Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot,
her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by
the lamp above the merchant’s door. When she saw her brother coming with
Gilian she ran forward on the footway, caught the boy by the hand and
drew him in.
“I am very angry, oh, I am terribly angry with you!” she cried. “Do not
speak a word to me.” She pushed him into a chair and spread thick butter
on a scone and thrust it in his hand. “To frighten us like this! The
Captain is all over the town for you, and the General has sent men to
drag for you about the quay.”
Peggy the maid smiled over her mistress’s shoulder at the youth. He ate
his scone with great complacency, heartened by this token that something
of Miss Mary’s vexation was assumed. Not perhaps her vexation--for were
her eyes not red as with weeping?--but her anger, if she had really been
angry.
“You are a perfect heartbreak,” she went on
“The Cornal heard you had run off after the sogers, and------”
“Would that vex you?” asked Gilian.
“It would not vex Colin; he would give his only infant, if he had one,
to the army; but I was thinking of you left behind in the march about
the loch-head, and lost and starving somewhere about the wood of
Dunderave.”
“I would not starve in Dunderave so long as the nut and bramble were
there,” said Gilian, rejoicing in her kindly perturbation. “And I could
not be lost anywhere--”
“--Except in the Duke’s flower garden, wasting the time with--with--a
woman’s daughter,” said the Cornal, putting his head in at the kitchen
door. He frowned upon his sister for her too prompt kindness to the
rover, and she hid behind her a cup of new-skimmed cream. “Come upstairs
and have a talk with Dugald and me,” he went on to the boy.
“Will it not do in the morning?” asked Miss Mary, all shaking, dreading
her darling’s punishment.
“No,” said the Cornal, “Now or never. Oh! you need have no fears that I
would put him to the triangle.”
“Then I may go too?” said Miss Mary.
The Cornal put the boy in front of him and pushed him towards the
stair-foot. “You stay where you are,” he said to his sister. “This will
be a man’s sederunt.”
They went up the stair together and entered the parlour, to find the
General half-sleeping in his lug-chair. He started at the apparition of
the entering youth.
“You are not drowned after all,” said he, “and there’s my money gone
that I spent for a gross of stenlock hooks to grapple you.”
“Sit down there,” said the Cornal, pointing to the chair in which Gilian
had first stood court-martial. The bottle was brought forth from the
cupboard; the glasses were ranged again by the General. In the grate a
sea-coal fire burned brightly, its glance striking golden now and then
upon the polished woodwork of the room and all its dusky corners, more
golden, more warm, more generous, than the wan disheartened rays of
the candles that shook a smoky flame above the board. Gilian waited his
punishment with more wonderment than fear. What could be said to him for
a misadventure? He had done no harm except to cause an hour or two of
apprehension, and if he had been with one whose company was forbidden it
had never been forbidden to him.
“It’s a fine carry-on this,” said the Cornal, breaking the silence. “Ay,
it’s a fine carry-on.” He stretched the upper part of his body over the
low table with his arms spread out, and looked into the boy’s eyes with
a glance more judicial than severe. “Here are we doing our best to make
a man of you, more in a brag against gentry that need not be named in
this house than for human kindness, though that is not wanting I assure
you, and what must you be at but colloguing and, perhaps, plotting
with the daughter of the gentry in question? I will not exactly say
plotting,” he hastened to amend, remembering apparently that before him
were but the rudiments of a man. “I will not say plotting, but at least
you were in a way to make us a laugh to the whole community. Do you know
anything of the girl that you were with?”
“I met her in the school before she got her governess.”
“Oh, ay! they must be making the leddy of her; that was the spoiling of
her mother before her. As if old Brooks could not be learning any woman
enough schooling to carry on a career in a kitchen. And have you seen
her elsewhere?”
“I heard her once singing on her father’s vessel,” said Gilian.
“She was singing!” cried the Cornal, standing to his feet and thumping
the table till the glasses rang. “Has she that art of the devil too? Her
mother had it; ay! her mother had it, and it would go to your head like
strong drink. Would it not, Dugald? You know the dame I mean.”
“It was very taking, her song,” said the General simply, playing with
the empty glass, his eyes upon the table.
“And what now did she sing? Would it be----”
“It was ‘The Rover’ and ‘The Man with the Coat of Green,’” said Gilian
in an eager recollection.
“Man! did I not ken it?” cried the Cornal. “Oh! I kent it fine. ‘The
Rover’ was her mother’s trump card. I never gave a curse for a tune, but
she had a way of lilting that one that was wonderful.”
“She had, that,” said the General, and he sighed.
The room, it seemed to Gilian, was a vault, a cavern of melancholy, with
only the flicker of the coal to light it up in patches. These old men
sighing were its ghosts or hermits, and he himself a worldling fallen
invisible among their spoken thoughts. To him the Cornal no longer spoke
directly; he was thinking aloud the thoughts alike of the General and
himself--the dreams, the actions, the joys, the bitterness of youth.
He sat back in his chair, relaxed, his hand wrinkled and grey, with no
lusty blood rushing any more under the skin; upon the arms his fingers
beating tattoo for his past.
“You’ll be wondering that between the Turners and us is little love
lost, though no doubt Miss Mary with her clinking tongue has given you
a glisk of the reason. He’ll be wondering, Dugald, he’ll be wondering,
I’ll warrant. And, man, there’s nothing by-ordinar wonderful in it, for
are we not but human men? There was a woman in Little Elrig who took
Dugald’s fancy (if you will let me say it, Dugald), and he was willing
to draw in with her and give her a name as reverend as any in the shire,
for who are older than the Campbells of Keils? It’s an old story, and in
a way it was only yesterday: sometimes I think it must be only a dream.
But, dream or waking, I can see plainly my brother Dugald there, home on
leave, make visitation to Glen Shira. I have seen him ambling up there
happy on his horse (it was Black Geordie, Dugald,--well I mind him), and
coming down again at night with a glow upon his countenance. Miss Mary,
she would be daffing with him on his return, with a ‘How’s her leddyship
to-day, Dugald?’ and he would be in a pleasant vexation at this guessing
of what he thought his secret. It was no secret: was ever such a thing
secret in the shire of Argyll? We all knew it. She was Mary’s friend
and companion; she would come to our house here on a Saturday; I see her
plainly on that chair at the window.”
The General turned with a gasp, following his brother’s glance. “I wish
to God you would not be so terribly precise,” was what he said. And then
he fingered at his glass anew.
“Many a time she sat there with our sister, the smell of the wallflower
on the sill about her, and many a time she sang ‘The Rover’ in this
room. In this very room, Dugald: isn’t every word I’m saying true?
Of course it is. God! as if a dream could be so fine! Well, well! my
brother, who sits there all bye with such affairs, went away on another
war. She was vexed. The woods of Shira Glen were empty for her after
that, I have no doubt, now that their rambles were concluded; she was
lonely on the Dhuloch-side, where many a time he convoyed her home in
the summer gloaming. He came back a tired man, a man hashed about with
wounds and voyaging, cold nights, wet marches, bitter cruel fare, not
the same at all in make or fashion, or in gaiety, that went away. The
girl--the girl was cold. I hate to say it, Dugald, but what is the harm
in a story so old? She came about Miss Mary in this house as before, no
way blate, but it was ‘Hands off!’ for the man who had so liked her.”
He paused and stretched to fill his glass, but as he seized the bottle
the hand shook so that he laid the vessel down in shame. The boy
stood entranced, following the story intimately, guessing every coming
sentence, filling up its bald outline with the pictures of his brain;
riding with the General, almost in his prime and almost handsome, and
hearing the woman sing in the window chair; feeling the soldier’s return
to a reception so cruel. The General said nothing, but sat musing, his
eyes, wide and distant, on the board. And out in the street there was
the traffic of the town, the high calls of lads in their boisterous
evening play, the laugh of a girl. From the kitchen came the rattle of
Peggy’s operations, and in a low murmur Miss Mary’s voice as she hummed
to herself, her symptom of anxiety, as she was sieving the evening milk
in the pantry.
The Cornal gulped the merest thimbleful of spirits and resumed in a
different key.
“Then, then,” said he, “then I became the family’s fool. Oh, ay!”--and
he laughed with a crackle at the throat and no merriment--“I was the
family fool; there was aye a succession of them in our house, one after
another, dancing to this woman’s piping. For a while nobody saw it;
Dugald never saw it, for he was sitting moping, wearying for some
work anywhere away from this infernal clime of rain and sleep and old
sorrows; Mary never noticed it--at least not for a little; she could not
easily fancy her companion the character she was. But I would be meeting
the girl here and there about the country, in the glen, in the town,
as well as here in this very parlour where I had to sit and look
indifferent, though--though my heart stounded, and I never met her but
I felt a traitor to my brother. You will believe that, Dugald?” said he,
recognition for a moment flashing to his eye.
And the General nodded, stretching himself weary on the chair.
“Oh, ay! even then I wished myself younger, for she was not long beyond
her teens, and walking beside her I would be feeling musty and old,
though I was not really old, as my picture there above the chimneypiece
will show. I was not old, in heart--it pattered like a bairn’s steps to
every glimpse and sentence of her. I lost six months at this game, my
corps calling me, but I could not drag myself away. Once I spoke of
going, and she sang ‘The Rover’--by God! it scaled me to her footsteps.
I stayed for very pity of myself, seeing myself a rover indeed if I
went, more distressed than ever gave the key to any song. The woods, the
woods in spring; the country full of birds; Dhuloch lap-lapping on the
shore; the summer with hay filling the field, and the sky blue from hill
to hill, the nights of heather and star--oh, yes, she led me a pretty
dance, I’m thinking, and sometimes I will be wondering if it was worth
the paying for.”
The Paymaster’s house was grown very still. Gilian ceased to make the
pictures in his mind.
“I met her ghost up there on the road this very night, and I had a hand
below her chin,” said the Cornal with a gulp.
“You did not dare, you did not dare!” cried his brother, an apple-red
upon his check, and half rising in his chair.
“Surely, surely--in a ghost,” said the Cornal. “I would never have
mentioned it had it been herself. Sit down, Dugald. It was her daughter.
I never saw her so close before, and the look of her almost gave me a
stroke. It was what I felt when I first saw her mother with a younger
man than you or I. Just like that I met them in the gloaming, with
Turner very jaunty at her side, rapping his leg with his riding-cane,
half a head higher than myself, a generation less in years. It was a
cursed bitter pill, Dugald! Then I understood what you had meant and
what Mary meant by her warnings. But I was cool--oh yes! I think I was
cool. I only made to laugh and pass on, and she stopped me with her own
hand. ‘I kept it from you as long as I could,’ she said: ‘it was cruel,
it was the blackest of sins, but this is the man for me.’”
“That was the man for her,” echoed the General, his sentence stifled in
a sigh.
“‘This is the man for me.’ Turner stood beside her, looking with an
admiration, but to do him justice, ill at case, and with some--with
some--with some pity for me. Oh! that stunned me! ‘Is it so indeed?’ I
said in a little when I came to myself, feeling for the first time old.
‘And must it be farewell with me as with my brother Dugald?’”
“You should not have said that at all,” said the General. “I would not
have said it.”
“I daresay not; I daresay not,” said the Cornal slowly, pondering on it.
“But, mind you, I was in a curious position, finding myself the second
fool of a family that had got fair warning. She birked up and took her
gallant’s arm. Said I then, ‘We’ll maybe get you yet; I have a younger
brother still.’ It was a stupid touch of bravado. ‘Jock!’ said she,
laughing, all her sorrow for her misdoing gone; ‘Jock! Not the three of
you together; give me youth and action.’ Then she went away with her new
fancy, and I was left alone. I was left alone. I was left alone.”
His voice, that had risen to a shout as he gave the woman’s words,
declined to a crackle, a choked harsh utterance that almost failed to
cross the table.
Up got the General. “Never mind, never mind, Colin,” said he as it were
to a vexed child. “We took our scuds gamely, and there was no more to
do. God knows we have had plenty since--made wanderers for the King, ill
fed for the King, wounded and blooded for the King. What does it matter
for one that was a girl and is now no more but a clod in Kilmalieu? I’m
forgetting it all fast I would never be minding it at all but for you
and Miss Mary there, and that picture of the man I was once, on the
wall. I mind more of Badajos and San Sebastian--that was the roaring,
the bloody, the splendid time!--than of the girl that played us on
her string--three brothers at a single cast--a witch’s fishing. What
nonsense is this to be bringing up at our time of life? In the hearing
of a wean too.”
A cough choked him and he stopped. At Gilian, sitting still and
seemingly uncomprehending, the Cornal looked as at a stranger. “So
it is,” said he; “just a wean! I forgot, some way. How old are
you--sixteen? Nonsense! By the look of you I would say a hundred. Oh,
you’re an old-farrent one, sitting there with your lugs cocked. And what
do you think is the moral of my story? Eh?--the moral of it? The lesson
of it? What? What? What?”
Gilian had the answer in a flash. “It is to be younger than the other
man; it is----”
“What?” cried the Cornal. “That’s the moral? To be younger than the
other man. No more than that? To be young? Old Brooks never put you to
your Æsops when that’s all you can make of it.”
The General sat back and folded his soft thick hands upon his lap. He
drew in his breath and blew it out again with the gasp of the wearied
emerging from water. “Do you know, Dugald,” said he, “there’s something
in that view of it? We were not young enough. We had too sober an eye
on life. Youth is not in the straight back or the clear eye; there is
something more, and--the person you mentioned had it, and has it yet.”
“That’s all havers,” said the Cornal; “all havers. I was as jocular at
the time as Jiggy Crawford himself. It did not come natural, but I could
force myself to it. The blame was not with us. She was a wanton hussy
first and last, and God be with her!”
He gripped the boy by the jacket collar. “Up and away,” said he. “If my
tale’s in vain, there’s no help for it. I cannot make it plainer. Do
not be a fool, wasting the hours that are due to your tasks in loitering
with the daughter of a woman who has her mother’s eye and her mother’s
songs, and maybe her mother’s heart.”
He pushed the boy almost rudely out at the parlour door.