Gilian, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary’s room. She gave him
soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut
for him the tenderest portions of the hen; she gave him most generously
of cheese--not the plain skim-milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the
leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made
of the overnight and morning’s milk, poured cream and all into the
yearning-tub. And as she served him, her tongue went constantly upon
themes of many varieties, but the background of them all, the conclusion
of them all, was the greatness of her brothers. Ah! she was a strange
little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly
displayed to its object is an affection discreditable.
“You will go far,” said she to Gilian, “before you will come on finer
men. They are getting old and done, but once I knew them tall and strong
and strapping, not their equals in all the armies. And what they have
seen of wars, my dear! They were ever going or coming from them, and
sometimes I would not know where they were out in the quarrelsome world
but for a line in the _Saturday Post_ or the _Courier_ or maybe an old
hint in the General Almanack itself. Perhaps when you become acquainted
with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at
any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life
and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them
nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light-footed laddies, running about
the pastures there gallivanting with the girls. But that, my dear, was
long ago, and I feel myself the old woman indeed when I see them so
stiff and solemn sitting in there over their evening glass.”
“I have never seen them; were they at the funeral?” asked Gilian, his
interest roused in such survivals of the past.
“That they were,” said Miss Mary; “a funeral now is their only
recreation. But perhaps you would not know them because they are not at
all like the Captain. He was a soldier too, in a way, but they were the
ancient warriors. Come into the room here and I will show you, if you
have finished your dinner.”
Gilian went with her into the parlour again among the prints and the
hanging swords, that now he knew the trade and story of the men who sat
among them, were imbued with new interests.
Miss Mary pointed to the portraits. “That was Colin and Dugald before
they went away the second time,” she said. “We had one of James too---he
died at Corunna--but it was the only one, and we gave it to a lady of
the place who was chief with him before he went away, and dwined a great
deal after his death. And that’s his sword. When it came home from Spain
by MacFarlane, the carrier round from Dumbarton, I took it out and it
was clagged in the scabbard with a red glut. It was a sore memorial to
an only sister.”
The boy stood in the middle of the floor feeling himself very much older
than he had done in the morning. The woman’s confidences made him almost
a man, for before he had been spoken to but as a child, though his
thoughts were far older than his years. Those relics of war, especially
the sheath that had the glut of life in it corrupting when it came back
with the dead man’s chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium.
The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the
shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all
the wonders or the shepherds’ battle stories round the fire, and he was
in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the
fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting
each other down. He saw--so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the
floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon
his vest--the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the
man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a
reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not
much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword
come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull
hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face when the terrible
life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils
expanded, his eyes glistened; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with
curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it was
the loudest sound in the room.
“What is it, dear?” she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder,
speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always
to her lips.
“I do not know,” said he, ashamed. “I was just thinking of your brother
who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword.”
She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair
skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. “I think,”
said she, “I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor
story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not
once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman’s heart.”
“I saw the battle,” said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known
before.
“I know you did,” said she.
“And I saw him dead.”
“_Ochame!_”
“And I saw you dropping the sword when you tugged it from the scabbard,
and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite
clean.”
“Indeed I did I,” said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so
plainly set before her. “You are uncanny--no, no, you are not uncanny,
you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel when
her dead brother’s sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the
brothers of other sisters was on its blade. That’s my only grievance
with those soldier brothers of mine. I said I did not think much of the
soldiers; oh! boy, I love them all. I sometimes grieve that God made me
a woman that I might not be putting on the red coat too, and following
the drum. And still and on, I would have no son of mine a soldier.
Three fozy, foggy brothers--what did the armies do for them? They never
sharpened their wits, but they sit and dover and dream, dream, even-on,
never knowing all that’s in their sister Mary’s mind. And here you are,
a boy, yet you get to my thoughts in a flash. Oh! I think I am going to
be very fond of you.”
Gilian was amazed that at last some one understood him. No one ever did
at Ladyfield; his dreams, his fancies, his spectacles of the inner eye
were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little
lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable.
He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes
in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each
other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told
her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the
smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the
mists streaming along the ravines. He told her--or rather he made her
understand, for his language was simple--how at sudden outer influences
his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off
horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set
him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin’s court
that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter
tale. How the joy of the swallow was his in its first darting flights
among the eaves of the old barn, and how when it sped at the summer’s
end he went with it across shires and towns, along the surface of
winding rivers, even over the seas to the land of everlasting sun. How
the sound of the wave on the rock moved him and set him with the ships
and galleys, the great venturers whipping and creaking and tossing in
the night-time under the stars. How the dark appalled or soothed as the
humour was, and the right of a first flower upon a tree would sometimes
make him weep at the notion of the brevity of its period.
All the time Miss Mary listened patient and understanding. The
high-backed chair compassed her figure so fully that she seemed to
shrink to a child’s size. It was a twelve-window house, and so among the
highest taxed in all the town, but in the parlour there were two blind
windows and only one gave light to the interior, so that as she sat in
her chair with her back to the window, her face in the shadow, leaning
against the chair haffits with the aspect of weariness her brothers
never had revealed to them, it seemed to Gilian the little figure and
the ruddy face of a companion. She was silent for a moment after his
confessions were completed, as if she had been wandering with him in the
realm of fancy, and with wings less practised had taken longer to fly
back to the narrow actual world. The boy had realised how much he had
forgotten himself, and how strange all this story of his must be even to
a child-companion with her face in the shadow of the chair haffits, and
his eyes were faltering with shame.
“You are very thin, sweetheart,” said she, with the two lines darkly
pencilled between her eyebrows. “You are far too white for a country
boy; upon my word we must be taking the Captain’s word for it and
putting your head in the cream.”
At this Gilian’s confusion increased. Here was another to misunderstand,
and he had thought she was shivering to his fancy as he was himself. He
turned to hide his disappointment. At once the lines disappeared. She
rose and put an arm over his shoulder and stooped the little that was
necessary to whisper in his ear.
“I know, I think I know,” said she; “but look, I’m very old and ancient.
Oh, dear! I once had my own fancies, but I think they must have
been sweat out of me in my constancy to my brothers’ oven-grate and
roasting-jack. It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us,
my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling for
generations round the fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the
constant complaint of the sea--tuts! am not I foolish to be weeping
because a boy from Glen Aray has not learned to keep his lips closed on
his innermost thought?”
Gilian looked up, and behold! she was in a little rain of tears, at
least her eyes swam soft in moisture. It comforted him exceedingly, for
it showed that after all she understood.
“If you were a little older,” she said, “so old as the merchants of the
town that are all too much on the hunt for the bawbees and the world
to sit down and commune with themselves, or if you were so old as my
brothers there and so hardened, I would be the last to say my thoughts
ever stirred an ell-length out of the customary track of breakfast,
beds, dinner and supper. Do not think I do not love and reverence my
brothers, mind you!” she added almost fiercely, rubbing with her lustre
apron the table there was nothing to rub from save its polish. “Oh!
they are big men and far-travelled men, and they have seen the wonderful
sights. They used to get great thick letters franked from the Government
with every post, and the Duke will be calling on them now and then in
his chariot. They speak to me of nothing but the poorest, simplest,
meanest transactions of the day because they think I cannot comprehend
nor feel. Gilian, do you know I am afraid of them? Not of John
the Captain, for he is different, with a tongue that goes, but I’m
frightened when the General and the Cornal sit and look at me saying
nothing because I am a woman.”
“I do not like people to sit looking at me saying nothing,” said Gilian,
“because when I sit and look at people without saying anything I am
reading them far in. But mostly I would sooner be making up things in my
mind.”
“Ah!” said she, “that is because your mind is young and spacious;
theirs, poor dears, are full of things that have actually happened, and
they need not fancy the orra any more.”
They moved together out of the parlour and along the lobby that lighted
it. With a low sill it looked upon the street that now was thronged with
the funeral people passing home or among the shops, or from tavern to
tavern. The funeral had given the town a holiday air, and baxters and
dealers stood at their doors gossiping with their customers or by-goers.
Country carts rumbled past, the horses moving slowly, reluctant to go
back from this place of oats and stall to the furrows where the collar
pressed constantly upon the shoulder. One or two gentlemen went by
on horses--Achnatra and Major Hall and the through-other son of Lorn
Campbell. The sun, westering, turned the clean rain-washed sand in the
gutters of the street to gold, and there the children played and their
calls and rhymes and laughter made so merry a world that the boy at the
window, looking out upon it, felt a glow. He was now to be always with
these fortunate children whom he knew so well ere ever he had changed
words with them. He had a little dread of the magnitude and corners of
this dwelling that was to be his in the future, and of the old men who
sat in it all day saying nothing, but it was strange indeed (thought
he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the
children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more
full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made
warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the
window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the
death of the little old woman of Ladyfield--what they were his mind did
not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with
no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a more intimate communion
with the animals of the wilds and the voices of the woods and hills.
The woman as well as the boy must have been lost in thought, for neither
of them noted the step upon the stair when the General and Cornal came
back from the dregy. The brothers were in the lobby beside them before
Miss Mary realised their presence. She turned with a flushed face and,
as it were, put herself a little in front of the boy, so that half his
figure found the shelter of a wing. The two brothers between them filled
the width of the lobby, and yet they were not wide. But they were broad
at the shoulders and once, no doubt, they filled their funeral suits
that of their own stiffness seemed to stand out in all their old
amplitude. The General was a white-faced rash of a man with bushy
eyebrows, a clean-shaven parchment jowl, and a tremulous hand upon the
knob of his malacca rattan; his brother the Cornal was less tall; he
was of a purpled visage, and a crimson scar, the record of a wound from
Corunna, slanted from his chin to the corner of his left eye.
“What wean is that?” he asked, standing in the lobby and casting a
suspicious eye upon the boy, his voice as high as in a barrack yard.
The General stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, but looking at Gilian
from under his pent brows.
Into Miss Mary’s demeanour there had came as great a change as that
which came upon the Pay-master when she broke in upon his vaunting. The
lines dashed to her brow; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained
accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to.
“It is the _oe_ from Ladyfield,” she explained.
“He’ll be making a noise in the house,” said the Cornal with a touch of
annoyance. “I cannot stand boys; he’ll break things, I’m sure. When is
he going away?”
“Are you one of the boys who cry after Major MacNicol, my old friend
and comrade?” asked the General in a high squeaking voice. “If I had my
stick at some of you, tormenting a gallant old soldier!” And as he
spoke he lifted his cane by the middle and shook it at the limbs of the
affrighted youth.
“O Dugald, Dugald, you know none of the children of this town ever
annoyed the Major; it is only the keelies from the low-country who do
so. And this is not the boy to make a mock of any old gentleman, I am
sure.”
“I know he’ll make a noise and start me when I am thinking,” said the
Cornal, still troubled. “Is it not very strange, Dugald, that women
must be aye bringing in useless weans off the street to make noise and
annoyance for their brothers?” He poked as he spoke with his stick at
Gilian’s feet as he would at an animal crossing his path.
“It is a strange cantrip, Mary,” said the General; “I suppose you’ll be
going to give him something. It is give, give all the day in this house
like Sergeant Scott’s cantiniers.”
“Indeed and you need not complain of the giving,” said Miss Mary: “there
was nobody gave with a greater extravagance than yourself when you had
it to give, and nobody sends more gangrels about the house than you.”
“Give the boy his meat and let him go,” said the Cornal roughly.
“He’s not going,” said Miss Mary, turning quite white and taking the
pin carefully out of her shawl and as carefully putting it in again. And
having done this quite unnecessary thing she slipped her hand down
and warmly clasped unseen the fingers of the boy in the folds of her
bombazine gown.
“Not going? I do not understand you, Mary; as you grow older you grow
stupider. Does she not grow stupider, Dugald?” said the Cornal.
“She does,” said the General. “I think she does it to torment us, just.”
He was tired by this discussion; he turned and walked to the parlour.
Miss Mary mustered all her courage, and speaking with great rapidity
explained the situation. The boy was the Ladyfield boy; the Paymaster
was going to keep him hereafter.
The Cornal stood listening to the story as one in a trance. There was a
little silence when she had done, and he broke it with a harsh laugh.
“Ah! and what is he going to make of this one?” he asked.
“That’s to be seen,” said Miss Mary; “he spoke of the army.”
“Fancy that now!” said the Cornal with contempt. “Let me see him,” he
added suddenly.
“Let me see the seeds of soldiery.” He put out a hand and--not roughly
but still with more force than Gilian relished--drew him from the
protection of the gown and turned his face to the window. He put his
hand under the boy’s chin; Gilian in the touch felt an abhorrence of the
hard, clammy fingers that had made dead men, but his eyes never quailed
as he looked up in the scarred face. He saw a mask; there was no getting
to the secrets behind that purple visage. Experience and trial, emotions
and passions had set lines there wholly new to him, and his fancy
refused to go further than just this one thought of the fingers that had
made dead men.
The Cornal looked him deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and
with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his
knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt.
“Man! Jock’s the daft recruiter,” he said coarsely with an oath. “What’s
this but a clerk? There’s not the spirit in the boy to make a drummer of
him. There’s no stuff for sogering here.”
Miss Mary drew Gilian to her again and stiffened her lips. “You have
nothing to do with it, Colin; it’s John’s house and if he wants to keep
the boy he’ll do it. And I’m sure if you but took the trouble to think
that he is a poor orphan with no kith nor kin in the world, you would be
the first to take him in at the door.”
The Cornal’s face visibly relaxed its sternness. He looked again more
closely at the boy.
“Come away into our parlour here, and the General and I will have a
crack with you,” said he, leading the way.
Miss Mary gave the boy’s hand a gentle squeeze, and softly pushed him in
after her brother, shut the door behind them, and turned and went down
to the kitchen.