In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old
Brooks’ school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own,
but by the luck that attends on such as have God’s gift to begin
with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them
lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The
magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the
fascination they had before, even when they had mocked with cries of
“Crotal-coat, Crotal-coat,” did not very bravely stand a close trial.
He was not dismayed at this; he did as we must all be doing through life
and changed one illusion for another. It is a wonderful rich world for
dreams, and he had a different one every day, as he sat in the peaty
odour of instruction.
Old Brooks would perch high on his three-legged stool conning over some
exercise while his scholars in their rows behind the knife-hewn inky
desks hummed like bees upon their tasks. The hornbooks of the little
ones at the bottom of the room would sometimes fall from their hands in
the languor of that stagnant atmosphere, but the boys of the upper forms
were ever awake for mischief. To the teaching of the Dominie they would
come with pockets full of playthings, sometimes animals from the woods
and fields about the town--frogs, moles, hedgehogs, or fledgeling birds.
Brooks rarely suspected the presence of these distractions in his sacred
grove, for he was dull of vision and preferred to see his scholars about
him in a vague mist rather than wear in their presence the great horn
spectacles that were privy to his room in Crombie’s Land. The town’s
clock staring frankly in at the school windows conveyed to him no
knowledge of the passing enemy, and, as his watch had been for a
generation but a bulge upon his vest, he must wait till the hour struck
ere he knew it was meridian and time to cross the playground and into
Kate Bell’s for his glass of waters. “Silence till I return!” he would
say, whipping on his better coat and making for the door that had no
sooner shut on him than tumult reigned.
On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster
making for the house of the Sergeant More. “I cannot understood,”
would the Paymaster say, “what makes you take your drams in so common
a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a
fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company! MacNicol and
Major Hall--and--and--myself and some of the best in the burgh; yet
you must be frequenting a low tavern with only merchants and mice and
fisherman to say ‘Good health’ to.”
Master Brooks had always his answer very pat.
“I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books,” he would say
drily. “And told with a greater ingenuity--not to mention veracity--than
pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between
ourselves, I’m not for war at all, but for the far finer and more
wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!” (and here would he
grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an
old acquaintance,) “Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though
we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so
short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us,
so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the
back room of Kate’s there where the merchants discourse upon their bales
and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the
country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their
way of it.”
“It’s aye the old story with you,” the Paymaster would say tolerantly.
“You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of
wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope
you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy’s
head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a
possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer.”
“The boy’s made, Captain Campbell,” said the schoolmaster one day at
this. “He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house
or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what
he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can
make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I’ve had many a curious student
yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was
a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such
rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere
but as the tinkler learns--by the roadside and in the wood.”
“I know he’s a droll one,” said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a
thoughtful brow, “but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have
turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it
in with your tawse.”
The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse
mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance
and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse-ness of
youth made its presence necessary in his desk.
“Captain Campbell,” said he, “it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom
into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a _lusus naturo_, that
is all; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as
an idiot when it is not, and then no tawse or ferule will avail.”
And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the
school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him
the restraints were galling shackles. When the classes would be humming
in the drowsy afternoon and the sharp high voice of old Brooks rose
above the murmur as he taught some little class in the upper corner, the
boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of
him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes
at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp
contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a
new edge on their instruments. Oh! the outer world was ever the world
of charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat in that constrained and
humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to
his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing,
himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were
a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow
in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets
went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept
himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so
peremptorily called.
If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty,
mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the
post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much
alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from
the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old
lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple
for hue, with eyebrows arching high in a perpetual surprise at so
hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was
suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but
one at a time. Marget Maclean’s little shop was the dullest in the
street, but it was the anteroom of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed
books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of
them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer
through her glasses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the
book she thought most suited for her customer.
“You will find that a good one,” she would say. “The one you mention
is not at all good; it was very fashionable last spring, but it is not
asked for now at all.” And in proof that the volume she recommended
was quite genteel, she would add: “That one was up at the Castle last
Saturday. Lady Charlotte’s maid, you will notice, wet all the pages
crying over the places where the lover went to sea another voyage. It
is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not
remember what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not
recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great
deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice
in a book.”
“You have none of Mr. Scott’s poetry?” asked Gilian one day, moved
thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars.
“Scott, Scott,” said Miss Marget. “Now let me think, my dear.”
She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bobbed behind her
ears as she tilted up her head and glanced along the shelves for what
she knew was not there.
“No, my boy,” she said. “We have none of Mr. Scott’s works at present.
There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but,” here
she frowned slightly, “I do not think you are old enough for poetry.
It is too romantic, and--it lingers in the memory. I have not read him
myself though I hear he is clever--in a way. I would not say that I
object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him to my young customers.”
So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The
Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea
without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the
granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood
within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and
streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up
the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round
the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge
with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be
the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” “Moll Flanders,” or
“Belinda,” the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but
no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea
was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in
fancy by many pages. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his
imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling
below or beating in petulant waves and he floated, as it were, between
sea and sky, as free from earth’s clogging influence as the gannet that
soared above.
He sought the Ramparts because for a boy of his age to read in books,
except as a task of the school, was something shameful; and he had been
long accustomed to the mid-air trip upon the walls ere some other boys
discovered him guilty, flushing and trembling with a story book in his
hand. They looked with astonishment at their discovery and were prepared
to jeer when his wits came to his rescue. He tore out one or two leaves
of the book, twisted them into a rough semblance of a boat and cast them
in the water.
“Watch,” said he, “you’ll see the big ones are sunk sooner than the
little ones.”
“Do not tear the good book,” said one of the boys, Young Islay, shocked,
or pretending to be so, at the destruction.
“Oh! it’s only a stupid story,” said Gilian, tearing again at the
treasure, with an agony that could have been no greater had it been his
heart. He had to forego many books from Marget Maclean to make up for
this one, but at least he had escaped the irony of his companions.
Yet not books were his first lovers and friends and teachers, so much as
the creatures of the wild, and the aspects of nature. Often the Dominie
missed him from his accustomed place at the foot of the class, and there
was no explanation to offer when he returned. He had suffered again the
wood’s fascination. In the upper part of the glen he had been content
with little clumps and plantings, the caldine woods of Kincreggan or the
hazels whereof the shepherds made their crooks. But the forest lay for
miles behind the town, a great land of shade and pillars where the winds
roved and tangled. It abounded in wild life, and sounded ever in spring
and summer with songs and cries. Into its glades he would wander and
stand delirious to the solitude, tingling to the wild. The dim vistas
about him had no affrights; he was at home, he was the child of the
tranquil, the loving mother, whose lap is the pasture-land and forest.
Autumn fills those woods with the very breath of melancholy, no birds
will sing in the multitudinous cloisters except the birds of the night
whose melody is one doleful and mocking note. The bracken burns and
withers, lush grass rots and whitens above the fir-roots, the birds flit
from shade to shade with no carolling. And over all will stand the trees
sleeping with their heads a-nod.
He would walk among the noisy fallen leaves, posturing the heroes of his
reading or his own imagination about him in the landscape--a pleasant
recreation. He would set Bruce the king himself sitting at a cave-mouth,
a young gentleman with a queue like Turner’s, pondering upon freedom,
while the spiders wrought for his instruction; deer breaking from covert
to dash away, or moving in stately herds across the forest openings,
became a foreign cavalry. Sometimes he would take a book to the upper
hunting-roads, where rarely any intrusion came except from some gillie
or fisher of the lochs far back in the moors, and stretched on dry
bracken he would read and dream for hours.
It was in such an attitude Young Islay found him on the Saturday after
the episode on the Ramparts. Gilian was in the midst of the same book,
trying hard to fill up the gaps that his sacrifice of leaves had brought
into the narrative, and Young Islay going a-fishing in the moor-lochs,
a keen sportsman all alone, stood over him a very much surprised
discoverer.
He gave an halloo that brought Gilian to his feet alarmed, for it
happened to fit in with some passage in his mind where foes cried. In
vain the book went behind the Paymaster’s boy; Islay saw the ragged
pages.
“Oh!” he cried, “you’ll not cheat me this time; you’re reading.” An
annoying contempt was in his manner, and as he stood with his basket
slung upon his back, and his rod in the crook of an arm, like a gun,
a straight, sturdy lad of neat limb, a handsome face, and short black
curls, he was, for a moment, more admirable in Gilian’s eyes than the
hero of the book he was ashamed to show.
“I had it in my pocket,” said Gilian, in a poor, ineffective
explanation, relinquishing the volume with a grudge to the examination
of this cynic.
“You pretended on the Ramparts you were tearing it up like any other
boy,” said Young Islay, “and I was sure you were doing nothing of the
kind.” He turned over the pages with scornful fingers. “It’s not a
school-book, there’s not a picture in it, it’s full of talking--fancy
being here with that rubbish, when you might be fishing with me!”
Gilian snatched the volume from him. “You don’t know anything about it!”
he cried.
“I know _you_ at any rate,” said Young Islay craftily. “You were ashamed
of your book; you come here often with books; you do nothing like
anybody else; you should have been a girl!”
All the resentment of the Paymaster’s boy sprung to his head at this
taunt; he threw the book down and dashed a small fist in Young Islay’s
face. There he found a youth not slow to reply. Down went the rod and
the book, and with the fishing-basket swinging and beating at his back,
Young Islay fell upon the zealous student. Gilian’s arms, as he defended
or aimed futile blows, felt, in a little, as heavy as lead. Between
each blow he aimed there seemed to be a great space of time, and yet his
enemy was striking with rapidity.
“Are you beaten?” at last cried Young Islay, drawing back for a truce.
“No,” said Gilian, gasping. “I’m only tired,’’ but he looked bloody and
vanquished.
“It’s the same thing,” said Young Islay, picking up his rod. “You can
do nothing with your hands; I--I can do anything.” And he drew up with a
bantam’s vanity. He moved off. The torn book was in his path. He kicked
it before him like a football until he reached the ditch beside the
hunting road, and there he left it. A little later Gilian saw him in a
distant vista of the trees as an old hunter of the wood, with a gun
in his hand and his spoil upon his back, breasting the brae with long
strides, a figure of achievement altogether admirable.