First Love and Last Love

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1868. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... chapter xxiv. traced at last. Sorely did Lena Weston require rest of body if she could not get peace of mind. Even the beauty of the Indian village--and though its huts were dark, baked, weather-beaten and crazy in construction, it was beautiful--failed to interest her. It was secluded among the most glorious foliage and luxuriant verdure; there were topes of venerable mango trees, tall tamarinds, with light feathery sprays, plantains with their broad green leaves and golden tinted fruit, and the giant banian, the developed growth of centuries--old perhaps as the days of Timour--throwing far and wide its hundred drooping arms, as if to shroud the Hindoo temple of Vishnu, whose walls were white as snowy chunam could make them; shrouding also the old Fakir who sat smoking on a mat under its grateful shadow; the sacred tank, where the brilliant cups and petals of the lotus floated, and where the dancing girls of the temple laved their graceful limbs, before engaging in the strange prayers and sensual ceremonies of the shrine to which they were devoted; and there too, was the pagod tree, with bronze idols placed under its branches, whereon the wild peacocks, the turtle-doves, and brilliant parrots were perching. For all these beauties of Nature, circumstanced as he was, Jack Harrower cared quite as little as Lena, and would willingly have given all Hindostan, for the bare scalp of Cornish Caddonburrow. Several weeks elapsed and they remained quietly and unmolested at the house of the Zemindar Kunoujee Lall; Harrower dared not venture beyond the precincts or outer walls, and he writhed under a system of such inactivity and restriction, feeling himself at times almost a prisoner of war. As in the dwelling of Khoda Bux, he saw very little of Lena, and nothing of the fe...