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.