Urquhart stopped his tale again, to wheel round the platform on which I
sat, so as to get me more in profile.
“This looks marvellously like stuff for a story,” I said to him as he set
to work again upon the clay. “My professional interests are fully
aroused. Please go on.”
He smiled again.
“I am charmed to find you can be so easily entertained,” said he. “After
all, what is it? Merely a trifling incident. Every other man who went
through the Peninsular campaign came on experiences, I am sure, far more
curious. My little story would have ended in the lane of Ciudad Rodrigo
had not three companies of the 71st—mainly invalids after Badajos—been
sent to Scotland for a whiff of their native air, and the fascination of
recruits. I had got a spent ball in the chest at Badajos. I, too, had
that gay vacation. I went with my silver drum to the county it came
from. It was glorious summer weather. For three weeks we were billeted
in the county town; for a fortnight I would not have changed places with
King George himself.”
“Mr Urquhart,” I said, “I have a premonition. Here comes in the
essential lady.”
The sculptor smiled.
“Here, indeed,” he said, “comes in the lady. There are, I find, no
surprises for a novelist. We were one day (to resume my story) in the
burgh square, where a market was being held, and hopes were entertained
by our captain that a few landward lads might nibble at the shilling.
Over one side of the square towered a tall whitewashed house of many
windows; and as I, with a uniform tunic that was the pride of the
regimental tailor, five feet eleven, twenty-one years of age, and the
vanity of a veteran, played my best to half a dozen fifes, I noticed the
lady at a window—the only window in all that massive house-front to
manifest any interest in our presence or performance. I turned my silver
drum a little round upon my leg that it might reflect more dazzlingly the
light of the afternoon sun, and threw into my beats and rolls the most
graceful style that was at my command, all the while with an eye on
madam. It was my youthful conceit that I had caught her fancy when, a
little later—our sergeants busy among the rustics—she came out from the
house and over where I sat apart beside my drum on the steps of the
market cross. She was younger than myself, a figure so airy and
graceful, you would swear that if she liked she could dance upon
blue-bells without bruising a petal; she had hair the colour of winter
bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.
“‘Excuse me,’ said she, ‘but I _must_ look at the darling drum—the sweet
drum,’ and caught the silken cords in her fingers, and ran a palm of the
daintiest hand I had ever seen over the shining barrel.
“I thought she might, with more creditable human sentiment, have had less
interest in my drum and more in me, but displayed my instrument with the
best grace I could command.
“‘Do you know why I am so interested?’ she asked in a little, looking at
me out of deep brown eyes in which I saw two little red-coated drummers,
a thing which gave me back my vanity and made me answer her only with a
smile. Her cheek for the first time reddened, and she hurried to
explain. ‘They are Kildalton’s drums. Mr Fraser of Kildalton was my
father, who is dead, and my mother is dead too; and I pleated and tied
these cords and tassels first. How beautifully you keep them!’
“‘Well, Miss Fraser,’ said I, ‘I assure you I could not keep them better
if I tried; but, after this, I shall have a better reason than ever for
keeping them at their best,’ a soldier’s speech she smiled at as she
turned away. As she went into the tall white house again she paused on
the threshold and looked back for a moment at me, smiling, and for the
first time since I took the bounty I rued my bargain, and thought I was
meant for something more dignified than drumming. From that hour I lived
in the eyes of Kildalton’s daughter Margory. Once a week we went fifing
and drumming through the square. She was on these occasions never absent
from her window; there was never a smile awanting for the smart young
gentleman who beat the silver drum. A second and a third time she came
into the square to speak to me. I made the most of my opportunities, and
she was speedily made to discover in the humble drummer a fellow of race
and education, a fellow with a touch of poetry, if you please. She was
an orphan, as I have indicated—the ward of an uncle, a general, at the
time abroad. She lived on the surviving fortune of Kildalton, in the
tall white house, with an elderly aunt and a servant. At our third
interview—we have a way of being urgent in the Army—she had trysted to
meet me that evening in the wood behind the town.
“Let me do the girl justice, and say that the drum of Kildalton brought
her there, and not the drummer. At least, she was at pains to tell me
so, for I had mentioned to her, with some of the gift of poetry I have
mentioned, how infinitely varied were the possibilities of an instrument
she would never have a proper chance to judge of in the routine of a
fife-and-drum parade.
“My billet was at the back of the town, on the verge of a wood, with the
window of my room opening on a sort of hunting-path that went winding
through the heart of what I have called a wood, but was in actual fact a
forest of considerable dimensions. I went out by the window that evening
with my drum, and walked, as had been arranged, about a mile among the
trees till I came to a narrow glen that cleft the hills, a burn of
shallow water from the peaty uplands bickering at the bottom of it. A
half moon swung like a halbert over the heights that were edged by
enormous fir-trees, and the wood was melancholy with the continuous call
of owls. They were soon silenced, for I began to play the silver drum.
“I began with the reveille, though it was a properer hour for the tattoo,
playing it lightly, so that while it silenced the hooting owls it did not
affright the whole forest. She came through the trees timidly, clothed,
as I remember, in a gown of green. She might have been the spirit of the
pine-plantings; she might have been a dryad charmed from the swinging
boughs. ‘Margory! Margory!’ I cried, my heart more noisy than my drum
had been, and clasped her to my arms. ‘Here’s a poor drummer, my dear,’
I said, ‘and you a queen. If you do not love me you were less cruel to
take this dirk and stab me to the heart than act the heartless coquette.’
“She faintly struggled. He hair fell loose in a lock or two from under
her hat, surged on her shoulder, and billowed about my lips. Her cheek
was warm; her eyes threw back the challenge of the silver moon over the
tops of pine.
“‘For a young gentleman from a kirk manse, Master Drummer, you have
considerable impertinence,’ said she, panting in my arms.
“‘My name, dear Margory, is George, as I have told you,’ I whispered, and
I kissed her.
“‘George, dear George,’ said she, ‘have done with folly! Let me hear the
drumming and go home.’
“I swung her father’s drum again before me and gave, in cataracts of
sound, or murmuring cascades, the sentiments of my heart.
“‘Wonderful! Oh, wonderful!’ she cried, entranced; so I played on.
“The moon went into a cloud; the glade of a sudden darkened; I ceased my
playing, swung the drum again behind, and turned for Margory.
“She was gone!
“I cried her name as I ran through the forest, but truly she was gone.”
Urquhart stopped his story and eagerly dashed some lines upon the clay.
“Pardon!” he said. “Just like that, for a moment. Ah! that is something
like it!”
“Well, well!” I cried. “And what followed?”
“I think—indeed, I know—she loved me, but—I went back to the war without
a single word from her again.”
“Oh, to the deuce with your story!” I cried at that, impatient. “I did
not bargain for a tragedy.”
“In truth it is something of a farce, as you shall discover in a moment,”
said the sculptor. “Next day the captain sent for me. ‘Do you know
General Fraser?’ said he, looking at a letter he held in his hand. I
told him I had not the honour. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘it looks as if the
family had a curious penchant for the drum, to judge from the fact that
his brother gave yours to the regiment, and also’—here he smiled
slyly—’from the interest of his niece. He is not an hour returned from
Spain to his native town when he asks me to send you with your drum to
his house at noon.’
“‘Very good, sir,’ I answered, with my heart thundering, and went out of
the room most hugely puzzled.
“I went at noon to the tall white house, and was shown into a room where
sat Margory, white to the lips, beside the window, out of which she
looked after a single hopeless glance at me. A middle-aged gentleman in
mufti, with an empty sleeve, stood beside her, and closely scrutinised
myself and my instrument as I entered.
“‘This is the—the person you have referred to?’ he asked her, and she
answered with a sob and an inclination of her head.
“‘You have come—you are reputed to have come of a respectable family,’ he
said then, addressing me; ‘you have studied at Edinburgh; you have, I am
told, some pretensions to being something of a gentleman.’
“‘I hope they are no pretensions, sir,’ I answered warmly. ‘My people
are as well known and as reputable as any in Argyll, though I should be
foolishly beating a drum.’
“‘Very good,’ said he, in no way losing his composure. ‘I can depend on
getting the truth from you, I suppose? You were with the 71st as drummer
at Ciudad Rodrigo?’
“‘I was, sir,’ I replied. ‘Also at Badajos, at Talavera, Busaco—’
“‘An excellent record!’ he interrupted. ‘I might have learned all about
it later had not my wound kept me two months in hospital after Ciudad.
By the way, you remember being sent as drummer with a picket of men down
a lane?’
“I started, gave a careful look at him, and recognised the General whose
life I had doubtless saved from the pillaging Portuguese.
“‘I do, sir,’ I answered. ‘It was you yourself who sent me.’
“He turned with a little air of triumph to Margory. ‘I told you so, my
dear,’ said he. ‘I got but a distant glimpse of him this forenoon, and
thought I could not be mistaken.’ And Margory sobbed.
“‘My lad,’ he said, visibly restraining some emotion, ‘I could ask your
drum-major to take the cords of Kildalton my brother’s drum and whip you
out of a gallant corps. I sent you with a picket—a brave lad, as I
thought any fellow should be who played Kildalton’s drum, and you came
back a snivelling poltroon. Nay—nay!’ he cried, lifting up his hand and
checking my attempt at an explanation. ‘You came out of that infernal
lane whimpering like a child, after basely deserting your comrades of the
picket, and made the mutilated condition of your drum the excuse for
refusing my order to go back again, and I, like a fool, lost a limb in
showing you how to do your duty.’
“‘But, General—’ I cried out.
“‘Be off with you!’ he cried. ‘Another word, and I shall have you
thrashed at the triangle.’
“He fairly thrust me from the room, and the last I heard was Margory’s
sobbing.
“Next day I was packed off to the regimental depot, and some weeks later
played a common drum at Salamanca.”
* * * * *
The sculptor rubbed the clay from his hands and took off his overall.
“That will do to-day, I think,” said he. “I am much better pleased than
I was yesterday,” and he looked at his work with satisfaction.
“But the story, my dear Mr Urquhart. You positively must give me its
conclusion!” I demanded.
“Why in the world should that not be its conclusion?” said he, drawing a
wet sheet over the bust. “Would you insist on the hackneyed happy
ending?”
“I am certain you did not take your quittance from the General in that
way. You surely wrote to Margory or to him with an explanation?”
The sculptor smiled.
“Wrote!” cried he. “Do you think that so obvious an idea would not occur
to me? But reflect again, I pray you, on the circumstances,—an obscure
and degraded drummer—the daughter of one of the oldest families in the
Highlands—the damning circumstantiality of her uncle’s evidence of my
alleged poltroonery. My explanation was too incredible for pen and
paper; and the poltroon himself, the man who had brought the disgrace
upon me, was beyond my identification, even had I known where to look for
him.”
“And yet, Mr Urquhart,” I insisted, all my instincts as romancer assuring
me of some other conclusion to a tale that had opened on a note so
cheerful, “I feel sure it was neither a tragedy nor a farce in the
long-run.”
“Well, you are right,” he confessed, smiling. “It was my drum that lost
me the lady before ever I met her, as it were, and it was but fair that
my drum should be the means of my recovering her ten years later. A
reshuffling of the cards of fortune in my family brought me into a
position where I was free to adopt the career of Art, and by-and-by I had
a studio of my own in Edinburgh. It was the day of the portrait bust in
marble. To have one’s own effigy in white, paid for by one’s own self,
in one’s own hall, was, in a way, the fad of fashionable Edinburgh. It
was profitable for the artist, I admit, but—but—”
“But it palled,” I suggested.
“Beyond belief! I grew to hate the appearance of every fresh client, and
it was then that I sought the solace of this drum. When a sitter had
gone for the day I drummed the vexation out of me, feeling that without
some such relief I could never recover a respect for myself. And
by-and-by I began to discover in the instrument something more than a
relief for my feelings of revolt against the commercial demands on my
art. I found in it an inspiration to rare emotions: I found in it
memory. I found, in the reveilles and chamades that I played in fields
of war and in the forest to my Marjory, love revived and mingled with a
sweet regret, and from these—memory, regret, and love—I fashioned what
have been my most successful sculptures.
“One day a gentleman came with a commission for his own portrait. It was
General Fraser! Of course, he did not recognise me. Was it likely he
should guess that the popular sculptor and the lad he had sent in
disgrace from the tall white house in the distant Highland burgh town
were one? Nor did I at first reveal myself. Perhaps, indeed, he would
never have discovered my identity had not his eyes fallen on my drum.
“‘You have had a military subject lately?’ he said, indicating the
instrument.
“‘No, General,’ I answered on an impulse. ‘That is a relic of some years
of youthful folly when I played Kildalton’s silver drum, and it serves to
solace my bachelor solitude.’
“‘Heavens!’ he cried; ‘you, then, are the drummer of Ciudad Rodrigo?’
“‘The same,’ I answered, not without a bitterness. ‘But a very different
man from the one you imagine.’ And then I told my story. He listened in
a curious mingling of apparent shame, regret, and pleasure, and when I
had ended was almost piteous in his plea for pardon. ‘The cursed thing
is,’ he said, that Margory maintains your innocence till this very day.’
“That she should have that confidence in me,’ said I, ‘is something of a
compensation for the past ten years. I trust Miss Margory—I trust your
niece is well.’
“The General pondered for a moment, then made a proposition.
“‘I think, Mr Urquhart,’ said he, ‘that a half-winged old man is but a
poor subject for any sculptor’s chisel, and, with your kind permission, I
should prefer to have a portrait of Miss Margory, whom I can swear you
will find quite worthy of your genius.’
“And so,” said Urquhart in conclusion, “and so, indeed, she was.”
“There is but one _dénouement_ possible,” I said with profound
conviction, and, as I said it, a bar of song rose in the garden, serene
and clear and unexpected like the first morning carol of a bird in
birchen shaws. Then the door of the studio flung open, and the singer
entered, with the melody checked on her lips whenever she saw the
unexpected stranger. She had hair the colour of winter bracken in
sunshine, and the merriest smile.
“My daughter Margory,” said the sculptor. “Tell your mother,” he added,
“that I bring our friend to luncheon.”