“Have you forgotten your Scotch songs, Stella?” asked Mary Carimon.
“Not I; I like them best of all,” replied Miss Featherston. And without more ado she broke into “Ye banks and braes.”
It was followed by “The Banks of Allan Water,” and others. Flore stole to the parlour-door, and thought she had never heard so sweet a singer. Last of all, Stella began a quaint song that was more of a chant than anything else, low and subdued:
“Woe’s me, for my heart is breakin’,
I think on my brither sma’,
And on my sister greetin’,
When I cam’ from home awa’.
And O, how my mither sobbit,
As she took from me her hand,
When I left the door of our old house
To come to this stranger land.
“There’s nae place like our ain home,
O, I would that I were there!
There’s nae home like our ain home
To be met wi’ onywhere.
And O, that I were back again
To our farm and fields sae green,
And heard the tongues of our ain folk,
And was what I hae been!”
A feeling of despair ran through the whole words; and the tears were running down Ann Fennel’s hectic cheeks as the melody died away in a plaintive silence.
“It is what I shall never see again, Stella,” she murmured—“the green fields of our home; or hear the tongues of all the dear ones there. In my dreams, sometimes, I am at Selby Court, light-hearted and happy, as I was before I left it for this ‘stranger land.’ Woe’s me, also, Stella!”
And now I come into the story—I, Johnny Ludlow. For what I have told of it hitherto has not been from any personal knowledge of mine, but from diaries, and from what Mary Carimon related to me, and from Featherston. It may be regarded as singular that I should have been, so to say, present at its ending, but that I was there is as true as anything I ever wrote. The story itself is true in all its chief facts; I have already said that; and it is true that I saw the close of it.