The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper
flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to
an honest merchant whose regular payment of his rent did not prevent the
Paymaster, every time he stepped through the close, from dunting with
his cane on the stones with the insolence of a man whose birth and his
father’s acres gave him a place high above such as earned their living
behind a counter.
“There you are, Sandy!” he would call, “doing no trade as usual; you’ll
not have sold a parcel of pins or a bolt of tape to-day, I suppose.
Where am I to get my rent, I wonder, next Martinmas?”
The merchant would remonstrate. “I’ve done very well to-day, Captain,”
he would say. “I have six bolls of meal and seven yards of wincey going
up the glen in the Salachary cart.”
“Pooh, pooh, what’s that to the time of war? I’ll tell you this, Sandy,
I’ll have to roup out for my rent yet.” And by he would sail, as red in
the face as a bubbly-jock, swelling his neck over his stock more largely
than ever, and swinging his rattan by its tassel or whacking with it on
his calves, satisfied once more to have put this merchant-body in his
own place.
To-day he paid no heed to the merchant, when, having just keeked in at
the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a
minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. “I’m going
to leave you with my sister Mary,” he explained. “You’ll think her
a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a
well-meaning creature.”
Gilian thought no one could be more droll than this old man himself.
Before indifferent to him, he had, in the past hour, grown to be afraid
of him as a new mysterious agent who had his future in his hands. And
to go up the stairs of this great high house, with its myriad windows
looking out upon the busiest part of the street, and others gazing
over the garden and the sea, was an experience new and bewildering. The
dwelling abounded in lobbies and corridors, in queer corners where the
gloom lurked, and in doors that gave glimpses of sombre bedsteads and
high-backed austere chairs, of china painted with the most wonderful
designs (loot of the old Indian palaces), of swords and sabretaches hung
on walls, and tables polished to such degree that they reflected their
surroundings.
They went into a parlour with its window open, upon the window-sill a
pigeon mourning among pots of wallflowers and southernwood that filled
the entering air with sweetness. A room with thin-legged chairs, with
cupboards whose lozens gave view to punch-bowls and rummers and silver
ladles, a room where the two brothers would convene at night while John
was elsewhere, and in a wan candle light sit silent by the hour before
cooling spirits, musing on other parlours elsewhere in which spurs had
jingled under the board, musing on comrades departed. It was hung around
with dark pictures in broad black frames, for the most part pictures
of battles, “Fontenoy,” “Stemming the Rout at Steinkirk,” “Blenheim
Field,” and--a new one--“Vittoria.” There were pictures of men too, all
with soldier collars high upon the nape of the neck, and epaulettes on
their shoulders, whiskered, keen-eyed young men--they were the brothers
in their prime when girls used to look after them as they went by
on their horses. And upon the mantlebrace, flanked by tall silver
candlesticks, was an engraving of John, Duke of Argyll, Field-Marshal.
“Look at that man there,” said the Paymaster, pointing to the noble and
arrogant head between the candles, “that was a soldier’s soldier. There
is not his like in these days. If you should take arms for your king,
boy, copy the precept and practice of Duke John. I myself modelled me
on his example, and that, mind you, calls for dignity and valour and
education and every manly part and----”
“Is that you blethering away in there, John?” cried a high female voice
from the spence.
The Paymaster’s voice surrendered half its confidence and pride, for
he never liked to be found vaunting before his sister, who knew his
qualities and had a sense of irony.
“Ay! it’s just me, Mary,” he cried back, hastening to the door. “I have
brought a laddie up here to see you.”
“It would be wiser like to bring me a man,” cried the lady, coming into
the room. “I’m wearied of washing sheets and blankets for a corps of
wrunkled old brothers that have no gratitude for my sisterly slavery.
Keep me! who’s _ballachan_ is that?”
She was a little thin woman, of middle age, with a lowland cap of lace
that went a little oddly with the apron covering the front of the merino
gown from top to toe. She had eyes like sloes, and teeth like pearls
that gleamed when she smiled, and by constant trying to keep herself
from smiling at things, she had worn two lines up and down between her
eyebrows. A dear fond heart, a darling hypocrite, a foolish bounteous
mother-soul without chick or child of her own, and yet with tenement for
the loves of a large family. She fended, and mended, and tended for her
soldier brothers, and they in the selfish blindness of their sex never
realised her devotion. They sat, and over punch would talk of war, and
valour, and devotion, and never thought that here, within their very
doors, was a constant war in their behalf against circumstances, in
their interest an unending valour that kept the little woman bustling on
her feet, and shrewd-eyed over her stew-pans, while weariness and pain
itself, and the hopeless unresponse and ingratitude of the surroundings,
rendered her more appropriate place between the bed-sheets.
“What _ballachan_ is this?” she asked, relaxing the affected acidity of
her manner and smoothing out the lines upon her brow at the sight of
the little fellow in a rough kilt, standing in a shy unrest upon the
spotless drugget of her parlour floor. She waited no answer, but went
forward as she spoke, as one who would take all youth to her heart, put
a hand on his head and stroked his fair hair. It was a touch wholly
new to the boy; he had never felt before that tingling feeling that a
woman’s hand, in love upon his head, sent through all his being. At the
message of it, the caress of it, he shivered and looked up at her face
in surprise.
“What do you think of him, Mary?” asked the brother. “Not a very stout
chap, I think, but hale enough, and if you stuck his head in a pail of
cream once a day you might put meat on him. He’s the _oe_ from Ladyfield;
surely you might know him even with his boots on.”
“Dear, dear,” she said; “you’re the Gilian I never saw but at a
distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield.
O little hero, am I not sorry for the goodwife? You have come for your
pick of the dinner----”
“Do you think we could make a soldier of him?” broke in the Paymaster,
carrying his rattan like a sword and throwing back his shoulders.
“A soldier!” she said, casting a shrewd glance at the boy in a red
confusion. “We might make a decenter man of him. Weary be on the
soldiering! I’m looking about the country-side and I see but a horde of
lameter privatemen and half-pay officers maimed in limb or mind sitting
about the dram bottle, hoved up with their vain-glory, blustering and
blowing, instead of being honest, eident lairds and farmers. I never saw
good in a soldier yet, except when he was away fighting and his name
was in the _Courier_ as dead or wounded. Soldiers, indeed! sitting
round there in the Sergeant More’s tavern, drinking, and roaring, and
gossiping like women--that I should miscall my sex! No, no, if I had a
son----
“Well, well, Mary,” said the Paymaster, breaking in again upon this
tirade, “here’s one to you. If you’ll make the man of him I’ll try to
make him the soldier.”
She understood in a flash! “And is he coming here?” she asked in an
accent the most pleased and motherly. A flush came over her cheeks and
her eyes grew and danced. It was as if some rare new thought had come
to her, a sentiment of poetry, the sound of a forgotten strain of once
familiar song.
“I’m sure I am very glad,” she said simply. She took the boy by the
hand, she led him into the kitchen, she cried “Peggy, Peggy,” and when
her servant appeared she said, “Here’s our new young gentleman, Peggy,”
and stroked his hair again, and Peggy smiled widely and looked about for
something to give him, and put a bowl of milk to his lips.
“Tuts!” cried Miss Mary, “it’s not a calf we have; we will not spoil his
dinner. But you may skim it and give him a cup of cream.”
The Paymaster, left in the parlour among the prints of war and warriors,
stood a moment with his head bent and his fingers among the snuff
listening to the talk of the kitchen that came along the spence and
through the open doors.
“She’s a queer body, Mary,” said he to himself, “but she’s taking to the
brat I think--oh yes, she’s taking to him.” And then he hurried down
the stair and up round the church corner to the schoolhouse where the
company, wearied waiting on his presence, were already partaking of his
viands. It was a company to whom the goodwife of Ladyfield, the quiet
douce widow, had been more or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this
occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on. They were there not
so much mourners as the guests of Captain Campbell, nigh on a dozen
of half-pay officers who had escaped the shambles of Europe, with the
merchants of the place, and some of the farmers of the glen, the banker,
the Sheriff, the Fiscal and the writers of whom the town has ever had
more than a fair share. Dr. Colin had blessed the viands and gone away;
he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views
about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts
had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of
relief, and old Baldy Bain, “Copenhagen” as they called him, who was
precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his
glass up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the
presence of the clergyman. The food and drink were spread on two
long tables; the men stood round or sat upon the forms their children
occupied in school hours. The room was clamant with the voices of the
company. Gathered in groups, they discussed everything under heaven
except the object of their meeting--the French, the sowing, the
condition of the hogs, the Duke’s approaching departure for London, the
storm, the fishing. They wore their preposterous tall hats on the backs
of their heads with the crape bows over the ears, they lifted up the
skirts of their swallow-tail coats and hung them on their arms with
their hands in their breeches pockets. And about them was the odour
of musty, mildewed broadcloth, taken out of damp presses only on such
occasions.
Mr. Spencer, standing very straight and tall and thin, so that his
trousers at the foot strained tightly at the straps under his insteps,
looked over the assembly, and with a stranger’s eye could not but be
struck by its oddity. He was seeing--lucky man to have the chance!--the
last of the old Highland burgh life and the raw beginnings of the
new; he was seeing the real _doaine-uasail_, gentry of ancient family,
colloguing with the common merchants whose day was coming in; he was
seeing the embers of the war in a grey ash, officers, merchants, bonnet
lairds, and tenants now safe and snug and secure in their places because
the old warriors had fought Boney. The schoolroom was perfumed with the
smoke of peat, for it was the landward pupils’ week of the fuelling,
and they were accustomed to bring each his own peat under his arm every
morning. The smoke swirled and eddied out into the room and hung about
the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of
Europe over the fireplace. Looking at this map and sipping now and then
a glass of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself
“Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” He wore a queue tied with a broad
black ribbon that reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his
attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man himself was little more
than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died
of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is
still upon his peninsula.
“You are at your studies?” said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side
with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for
the son of a plain Portioner of Glen Shira who was to be seen any day
coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather
emptily in front of his kilt.
Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper.
“I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer,” said he, “I
know it by heart--all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut
my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some
of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I’m but
looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria,
Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black
dots no more ken-speckle than the township of Camus up the glen. Wars,
wars, bloody wars! have we indeed got to the last of them?”
“Indeed I hope so, sir,” said the innkeeper, “for my wife has become
very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the
rejoicings, and if every war set a woman’s mind running to extravagance
in clothing, the fewer we have the better.”
“If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas! it’s my fate to have lost
mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the
colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General?”
He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies *
because it was the fashion of the country, but never ate nor drank at
them.
* Dregy: The Scots equivalent of the old English _Dirge-
ale_, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon
in the office for the dead, “_Dirige, Domine meus_,”
“You were speaking, General Turner?” said Campbell.
Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its motto “_Tu ne cede
malis_,” and smiled blandly, as he always did when it was brought to his
recollection that he had won more than soldiers’ battles when the odds
against him were three to one.
“I was just telling Mr. Spencer that Waterloo looks like being the last
of the battles, General, and that one bit of Brooks’ map here is just
as well known to some of us as the paths and woods and waters of Glen
Shira.”
“I’m not very well acquaint with Glen Shira myself,” was all the General
said, looking at the map for a moment with eyes that plainly had no
interest in the thing before them, and then he turned to a nudge of the
Paymaster’s arm.
Turner smiled again knowingly to Mr. Spencer. “I put my brogues in it
that time,” said he in a discreet tone. “I forgot that the old gentleman
and his brothers were far better acquaint with Glen Shira in my wife’s
maiden days than I was myself. But that’s an old story, Mr. Spencer,
that you are too recent an incomer to know the shades and meanings of.”
“I daresay, sir, I daresay,” said Mr. Spencer gravely. “You are a most
interesting and sensitive people, and I find myself often making the
most unhappy blunders.”
“Interesting is not the word, I think, Mr. Spencer,” said General Turner
coldly; “we refuse to be interesting to any simple Sassenach.” Then he
saw the confusion in the innkeeper’s face and laughed. “Upon my word,”
he said, “here I’m as touchy as a bard upon a mere phrase. This is very
good drink, Mr. Spencer; your purveyance, I suppose?”
“I had the privilege, sir,” said the innkeeper. “Captain Campbell gave
the order----”
“Captain Campbell!” said the General, putting down his glass and
drinking no more. “I was not aware that he was at the costs of this
dregy. Still, no matter, you’ll find the Campbells a good family to have
dealings with of any commercial kind, pernick-etty and proud a bit, like
all the rest of us, with their bark worse than their bite.”
“I find them quite the gentlemen,” said the innkeeper.
Turner laughed again.
“Man!” said he, “take care you do not put your compliment just exactly
that way to them; you might as well tell Dr. Colin he was a surprisingly
good Christian.”
Old Brooks, out of sheer custom, sat on the high stool at his desk and
hummed his declensions to himself, or the sing-song _Arma virumque cano_
that was almost all his Latin pupils remembered of his classics when
they had left school. The noise of the assembly a little distressed him;
at times he would fancy it was his scholars who were clamouring before
him, and he checked on his lips a high peremptory challenge for silence,
flushing to think how nearly he had made himself ridiculous. From his
stool he could see over the frosted glass of the lower window sash into
the playground where it lay bathed in a yellow light, and bare-legged
children played at shinty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a
little wooden ball. The town’s cows were wandering in for the night
from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide
petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked
well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road
overhung with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering
through in lighter splashes on the shade. Within, the drink was running
to its dregs, and piles of oatcake farls lay yet untouched. One by
one the company departed. The glen folks solemnly shook hands with
the Paymaster, as donor of the feast, and subdued their faces to a sad
regret for this “melancholy occasion, Captain Campbell”; then went over
to the taverns in the tenements and kept up their drinking and their
singing till late in the evening; the merchants and writers had gone
earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer,
superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The
afternoon was sinking into the calm it ever has in this place, drowsing,
mellowing; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners,
gathered at the head of the schoolroom near the door, seemed silent as
his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and
kept it up with his head while he surveyed the interior. Grammars and
copy-books, pens in long tin boxes, the terrible black tawse he never
used but reluctantly, and the confiscated playthings of the children who
had been guilty of encroaching upon the hours of study with the trifles
of leisure, were heaped within. They were for the most part the common
toys of the country-side, and among them was a whistle made of young
ash, after the fashion practised by children, who tap upon the bark to
release it from its wood, slip off the bark entire upon its sap, and cut
the vent or blow-hole. Old Brooks took it in his hand and a smile went
over his visage.
“General Turner,” he cried up the room, “here’s an oddity I would like
to show you,” and he balanced the pipe upon his long fingers, and the
smile played about his lips as he looked at it.
Turner came up, and “A whistle,” said he. “What’s the story?”
“Do you know who owns it?” asked Brooks.
“Sandy, I suppose,” said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his
only son. “At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and
this may very well be the rogue’s contrivance.” He took the pipe in hand
and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. “Man,” said he, “that
makes me young again! I wish I was still at the age when that would
pipe me to romance.”
The schoolmaster smiled still. “It is not Master Sandy’s,” said he.
“Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made
it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the
time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer.”
“Ah! the witch!” cried the General, his face showing affection and
annoyance. “That’s the most hoyden jade I’m sure you ever gave the
ferule to.”
“I never did that,” said the schoolmaster.
“Well, at least she’s the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not
more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it
off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling
wretch ever kept a sergeant’s section of lovers at her skirts. I
wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high
schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some
sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the
meadow.”
Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a
moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the
moor-fowl pipes in spring. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “It is all,
my General, we get from life and knowledge--a very thin and apparently
meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of
us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not
so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of
the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden
whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General,
is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn
my fees and Queen Anne’s Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what
your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by
my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one
mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that’s the music that may
be inopportune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an
ashen stick made by the performer during the morning’s sacred exercise.”
The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old
Brooks was doing, and among them was the Paymaster. He was redder in the
face than ever, and his wig was almost off his head, it was so slewed
aside.
“Giving the General a lesson?” he asked with some show at geniality. He
leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he
leaned on he had placed many a shilling as Candlemas and Han’sel Monday
offerings when he was a schoolboy, before the farming, before the army
and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house
up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee-lone homester among her
wanderers returned.
“I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan,” said
Old Brooks pleasantly. “A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I assure
you.”
“Oh! I have heard of her,” said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of
maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with
the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was
insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very
hotly.
“And you have heard of a very handsome little lady,” said he,
“remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted
daughter.”
The Paymaster had an unpleasant little laugh that when he chose he could
use with the sting of a whip though accompanied by never a word. He
flicked the surplus of his snuff from his stock and gave this annoying
little laugh, but he did not allow it to go unaccompanied, for he had
overheard the General’s speech to Mr. Spencer.
“No doubt she’s all you say or think,” said he dryly, “I’m sure I’m no
judge, but there’s a rumour abroad that she’s a big handful. A want of
discipline perhaps, no more than that--”
“You know the old saying, Captain,” said the General, “bachelors’ bairns
are aye well trained.”
The Paymaster started in a temper, and “I have a son,” said he,
“and----”
The General smiled with meaning.
“----A son; at least I’ll make him that, and I’ll show you something of
training!”
Turner smiled anew, with a mock little bow and a wave of the fingers, a
trick picked up abroad and maddening in its influence on a man with the
feeling that it meant he was too small to have words with.
“I’ll train him--I’ll train him to hate your very name,” said the
Paymaster with an oath.
“I’m obliged for your cake and wine,” said the General, still smiling,
“and I wish you all good day.” He lifted his hat and bowed and left the
room.
“This is a most unfortunate contretemps,” said Brooks, all trembling.
“If I had thought a little whistle, a mere _tibia_ of ash, had power to
precipitate this unlucky and unseemly belligerence I would never have
opened my desk.”
The great bell upon the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an
acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer
boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the
clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up
the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street
was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves, so that even in the
schoolroom the ear throbbed to the loud proclamation. Into the avenue
streamed the schools of crows from their wanderings on the braes of
Shira, and the children ceased their shinty play and looked up at the
flying companies, and called a noisy song--
“Crow, crow, fly away home,
Your fires are out and your children gone.”
“That’s a most haughty up-setting crew, and the queue-haired rover the
worst of the lot!” said the Paymaster, still red and angry. “What I
say’s true, Brooks; it’s true I tell you! You’ll not for your life put
it out of the boy’s head when you have the teaching of him; he must hate
the Turners like poison. Mind that now, mind that now!”
And turning quickly on his heels, the Paymaster went out of the
schoolroom.