All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either
side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira
and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west,
full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the
rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the
rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road
by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with the broken blossom.
The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside
the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes
under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon
their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions,
the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing
melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the
wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears
of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but
unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun
shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of
the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the
laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster
in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the
garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs
its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her
richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the
stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowers
they would not pluck. Sometimes they will put a cap on the side of a
cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grinning face will
create a moment’s laughter, but it is soon checked and they walk among
the graves in a more seemly peace.
They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside
her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the
coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it.
The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people
moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook
a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a
table tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times
before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him
anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love
or merriment.
The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily,
and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster’s dram at the “lifting”
at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old
Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times
before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge,
except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day
bring the massive masonry down. “Ha! ha! is that not good?” demanded the
Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. “I told him he
would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he
would be first.”
The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with
vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the
box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by
Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the
sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was
Colonel.
“I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt,” said Mr. William
Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make
his way among the people here, “It is quite the style, quite the style,
sir.”
“Do you think so, now?” asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment.
“I do, indeed,” said Mr. Spencer, “it is very genteel and just as the
gentry like it.”
The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye.
“Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer,” he asked, “with any idea of
making distinctions? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do
not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years
and I am the first man-of-business in the family.”
The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man! he had much to learn of Highland
punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he
had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee’d gun
that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far
behind them, alone on the top of the bridge.
“Is there no one with the boy?” he asked. “And where is he to stay now
that his grandmother is dead?”
The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to
himself.
“Am not I the _golan_?” said he. “I forgot about the fellow, and I told
the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I’m
putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It
must be seen to, it must be seen to.”
Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way
he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed.
“Oh,” said he, “Jean Clerk’s a relative; he’ll be going to bide there.”
They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with
his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass
button would burst with a crack like a gun; Rixa puffing and stretching
himself; Major Dugald ducking his head and darting his glance about from
side to side looking for the enemy; Mr. Spencer, tall, thin, with the
new strapped breeches and a London hat, blowing his nose with much noise
in a Barcelona silk handkerchief. All the way before them the crowd went
straggling down in blacks with as much hurry as the look of the thing
would permit, to reach the schoolhouse where the Paymaster had laid out
the last service of meat and drink for the mourners. The tide was out;
a sandy beach strewn with stones and clumps of seaweed gave its saline
odour to the air; lank herons came sweeping down from the trees over
Croitivile, and stalked about the water’s edge. There was only one sound
in nature beyond the soughing of the wind in the shrubbery of the Duke’s
garden, it was the plaintive call of a curlew as it flew over the stable
park. A stopped and stagnant world, full of old men and old plaints, the
dead of the yard behind, the solemn and sleepy town before.
The boy was the only person left in the rear of the Paymaster and his
friends; he was standing on the bridge, fair in the middle of the way.
Though the Paymaster cried he was not heard, so he walked back and up to
the boy while the others went on their way to the schoolhouse, where old
Brooks the dominie was waiting among the jars and oatcakes and funeral
biscuits with currants and carvie in them.
Gilian was standing with the weepers off his cuffs and the crape off his
bonnet; he had divested himself of the hateful things whenever he found
himself alone, and he was listening with a rapt and inexpressive face to
the pensive call of the curlew as it rose over the fields, and the tears
were dropping down his cheeks.
“Oh, _‘ille_, what’s the matter with you?” asked the Paymaster in
Gaelic, struck that sorrow should so long remain with a child.
Gilian started guiltily, flushed to the nape of his neck and stammered
an explanation or excuse.
“The bird, the bird!” said he, turning and looking at the dolorous piper
of the marsh.
“Man!” said the Paymaster in English, looking whimsically at this
childish expression of surprise. “Man! you’re a queer callant too. Are
there no curlews about Ladyfield that you should be in such a wonder at
this one? Just a plain, long-nebbed, useless bird, not worth powder
and shot, very douce in the plumage, and always at the same song like
MacNicol the Major.”
The little fellow broke into a stammering torrent of Gaelic. “What does
it say, what does it say?” he asked: “it is calling, calling, calling,
and no one will answer it; it is telling something, and I cannot
understand. Oh, I am sorry for it, and----”
“You must be very hungry, poor boy,” said the Paymaster. “Come away
down, and Miss Mary will give you dinner. Did you ever taste rhubarb
tart with cream to it? I have seen you making umbrellas with the rhubarb
up the glen, but I’m sure the goodwife did not know the real use of it.”
Gilian paid no heed to the speaker, but listened with streaming eyes to
the wearied note of the bird that still cried over the field. Then the
Paymaster swore a fiery oath most mildly, and clutched the boy by the
jacket sleeve and led him homeward.
“Come along,” said he, “come along. You’re the daftest creature ever
came out of the glen, and what’s the wonder of it, born and bred among
stirks and sheep on a lee-lone country-side with only the birds to speak
to?”
The two went down the road together, the Paymaster a little wearied with
his years and weight or lazied by his own drams, leaning in the
least degree upon the shoulder of the boy. They made an odd-looking
couple--dawn and the declining day, Spring and ripe Autumn, illusion and
an elderly half-pay officer in a stock and a brown scratch wig upon a
head that would harbour no more the dreams, the poignancies of youth.
Some of the mourners hastening to their liquor turned at the Cross and
looked up the road to see if they were following, and they were struck
vaguely by the significance of the thing.
“Dear me,” said the Fiscal, “is not Old Mars getting very bent and
ancient?”
“He is, that!” said Rixa, who was Sheriff Maclachlan to his face. “I
notice a glass or two makes a wonderful difference on him this year back
ever since he had his little bit towt. That’s a nice looking boy; I like
the aspect of him; it’s unusual. What a pity the Paymaster never had a
wife or sons of his own.”
“You say what is very true, Sheriff,” said Mr. Spencer. “I think there
is something very sad in the spectacle, sir, of an old gentleman with
plenty of the world in his possession going down to the bourne with not
a face beside him to mind of his youth.”
But indeed the Paymaster was not even reminded of his own youth by
this queer child on whom he leaned. He had never been like this, a shy
frightened dreaming child taken up with fancies and finding omens and
stories in the piping of a fowl. Oh! no, he had been a bluff, hearty,
hungry boy, hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a
bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy
beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sister
Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever
girl, with a nerve that a harsh word set thrilling.
“Did Jean Clerk say anything about where you are to sleep to-night?” he
asked him, still speaking the Gaelic in which he knew the little fellow
was most at home.
“I suppose I’ll just stay in my own bed in Lady-field,” said Gilian,
apparently little exercised by the thought of his future, and dividing
some of his attention to the Paymaster with the sounds and sights of
nature by the way, the thrust of the bracken crook between the crannies
of the Duke’s dykes, the gummy buds of the limes and chestnuts, the
straw-gathering birds on the road, the heron so serenely stalking on the
shore, and the running of the tiny streams upon the beach that smoked
now in the heat of the sun.
The Paymaster seemed confounded. He swelled his neck more fully in the
stock, cleared his throat with a loud noise, took a great pinch of
snuff from his waistcoat pocket and spent a long time in disposing of it
Gilian was in a dream far off from the elderly companion and the smoking
shore; his spirit floated over the glen and sometimes farther still,
among the hill gorges that were always so full of mystery to him, or
farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities,
towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings
were, in the tales the shepherds told about the peat fires on _ceilidh_
nights.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep in the town tonight,” said the
Paymaster, at last somewhat relieved of his confusion by the boy’s
indifference; “the truth is we are shutting up Ladyfield for a little.
You could not stay alone in it at any rate, and did Jean Clerk not
arrange that you were to stay with her after this?”
“No,” said Gilian simply, even yet getting no grasp of his homelessness.
“And where are you going to stay?” asked the Paymaster testily.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.
The Paymaster spoke in strange words under his breath and put on a
quicker pace and went through the town, even past the schoolhouse,
where old Brooks stood at the door in his long surtout saying a
Latin declension over to himself as if it were a song, and into the
Crosshouses past the tanned women standing with their hands rolled up
in their aprons, and up to Jean Clerk’s door. He rapped loudly with his
rattan. He rapped so loudly that the inmates knew this was no common
messenger, and instead of crying out their invitation they came together
and opened the door. The faces of the sisters grew rosy red at the sight
of the man and the boy before him.
“Come away in, Captain,” said Jean, assuming an air of briskness the
confusion of her face belied. “Come away in, I am proud to see you at my
door.”
The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but
refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled
English.
“Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you?” he asked.
“I did, that!” said Jean Clerk, lifting her brattie and preparing to
weep, “and it’ll be the last time I’ll ever be inside its hospitable
door.”
“And you gave the key to Cameron the shepherd?”
“I did,” said Jean, wondering what was to come next.
The Paymaster changed his look and his accent, and spoke again with
something of a pawky humour that those who knew him best were well aware
was a sign that his temper was at its worst.
“Ay,” said he, “and you forgot about the boy. What’s to be done with
him? I suppose you would leave him to rout with the kye he was bred
among, or haunt the rocks with the sheep. I was thinking myself coming
down the road there, and this little fellow with me without a friend in
the world, that the sky is a damp ceiling sometimes, and the grass of
the field a poor meal for a boy’s stomach. Eh! what say you, Mistress
Clerk?” And the old soldier heaved a thumbful of snuff from his
waistcoat pocket.
“The boy’s no kith nor kin of mine,” said Jean Clerk, “except a very
far-out cousin’s son.” She turned her face away from both of them and
pretended to be very busy folding up her plaid, which, as is well known,
can only be done neatly with the aid of the teeth and thus demands some
concealment of the face. The sister passed behind the Paymaster and the
boy and startled the latter with a sly squeeze of the wrist as she did
so.
“Do you tell me, my good woman,” demanded the Paymaster, “that you would
set him out on the road homeless on so poor an excuse as that? Far-out
cousin here or far-out cousin there, he has no kin closer than yourself
between the two stones of the parish. Where’s your Hielan’ heart,
woman?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my heart, Captain Campbell,” said Jean
tartly, “but my pocket’s empty. If you think the boy’s neglected you
have a house of your own to take him into; it would be all the better
for a young one in it, and you have the money to spend that Jean Clerk
has not.” All this with a very brave show of spirit, but with something
uncommonly moist about the eyes.
The Paymaster, still clutching the boy at the shoulder, turned on his
heel to go, but a side glance at Jean Clerk’s face again showed him
something different from avarice or anger.
“You auld besom you!” said he, dunting the floor with his rattan, “I see
through you now; you think you’ll get him put off on me. I suppose if I
refused to take him in, you would be the first to make of him.”
The woman laughed through her tears. “Oh, but you are the gleg-eyed
one, Captain. You may be sure I would not see my cousin’s grandchild
starving, and I’ll not deny I put him in your way, because I never knew
a Campbell of Kiels, one of the old bold race, who had not a kind heart
for the poor, and I thought you and your sister could do better than two
old maiden women in a garret could do by him.”
“You randy!” said he, “and that’s the way you would portion your poor
relations about the countryside. As if I had not plenty of poor friends
of my own! And what in all the world am I to make of the youth?”
“You’ll have nothing to do with the making of him, Captain Campbell,”
said Jean Clerk, now safe and certain that the boy’s future was assured.
“It’ll be Miss Mary will have the making of him, and I ken the lady well
enough--with my humble duty to her--to know she’ll make him a gentleman
at the very least.”
“Tuts,” said the Paymaster, “Sister Mary’s like the rest of you; she
would make a milksop of the boy if I was foolish enough to take him home
to her. He’ll want smeddum and manly discipline; that’s the stuff to
make the soldier. The uneasy bed to sleep on, the day’s task to be done
to the uttermost. I’ll make him the smartest ensign ever put baldrick
on--that’s if I was taking him in hand,” he added hastily, realising
from the look of the woman that he was making a complete capitulation.
“And of course you’ll take him, Captain Campbell,” cried Jean Clerk in
triumph. “I’m sure you would sooner take him and make a soldier of him
than leave him with me--though before God he was welcome--to grow up
harvester or herd.”
The Paymaster took a ponderous snuff, snorted, and went off down the
stair with the boy still by the hand, the boy wide-eyed wondering,
unable to realise very clearly whether he was to be made a soldier or a
herd there and then. And when the door closed behind them Jean Clerk and
her sister sat down and wept and laughed in a curious mingling of sorrow
and joy--sorrow that the child had to be turned from their door and out
of their lives with even the pretence at inhospitality, and joy that
their device had secured for him a home and future more comfortable than
the best their straitened circumstances could afford.