AS he spoke he staggered to the side, and would have fallen but for his
sister’s readiness. About that tall rush of a brother she quickly
placed an arm and kept him on his feet with infinite exertion, the
while uttering endearments long out of fashion for her or him, but come
suddenly, at this crisis, from the grave of the past--the past where she
and Dugald had played as children, with free frank hearts loving each
other truly.
“Put me to my bed,” said he again thickly, and his eyes blurred with the
utmost weariness. “Put me to my bed. O God! what is on me now? Put me to
my bed.”
“Dugald! Dugald! Dugald!” she cried. “My darling brother, here is Mary
with you; it is just a turn.” But as she said the flattering thing her
face was hopeless. The odour of the southernwood on the window-sill
changed at once to laurel, rain-drenched, dark, and waving over tombs
for the boy spellbound on the floor. All his shameful perturbation
vanished, a trifling thing before the great Perturber’s presence.
The brothers went quickly beside their sister, and took him to
his bedroom, furnished sparsely always by his own wish that denied
indulgence in anything much beyond a soldier’s campaign quarters.
Dr. Anderson came, and went, shaking hands with Miss Mary in the lobby
and his eyes most sternly bent upon the inside of his hat “Before
morning at the very most,” he said in his odd low-country voice. No more
than that, and still it thundered at her soul like an infernal doom. Up
she gathered her apron, up to her face, and fled in among her pots and
pans, and loudly she moved among them to drown her lamentation.
Dr. Colin came later and prayed in the two languages over a figure on
the bed, and then went home to write another sermon than the one already
started. The room he left was silent for a while, till of a sudden the
eyes of the General opened and he looked upon the sorry company.
“Bring me MacGibbon,” said he in a voice extremely sensible.
Gilian ran up the street and fetched the old comrade, who put his hand
upon the General’s head.
“Dugald, do you ken me?” said he.
“Do I ken you?” said the General with an unpractised smile. “You’re the
laddie that burned the master’s cane. I would know your voice if you
were in any guise, and what masquerade is this that you should be so
old? We’re to be the first to move in the morning, under arms at scream
of day.... Lord, but I’m tired! Bob, Bob, they’re not thinking of us
at home in the old place I’ll warrant, and to-morrow we may be stricken
corpses for the king without so much as Macintyre’s stretching-board to
give us a soger’s chest and shoulders.”
“Was there anything I could do, Dugald?” said the comrade, a ludicrous
man with his paunch now far beyond the limit of the soldier’s belt he
used to buckle easily, wearing in a clownish notion of deference to this
soldier’s passing a foolish small Highland bonnet he had donned in old
campaigns.
“There was something running in my mind,” said the man in the bed.
“I think I would be wanting you to take word home in case anything
happened. I was thinking of--of--of--what was her name, now? You know
the one I mean--her ladyship in Glen Shira. Am I not stupid to
forget it? that’s the worst of the bottle! What was her name, now?...
_Battalion will form an hollow square_.... The name, the name, what was
it?... _On the center companies, ‘kwards wheel_.... I’m wearied to the
marrow of my bones, all but the right arm, that’s like a feather, that’s
like a... _By the right angle of the front face; sub-divisions to the
right and left half wheel. Re-form the square. Hall! Dress!_... What’s
that piper doing out there? MacVurich, come in! This is not a reel at
a Skye wedding.... Let me see, I have the name on the tip of my
tongue--what could it be, now? _Steady, men!_”
The door of the chamber was pushed in a little, and to Gilian’s mouth
his heart rose up at the manifestation, for what was this with no
footstep on the wooden stair? About him he felt of a sudden cold airs
waft, and the door ajar with no one entering glued his gaze upon its
panels. The others in the room had not perceived it. Miss Mary, grown
of a sudden plain and old, looked up in the Cornal’s face, craving there
for something for the ease of sorrow, as if he that had wandered so far
and seen the Enemy so often and so ugly had some secret to share with
her whereby this ancient trouble could be marred. There she found no
consolation. No magician but only the brother looked over an untidy
scarf and a limp high collar at the delirious man in bed. The Paymaster
stood at the window frowning out upon the street; MacGibbon coughed
in short dry jerky coughs, patted with a bony hand upon the coverlet,
turned his head away. A stillness that was like a swoon came over all.
“Is that you, mother?” It was the General who broke the quiet, and his
eyes were on his sister. A flush had fallen like a sunset on his face,
his eyes were very clear and full, and, with his shaven cheeks, he might
in the mitigate light of the chamber have been a lad new waked from an
unpleasant dream. His sister put her head upon the pillow beside him and
an arm about his shoulders.
“Oh, Dugald, Dugald!” said she, “it is not mother yet, but only Mary.”
And the bedstead shook with the stress of her grief.
“Mary, is it?” said he, shutting his eyes again. “What are you laughing
at? I was not up there at all; I never saw her to-day, upon my word;
I was just giving Black George an exercise no further than the Boshang
Gate.... I’m saying, though, you need not let on about it to Colin...
Colin, Colin, Colin, I wish we were home; the leaf must be fine and
green upon Dunchuach.... They’re over the river at Aldea Tajarda, and
we push on to Cieudada.... What’s that, Mackay? let go the girl! And you
the Highland gentleman! _Lo sien--sien--siento mucho, Senora_.”
“I am at your shoulder, Dugald, do you not know me?” asked the Cornal,
gently putting his sister aside. His brother looked and smiled again,
but did not seem to see him.
“What was her name? and I’ll send her my love and duty, for, man,
between us, I was fond of her,... There was a song she had:
The Rover went a-roving far upon the foreign seas,
Oh, hail to thee, my dear, and fare-ye-weel.
Only it was in the Gaelic she sung it”
His voice, that was very weak and thin now, cracked, and no sound came
though his lips moved.
Miss Mary took a cup and wet his lips. He seemed to think it a
Communion, for again he shut his eyes, and “God,” said he, “I am a
sinful man to be sitting at Thy tables, but Thou knowest the soldier’s
trade, the soldier’s sacrifice, and Thou art ready to forgive.”
And still Gilian was in his bewilderment and fear about the open door.
Had anything come in that was there beside them at the bed? Down in the
kitchen Peggy poked the fire with less than her customary vigour, but
between her cheerful and worldly occupation and this doleful room, felt
Gilian, lay a space--a stairway full of dreads. All the stories he had
heard of Death personified came to him fast upon each other, and they
are numerous about winter fires in the Highland glens. He could fancy
almost that he saw the plaided spectre by the bedside, arms akimbo,
smiling ghastly, waiting till his prey was done with earthly
conversation. It was horrible to be the only one in that chamber to know
of the terrific presence that had entered at the door, and the boy’s
mouth parched with old, remote, unreasonable fears.
They did not disappear, those childish terrors, even when a kitten
moved across the floor and began to toy with the vallance of the bed,
explaining at once the door’s opening. For might not the kitten, he
thought, be more than Peggy’s foundling be the other Thing disguised?
He watched its gambols at the feet of that distressed household, watched
its pawing at the fringe, turning round upon itself in playfulness,
emblem surely of the cruel heedlessness of nature.
MacGibbon moved to the window and stood beside the Paymaster, saying no
word, but looking out at the vacant street, its causeway still shining
with the rain. They were turning their backs, as it were, on a sorrow
irremediable. Miss Mary and the Cornal stood alone by the dying man. He
lay like a log but that his left hand played restlessly on the coverlet,
long in the fingers, sinewy at the wrist. Miss Mary took it in hers
and put palm to palm, and caressed the back with her other hand with an
overflowing of affection that murmured at her throat.
And now that MacGibbon did not see and the Cornal had blurred eyes upon
his brother’s boyish countenance, she felt free to caress, and she laid
the poor hand against her cheek and coyly kissed it.
The General turned his look upon her wet face with a moment’s
comprehension. “Tuts! never mind, Mary, my dear,” said he, “it might
have been with Jamie yonder on the field, and there--there you have a
son--in a manner--left to comfort you.” Then he began to wander anew. “A
son,” said he, “a son. Whose son? Turner threw our sonlessness in our
Jock’s face, but it was in my mind there was a boy somewhere we expected
something of.”
Miss Mary beckoned on Gilian to come forward to the bedside. He rose
from the chair he sat on in the farthest corner with his dreads and
faltered over.
“What boy’s this?” said the General, looking at him with surmising eyes.
“He puts me in mind of--of--of--of an old tale somewhere with a sunny
day in it. Nan! Nan! Nan!--that’s the name. I knew I would come on
it, for the sound of it was always like a sunny day in Portugal or
Spain--_He estado en Espana_.”
“This is the boy, Dugald,” said Miss Mary; “this is just our Gilian.”
“I see that. I know him finely,” said the General, turning upon him a
roving melancholy eye: “Jock’s recruit.... Did you get back from your
walk, my young lad? I never could fathom you, but perhaps you have your
parts.... Well, well... what are ye dreaming on the day?... Eh? Ha! ha!
ha! Aye dreaming, that was you; you’ll be dreaming next that the lassie
likes you. Mind, she jilted Jock, she jilted Colin, she jilted me; were
we not the born idiots? yet still-and-on.... Sixty miles in twenty-four
hours; good marching, lads, good marching, for half-starved men, and not
the true heather-bred at that.”
The voice was becoming weaker in every sentence, the flush was paling
on the countenance. Standing by the bedside, the Cornal looked upon his
brother with a most rueful visage, his face hoved up with tears.
“This beats all!” said he, and he turned and went beside the men at the
window, leaving Miss Mary caressing still at the hand upon the coverlet,
and with an arm about the boy.
“He was a strong, fine, wiry man in his time,” said MacGibbon, looking
over his shoulder at this end of a stormy life. “I mind him at Talavera;
I think he was at his very best there.”
The Paymaster looked, too, at the figure upon the bed, looked with a
bent head, under lowered eyebrows, his lip and chin brown with snuffy
tears.
“At sixteen he threw the cabar against the champion of the three shires,
and though he was a sober man a bottle was neither here nor there with
him,” said the Cornal.
Miss Mary was upon her knees.
“The batteries are to open fire on San Vincent; seven eighteen-pounders
and half a dozen howitzers are scarcely enough for that job. Tell
Mackellar to move up two hundred yards farther on the right.”
The General babbled again of his wars in a child’s accent, that rose now
and then stormily to the vehemence of the battle-field. “_Columns deploy
on the right centre company.... No, no, close column on the rear of the
Grenadiers_.... I wish, I wish.... Jock, Jock, where’s your boy now? I
cannot see him, I’m sore feared he’s hiding in the sutler’s vans. I knew
him for a dreamer from the first day I saw him.... That’s Williams gone
and my step to Major come. God sain him! we could have better spared
another man.... _Halt, dress!_”
He opened his eyes again and they fell upon Gilian. “You mind me of a
boy I once knew,” said he. “Poor boy, poor boy, what a pity of you! My
sister Mary would have liked you. I think we never gave her her due, and
indeed she had a generous hand.”
“Here she’s at your side, dear Dugald,” said his sister, and her head
went down upon his breast.
“So she is,” said he, arousing to the fact; “I might be sure she would
be there!” He disengaged the hand she had in hers, and wearily placed
it for a moment on her hair with an awkward effort at fondling. “Are
you tired, my dear?” he said, repeating it in the Gaelic. “It’s a dreich
dreich dying on a feather bed.” He smiled once more feebly, and Gilian
screamed, for the kitten had touched him on the leg.
“Go downstairs, this is no place for you, my dear,” said Miss Mary; and
he went willingly, hearing a stertorous breathing in the bed behind him.
PART II
CHAPTER XX--THE RETURN
When the General died, the household in the high burgh land suffered a
change marvellous enough considering how little that old man musing in
his parlour had had to do for years with its activities. Cornal Colin
would sit of an evening with candles extravagantly burning more numerous
than before to make up for the glowing heart extinguished; the long
winter nights, black and stifling and immense around the burgh town, and
the wind with a perpetual moan among the trees, would find him abandoned
to his sorry self, looking into the fire, the week’s paper on his knees
unread, and him full of old remembrances and regrets. It had become for
him a parlour full of ghosts. He could not, in October blasts, but
think of Jamie yonder on the cold foreign field with no stone for his
memorial; Dugald, so lately gone, an old man, bent and palsied, would
return in the flicker of the candle, remitted to his prime, the very
counterpart of the sturdy gallant on the wall. Sometimes he would talk
with these wraiths, and Miss Mary standing still in the lobby, her heart
tortured by his loneliness, would hear him murmuring in these phantom
visitations. She would, perhaps, venture in now and then timidly, and
take a seat unbidden on the corner of a chair near him, and embark
on some topic of the day. For a little he would listen almost with a
brightness, but brief, brief was the mood; very soon would he let his
chin fall upon his breast, and with pouted lips relapse into his
doleful meditation.
All life, all the interests, the activities of the town seemed to drift
by him; folk saw him less and less often on the plain stones of
the street; children grew up from pinafores to kilts, from kilts to
breeches, never knowing of his presence in that community that at last
he saw but of an afternoon in momentary glimpses from the window.
On a week-end, perhaps, the veterans would come up to cheer him if they
could; tobacco that he nor any of his had cared for in that form
would send its cloud among Miss Mary’s dear naperies, but she never
complained: they might have fumed her out of press and pantry if
they brought her brother cheer. They talked loudly; they laughed
boisterously; they acted a certain zest in life: for a little he would
rouse to their entertainment, fiddling heedlessly with an empty glass,
but anon he would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering
at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till
some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal
Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour
any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their
departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in
that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the
door with one of her mother’s candlesticks, felt as she had the light
above her head and showed them down the stair as if she had been the
last left at a funeral feast. Her shadow on the wall, dancing before her
as she returned, seemed some mockery of the night.
Only Old Brooks could rouse the Cornal to some spirit of liveliness.
In a neighbourly compassion the dominie would come in of a Sunday or a
Friday evening, leaving for an hour or two the books he was so fond of
that he must have a little one in his pocket to feel the touch of when
he could not be studying the pages. Seated in the Cornal’s chair, he had
a welcome almost blithe. For he was a man of great urbanity, sobered by
thought upon the complexities of life, but yet with sparkling courage.
He found the brothers now contemptuous of the boy who showed no sign
of adaptability or desire for that gallant career that had been theirs.
These, indeed, were the cold days for Gilian in a household indifferent
to him save Miss Mary, who grew fonder every day, doting upon him like a
lover for a score of reasons, but most of all because he was that rarity
the perpetual child, and she must be loving somewhere.
“I have not seen the lad at school for a week now,” Brooks said,
compelled at last by long truancies.
“So?” said the Cornal, showing no interest “It is not my affair. John
must look after his own recruit, who seems an uncommon tardy one, Mr.
Brooks--an uncommon tardy.”
“But I get small satisfaction from the Captain.”
“I daresay, I daresay; would you wonder at that in our Jock? He’s my
brother, but some way there is wanting in him the stuff of Jamie and
of Dugald. Even in his throes upon his latter bed Dugald could see what
Jock could never see--the doom in this lad’s countenance. As for me, I
was done with the fellow after the trick he played us in his story of
the wreck on Ealan Dubh. I blame him, in a way, for my brother Dugald’s
stroke.”
The dominie looked in a startled remonstrance. “I would not blame him
for that, Cornal,” he said: “that was what the Sheriff calls _damnum
fatale_. Upon my word, though Gilian has been something of a heart-break
to myself, I must say you give him but scant justice among you here.”
“I can see in him but youth wasted, and the prodigal of that is
spendthrift indeed.”
“I would not just say wasted,” protested the dominie. “There’s the
makings of a fine man in him if we give him but a shove in the right
direction. He baffles me to comprehend, and yet”--this a little
shamefacedly--“and yet I’ve brought him to my evening prayers. I
would like guidance on the laddie. With him it’s a spoon made or a horn
spoiled. Sometimes I feel I have in him fine stuff and pliable, and I’ll
be trying to fathom how best to work it, but my experience has always
been with more common metal, and I am feared, I’m feared, we may be
botching him.”
“That was done for us in the making of him,” said the Cornal.
“I would not say that either, Cornal,” said the dominie firmly. “But I’m
wae to see him brought up on no special plan. The Captain seems to have
given up his notion of the army for him.”
“You can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink.
What’s to be made of him? Here’s he sixteen or thereabouts, and just a
bairn over lesson-books at every chance.”
Brooks smiled wistfully. “It is not the lesson-books, Cornal, not the
lesson-books exactly. I wish it was, but books of any kind--come now,
Cornal, you can hardly expect me to condemn them in the hands of youth,”
He fondled the little Horace in his pocket as a man in company may
squeeze his wife’s hand. “They made my bread and butter, did the books,
for fifty years, and Gilian will get no harm there. The lightest of
novelles and the thinnest of ballants have something precious for a lad
of his kind.”
The Cornal made no response; the issue was too trivial to keep him from
his meditation. His chin sunk upon his chest as it would not have done
had the dominie kept to the commoner channels of his gossip, that was
generally on universal history, philosophy of a rough and ready rural
kind, and theology handled with a freedom that would have seriously
alarmed Dr. Colin if he could have heard his Session Clerk in the
operation.
“Eh? Are you hearing me, Cornal?” he pressed, eager to compel something
for the youth whose days were being wasted.
“Speak to Miss Mary,” was all the Cornal would say. “I have nothing to
do with him, and John’s heedless now, for he knows his plan for the army
is useless.”
The dominie shook his head. “Man!” he cried. “I cannot even tell of his
truancy there, for her heart’s wrapped up in the youth. When she speaks
to me about him her face is lighted up like a day in spring, and I dare
not say cheep to shatter her illusion.”
Gilian, alas! knew how little these old men now cared for him. The
Cornal had long since ceased his stories; the Paymaster, coming in from
his meridian in the Sergeant More, would pass him on the stair with as
little notice as if he were a stranger in the street. Miss Mary was his
only link between his dreams, his books, and the common life of the day,
and it was she who at last made the move that sent him back to Ladyfield
to learn with Cameron the shepherd--still there in the interests of the
Paymaster who had whimsically remained tenant--the trade that was not
perhaps best suited for him, but at least came somehow most conveniently
to his practice. But for the loss of her consoling and continual company
there would have been almost joy on his part at this returning to the
scene of his childhood. He went back to it on a summer day figuring to
himself the content, the carelessness that had been his there before,
and thinking, poor fool, they were waiting where he had left them.
Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven
cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman
with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one
sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the
plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of
Drimfern. A pleasant place for meditation, bleak in winter for the want
of trees, but in other seasons in a bloom of colour.
Though he was there ‘prentice to a hard calling, Gilian’s life was more
the gentle’s than the shepherd’s. He might be often on the hill, but it
was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling,
it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries
of the countryside. A certain weeping effect of the mists on the
ravines, one particular moaning sound of the wind among the rocks, had
a strange solace for his ear, chording with some sweet melancholy of his
spirit He loved it all, yet at times he would flee from the place as if
a terror were at his heels and in a revolt against the narrowness of his
life, hungering almost to starvation for some companionship, for some
salve to an anxious mind, and, in spite of his shyness, bathe in the
society of the town--an idler. The people as he rode past would
indicate him with a toss of the head over their shoulders, and say, “The
Paymaster’s boy,” and yet the down was showing on his lip. He would go
up the street looking from side to side with an expectancy that had no
object; he stared almost rudely at faces, seeking for he knew not what.
It was not the winters with their cold, their rain, their wind and
darkness, that oppressed him most in his banishment, but the summers. In
the winter the mists crowded so close about, and the snow so robbed
the land of all variety, that Ladyfield house with its peats burning
ceaselessly, its clean paven court, its store of books he had gathered
there, was an enviable place for compactness and comfort, and he could
feel as if the desirable world was in his immediate neighbourhood. Down
in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights
with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each
with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of
tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the
dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor
shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth’s
manifest duty to do.
But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable.
For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them;
the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the
world. “Come away,” said the breezes; passing gipsies all jangling with
tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling. When the
summer was just on the turn at that most pitiful’ of periods, the
autumn, he must go more often down to town.
CHAPTER XXI--THE SORROWFUL SEASON
It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the
lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful
from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the
shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress,
growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The
separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed
a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some
universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape
so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in
upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus
affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some
flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town.
He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have
seemed--if not handsome altogether--at least notable and pleasant to
any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men
full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of
place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw
anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it,
puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his
appearance on the street or on the highway put a new interest in the
day.
The Paymaster was standing gossiping at the inn door with Mr. Spencer,
Rixa, and General Turner himself--no less, for the ancient rancour at
the moment was at rest.
“Here he comes,” said old Mars sourly, as Gilian turned round the Arches
into the town. “He’s like Gillesbeg Aotram, always seeking for something
he’ll never find.”
“Your failure!” said Turner playfully, but with poor inspiration, as in
a moment he realised.
The Paymaster bridled. He had no answer to a truth so manifest to
himself. In a lightning-flash he remembered his boast in the schoolroom
at the dregy, and hoped Turner had not so good a memory as himself. He
could only vent his annoyance on Gilian, who drew up his horse with
a studied curvet--for still there was the play-actor in him to some
degree.
“Down again?” said he with half a sneer. There is a way of leaning on
a stick and talking over the shoulder at an antagonist that can be very
trying to the antagonist if he has any sense of shyness.
“Down again,” agreed Gilian uncomfortably, sorry he had had the courtesy
to stop. The others moved away, for they knew the relations of the man
and his adopted son were not of the pleasantest.
“An odd kind of farm training!” said the old officer. “I wish I could
fathom whether you are dolt or deep one.”
Gilian might have come off the horse and argued it, for he had an answer
pat enough. He sat still and fingered the reins, looking at the old
man with the puffed face, and the constricted bull neck, and
self-satisfaction written upon every line of him, and concluding it was
not worth while to explain to a nature so shallow. And the man, after
all, was his benefactor: scrupulous about every penny he spent on
himself, he had paid, at Miss Mary’s solicitations, for the very horse
the lad bestrode.
“Do you know what Turner said there?” asked the Paymaster, still with
his contemptuous side to the lad. “He called you our failure. God, and
it’s true! Neither soldier nor shepherd seems to be in you, a muckle
bulrush nodding to the winds of Heaven! See that sturdy fellow at the
quay there?”
Gilian looked and saw Young Islay, a smart ensign home on leave from the
county corps that even yet was taking so many fine young fellows from
that community.
“There’s a lad who’s a credit to all about him, and he had not half your
chances; do you know that?”
“He seems to have the knack of turning up for my poor comparison ever
since I can mind,” said Gilian, good-humouredly. “And somehow,” he
added, “I have a notion that he has but half my brains as well as half
my chances.” He looked up to see Turner still at the inn door. “General
Turner,” he cried, his face reddening and his heart stormy, “I hear
that in your frank estimate I’m the Paymaster’s failure; is it so bad as
that? It seems, if I may say it, scarcely fair from one of your years to
one of mine.”
“Shut your mouth!” said the Paymaster coarsely, as Turner came forward.
“You have no right to repeat what I said and show the man I took his
insolence to heart.”
“I said it; I don’t deny,” answered the General, coming forward from
the group at the door and putting his hand in a friendly freedom on the
horse’s neck and looking up with some regret in Gilian’s face. “One
says many things in an impetus. Excuse a soldier’s extravagance. I never
meant it either for your ear or for unkindness. And you talk of ages:
surely a man so much your senior has a little privilege?”
“Not to judge youth, sir, which he may have forgotten to understand,”
said Gilian, yet very red and uneasy, but with a wistful countenance.
“If you’ll think of it I’m just at the beginning of life, a little more
shy of making the plunge perhaps than Young Islay there might be, or
your own son Sandy, who’s a credit to his corps, they say.”
“Quite right, Gilian, and I ask your pardon,” said the General, putting
out his hand. “God knows who the failures of this life are; some of them
go about very flashy semblances of success. In these parts we judge by
the external signs, that are not always safest; for my son Sandy, who
looks so thriving and so douce when he comes home, is after all a scamp
whose hands are ever in his simple daddy’s pockets.” But this he said
laughing, with a father’s reservation.
The Paymaster stared at this encounter, in some ways so much beyond his
comprehension. “Humph!” he ejaculated; and Gilian rode on, leaving in
the group behind him an uncomfortable feeling that somehow, somewhere,
an injustice had been done.
Miss Mary’s face was at the window whenever his horse’s hooves came
clattering on the causeway--she knew the very clink of the shoes.
“There’s something wrong with the laddie to-day,” she cried to Peggy;
“he looks unco dejected;” and her own countenance fell in sympathy with
her darling’s mood.
She met him on the stair as if by accident, pretending to be going
down to her cellar in the pend. They did not even shake hands; it is
a formality neglected in these parts except for long farewells or
unexpected meetings. Only she must take his bonnet and cane from him and
in each hand take them upstairs as if she were leading thus two little
children, her gaze fond upon the back of him.
“Well, auntie!” he said, showing at first no sign of the dejection she
had seen from the window. “Here I am again. I met the Captain up at the
inn door, and he seems to grudge me the occasional comfort of hearing
any other voice than my own. I could scarcely tell him as I can tell
you, that the bleating of the lambs gave me a sore heart. The very hills
are grieving with them. I’m a fine farmer, am I not? Are you not
vexed for me?” His lips could no longer keep his secret, their corners
trembled with the excess of his feeling.
She put a thin hand upon his coat lapel, and with the other picked
invisible specks of dust from his coat sleeve, her eyes revealing by
their moisture a ready harmony with his sentiment.
“Farmer indeed!” said she with a gallant attempt at badinage; “you’re as
little for that, I’m afraid, as you’re for the plough or the army.”
She led him into her room and set a chair for him as if he had been a
prince, only to have an excuse for putting an arm for a moment almost
round his waist. She leaned over him as he sat and came as close as she
dared in contact with his hair, all the time a glow in her face.
“And what did you come down for?” she asked, expecting an old answer he
never varied in.
He looked up and smiled with a touch of mock gallantry wholly new. “To
see you, of course,” said he, as though she had been a girl.
She was startled at this first revelation of the gallant in what till
now had been her child. She flushed to the coils above her ear. Then she
laughed softly and slapped him harmlessly on the back. “Get away with
you,” she said, “and do not make fun of a douce old maiden!” She drew
back as she spoke and busily set about some household office, fearing,
apparently, that her fondness had been made too plain.
“Do you know what the Captain said?” he remarked in a tone less hearty,
moving about the room in a searching discontent.
“The old fool!” she answered irrelevantly, anticipating some
unpleasantness. “He went out this morning in a tiravee about a button
wanting from his waistcoat. It’s long since I learned never to heed him
much.”
It was a story invented on the moment; in heavenly archives that sin of
love is never indexed Her face had at once assumed a look of anxiety,
for she felt that the encounter had caused Gilian’s dejection as he rode
down the street.
“What was he saying?” she asked at last, seeing there was no sign of
his volunteering more. And she spoke with a very creditable show of
indifference, and even hummed a little bar of song as she turned some
airing towels on a winter-dyke beside the fire.
“Do you think I’m a failure, auntie?” asked he, facing her. “That was
what he called me.”
She was extremely hurt and angry.
“A failure!” she cried. “Did any one ever hear the like? God forgive me
for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his
own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like
his brothers than I’m like Duke George.”
“You do not deny it!” said Gilian simply.
She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a
transfiguration.
“My dear, my dear!” said she, “is there need for me to deny it? What are
you yet but a laddie?”
He fingered the down upon his lip.
“But a laddie,” she repeated, determined not to see. “All the world’s
before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its
crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not
willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants--do I not know them?
Grant me patience with them!”
“It was General Turner’s word,” said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he
wondered for a moment to see her flush.
“He might have had a kinder thought,” said she, “with his own affairs,
as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I’ll
warrant you do not know anything of that, but it’s the clavers of the
Crosswell.” She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away
from what had vexed her darling. “Old Islay has his schemes, they say,
to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of
the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear
of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a
place of greed and plot!”
“That Turner said it, showed he thought it!” said Gilian, not a whit
moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings.
“Amn’t I telling you?” said Miss Mary. “It’s just his own sorrows
souring him. There’s Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye
liked the laddie and he’s young yet), and his daughter back from her
schooling in Edinburgh, educated, or polished, or finished off as they
call it--I hope she kens what she’s to be after next, for I’m sure her
father does not.”
Gilian’s breast filled with some strange new sense of sudden relief. It
was as if he had been climbing out of an airless, hopeless valley, and
emerged upon a hill-crest, and was struck there by the flat hand of
the lusty wind and stiffened into hearty interest in the rolling and
variegated world around. In a second, the taunt of the General of Maam
was no more to him than a dream. A dozen emotions mastered him, and he
tingled from head to foot, for the first time man.
“Oh, and _she’s_ back, is she?” said he with a crafty indifference, as
one who expects no answer.
Miss Mary was not deceived. She had moved to the window and was looking
down into the street where the children played, but the new tone of his
voice, and the pause before it, gave her a sense of desertion, and she
grieved. On the ridges of the opposite lands, sea-gulls perched and
preened their feathers, pigeons kissed each other as they moved about
the feet of the passers-by. A servant lass bent over a window in the
dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up
the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was
glorious with sun.
CHAPTER XXII--IN CHURCH
If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he
never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was
absent, indeed! For he was riding through an air almost jocund, and his
spirit sang within him. The burns bubbled merrily among the long grasses
and the bracken, the myrtle cast a sharp and tonic sweetness all around.
The mountain bens no more pricked the sky in solemn loneliness, but
looked one to the other over the plains--companions, lovers, touched to
warmth and passion by the sun of the afternoon. It was as if an empty
world had been fresh tenanted. Gilian, as he rode up home, woke to
wonder at his own cheerfulness. He reflected that he had been called a
failure--and he laughed.
Next day he was up with the sun, and Cameron was amazed at this new
zeal that sent him, crook in hand, to the hill for some wanderers of the
flock, whistling blithely as he went. Long after he was gone he could
see him, black against the sky, on the backbone of the mountain, not
very active for a man in search of sheep. But what he could not see so
far was Gilian’s rapture as he looked upon the two glens severed by so
many weary miles of roadway, but close together at his feet. And the
chimneys of Maam (that looks so like an ancient castle at Dim Loch head)
were smoking cheerily below. Looking down upon them he made a pretence
to himself after a little that he had just that moment remembered who
was now there. He even said the words to himself, “Oh! Nan--Miss Nan is
there!” in the tone of sudden recollection, and he flushed in the cold
breeze of the lonely mountain, half at the mention of the name, half at
his own deceit with himself.
He allowed himself to fancy what the girl had grown to in her three
years’ absence among Lowland influences, that, by all his reading, must
be miraculous indeed. He saw her a little older only than she had been
when they sat in the den of the _Jean_ or walked a magic garden, the
toss of spate-brown hair longer upon her shoulders, a little more
sedateness in her mien. About her still hung the perfume of young birch,
and her gown was still no lower than her knees. He met her (still in his
imagination upon the hill-top) by some rare chance, in the garden where
they had strayed, and his coolness and ease were a marvel to himself.
“Miss Nan!” he cried. “They told me you were returned and----” What was
to follow of the sentence he could not just now say.
She blushed to see him; his hand tingled at the contact with hers. She
answered in a pleasant tone of Edinburgh gentility, like Lady Charlotte,
and they walked a little way together, conversing wondrously upon life
and books and poems, whose secrets they shared between them. He was able
to hold her fascinated by the sparkle of his talk; he had never before
felt so much the master of himself, and his head fairly hummed with high
notions. They talked of their childhood----
Here Gilian dropped from the clouds, at first with a sense of some
unpleasant memory undefined, then with shivering, ashamed, as his last
meeting with the girl flashed before him, and he saw himself again
fleeing, an incapable, from the sea-beach at Ealan Dubh.
If she should remember that so vividly as he did! The thought was one to
fly from, and he sped down the hill furiously, and plied himself busily
for the remainder of the day with an industry Cameron had never seen him
show before. Upon him had obviously come a change of some wholesome and
compelling kind. He knew it himself, and yet--he told himself--he could
not say what it was.
Sunday came, and he went down to church in the morning as usual, but
dressed with more scruples than was customary. Far up the glen the bell
jangled through the trees of the Duke’s policies, and the road was busy
with people bound for the sermon of Dr. Colin. They walked down the glen
in groups, elderly women with snow-white piped caps, younger ones
with sober hoods, and all with Bibles carried in their napkins and
southernwood or tansy between the leaves. The road was dry and sandy;
they cast off their shoes, as was their custom, and walked barefoot,
carrying them in their hands till they came to the plane-tree at the
cross-roads, and put them on again to enter the town with fit decorum.
The men followed, unhappy in their unaccustomed suits of broad-cloth or
hodden, dark, flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular
thoughts as they passed the licensed houses to some harmony with the
sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered,
smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high
up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow
for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth breathing peace.
The Paymaster and Miss Mary sat together in Keils pew, Gilian with them,
conscious of a new silk cravat. But his mind almost unceasingly was set
upon a problem whose solution lay behind him. Keils pew was in front,
the Maam pew was at least seven rows behind, in the shadow of the loft,
beneath the cushioned and gated preserve of the castle. One must not at
any time look round, even for the space of a second, lest it should be
thought he was guilty of some poor worldly curiosity as to the occupants
of the ducal seat, and to-day especially, Gilian dared not show
an unusual interest in the Turner pew. His acute ear had heard its
occupants enter after a loud salutation from the elder at the plate to
the General, he fancied there was a rustle of garments such as had not
been heard there for three years. All other sounds in the church--the
shuffle of feet, the chewing of sweets with which the worshippers in
these parts always induce wakefulness, the noisy breathing of Rixa as
he hunched in his corner beside the pulpit--seemed to stop while a skirt
rustled. A glow went over him, and unknowing what he did he put forward
his hand to take his Bible off the book-board.
Miss Mary from the corners of her eyes, and without turning her face in
the slightest degree from the pulpit where Dr. Colin was soon to appear,
saw the action. It was contrary to every form in that congregation; it
was a shocking departure from the rule that no one should display sign
of life (except in the covert conveyance of a lozenge under the napkin
to the mouth, or a clearance of the throat), and she put a foot with
pressure upon that of Gilian nearest her. Yet as she did so, no part of
her body seen above the boards of the pew betrayed her movement.
Gilian flushed hotly, drew back his hand quickly, without having touched
the book, and bent a stern gaze upon the stairs by which Dr. Colin would
descend to his battlements.
It was a day of stagnant air, and the church swung with sleepy
influences. The very pews and desks, the pillars of the loft and the
star-crowned canopy of the pulpit, seemed in their dry and mouldy
antiquity to give forth soporific dry accessions to that somnolent
atmosphere, and the sun-rays, slanted over the heads of the worshippers,
showed full of dust. Outside, through the tall windows, could be seen
the beech-trees of the Avenue, and the crows upon them busy at their
domestic affairs. Children in the Square cried to each other, a man’s
footsteps passed on the causeway, returned, and stopped below the
window. Everybody knew it was Black Duncan the seaman, of an older
church, and reluctant, yet anxious, to share in some of the Sabbath
exercises.
Gilian, with the back of the pew coming up near his neck, wished
fervently it had been built lower, for he knew how common and
undignified his view from the rear must thus be made. Also he wished
he could have had a secret eye that he might look unashamed in the
direction of his interest He tingled with feeling when he fancied
after a little (indeed, it was no more than fancy) that there was a
perceptible odour of young birch. Again he was remitted to his teens,
sitting transported in the _Jean_, soaring heavenward upon a song by a
bold child with spate-brown hair. He put forward his hand unconsciously
again, and this time he had the Bible on his knee before Miss Mary could
check him.
She looked down with motionless horror at his fingers feverishly
turning over the leaves, and saw that he had the volume upside down.
Her pressure on his foot was delayed by astonishment. What could this
conduct of his mean? He was disturbed about something; or perhaps he was
unwell. And as she saw him still holding the volume upside down on his
knee and continuing to look at it with absent eyes she put her mittened
hand into the pocket of her silk gown, produced a large peppermint
lozenge, and passed it into his hand.
This long unaccustomed courtesy found him awkwardly unprepared, and his
fingers not closing quickly enough on the sweet it fell on the floor.
It rolled with an alarming noise far to the left, and stirred the
congregation like a trumpet. Though little movement showed it, every
eye was on the pew from which this disturbance came, and Miss Mary
and Gilian knew it. Miss Mary did not flinch; she kept a steadfast eye
straight in front of her, but to those behind her the sudden colour of
her neck betrayed her culpability. Gilian was wretched, all the more
because he heard a rustle of the skirts behind in Turner’s pew, and his
imagination saw Miss Nan suppressing her laughter with shaking hair and
quite conscious that he had been the object of Miss Mary’s attention.
He felt the blood that rushed to his body must betray itself behind. All
the gowk in him came uppermost; he did not know what he was doing; he
put the Bible awkwardly on the book-board in front of him, and it,
too, slid to the floor with a noise even more alarming than that of the
rolling sweet.
The Paymaster, clearing his throat harshly, wakened from a dover to
the fact that these disturbances were in his own territory, and saw the
lad’s confusion. If that had not informed him the mischievous smile of
Young Islay in Gilian’s direction would have done so. He half turned his
face to Gilian, and with shut lips whispered angrily:
“Thumbs! thumbs!” he said. “God forgive you for a gomeral!” And then he
stared very sternly at Rixa, who saw the movement of the swollen
neck above the ‘kerchief, knew that the Paymaster was administering
a reproof, and was comforted exceedingly by this prelude to the day’s
devotions.
Gilian left the book where it lay to conceal from those behind that he
had been the delinquent. But he felt, at the same time, he was detected.
What a contrast the lady behind must find in his gawkiness compared with
the correct and composed deportment of the Capital she had come from! He
must be the rustic indeed to her, handling lollipops yet like a child,
and tumbling books in a child’s confusion. As if to give more acuteness
to his picture of himself he saw a foil in Young Islay so trim and
manly in the uniform old custom demanded for the Sunday parade, a shrewd
upward tilt of the chin and lowering of the brow, his hand now and then
at his cheeks, not so much to feel its pleasing roughness, as to show
the fine fingers of which he was so conscious. It demanded all his
strength to shake himself into equanimity, and Miss Mary felt rather
than saw it.
What ailed him? Something unusual was perturbing him. An influence, an
air, a current of uneasiness flowed from him and she shared his anxiety,
not knowing what might be its source. His every attitude was a new and
unaccustomed one. She concluded he must be unwell, and a commotion set
up in her heart, so that Dr. Colin’s opening prayer went sounding past
her a thing utterly meaningless like the wind among trees, and love
that is like a high march wall separated her and her favourite from the
world.
She surrendered even her scruples of kirk etiquette to put out a hand
timidly as they stood together at the prayer, and touched Gilian softly
on the sleeve with a gush of consolation in the momentary contact.
But he never felt the touch, or he thought it accidental, for he was
almost feverishly waiting till that interminable prayer was ended that
he might have the last proof of the presence of the girl behind him.
The crimson hangings of the canopy shook in the stridor of Dr. Colin’s
supplication, the hollows underneath the gallery rumbled a sleepy echo;
Rixa breathed ponderously and thought upon his interlocutors, but no
other life was apparent; it was a man crying in the wilderness, and
outside in the playground of the world the children were yet calling and
laughing content, the rooks among the beeches surveyed, carelessly, the
rich lush policies of the Duke.
Gilian was waiting on the final proof, that was only in the girl’s own
voice. He remembered her of old a daring and entrancing vocalist, in
the harmony one thread of gold among the hodden grey of those simple
unstudied psalmodists.
The prayer concluded, the congregation, wearied their long stand,
relapsed in their hard seats with a sense of satisfaction, the psalm was
given out, the precentor stuck up on the desk before him the two tablets
bearing the name of the tune, “Martyrs,” and essayed at a beginning. He
began too high, stopped and cleared his throat. “We will try it again,”
said he, and this time led the voices all in unison. Such a storm was
in Gilian’s mind that he could not for a little listen to hear what he
expected. He had forgotten his awkwardness, he had forgotten his shame;
his erratic and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of
the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship’s interior listening to a
girl’s song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually
there by some message in the notes, some soothing passionate melancholy
without relation to the words or to the tune, some inexplicable and
mellow vibration he had felt first as he stood, a child, on the road
from Kilmalieu, and a bird solitary in the winds, lifting with curious
tilt of feathers over the marshy field, had piped dolorously some
mystery of animal life man must have lost when he ceased to sleep stark
naked to the stars. In his mind he traced the baffling accent, failing
often to come upon it, anon finding it fill all his being with an
emotion he had never known before.
Miss Mary was now more alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and
his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison
of sluggish men’s voices, women’s eager earnest shrilling. It was as if
he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the
side a little to touch him and assure herself he was there.
And that awakened him! He listened with his workaday ears to separate
from the clamour, as he once had done, the thread of golden melody. For
a moment he was amazed and disappointed; no unusual voice was there. If
Miss Nan was behind him, she was taking only a mute part in the praise,
amused mildly perhaps--he could not blame--by this rough contrast with
the more tuneful praise she was accustomed to elsewhere.
And then--then he distinguished her I No, he was wrong; no, he was
right, there it was again, not so loud and clear as he had expected, but
yet her magic, unmistakably, as surely as when first it sounded to
him in “The Rover” and “The Man with the Coat of Green.” A thrill went
through him. He rose at the close of the psalm, and trod upon clouds
more airily, high-breastedly, uplifted triumphantly, than Ronaig of Gaul
who marched, in the story, upon plunging seas from land to land.
“He has been eating something wrong,” concluded Miss Mary, finding
ease of a kind in so poor an excuse for her darling’s perturbation. It
accounted to her for all his odd behaviour during the remainder of the
service, for his muteness in the psalmody, his restless disregard of the
sermon, his hurry to be out of the straight-backed, uncomfortable pew.
As he stood to his feet to follow the Paymaster she ventured a hand
from behind upon his waist, pretending to hasten the departure, but in
reality to get some pleasure from the touch. Again he never heeded; he
was staring at the Maam pew, from which the General and his brother were
slowly moving out.
There was no girl there!
He could scarcely trust his eyes. The aisle had a few women in it,
moving decorously to the door with busy eyes upon each other’s clothes;
but no, she was not there, whose voice had made the few psalms of the
day the sweetest of his experience. When he got outside the door and
upon the entrance steps the whole congregation was before him; his
glance went through it in a flash twice, but there was no Miss Nan. Her
father and his brother walked up the street alone. Gilian realised that
his imagination, and his imagination only, had tenanted the pew. She was
not there!
CHAPTER XXIII--YOUNG ISLAY
“The clash in the kirkyard is worth half a dozen sermons,” say the
unregenerate, and though no kirkyard is about the Zion of our parish,
the people are used to wait a little before home-going and talk of a
careful selection of secular affairs; not about the prices of hoggs
and queys, for that is Commerce, nor of Saturday night’s songs in the
tavern, for that (in the Sabbath mind) is Sin. But of births, marriages,
courtships, weather, they discourse. And Gilian, his head dazed, stood
in a group with the Paymaster and Miss Mary, and some of the people of
the glens, who were the ostensible reason for the palaver. At first he
was glad of the excuse to wait outside, for to have gone the few yards
that were necessary down the street and sat at Sunday’s cold viands even
with Peggy’s brew of tea to follow would be to place a flight of stairs
and a larch door between him and---- And what? What was he reluctant
to sever from? He asked himself that with as much surprise as if he had
been a stranger to himself. He felt that to go within at once would be
to lose something, to go out of a most agreeable atmosphere. He was not
hungry. To sit with old people over an austere table with no flowers
on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid
second day’s broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops
his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available
to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary
world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh,
in some flutter of the breast It was better to be out here in the sun
among the chattering people, to have nothing between him and Glen Shira
but a straight sweep of wind-blown highway. From the steps of the church
he could see the Boshang Gate and the hazy ravines and jostling elbows
of the hills in Shira Glen. He saw it all, and in one bound his spirit
vaulted there, figuring her whose psalm he had but heard in the delusion
of desire.
The Duke came lazily down the steps, threw a glance among his clan
and tenantry, cast his plaid, with a fine grace, about his shoulders,
touching his bonnet with a finger as hat or bonnet rose in salutation,
and he went fair up in the middle of the street.
The conversation ceased, and people looked after him as on an Emperor.
“He’s going to London on Tuesday, I hear,” said Major Hall to Mr.
Spencer. It was the Majors great pride to know the prospective movements
at the Castle sooner than any one else, and he was not above exchanging
snuff-mulls with Wat Thomson, the ducal boot-brusher, if ducal news
could only be got thereby.
“London, London; did you say, London, sir?” said the innkeeper, looking
again with an envy after his Grace, the name at once stirring in him the
clime from which he was an exile. And the smell of peaty clothes smote
him on the nostril for the first time that day. He had been so many
Sundays accustomed to it that as a rule he no longer perceived it, but
now it rose in contrast to the beefy, beer-charged, comfortable odours
of his native town.
“Ah! he’s going on Tuesday,” said the Paymaster, “but when Duke George’s
gone, there are plenty of Dukes to take his place. Every officer in his
corps will be claiming a full command, quarrelling among themselves.
There’ll be Duke Islay----”
“Hus--s--sh!” whispered Major Hall discreetly from the corner of his
mouth. “Here’s his young fellow coming up behind.” Then loudly, “It’s a
very fine season indeed, Captain Campbell, a very fine season.”
Young Islay came forward with a salute for the Captain and his sister.
He was Gilian’s age and size, but of a different build, broader at the
shoulder, fuller at the chest, black of hair, piercing of eye, with
just enough and no more of a wholesome conceit of himself to give his
Majesty’s uniform justice. When he spoke it was with a clear and manly
tone deep in the chest.
He shook hands all round, he was newly come home from the lowlands, his
tunic was without speck or crease, his chin was smooth, his strong
hands were white; as Gilian returned his greeting he felt himself in an
enviable and superior presence.
Promptly, too, there came like a breath upon glass a remembrance of the
ensign of the same corps who kissed his hand to Nan on just such another
day of sunshine at Boshang Gate.
“Glad to see you back, Islay,” said the Paymaster, proffering his
Sabbath snuff-mull. “Faith, you do credit to the coat!” And he cast an
admiring eye upon the young soldier.
Young Islay showed his satisfaction in his face.
“But it’s a smaller coat than yours, Captain,” said he, “and easier
filled nowadays than when fighting was in fashion. I’m afraid the old
school would have the better of us.”
It was a touch of Gaelic courtesy to an elder, well-meant, pardonable;
it visibly pleased the old gentleman to whom it was addressed, and he
looked more in admiration than before upon this smart young officer.
“Up the Glen yet, Gilian?” said Islay, with the old schoolboy freedom,
and Gilian carelessly nodded, his eyes once more roving on the road
to Boshang Gate. Young Islay looked at him curiously, a little smile
hovering about the corners of his lips, for he knew the dreamer’s
reputation.
The Paymaster gave a contemptuous “Humph!” “Up the Glen yet. You may
well say it,” said he. “And like to be. It’s a fine clime for stirks.”
Gilian did not hear it, but Miss Mary felt it sting to her very heart,
and she moved away, pressing upon her favourite’s arm to bring him with
her. “We must be moving,” said she; “Peggy will be scolding about the
dinner spoiled with waiting.”
But no one else seemed willing to break up the group. Young Islay had
become the centre of attraction. MacGibbon and Major Hall, the Sheriff,
Mr. Spencer and the dominie, listened to his words as to a sage,
gratified by his robust and handsome youth, and the Turners had him
by the arm and questioned him upon his experience. Major Mac-Nicol,
ludicrous in a bottle-green coat with abrupt tails and an English beaver
hat of an ancient pattern, jinked here and there among the people,
tip-toeing, round shouldered, with eyes peering and alarmed, jerking
his head across his shoulder at intervals to see that no musket barrel
threatened, and at times, for a moment or two, he would hang upon the
outskirts of Young Islay’s _levée_, with a hand behind an ear to listen
to his story, filled for a little space with a wave of vague and bitter
recollection that never broke upon the shore of solid understanding,
enchanted by a gleam of red and gold, the colours of glory and of youth.
“Let us go home,” whispered Miss Mary, pulling gently at Gilian’s coat.
“Wait, wait, no hurry for cold kail hot again,” said the Paymaster,
every instinct for gossip alert and eager.
“And you showed him the qualities of a Highland riposte! Good lad! Good
lad! I’m glad that Sandy and you learned something of the art of fence
before they tried you in the Stirling fashion,” General Turner was
saying. “You’ll be home for a while won’t you? Come up and see us at
Maam; no ceremony, a bird, a soldier’s jug, and----”
“And a soldier’s song from Miss Nan, I hope,” continued the young
officer, smiling. “That would be the best inducement of all I hear she’s
home again from the low country, and thought she would have been in
church to-day.”
“City ways, you know, Islay, city ways,” said Turner, tapping the young
fellow playfully on the shoulder with his cane. “She did not come down
because she must walk! I wonder what Dr. Colin would say if he found me
yoking a horse to save a three miles Sabbath daunder to the kirk. Come
up and have your song, though, any day you like; I’ll warrant you never
heard better.”
“I’m certain I never did,” admitted Young Islay heartily.
“And when I think,” said the General softly, more closely pressing the
young fellow’s arm, “that there might be no song now at all but for your
readiness with an oar, I’m bound to make a tryst of it: say Tuesday.”
“Certainly!” said Young Islay. “About my readiness with an oar, now,
that was less skill than a boy’s luck. I can tell you I was pretty
frightened when I baled--good heavens, how long ago I--the water from
the punt, and felt the storm would smother me!” He was flushing to speak
of a thing so much to his credit, and sought relief from his feelings by
a random remark to the Paymaster’s boy.
“You mind?” said he, with a laughing look at Gilian, who wished now that
he were in the more comfortable atmosphere of the Paymaster’s parlour
for he was lamentably outside the interests of this group. “You mind?”
he pressed again, as if the only victim of that storm and stranding
could ever forget!
“I remember very well,” said Gilian in an Anglified accent that renewed
all Miss Mary’s apprehension, for it showed an artificial mood. “I came
out of that with small credit,” he went on, sparing himself nothing. “I
suppose I would have risked my life half a dozen times over to be of any
service; what was wanting was the sense to know what I should do. There
you had the advantage of me. And did you really bail the boat with your
bonnet?”
“Faith I did!” said Young Islay, laughing.
“I knew it,” said Gilian. “I knew your feelings and your acts as well
as if it had been myself that had been there. I wish my comprehension of
the act to be done was as ready as my imagination. I wish--”
A shyness throttled the words in his mouth when he found all the company
looking upon him, all amused or a little pitiful except the dominie,
whose face had a kindly respect and curiosity, and Miss Mary, who was
looking wistfully in his eyes.
“There are two worlds about us,” said Brooks; “the manifest, that is as
plain as a horn-book from A to Ampersand; the other, that is in the mind
of man, no iota less real, but we are few that venture into it further
than the lintel of the door.” And he had about his eyes an almost
fatherly fondness for Gilian, who felt that in the words were some
justification for him, the dreamer.
The street was emptying, one by one the people had dispersed. Young
Islay’s group broke up, and went their several ways. The Paymaster and
Miss Mary and Gilian went in to dinner.
“What’s the matter with you, my dear?” whispered Miss Mary at the turn
of the stair when her brother had gone within.
“Matter?” said Gilian, surprised at her discovery. “Nothing that I know
of. What makes you think there is anything the matter with me?”
She stopped him at the stair-head, and here in the dusk of it she was
again the young companion. “Gilian, Gilian,” said she, with stress in
her whisper and a great affection in the face of her. “Do you think I
can be deceived? You are ill; or something troubles you. What were you
eating?”
He laughed loudly; he could not help it at so prosaic a conclusion.
“What carry-on is that on the stair on a Lord’s day?” cried the
Paymaster angrily and roughly from his room as he tugged short-tempered
at the buckle of his Sabbath stock.
“Then there’s something bothering you, my dear,” said Miss Mary again,
paying no heed to the interruption. And Gilian could not release his arm
from her restraint.
“Is there, Auntie?” said he. “Perhaps. And still I could not name it.
Come, come, what’s the sense of querying a man upon his moods?”
“A man!” said Miss Mary.
“On the verge at least,” said he, with a confidence he had never had in
his voice before, taking a full breath in his chest.
“A man!” said she again. And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from
before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced,
trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart.
“I wish, I wish,” said she all trembling, “the children did not grow at
all!”
CHAPTER XXIV--MAAM HOUSE
Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land
that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt
hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of
deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost
at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links
cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its
surface like a looking-glass or shivers in icy winds. Round about the
bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the
cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs
from shore to shore.
To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings,
and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It
touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant,
her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about
her head, her eyes brimming and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom
generous--she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that
hers was a soldier’s fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a
tombstone--the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days
of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week
home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes
in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of
Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.
What she missed of the strident town was the clustering round of fellow
creatures, the eternal drumming of neighbour hearts, the feet upon the
pavement and the eager faces all around that were so full of interest
they did not let her seek into the depths of her, where lay the old
Highland sorrows that her richest notes so wondrously expressed. The
tumult for herl Constant touch with the active, the gay! Solitude
oppressed her like a looming disease. Sometimes, as in those mornings
when she looked abroad from her window upon the Glen, she felt sick
of her own company, terrified at the pathetic profound to which the
landscape made her sink. Then she wept, and then she shook the mood
from her angrily and flashed about the house of Maam like a sunbeam
new-washed by the rain.
Her father used to marvel at those sudden whims of silence and of song.
He would come in on some poor excuse from his stable or cunningly listen
above his book and try to understand; but he, the man of action,
the soldier, the child of undying ambitions, was far indeed from
comprehension. Only he was sure of her affection. She would come and sit
upon his knee, with arms around his neck, indulgent madly in a child’s
caresses. Her uncle James, finding them thus sometimes, would start
at an illusion, for it looked as if her mother was back again, and her
father, long so youthful of aspect, seemed the sweetheart husband once
more.
“Ah! you randy!” he would say to his niece, scowling upon her; “the
sooner you get a man the better!”
“If there is one in the world half so handsome as my father--yes,” she
would answer merrily, nestling more fondly in the General’s breast, till
he rose and put her off with laughing confusion.
“Away! away!” he would cry in pretended annoyance. “You make my grey
hairs ridiculous.”
“Where are they?” she would say, running her white fingers over his head
and daintily refastening the ribbon of that antiquated queue that made
him always look the chevalier. She treated him, in all, less like a
father than a lover, exceedingly proud of him, untiring of his countless
tales of campaign and court, uplifted marvellously with his ambitious
dreams of State preferment. For General Turner was but passing the
time in Maam till by favour promised a foreign office was found for him
elsewhere.
“And when the office comes,” said he, “then I leave my girl. It is the
one thing that sobers me.”
“Not here! not here!” she cried, alarm in eye and tone. So he found,
for the first time, her impatience with the quiet of Maam. He was, for a
little, dumb with regret that this should be her feeling.
“Where better, where safer, my dear?” he asked.
“Come up to the bow-window.” And he led her where she could see their
native glen from end to end.
In the farm-towns the cots were displayed; smoke rose from their
chimneys in the silent air, grey blue banners of peace. “Bide at home,
my dear,” said he softly, “bide at home and rest. I thought you would
have been glad to be back from towns among our own kindly people in the
land your very heart-blood sprang from. Quiet, do you say? True, true,”
and still he surveyed the valley himself with solemn eyes. “But there
is content here, and every hearth there would make you welcome if it was
only for your name, even if the world was against you.”
She saw the reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are
sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy.
Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her
remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she
shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon
a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. “Is it not
homely?” said he, dreading her reply. “I can bear it--with you,” she
answered pitifully. “But if you go abroad, it would kill me. I must have
something that is not here; I must have youth and life--and--life.”
“At your age I would not have given Maam and the glen about it for my
share of Paradise.”--“But now?” said she.
He turned hastily from the window and nervously paced the room.
“No matter about me,” he answered in a little. “Ah! you’re your mother’s
child. I wish--I wish I could leave you content here.” He felt at
his chin with a nervous hand, muttered, looked on her askance, pitied
himself that when he went wandering he must not have the consoling
thought that she was safe and happy in her childhood’s home.
“I wish I had never sent you away,” he said. “You would have been more
content to-day. But that’s the manner of the world, we must pay our way
as we go, in inns and in knowledge.”
She ran up with tripping feet and kissed him rapturously.
“No lowland tricks!” he cried, pleased and yet ashamed at a display
unusual in these parts. “Fancy if some one saw you!”
“Then let them look well again,” she said, laughingly defiant, and he
had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The
little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and
lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle
it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was,
indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook
of his arm and dandled on his knee.
“I wish,” said he again, while she neatly tied the knot upon his queue,
“I wish we had a husband for you, good or--indifferent, before I go.”
“Not indifferent, father,” she laughed. “Surely the best would not be
too good for your daughter! As if I wanted a husband of any kind!”
“True, true,” he answered thoughtfully. “You are young yet. The best
would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman’s
well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that
minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no
less. Can you guess him?”
“The Paymaster’s Boy,” said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.
Her father laughed.
“Pooh!” he exclaimed. “Is that all you have of our news here that you
don’t know Gilian’s farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield?
He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very
humorous now when I think of it.”
“I told him he never would,” said Nan, with no note of triumph in the
accuracy of her prediction. “I thought he could play-act the thing in
his mind too well ever to be the thing itself.”
“It was Young Islay I meant,” said her father. “A smart fellow; he’s
home on leave from his corps, and he promises to come some day this week
to see the girl whose father has some reason to be grateful to him.”
She flushed all at once, overtaken by feelings she could not have
described--feelings of gratitude for the old rescue, of curiosity,
pleasure, and a sudden shyness. Following it came a sudden recollection
of the old glamour that was about the ensign--such another, no doubt, as
Young Islay--who had given her the first taste of gallantry as he passed
with the troops in a day of sunshine. She looked out at the window to
conceal her eyes, and behold! the glen was not so melancholy as it was
a little ago. She wished she had put on another gown that afternoon, the
rustling one of double tabinet that her Edinburgh friends considered too
imposing for her years, but that she herself felt a singular complacence
in no matter what her company might be.
“A smart fellow,” repeated her father musingly, flicking some dust from
his shoes, unobserving of her abstraction. “I wish Sandy took a lesson
or two from him in application.”
“Ah!” she cried, “you’re partial just because----”
And she hesitated.
--“Just because he saved my lassie’s life,” continued Turner, and seized
by an uncommon impulse he put an arm round her and bent to kiss her
not unwilling lips. He paused at the threshold, and drew back with a
half-shamed laugh.
“Tuts!” said he. “You smit me with silly lowland customs. Fancy your old
Highland daddie kissing you! If it had been the young gentleman we speak
of----”
A loud rap came to the knocker of the front door, and Nan’s hands went
flying to her hair in soft inquiries; back to her face came its colour.
It was Young Islay. He came into the room with two strides from the
stair-head and a very genteel obeisance to the lady, a conceit of
fashion altogether foreign to glens, but that sent her back in one dart
of fancy to the parlour of Edinburgh, back to the warm town, back to
places of gaiety, and youth, and enterprise, back to soft manners, the
lip gossiping at the ear, shoes gliding upon waxen floors, music, dance,
and mirth. Her heart throbbed as to a revelation, and she could have
taken him in her arms for the sake of that brave life he indicated.
His eyes met hers whenever he entered, and he could not draw them away
till hers, wavering before him, showed him he was daring. He turned and
shook hands with the General, and muttered some commonplace, then back
again he came to that pleasant face so like and yet so unlike the face
he had known when a boy.
“You’ll hardly know each other,” said the father, amused at this common
interest. “Isn’t she a most elderly person to be the daughter of so
young and capable a man?”
Young Islay ranged his mind for a proper compliment, but for once he was
dumb; in all the oft-repeated phrases of his gallant experiences there
was no sentiment to do justice to a moment like this. “I am delighted to
meet you again,” he said slowly, his mind confused with a sense of the
inadequacy of the thing and the inexplicable feelings that crowded into
him in the presence of a girl who, three years ago, would have no more
disturbed him than would his sister. She was the first to recover from
the awkwardness of the moment.
“I was just wishing I had on another gown,” she said more frankly than
she felt, but bound to give utterance to the last clear thought in her
mind. “I had an idea we might have callers.”
“You could have none that became you better,” said the lad boldly,
feasting upon her charms of lip and eye. And now he was the
soldier--free, bold, assured.
“What? In the way of visitors,” laughed her father, and she flushed
again.
“I spoke of the gown,” said Young Islay (and he had not yet seen it,
it might have been red or blue for all he could tell). “I spoke of the
gown; if it depends on that for you to charm your company, you should
wear no other.”
“A touch of the garrison, but honest enough to be said before the
father!” thought General Turner.
Nan laughed. She courtesied with an affected manner taught in Edinburgh
schools.
“Sir,” she said, “you are a soldier, and of course the gown at the
moment in front of you is always the finest in the world. Don’t tell me
it is not so,” she hastened to add, as he made to protest, “because I
know my father and all the ways of his trade, and--and--and if you were
not the soldier even in your pleasantries to ladies I would not think
you the soldier at all.”
The General smiled and nudged the young fellow jocosely. “There,” said
he, “did I not tell you she was a fiery one?”
“I hope you did not discuss me in that fashion,” said Nan, pausing with
annoyance as she moved aside a little, all her pride leaping to her
face.
“Your father will have his joke,” said Young Islay quickly. “He barely
let me know you were here.”
The General smiled again in admiration of the young fellow’s astuteness,
and Nan recovered.
They went to the parlour. Through the window came the songs of the
reapers and the twitter of birds busy among the seeds at the barn-door.
Roses swinging on the porch threw a perfume into the room. Young Islay
felt, for the first time in his life, a sense of placid happiness. And
when Nan sang later--a newer, wider world, more years, more thoughts,
more profound depths in her song--he was captive.
To his aid he summoned all his confidence; he talked like a prince (if
they talk head-up, valiantly, serene and possessing); he moved about the
room studiously unconscious and manly; he sat with grace and showed his
hand, and all the time he claimed the girl for his. “You are mine, you
are mine!” he said to himself over and over again, and by the flush on
her neck as she sat at the harpsichord she might be hearing, through
some magic sense, his bold unspoken thought.
Evening crept, lights came, the father went out to give some orders at
the barn; they were left alone. The instrument that might have been a
heavenly harp at once lost its dignity and relapsed to a tinkling wire,
for Nan was silent, and there crowded into Young Islay’s head all the
passion of his people. He rose and strode across the room; he put an arm
round her waist and raised her, all astounded, from the chair.
She turned round and tried to draw back, looking startled at his eyes
that were wide with fire.
“What do you mean?” she gasped.
“Need you ask it?” he said in a new voice, raising an arm round her
shoulder. His fingers unexpectedly touched her warm skin beneath the
kerchief-souffle. The feeling ran to his heart, and struck him there
like an earthquake. Down went his head, more firm his hold upon the
lady’s waist; she might have been a flower to crush, but yet he must be
rude and strong; he bent her back and kissed her. Her lips parted as if
she would cry out against this outrage, and he felt her breath upon his
cheek, an air, a perfume maddening. “Nan, Nan, you are mine, you are
mine!” said he huskily, and he kissed her again.
Out in the fields, a corncrake raised its rasping vesper and a shepherd
whistled on his dogs. The carts rumbled as they made for the sheds. The
sound of the river far off in the shallows among the saugh-trees came on
a little breeze, a murmur of the sad inevitable sea that ends all love
and passion, the old Sea beating black about the world.
In the room was an utter silence. She had drawn back for a moment
stupefied, checking in her pride even the breathing of her struggle. He
stood bent at the head a little, contrite, his hat, that he had
lifted, in his hand. And they gazed at each other--people who had found
themselves in some action horribly rude and shameful.
“I think you must have made a mistake, or have been drinking,” she said
at last, her breast now heaving stormily and her eyes ablaze with anger.
“I am not the dairy-maid.”
“I could not help it,” he answered lamely. “You--you--you made me do it.
I love you!” She drew back shocked.
He stepped forward again, manly, self-possessed again, and looked her
hungrily in the eyes. “Do you hear that?” he said. “Do you hear that? I
love you! I love you! There you look at me, and I’m inside like a fire.
What am I to do? I am Highland; I am Long Islay’s grandson. I am a
soldier. I am Highland, and if I want you I must have you.”
She drew softly towards the door as if to escape, but heard her father’s
voice without, and it gave her assurance. A pallor had come upon her
cheek, only her lips were bright as if his kiss had seared them.
“You are Highland, you are Highland, are you?” she said, restraining her
sobs. “Then where is the gentleman? Do you fancy I have been growing up
in Maam all the years you were away among canteens for you to come home
and insult me when you wished?”
He did not quail before her indignation, but he drew back with respect
in every movement.
“Madame,” he said, with a touch of the ballroom, “you may miscall me
as you will; I deserve it all. I have been brutal; I have frightened
you--that would not harm a hair of your head for a million pounds; I
have disgraced the hospitality of your father’s house. I may have ruined
myself in your eyes, and to-morrow I’ll writhe for it, but now--but
now--I have but one plea: I love you! I’ll say it, though you struck me
dumb for ever.”
She recovered a little, looked curiously at him, and “Is it not
something of a liberty, even that?” she asked. “You bring the manners of
the Inn to my father’s house.” The recollection of her helplessness in
his grasp came to her again, and stained her face as it had been with
wine.
He turned his hat in his hand, eyeing her dubiously but more calmly than
before.
“There you have me,” he said, with a large and helpless gesture, “I am
not worth two of your most trivial words. I am a common rude soldier
that has not, as it were, seen you till a moment ago, and when I was at
your--at your lips, I should have been at your shoes.”
She laughed disdainfully a little.
“Don’t do that,” said he, “you make me mad.” Again the tumult of his
passion swept him down; he put a foot forward as if to approach her, but
stopped short as by an immense inward effort. “Nan, Nan, Nan,” he cried
so loudly that a more watchful father would have heard it outside. “Nan,
Nan, Nan, I must say it if I die for it: I love you! I never felt--I
do not know--I cannot tell what ails me, but you are mine!” Then all at
once again his mood and accent changed. “Mine! What can I give? What can
I offer? Here’s a poor ensign, and never a war with chances in it!”
He strode up and down the room, throwing his shadow, a feverish phantom,
on the blind, and Nan looked at him as if he had been a man in a play.
Here was her first lover with a vengeance! They might be all like that;
this madness, perhaps, was the common folly. She remembered that to him
she owed her life, and she was overtaken by pity.
“Let us say no more about it,” she said calmly. “You alarmed me very
much, and I hope you will never do the like again. Let me think I myself
was willing”--he started--“that it was some--some playful way of paying
off the score I owe you.”
“What score?” said he, astonished. “You saved my life,” she answered,
all resentment gone. “Did I?” said he. “It would be the last plea I
would offer here and now. That was a boy’s work, or luck as it might be;
this is a man before you. I am not wanting gratitude, but something far
more ill to win. Look at me,” he went on; “I am Highland, I’m a soldier,
I’m a man. You may put me to the door (my mother in heaven would not
blame you), but still you’re mine.”
He was very handsome as he stood upon the floor resolute, something of
the savage and the dandy, a man compelling. Nan felt the tremor of an
admiration, though the insult was yet burning on her countenance.
“Here’s my father,” she said, quickly sitting at the harpsichord again,
with her face away from it and the candle-light. Into the room stepped
the General, never knowing he had come upon a storm. Their silence
surprised him. He looked suspiciously at the lad, who still stood on the
floor with his hat in his hand.
“You’re not going yet, Islay?” said he, and there was no answer.
“Have you two quarrelled?” he asked, again glancing at his daughter’s
averted face.
Young Islay stammered his reply. “I have been a fool, General, that’s
all,” said he. “I brought the manners of the Inn, as your daughter says,
into your house, and--”
The father caught him by the sleeve and bent a most stern eye.
“Well, well?” he pushed.
“And--the rest, I think, should be between yourself and me,” said Young
Islay, looking at Nan now with her back to them, and he and the father
went out of the room.
CHAPTER XXV--THE EAVESDROPPER
There was no moon, but the sky hung thick with stars, and the evening
was a rare dusk where bush and tree stood half revealed, things
sinister, concealing the terrific elements of dreams. Over the hills
came Gilian, a passionate pilgrim of the night. The steeps, the gullies,
the hazel thickets he trod were scarcely real for him, he passed them
as if in a swoon, he felt himself supreme, able to step from ben to ben,
inspired by the one exaltation that puts man above all toils, fears,
weariness and doubts, brother of the April eagle, cousin-german of the
remote and soaring star.
He approached the house of Maam by a rough sheep-path along the side of
the burn, leaped from boulder to boulder to keep the lights of the house
in view, brushed eagerly through the bracken, ran masterfully in the
flats. When he came close to the house, caution was necessary lest late
harvesters should discover him. He went round on the outside of the
orchard hedge, behind the milk-house wall, and stood in the concealment
of a little alder planting. The house was lit in several windows, it
struck--thought he--warm upon a neck and flashed back in a melting eye
within; his heart drummed furiously.
In the farmyard the workers were preparing to depart for the night from
their long day of toil. All but the last of the horses had been stabled;
the shepherds were returning from the fanks; two women, the weariness of
their bodies apparent in their attitudes even in the dusk, stood for
a little in the yard, then with arms round each other’s waists went
towards the cot-house, singing softly as they went. The General’s voice
in Gaelic rose over all but the river’s murmur, as he called across
the wattle gate to a herd-boy bearing in peat for the night and morning
fires. And the night was all wrapt in an odour of bog myrtle and
flowers.
That outer world, for once, had no interest for Gilian; his eyes were on
the windows, and though the interior of Maam was utterly unknown to him
from actual sight, he was fancying it in every detail. He knew the upper
room where Nan slept; he had watched the light come to it and disappear,
every night since she had returned, though he could not guess how in
that eminent flame she was reading the memorials, the letters, the
diaries of her lost lowland life and weeping for her solitude.
The light was not there now; it was too early in the evening, so she
must be in the room whose two windows shone on the grass between
the house and the barn. He could see them plainly as he stood in the
planting, and he busied himself, forgetting all the outside interests of
the house, in picturing its interior. Nan, he told himself, sat sewing
or reading within, still the tall lady of his day-dreams, for he had not
yet seen her since her return.
And then he heard her harpsichord, its unfamiliar music amazing him by
its relation to some world he did not know, the world from which she
had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that
ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed
only to rough men’s voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh
fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the
hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with associations of life
genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan
so far removed as then from him, the home-staying dreamer. Up rose his
startled judgment and called him fool.
But hark! her voice came in and joined the harpsichord--surely this time
he was not mistaken? Her voice! it was certainly her voice! He held his
breath to listen for fear he should lose the softest note as it came
from her lips. Now he was well repaid for his nights of traverse on the
hills, his watching, his disappointment! The very night held breath to
listen to that song, not the song that had been sung in the _Jean_, but
another, the song of a child no more, but of a woman, full of passion,
antique love and sorrow, of the unsatisfied and yearning years.