But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.
It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the
lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk
made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of
social intercourse in each other’s homes, where the winter nights, that
otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women
would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or
their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly
revealed for the shawls that must cover them. The men donned their best
figured waistcoats and their newest stocks, and cursed the fashions that
took them from their pipes and cards, but solaced themselves mightily
with the bottle in the host’s bedroom. From those friendly convocations,
jealousies innumerable bred. It was not only that each other’s gowns
raised unchristian thoughts in the bosoms of the women, but in a
community where each knew her neighbour and many were on equality,
there must be selections, and rancour rose. And it was the true Highland
rancour, concealing itself under a front of indifference and even
politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning
fiercely at the core.
A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were
submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the
wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff’s
servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster’s house early in the
forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this
purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in
the Sheriff’s the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive
nights.
Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no
invitation to the Sheriff’s, and yet here was the hint of some convivial
gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome
to.
“What do you think it will be, John?” she asked the Paymaster, telling
him what she had seen.
“Tuts,” said he, “they’ll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has
an extra hard case at avizandum, not to be seen clearly through with a
common creesh flame.”
“That’s aye you,” cried Miss Mary, indignant “People might slap you in
the face and you would have no interest.”
She hastened to Peggy in the kitchen and Peggy shared her wonder, though
she was not permitted to see her annoyance. A plan was devised to find
out what this extravagance of candle might portend.
The maid took her water-stoups and went up to the Cross Well, where
women were busy at that hour of the day plying for the water of
Bealloch-an-uarain, that bubbles up deep in the heart of the hills, and
brings the coolness and refreshment of the shady wood into the burgh
street in the most intense days of summer warmth. She filled her stoups
composedly, set them down and gossiped, upset them as by accident, and
waited patiently her turn to fill them anew. Thus by twenty minutes’
skilful loitering she secured from the baxter’s daughter the news that
there was a supper at the Sheriff’s that very night, and that very large
tarts were at the firing in the baxter’s oven.
“Oh, indeed!” cried Miss Mary, when her emissary brought to her those
tidings. “Then it seems the Campbells of Keil are not good enough
company for Sheriff Maclachlan’s supper parties! My brother the Cornal,
and my brother the Major-General, would have their own idea about that
if so small a trifle as Madam’s tart supper and green tea was worth
their notice or annoyance.”
She was visibly disturbed, yet put on a certain air of indifference that
scarcely deceived even Peggy. The worst of it was there was no one
with whom she could share her annoyance, for, if the Paymaster had no
sympathy, the other two brothers were unapproachable. Gilian found her
in a little rain of tears. She started with shame at his discovery, and
set herself to a noisy handling of dinner dishes that by this time he
knew well enough were not in her daily office of industry. And she said
never a word--she that never heard his foot upon the stair without
a smile of pleasure, or saw his face at the door without a mother’s
challenge to his appetite.
“What is wrong, aunty?” he said in the Gaelic, using the term it had
been agreed would best suit the new relationship.
“Just nothing at all, my dear,” she said without looking round. “What
would be wrong?”
“But you are crying,” protested Gilian, alarmed lest he in some way
should have been the cause of her distress.
“Am I?” said Miss Mary. “And if I am, it is just for a silly thing only
a woman would mind, a slight from people not worth heeding.” And then
she told, still shamefacedly, her story.
Gilian was amazed.
“I did not think you cared for suppers and teas,” he said. “The last
time you went to the Sheriffs you said you would far sooner be at home,
and--”
“Did I?” said she. Then she smiled to find some one who knew it was
not the outing she immediately prized. “Indeed, what you say is true,
Gilian. I’m an old done dame, and it was wiser for the like of me to
be sitting knitting at the fire than going on diverts to their bohea
parties and clashing supper tables. But it’s not myself I’m angry for.
Oh, no! they might leave me alone for ever and a day and I would care
not a pin-head, but it’s Dugald I’m thinking of--a Major-General--one of
the only three in the shire, and Colin--a Cornal--and both of Keils. The
Sheriff’s lady might leave me out of her routs if she pleasured it, but
she has no cause to put my brothers to an insult like this.” She said
“my brothers” with a high hard sound of stern and proud possession that
was very fine to hear. Even Gilian, as yet only beginning to know the
love and pride of this little woman, had, at her accent, a sudden deep
revealing of her devoted heart.
“It is the Turners’ doing,” she said, feverishly rubbing a warming pan
whose carved lid from Zaandam blinked and gleamed like the shining face
of a Dutch skipper over his dram. “I know them; because my brother
must be quarrelling with them, their half-sister must be taking up the
quarrel and shutting her door in our faces.”
“The Turners! Then I hate them too,” cried Gilian, won to the
Paymaster’s side by the sorrow of Miss Mary.
“Oh, you must not say that, my dear,” she cried, appalled. “It is not
your affair at all, and the Turners are not to blame because the Sheriff
is under the thumb of his madam. The Turners have their good points as
well as the rest of us, and--”
“They have a daughter,” said Gilian, almost unconsciously, for there had
come flooding into his mind a vision of the sombre vessel’s cabin, shot
over by a ray of sunshine, wherein a fairy sang of love and wandering.
And then he regretted he had spoke of hate for any of her name, for
surely (he thought) there should be no hate in the world for any that
had her blood and shared her home.
Surely in her people, knowing her so warm, so lovely, so kind, so
gifted, there could be no cruelty and wrong.
“I would not say I hated any one if I were you, my dear,” said Miss
Mary; “but I would keep a cool side to the Turners, father, or daughter,
or son. Their daughter that you speak of was the cause of this new
quarrel. The Captain miscalled her to her father, which was not right,
for indeed she’s a bonny lassie, and they tell me she sings--”
“Like the mavis,9’ cried Gilian, still in his Gaelic and in a transport
of recollection.
“Where did you hear her?” asked Miss Mary.
Gilian, flushed and uneasy, told her of the performance in the ship.
Finding a listener neither inattentive nor without sympathy, he went
further still and told of the song’s effect upon him, and that the
sweetness of it still abiding made his hatred of her people impossible.
“She’ll do for looks too,” said Miss Mary. “She takes them with her
singing from her mother, who was my dear companion before this trouble
rose.”
“Oh! she looks like--like--like the _gruagach_ girl in the story,” said
Gilian, remembering the tale of the sea-maiden who sat on the shore and
dressed her hair with a comb of gold.
“I hope she’s not so uncanny,” said Miss Mary with a laugh, “for the
_gruagach_ combed till a sweetheart came (that I should be talking of
such daft-like things!), and he was drowned and that was the end of
him.”
“Still--still,” said Gilian, “the _gruagach_ was worth the drowning
for.”
Miss Mary looked at him with a sigh for a spirit so much to be envied.
“This may be but a chapter in a very old tale,” said she. “It was with
a lass the feud came in.” A saying full of mystery to the boy. Then she
changed the conversation back to her own affairs. “We’ll take a walk out
in the gloaming and see all the Sheriff’s friends,” said she, “and
all the Sheriff’s friends in this supper are Turner’s friends and the
Paymaster’s enemies.”
The night of the Sheriff’s supper party came with heavy showers and a
sky swept by clouds that let through glimpse of moon nor star. The town
lay in pitch darkness, all silent except for the plash of the sea upon
the shore or its long roll on the Ramparts. A deserted and wind-swept
street, its white walls streaming with waters, its outer shutters on the
ground fiats barred to darkness, its gutters running over--it was the
last night on which any one with finery and a notion for comfort would
choose for going abroad to parties. Miss Mary, sitting high at her
parlour window with Gilian, looked out through the blurred pane with
satisfaction upon all this inclemency.
“Faith,” said she, “I wish them joy of their party whoever they be
that share it!” Then all at once her mood changed to one of pity as the
solitary street showed a moving light upon its footway. “Oh!” she cried.
“There’s Donacha Breck’s lantern and his wife will be with him. And
to-day she was at me for my jelly for a cold! I wish--I wish she was not
over the door this night; it will be the death of her. To-morrow I must
send her over the last of my Ladyfield honey.”
From the window and in the darkness of the night, it was impossible to
tell who were for the Sheriffs party, so Miss Mary in the excess of her
curiosity must be out after a time and into the dripping darkness, with
Gilian by her side for companionship. It was an adventure altogether to
his liking. As he walked up and down the street on its darker side he
could think upon the things that were happening behind the drawn blinds
and bolted shutters. It was as if he was the single tenant of a sleeping
star and guessing at the mysteries of a universe. Stories were happening
behind the walls, fires were glimmering, suppers were set, each family
for the time being was in a world of its own, split off from its
neighbours by the darkness.
A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam
in water.
Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady
Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years
ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully.
“It’s gone; I knew it would be gone,” she said in a whisper to Gilian,
withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep
sounded a little way down the street.
He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank
expanse of the moaning sea round the corner of a tall tenement filled
him with new and moving emotions.
“There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa’s
sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her
lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That’s two pair
at least for the Sheriff’s party.”
“Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there?”
said Gilian.
She shook his arm with startled affright.
“Ask! ask!” she exclaimed. “If you dared let on to any one we even heard
there was a party, I would--I would--be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we
must hold our heads a bit higher than that.”
She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement.
“Major Hall and his sister are there,” she said, showing darkened
windows. “And the Camerons and the Frasers,” she added later, informed
by the same signs of absence.
Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and
bolted up their doors, then retreated to their homes behind. More dark
than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few
windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in
the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation.
And yet the town was not all asleep but for the Sheriff’s party and
Miss Mary and the Paymaster’s boy, for there came from the Abercrombie,
though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of carousal. It
was not, this time, the old half-pay officers but a lower plane of the
burgh’s manhood, the salvage and the wreckage of the wars, privatemen
and sergeants, by a period of strife and travel made in some degree
unfit for the tame ways of peace in a stagnant burgh. They told the old
tales of the bivouac; they sang its naughty or swaggering songs. By a
plain deal door and some glasses of spirit they removed themselves from
the dull town drowsing in the night, and in the light of the Sergeant
More’s cruisie moved again in the sacked towns of Ciudad Rodrigo,
Badajos and San Sebastian, gorged anew, perhaps, with blood and lust.
Miss Mary and Gilian passed the door of the Sergeant More hurriedly, she
deaf to its carousal, he remembering all at once and finding wake anew
his first feelings when he stood in the same room before the half-pay
officers at their midday drams. He had become a little tired of this
quest all to gratify an old maid’s curiosity, he wished he could be home
again and in his attic room with his candle and his story book, or his
abundant and lively thoughts. But there was one other task before Miss
Mary. She could not forbear so little as a glance at the exterior of
the Sheriff’s dwelling where the enemies of her home (as so she now must
fancy them) were trying to be happy without the company of the Campbells
of Keils. When they were in front of it every window shone across the
grass-plot, some of them open so that the sound of gaiety came clearly
to the woman and the boy. Miss Mary stood woebegone, suffused in tears.
“And there are my dear brothers at home yonder, their lee-lone, silent,
sitting in a parlour! Oh! it is shameful, it is shameful! And all for a
hasty word about a lass!”
Gilian before this curious sorrow was dumb. Silently he tried to lead
the little lady away from the place, but she would not go, and would not
be comforted. Then there came from the open windows the beginning of a
song. At the first note Gilian thrilled in every nerve.
“Fancy that now!” said Miss Mary, checking her tears. “No more than
a wean and here she must be singing at supper parties as brave as the
mother before her. It’s a scandal! And it shows the bitterness of the
quarrel to have her here, for she was never here at supper before.”
“But is she not fine?” said Gilian, with a passion in his utterance.
Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a
song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a
sweetness almost magic.
“Is she not fine?” he said again, clutching with eager hands at the
rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that
alluring melody.
“Oh, the dear! the dear!” sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the
strain. “When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that
too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful
woman here on any quarrel for her!”
The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a
shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the
sea moaning in the trees behind the town.
“What--what--what are we here for?” said he, beholding for the first
time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and
sensitive a dame.
She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought
him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense
of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!
“You may well ask,” she said, moving away from that alluring house-front
with its inmates so indifferent to the passions in the dark without And
her sobs were not yet finished. “Because I prize my brothers,” said
she, “and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead
companion’s child?” She hurried her pace away from that house whose
windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged
reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious
that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then
she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.
“Do you like that girl?” said she.
“I like her--when she sings,” said he.
“Oh! it was always that,” she went on helplessly “My poor brothers!
They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very
much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that
brought them together.” Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful
exclamation: “Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but
for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing
here with you? She may have her mother’s nature as well as her mother’s
songs.”
For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not
put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled
in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the
street, now deserted but for themselves and a man’s footsteps sounding
on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming.
It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming
upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross
Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.
“It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell,” he said, in a shrill high
dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the
guttural Highland burghers.
She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason
for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.
“You have left the Sheriff’s early to-night,” said he. “I was asked, but
I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when
I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here.”
“I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of,”
said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. “The mantua-maker tells me the latest
fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edinburgh.” She
saw in his face the innkeeper’s apology for his common sin against
the Gaelic vanity. “We were just out for an airing,” she added, taking
Gilian’s hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning.
“I thought, ma’am, you were at the Sheriffs,” said Mr. Spencer.
“Oh! there is a party in the Sheriff’s, is there?” she said. “That is
very nice; they have a hospitable house and many friends. I must
hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little
troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave
them to go out myself.”
She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that
died in her twenty years before. She said “Good-night,” and then she was
gone.
Mr. Spencer’s footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he
resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not
on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while
this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her
cheek.