The ovation that followed the landing of the Rifles may be fresh in the recollection of many. Balls, banquets, and addresses were amply accorded to all the returned troops, and decorations and crosses for valour were fully bestowed; but of all the joyous entertainments Bevil Goring saw nothing, as a notice which he read by chance in a paper led him to leave Portsmouth on the evening of the very day the regiment landed.
It was simply a paragraph in a Southampton paper, on which his eye fell casually, that rooted him for a few minutes to the spot, and ran thus:
'We understand that the late Sir Ranald Cheyne, Bart., of Essilmont and that ilk, whose demise at Chilcote we recorded some days ago, has died without heirs male, and his baronetcy, one of the oldest in Scotland, has thus become extinct.'
'Who died some days ago at Chilcote,' thought Goring, who felt a species of shock; 'and Alison is thus alone—alone in the world—poor girl! At Cadbury's mercy perhaps—while I—oh, what must she think of me? Why do I only hear of this calamity now?'
So next noon betimes saw him arrive at Chilcote with his horse at a rasping gallop, and his heart beating high with mingled hope, love, and great commiseration, as he knew how Alison idolised the querulous old man she had lost; and again, as before, his spirit sank on finding only silence and desolation—the house abandoned and all its windows shuttered.
'Desolation, as before,' he muttered, as he leaped from his horse; 'desolation, and perhaps mystery too. Where can she have gone, and with whom?'
He passed the gate, and mechanically handled the door-knocker, and the sound thereof echoed hollowly through the silent house. He drew close to the shuttered windows, and peeped in through a fissure in one. He saw the almost entirely darkened dining-room, from the walls of which the portraits of the two cavalier brothers were still looking grimly and stonily down; on the table was a vase, with a few flowers still in it; and near stood a chair and a work-basket, in which some coloured wools were lying.
Very recently must Alison have been there, as the flowers seemed still somewhat fresh; in fact, she had only set out on her pilgrimage the day before, when he had been at Portsmouth.
How full the place seemed of her presence! Yet he had to turn sadly away.
The buds in the giant beeches were bursting already into tender green leaves; the birds were twittering and singing in the hedgerows, and the kine lowed amid the deep spring grass of yonder meadows; 'the deep bell' swung in the distant tower of Chilcote Church; the dogs barked sharply in an adjacent farm-yard; and close and nigh was the hum of the bee, as it thrust its golden head into the cups of the spring flowers in the now neglected garden.