Gilian went up to his attic, stood looking blankly from the window at
the skylights on the other side of the street, his head against the
camecil of the room. He was bewildered and pleased. He was bewildered
at this new candour of the Cornal that seemed to rank him for the first
time more than a child; he was pleased to have his escapade treated in
so tolerant a fashion, and to be taken into a great and old romance,
though there was no active feud in it as in Marget Maclean’s books.
Besides, the sorrow of the old man’s love story touched him. To find a
soft piece in that old warrior so intent upon the past and a splutter
of glory was astonishing, and it was pitiful too that it should be a
tragedy so hopeless. He ‘listed once more on the Cornal’s side in the
feud against Maam, even against Nan herself for her likeness to her
mother, forgetting the charm of her song, the glamour at the gate, and
all the magic of the garden. He determined to keep at a distance if he
was to be loyal to those who had adopted him. There was no reason,
he told himself, why he should vex the Paymaster and his brothers by
indulging his mere love of good company in such escapades as he had in
the ship and in the Duke’s garden. There was no reason why---- His head
unexpectedly bumped against the camceil of the room. He was startled at
the accident. It revealed to him for the first time how time was passing
and he was growing. When he had come first to the Paymaster’s that
drooping ceil was just within the reach of his outstretched hand; now he
could touch it with his brow.
“Gilian! Gilian!” cried Miss Mary up the stair.
He went down rosy red, feeling some unrest to meet a woman so soon after
the revelation of a woman’s perfidy, so soon indeed after a love-tale
told among men. The parlour, as he passed its slightly open door, was
still; its candles guttered on the table. The fire was down to the
ash. He knew, without seeing it, that the old men were seated musing as
always, ancient and moribund.
Miss Mary gave him his supper. For a time she bustled round him, with
all her vexation gone, saying nothing of his sederunt with her brothers.
Peggy was at the well, spilling stoup after stoup to make her evening
gossip the longer, and the great flagged kitchen was theirs alone.
“What--what was the Cornal saying to you?” at last she queried, busying
herself as she spoke with some uncalled-for kitchen office to show the
indifference of her question.
“Oh, he was not angry,” said Gilian, thinking that might satisfy.
“I did not think he would be,” she said. Then in a little again,
reluctantly: “But what was he talking about?”
The boy fobbed it off again. “Oh, just about--about--a story about a
woman in Little Elrig.”
“Did you understand?” she said, stopping her fictitious task and
gasping, at the same time scrutinising him closely.
“Oh, yes--no, not very well,” he stammered, making a great work with his
plate and spoon.
“Do not tell _me_ that,” she said, coming over courageously and laying
her hand upon his shoulder. “I know you understand every word of the
story, if it is the story I mean.”
He did not deny it this time. “But I do not know whether it is the same
story or not,” he said, eagerly wishing she would change the subject.
“What I mean,” said she, “is a story about a woman who was a friend of
mine--and--and she quarrelled with my brothers. Is that the one?”
“That was the one,” said he.
Miss Mary wrung her hands. “Oh!” she cried piteously, “that they should
be thinking about that yet! wiser-like would it be for them to be
sitting at the Book. Poor Nan! Poor Nan! my dear companion! Must they
be blaming her even in the grave? You understand it very well. I know by
your face you understand it. She should not have all the blame. They
did not understand; they were older, more sedate than she was; their
merriment was past; there was no scrap left of their bairnhood that
even in the manliest man finds a woman’s heart quicker than any other
quality. I think she tried to--to--to--like them because they were my
brothers, but the task beat her for all her endeavour. It is an old,
dait story. I am wondering at them bringing it up to you. What do
you think they would bring it up to you for?” And she scrutinised him
shrewdly again.
“I think the girl the Cornal saw me with put him in mind of her mother,”
said Gilian, pushing the idea no further.
She still looked closely at him. “The girl cannot help that,” said she.
“She is very like her mother in some ways--perhaps in many. Maybe that
was the Cornal’s reason for telling you the story.”
There was not, for once, the response of understanding in Gilian’s face.
She could say no more. Was he not a boy yet, perhaps with the impulse
she and the Cornal feared, all undeveloped? And at any rate she dare not
give him the watchword that all their remembrances led up to--the word
Beware.
But Gilian guessed the word, and his assumption of ignorance was to
prevent Miss Mary from guessing so much. Only he misunderstood. He looked
upon the desire to keep him from the company of the people of Maam as
due to the old rancours and jealousies, while indeed it was all in his
interest.
But in any case he respected the feelings of the Paymaster’s family,
and thereafter for long he avoided as honestly as a boy might all
intercourse with the girl, whom circumstance the mischievous, the
henchman of the enemy, put in his way more frequently almost than any
of her sex. He must be meeting her in the street, the lane, the
market-place, in the highway, or in walks along the glen. He kept aloof
as well as he might (yet ever thinking her for song and charm the most
interesting girl he knew), and the days passed; the springs would be
but a breath of rich brown mould and birch, the summers but a flash
of golden days growing briefer every year, the winters a lessening
interlude of storm and darkness.
Gilian grew like a sapling in all seasons, in mind and fancy as in body.
Ever he would be bent above the books of Marget Maclean, getting deeper
to the meaning of them. The most trivial, the most inadequate and common
story had for him more than for its author, for under the poor battered
phrase that runs through book and book, the universal gestures of
bookmen, he could see history and renew the tragedies that suggested
them at the outset. He was no more Brooks’ scholar though he sat upon
his upper forms, for, as the dominie well could see, he was launching
out on barques of his own; the plain lessons ot the school were without
any interest as they were without any difficulty to him. He roamed about
the woods, he passed precious hours upon the shore, his mind plangent
like the wave.
“A droll fellow that of the Paymaster’s,” they said of him in the
town. For as he aged his shyness grew upon him, and he went about the
community at ease with himself only when his mind was elsewhere.
“A remarkable young gentleman,” said Mr. Spencer one day to the
Paymaster. “I am struck by him, sir, I am struck. He has an air of
cleverness, and yet they tell me he is--”
“He is what?” asked the Paymaster, lowering his brows suspicious on the
innkeeper’s hesitation.
“They tell me he is not so great a credit to old Brooks as he might
expect,” said the innkeeper, who was not lacking in boldness or plain
speaking if pushed to it.
“Ay, they say that?” repeated the Paymaster, pinching his snuff
vigorously. “Maybe they’re right too. I’ll tell you what. The lad’s head
is stuffed with wind. He goes about with notions swishing round inside
that head of his, as much the plaything of nature as the reed that
whistles in the wind at the riverside and fancies itself a songster.”
Mr. Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his
fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known
intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had
followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that
this was a delicate question. He let it pass unput.
Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy. The same day at their meridian in
the “Abercrombie” he broached the topic.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is
ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his
hand.”
“A crook in his hand?” said the Paymaster. “Would you have nothing else
for him but a crook?”
“Well,” said MacGibbon, “I supposed you would be for putting him into
Ladyfield. If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for.”
“Ladyfield!” cried the Paymaster. “There was no notion further from my
mind. Farming, for all Duke George’s reductions, is the last of trades
nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a
soger.”
MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. “If you did I forgot,” said he. “It
never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your
influence will be useful.” And he changed the subject.
At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from
school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said,
“when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go,” was on an
excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels
at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless
fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness.
For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No
living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the
white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children
among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets
and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river’s peaty flow;
he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazily,
and within him rose the whole charm and glamour of oceans and isles.
Swimming in the briny deeps that washed the rocks, he felt in that
solitude so sufficient, so much in harmony with the spirit of the place,
its rumination, its content, its free and happy birds, as if he were
Ellar in the fairy tale. The tide caressed; it put its arms round him;
it laughed in the sunshine and kissed him shyly at the lips. Into
the swooping concourse of the birds he would send, thus swimming, his
brotherly halloo. They called back; they were not afraid, they need not
be--he loved them.
To-day he had come down to the Waterfoot almost unknowing where he
walked. Though the woods were bare there was the look of warmth in their
brown and purple depths; only on the upper hills did the snow lie in
patches. Great piles of trunks, the trunks of old fir and oak, lay above
high-water mark. He turned instinctively to look for the ship they were
waiting for, and behind him, labouring at a slant against the wind,
was the _Jean_ coming from the town to pick her cargo from this narrow
estuary.
He was plucked at the heart by a violent wish to stay. At the poop he
could see Black Duncan, and the seaman’s histories, the seaman’s fables
all came into his mind again, and the sea was the very highway of
content. The ship was all alone upon the water, not even the tan of a
fisher’s lug-sail broke the blue. A bracing heartening air blew from
French Foreland And as he was looking spellbound upon the little vessel
coming into the mouth of the river, he was startled by a strain of
music. It floated, a rumour angelic, upon the air, coming whence he
could not guess--surely not from the vessel where Black Duncan and two
others held the deck alone?
It was for a time but a charm of broken melody in the veering wind,
distinct a moment, then gone, then back a faint echo of its first
clearness. It was not till the vessel came fairly opposite him that the
singer revealed herself in Nan sitting on a water-breaker in the lee of
the companion hatch.
For the life of him he could not turn to go away. He rebelled against
the Paymaster’s service, and remained till the ship was in the river
mouth beside him.
“Ho ‘_ille ‘ille!_” Black Duncan cried upon him, leaning upon his tarry
gunnle, and smiling to the shore like a man far-travelled come upon a
friendly face in some foreign port. The wooded rock gave back the call
with interest. Round about turned the seaman and viewed the southern
sky. A black cloud was pricked upon the spur of Cowal. “There’s wind
there,” said he, “and water too! I’m thinking we are better here than
below Otter this night. Nan, my dear, it is home you may get to-day, but
not without a wetting. I told you not to come, and come you would.”
She drummed with her heels upon the breaker, held up a merry chin, and
smiled boldly at her father’s captain. “Yes, you told me not to come,
but you wanted me to come all the time. I know you did. You wanted
songs, you wanted all the songs, and you had the ropes off the pawl
before I had time to change my mind.”
“You should go home now,” said the seaman anxiously. “Here is our young
fellow, and he will walk up to the town with you.”
She pretented to see Gilian for the first time, staring at him boldly,
with a look that made him certain she was thinking of the many times he
had manifestly kept out of her way. It made him uneasy, but he was more
uneasy when she spoke.
“The Paymaster’s boy,” said she. “Oh! he would lose himself on the way
home, and the fairies might get him. When I go I must find my own way.
But I am not going now, Duncan. If it will rain, it will rain and be
done with it, and then I will go home.”
“Come on board,” said Duncan to the boy. “Come on board, and see my
ship, then; she is a little ship, but she is a brave one, I’m telling
you; there is nothing of the first of her left for patches.”
Gilian looked longingly at the magic decks confused with ropes, and the
open companion faced him, leading to warm depths, he knew by the smoke
that floated from the funnel. But he paused, for the girl had turned
her head to look at the sea, and though he guessed somehow she might be
willing to have him with her for his youth, he did not care to venture.
Then Black Duncan swore. He considered his invitation too much of a
favour to have it treated so dubiously. Gilian saw it and went upon the
deck.
Youth, that is so long (and all too momentary), and leaves for ever such
a memory, soon, forgets. So it was that in a little while Gilian and Nan
were on the friendliest of terms, listening to Black Duncan’s stories.
As they listened, the girl sat facing the den stair, so that her eyes
were lit to their depths, her lips were flaming red. The seaman and the
boy sat in shadow. The seaman, stretched upon a bunk with his feet to
the Carron stove, the boy upon a firkin, could see her every wave of
fancy displayed upon her countenance. She was eager, she was piteous,
she was laughing, in the right key of response always when the
stories that were told were the straightforward things of a sailor’s
experience--storms, adventures, mishaps, passion, or calm. She had grown
as Gilian had grown, in mind as in body; and thinking so, he was pleased
exceedingly. But the tales that the boy liked were the tales that were
not true, and these, to Gilian’s sorrow, she plainly did not care for;
he could see it in the calmness of her features. When she yawned at a
tale of Irish mermaidens he was dashed exceedingly, for before him again
was the sceptic who had laughed at his heron’s nest and had wantonly
broken the crystal of the Lady’s Linn. But by-and-by she sang, and oh!
all was forgiven her. This time she sang some songs of her father’s, odd
airs from English camp-fires, braggart of word, or with the melodious
longings of men abroad from the familiar country, the early friend.
“I wish I was a soldier,” he found himself repeating in his thought. “I
wish I was a soldier, that such songs might be sung for me.”
A fury at the futility of his existence seized him. He would give
anything to be away from this life of ease and dream, away where things
were ever happening, where big deeds were possible, where the admiration
and desire were justified. He felt ashamed of his dreams, his pictures,
his illusions. Up he got from his seat upon the firkin, and his head was
in the shadows of the smoky timbers.
“Sit down, lad, sit down,” said the seaman, lazy upon his arm upon the
shelf. “There need be no hurry now; I hear the rain.”
A moan was in the shrouds, the alarm of a freshening wind. Some drops
trespassed on the cabin floor, then the rain pattered heavily on the
deck. The odours of the ship passed, and in their place came the smell
of the cut timber on the shore, the oak’s sharpness, the rough sweetness
of the firs, all the essence, the remembrance of the years circled
upon the ruddy trunks, their gatherings of storm and sunshine, of dew,
showers, earth-sap, and the dripping influence of the constant stars.
“I cannot stay here, I cannot stay here! I must go,” cried the lad, and
he made to run on deck.
But Duncan put a hand out as the lowest step was reached, and set him
back in his place.
“Sit you there!” said he. “I have a fine story you never heard yet And a
fighting story too.”
“What is it? What is it?” cried Nan. “Oh! tell us that one. Is it a true
one?”
“It is true--in a way,” said the seaman. “It was a thing that happened
to myself.”
Gilian delayed his going--the temptation of a new story was too much for
him.
“Do you take frights?” Black Duncan asked him. “Frights for things that
are not there at all?”
Gilian nodded.
“That is because it is in the blood,” said the seaman; “that is the kind
of fright of my story.”
And this is the story Black Duncan told in the Gaelic.