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.