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.