And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian
up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the
town about him in a ferment of anticipation? In our sleeping community
we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the
people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs
made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in
the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room
of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their
midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down
the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working
for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open
windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs.
He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor’s door. Old
Islay came out with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow.
“What is wrong in the place to-day?” asked his Grace with a flourish of
his crop about him to the lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern
doors. “Am I paying good day’s wages for the like of that?”
Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. “It’s the coming of the army,” said
he. “The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day.
They would not do a hand’s turn for an emperor.”
“Humph!” said Duke George. “I wish I could throw off life’s
responsibilities so easily. The rogues! the rogues!” he mused, soothing
his horse’s neck with a fine and kindly hand. “I suppose it’s in
them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances.
My father--well, well, let them be.” His heels turned the horse in a
graceful curvet “I’m saying, Islay,” he cried over his shoulder, “have a
free cask or two at the Cross in the morning.”
But it was in the Paymaster’s house that the fullest stress, the most
nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster’s
snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as
he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited
half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who
smiled behind his back. His brothers’ slumbers in the silent parlour had
been utterly destroyed till “Me-the-day!” Miss Mary had to cry at last
when her maid brought back untasted viands, “I wish the army was never
to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a
respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the
better for this.”
All this excitement sustained the tremulous feeling at the boy’s
heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier’s
experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in
a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered
to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as
he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though
sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his
familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal’s character
suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a
pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till
she cried “The man’s doited!” though she clearly liked it; to Gilian he
began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales.
Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero.
It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d’Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to
the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry “Well
done!”; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at
Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain
in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every “whe--e--et” of the
bullets at his ear bringing the moment’s alarm to his teeth in a checked
sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams,
to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the
battle-lines upon the page--the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the
blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge
and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of
Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting,
commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly
embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and
he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the
master’s desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the
vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.
Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled
down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.
“At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?” said the dominie a little
bitterly, a little humorously. “And what might it be this time?”
“Sogers,” said the boy most red and awkward.
“Ay, ay,” said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him
with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. “Soldiers is it? And the
playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind.
Soldiers! H’m! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in
vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you’re going to
meet Captain Campbell’s most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade
early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts.
Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a
boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of
heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and--my work’s hopeless.
Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act
to-day you’ll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better
and--and--I maybe wished for worse.”
That night Gilian went to bed in his garret while yet the daylight was
abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the
garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the
soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.
He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up
to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay
guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and
unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat
up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was
nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he
had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was
again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in
veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable.
The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more
the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that
throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in
darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering
to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the
approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family
of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of
his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.
The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down
the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that
dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have
been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the
Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and
the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the
causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of
them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as
he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor’s corner there to stand
awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There
was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a
beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the
drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the
drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited
whispering, afraid like the Paymaster’s boy to shatter the charm of
that delightful terror. Then of a sudden the town roared and shook to
a twofold rattle of the skins and the shrill of fifes as the corps
from the north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept
through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick
of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he
should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through
the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying
no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the
darkness to the rattle of the drums? The drums, the drums, the drums!
Gilian stood entranced as they passed, looming large and innumerable in
the darkness, unchallenged and uncheered by the bewildered citizens. It
was the very entrance he could have chosen. For now they were ghosts,
legions of the air in borrowed boots of the earth, shades of some army
cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal’s bloodiest
stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did
not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving
in to strike it at the vitals.