silence. Then in the field behind, the last corncrake harshly called; a
shepherd whistled on his dogs; a cart rumbled over the cobbles, making
for the shed. The sound of the river as it came to him among the
alder-trees seemed the sound the wave makes in the ears of the sinking
and exhausted swimmer.
Gilian turned over in his pocket a lucky flint arrowhead, and wished for
a glimpse of Nan.
He had no sooner done so than her shadow showed upon the blind, hurried
and nervous as in some affright.
His heart leaped; he made a step forward as if he would storm that
citadel of his fancy, but he checked himself on a saner thought that he
was imbuing the shadow with fears that were not there. He drew a deep
breath and turned his lucky arrowhead again. For a second or two there
was no response. Then another shadow came upon the blinds--a man’s,
striding for a little back and forward, as if in perturbation. Who could
it be? the trembling outsider asked himself. Not the father; there was
no queue to the shadow, and a vague suggestion of the General’s voice
had come but a moment before from another part of the steading. Not the
uncle? This was no long, bent, bearded apparition, but the figure of
youth. Gilian promptly fancied himself the substance of the shadow in
that envied light and presence, seeing the glow of fire and candle
in Nan’s eyes as she turned to the accepted lover. “Nan, Nan!” he
whispered, “I love you! I love you!”
A faint breath from a new point came through the trees, the dryads
sighing for all this pitiful illusion. It struck chill upon his face;
he shivered and prepared to set off for home across the hill. A last
reluctant glance was thrown at the window, and he had turned towards the
milk-house wall when a sound of opening doors arrested him. Now he could
not escape unobserved; he withdrew into the shadow of the trees again.
The General and another came out and stood midway between the house
and the planting. There they spoke in constrained words that did not at
first reach him. Against the grey dun of the sky he could separate their
figures, but he could not guess the identity of the General’s companion.
In a second or two they moved nearer and he was an unwilling listener,
though a keenly interested one.
“Come, come,” said the General, in a tone of some annoyance, “you had me
out to hear your explanation, and now I’m to be kept chittering in the
night air till you range your inside for words.”
The other murmured something in a voice that did not intelligently reach
the planting.
“Ay, you did, did you?” said the General in reply, very dryly, and then
he paused. “I’ll warrant you found a tartar,” he said in a little.
The other answered softly in a word or two.
There was another pause, and then the General laughed, not with much
geniality. “That was all the news you brought me out here for?” said he.
“Come, come, the lady can look after herself so far as that goes. Either
that or she’s not her mother’s child. And yet--and yet, I would not
be saying. Edinburgh and all their low-country notions make some
difference; I see them in her. This is not the girl I sent off south
on a mail-gig--just like a parcel. Curse the practice that we must be
risking the things of our affection among strangers!”
There was no more than the brief and muffled answer, like that of a man
ashamed.
“I’ve seen that before,” said the General stiffly. “It’s not uncommon at
the age, but it’s unusual to take the old gentleman into the garden at
night without his bonnet to tell him so little as that.”
The answer, still muffled to the listener in the planting, poured forth
quickly.
“Highland,” said the General, “queer Highlands! And it must be now or
never with us, must it? Well, young gentleman, you have nerve at least,”
and he quoted a Gaelic proverb. He put his hand on the shoulder of the
other and leaned to whisper. Gilian could make the action out against
the sky. Then “Good-night” and the father’s footsteps went back to the
door and the unknown proceeded down the glen.
On an impulse irresistible, Gilian followed at a discreet distance,
keeping on the verges of the grass beside the road, so that his
footsteps might not betray him. All the night was tenantless but for
themselves and some birds that called dolefully in the woods. The river,
broadened by the burns on either hand that joined it, grew soon to a
rapid and tumultuous current washing round the rushy bends, and the Dhu
Loch when they came to it had a ripple on its shore, so that they
were at the bridge and yet the one who led was not aware that he was
followed. He leaned upon the crenelated parapet and hummed a strain of
song as Gilian came up to him with a swinging step, now on the footway.
Young Islay started at this approach without warning, but he was not
afraid. He peered into Gilian’s face when he had come up to him.
“Oh, you!” said he. “I got quite a start, I thought at first it was
Drimmin dorran’s ghost.” This, laughingly, of a shade with a reputation
for haunting these evening solitudes.
“You’re late on the road?” he went on curiously.
“No later than yourself,” answered Gilian, vaguely grieving to find that
this was the substance of his shadow on the blind and the audience for
Miss Nan’s entertainment.
“Oh! I was--I was on a visit,” said Young Islay. He went closer up to
Gilian and added eagerly, as one glad to unbosom, “Man! did you ever
hear--did you ever hear Miss Nan sing?”
“Long ago,” said Gilian; “it’s an old story.” “Lucky man!” said Young
Islay enviously, “to be here so long to listen when I was far away.”
“She was away herself a good deal,” said Gilian, “but when we heard her
we quite appreciated our opportunities, I assure you.”
“Did you, faith?” said Young Islay, with a jealous tone. “You seem,” he
went on, “to have made very little use of them. I wonder where the eyes
of you could be. I never saw her, really, till an hour or two ago. I
never heard her sing before, but yet, some way----” He hesitated in
embarrassment.
Gilian made no answer. He felt it the most natural thing in the world
that any one seeing and hearing Nan should appreciate herself and her
singing. There was no harm in that.
The night was solemn with the continual cry of the owls that abound in
the woody shoulder of Duntorvil; a sweet balmy influence loaded the air,
stars gathered in patches between drifts of cloud. For some distance the
young men walked together silent, till Young Islay spoke.
“I’ve been away seeing the world,” said he hurriedly, like a man at a
confession, “not altogether with my father’s wish, who would sooner I
stayed at home and farmed Drimlee; moving from garrison to garrison,
giving my mind no hearth to stay at for more than a night at a time, and
I’ve been missing the chance of my life. I went up the way there an hour
or two since--Young Islay, a soldier, coarse, ashamed of sentiment, and
now I go down another man altogether. I would not say it to any one but
yourself; you’re a sort of sentimental person in a wholesale way;
you’ll understand. Eh, what? You’ll understand!” He threw out his chest;
breathed fully. “I’m a new man, I’m telling you. I wonder where the eyes
of you fellows were?”
Even yet Gilian did not grudge Young Islay the elation that was so
manifest.
“You understand, we did not see much of her in these parts lately, much
more than yourself. I have not seen her myself since she returned. Has
she changed much?”
“Much!” exclaimed Young Islay, laughing. “My son! she is not the girl I
knew at all. When I went in there--into the room up, there you know, I
was--I was--baffled to know her. I think I expected to see the same girl
I had--I had--you mind, brought the boat out to, the same loose hair,
the same--you know, I never expected to see a princess in Maam. A
princess, mind you, and she looked all the more that because her uncle
met me at the stair-foot as I was going in. A sour old scamp yon! He was
teasing out his beard, and, ‘A nice piece there,’ said he, nodding at
the door, ‘and I’m sure her father would be glad to have her off his
hands.’ I laughed and----”
“I would have struck him on the jaw,” said Gilian with great heat.
“Oh!” said Young Islay, astonishment in his voice. He said no more for a
little. Then, “I was not very well pleased myself with the remark when
I went into the room and saw the lady it referred to. You’re not--you’re
not chief in that quarter, are you?”
“Chief!” repeated Gilian. “You’re ahead of me even in seeing the lady.”
“Oh well, that’s all right,” said Young Islay, seemingly relieved. “Look
here; I’m gone, that’s the long and the short of it! I’m seeing a week
or two of hard work before me convincing her ladyship that a young
ensign in a marching regiment is maybe worth her smiling on.”
Gilian turned cold with apprehension. This, indeed, was a revelation of
love-making in garrison fashion.
“You don’t know the girl at all,” he said.
“So much the better,” said Young Islay; “that means that she does not
know me, and that’s all the better start for me, perhaps. It’s a great
advantage, for I’ve noticed that they’re all the most interested--the
sex of them--in a novelty. I have a better chance than the best man in
these parts, that has been under her eye all the time I was away. I’ll
have stiff work, perhaps, but I want her, and between ourselves, and not
to make a brag of it, I’ll have her. Youll not breathe that,” he added,
turning in apprehension, stopping opposite Gilian and putting his hand
on his coat lapel. “I am wrong to mention it at all even to you, but I
must out with what I feel to somebody. The thing is dirling in my
blood. Listen, do you hear that?” He threw out his chest again, held
his breath, and Gilian could almost swear he heard his heart throb with
feeling.
“Does she want you? That’s the question, I suppose,” said Gilian weakly.
“That is not the question at all, it’s do I want her? There must be a
beginning somewhere. Look at me; I’m strong, young, not very ugly (at
least they tell me), I’m the grandson of Long Islay, who had a name for
gallantry; the girl has no lover--Has she?” he asked eagerly, suddenly
dropping his confidence.
“Not that I’m aware of,” said Gilian.
“Well, there you are! What more is to be said? In these things one has
but to wish and win--at least that’s been my training and my conviction.
Here she’s lonely--I could see it in her; the company of her father is
not likely to be long for her, and her Uncle Jamie is not what you would
call a cheerful spark. Upon my soul, I believe I could get her if I was
a hunchback.... Mind, I’m not lightlying the lady; I could not do that
in this mood, but I’m fair taken with her; she beats all ever I saw. You
know the feeling? No, you don’t; you’re too throng at book notions. God!
God! God! I’m all ashake!”
He looked at Gilian, trying in the dark to make out how he was taking
this, to make sure he was not laughing at him. Gilian, on the contrary,
was feeling very solemn. He felt that this was a dangerously effective
mood for a lover, and he knew the lad before him would always bring
it to actual wooing if it got that length. He had no answer, and Young
Islay again believed him the abstracted dreamer.
“I have this advantage,” he went on, unable to resist. “She likes
soldiers; she said as much; it was in her mother and in her; she likes
action, she likes spirit. She has them herself in faith! she almost
boxed my ears when--when--but I could swear she was rather tickled at my
impudence.”
“Your impudence!” repeated Gilian, “were you in that mood?”
“Oh, well, you know--I had the boldness to----
“To what?” said Gilian; apprehending some disaster.
“Just a trifle,” said Young Islay, shrewdly affecting indifference. “A
soldier’s compliment; we are too ready with them in barrack-yards, you
know.” And he sighed as he remembered the red ripe lips, the warm breath
on his face, and the tingling influence of the skin he touched under the
kerchief.
They walked on in silence again for a while. The night grew dark with
gathering clouds. Lights far out at sea showed the trailing fishers; a
flaring torch told of a trawler’s evening fortune made already. And soon
they were at the Duke’s lodge and Gilian’s way up Glen Aray lay before
him. He was pausing to say good-night, confused, troubled by what he had
heard, feeling he must confess his own regard for the girl and not let
this comparative stranger so buoyantly outdo him in admiration.
“Now,” said he, hesitating, “what would you think I was in Glen Shira
myself for?”
“Eh?” said Young Islay, scarcely hearing, and he hummed the refrain of
the lady’s song.
“In Glen Shira; what was I doing there?” repeated Gilian. He wanted no
answer. “It was on the odd chance that I might see Miss Nan. We are
not altogether without some taste in these parts, though wanting the
advantage of travel and garrison gallantry. I was in the garden when you
were inside. I heard her singing, and I think I got closer on herself
and her song than you did.”
“My dear Gilian,” said Young Islay, “I once fought you for less than
that.” He laughed as he said it. “If you mean,” he went on, “that you
are in love with Miss Nan, that’s nothing to wonder at, the miracle
would be for you to be indifferent. We’re in the same hunt, are we then?
Well, luck to the winner! I can say no fairer than that. Only you’ll
have to look sharp, my boy, for I’m not going to lose any time, I assure
you. If you’re going to do all your courtship of yon lady from outside
her window, you’ll not make much progress, I’m thinking. Good-night;
good-night!” He went off laughing, and when he had gone away a few yards
Gilian, walking slowly homewards, heard him break whistling into the air
that Nan had sung in the parlour of Maam.
CHAPTER XXVI--AGAIN IN THE GARDEN
Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence
that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone.
Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and
in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin
gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what
still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently
he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the
Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the
Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure
there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is
a stone at Old Islay’s corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of
Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to
the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over
the bridge whence she must sometime come. Years after he would stop
again upon the blue slab and recall with a pensive pleasure those old
hours of expectation.
For days he loitered in vain, the wonder of the Inns and its
frequenters. Nan never appeared. To her father a letter had come; the
Duke had come up on the back of it; there had been long discourse and
a dram of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his
Grace’s cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the
dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an
oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower
on Nan as he passed into the house behind her father, and come out anon
smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name
like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her
father would have her constant in his sight, though it was only, as it
seemed, to pleasure an averted eye.
By-and-by Gilian turned his lucky flint one morning in a fortunate
inspiration, and had no sooner done so than he remembered a very
plausible excuse for going to a farm at the very head of Glen Shira. He
started forth with the certainty, somehow, that he should meet the lady
at last.
He had transacted his business and was on his way to the foot of the
glen when he came upon her at Boshang Gate. Her back was to him; she
was looking out to sea, leaning upon the bars as if she were a weary
prisoner.
She turned at the sound of his footstep, a stranger utterly to his eyes
and imagination, but not to his instinct, her hair bound, her apparel
mature and decorous, her demeanour womanly. And he had been looking all
the while for a little girl grown tall, with no external difference but
that!
She took an impulsive step towards him as he hesitated with his hand
dubious between his side and his bonnet, a pleasant, even an eager smile
upon her face.
“You are quite sure you are you?” she said, holding out her hand before
he had time to say a word. “For I was standing there thinking of you, a
little white-faced fellow in a kilt, and here comes your elderly wraith
at my back like one of Black Duncan’s ghosts!”
“I would be the more certain it was myself,” he answered, “if you had
not been so different from what I expected.”
“Oh! then you had not forgotten me altogether?” she said, waiting
her answer, a mere beginner in coquetry emboldened to practice by the
slightly rustic awkwardness of the lad.
“Not--not altogether,” said he, unhappily accepting the common locution
of the town, that means always more than it says.
A spark of humour flashed to merriment in her eyes and died to a demure
ember again before he noticed it. “Here’s John Hielan’man,” she said to
herself, and she recalled, not to Gilian’s credit in the comparison, the
effrontery of Young Islay.
The situation was a little awkward, for he held her hand too long,
taking all the pleasure he could from a sudden conviction that in all
the times he had seen Glen Shira it had never seemed fully furnished and
habitable till now. This creature, so much the mistress of herself, and
dainty and cheerful, made up for all its solitude; she was the one thing
(he felt) wanting to make complete the landscape.
Her blush and a feeble effort to disengage her hand brought him to
himself.
“I am pleased to see you back,” said he shyly, as he released her. “I
had not forgotten--oh no, I had not forgotten you. It would be easy to
convince you of that, I think, but in all my recollection of Miss Nan
I had more of the girl in the den of the _Jean_ in my mind than the
Edinburgh lady.”
“You’ll be meaning that I am old and--and pretty no longer,” said she.
“Upon my word, you are honestly outspoken in these parts nowadays.” She
pouted, with lines of annoyance upon her brow, which seriously disturbed
him, and so obviously that she was compelled to laugh.
Not a word could he find to say to raillery which was quite new to him,
and so for the sake of both of them as they stood at the gate Miss Nan
had to ply an odd one-sided conversation till he found himself at his
ease. By-and-by his shyness forsook him.
The sun was declining; the odours of the traffic of peace blew from the
land; one large and ruddy star lit over Strone. The fishers raised their
sails, and as their prows beat the sea they chanted the choruses of the
wave.
A recollection of all this having happened before seized them together;
she looked at him with a smile upon her lips, and he was master of her
thought before she had expressed it.
“I know exactly what you are thinking of,” he said.
“It was the odd thing about you that you often did,” she replied. “It’s
a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan’man,” she thought.
“You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke’s garden,” he
said. “It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I’m as old--as
old as the hills.” He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the
looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with brass.
“As old as the hills,” he went on, eager to display himself, and also
to show he appreciated her advantages. “Do you know I begin to find them
irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the
years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body,
like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the
glens.”
She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found
him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something
of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to
some women makes a strange appeal.
“One sees much among strangers,” she confessed. “I thought you had been
out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked
of the army for you?”
“The army,” he said, wincing imperceptibly. “Oh! that was the
Paymaster’s old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a
thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it
was?” He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.
“No, tell me,” she said.
“It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved
off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed,
shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least,
when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my
eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my
martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that
was the very last of the army for me.”
“I don’t understand it,” she said.
“Nor I,” he confessed frankly; “only there’s the fact! All I know is
that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot
all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before,
night and day.”
“I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not
likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be
the thing in actuality.”
“I remember that too. _Dhe!_ how the whole thing comes back! I wonder--”
“Well!” she pressed.
“I wonder if we walked in the Duke’s garden again, if we could restore
the very feelings of that time--the innocence and ignorance of it?”
“I don’t know that I want to do so,” said she, laughing.
“Might we not----” He paused, afraid of his own temerity.
“Try it, you were going to say,” she continued.
“You see I have little of your own gift. I’m willing. I am going to the
town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not.”
Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though
she was saying “John Hielan’man, John Hielan’man!” to herself most of
the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer--little
more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his
speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to
her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her
fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.
They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the
flowers grew thick on the dykes; the tall trees swayed their boughs:
still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of
yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they
were trying to recall.
“It is all just as it was,” said she. “All just as it was; there are the
very flowers I plucked,” and she bent and plucked them again.
“We can never pluck our flowers twice,” said he. “The flowers you
gathered then are ghosts.”
“Not a bit,” said she. “Here they are re-born,” and she went as before
from bush to bush and bank to bank, humming a strain of sailor song.
They went under the trees on which he had fancied his heron’s nest, and
they looked at each other, laughing.
“Wasn’t I a young fool?” he asked. “I was full of dream and conceit in
those days.”
“And now?” she asked, burying her face in the flowers and eyeing him
wonderingly.
“Oh, now,” said he, “I have lost every illusion.” “Or changed them
for others, perhaps.” He started at the suggestion. “I suppose you are
right, after all,” he said. “I’m still in a measure the child of fancy.
This countryside moves me--I could tenant it with a thousand tales;
never a wood or thicket in it but is full of song. I love it all, and
yet it is my torture. When I was a child the Paymaster once got me on
the bridge crying my eyes out over the screech of a curlew--that has
been me all through life--I must be wondering at the hidden meanings
of things. The wind in the winter trees, the gossip of the rivers, the
trail of clouds, waves washing the shore at night--all these things have
a tremendous importance to me. And I must laugh to see my neighbours
making a to-do about a mercantile bargain. Well, I suppose it is the old
Highlands in me, as Miss Mary says.” “I have felt a little of it in a
song,” said Nan. “You could scarce do otherwise to sing them as you do,”
he answered. “I never heard you yet but you had the magic key for every
garden of fancy. One note, one phrase of yours comes up over and over
again that seems to me filled with the longings of thousand years.”
He turned on her suddenly a face strenuous, eyes led with passion.
“I wish! I wish!” said he all fervent, “I wish could fathom the woman
within.”
“Here she’s on the surface,” said Nan, a little impatiently, arranging
her flowers. And then she looked him straight in the eyes. “Ladyfield
seems a poor academy,” she said, “if it taught you but to speculate on
things unfathomable. I always preferred the doer to the dreamer. The
mind of man is a far more interesting thing than the song of the river
I’m thinking, or the trailing of mist. And woman----” she laughed and
paused.
“Well?” He eyed her robust and wholesome figure.
“Should I expose my sex, John Hielan’man, or should I not?” she
reflected with an amused look in her face yet. “Never bother to look
below the surface for us,” she said. “We are better pleased, and you
will speed the quicker to take us for what we seem. What matters of us
is--as it is with men too--plain enough on the surface. Dear, dear! what
nonsense to be on! You are far too much of the mist and mountain for me.
As if I had not plenty of them up in Maam! Oh! I grow sick of them!” She
began to walk faster, forgetting his company in the sudden remembrance
of her troubles; and he strode awkwardly at her heels, not very
dignified, like a menial overlooked. “They hang about the place like a
menace,” said she. “No wonder mother died! If she was like me she must
have been heart-broken when father left her to face these solitudes.”
“It is so, it is so,” confessed the lad. “But they would not be
wearisome with love. With love in that valley it would smile like an
Indian plain.”
“How do _you_ ken?” said she, stopping suddenly at this.
“It would make habitable and even pleasant,” said he, “a dwelling where
age and bitterness had their abode.”
“Faith, you’re not so blate as I thought you!” she said, setting aside
the last of her affected shy simplicity.
“Blate!” he repeated, “I would not have thought that was my failing. Am
I not cracking away to you like an old wife?”
“Just to hide the blateness of you,” she answered. “You may go to great
depths with hills and heughs and mists--and possibly with women too when
you get the chance, but, my dear Gilian, you’re terribly shallow to any
woman with an eye in her head.”
“Did you say ‘Gilian’?” he asked, stopping and looking at her with a
high colour.
“Did I?” she repeated, biting her lips. “What liberty!”
“No, no,” he cried----
“I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you
object----”
He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him,
and she laughed. All her assurance was back to her, she knew the young
gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.
“Well, well,” she went on after a silence, “you seem poorly provided
with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would
be making love to me by this time.”
He stared at her aghast. “But, but----”
“But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very
particularly in Miss Simpson’s, I can assure you.” This with a prim
tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer
would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with
an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was
with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing
him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the
policies.
They reached the Lady’s Linn, but did not repeat old history to the
extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested
it in a momentary boldness.
“No, no,” said she. “We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson’s.
And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram’s
stories here; what was it again?”
He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale’s Daughter. She listened
attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him
gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put
into the narrative.
“It is a kind of gruesome fable,” she said when he was done, and she
shuddered slightly. “The other brother was Death, wasn’t he? When you
told it to me last I did not understand.”
They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so
bewildered them before: “After all, it is not a bit like what it was,”
said she. “I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now
I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time.”
“Just so,” he answered, “but you could see over no bushes in those days,
and more’s the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke’s garden
as well as in life, for it’s only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan.”
“Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John
Hielan’man.” But this was to herself.
“Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?”
“The same and not all the same,” he admitted. “I can make it exactly the
same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew
then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer
and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no
difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other
way, some sad way I cannot explain.”
The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees.
There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream
compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous
beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady’s breathing, that
to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic
story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers.
And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all
childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than
that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams
that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other
rumour to the ear.
“Listen,” said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that
grey grassy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady’s arm.
“Faith, and you are _not_ blate,” said she whimsically, but indifferent
to remove herself from a grasp so innocent.
She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its
midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she
could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of
the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature.
A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt
attention. She withdrew her arm gently.
“Hush, hush!” he said. “Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?”
“I do?” she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly
sense of laughter as at a child “Bees and midges, late things like
ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies.”
“They are, of course they are,” he protested, laughing. “At least a
second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread
on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet”--his humour came back--“even
yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other
path.”
“What, and waste ten minutes more!” she cried “Follow me, follow me!”
And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the
night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself,
very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all
his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of
sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity.
He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book
again to please or to deceive the Philistine.
“I thought we could bring it all back again--that was the object of my
rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past.”
They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.
“And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions
about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you
ever written anything?”
He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time
suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he
confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he
had read in Marget Maclean’s books that were still the favourites of his
leisure hours.
“It’ll be in that like other things,” she said with some sense of her
own cruelty. “You must be dreaming it when you might be making it.”
“I never had the inspiration----”
“What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!” she
pointed out.
“But now, of course---”
“Just the weather, Gilian,” she hastened to interject. “A bonny night
with stars, the scent of flower, a misty garden--I could find some
inspiration in them myself for poetry, and I make no pretence at it.”
“There was a little more,” he said meaningly; “but no matter, that may
wait,” and he proceeded immediately to the making of a poem as he went,
the subject a night of stars and a maiden. They had got into the dark
upper end of the town overhung by the avenue trees, the lands were
spotted with the lemon lights of the evening candles, choruses came from
the New Inns where fishermen from Cowal met to spend a shilling or
two in the illusion of joy. Mr. Spencer saw them as he passed and was
suffused by a kindly glow of uncommon romance. He saw, as he thought, a
pair made for each other because they were of an age and of a size (as
if that meant much); what should they be but lovers coming from the
gardens of Duke George in such a night and the very heavens twinkling
with the courtship of the stars? He looked and sighed. Far off in the
south was an old tale of his own; the lady upstairs eternally whining
because she must be banished to the wilds away from her roaring native
city was not in it. “Lucky lad!” said he to himself. “He is not so shy
as we thought him.” They came for a moment under the influence of the
swinging lamp above his door, then passed into the dusk. He went into
his public room, and “Mary,” he cried to a maid, “a little drop of the
French for Sergeant Cameron and me. You will allow me, Sergeant? I feel
a little need of an evening brace.” And he drank, for the sake of bygone
dusks, with his customer.
Nan and Gilian now walked on the pavement, a discreet distance apart.
She stopped at the mantua-makers door. He lingered on the parting, eager
to prolong it. The street was deserted; from the Sergeant More’s came
the sound of song; some fallen leaves ran crisp along the stones, blown
by an air of wind. He had her by the hand, still loath to leave, when
suddenly the door of the mantua-maker’s opened and out came a little
woman, who, plunging from the splendour of two penny dips into the outer
mirk, ran into his arms before she noticed his presence. She drew back
with an apology uttered in Gaelic in her hurried perturbation. It was
Miss Mary.
“Auntie,” he said, no more.
She glanced at his companion and started as if in fear, shivered, put
out a hand and bade her welcome home.
“Dear me! Miss Nan,” said she, “amn’t I proud to see you back? What
a tall lady you have grown, and so like--so like----” She stopped
embarrassed.
Her hand had gone with an excess of kindness upon the girl’s arm ere she
remembered all that lay between them and the heyday of another Nan than
this. Of Gilian she seemed to take no notice, which much surprised him
with a sense of something wanting.
At last they parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster’s
house.
CHAPTER XXVII--ALARM
Nan’s uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides
of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature’s caprice with sheep and
crop, man’s injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons,
nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life’s dolours, would
be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries
or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A
gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard--a
fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man’s face--he
looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of
Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from
above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood
he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to
find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never
word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out
feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine
uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable,
then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more
than ever.
He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the
bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for
Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was
off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a
tryst of her own making. She was indifferent--I have no excuse for her,
and she’s my poor heroine--about his wasted hours so long as she had
her days illumined by some flicker of life and youth. He never knew
how often it was from weeping over a letter from Edinburgh, or a song
familiar elsewhere, upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet
him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand
this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam--and Young Islay
was for reasons away in the Lowlands--this dreamer of the wild, with
the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very
well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts.
So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real
lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers have ever been
meeting in the woods of these glens without saying to each other why.
Gilian went little to town in that weather, he was getting credit
with Miss Mary, if not with her brothers, for a new interest in his
profession. Nor did Nan. Her father did not let her go much without
himself, he had his own reasons for keeping her from hearing the gossip
of the streets.
A week or two passed. The corn, in the badger’s moon, yellowed and
hung; silent days of heat haze, all breathless, came on the country;
the stubble fields filled at evening with great flights of birds moving
south. A spirit like Nan’s, that must ever be in motion, could not but
irk to share such a doleful season; she went more than ever about
the house of Maam sighing for lost companions, and a future not to be
guessed at. Only she would cheer up when she had her duties done for the
afternoon and could run out to the hillside to meet Gilian if he were
there.
She was thus running, actually with a song on her lips, one day, when
she ran into the arms of her uncle as he came round the corner of the
barn.
“Where away?” said he shortly, putting her before him, with his hands
upon her shoulders.
She reddened, but answered promptly, for there was nothing clandestine
in her meetings on the bare hillside with Gilian.
“The berries again,” she said. “Some of the people from Glen Aray are
coming over.”
“Some of the people,” he repeated ironically; “that means one particular
gentleman. My lassie, there’s an end coming to that.”
He drew a large-jointed coarse hand through his tangled beard and
chuckled to himself.
“Are you aware of that?” he went on. “An end coming to it. Oh! I see
things; I’m no fool: I could have told your father long ago, but he’s
putting an end to it in his own way, and for his own reasons.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” she said, surprised at the portentous
tone. She was not a bit afraid of him, though he was so little in
sympathy with her youth, so apparently in antagonism to her.
“What would you say to a man?” he asked cunningly.
“It would depend, uncle,” she said readily and cheerfully, though a
sudden apprehension smote her at the heart. “It would depend on what he
said to me first.”
The old man grinned callously as the only person in the secret.
“Suppose he said: ‘Come away home, wife, I’ve paid a bonny penny for
ye’?”
“Perhaps I would say, if I was in very good humour at the time, ‘You’ve
got a bonny wife for your bonny penny.’ More likely I would be throwing
something at him, for I have my Uncle Jamie’s temper they say, but I’m
nobody’s wife, and for want of the asking I’m not likely to be.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said the uncle oracularly. Then abruptly, “Have you
heard that your father’s got an appointment?”
“I--I heard just a hint of it, of course he has not told me all about
it yet,” she answered with a readiness that surprised herself when she
reflected on it later, for the news now so unexpectedly given her in the
momentary irritation of the old man was news indeed, and though she was
unwilling to let him see that it was so, a tremendous oppression seized
her; now she was to be lonely indeed. Half uttering her thoughts she
said, “I’ll sooner go with him than stay here and----”
“Oh, there’s no going yonder,” said the uncle. “Sierra Leone is not a
healthy clime for men, let alone for women. That’s where the man comes
in. He could hardly leave you alone to stravaige about the hills there
with all sorts of people from Glen Aray.”
“The white man’s grave!” said she, appalled.
“Ay!” said he, “but he’s no ordinary white man; he’s of good stock.”
“And--and--he has found a man for me,” she said bitterly. “Could I not
be left to find one for myself?”
Her uncle laughed his hoarse rude laugh again, and still combed his
tangled beard.
“Not to his fancy,” he answered. “It’s not every one who would suit.” He
smiled grimly--a wicked elder man. “It’s not every one would suit,” he
repeated--as if he was anxious to let the full significance of what
he meant sink to her understanding. And he combed his rough beard with
large-jointed knotted fingers, and looked from under his heavy eyebrows.
“Seeing the business is so commercial,” said she, “I’m sure that between
the two of you you will make a good bargain. I am not sure but I might
be glad to be anywhere out of this if father’s gone and I not with
him.” She said it with outer equanimity, and unable to face him a moment
longer without betraying her shame and indignation, she left him and
went to the corn-field where Black Duncan was working alone.
That dark mariner was to some extent a grieved sharer of her solitude
in Maam. The loss of the _Jean_ on Ealan Dubh had sundered him for ever
from his life of voyaging. The distant ports in whose dusks wild beasts
roared and spices filled the air were far back in another life for
him; even the little trips to the Clyde were, in the regrets of memory,
experiences most precious. Now he had to wear thick shoes on the hill of
Maam or sweat like a common son of the shore in the harvest-fields.
At night upon his pillow in the barn loft he would lie and mourn for
unreturning days and loud and clamorous experience. Or at morning ere
he started the work of the day he would ascend the little tulloch behind
the house and look far off at a patch of blue--the inner arm of the
ocean.
Nan found him in one of his cranky moods, fretful at circumstances,
and at her father who kept him there on the shore, and had no word of
another ship to take the place of the _Jean_. Of late he had been worse
than usual, for he had learned that the master was bound for abroad, and
though he was a sure pensioner so long as Maam held together, it meant
his eternal severance from the sea and ships.
Nan threw herself upon the grass beside him as he twisted hay-bands for
the stacks, and said no more than “Good afternoon” for a little.
He gloomed at her, and hissed between his teeth a Skye pibroch. For a
time he would have her believe he was paying no attention, but ever and
anon he would let slip a glance of inquiry from the corner of his
eyes. He was not too intent upon his own grievances to see that she was
troubled with hers, but he knew her well enough to know that she must
introduce them herself if they were to be introduced at all.
He changed his tune, let a little more affability come into his face,
and it was an old air of her childhood on the _Jean_ he had at his
lips. As he whistled it he saw a little moisture at her eyes; she was
recalling the lost old happiness of the days when she had gone about
with that song at her lips. But he knew her better than to show that he
perceived it.
“Have you heard that father’s going away, Duncan?” she asked in a
little.
“I have been hearing that for five years,” said he shortly. He had not
thought her worries would have been his own like this.
“Yes, but this time he goes.”
“So they’re telling me,” said Black Duncan.
He busied himself more closely than ever with his occupation.
“Do you think he should be taking me?” she asked in a little.
He stopped his work immediately, and looked up startled.
“The worst curse!” said he in Gaelic. “He could not be doing that. He
goes to the Gold Coast. Do I not know it--the white man’s grave?”
“But this Glen Shira,” said she, pretending merriment, “it’s the white
girl’s grave for me, Duncan. Should not I be glad to be getting out
of it?” And now her eyes were suffused with tears though her lips were
smiling.
“I know, I know,” said he, casting a glance up that lone valley that was
so much their common grief. “And could we not be worse? I’m sure Black
Duncan, reared in a bothy in Skye, who has been tossed by the sea, and
been wet and dry in all airts of the world, would be a very thankless
man if he was not pleased to be here safe and comfortable, on a steady
bed at night, and not heeding the wind nor the storm no more than if he
was a skart.”
“Oh! you’re glad enough to be here, then?” said she.
“Am I?” said he. And he sighed, so comical a sound from that hard
mariner that she could not but laugh in spite of the anxieties
oppressing her.
“I’m not going with him,” she proceeded.
“I know,” said he. “At least I heard--I heard otherwise, and I wondered
when you said it, thinking perhaps you had made him change his mind.”
“You thought I had made him change--what do you mean?” she pressed,
feeling herself on the verge of an explanation, but determined not to
ask directly.
Black Duncan became cautious.
“You need not be asking me anything: I know nothing about it,” said he
shortly. “I am very busy--I----” He hissed at his work more strenuously
than ever.
Then Nan knew he was not to be got at that way.
“Oh, well, never mind,” said she; “tell me a story.”
“I have no time just now,” he answered.
Nan’s uncle came round the corner of the dyke, no sound from his
footsteps, his hands in his pockets, his brows lowering. He looked at
the two of them and surmised the reason of Nan’s discourse with Black
Duncan.
“Women--” said he to himself vaguely. “Women--” said he, pausing for
a phrase to express many commingled sentiments he had as to their
unnecessity, their aggravation, and his suspicion of them. He did not
find the right one. He lifted his hand, stroked again the tangled beard,
then made a gesture, a large animal gesture--still the satyr--to the
sky. He turned and went down to the riverside. Mid-way he paused and
stroked his beard again, and looked grimly up at where the maid and
the manservant were blue-black against the evening sky. He shrugged his
shoulders, “Women,” said he, “they make trouble. I wish--I wish----” He
had no word to finish the sentence with, he but sighed and proceeded on
his way.
Nan seemed to be lazily watching his figure as she sat in the grass,
herself observed by Black Duncan. But she really saw him not.
“Ah well! never mind the story, Duncan,” she said at last; “I know you
are tired and not in the mood for _sguullachd_, and if you like I will
sing you my song.”
“You randy!” he said to himself, “you are going to have it out of me, my
dear.” And he bent the more industriously to his task.
“Stop! stop!” he cried before she had got halfway through the old song
of “The Rover.” “Stop! stop!” said he. He threw the binding bands from
him and faced the crimson west, with his back to her.
“Any port but that, my dear! If you are grieving because you think you
are going abroad you need not be anything of the kind, my leddy. This
is the place for you, about your father’s door and him away where the
fevers are--aye and the harbours too with diversions in every one of
them.”
“And Uncle Jamie’s going to keep me, is he?” said she. “Lucky me! I was
aye so fond of gaiety, you mind.”
“Whoever it is that’s to keep you it might be worse,” said he.
“Then there’s somebody.”
“Somebody,” he repeated; “the cleverest young----”
“Stop! stop!” she cried, rising suddenly to her feet; “do not dare to
mention a name; spare me that.”
He looked at her in amazement.
“Do you think I’m a stone, Duncan?”
“You would not be asking me that twice if I was younger myself,” he said
redly, looking at her fine figure, the blush like a sunset on her neck,
the palpitation of her bosom, the flash and menace of her eyes.
“Well, well, well, go on, tell me more,” she cried when she had
recovered herself. “What more is there?”
“You are the one that should know most,” said he.
“I know nothing at all,” she answered bitterly. “It seems that
nowadays the lady is the last to be taken into confidence about her own
marriage.”
“Are you telling me?” he asked incredulously.
“I’m swearing it down your throat,” she cried. “If I had a friend in
this countryside he would be pitying my shame that I must be bargained
for like beast at a fair and not have a word in the bargain.”
“My name’s what my name may be,” said he, putting out an arm and
addressing the world, “and you are my master’s daughter; I would cut off
that hand to save you a minute’s vexation. What did Black Duncan know
but that you had the picking of the gentleman yourself--and you might
have picked worse, though I tell you I did not care to hear about the
money in it.”
“The money,” she exclaimed, turning pale to the lips; “then--then--then
there’s money in it?”
“He’s a smart young fellow----”
“No name, no name, or you are no friend of mine! Money, you say?”
“I could have picked no better for you myself.”
“Did you say money?”
“I thought once there might be something.”
“Money, money,” she repeated to herself.
“A tocher should not be all on one side,” said he, “and I know the
gentleman would be glad to have you----”
“Perhaps the whole countryside knows more about it than I do; it could
scarcely know less. I wondered why they were looking at me in the church
on Sunday. Oh! I feel black burning shame--shame--shame!”
She put her hands to her face to hide her tears; she trembled in every
part.
“They know; the cries are in at least,” said Duncan.
“The cries! the cries!” she repeated. “Is my fate so near at hand as
that?”
“You’ll be a married woman before the General takes the road,” said he.
She took her hands from her face; her eyes froze and snapped, cold as
ice, the very redness of her weeping cooling pale in her passion. She
had no words to utter; she left him hurriedly, and ran fast into the
house.
CHAPTER XXVIII--GILIAN’S OPPORTUNITY
Her father was at the door when she went in. Now for the first time she
knew the reason for his change of manner lately, for that bustle about
trivial affairs when she was near, that averted eye when she was
fond and humorous. She went past him, unable to speak more than an
indifferent word, and great was his relief at that, for he had been
standing there bracing his courage to consult her on what she must be
told of sooner or later. He looked after her as she sped upstairs. “I
wonder how she’ll take it?” he said to himself, greatly perplexed. “A
father has some unco’ tasks to perform, and here’s a father not very
well fitted by nature for the management of a daughter.” He took off his
hat and dried a clammy brow that showed how much the duty postponed had
been disturbing him. “It’s for the best, but it’s a vulgar business even
then. If it was her uncle, now, he would wake her out of her sleep to
tell her the news. Poor girl, poor girl! I wish she had her mother.”
He went into the barn, where corn was piling up, the straw filling the
gloomy gable-ends with rustling gold. Loud he stormed among some workers
there; loud he stormed, for him a thing unusual; and they bent silent
to their work and looked at one another knowingly, sensible that he
was ashamed of himself. Sitting dry-eyed on the edge of her bed, Nan
reflected upon her next step. At a cast of her mind round all the
countryside she could think of no woman to turn to in this trouble, and
only with a woman could she share it. Her pride first, and then the fear
of her father’s anger, left her only certain limits in which to operate.
Her pride would not let her even show curiosity in the identity of the
man who was to be her doom, nor confess to another that she did not know
his name. And the whole parish, if it was acquainted with her sale (as
now she deemed it), must be her enemy. Against any other outrage than
this she would have gone straight to her father. He that she loved and
caressed, on whose knees sometimes even yet she sat, would not be deaf
to any ordinary plea or protest of hers. She would need but to nestle in
his arms, and loose and tie the antique queue, and perhaps steal a
kiss willingly surrendered, and all would be well But this, all her
instincts, all her knowledge of her father told her, was no ordinary
decision of his. He had gone too far to draw back. The world knew it;
he feared to face her because for once to please her he could not cancel
what was done. There was no hope, she told herself, in that direction;
even if there was she would not have gone there, for the sordid horror
of this transaction put a gulf between them. Feverishly she turned over
her lowland letters, and there she found but records of easy heart and
gaiety; no sacrificing friends were offering themselves in the pages
she had mourned over in her moods of evening loneliness. And again she
brought her mind back to her own country, and sitting still dry-eyed,
with a burning skin, upon her bed, reviewed her relatives and friends,
weighing which would be most like to help her.
She almost laughed when she found she had reduced all at last to one
eligible--Elasaid, her old Skye nurse, and the mother of Black Duncan,
who was in what was called the last of the shealings, by the lochs of
Karnes. Many a time her mother had gone to the shealing a young matron
for motherly counsel, but Nan herself had never been there, though
Elasaid had come to Nan to nurse her when her mother died. In the
shealing, she felt sure, there was not only counsel, but concealment if
occasion demanded that.
But how was she to get there, lost as it was somewhere miles beyond the
corner of the Salachary hill, in the wild red moors between the two big
waters?
First she thought of Young Islay--first and with a gladness at the sense
of his sufficiency in such an enterprise. His was the right nature for
knight-errantry in a case like hers, but then she reflected that he was
away from home--her father had casually let that drop in conversation
at breakfast yesterday; and even if he had been at home, said cooler
thought, she would hesitate to enlist him in so sordid a cause.
Then Gilian occurred--less well adapted, she felt, for the
circumstances; but she could speak more freely to him than to any other,
and he was out there in the hazel-wood, no doubt, still waiting for
her. Gilian would do, Gilian would have to do. If he could have seen how
unimpassioned she was in coming to this conclusion he would have been
grieved.
She went out at once, leisurely and with her thoughts constrained
upon some unimportant matter, so that her face might not betray her
tribulation when she met him.
In the low fields her uncle was scanning the hills with his hands arched
above his eyes to shield them from the glare of the westering sun,
groaning for the senselessness of sheep that must go roaming on
altitudes when they are wanted specially in the plains. She evaded his
supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came
upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first
words showed her the way to a speedy explanation.
“Next week,” said he, “we’ll try Strongara; the place is as full of
berries as the night is full of stars. Here they’re not so ripe as on
the other side.”
“Next week the berries might be as numerous as that at the very door of
Maam,” said she, “and I none the better for them.”
“What’s the matter?” he cried, appalled at the omen of her face.
“My father is going abroad at once,” she answered.
“Abroad?” he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked
for the crimson of its leafage. He drew it through his hands and the
thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too!
She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late
days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at
an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice
to think on expectantly in slow-passing forenoons, and no light to shine
like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!
“Well,” she said, looking curiously at him. “My father is going abroad,
have you heard?”
“I have not,” he answered; and she was relieved, for in that case he had
not learned the full ignominy of her story.
“Can you not say so little as ‘good luck’ to us?” she asked in her
lightest manner.
“You--you are going with him, then?” said Gilian, and he delighted in
the sharp torture of the thorns that bled his hands.
“No,” she answered, “it’s worse than that, for I stay. You have not
heard? Then you are the only one in the parish, I am sure, so ignorant
of my poor business. They’re--they’re looking for a man for me. Is it
not a pretty thing, Gilian?” She laughed with a bitterness that shocked
him. “Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” she went on. “I’m wondering
they did not lead me on a halter round the country and take the best
offer at a fair I It was throwing away good chances to give me to the
first offerer, was it not, Gilian?”
“Who is it?” he asked, every nerve jarring at the story.
“Do you think I would ask?” she said sharply. “It does not matter who it
is; and it is the last thing I would like to know, for then I would know
who knew my price in the market.”
“Your father would never do it!”
“My father would not do but what he thought he must. He is poor, though
I never thought him so poor as this; and I daresay he would like to see
me settled before he goes. It is the black settling when I’m cried in
the kirk before I’m courted.”
“They can never marry you against your will,” said Gilian in a dull,
lifeless way, as if he had no great belief in what he laid forth.
“And that would be true,” she said, “if I had a friend in the whole
countryside. I have not one except----”
He flushed and waited, and so did she expectantly, thinking he
would make the fervent protest most lads would do under the same
circumstances. But in the moment’s pause he could not find the words for
his profound feeling.
“Except old Elasaid, the nurse on the Kames moor,” she continued.
“Oh, her!” said he lamely.
“There’s no one else I could think of.”
“Look at me,” he cried; “look at me; am I not your true friend? I
will do anything in the world for you.” But he still went on torturing
himself with his bramble branch, the most insensible of lovers.
She was annoyed at his want of the commonest courage or tact. “John
Hielan’man! John Hielan’-man!” she said inwardly, trying a little
coquetry of the downcast eyes to tempt him. For now she was desolate
that she almost loved this gawky youth throbbing in sympathy with her
tribulation.
“I believe you are my true friend, I believe you arc my true friend, and
there is no one else,” she said, blushing now with no coquetry, and if
he had not been a fool and his fate against him, he might at a hand’s
movement or a word have had her in his arms. The word to say was
sounding loud and strong within him; he took her (only, alas! in fancy)
to his breast, but what was she the wiser?
“And I can do nothing?” he said pitifully. “Nothing!” said she; “you
can do everything.” “Show me how, then,” he said eagerly. She had been
gazing away from him with her eyes on Maam, that looked so sombre a
home, and was certainly now so cruel a home, and she turned then, almost
weeping, her breath rising and falling, audible to his ear, the sweetest
of sounds.
“Will you take me away from here?” she asked in entreaty. “I must go
away from here.”
“I will take you anywhere you wish,” said he.
He held out his hands in a gesture of sudden offering, and she felt
a happiness as one who comes upon a familiar and kind face all
unexpectedly in a strange country. Her face betrayed her gladness.
“I will take you, and who would be better pleased?” said Gilian.
She explained her intention briefly. She must leave Maam at the latest
to-morrow night without being observed, and he must show her the way to
Elasaid’s shealing.
“Ah! give me the right,” he said, “and I will take you to the world’s
end.” He put out his hands and nigh encircled her, but shyness sent him
back to a calmer distance.
“John Hielan’man!” she repeated to herself, annoyed at this tardiness,
but she outwardly showed no knowledge of it.
They planned what only half in fun she called their elopement. He was to
come across to Maam in the early morning.
CHAPTER XXIX--THE ELOPEMENT
He had ideas of his own as to how this enterprise should be conducted,
but on Nan’s advice he had gone about it in the fashion of Marget
Maclean’s novels, even to the ladder. It was not a rope ladder, but a
common one of wood that Black Duncan was accustomed to use for ascent to
his sleep in the loft.
Gilian, apprised by Nan of its exact situation, crept breathlessly into
the barn, left his lantern at the door, and felt around with searching
fingers. The place was all silent but for the seaman’s snores as he
slept the sleep of a landsman upon his coarse pallet. Outside a cock
crew; its sudden alarm brought the sweat to Gilian’s brow; he clutched
with blind instinct, found what he wanted, turned and hastened from the
dusty barn.
The house of Maam was jet-black among its trees, no light peeped even in
Nan’s room.
Carefully he put the ladder against the wall beneath her window, and as
he did so he fancied he heard a movement above. He stood with his hand
on one of the rungs, dubious, hesitating. For the first time a sense
of the risks of the adventure swept into that mind of his, always the
monopoly of imagination and the actor. He was ashamed to find himself
half-wishing she might not come. He tried to think it was all a dream,
and he pinched his arm to try and waken himself. But the blank black
walls of Maam confronted him; the river was crying in its reeds; it was
a real adventure that must be gone on with.
He lit the lantern. Through the open door of it as he did so the flood
of light revealed his face anxious and haggard, his eyes uncertain. He
closed the lantern and looked around.
Through the myriad holes that pierced the tin, pin-points of fire lanced
the night, streaming in all directions, throwing the front of the house
at once into cold relief with a rasping, harled, lime surface. The
bushes were big masses of shade; the trees, a little more remote, seemed
to watch him with an irony that made him half ashamed. What an appalling
night! Over him came the sentiments of the robber, the marauder, the
murderer. As he held the lantern on his finger a faint wind swung it,
and its lances of light danced rhythmic through the gloom. He put it
under his plaid, and prepared to give the signal whistle. For the life
of him he could not give it utterance; his lips seemed to have frozen,
not with fear, for he was calm in that way, but with some commingling
of emotions where fear was not at all. When he gave breath to his
hesitating lips, it went through inaudible.
What he might have done then may only be guessed, for the opening of the
window overhead brought an end to his hesitation.
“Is it you?” said Nan’s voice, just a little revealing her anxiety in
its whisper. He could not see her now that his lantern was concealed,
but he looked up and fancied her eyes were shining more lambent than his
own lantern that smelled unpleasantly.
He wet his lips with his tongue. “The ladder is ready; it’s up against
your window, don’t you see it?” he said, also whispering, but astounded
at the volume of his voice.
“Tuts!” she exclaimed impatiently, “why don’t you show a light? How can
I see it without a light?”
“Dare I?” he asked, astonished.
“Dare! dare! Oh dear!” she repeated. “Am I to do the daring and break my
neck perhaps?”
Out flashed the lantern from beneath his plaid and he held it up to the
window. Nan leant over and all his hesitation fled. He had never seen
her more alluring. Her hair had become somehow unfastened, and, without
untidiness, there lay a lock across her brow; all her blood was in her
face, her eyes might indeed have been the flames he had fancied, for
to the appeal of the lantern they flashed back from great and rolling
depths of luminousness. Her lips seemed to have gathered up in sleep the
wealth of a day of kissing. A screen of tartan that she had placed about
her shoulders had slipped aside in her movement at the window and showed
her neck, ivory pale and pulsing.
“Come along, come along!” he cried in an eager whisper, and he put up
his arms, lantern and all, as if she were to jump. Something in his
first look made her pause.
“Do you really want to go?” he asked, and she was drawing her screen
by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might
well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still
no sound in the night, except that the cock crew at intervals over in
the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of bog-myrtle
drugged the air.
“Do I really want?” she repeated. “Mercy! what a question. It seems
to me that yesterday would have been the best time to ask it. Are you
rueing your bargain?” She looked at him with great dissatisfaction as he
stood at the foot of the ladder, by no means a handsome cavalier, as
he carried his plaid clumsily. He was made all the more eager by her
coldness.
“Come, come!” he cried; “the house will be awake before you are ready,
and I cannot be keeping this lantern lighted for fear some one sees it.”
“We are safe for an hour yet, if we cared to waste the time,” she said
composedly, “and if you’re sure you want it----”
“Want you, Nan,” he corrected, “That’s a little more like it,” she said
to herself, and she dropped the customary bundle at his feet He picked
it up gingerly, as if it were a church relic; that it was a possession
of hers, apparel apparently, made him feel a slight intoxication. No
swithering now; he would carry out the adventure if it led to the end
of the world! He hugged the bundle under his arm, as if it were a
woman, and felt a fictional glow from the touch of it. “Well?” said she
impatiently, for he was no longer looking at her, no longer, indeed,
conceding her so little as the light of the lantern, which he had placed
on the ground, so that its light was dissipated around, while none of it
reached the top of the ladder.
“Well,” she repeated sharply, for he had not answered.
He looked up with a start. “Are you not coming?” he said, with a tone to
suggest that he was waiting impatiently.
She had the window wide open now; she leaned out on her arms ready to
descend; the last rung of the ladder was a foot lower than the sill
of the window; she looked in perplexity at her cavalier, for it was
impossible to put much of grace into an emergence and a descent like
this.
“I am just coming,” she said, but still she made no other move, and he
held up the lantern for her to sec the better.
“Well, be careful!” he advised, and he thought how delightful it was to
have the right to say so much.
“O Gilian!” she said helplessly, “you are far from gleg.”
He gazed ludicrously uncomprehending at her, and in his sense of almost
conjugal right to the girl failed to realise her delicacy.
“Go round to the barn and make sure that Duncan is not moving; he’s the
only one I fear,” she said. “Leave the lantern.”
He did as he was told; he put the lantern on the ground; he went round
again to the barn, put his head in, and satisfied himself that his
seaman was still musical aloft. Then he hurried back. He found the
lantern swinging on Nan’s finger, and her composed upon the ground, to
which she had made a speedy descent whenever he had disappeared.
“Oh! I wanted to help you,” said he.
“Did you?” said she, looking for a sign of the humorist, but he was as
solemn as a sermon.
They might have been extremely sedate in Miss Simpson’s school in
Edinburgh, but at that moment Miss Nan would have forgiven some apparent
appreciation of her cleverness in getting him out of the way while she
came feet first through a window. They stood for a moment in expectancy,
as if something was going to happen, she still holding the lantern,
trembling a little, as it might be with the cold, he with her bundle
under his arm pressed affectionately.
“And--and--do we just go on?” she asked suggestively.
“The quicker the better,” said he, but he made no movement to depart,
for his mind was in the house of Maam, and he felt the father’s sorrow
and alarm at an empty bed, a daughter gone.
She put out an arm, flushing in the dark as she did so, as if to place
it on his neck, but drew back and put the lantern fast behind her, lest
her fervour had been noticed by the ironic and jealous night. He, she
saw, could not notice; the thing was not in his mind.
“In the stories they just move off, then?” said she shyly. “There was
the meeting, the meeting--no more, and they just went away?”
“And the sooner the better,” said he, again leading the way at
last, after taking the lantern from her, and “John Hielan’man, John
Hielan’man!” she cried vexatiously within.
She followed, pouting her lips in the darkness. “It’s quite different
from what I expected,” she said, whispering as they passed the front
door and down by the burn.
“And with me too,” he confessed. “I had it made up in my mind all
otherwise. There should have been moonlight and a horse, and many other
things.” “It seems to me you are not making so much as you might of what
there is,” she suggested. “Are you sure it is not a trouble to carry the
lantern and the bundle too?”
“Oh! no, no!” he cried softly, but eagerly, every chivalric sentiment
roused lest she should deprive him of the pleasure of doing all he could
for her. She sighed.
“Are you vexed you have come?” he asked, stopping and turning on her his
yet wan face full of regret and of dubiety too.
“The thing is done,” she answered abruptly, and they were stepping
carefully over the burn that ran about its boulders in the dark,
gurgling. “Are you sure you are not sorry yourself?”
“I am not a bit sorry,” he said, “but--but----”
“Your ‘buts’ are too late, Gilian,” she went on firmly. “If you rued the
enterprise now, I would go myself.” But she relaxed some of the coldness
of her mood as he shifted his lantern to the other hand and put a
bashful but firm and supporting hand below her arm to secure her footing
in the rough ascent. This was a little more like what she had expected,
she told herself, though she missed something of warmth in the action.
How could she tell that the hand that held her was trembling with
passion, that her shawl fringe as it was blown across his face by the
breeze was something he could have kissed rapturously?
And now they were well up the hillside. The house of Maam, the garden,
the plantings, the noisy river, were down in the valley, all surrendered
to the night. Their lantern, swinging on the lad’s finger, threw a
path of light before them, showing the short cropped grass, the rushy
patches, or the gall they trod odorously, or the heather in its rare
clumps. No sound came louder than the tumbling waters; their voices,
as they spoke even yet guardedly as people will in enterprises the
most solitary when their consciences are unresting, seemed strange and
unfamiliar to each other.
Soon they were on the summit of the hill range and below them lay the
two glens, and the first breath of the morning came behind from Strone,
where dawn threw a wan grey flag across the world. They plunged into the
caldine trees of Strongara, sped fast across Aray at Three Bridges, and
the dawn was on Balantyre, where the farm-touns high and low lay like
thatched forts, grey, cold, unwelcoming in the morning, with here and
there a stream of peat reek from the _greasach_ of the night’s fires.
They became, as it might be, children again as they hastened through
the country. He lost all his diffident dubiety and was anew the bold
adventurer, treading loverlike upon the very stars. A passion of
affection was on him; he would take her unresisting hand and lead her
as though she were his, really, and before them was their moated castle.
And Nan forgot herself in the fresh zest of the dewy morning that now
was setting the birds to their singing in the dens that hang above the
banks of the Balantyre burn.
A rosy flush came to the hills where on the upper edges spread the
antlers of deer sniffing the wind, rejoicing in the magnificence of the
fine highland country in its autumn time. Nan hummed and broke into a
strain of the verse of Donacha Ban that chants the praise of day and
deer-hunting; she charmed her comrade; he felt the passion of the
possessor and stopped and turned upon her and made to kiss. She laughed
temptingly, drew back, warding her lips with the screen that now she
had arranged in a new and pleasing fashion on her shoulders so that she
looked some Gaelic huntress of the wilds. “So, so, Gilian!” said she,
“you have found that there might be more in the books than simply to
take the girl away with not so much as ‘Have you a mouth?’ when she
stepped out at the window.”
“What a fool I was!” he cried. “I was thinking of it all the time, but
did not dare.” But awakened to the actuality of what he now had dared,
he was ashamed to go further.
Nan laughed. He looked odd indeed standing facing her with the lantern
burning yet in his hand though the day was almost wide-awake. He was a
poet bearing his own light about the world extravagantly while the sun
was shining for common mortals.
“Out with your light!” said she. And then she added: “If you dared not
do it in the dark when you met me first, you cannot do it now,” and he
was dashed exceedingly. He puffed out the flame.
“That’s aye me!” he said as they resumed their journey up the second
hill of their morning escapade. “I am too often a day behind the fair.
I was--I was--kissing you a score of times in fancy and all the time you
were willing in the actual fact.”
“Was I indeed?” she retorted shortly, with a movement to bring her shawl
more closely round her. “Do not be so flattering. I like you little
over-blate, Gilian, but I like you less over-bold. If you could see
yourself you would know which suits you best.”
He had no answer. He must face his brae with lacerated feelings, now a
step removed from the girl who walked with him. But only for a little
was he depressed. She saw she had vexed him, and soon she was humming
again, and again they were children of illusion and content.
They reached the pass that led to the lochs, and now Gilian had to
confess himself in a strange country, but he did not reveal the fact to
his companion. They talked of their coming sojourn in these lovely wilds
that her mother had known and loved. The sun would shine constantly for
them; the lakes--the little and numerous lakes--would be fringed
with dreams and delight, starshine would find them innocent among the
heather, remitted to the days of old when they were happy and careless,
when no trouble marred their sky. Only now and then, as they sped on
their way, Gilian wished fervently he knew more of where he was going,
and was certain that life in the wilds would be so pleasant and easy as
they pictured it.
When they came at last upon the slope of Cruach-an-Lochain that revealed
the great valley of the lakes, they stood raptured by the spectacle
before them. Far off, the great hollow among the hills was hazy and
mysterious, but spread before them was the moor, tangled with grass and
heather, all vacant in the morning dream. A tremor of wind was in the
grass about their feet, a little mist tarried about the warm side of Ben
Bhreac, caught among the juniper bushes the hunters had put there for
shelter. All over brooded calm, a land forgetful of its stormy elements,
of the dripping nights, the hail-beat, shrewd ost and hurricane. They
could not, the pair of them, flying from a world of anxieties, but stop
and look at the spectacle, when they came on the face of the Cruach. For
a little they did not speak.
“My God!” said Gilian at last, a lump somewhere at his throat. “It seems
as if this place had been waiting on us tenantless since the start of
time. Where have we been to be so long and so far away from it? _Mo
chridhe, mo chridhe!_”
“Now that I see it,” said she doubtfully, “it seems melancholy enough. I
wish----” She hung upon her sentence, with a rueful gaze out of her eyes
at the scene.
“Melancholy!” he repeated. “Of course, of course,” he quickly came
to her reflection, “what could it be but melancholy with all the past
unrecoverable behind it? It must be brooding for its people gone. Empty,
empty, but I see all the old peoples roaming in bands over it, the sun
smiting them, the rain drenching, I cannot but be thinking of shealing
huts that spotted the levels, of bairns crying about the doors, of
nights of _ceilidh_ round peat fires dead and cold now, but yet with the
smoke of them hanging somewhere round the universe.”
He stopped, and turned away from her, concealing his perturbation.
She shivered at the thought and partly from weariness and hunger, with
a little sucking in of the breath his ear caught, and he turned, a
different man.
“You are tired; will we rest before we go further?” “Is it far?” she
asked.
He reddened. He cast a fast glance round the country as if to look for
some familiar landmark, but all was strange to him.
“I do not know,” he confessed humbly. “I was never on the moor before.”
“Mercy!” she said. “I thought there was never a lad from town but had
fished here.”
“But I was different,” he replied. “The woods and waters about the door
were enough for me. But we’ll get to Elasaid’s very soon, I’m sure, and
find fire, food, and rest.”
She bit her nether lip in annoyance at a courtier so ill-prepared for
their adventure. She turned to look back to the familiar country they
were leaving behind them, and for a moment wished she had never come.
“I wish we could have them now,” she said at last; the words drawn from
her by her weariness.
“And so we can,” said he eagerly, with a delight at a reflection that
sprung into his mind like a revelation. “We can go down to the water
there and build a fire, and rest and eat. It will be like what I
fancied, a real adventure of hunters, and I will be the valet, and you
will be the--the queen.”
So they went down to the lake side. Heathery braes rose about it,
reflected in its dark water; an islet overgrown with scrub lay in
the middle of it, the very haunt of possible romance; Gilian straight
inhabited the same with memories and exploits. Nan sat her down on the
springy heather that swept its scents about her, she leaned a tired
shoulder on it, and the bells of the ling blushed as they swayed against
her cheek. Gilian put down his lantern, a ludicrous companion in broad
sunshine, and was dashed by the sudden recollection that though he had
talked of something to eat, he had really no means of providing it!
The girl observed his perturbation and shrewdly guessed the reason.
“Well?” she said maliciously, without a smile; “and where are we to get
the food you so nicely spoke of?”
He stood stupefied, and so dolorous a spectacle that she could not but
laugh.
“You have got none at all, but imagined our feast--as usual,” she said,
unfolding her bundle. “It was well I did not depend on your forethought,
Gilian,” and she took a flask of milk and some bread from within. He was
as much vexed at the spoiling of his illusion about the contents of the
bundle as at the discovery of his thoughtlessness. What he had been
so fervently caressing against his side had been no more romantic than
bread and cheese and some more substantial augmentation for the poor
table of the old woman they were going to meet!
The side of the loch bristled with dry heather roots; he plucked them
and placed them on the side of a boulder beside Nan, and set fire to
them, and soon a cheerful blaze competed with the tardy morning chill.
They sat beside it singularly uplifted by this domestic hearth among the
wilds; he felt himself a sort of householder, and to share as he did the
fare of the girl was a huge delight. Her single cup passed between them;
at first he was shy to touch at all the object her lips had kissed; he
showed the feeling in his face, and she laughed again.
He joined in the merriment, quite comprehending. Next time the cup came
his way he boldly turned it about so that where last she had sipped came
to his lips, and there he lingered--just a shade too long for the look
of the thing. What at first she but blushed and smiled at, she frowned
upon at last with a sparkle of the eye her Uncle Jamie used to call in
the Gaelic the torch of temper. Gilian missed it; that touch of his lip
upon her cup had recalled the warmth of her hand upon the flowers he had
gathered when she had let them fall in the Duke’s garden, but this was
closer and more stirring. As he knelt on the heather he felt himself a
worshipper of ancient days, and her the goddess of long-lost times. An
uplifting was in his eyes; it would have been great and beautiful to any
one that could have understood, but her it only vexed. When he handed
back the cup she tossed it from her. It broke--sad omen!--on their first
hearthstone. “That’ll do,” said she shortly, “it’s time we were going.”
And she gathered hastily the remains of their breakfast and made for a
departure.
He surveyed her dubiously, wondering why she so abruptly checked the
advances he could swear she had challenged.
“I am sorry I vexed you,” he stammered. She brought down her brows
questioningly. There was something pleasant and tempting though
queenlike and severe in her straightened figure standing over him curved
and strong and full, her screen fallen to her waist, a strand of her
hair blown about her cheek by a saucy wind.