Chapter XVII: Among the Birks of Invermay

'Home at last!' exclaimed Leslie Colville, aloud but to himself in the excess of his joy, as his train from Dover went clanking in to crowded and busy Charing-Cross Station. 'Home at last! How jolly it is to see the English faces, the familiar sights and hear the familiar sounds again--and to be once more in mufti!'

'_Globe--Graphic--'Lustrated News--Punch!_' He listened to the calls of the newsboys as if they sang sweet music; and for days past he had thought of, whistled, and hummed the burden of an old Scottish song he had heard his nurse sing long ago--

'Hame, hame, hame, oh, fain wad I be;
Hame, hame, hame, in my ain countrie!'

And the desire had become a realization--a fact.

'And now to meet my darling!' he thought, as he plunged into a well-horsed hansom, and, leaving his luggage to follow, was driven at a tearing pace towards Grosvenor Square, for which the residence at Altona had been gladly quitted by Mrs. Deroubigne and her two charges,

'Journeys of a few hundred miles are no longer described in these days of ours,' says Charles Reade; nor those of thousands at the rate we travel, so we have not detailed the journey of Colville.

At last it was ended, and he was with _her_.

Mary's pulses were leaping with excitement when they met, and she felt herself in his tender and prolonged embrace, though it all seemed a delicious and delirious dream, from which she might waken and again weep for him as dead, or as still expecting him.

It was well-nigh a year since they had parted, a year of many startling events, months since a line had been exchanged between them; and who could blame them if, for a little time, they forgot all the world, and everything else, but each other?

'How strange to think that this is the last walk we shall have together as lovers,' said Mary, in a soft, cooing tone, as they loitered by the Serpentine one evening.

'Yes, when next we promenade thus it will be as sober married folks,' said Colville, with his brightest smile.

'Dear--dear Leslie!'

'Our courtship days have been chequered certainly, but the end is a happy one.'

'Happy we have been from the moment we had perfect faith in each other, with one dreadful interval,' said Mary, with a little sob in her throat, as she thought of the first tidings from Cabul; 'could I but see my pet Ellinor even half so happy!'

'Her days for fullest happiness will come in time--and, dearest Mary, if all these lawyer fellows, Horning and Tailzie, tell me is true, I shall put a coronet on your golden hair, and you shall be my Lady Colville of Ochiltree,' said he, laughingly.

'Oh, to go home again!' said Mary, who was thinking more of Birkwoodbrae than a peerage and a house in Tyburnia. 'I was always a great knitter at odd times, Leslie, and half the old people at Kirktoun-Mailler benefited thereby. I was born among my old people, and long so much--amid my own great happiness--to see them once again. It seems ages since I came away.'

'And see them you shall in a little time now, darling, for there we shall spend our honeymoon.'

And then that season, so important in human life and human love, was spent as Colville had promised, and to Mary supreme was the delight of wandering over all the old familiar places again and again with him--the trout-pool where they had first met and he had lifted her off the stone; the Linn; the Holyhill; the Miller's Acre; under the old gate with the legend on its lintel, and where again she could train her flowers, and feed her chickens that looked like balls of golden fluff, while the 'siller birks'--the Birks of Invermay--cast their shadows over her again.

She was back again in her old groove as if she had never left it--to train her roses and clematis, to sow mignonette and sweet-scented stocks, and plant white lilies for Ellinor to paint from; and, with Jack by her side, with a solid silver collar (though one with spikes would better have suited his pugnacious propensities), to wander when dewy evening was falling, when the sheep were nibbling the grass briskly and monotonously; and a gleam came from the old ingle-lum of the kitchen, where Elspat was rolling out barley-meal cakes, and where everything spoke of home--now more than ever home!

'You see, Leslie darling,' said she, 'I feel for this place--we feel, Ellinor and I--as no one else ever could, having always, during the lifetime of papa and ever after, looked upon it as our own.'

'And your own it is, pet Mary.'

'And no other place, however grand or beautiful, could be like a home to us.'

The luxuries with which Colville could surround her--luxuries too great for a mansion so small then--her carriage-horses, her pair of ponies, her white Arab pad (all stabled as yet at the 'Dunkeld Arms'), her set of sables, her jewellery, and Parisian toilettes, her retinue of servants were the topics of 'the countryside,' and were duly descanted on by Mademoiselle Rosette Patchouli for the edification of her ladies; and the Honourable Blanche Gabrielle, with her elevated eyebrows, foreign tricks of manner, and incipient little French moustache, thought with anger of all she had lost.

The pompous old lord, with his facial angle _à la_ Louis XIV., and his cold-blooded yet perfectly aristocratic lady, would gladly have shed the light of their countenances over Birkwoodbrae, but there Mary's Christianity ended; and she would have nothing of them, despite all good old Dr. Wodrow could urge.

Robert was returning an officer, with a well-earned cluster of medals on his breast, and he was coming straight to Kirktoun-Mailler and to her. So Ellinor often seated herself on a mossy bank, and, leaning her head of rich brown hair against the white stem of a silver birch, would give herself up to memory, and many a happy and repentant thought; while tears fell from her eyes--she was so happy!

A little time ago it would have been torture for Ellinor to look upon scenes so associated with Robert Wodrow, the lover she had wronged and lost and mourned for; and it was painful still to do so, though her heart throbbed with hope and joy, as he was returning to her with the rank and position he had predicted to his mother.

So Robert Wodrow will win the one woman of his heart! Hand and hand they will go forward together into that new existence--that new world of tame, married life, as it is deemed; but to them, a world of trust and love it will be; while explanations and memories of the sweet and bitter and perilous past will come in due course with the current of their own happy and mutual thoughts.

THE END.

LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.