended with the russet tones of autumn; the pleasant meadows are yet
green, and over the ripened harvest the breeze murmurs like the ocean
when nearly asleep.

Apart from the joyous exhilaration of shooting, and that out-door
exercise so dear to every English gentleman, Vivian Hammersley felt
all that which comes from the romantic beauty of his
surroundings--the scenery of the Howe of the Mearns, which is a low
champaign and highly cultivated country, studded with handsome
mansions, and ornamented by rich plantations and thriving villages.

Ere long the open muirs were reached, and the hill-sides, the steep,
purple ridges of which the sportsmen had to breast; and, keen
sportsman though he was, Hammersley had soon to admit that
grouse-shooting was the most fatiguing work he had yet encountered;
but soon came the excitements of the first point, the first brood,
and the first shot or two.

To the eye chiefly accustomed to brown partridges, grouse look dusky
and even black, and they seem to hug the purple heather, but when one
becomes accustomed to them they are as easy to knock over as the tame
birds; and now the crack of the guns began to ring out along the
hill-slopes.

Shafto and Hammersley were about twenty yards apart, and twice when a
bird rose before the latter, it was brought down wounded but not
killed by the former.

Hammersley felt that this was 'bad form,' as Shafto should not have
fired, unless he had missed or passed it; but he only bit his lip and
smiled disdainfully.  Lord Fettercairn remarked the discourtesy, and
added,

'Shafto, I do wish you would take an example from Captain Hammersley.'

'In what way?' grumbled Shafto.

'He kills his game clean--few birds run from him with broken wings
and so forth.'

'I am glad to hit when I can,' said Shafto, whose mode of life in
Devonshire had made him rather soft, and he was beginning to think
that nerves of iron and lungs like a bagpipe were requisite for
breasting up the hill-slopes, and then shoot straight at anything.

Hammersley worked away silently, neither looking to his right nor
left, feeling that though several elements are requisite for 'sport,'
the chief then was to kill as much grouse as possible in a given
time, but was more than once irritated and discomposed by Shafto, and
even young Kippilaw, shooting in a blundering way along the line even
when the birds were not flying high; and he proceeded in a
workmanlike way to bring down one bird as it approached, the next
when it was past him, and so on.

The first portion of the day the Fettercairn party shot to points,
and then to drivers, and in their fear of Shafto's wild shooting, the
latter kept shouting while driving, and, as he loathed the whole
thing, and was now 'completely blown--pumped out,' as he phrased it,
he was not sorry when the magic word 'lunch' was uttered; and
Hammersley certainly hailed it, for with the lunch came Finella, and
with her arrival--to him--the most delightful part of the day.

She came tooling along the sunny pathway that traversed the bottom of
a glen, driving with her tightly gauntleted and deft little hands a
pair of beautiful white ponies, which drew the daintiest of
basket-phaetons, containing also Mr. Grapeston and an ample
luncheon-basket; and the place chosen for halting was a green oasis
amid the dark heather, where a spring of deliciously cool water was
bubbling up, called Finella's Well.

'Now, gentlemen,' said Lord Fettercairn, 'please to draw your
cartridges.  I was once nearly shot in this very place by a stupid
fellow who omitted to do so.  So glad you have come, Finella darling,
we are all hungry as hawks, and thirsty too.'

Lovely indeed did the piquante girl look in her coquettish hat and
well-fitting jacket, while the drive, the occasion, and the touch of
Hammersley's hand as he assisted her to alight gave her cheek an
unwonted colour, and lent fresh lustre to her dark eyes, and the
soldier thought that certainly there was nothing in the world so
pleasant to a man's eye as a young, well-dressed, and beautiful girl.

'You have had good sport,' said she to the group, while her eye
rested on Hammersley, and then on the rows of grouse laid by braces
on the grass; and she 'brought a breeze with her,' as the gentlemen
thought, and had a pleasant remark for each.  Her mode of greeting
the members of the party was different, as to some she gave her hand
like a little queen, while to others she smiled, or simply bowed; but
provoked an angry snort from Shafto by expressing a hope that he 'had
not shot anyone yet.'

And then he grew white as he recalled his angry thoughts of the
preceding night.

'Why did you take the trouble to drive here?' he asked her, in a low
voice.

'Because I chose to come; and I do so love driving these plump
darlings of ponies,' replied the girl, patting the sleek animals with
her tiny, slim hand.

'Old Grapeston would have done well enough; and why did you not bring
one of the Kippilaw girls?'

'They are at lawn-tennis.  If I thought I could please you--not an
easy task--I should have tried to bring them all, though that is
rather beyond the capacities of my phaeton.'

Shafto never for a moment doubted that she had come over to
superintend the luncheon because 'that fellow Hammersley' was one of
the party; and in this suspicion perhaps he was right.

As for Hammersley, being ignorant of Shafto's antecedents, his
present hopes, and those of Lady Fettercairn, he could not comprehend
how the grandson and heir-apparent of a peer came to be 'such bad
form--bad style, and all that sort of thing,' as he thought; and all
that became rather worse when Shafto was under the influence of
sundry bumpers of iced Pommery Greno administered by Mr. Grapeston.

As the sportsmen lounged on the grass, and the luncheon proceeded
under the superintendence of old Jasper Grapeston, Finella, the
presiding goddess, looked unusually bright and happy--a consummation
which Shafto never doubted, in his rage and jealousy, came of the
presence of Vivian Hammersley, and that her brilliance was all the
result of another man's society--not his certainly, and hence he
would have preferred that she was not light-hearted at all.

He could see that with all her _espieglerie_ Finella found no
occasion to laugh at Hammersley or tease or snub that gentleman as
she did himself, but the attentions of Hammersley were delicately and
seductively paid.  Deferential and gentle at all times, to all women,
he had always been so to Finella Melfort, and she was able to feel
more than his words, looks, or manner suggested to others; and he
imagined--nay, he was becoming certain--and a glow of great joy came
with the certainty--that Finella's sweet dark eyes grew brighter at
his approach; that a rose-leaf tinge crossed her delicate cheek, and
there came a slight quiver into her voice when she replied to him,

'Was it all really so?'

Fate was soon to decide that which he had been too slow or timid to
decide for himself.

As he said one of the merest commonplaces to her, their eyes met.

It was only one lingering glance!

But looks can say so much more than the voice, the eyes surpassing
the lips, breaking or revealing what the silence of months, it may be
years, has hidden, and leading heart to heart.

'Grandpapa,' said Finella, suddenly, and just before driving off, 'do
you shoot over this ground to-morrow?'

'To a certain extent we shall--but why?'

'Shall I bring the luncheon here?'

'Yes, pet, to Finella's Well.'

'So, then, this shall be our trysting-place!' said she, with a bow to
all, and a merry glance which included most certainly Vivian
Hammersley, to whom the landscape seemed to darken with her departure.

'Now is the time for shooting to advantage,' said Lord Fettercairn,
who knew by old experience that when the afternoon shadows, and more
especially those of evening, begin to lengthen, the slopes of the
hills are seen better, that the birds, too, lie better, and that as
the air becomes more fresh and cool, men can shoot with greater care
and deliberation than in the heat of noon.  But Hammersley, full of
his own thoughts, full of the image of Finella and that tale-telling
glance they had exchanged, missed nearly every bird, to the great
exultation of Shafto, who made an incredible number of bad and clumsy
jokes thereon--jokes which the young Englishman heard with perfect
indifference and equanimity.

Shafto, however, scarcely foresaw the result of the next day's
expedition, and certainly Hammersley did not do so either.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE TWO FINELLAS.

Next day, when the grouse-shooting had been in progress for an hour
or two, a mishap occurred to Hammersley.  He twisted his ankle in a
turnip-field, fell heavily on one side, and staggered up too lame to
take further share in the sport for that day at least.

'When Finella comes with the lunch in the pony-phaeton, she will
drive you home,' said Lord Fettercairn, who then desired one of the
beaters to give Hammersley the assistance of an arm to the well,
where the repast was to be laid out as before.

When Shafto saw his rival limping he was delighted, and thought,
'This will mar his waltzing for a time at least;' but he was less
delighted when he heard of Lord Fettercairn's natural suggestion.

'It is likely a cunning dodge,' was his next thought, 'to get a quiet
drive with her to Craigengowan.'

And Finella's look and exclamation of alarm and interest were not
lost upon him when she arrived and found Hammersley seated on the
grass by the side of the well, and saw the difficulty with which he
rose to greet her, propping himself upon his unloaded gun as he did
so; and soft, indeed, was the blush of pleasure that crossed her
delicate face when she heard of 'grandpapa's arrangement;' and
certainly it met, secretly, with the entire approbation of
Hammersley, who anticipated with delight the drive home with such a
companion.

After a time the luncheon--though skilfully protracted by Shafto--was
over, and Finella and her 'patient' were together in the phaeton, and
she, with a smile and farewell bow, whipped up her petted ponies,
Flirt and Fairy, whom every day she fed with apples and carrots.

Shafto thought jealously and sulkily that she was in great haste to
be gone; but more sulky would he have been had he seen, or known that
when once an angle of the glen was reached where the road dipped out
of sight, the ponies were permitted to go at their own pace, which
ere long dwindled into a walk, till they passed the vast ruined
castle of Fettercairn.  Finella and Hammersley were, however, if very
happy, very silent, though both enjoyed the drive in the bright
sunshine amid such beautiful scenery, and he quite forgot his petty
misfortune in contemplating the delicate profile and long drooping
eyelashes of the girl who sat beside him, and who, with a fluttering
heart, was perhaps expecting the avowal that trembled on his lips,
especially when he placed his hand on hers, in pretence of guiding
the ponies, which broke into a rapid trot as the lodge gates were
passed; and glorious as the opportunity accorded him had been,
Hammersley's heart, while burning with passionate ardour, seemed to
have lost all courage, for he had a sincere dread of Lady
Fettercairn, and suspected that her interests were naturally centred
in Shafto.

At seven-and-twenty a man, who has knocked about the world, with a
regiment especially, for some nine years or so, does not fall over
head and ears in love like a rash boy, or without calculating his
chances of general success; and poor Hammersley, though he did not
doubt achieving it with Finella herself, saw deadly rocks and
breakers ahead with her family, and his spirit was a proud one.  To
make a declaration was to ruin or lose everything, for if the family
were averse to his suit he must, he knew, quit their roof for ever,
and Finella would be lost to him, for heiresses seldom elope now,
save in novels; and he knew that in her circle the motives for
marriage are more various and questionable than with other and
untitled ranks of life.  Rank and money were the chief incentives of
such people as the Melforts of Fettercairn.  'Venal unions,' says an
essayist, 'no doubt occur in the humbler classes, but love is more
frequently the incentive, while with princes and patricians the
conjugal alliance is, in nine instances out of ten, a mere matter of
_expedience_.'

Craigengowan was reached, and not a word of the great secret that
filled his heart had escaped him, for which he cursed his own folly
and timidity when the drive ended, and a groom took the ponies' heads.

Yet the day was not over, nor was a fresh opportunity wanting.  Lady
Fettercairn and all her female quests had driven to a flower-show at
the nearest town--even Mrs. Prim was gone, and the house was empty!

Everything in and about Craigengowan seemed conducive to love-talk
and confidences.  The great and picturesque house itself was
charming.  The old orchards would ere long be heavy with fruit, and
were then a sight to see; on the terrace the peacocks were strutting
to and fro; there were fancy arbours admirably adapted for
flirtation, and a quaint old Scottish garden (with a sun and moon
dial) now gay with all the flowers of August.

On a lounge near an open window facing the latter Hammersley was
reclining, when Finella, after changing her driving dress, came into
the drawing-room, and finely her costume suited her dark and piquante
style of beauty.  She wore a cream-coloured silk, profusely trimmed
with filmy lace, and a cluster of scarlet flowers on the left
shoulder among the lace of the collarette that encircled her slender
neck; and Hammersley, as he looked at her, thought that 'beauty
unadorned' was rather a fallacy.

His undisguised expression of admiration as he partly rose to receive
her caused her to colour a little, as she inquired if his hurt was
easier now; but, instead of replying, he said, while venturing
slightly to touch her hand:

'Tell me, Miss Melfort, how you came by your dear pretty name of
Finella?  Not from Finella in "Peveril of the Peak"?'

'Ah, I am very unlike her!'

'You are certainly quite as charming!'

'But neither dumb nor pretending to be so,' said the girl, with one
of her silvery little laughs.

'Finella!' said Hammersley, as if to himself, in a low and
unconsciously loving tone; 'whence the name?  Is it a family one?'

'Don't you know?' she asked.

'How could I know?  I know only that I will never forget it.'

'Of course you could not know.  The origin of my name is one of the
oldest legends of the Howe of the Mearns.'

'Howe--that is Scotch for "hollow," I believe.'

'No; "hollow" is the English for _howe_,' replied Finella, laughing,
as she recalled a quip of Boucicault's to the same purpose.  'You saw
the great old castle we passed in our drive home?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I am called Finella from a lady who lived there.'

'After it fell into ruin?'

'No; before it.'

'Then she must have lived a precious long time ago.'

'She certainly did--some--nearly a thousand years ago.'

'What a little quiz you are!  Now, Miss Melfort, what joke is this?'

'No joke at all,' said she, quite seriously; 'you can read about it
in our family history--or I shall read it to you in the "Book of
Fettercairn."'

She took from a table near a handsome volume, which her
grandfather--to please whom she was named Finella--had in a spirit of
family vanity prepared for private circulation, and as if to connect
his title with antiquity, prefaced by a story well known in ancient
Scottish history, though little known to the Scots of the present day.

We give it from his Lordship's book verbatim as she read it to Vivian
Hammersley, who--cunning rogue--was not indisposed with such a
charming and sympathetic companion as Finella to make the most of his
fall, and reclined rather luxuriously on the velvet lounge, while
she, seated in a dainty little chair, read on; but he scarcely
listened, so intent was he on watching her sweet face, her white and
perfect ears, her downcast eyelids with their long lashes--her whole
self!

The Melforts, Lords Fettercairn (Strathfinella) and of that Ilk, take
their hereditary title from the old castle of that name, which stands
in the Howe of the Mearns, and is sometimes called the Castle of
Finella.  It is situated on an eminence, and is now surrounded on
three sides by a morass.  It is enclosed within an inner and an outer
wall of oblong form, and occupying half an acre of ground.  The inner
is composed of vitrified matter, but no lime has been used in its
construction.  The walls are a congeries of small stones cemented
together by some molten matter, now harder than the stones
themselves; and the remarkable event for which this castle is
celebrated in history is the following:

When Kenneth III., a wise and valiant king (who defeated the Danes at
the battle of Luncarty, and created on that field the Hays, Earls of
Errol, Hereditary Constables of Scotland, and leaders of the Feudal
cavalry, thus originating also the noble families of Tweeddale and
Kinnoull), was on the throne, his favourite residence was the castle
of Kincardine, the ruins of which still remain about a mile eastward
of the village of Fettercairn, and from thence he went periodically
to pay his devotions at the shrine of St. Palladius, Apostle of the
Scots, to whom the latter had been sent by Pope Celestine in the
sixth century to oppose the Pelagian heresy, and whose bones at
Fordoun were enclosed in a shrine of gold and precious stones in 1409
by the Bishop of St. Andrews.

The king had excited the deadly hatred of Finella, the Lady of
Fettercairn, daughter of the Earl of Angus, by having justly put to
death her son, who was a traitor and had rebelled against him in
Lochaber; and, with the intention of being revenged, she prepared at
Fettercairn a singular engine or 'infernal machine,' with which to
slay the king.

This engine consisted of a brass statue, which shot out arrows when a
golden apple was taken from its hand.

Kenneth was at Kincardine, engaged in hunting the deer, wolf, the
badger and the boar, when she treacherously invited him to her castle
of Fettercairn, which was then, as Buchanan records, 'pleasant with
shady groves and piles of curious buildings,' of which there remained
no vestiges when he wrote in the days of James VI.; and thither the
king rode, clad in a rich scarlet mantle, white tunic, an eagle's
wing in his helmet, and on its crest a glittering _clach-bhuai_, or
stone of power, one of the three now in the Scottish regalia.

Dissembling her hate, she entertained the king very splendidly, and
after dinner conducted him out to view the beauties of the place and
the structure of her castle; and Kenneth, pleased with her beauty
(which her raiment enhanced), for she wore a dress of blue silk,
without sleeves, a mantle of fine linen, fastened by a brooch of
silver, and all her golden hair floating on her shoulders,
accompanied her into a tower, where, in an upper apartment, and amid
rich festooned arras and 'curious sculptures' stood the infernal
machine.

She courteously and smilingly requested the king to take the golden
apple from the right hand of the statue; and he, amazed by the
strange conceit, did so; on this a rushing sound was heard within it
as a string or cord gave way, and from its mouth there came forth two
barbed arrows which mortally wounded him, and he fell at her feet.

Finella fled to Den Finella, and Kenneth was found by his retinue
'_bullerand in his blude_.'

Den Finella, says a writer, is said, in the genuine spirit of
legendary lore, to have obtained its name from this princess, who,
the more readily to evade her pursuers, stepped from the branches of
one tree to those of another the whole way from her castle to this
den, which is near the sea, in the parish of St. Cyres, as all the
country then was a wild forest.

Buchanan deems all this story a fable, though asserted by John Major
and Hector Boece, and thinks it more probable that the king was slain
near Fettercairn in an ambush prepared by Finella.

So ended the legend.

As the girl read on, Vivian Hammersley had bent lower and lower over
her, till the tip of his moustache nearly touched her rich dark hair,
and his arm all but stole round her.  Finella Melfort was quite
conscious of this close proximity, and though she did not shrink from
it, that consciousness made her colour deepen and her sweet voice
become unsteady.

'That is the story of Finella of Fettercairn,' said she, closing the
book.

'And to this awful legend of the dark ages, which only wants
blue-fire, lime-light, and a musical accompaniment to set it off, you
owe your name?' said he, laughingly.

'Yes--it was grandfather's whim.'

'It is odd that you--the belle of the last London season, should be
named after such a grotesque old termagant!'

She looked up at him smilingly, and then, as their eyes met, the
expression of that glance exchanged beside the well on the hills came
into them again; heart spoke to heart; he bent his face nearer hers,
and his arm went round her in earnest.

'Finella, my darling!' escaped him, and as he kissed her unresisting
lips, her blushing face was hidden on his shoulder.

And _this_ tableau was the result of the two days' shooting--a sudden
result which neither Shafto nor Hammersley had quite foreseen.

Of how long they remained thus neither had any idea.  Time seemed to
stand still with them.  Finella was only conscious of his hand
caressing hers, which lay so willingly in his tender, yet firm, clasp.

Hammersley in the gush of his joy felt oblivious of all the world.
He could think of nothing but Finella, while the latter seemed
scarcely capable of reflection at all beyond the existing thought
that he loved her, and though the avowal was a silent and unuttered
one, the new sense of all it admitted and involved, seemed to
overwhelm the girl; her brightest day-dreams had come, and she
nestled, trembling and silent, by his side.

The unwelcome sound of voices and also of carriage-wheels on the
terrace roused them.  He released her hand, stole one more clinging
kiss, and forgetful of his fall and all about it started with
impatience to his feet.

Lady Fettercairn and her lady guests had returned from the
flower-show, and to avoid them and all the world, for a little time
yet, the lovers, with their hearts still beating too wildly to come
down to commonplace, tacitly wandered hand in hand into the recesses
of a conservatory, and lingered there amid the warm, flower-scented
atmosphere and shaded aisles, in what seemed a delicious dream.

Finella was conscious that Vivian Hammersley was talking to her
lovingly and caressingly, in a low and tender voice as he had never
talked before, and she felt that she was 'Finella'--the dearest and
sweetest name in the world to him--and no more Miss Melfort.

* * * *

It would be difficult, and superfluous perhaps, to describe the
emotions of these two during the next few days.

Though now quite aware that Finella and Hammersley had met each other
frequently before, Shafto's surprise at their intimacy, though
apparently undemonstrative, grew speedily into suspicious anger.  He
felt intuitively that _his_ presence made not the slightest
difference to them, though he did not forget it; and he failed to
understand how 'this fellow' had so quickly gained his subtle and
familiar position with Finella.'

It galled him to the quick to see and feel all this, and know that he
could never please her as she seemed to be pleased with Hammersley;
for her colour heightened, her eyes brightened, and her eyelashes
drooped and flickered whenever he approached or addressed her.

Shafto thought of his hopes of gaining Finella and her fortune
against any discovery that might be made of the falsehood of his
position, and so wrath and hatred gathered in his heart together.

He was baffled at times by her bright smiles and pretty, irresistible
manner, but nevertheless he 'put his brains in steep' to scheme again.




CHAPTER XV.

AT REVELSTOKE AGAIN.

Meanwhile sore trouble had come upon Dulcie Carlyon in her Devonshire
home.

Her father had been dull and gloomy of late, and had more than once
laid his hand affectionately on her ruddy golden hair, and said in a
prayerful way that 'he hoped he might soon see her well married, and
that she might never be left friendless!'

'Why such thoughts, dear papa?' she would reply.

Dulcie had felt a sense of apprehension for some time past.  Was it
born of her father's forebodings, or of the presentiment about which
she had conversed with Florian?  A depression hung over her--an
undefinable dread of some great calamity about to happen.  At night
her sleep was restless and broken, and by day a vague fear haunted
her.

The evil boded was to happen soon now.

With these oppressive thoughts mingled the memory of the tall and
handsome dark-eyed lad she loved--it seemed so long ago, and she
longed to hear his voice again, and for his breast to lay her head
upon.  But where was Florian now?  Months had passed without her
hearing of him, and she might never hear again!

Little could she have conceived the foul trick that Shafto had played
them both in the matter of the locket; but, unfortunately for
herself, she had not seen the last of that enterprising young
gentleman.

She felt miserably that her heart was lonely and heavy, and that,
young as she was, light and joy, with the absence and ruin of
Florian, had gone out of her life.  She was alone always with her
great sorrow, and longed much for tears; but as her past life had
been a happy and joyous one, Dulcie Carlyon had been little--if at
all--given to them.

One morning her father did not appear at breakfast as usual.  As yet
undressed her red-golden hair, that the old man loved to stroke and
caress, was floating in a great loose mass on her back and shoulders,
and her blue eyes looked bright and clear, if thoughtful.

She had, as was her daily wont, arranged his letters, cut and aired
the morning papers for him, adjusted a vase of fresh flowers on the
table, with a basket of delicate peaches, which she knew he liked,
from the famous south wall of the garden, with green fig leaves round
them, for Dulcie did everything prettily and tastefully, however
trivial.  Then she cut and buttered his bread, poured out his tea,
and waited.

Still he did not appear.  She knocked on his bedroom door, but
received no answer, and saw, with surprise, that his boots were still
on the mat outside.

She peeped in and called on him--'Papa, papa!' but there was no
response.

The room was empty, and the morning sun streamed through the
uncurtained window.  The bed had not been slept in!  Again she called
his name, and rushed downstairs in alarm and affright.

The gas was burning in his writing-room; the window was still closed
as it had been overnight; and there, in his easy chair, with his
hands and arms stretched out on the table, sat Llewellen Carlyon,
with his head bent forward, asleep as Dulcie thought when she saw him.

'Poor papa,' she murmured; 'he has actually gone to sleep over his
horrid weary work.'

She leaned over his chair; wound her soft arms round his neck and
bowed grey head--her lovely blue eyes melting with tenderness, her
sweet face radiant with filial love, till, as she laid her cheek upon
it, a mortal chill struck her, and a low cry of awful dismay escaped
her.

'What is this--papa?'

She failed to rouse him, for his sleep was the sleep of death!

It was disease of the heart, the doctors said, and he had thus passed
away--died in harness; a pen was yet clutched in his right hand, and
an unfinished legal document lay beneath it.

Dulcie fainted, and was borne away by the servants to her own
room--they were old and affectionate country folks, who had been long
with Llewellen Carlyon, and loved him and his daughter well.

Poor Dulcie remained long unconscious, the sudden shock was so
dreadful to her, and when she woke from it, the old curate, Mr.
Pentreath, who had baptized Florian and herself, was standing near
her bed.

'My poor bruised lamb,' said he, kindly and tenderly, as he passed
his wrinkled hand over her rich and now dishevelled tresses.

'What has happened?' she asked wildly.

'You fainted, Dulcie.'

'Why--I never fainted before.'

'She don't seem to remember, sir,' whispered an old servant, who saw
the vague and wild inquiring expression of her eyes.

'Drink this, child, and try to eat a morsel,' said the curate,
putting a cup of coffee and piece of toast before her.

'Something happened--something dreadful--what was it--oh, what was
it?' asked Dulcie, putting her hands to her throbbing temples.

'Drink, dear,' said the curate again.

She drank of the coffee thirstily; but declined the bread.

'I beat up an egg in the coffee,' said he; 'I feared you might be
unable to eat yet.'

Her blue eyes began to lose their wandering and troubled look, and to
become less wild and wistful; then suddenly a shrill cry escaped her,
and she said, with a calmness more terrible and painful than fainting
or hysterics:

'Oh, I remember now--papa--poor papa--dead!  Found dead!  Oh, my God!
help me to bear it, or take me too--take me too!'

'Do not speak thus, child,' said Mr. Pentreath gently.

'How long ago was it--yesterday--a month ago, or when?  I seem--I
feel as if I had grown quite old, yet you all look just the
same--just the same; how is this?'

'My child,' said the curate, with dim eyes, 'your dire calamity
happened but a short time ago--little more than an hour since.'

Her response was a deep and heavy sob, that seemed to come from her
overcharged heart rather than her slender throat, and which was the
result of the unnatural tension of her mind.

'Come to my house with me,' said the kind old curate; but Dulcie
shook her head.

'I cannot leave papa, dead or alive.  I wish to be with him, and
alone.'

'I shall not leave you so; it is a mistake in grief to avoid contact
with the world.  The mind only gets sadder and deeper into its gloom
of melancholy.  If you could but sleep, child, a little.'

'Sleep--I feel as if I had been asleep for years; and it was this
morning, you tell me--only this morning I had my arms round his
neck--dead--my darling papa dead!'

She started to her feet as if to go where the body lay under the now
useless hands of the doctor, but would have fallen had she not
clutched for support at Mr. Pentreath, who upheld and restrained her.

The awful thought of her future loneliness now that she had thus
suddenly lost her father, as she had not another relation in the
world, haunted the unhappy Dulcie, and deprived her of the power of
taking food or obtaining sleep.

In vain her old servants, who had known her from infancy, coaxed her
to attempt both, but sleep would not come, and the food remained
untasted before her.

'A little water,' she would say; 'give me a little water, for thirst
parches me.'

All that passed subsequently seemed like one long and terrible dream
to Dulcie.  She was alone in the world, and when her father was laid
in his last home at Revelstoke, within sound of the tumbling waves,
in addition to being alone she found herself well-nigh penniless, for
her father had nothing to leave her but the old furniture of the
house they had inhabited.

That was sold, and she was to remain with the family of the curate
till some situation could be procured for her.

She had long since ceased to expect any letter from or tidings of
Florian.  She began to think that perhaps, amid the splendour of his
new relations, he had forgotten her.  Well, it was the way of the
world.

Never would she forget the day she quitted her old home.  Her
father's hat, his coat and cane were in the hall; all that he had
used and that belonged to him were still there, to bring his presence
before her with fresh poignancy, and to impress upon her that she was
fatherless, all but friendless, and an orphan.

The superstitious people about Revelstoke now remembered that in
Lawyer Carlyon's garden, blossom and fruit had at the same time
appeared on more than one of his apple-trees, a certain sign of
coming death to one of his household.  But who can tell in this
ever-shifting world what a day may bring forth!

One evening--she never forgot it--she had been visiting her father's
grave, and was slowly quitting the secluded burial-ground, when a man
like a soldier approached her in haste.

'Florian!'  She attempted to utter his name, but it died away on her
bloodless lips.




CHAPTER XVI.

''TIS BUT THE OLD, OLD STORY.'

A poet says:

  'Not by appointment do we meet delight
  And joy: they need not our expectancy.
  But round some corner in the streets of life,
  They on a sudden clasp us with a smile.'


Florian it was who stood before her, but though he gazed at her
earnestly, wistfully, and with great pity in his tender eyes as he
surveyed her pale face and deep mourning, he made no attempt to take
the hands she yearningly extended towards him.  She saw that he was
in the uniform of a private soldier, over which he wore a light
dust-coat as a sort of disguise, but there was no mistaking his
glengarry--that head-dress which is odious and absurd for English and
Irish regiments, and which in his instance bore a brass badge--the
sphinx, for Egypt.

He looked thin, gaunt, and pale, and anon the expression of his eye
grew doubtful and cloudy.

'Florian!' exclaimed Dulcie in a piercing voice, in which something
of upbraiding blended with tones of surprise and grief; and yet the
fact of his presence seemed so unreal that she lingered for a moment
before she flung herself into his arms, and was clasped to his
breast.  'Oh, what is the meaning of this dress?' she asked, lifting
her face and surveying him again.

'It means that I am a soldier--like him whose son I thought myself--a
soldier of the Warwickshire Regiment,' replied Florian with some
bitterness of tone.

'Oh, my God, and has it come to this!' said Dulcie wringing her
interlaced fingers.  'Could not Shafto--your cousin----'

'Shafto cast me off--seemed as if he could not get rid of me too
soon.'

'How cruel, when he might have done so much for you, to use you so!'

'I had no other resort, Dulcie; I would not stoop to seek favours
even from him, and our paths in life will never cross each other
again; but a time may come--I know not when--in which I may seek
forgiveness of enemies as well as friends--the bad and the good
together--for a soldier's life is one of peril.'

'Of horror--to me!' wailed Dulcie, weeping freely on his breast.

'This tenderness is strange, Dulcie!  Why did you cast me off in my
utter adversity and return to me my locket?'

Dulcie looked up in astonishment.

'What _do_ you mean, Florian--have you lost your senses?' she asked
in sore perplexity.  'Where have you come from last?'

'Plymouth; in a paper there I saw a notice of your terrible loss, and
resolved to see, even if I could not speak with you.'

'And you came----'

'To see you, my lost darling, once again.  Oh, Dulcie, I thought I
should die if I left England and sailed for Africa without doing so.
I got a day's leave and am here.'

'But why have you done this?'

'This--what?'

'Soldiering!'

'Penniless, hopeless, what else could I do?--besides, I thought you
had cast me off when you sent me back this locket,' he added,
producing the gift referred to.

'That locket was stolen from me on the night you left
Revelstoke--literally wrenched from my neck, as I told you in my
letter--the letter you never answered.'

'I received no letter, Dulcie--but your locket was taken from you by
whom?'

'Shafto.'

'The double villain!  He must have intercepted that letter, and
utilised the envelope with its postmarks and stamps to deceive me,
and effect a breach between us.'

'Thank God you came, dearest Florian!'

'I thought you had renounced me, Dulcie, and now I almost wish you
had.'

'Why?'

'It is little use to remember me now--I am so poor and hopeless.'

'After all,' said she, taking his face between her hands caressingly,
'what does poverty matter if we love each other still?'

'And you love me, Dulcie--love me yet!' exclaimed Florian
passionately.

'And shall never, never cease to do so.'

'But I am so much beneath you now in position, Dulcie--and--and----'
his voice broke.

'What, darling?'

'May never rise.'

'Would I be a true woman if I forsook you because you were
unfortunate?'

'No; but you are more than a woman, Dulcie--you are a golden-haired
angel!'

'My poor Florian, how gaunt and hollow your cheeks are!  You have
suffered----'

'Much since last we parted here in dear old Devonshire.  But Shafto's
villainy surpasses all I could have imagined!'

'And where is Shafto now?'

'With his grand relations, I suppose.  I am glad that we have
unravelled that which was to me a source of sorrow and dismay--the
returned locket.  So you cannot take back your heart, Dulcie, nor
give me mine?' said Florian.

'Nor would I wish to do so,' she replied, sweetly and simply.
'Though poor, we are all the world to each other now.'

'Hard and matter-of-fact as our every-day existence is, there
is--even in these railway times--much of strange and painful romance
woven up with many a life; and so it seems to be with mine--with
ours, Dulcie.'

'Oh that I were rich, Florian, or that you were so!' exclaimed the
girl, as a great pity filled her heart, when she thought of her
lover's blighted life, their own baffled hopes, and the humble and
most perilous course that was before him in South Africa, where the
clouds of war were gathering fast.  'I, too, am poor, Florian--very
poor; dear papa died involved, leaving me penniless, and I must cast
about to earn my own bread.'

'This is horrible--how shall I endure it?' said he fiercely, while
regarding her with a loving but haggard expression in his dark eyes.

'What would you have done if you had not met me by chance here?'

'Loafed about till the last moment, and then done something
desperate.  I _would_ have seen you, and after that--the Deluge!  In
two days we embark at Plymouth,' he added, casting a glance at the
old church of Revelstoke and its burying-ground.  'There our parents
lie, Dulcie--yours at least, and those that I, till lately, thought
were mine.  There is something very strange and mysterious in this
change of relationship and position between Shafto and myself.  I
cannot understand it.  Why was I misled all my life by one who loved
me so well?  How often have I stood with the Major by a gravestone
yonder inscribed with the name of Flora MacIan and heard him repeat
while looking at it--

  'A thousand would call the spot dreary
    Where thou takest thy long repose;
  But a rude couch is sweet to the weary,
    And the frame that suffering knows.
  I never rejoiced more sincerely
    Than at thy funeral hour,
  Assured that the one I loved dearly
    Was beyond affliction's power!

Why did he quote all this to me, and tell me never to forget that
spot, or who was buried there, if she was only Shafto's aunt, and not
my mother?'

Florian felt keenly for the position of Dulcie Carlyon, and the
perils and mortifications that might beset her path now; but he was
too young, too healthy and full of animal life and spirits, to be
altogether weighed down by the thought of his humble position and all
that was before him; and now that he had seen her again, restored to
her bosom the locket, and that he knew she was true to him, and had
never for a moment wavered in her girlish love, life seemed to become
suddenly full of new impulses and hopes for him, and he thought
prayerfully that all might yet be well for them both.

But when?

To Dulcie there seemed something noble in the hopeful spirit that,
under her influence, animated her grave lover now.  He seemed to
become calm, cool, steadfast, and, hap what might, she felt he would
ever be true to her.

He seemed brave and tender and true--'tender and true' as a Douglas
of old, and Dulcie thought how pleasant and glorious it would be to
have such a handsome young husband as he to take care of her always,
and see that all she did was right and proper and wise.

A long embrace, and he was gone to catch the inexorable train.  She
was again alone, and for the first time she perceived that the sun
had set, that the waves looked black as they rounded Revelstoke
promontory, and that all the landscape had grown dark, desolate, and
dreary.

What a hopeless future seemed to stretch before these two creatures,
so young and so loving!

Florian was gone--gone to serve as a private soldier on the burning
coast of Africa.  It seemed all too terrible, too dreadful to think
of.

'Every morning and evening I shall pray for you, Florian,' wailed the
girl in her heart; 'pray that you may be happy, good, and rich,
and--and that we shall yet meet in heaven if we never meet on earth.'

On the second morning after this separation, when Dulcie was pillowed
in sleep, and the rising sun was shining brightly on the waves that
rolled in Cawsand Bay and danced over the Mewstone, a great white
'trooper' came out of Plymouth Sound under sail and steam, with the
blue-peter flying at its foremasthead, her starboard side crowded
with red coats, all waving their caps and taking a farewell look at
Old England--the last look it proved to many--and, led by Bob
Edgehill, a joyous, rackety, young private of the Warwickshire,
hundreds of voices joined chorusing:

    'Merrily, my lads, so ho!
  They may talk of a life at sea,
    But a life on the land
    With sword in hand
  Is the life, my lads, for me!'


But there was one young soldier whose voice failed him in the chorus,
and whose eyes rested on Stoke Point and the mouth of the Yealm till
these and other familiar features of the coast melted into the
widening Channel.

Dulcie was roused to exertion from the stupor of grief that had come
upon her by tidings that a situation had been found for her as
companion--one in which she would have to make herself useful,
amiable, and agreeable in the family of a lady of rank and wealth, to
whom she would be sent by influential friends of Mr. Pentreath in
London.

The poor girl thought tearfully how desolate was her lot now, cast to
seek her bread among utter strangers; and if she became ill,
delicate, or unable to work, what would become of her?

Her separation from Florian seemed now greater than ever; but, as
Heine has it:

  'Tis but the old, old story,
    Yet it ever abideth new;
  And to whomsoever it cometh
    The heart it breaks in two.'


To leave Revelstoke seemed another wrench.

Dulcie had been born and bred there, and all the villagers in
Revelstoke loved and knew Lawyer Carlyon well, and were deeply
interested in the future of his daughter; thus, on the day of her
departure no one made any pretence of work or working.  Heads were
popping out and in of the windows of the village street all morning,
and a cluster--a veritable crowd--of kindly folks accompanied Mr.
Pentreath and the weeping girl to the railway station, for she wept
freely at all this display of regard and sympathy, especially from
the old, whom she might never see again.

When the train swept her away, and she lost sight of the last
familiar feature of her native place, a strange and heavy sense of
utter desolation came over poor Dulcie, and but for the presence of
other passengers she would have stooped her head upon her hot hands
and sobbed aloud, for she thought of her dead parents--when did she
not think of them now?

'Oh!' exclaims a writer, 'if those who have loved and gone before us
can see afar off those they have left, surely the mother who had
passed from earth might tremble now for her child, standing so
terribly alone in the midst of a seething sea of danger and
temptations?'




CHAPTER XVII.

AT CRAIGENGOWAN.

With the new understanding--the tacit engagement that existed between
herself and Vivian Hammersley--Finella writhed with annoyance when
privately and pointedly spoken to on the subject of her 'cousin'
Shafto's attentions and hopes.

'Grandmamma,' said she to Lady Fettercairn, 'I don't see why I may
not marry whom I please.  I am not like a poor girl who has nothing
in the world.  Indeed, in that case I am pretty sure that neither you
nor cousin Shafto would want me.'

'She must settle soon,' said Lady Fettercairn, when reporting this
plain reply to Lady Drumshoddy.  'I certainly shall not take her to
London again, yet awhile.'

'You are right,' replied that somewhat grim matron; 'and when once
this Captain Hammersley, who, to my idea, is somewhat too _èpris_
with her, is gone, you can easily find some pretext for remaining at
Craigengowan; or shall I have her with me?'

'As you please,' replied Lady Fettercairn, who knew that the
Drumshoddy _mènage_ did not always suit the taste of Finella; 'but I
think she is better here--propinquity and all that sort of thing may
be productive of good.  I know that poor Shafto's mind is quite made
up, and, as I said before, she must settle soon.  We can't have
twenty thousand a year slipping out of the family.'

Finella thought little of their wishes or those of Shafto.  She
thought only of that passionate hour in the lonely drawing-room,
where she was alone with Vivian, and his lips were pressed to hers;
of the close throb of heart to heart, and that the great secret of
her young girl's life was his now and hers no longer, but aware of
the opposition and antagonism he would be sure to encounter just
then, she urged upon him a caution and a secrecy of the engagement
which his proud spirit somewhat resented.

He thought it scarcely honourable to take advantage of Lord
Fettercairn's hospitality, and gain the love of Finella without his
permission; but as both knew that would never be accorded--that to
ask for it would cut short his visit, and as he was so soon going on
distant service, with Finella he agreed that their engagement should
be kept a secret till his return.

And to blind the eyes of the watchful or suspicious he actually found
himself flirting with one of the Miss Kippilaws, three young ladies
who thought they spoke the purest English, though it was with that
accent which Basil Hall calls 'the hideous patois of Edinburgh;' and,
perceiving this, Lady Fettercairn became somewhat contented, and
Finella was excessively amused.

Not so the astute Shafto.

'It is all a d----d game!' muttered that young gentleman; 'a red
herring drawn across the scent.'

'Why do you look so unhappy, dearest?' asked Finella one evening,
when she and her lover found themselves alone for a few minutes,
during which she had been contemplating his dark face in silence.

'My leave of absence is running out so fast--by Jove, faster than
ever apparently now!'

'Is that the sole reason?' asked the girl softly and after a pause,
her dark eyes darkening and seeming to become more intense.

'No,' he replied, with hesitation.

'Tell me, then--what is the other?'

'You know how I love you----'

'And I--you.'

'But in one sense my love is so liable to misconstruction--so
hopeless of proof.'

'Hopeless, Vivian--after all I have admitted?' she asked
reproachfully.

'I mean because I am almost penniless as compared to you.'

'What does that matter?  Surely I have enough for two,' said she,
laughing.

'And I fear the bitter opposition of your family.'

'So do I; but don't mind it,' said the independent little beauty.

'I have heard a rumour that one of the Melforts who made a pure
love-marriage was cut off root and branch.'

'That was poor Uncle Lennard, before I was born.  Well--they can't
cut _me_ off.'

'They will never consent; and when I am far away, as I soon shall be,
if their evil influence----'

'Should prevail with me?  Oh, Vivian!' exclaimed the girl, her dark
eyes sparkling through their unshed tears.  'Think not of their
influencing me, for a moment.'

'Thank you a thousand times for the assurance, my love.  It was vile
of me to think of such things.  I have a sure conviction that your
cousin Shafto dislikes me most certainly,' said Hammersley, after a
pause.

'I don't doubt it,' said she.

'They mean you for him.'

'They--who?'

'Your grandparents.'

'I know they do--but don't tease me by speaking of a subject so
distasteful,' exclaimed Finella, making a pretty moue expression of
disdain.

He pressed a kiss on her brow, another on her hair, and his lips
quickly found their way to hers, after they had been pressed on her
snow-white eyelids.

'I love you with my whole heart, Finella,' he exclaimed passionately.

'And I you,' said the artless girl again, in that style of iteration
of which lovers never grow weary, with an adoring upward glance,
which it was a pity the gathering gloom prevented him from seeing.

As they walked slowly towards the house, she quickly withdrew her
hands, which were clasped clingingly to his arm, as Shafto approached
them suddenly.  He saw the abrupt act, and drew his own conclusions
therefrom, and, somewhat to Finella's annoyance, turned abruptly away.

'So that is the amiable youth for whom they design you,' said he in a
whisper.

'Did I not say you were not to speak of him?  To tell you the truth,
I am at times somewhat afraid of him.'

'My darling--I must give you an amulet--a charm against his evil
influence,' said Hammersley, laughing, as he slipped a ring on her
wedding-finger, adding, 'I hope it fits.'

'What is this--oh, Vivian! actually a wedding-ring--but I cannot
wear, though I may keep it.'

'Then wear this until you can, when I return, darling,' said he, as
he slipped a gemmed ring on the tiny finger, and stooping, kissed it.

'My heart's dearest!' cooed the girl happily.  'Well, Vivian, none
other than the hoop you have now given me shall be my wedding-ring!'

Had Lady Fettercairn overheard all this she would have had good
reason to fear that Finella's twenty thousand a year was slipping
away from the Craigengowan family, all the more so that the scene of
this tender interview was a spot below the mansion-house, said to be
traditionally fatal to the Melforts of Fettercairn, the Howe of
Craigengowan--for there a terrible adventure occurred to the first
Lord, he who sold his Union vote, and of whom the men of the Mearns
were wont to say he had not only sold his country to her enemies, but
that he had also sold his soul to the evil one.

It chanced that in the gloaming of the 28th of April, 1708, the first
anniversary of that day on which the Scottish Parliament dissolved to
meet no more, he was walking in a place which he had bought with his
Union bribe--the Howe of Craigengowan, then a secluded dell,
overshadowed by great alders and whin bushes--when he saw at the
opposite end the figure of a man approaching pace for pace with
himself, and his outline was distinctly seen against the red flush of
the western sky.

As they neared each other slowly, a strange emotion of superstitious
awe stole into the hard heart of Lord Fettercairn.  So strong was
this that he paused for a minute, and rested on his cane.  The
stranger did precisely the same.

The peer--the ex-Commissioner on Forfeited Estates--'pulled himself
together,' and put his left hand jauntily into the silver hilt of his
sword--a motion imitated exactly, and to all appearance mockingly, by
the other, whose gait, bearing, and costume--a square-skirted crimson
coat, a long-flapped white vest, black breeches and stockings rolled
over the knee, and a Ramillie wig--were all the same in cut and
colour as his own!

Lord Fettercairn afterwards used to assert that he would never be
able to describe the undefinable, the strange and awful sensation
that crept over him when, as they neared each other, pace by pace, he
saw in the other's visage the features of himself reproduced, as if
he had been looking into a mirror.

A cold horror ran through every vein.  He knew and felt that his own
features were pallid and convulsed with mortal terror and dismay,
while he could see that those of his dreadful counterpart were
radiant with spite and triumphant malice.

Himself seemed to look upon himself--the same in face, figure, dress;
every detail was the same, save that the other clutched a canvas bag,
inscribed '£500' the price of the Union vote (or, as some said, the
price of his soul)--on seeing which my Lord Fettercairn shrieked in
an agony of terror, and fell prone on his face--a fiendish yell and
laugh from the other making all the lonely Howe re-echo as he did so.

How long he lay there he knew not precisely; but when he opened his
eyes the pale April moon was shining down the Howe, producing weird
and eerie shadows, the alder and whin bushes looked black and gloomy,
and the window lights were shining redly in the tall and sombre mass
of Craigengowan, the gables, turrets, and vanes of which stood up
against the starry sky.

He never quite recovered the shock, but died some years after; and
even now on dark nights, when owls hoot, ravens croak, toads crawl,
and the clock at Craigengowan strikes twelve, something strange--no
one can exactly say what--is to be seen in the Howe, even within
sound of the railway engine.

But to resume our own story:

Though a day for parting--for a separation involving distance, time,
and no small danger to one--was inexorably approaching, Finella was
very happy just then, with a happiness she had never known before,
and with a completeness that made life--even to her who had known
London for a brilliant season--seem radiant.  She had been joyous
like a beautiful bird, and content, too, before the renewal and
fuller development of her intimacy with Vivian Hammersley; but she
was infinitely more joyous and content now.  ''Twas but the old, old
story' of a girl's love, and in all her sentiments and all her hopes
for the future Vivian shared.

The beautiful dreams of a dual life had been partly--if not
fully--realised through him, who seemed to her a perfect being, a
perfect hero: though he was only a smart linesman, a handsome young
fellow like a thousand others, yet he possessed every quality to
render a girl happy.

Shafto felt that Hammersley had quite 'cut the ground from under his
feet' with Finella, as he phrased it; and hating him in consequence,
and being a master in cunning and finesse, wonderfully so for his
years, he resolved to get 'the interloper's' visit to Craigengowan
cut short at all hazards, and he was not long in putting his scheme
in operation.

The lovers thus were not quite unconscious of being watched by eyes
that were quickened by avarice, passion, and jealousy; yet, withal,
they were very, very happy--in Elysium, in fact.

Finding that Hammersley had suddenly become averse to gambling, after
a long day among the grouse, Shafto strove hard to lure him into play
one evening in the smoke-room.

Hammersley declined, aware that Shafto was remarkably sharp at cards,
having become somewhat efficient after years of almost nightly play
in the bar-room of the Torrington Arms at Revelstoke.

Shafto's manner on this evening became almost insulting, and he
taunted him with 'taking deuced good care of such money as he had.'

''Pon my soul, young fellow, do you know that you are
rather--well--ah--rude?' said Hammersley, removing his cigar for a
moment and staring at the speaker.

'Sorry, but it's my way,' replied Shafto.

'Perhaps you had better make that your way,' said Hammersley, his
brown cheek reddening as he indicated the room-door with his cigar.
Then suddenly remembering that he must preserve certain amenities,
and as guest--especially one circumstanced as he was secretly--he
pushed his cigar-case towards Shafto, saying--'Try one of these--they
are Rio Hondos, and are of the best kind.'

'Thanks, I prefer my own,' said Shafto, sulkily.

At last, piqued by the manner of the latter, and having been lured
into drinking a little more brandy and soda than was good for him
after dinner, the unsuspecting Englishman sat down to play, and
though he did so carelessly, his success was wonderful, for, while
not caring to win, he won greatly.

Higher and higher rose the stakes, till a very considerable sum had
passed into his hands, and, handsome though Shafto's quarterly
allowance from his 'grandfather,' paid duly by Mr. Kippilaw, he could
not help the lengthening of his visage, and the growing pallor of it,
while his shifty eyes rolled about in his anxiety and anger; and Lord
Fettercairn and young Kippilaw, who were present, looked on--the
former with some annoyance, and the latter with amused interest.

Quite suddenly, Kippilaw exclaimed:

'Hey--what the deuce is this?  Captain Hammersley, you have dropped a
card.'

And he picked one up from that officer's side, and laid it on the
table.

'The ace of spades!  By heaven, you have _already_ played that card!'
exclaimed Shafto, with fierce triumph.

'It is not mine!' said Hammersley, hotly.

'Whose, then?'

'How the devil should I know?' asked Hammersley, eyeing him firmly.

'Your luck has been marvellous, but not so much so when we know that
you play with double aces,' said Shafto, throwing down his cards and
starting from the table, as the other did, now pallid with just rage.

'Would you dare to insinuate?' began the officer, in a hoarse tone.

'I insinuate nothing; but the disgraceful fact speaks for itself; and
I think you have been quite long enough among us in Craigengowan,' he
added, coarsely.

Vivian Hammersley was pale as death, and speechless with rage.  He
thought first of Finella and then of his own injured honour; and we
know not what turn this episode might have taken had not Lord
Fettercairn, who, we have said, had been quietly looking on from a
corner, said gravely, sharply, and even with pain, as he started
forward:

'Shafto!  I saw you drop _that card_, where Mr. Kippilaw picked it
up--drop it, whether purposely or not I do not say--but drop it you
did.'

'Impossible, sir!'

'It is _not_ impossible,' said the peer, irately; 'and I am not blind
or liable to make mistakes; and you too manifestly did so; whence
this foul accusation of a guest in my own house--a gentleman to whom
you owe a humble and most complete apology.'

Shafto was speechless with rage and baffled spite at the new and
sudden turn his scheme had taken, and at being circumvented in his
own villainy.

'My Lord Fettercairn, from my soul I thank you!' said Hammersley,
drawing himself up proudly, looking greatly relieved in mind, and,
turning next to Shafto, evidently waited for the suggested apology.

But in that he was disappointed, as the 'heir' of Fettercairn turned
abruptly on his heel and left the room, leaving his lordship to make
the _amende_, which he did in very graceful terms.

As it was impossible now for both to remain longer under the same
roof after a fracas of this kind, Hammersley proposed at once to take
his departure for the south by a morning train; but Lord Fettercairn,
who, with all his selfish shortcomings, had been shocked by the
episode, and by several other ugly matters connected with his newly
found 'grandson,' would by no means permit of that movement; and in
this spirit of hospitality even Lady Fettercairn joined, pressing him
to remain and finish his visit, as first intended, while Shafto, in a
gust of baffled rage and resentment, greatly to the relief of Finella
and of the domestics, betook himself to Edinburgh, thus for a time
leaving his rival more than ever in full possession of the field.

'Whether she is influenced by Captain Hammersley I cannot say,' were
the parting words of Lady Fettercairn to this young hopeful; 'but you
seem by this last untoward affair to have lost even her friendship,
and it will be a dreadful pity, Shafto, if all her money should be
lost to you too.'

And Shafto fully agreed with his 'dear grandmother' that it would be
a pity indeed.

As a gentleman and man with a keen sense of honour, Hammersley
disliked exceedingly the secrecy of the engagement he had made with
Finella, and felt himself actually colour more than once when Lord
Fettercairn addressed him; but his compunctions about it grew less
when he thought of the awful escape he had made from a perilous
accusation, that might have 'smashed' him in the Service, and of the
trickery of which Shafto was capable--a trickery of which he had not
yet seen the end.




CHAPTER XVIII.

AT THE BUFFALO RIVER.

The evening of the 10th January was closing in, and the blood-red
African sun, through a blended haze of gold and pale green, red and
fiery, seemed to linger like a monstrous crimson globe at the
horizon, tinging with the same hues the Buffalo River as its broad
waters flowed past the Itelizi Hill towards Rorke's Drift.

There a picquet of the Centre or Second column of infantry (of the
army then advancing into Zululand), under Colonel Richard Glyn of the
24th Regiment, was posted for the night.  The main body of the
picquet, under Lieutenant Vincent Sheldrake, a smart young officer,
was bivouacked among some mealies at a little distance from the bank
of the river, along the margin of which his advanced sentinels were
posted at proper distances apart, and there each man stood motionless
as a statue, in his red tunic and white tropical helmet, with his
rifle at the 'order,' and his eyes steadily fixed on that quarter in
which the Zulu army was supposed to be hovering.

To reach the Buffalo River the various columns of Lord Chelmsford's
army could not march by regular roads, as no such thing exists in
Zululand, and the sole guides of our officers in selecting the line
of advance through these savage regions were the grass-covered ruts
left by the waggon-wheels of some occasional trader or sportsman in
past times.

As the column had been halted for the night, at a considerable
distance in rear of the outlying picquet, the men of the latter had
their provisions with them ready cooked, and were now having their
supper in a grassy donga or hollow.  The earthen floor was their
table, and Lieutenant Sheldrake, being more luxurious than the rest,
had spread thereon as a cloth an old sheet of the _Times_; but the
appetites of all were good, and their temperament cheery and hearty.
Their rifles were piled, and they brewed their coffee over a blazing
fire, the flame of which glowed on their sun-burned and beardless
young faces, and a few Kaffirs squatted round their own fire,
jabbered, gesticulated, and swallowed great mouthfuls of their
favourite liquor 'scoff.'

Sheldrake was too ill or weary to attend closely to his own duties,
and the moment the evening meal was over, he desired the sergeant of
the picquet to 'go round the advanced sentries.'

The sergeant, a young and slender man, and who was no other than
Florian, touched the barrel of his rifle and departed on his
mission--to visit the sentinels in rotation by the river bank, and
see that they were in communication with those of the picquets on the
right and left.

The scenery around was savage and desolate; long feathery grass
covered the veldt for miles upon miles.  The chief features in it
were some blue gum trees, and on a koppie, or little eminence, the
deserted ruins of a Boer farm under the shadow of a clump of
eucalyptus trees; and in the foreground were some bustards and blue
Kaffir cranes by the river bank.

Short service and disease had given Florian rapid promotion; for our
soldiers, if brave, had no longer the power of manly endurance of
their predecessors under the old system.  According to General
Crealock, the extreme youth of our soldiers in South Africa rendered
their powers for toil very small; while the Naval Brigade, composed
of older men, had scarcely ever a man in hospital.  The Zulu campaign
was a very trying one; there were the nightly entrenchments, the
picquet duty amid high grass, and the absence of all confidence that
discipline and that long mutual knowledge of each other give in the
ranks.  He added most emphatically that our younger soldiers were
unfit for European campaigning; that half the First Division were
'sick;' there were always some 200 weak lads in hospital, 'crawling
about like sick flies,' and, like him, every officer was dead against
the short-service system.

The face of our young sergeant was handsome as ever; but it was
strangely altered since late events had come to pass.  There was a
haggard and worn look in the features, particularly in the eyes.  The
latter looked feverish and dim--their brightness less at times, while
a shadow seemed below them.

Florian having, as he now deemed, no right to the name of Melfort, or
even that of MacIan, had enlisted under the latter name, as that by
which he had been known from infancy, lest he might make a false
attestation.  The name of Gyle he shrank from, even if it was
his--which at times he doubted!  His regiment was the brave old 24th,
or Second Warwickshire, which had been raised in the eventful year
1689 by Sir Edward Dering, Bart, of Surrenden-Dering, head of one of
the few undoubted Saxon families in England, and it was afterwards
commanded in 1695 by Louis, Marquis de Puizar.

Second to none in the annals of war during the reigns of Anne and the
early Georges, the 24th in later times served with valour at the
first capture of the Cape of Good Hope, in the old Egyptian campaign,
in the wars of Spain and India, and now they were once again to cover
themselves with a somewhat clouded and desperate glory in conflict
with the gallant Zulus.

Florian in his new career found himself occasionally among a somewhat
mixed and rough lot--the raw, weedy soldiers of the new disastrous
system--but there were many who were of a better type; and the
thought of Dulcie Carlyon--the only friend he had in the world, the
only human creature who loved him--kept him free from the temptations
and evil habits of the former; and he strove to live a steady, pure,
and brave life, that he might yet be worthy of her, and give her no
cause to blush for him.

He got through his drilling as quickly as he could, and soon
discovered that the sooner a soldier takes his place in the ranks the
better for himself.  He found that though many of his comrades were
noisy, talkative, and quarrelsome, that the English soldier quicker
than any other discovers and appreciates a gentleman.  His officers
soon learned to appreciate him too, and hence the rapidity with which
he won his three chevrons, and Mr. Sheldrake felt that, young though
he was, he could trust Florian to go round the sentinels.

Each was at his post, and the attention of each increased as the
gloom after sunset deepened, for none knew who or what might be
approaching stealthily and unseen among the long wavy grass and mossy
dongas that yawned amid the country in front.

'Hush, Bob!' said he to his comrade, Edgehill, whom he heard singing
merrily to himself, 'you should be mute as a fish on outpost duty,
and keep your ears open as well as your eyes.  What have you got in
your head, Bob, that makes you so silly?  But, as the author of the
"Red Rag" says, we soldiers have not much in our heads at any time,
or we wouldn't go trying to stop cannon balls or bullets with them.'

'Right you are, Sergeant,' replied Bob, 'but I can't think what made
you--a gentleman--enlist.'

'Because I was bound to be a soldier, I suppose.  And you?'

'Through one I wish I never had seen?'

'Who was that?'

    'The handsome young girl,
    With her fringe in curl,
  That worked a sewing-machine,'

--sung the irrepressible Bob; and Florian returned to report 'all
right' to Mr. Sheldrake.

Though the actual cause of the Zulu war lies a little apart from our
story, it may be necessary to mention that we invaded the country of
Cetewayo after giving him a certain time, up to the 11th of January,
to accept our ultimatum; to adopt an alternative for war, by
delivering up certain of his subjects who had violated British
territory, attacked a police-station, and committed many
outrages,--among others, carrying off two women, one of whom they put
to a barbarous death near the Buffalo River.

But instead of making any apology, or giving an indemnity, Cetewayo
prepared to defend himself at the head of an enormous army of hardy
Zulu warriors, all trained in a fashion of their own, divided into
strong regiments, furnished with powerful shields of ox-hide, and
armed with rifles, war clubs, and assegais--a name with which we are
now so familiar.  The shaft of this weapon averages five feet in
length, with the diameter of an ordinary walking-stick, cut from the
assegai tree, which is not unlike mahogany in its fibre, and
furnished with a spear-head.  Some are barbed, some double-barbed,
and the tang of the blade is fitted--when red-hot--into the wood, not
the latter into the blade, which is then secured by a thong of wet
hide, and is so sharp that the Zulu can shave his head with it; and
it is a weapon which they can launch with deadly and unerring skill.

The Zulu king, says Captain Lucas, was unable to sign his own name,
'and was as ignorant and as savage as our Norman kings,' and he
thought no more of putting women, 'especially young girls, to death,
than Bluff King Hal' himself; yet a little time after all this was to
see him presented at Osborne, and to become the petted and fêted
exile of Melbury Road, Kensington.

This night by the Buffalo River was Florian's first experience of
outpost duty, and he felt--though not the responsible party--anxious,
wakeful, and weary after a long and toilsome day's march.

He knew enough of military matters to be well aware that the
importance of outposts, especially when dealing with a wily and
savage enemy, could scarcely be exaggerated, for no force, when
encamped in the field, can be deemed for a moment safe without them.
Thus it was a maxim of Frederick the Great that it was pardonable to
be defeated, but never to be surprised.

'I don't understand all this change that has come over my life,'
thought he, as he stretched himself on the bare earth near the
picquet fire; 'but I wonder if my father and mother can see and think
of me where they are.  Yet I sometimes feel,' he added, with a kind
of boyish gush in his heart, 'as if they were near me and watching
over me, so they must see and think too.'

Where was Dulcie, then, and what was she doing?  How supporting
herself, as she said she would have to do?  Had she found friends,
or, months ago, been trodden, with all her tender beauty, down in the
mire of misfortune and adversity?

These were maddening thoughts for one so far away and so utterly
powerless to help her as Florian felt himself, and rendered him at
times more reckless of his own existence because it was useless to
her.

The air around was heavy with the dewy fragrance of strange and
tropical plants, and vast, spiky, and fan-shaped leaves cast their
shadows over him as he strove to snatch the proverbial 'forty winks'
before again going 'the rounds,' or posting the hourly reliefs, for
they are always hourly when before an enemy.

And when our weary young soldier did sleep, he dreamt, not of the
quick-coming strife, nor even of blue-eyed Dulcie, with her wealth of
red golden hair, but, as the tender smile on his lips might have
showed, of the time when his mother watched him in his little cot,
with idolizing gaze, and when he, the now bronzed and moustached
soldier, was a little child, with rings of soft dusky hair curling
over his white forehead; when his cheeks had a rosy flush, and his
tiny mouth a smile, and she fondly kissed the little hands that lay
outside the snow-white coverlet her own deft fingers had made--the
two wee hands that held his mother's heart between them--the heart
that had long since mouldered by Revelstoke Church.

And so he slept and dreamed till roused by the inevitable cry of
'Sentry, go!' and, that duty over, as he composed himself to sleep
again, with his knapsack under his head for a pillow, he thought as a
soldier--

  'To-day is ours.  To-morrow never yet
  On any human being rose or set!'




CHAPTER XIX.

ELANDSBERGEN.

Next morning when the picquet was relieved young Sheldrake, who paid
Hammersley's company in absence of the latter, who was soon expected
with a strong draft from England, said to Florian--

'Look here, MacIan, I've made a stupid mistake.  The company's money
I have left among my heavier baggage in the fort beyond Elandsbergen,
and I have got the Colonel's permission to send you back for it.
This is just like me--I've a head, and so has a pin!  The
Quartermaster will lend you his horse, and you can have my spare
revolver and ammunition.  Have a cigar before you go,' he added,
proffering his case, 'and look sharp after yourself and the money.
There is a deuced unchancy lot in the quarter you are going back to.
We don't advance from this till to-morrow, so you have plenty of time
to be with us ere we cross the river, if you start at once.'

'Very good, sir,' replied Florian, as he saluted and went away to
obtain the horse, the revolver, and to prepare for a duty which he
intensely disliked, and almost doubted his power to carry out, as it
took him rearward through a country of which he was ignorant, which
was almost without roads, and where he would be single-handed, if not
among savages, among those who were quite as bad, for in some of
these districts, as in the Orange Free State and Boerland, there
swarmed broken ruffians of every kind, many of them deserters; and,
says an officer, 'so great, in fact, was the number of these
undesirable specimens of our countrymen assembled in Harrysmith alone
that night was truly made hideous with their howlings, respectable
persons were afraid to leave their houses after nightfall, and the
report of revolvers ceased to elicit surprise or curiosity.  I have
been in some of the most notorious camps and towns in the territories
and mining districts of the United States, but can safely assert that
I never felt more thankful than when I found my horse sufficiently
rested here to continue my journey.'  There were lions, too, in the
wild plains, for some of our cavalry horses were devoured by them;
the tiger-cat and the aarde-wolf also.

With a knowledge of all this Florian loaded his revolver, looked
carefully to the bridle and stirrup leathers of his horse, received a
note from Mr. Sheldrake to the officer commanding the little fort
near the foot of the Drakensberg, and left the camp of No. 2 column
on his solitary journey, steering his way by the natural features of
the country so far as he could recall them after the advance of the
10th January, and watching carefully for the wheel tracks or other
indications of a roadway leading in a westerly direction; and many of
his comrades, including Bob Edgehill, watched him with interest and
kindly anxiety till his white helmet disappeared as he descended into
a long grassy donga, about a mile from Rorke's Drift.

The evening passed and the following day dawned--the important
12th--when Zululand was to be invaded at three points by the three
columns of Lord Chelmsford; the advance party detailed from Colonel
Glyn's brigade to reconnoitre the ground in front got under arms and
began to move off, and Sheldrake and others began to feel somewhat
uneasy, for there was still no appearance of the absent one.

* * * *

The country through which Florian rode was lonely, and farmhouses
were few and many miles apart.  Its natural features were undulating
downs covered with tall waving grass, furrowed by deep, reedy
water-courses; here and there were abrupt rocky eminences, and dense
brushwood grew in the rugged kloofs and ravines.

The air was delightful, and in spite of his thoughts the blood
coursed freely through his veins; his spirits rose, and, exhilarated
by the pace at which his horse went, he could not help giving a loud
'Whoop!' now and then when a gnu, with its curved horns and white
mane, or a hartebeest appeared on the upland slopes, or a baboon
grinned at him from amid the bushes of a kloof.

Before him stretched miles of open and grassy veldt, and the
flat-topped hills of the Drakensberg range closed the horizon.  The
vast stretch of plain, across which ever and anon swept herds of
beautiful little antelopes, was covered with luxuriant grass, which
seemed smooth as a billiard-table, and over it went the track, which
he was always afraid of losing.  But, if pleasant to look upon, the
veldt was treacherous ground, for hidden by the grass were everywhere
deep holes burrowed by the ant-bears, and into these his horse's
forelegs sank ever and anon, to the peril of the animal and his rider
too.  Thus Florian was compelled to proceed at a canter with his
reins loose, while he sat tight and prepared for swerving when his
nag, which was a native horse, prepared to dodge an apparent hole,
which they can do with wonderful sagacity.

So Florian was not sorry when he left the veldt behind him, and after
a ride of about thirty miles saw the earthworks of the small fort at
the foot of Drakensberg appear in front with a little Union Jack
fluttering on a flagstaff.

This was about mid-day.

Anxious to return as soon as he could rest his horse, he lost no time
in delivering Sheldrake's note to the officer in command, and with
the key of a trunk indicated therein among his best uniform, and amid
girls' photos, bundles of letters, old button bouquets, rare pipes,
and an omnium-gatherum of various things, the bag was found, with the
company's money, and delivered to Florian, who, after a two hours'
halt, set out on his return journey; but he had not proceeded many
miles when he found that his horse was utterly failing him, and,
regretting that he had not remained at the post for the night, he
resolved to spend it in the little town of Elandsbergen, towards
which he bent his way, leading the now halting nag by the bridle.

Elandsbergen consisted of a few widely detached cottages studding
both sides of a broad pathway, amid a vast expanse of veldt or
prairie, with fragmentary attempts at cultivation here and there; and
how the people lived seemed somewhat of a mystery.  Rows of stunted
oaks lined the street, if such it could be called, and through it
flowed a rill of pure water, at which the poor nag drank thirstily.

Elandsbergen boasted of one hostelry, dignified by the title of the
Royal Hotel, where 'civil entertainment for man and beast' was
promised by the landlord, 'Josh Jarrett.'  It was a somewhat
substantial edifice of two storeys, built of baked brick, square in
form, with a flat roof composed of strong lattice-work, covered with
half-bricks and with clayey mortar to render it impervious to the
torrents of the South African rainy season.

In some of the windows were glass panes; in others sheepskin with the
wool off, which, in consequence of extreme tension, attains a certain
transparency.  Giving his horse to a Kaffir ostler, whose sole
raiment was a waistcoat made of a sleeveless regimental tunic,
Florian somewhat wearily entered the 'hotel,' the proprietor of which
started and changed colour at the sight of his red coat, as well he
might, for, though disguised by a bushy beard, sedulously cultivated,
and a shock head of hair under his broad-leaved hat, he was one of
the many deserters from our troops, already referred to, and, though
apparently anxious to appear civil, was secretly a ruffian of the
worst kind.

The room into which he ushered Florian was bare-walled, the furniture
was of the plainest and rudest kind, and the floor was formed of
cow-dung over wet clay, all kneaded, trodden, and hardened till it
could be polished, a process learned from the Zulus in the
construction of their kraals.

A fly-blown map of Cape Colony, a cheap portrait of Sir Bartle Frere,
and the skull of an eland with its spiral horns were the only
decorations of the apartment, and the literature of 'the day' was
represented by three tattered copies of the _Cape Argus_, _Natal
Mercury_, and the _Boer Volksteem_.

Josh Jarrett was dressed like a Boer, and in person was quite as
dirty as a Boer; his loose cracker-trousers were girt by a broad belt
with a square buckle, whereat hung a leopard-skin pouch and an ugly
hunting-knife with a cross hilt.  In the band of his broad hat were
stuck a large meerschaum pipe and the tattered remnant of an ostrich
feather.

The Kaffir ostler now came hurriedly in, and announced something in
his own language to the landlord, who, turning abruptly to Florian,
said--

'You are in something of a fix, Sergeant!'

'How--what do you mean?' demanded Florian.

'That your horse is dying.'

'Dying!'

'Yes, of the regular horse-sickness.'

Florian in no small anxiety and excitement hurried out to the stable,
in which two other nags were stalled, and there he saw the poor
animal he had ridden lying among the straw in strong convulsions,
labouring under that curse of South Africa, the horse-sickness, a
most mysterious disorder, which had suddenly attacked it.

The animal had looked sullen and dull all morning, and in the stable
had been assailed by the distemper and its usual symptoms, heaving
flanks, disturbed breathing, glassy eyes, and a projecting tongue
tightly clenched between the teeth.  Then came the convulsions, and
he was dead in half an hour, and Florian found that he would probably
have to travel afoot for more than twenty miles before he could
rejoin the column on the morrow.

'Where have you come from, Sergeant?' asked Josh Jarrett, when they
returned to the public room.

'The fort at the Drakensberg, last.'

'Taking French leave, eh?' said Jarrett, with a portentous wink and a
brightening eye.

'Not at all!' replied Florian, indignantly.

'Fellows do so every day now in these short-service times.'

'I was going to the front, when my horse fell lame.'

'Belong to the Mounted Infantry?'

'The dismounted now, I think,' replied Florian.  'I should like to
rest here for the night, and push on as best I can to-morrow; so what
can I have for supper?'

Josh Jarrett paused a moment, as if he thought a sergeant's purse
would not go far in the way of luxuries, and then replied:

'Rasher of bacon and eggs, or dried beef and a good glass of
squareface or Cape smoke, which you please.'

'The first will do, and a glass of the squareface, which means
Hollands, I suppose.  Cape smoke is a disagreeable spirit,' replied
Florian wearily, as he took off his helmet and seated himself in a
large cane-bottomed chair.

'Won't you lay aside your revolver?' asked Jarrett.

'Thanks--well, no--I am used to it.'

'As you please,' said the other surlily, and summoning in a loud
voice a female named 'Nan,' left the room.

The latter laid the table, brought in the frugal supper, with a case
bottle of squareface, and, instead of leaving the room, seated
herself near a window and entered into conversation, with what object
Florian scarcely knew, but he disliked the circumstance, till he
began to remember that she probably considered herself his equal.

When his hasty repast was over, taking a hint from a remark that he
was weary, she withdrew, and then Florian began to consider the
situation.

He was fully twenty miles from the regiment; a rough country, not to
be traversed even by daylight, infested with wild animals, and many
obnoxious things, such as puff-adders, perhaps Zulus, lay between;
and unless Jarrett would accommodate him with a horse, which was very
unlikely (he seemed such a sullen and forbidding fellow), he would
have to travel the journey on foot, and begin betimes on the morrow
as soon as dawn would enable him to see the track eastward.

He examined Sheldrake's handsome revolver and its ammunition,
reloading the six chambers carefully.  Then he thought of the
company's money; and tempted, he knew not by what rash impulse unless
it was mere boyish curiosity, he untied the red tape by which the
paymaster had secured the mouth of the bag to have a peep at the gold.

He had never seen a hundred sovereigns before, and never before had
so much money in his possession.  Some of the glittering coins fell
out on the clay floor; and as he gathered them up a sound made him
look round, and from the window he saw a human face suddenly vanish
outside, thus showing that some one had, hitherto unnoticed, been
furtively watching him, and he strongly suspected it to be the woman
Nan, prompted, perhaps, by idle curiosity, and in haste he concealed
the gold.

He was the more convinced of the lurker being she when, soon after,
she entered, retook her seat by the window, through which the evening
sun was streaming now, and began to address him in a light and
flippant manner, as if to get up a flirtation with him for ulterior
purposes; but his suspicions were awakened now, and Florian was on
his guard.

He perceived that she had made some alterations and improvements in
her tawdry dress, and had hung in her ears a pair of large
old-fashioned Dutch ear-rings shaped like small rams' horns of real
gold.

She seemed to be about thirty years of age, and was not without
personal attractions, though all bloom was past, and the expression
of her face was marred by its being alternately leering, mocking,
and--even in spite of herself--cruel.  Yet her eyes were dark and
sparkling.  She wore a fringe of thick brown hair close down to them,
concealing nearly all her forehead.  Her mouth, if large, was
handsome, but lascivious-looking, and Florian, whose barrack-room
experience had somewhat 'opened his eyes,' thought--though he was not
ungallant enough to say so--that her absence would be preferable to
her company, which she seemed resolved to thrust upon him.  But
guests were doubtless scarce in these parts, and the 'Royal Hotel,'
Elandsbergen, had probably not many visitors.

She asked him innumerable questions--his age, country, regiment, and
so forth--and all in a wheedling coaxing way, toyed with his hair,
and once attempted to seat herself on his knee; but he rose and
repelled her, and then it was that the unmistakably cruel expression
came flashing into her eyes.

'You are too young and too handsome to be killed and disembowelled by
the big Zulus,' said she after a pause; 'they could eat a boy like
you.  Why don't you desert and go to the Diamond Fields?'

'Thank you; I would die rather than do that!'

'And so you serve the Queen, my dear?' she said sneeringly.

'Yes.'

'For what reason do you fight the poor Zulus?'

'Honour,' replied Florian curtly.

'I have read--I have some book-knowledge, you see--that when a Swiss
officer was reproached by a French one that he fought for pay, and
not like himself for honour, "So be it," replied the Swiss, "we each
of us fight for that which he is most in need of."'

'I don't see the allusion in this instance: a soldier, I do my duty
and obey orders.'

'Have a drop more of the squareface--you can't be so rude as to
refuse a lady,' she continued, filling up a long glass, which she put
to her lips, and then to those of Florian, who pretended to sip and
then put the glass down.

He was at a loss to understand her and her advances.  Vanity quite
apart, he knew that he was a good-looking young fellow, and that his
uniform 'set him off;' but he remembered the face at the window, and
was on his guard against her in every way.  Would she have acted thus
with an officer? he thought; and in what relation did she stand to
the truculent-looking landlord--wife, daughter, or sister?  Probably
none of them at all.

Suddenly her mood changed, or appeared to do so, and seating herself
at a rickety old piano, which Florian had not noticed before, she,
while eyeing him waggishly, proceeded to sing a once-popular flash
song, long since forgotten in England, and probably taken out by some
ancient settler, generations ago, to the Cape Colony:

  'If I was a wife, and my dearest life
    Took it into his noddle to die,
  Ere I took the whim to be buried with him,
    I think I'd know very well _why_.

  'If poignant my grief, I'd search for relief--
    Not sink with the weight of my care:
  A salve might be found, no doubt, above ground,
    And I think I know very well _where_.

  'Another kind mate should give me what fate
    Would not from the former allow;
  With him I'd amuse the hours you abuse,
    And I think I'd know very well _how_.

  ''Tis true I'm a maid, and so't may be said
    No judge of the conjugal lot;
  Yet marriage, I ween, has a cure for the spleen,
    And I think I know very well _what_.'


This she sang with a skill and power that savoured of the music hall,
and then tried her blandishments again to induce Florian to drink of
the fiery squareface; but he resisted all her inducement to take
'just one little glass more.'

Why was she so anxious that he should imbibe that treacherous spirit,
which he would have to pay for?  And why did the landlord, who
certainly seemed full of curiosity about him, leave him so entirely
in her society?

Suddenly the voice of the latter was heard shouting, 'Nan, Nan!'

'That is Josh,' said she impatiently; 'bother him, what does he want
now?  Josh is getting old, and nothing improves by age.'

'Except brandy,' said Florian smiling, as he now hoped to be rid of
her.

'Right; and squareface, perhaps.  Have one glass more, dear, before I
leave you.'

But he turned impatiently away, and she withdrew, closing a scene
which caused Florian much suspicion and perplexity.  He remembered to
have read, that 'man destroys with the horns of a bull, or with paws
like a bear; woman by nibbling like a mouse, or by embracing like a
serpent.'  And he was in toils here unseen as yet!

The light faded out beyond the dark ridges of the Drakensberg, and
Florian requested to be shown to his sleeping-apartment, which was on
the upper storey.

'You may hear a roaring lot here by-and-by,' said his host; 'but you
are a soldier, and I dare say will sleep sound enough.  You will be
tired, too, after your ride.'

The man had now a sneaking and wicked look in his eyes, which avoided
meeting those of Florian, and which the latter did not like, but
there was no help for it then.

'You will call me early if I sleep too long,' said Florian, as
Jarrett gave him a candle.

The hand of the latter shook as he did so--he had evidently been
drinking heavily, and his yellow-balled eyes were bloodshot, and his
voice thick, as he said:

'Good-night, Sergeant; you'll sleep sound enough,' and closed the
door.

With a sigh almost of relief Florian found himself alone.  He set
down the sputtering candle, and turned to fasten the door.  It was
without a lock, and secured only by a latch, by which it could be
opened from the outside as well as within.

On making this startling discovery, Florian's heart glowed with
indignation and growing alarm!  He felt himself trapped!




CHAPTER XX.

BAFFLED!

The room was small, low-ceiled, and its only furniture was a table,
chair, and truckle-bed--all obviously of Dutch construction--and,
unless he could find some means to secure his door, he resolved to
remain awake till dawn.  The only window in the room overlooked the
roof of the stable where the dead horse lay.  The sash was loose, and
shook in the night wind, and he could see the bright and, to him, new
constellations glittering in the southern sky.

Florian contrived to secure the door by placing the chair on the
floor as a wedge or barrier between it and the bedstead, on the
mattress of which--though not very savoury in appearance--he cast
himself, for he was weary, worn, and felt that there was an absolute
necessity for husbanding his strength, as he knew not what might be
before him, so he extinguished the candle.

Something in the general aspect and bearing of the man Josh Jarrett,
and in those of the woman, with her efforts to intoxicate him, and
something, too, in his general surroundings and isolated
situation--for the few scattered houses of Elandsbergen were all far
apart--together with the memory of the prying face he had seen at the
window, at the very moment he was picking up the gold, all served to
put Florian on his guard; thus he lay down without undressing, and,
longing only for daylight, grasped ever and anon the butt of his
pistol.

For some time past he had been unused to the luxury of even a
truckle-bed or other arrangements for repose than his grey greatcoat
and ammunition blanket, with a knapsack for a pillow; hence, despite
his keen anxiety, he must have dropped asleep, for how long he knew
not; but he suddenly started up as the sound of voices below came to
his ear, and the full sense of his peculiar whereabouts rushed on him.

Voices!  They were coarse and deep, but not loud--voices of persons
talking in low and concentrated tones in the room beneath, separated
from him only by the ill-fitting boarding of the floor, between the
joints of which lines of light were visible, and one bright upward
flake, through a hole from which a knot had dropped out.

'Curse him, he's but a boy; I could smash the life out of him by one
blow of my fist!' he heard his host, Josh Jarrett, say.

Others responded to this, but in low, stealthy, and husky tones.
Certain that some mischief with regard to himself was on the _tapis_.
Florian crept softly to the orifice in the floor, and looked down.
Round a dirty and sloppy table, covered with drinking-vessels, pipes
and tobacco-pouches, bottles of squareface and Cape smoke, were Josh
Jarrett and three other ruffians, digger-like fellows, with Nan among
them, all drinking; and a vile-looking quintette they were,
especially the woman, with her hair all dishevelled now, and her face
inflamed by that maddening compound known as Cape smoke.

'When I was ass enough to be in the Queen's service,' said Jarrett
with a horrible imprecation, 'these 'ere blooming officers and
non-comms. led me a devil of a life; they said it was my own fault
that I was always drunk and in the mill.  Be that as it may, I've one
of the cursed lot upstairs, and I'll sarve him out for what they made
me undergo, cuss 'em.  One will answer my purpose as well as another.
Nan, you did your best to screw him, but he was wary--infernally
wary.  Blest if I don't think the fellow is a Scotsman after all, for
all his English lingo.'

'Yes, he did shirk his liquor,' hiccupped the amiable Nan; 'you
should have drugged it, Josh.'

'But then we didn't know that he had all this chink about him.'

'That must be ours,' growled a fellow who had not yet spoken, but was
prodding the table with a knife he had drawn from his belt; 'we'll
give him a through ticket to the other world--one with the down
train.'

'And no return,' added Nan, laughing.

Florian felt beads of perspiration on his brow; he was one against
five--entrapped, baited, done to death--and if he did not appear at
headquarters with the fatal money, what would be thought of him but
that he had deserted with it, and his name would be branded as that
of a coward and robber.

Dulcie!  The thought of Dulcie choked him, but it nerved him too.

Another truculent-looking fellow now came in, making five men in all.

'He has money galore on him--Nan saw the gold--money in a canvas bag.
How comes he, a sergeant, to have all this in his grab, unless he
stole it?' said Jarrett, in explanation to the new-comer.

'Of course he stole it--it's regimental money, and evidently he is
deserting with it,' said the other, who was no doubt, like Jarrett, a
Queen's bad bargain also; for he added, 'What the devil do Cardwell's
short-service soldiers care about their chances of pension or
promotion--that's the reason he has the bag of gold; so why shouldn't
we make it ours?  It is only dolloping a knife into him, and then
burying him out in the veldt before daylight.  Even if he was traced
here, who is to be accountable for a deserter?'

And this practical ruffian proceeded at once to put a finer edge and
point upon his long bowie knife.

'You forget that he has a revolver,' said Nan.

'I don't,' said Jarrett; 'but he ain't likely to use it in his sleep,
especially when we pin him by the throat.'

He was but one against five armed and reckless desperadoes; and there
was the woman, too, whose hands were ready for evil work.  The stair
that led to his room was narrow--so much so that there was but space
for one on a step.  The lower or outer door he knew to be securely
locked and bolted.  The window of his room, we have said, overlooked
the lean-to roof of the stable, where he knew that two horses were in
stall--a sure means of escape could he reach one; but the door, he
was aware, was locked, and the key in possession of the Kaffir groom.

He was maddened by the thought that his barbarous and obscure death
would brand him with a double disgrace; and death is more than ever
hard when suffered at the hands of cowards.

'What is the use of all this blooming talk?' said one, starting from
the table; 'let us set about the job at once!'

'Look you,' said Jarrett, 'if roused he'll perhaps try to escape by
the stable-roof, so while you fellows go up the stair, I go round to
the back of the house and cut off his retreat.'

'The stable-roof,' thought Florian, 'my only chance lies that way.'

He opened the window at the very moment that stealthy steps sounded
on the wooden stair, and a red light streamed under the door, which
their felon hands failed to force, so firmly was the chair wedged
between it and the bed.  He slid down the stable-roof, and dropped
safely on the ground, to be faced by Josh Jarrett, who came rushing
on, knife in hand, but Florian shot him down, firing two chambers
into his very teeth, and then he sprang away like a hare out into the
open veldt, leaving the ruffian wallowing in his blood.

He knew not and cared not in what direction he ran at first, as he
could hear the oaths and imprecations of his pursuers, over whom his
youth, lightness, and activity gave him an advantage; but after a
time red-dawn began to streak the eastern sky, and he knew that was
the direction which, if he was spared, would take him to the bank of
the Buffalo River.

He continued to run at a good steady double, saving his wind as he
did so, and his courage and confidence rose when he found that he was
distancing his pursuers so much that he could neither see nor hear
anything of them.

As he ran on he thought for a moment or two of the fierce gleaming
eyes and glistening teeth of Jarrett--of the blood he had shed, and
the life he had perhaps taken for the first time, remorsefully; but
had he not acted thus, what would he have been?  A gashed corpse!

'Bah!' he said aloud, 'I am a soldier--why such thoughts at all?  Why
should I have mercy when these wretches would have had none?' and he
began to regret that he had not fired a random shot or two through
the room-door and knocked over some of them on the staircase.

A sound now struck his ear; it was the thud of galloping hoofs upon
the veldt, and his heart sank as he remembered the two horses in the
stable, where his dead nag was lying.

He looked back, and there, sure enough, in the grey dawn were two
mounted men riding in scouting fashion, far apart, and he could not
for a moment doubt they were two of Jarrett's companions in pursuit,
thirsting with avarice and for revenge.

He made his way, stumbling wildly and breathlessly down a wooded
ravine to elude their sight; on and on he strove till a vine root
caught his foot: his hands outstretched beat the air for a moment,
and then he fell headlong forward and downward into a donga full of
brushwood.

For a moment he had a sense of strange palms, and giant cacti, and of
great plants with long spiky leaves being about him, and then he
became unconscious as he lay there stunned and bleeding profusely
from a wound in his forehead, which had come in contact with a stone.



END OF VOL. I.



BILLING & SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.



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