“Vexed?” she queried, and then smiled indifferent. “What would I be

vexed at? We are finished, are we not? Must we be burdening ourselves

unnecessarily going on a road you neither know the length or nature of?”

And without a word more they proceeded towards the shealing that was to

be the end of their adventure.

CHAPTER XXX--AMONG THE HEATHER

Old Elasaid met them at the door. She was a woman with eyes profound

and piercing under hanging brows, a woman grey even to the colour of her

cheeks and the checks of the gown that hung loosely on her gaunt figure.

It was with no shealing welcome, no kind memory of the old nurse even,

she met them, but stood under her lintel looking as it were through them

to the airt of the country whence they had come. She passed the time of

day as if they had been strangers, puckering her mouth with a sort of

unexpressed disapproval. They stood before her very much put out at a

reception so different from what they had looked for, and Gilian knew

that there must be something decisive to say but could not find it in

his head.

“Well,” said the old woman at last, “this’ll be the good man, I’m

thinking?” But still she had that in her tone, a sour dissatisfaction

that showed she had her doubts.

Gilian was not unhappy at the assumption, but felt warm, and Nan

reddened.

“Not at all,” she answered with some difficulty. “It’s just a friend who

convoyed me up.”

“Well I kent it,” said the old woman, who spoke English to show she was

displeased, and there was in her voice a tone of satisfaction with her

own shrewdness. “When I saw you coming up the way there I thought there

was something very unlike the thing about this person with you. The

other one would have been a little closer on your elbow, and a lantern’s

a very queer contrivance to be stravaiging with on a summer day.”

All her contempt seemed to be for Gilian, and he felt mightily

uncomfortable.

“Tell me this,” she went on, suddenly taking Nan by the arm and bending

a most condemnatory face on her; “tell mc this: did you run away from

the other one?”

“Mercy on me!” cried the girl. “Is the story up here already?”

“Oh, we’re not so far back,” said the dame, who did not add that her son

the seaman had told her the news on his last weekly visit.

“Then I’ll need the less excuse for being here,” said Nan, trying to

find in the hard and unapproving visage any trace of the woman who in

happier days used to be so kind a nurse.

“No excuse at all!” said old Elasaid. “If it’s your father’s wish you’re

flying from, you need not come here.” She stepped within the house,

pulled out the wattle door and between it and the fir post stuck a

disapproving face.

“Go away! go away!” she cried harshly, “I have no room for a baggage of

that kind.” Then she shut the door in their faces; they could hear the

bar run to in the staples.

For a minute or two they stood aghast and silent, and Nan was

plainly close on tears. But the humour of the thing struck her quick

enough--sooner than Gilian saw it--and she broke into laughter, subdued

so that it might not reach the woman righteous within, and her ear maybe

at the door chink. It was not perhaps of the heartiest merriment, but

it inspired her companion with respect for her spirit in a moment so

trying. She was pale, partly with weariness, partly with distress at

this unlooked-for reception; but her lips, red and luscious, smiled for

his encouragement.

“Must we go back?” he asked, irresolute, as they made some slow steps

away from the door.

“Back!” said Nan, her eyes flashing. “Am I mad? Are you speaking for

yourself? If it must be back for you let me not be keeping you. After

all you bargained for no more than to take me to old Elasaid’s, and now

that I’m here and there’s none of the Elasaid I expected to meet me,

I’ll make the rest of my way somewhere myself.” But her gaze upon that

rolling and bleak moorland was far less confident than her words.

Gilian made no reply. He only looked at her reproaching for her

bitterness, and humbly took up step by her side as she walked quickly

away from the scene of the cold reception.

They had gone some distance when Elasaid opened her door again and came

out to look after them. She saw a most touching helplessness in the

manner of their uncertain walk across the heather, with no fixed mind

as to which direction was the best, stopping and debating, moving now

a little to the east, now a little to the west, but always further into

the region of the lochs. She began to blame herself for her hastiness.

She had expected that, face to face with her disapproval, the foolish

young people would have gone back the road they came; but here they were

going further than ever away from the father in whose interest she had

loyally refused her hospitality. She cried loudly after them with a

short-breathed Gaelic halloo, too much like an animal’s cry to attract

their attention. Nan did not hear it at all; Gilian but dreamed it, as

it were, and though he took it for the call of a moor-fowl, found it in

his ready fancy alarmingly like the summons of an irate father. But now

he dared betray no hesitancy; he did not even turn to look behind him.

Elasaid cried again, but still in vain. She concluded they were

deliberately deaf to her, and “Let them go!” she said crabbedly,

flaunting an eloquent arm to the winds, comforting herself with the

thought that there was no other house in all that dreary country to give

them the shelter she had denied.

The sun by this time was pouring into the moor from a sky without a

speck of cloud. Compared with the brown and purple of the moor and the

dull colour of Ben Bhreac--the mount away to the southeast--the heavens

were uncommonly blue, paling gradual to their dip. In another hour than

this distressed and perplexed one, our wanderers would have felt some

jocund influence in a forenoon so benign and handsome.

And now, too, the country began to show more of its true character. Its

little lochs--a great chain of them--dashed upon their vision in patches

of blue or grey or yellow. The valley was speckled with the tarns.

Gilian forgot the hazards of the enterprise and the discomforts to be

faced; he had no time to think of what was to be done next for them in

their flight, so full was he with the romance of those multitudinous

lakelets lost in the empty and sunny wilds, some with isle, all with

shelving heathery braes beside them, or golden bights where the little

wave lapped. He turned to his companion with an ecstasy.

“Did you ask me if I rued it?” he said. “Give me no better than to stay

here for ever--with you to share it.”

She met his ardour with coolness. “I wish you had been so certain of

that a little ago,” she said; “you seem very much on the swither. Have

you thought of what’s to be done next? It is all very well to be putting

our backs to the angry Elasaid behind us there, but all the time I’m

wondering what’s to be the outcome.”

He confessed himself at a loss. She eyed him without satisfaction. This

young gentleman, who seemed so enchanting in circumstances where no

readiness of purpose was needed, looked very inadequate in the actual

stress of things, in the broad daylight, his flat bonnet far back on

his brow, his face wan, his plaid awry. And there was something in his

carriage of the ridiculous lantern that made her annoyed at herself for

some reason.

She stopped, and they hung hesitating, with the lapwings crying about

them, and no other sound in the air.

“I’m going back,” said she, as if she meant it. His face fell. This time

there was no mistaking his distress.

“No, no, you cannot, Nan,” he said. “We will get out of it somehow; you

cannot return, and what of me? It would be ill to explain.”

“We’re neither whaup nor deer,” said she, shrugging her shoulders, “to

live here wild the rest of our days.”

Gilian looked about him rather helplessly, and he started at the sight

of a gable wall, with what in a shealing might pass for a window in it,

and he knew it for a relic of the old days, when the moor in its levels

here would be spotted with happy summer homes, when the people of Lochow

came from the shores below and gave their cattle the juicy grazing of

these untamed pastures, themselves living the ancient life, with singing

and spinning in the open, gathering at nights for song or dance and tale

in the fine weather.

“There’s something of shelter at least,” he said, pointing to it. She

looked dubiously at the dry-stone walls almost tumbling, the cabars

of what had been a byre fallen over half the interior, and at the rank

nettles--head-high almost--about the rotten door.

“Is this home-coming?” she said whimsically, forcing a smile, but she

was glad to see it. By this time she was master of her companion’s mind,

and could guess that it would be to him a palace for them both. But they

went up towards the abandoned hut, glad enough, both of them, to see an

edifice, even in decay, showing man had once been there, where now the

world about seemed given over to vacant sunshine or the wild winds of

heaven, the rains, and doleful birds. It stood between two lochs that

were separated from each other by but a hundred yards of heather and

rush, its back-end to one of the lochs, the door to Ben Bhreac.

Gilian went first and trod down the nettles, making a path that she

might the more comfortably reach this sanctuary so melancholy. She

gathered up her gown close round her, dreading the touch of these kind

plants that hide the shame of fallen lintels and the sorrow of cold

hearths, and timidly went to the door, her shawl fallen from one of her

shoulders and dragging at the other. She put her head within, and as she

did so, the lad caught the shawl, unseen by her, and kissed the fringe,

wishing he could do so to her lips.

A cold damp air was in the dwelling, that had no light but from the half

open door and the vent in the middle of the roof.

She drew back shuddering in spite of herself, though her whole desire

was to seem content with any refuge now that she had brought him so far

on what looked like a gowk’s errand.

He ventured an assuring arm around her waist and they went slowly

in together, and stood silent in the middle of the floor where the

long-dead fire had been, saying nothing at all till their eyes had grown

accustomed to the gloom.

What she felt beyond timidity she betrayed not, but Gilian peopled the

house at an instant with all its bygone tenants, seeing the peats ruddy

on the stones, the smoke curling up among the shining cabars, hearing

ghosts gossiping in muffled Gaelic round the fire.

Yet soon they found even in this relic of old long-gone people the air

of domesticity; it was like a shelter even though so poor a one; it

was some sort of an end to her quest for a refuge, though the more she

looked at its dim interior the more content she was with the outside

of it. Where doubtless many children had played, on the knowe below a

single shrub of fir-wood beside the loch, Nan spread out the remains of

her breakfast again and they prepared to make a meal. Gilian gathered

the dry heather tufts, happy in his usefulness, thinking her quite

content too, while all the time she was puzzling as to what was next to

be done. Never seemed a bleak piece of country so lovely to him as now.

As he rose from bending over the heather and looked around, seeing

the moor in its many colours stretch in swelling waves far into the

distance, the lochans winking to the day and over all a kind soft sky,

he was thrilling with his delight.

She summoned him in a little to eat. He looked at her scanty provender,

and there was as much of truth as self-sacrifice in his words as he

said: “I do not care for eating; I am just satisfied with seeing you

there and the world so fine.” And still exulting in that rare solitude

of two he went farther off by Little Fox Loch and sought for white

heather, symbol of luck and love, as rare to find among the red as

true love is among illusion. Searching the braes he could hear, after a

little, Nan sing at the shealing hut. A faint breeze brought the strain

to him faintly so that it might be the melody of fairydom heard at eves

on grassy hillocks by the gifted ear, the melody of the gentle other

world, had he not known that it had the words of “The Rover.” Nan was

singing it to keep up her heart, far from cheerful, tortured indeed

with doubt and fear, and yet the listener found in the notes content

and hope. When he came back with his spray of white heather he was so

uplifted with the song that he ran up to her for once with no restraint

and made to fasten it at her neck. She was surprised at his new freedom

but noway displeased. A little less self-consciousness as he fumbled

at the riband on her neck would have satisfied her more, but even that

disappeared when he felt her breath upon his hair and an unconscious

touch of her hand on his arm as he fastened the flower. She let her eyes

drop before his bold rapture, he could have kissed her there and then

and welcome. But he only went halfway. When the heather was fastened,

he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, remembering some inadequate

tale in the books of Margot Maclean.

“John Hielan’man! John Hielan’man!” she said within herself, and

suddenly she tore the white spray from her bosom and threw it

passionately at her feet, while tears of vexation ran to her eyes.

“Forgive me, forgive me, I have vexed you again,” said Gilian, contrite.

“I should not be so bold.”

She could not but smile through her tears.

“If you will take my heather again and say nothing of it, I will never

take the liberty again,” he went on, eager to make up for his error.

“Then I will not take it,” she answered.

“It was stupid of me,” said he.

“It is,” she corrected meaningly.

“I never had any acquaintance with--with--girls,” he added, trying to

find some excuse for himself.

“That is plain enough,” she agreed cordially, and she followed it with a

sigh.

For a minute they stood thus irresolute and then the lad bent and lifted

the ill-used heather. He held it in his hand for a moment tenderly as if

it was a thing that lived, and sighed over it, and then, fearing that,

too, might seem absurd to her and vexatious, he made an effort and

twirled it between a finger and thumb by its stem like any casual

wild-flower culled without reflection.

“What are you going to do with it now?” she asked him, affecting

indifference, but eyeing it with interest; and he made no answer, for

how could he tell her he meant to keep it always for remembrance? “Give

it to me,” she said suddenly, and took it from his fingers. She ran into

the house and placed it in the only fragment of earthenware left by the

departed tenants. “It will do very well there,” she said.

“But I meant it for you,” said Gilian ruefully, “It is a sign of good

luck.”

“It is a sign of more than that, I’ve heard many a time,” she replied,

and he became very red indeed, for he knew that as well as she, though

he had not said it. “I’ll take it for the luck,” she went on.

“And for mine too,” said Gilian.

“That’s not so blate, John Hielan’man!” said she again to herself. “And

for yours too,” she conceded, smiling. “When you find that I have taken

it away from there you will know it is for your luck too.”

“And it will be at your breast then?” he cried eagerly.

She laughed and blushed and laughed again, most sweetly and most merrily.

“It will be at--at--at my heart,” she said.

“Ah,” said he, in an instinct of fear that quelled his rapture; “ah, if

they take you from me!”

“When I take your heather,” said she, “it will be for ever at my heart.”

Oh! then that savage moorland was Paradise for the dreamer, and he was

a coquette’s slave, fettered by a compliment. The afternoon passed, for

him at least, in a delirium of joy; she, though she never revealed it,

was never at a moment’s rest from her plans of escape from her folly.

Late in the afternoon she came to a lame conclusion.

“You will go down to the town to-night,” she said, “and----”

“And you!” he cried, alarmed at the notion of severance.

“I’ll stay here, of course. You’ll tell Miss Mary that we--that I am

here, and she will tell you what we--what I, must do.”

“But--but--” he stammered, dubious of the plan.

“Of course I can go home again to Maam now,” she broke in coldly, and

she was vexed for the alarm and grief he showed at the alternative.

“I will go; I will go at once,” he cried, but first he went far down on

Blaraghour for wood for a fire to cheer her loneliness, and the dusk was

down on them before he left her.

She gave him her hand at the door, a hand for once with helpless

dependence in the clinging and the confidence of it, and he held it long

without dissent from her. Never before had she seemed so beautiful or

so affable, so necessary to his life. Her trials had paled the colour of

her face and her eyes had a hint of tears. Over his shoulder she would

now and then cast a glance of apprehension at the falling night and

check a shudder of her frame.

“Good-night!” he said.

“Good-night!” she answered, and yet she did not loose her prisoned hand.

He sighed, and brought, in spite of her, an echo from her heart.

Then he drew her suddenly to his arms and scorched her face with lips of

fire.

Nan released herself and fled within. The door closed; she dared not

make her trial the more intense by seeing the night swallow up her only

living link with the human world beyond the vague selvedge of the moor.

And Gilian, till the dawn came over Cruach-an-Lochain, walked by the

side of Little Fox Loch, within view of the hut that held his heart.

CHAPTER XXXI--DEFIANCE

That there was some unusual agitation in the town Gilian could gather as

soon as he had set foot within the Arches in the early morning. It was

in the air, it was mustering many women at the well. There they stood in

loud and lingering groups, their stoups running over extravagantly while

they kept the tap running, unconscious what they were about Or they had

a furtive aspect as they whispered in the closes, their aprons wrapping

their folded arms. At the door of the New Inns, Mr. Spencer was laying

forth a theory of abduction. He had had English experience, he knew

life; for the first time since he had come to this place of poor

happenings he had found something he could speak upon with authority

and an audience to listen with respect What his theory was, Gilian might

have heard fully as he passed; but he was thinking of other things,

and all that came to him were two or three words, and one of the errant

sentences was seemingly about himself. That attracted all his attention.

He gave a glance at the people at the door--the inn-keeper, MacGibbon,

with an unusual Kilmarnock bonnet on that seemed to have been donned

in a hurry; Rixa, in a great perturbation, having just come out of a

shandry-dan with which he had been driving up Glen Shira; Major Paul,

and Wilson the writer. The inn-keeper, who was the first to see the lad,

stopped his speech with confusion and reddened. They gave him a stare

and a curt acknowledgment of his passage of the time of day as the

saying goes, looked after him as he passed round Old Islay’s corner, and

found no words till he was out of sight.

“That puts an end to that notion, at any rate,” said the Sheriff, almost

pleased to find the Londoner in the wrong with his surmises. And the

others smiled at Mr. Spencer as people do who told you so. Two minutes

ago they were half inclined to give some credit to the plausibility of

his reasoning.

The inn-keeper was visibly disturbed. “Dear me! I have been doing the

lad an injustice after all; I could have sworn he was the man in it if

it was anybody.”

“Pooh!” said Rixa, “the Paymaster’s boy! I would as soon expect it of

Gillesbeg Aotram.”

They went into the hostelry, and Gilian, halfway round the factor’s

corner, was well-nigh ridden down by Turner on a roan horse spattered

on the breast and bridle with the foam of a hard morn’s labour. He had

scoured the countryside on every outward road, and come early at the

dawn to the ferry-house and rapped wildly on the shutter. But nowhere

were tidings of his daughter. Gilian felt a traitor to this man as he

swept past, seeing nothing, with a face cruel and vengeful, the flanks

of his horse streaked with crimson. The people shrunk back in their

closes and their shop-doors as he passed all covered upon with the

fighting passion that had been slumbering up the glen since ever he came

home from the Peninsula.

It was the breakfast hour in the Paymaster’s. Miss Mary was going in

with the Book and had but time to whisper welcome to her boy on the step

of the door, for the brothers waited and the clock was on the stroke.

Gilian had to follow her without a word of explanation. He was hungry;

he welcomed the little respite the taking of food would give him from

the telling of a confidence he felt ashamed to share with Miss Mary.

The Paymaster mumbled a blessing upon the vivours, then fed noisily,

looking, when he looked at Gilian at all, but at the upper buttons of

his coat as if through him, and letting not so little as the edge of his

gaze fall upon his face. That was a studious contempt, and Gilian knew

it, and there were many considerations that made him feel no injury

at it. But the Cornal’s utter indifference--that sent his eye

roaming unrecognising into Gilian’s and away again without a spark of

recognition--was painful. It would have been an insufferable meal, even

in his hunger, but for Miss Mary’s presence. The little lady would be

smiling to him across the table without any provocation whenever her

brothers’ eyes were averted, and the faint perfume of a silk shawl she

had about her shoulders endowed the air with an odour of domesticity,

womanhood, maternity.

For a long time nobody spoke, and the pigeons came boldly to the sill of

the open window and cooed.

At last said the Paymaster, as if he were resuming a conversation: “I

met him out there on horseback; the hunt is still up, I’m thinking.”

“Ay?” said the Cornal, as if he gripped the subject and waited the

continuance of the narrative.

“He’ll have ranged the country, I’m thinking,” went on his brother. “I

could not but be sorry for the man.”

Miss Mary cast upon him a look he seldom got from her, of warmth more

than kinship, but she had nothing to say; her voice was long dumb in

that parlour where she loved and feared, a woman subjugate to a sex far

less worthy than her own and less courageous.

“Humph!” said the Cornal. He felt with nervous inquiry at his ragged

chin, inspired for a second by old dreads of untidy morning parades.

“I had one consolation for my bachelordom in him,” went on the younger

brother, and then he paused confused.

“And what might that be?” asked the Cornal.

“It’s that I’m never like to be in the same scrape with a child of

mine,” he answered, pretending a jocosity that sat ill on him. Then

he looked at Miss Mary a little shamefaced for a speech so uncommonly

confidential.

The Cornal opened his mouth as if he would laugh, but no sound came.

“I’m minding,” said he, speaking slowly and in a muffled accent he was

beginning to have always; “I’m minding when that same, cast in your face

by the gentleman himself, greatly put you about Jock, Jock, I mind you

were angry with Turner on that score! And no child to have the same

sorrows over! Well--well----” He broke short and for the first time let

his eyes rest with any meaning on Gilian sitting at the indulgence of a

good morning’s appetite.

Miss Mary put about the breakfast dishes with a great hurry to be

finished and out of this explosive atmosphere.

“There was an odd rumour--” said the Paymaster. He paused a moment,

looking at the inattentive youth opposite him. He saw no reason to stay

his confidences, and the Cornal was waiting expectingly on him. “An odd

rumour up the way; I heard it first from that gabbling man Spencer at

the Inns. It was that a young gentleman of our acquaintance might have

had a hand in the affair. I could not say at the first whether the

notion vexed or pleased me, but I assured him of the stupidity of it.”

He looked his brother in the eyes, and fixing his attention cunningly

dropped a lid to indicate that the young gentleman was beside them.

The Cornal laughed, this time with a sound.

“Lord,” he cried. “As if it was possible! You might go far in that

quarter for anything of dare-deviltry so likeable. What’s more, is the

girl daft? Her mother had caprice enough, but to give her her due she

took up with men of spirit There was my brother Dugald---- But this one,

what did Dugald call him--aye! on his very death-bed? The dreamer, the

dreamer! It will hold true! Him, indeed!” And he had no more words for

his contempt.

All the time, however, Gilian was luckily more or less separate from

his company by many miles of fancy, behind the hills among the lochs

watching the uprising of Nan, sharing her loneliness, seeing her feet

brush the dew from the scented gall. But the Cornal’s allusion brought

him to the parlour of his banishment, away from that dear presence. He

listened now but said nothing. He feared his very accent would betray

his secret.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Cornal again, “whoever is with her

will rue it; mind, I’m telling you. It’s like mother like child.”

“I’m glad,” said the Paymaster, “I had nothing to do with the sex of

them.” He puffed up as he spoke it; there was an irresistible comedy

in the complacence of a man no woman was ever like to run after at his

best. His sister looked at him; his brother chuckled noiselessly.

“You--you--you----” said the elder brother grimly, but again he did not

finish the sentence.

The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary

cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at

the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might,

ran over the morning’s sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid

before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out

the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding

for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary

stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left

the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old

man’s voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly

through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian

heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine,

the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed

very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a

parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself

with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal

gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he

remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the

instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through

eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened.

The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary

to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business

query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool

merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read

it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about

the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into

the street where each passerby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was

obviously canvassing the latest news.

“There’s her uncle away by,” said the Paymaster, straining his head to

follow a figure passing on the other side of the street. “If they had

kept a stricter eye on her from the first when they had her they might

have saved themselves all this.”

“Stricter eye!” said the Cornal. “You ken as much about women as I ken

about cattle. The veins of her body were full of caprice, that’s what

ailed her, and for that is there any remede? I’m asking you. As if I did

not ken the mother of her! Man, man, man! She was the emblem and type of

all her sex, I’m thinking, wanting all sobriety, hating the thought of

age in herself and unfriendly to the same in others. A kind of a splash

on a fine day upon the deep sea, laughing over the surface of great

depths. I knew her well, Dugald knew her----”

“You had every chance,” said the Paymaster, who nowadays found more

courage to retort when his brother’s shortness and contempt annoyed him.

“More chance, of course I had,” said the Cornal. “I’m thinking you had

mighty little from yon lady.”

“Anyway, here’s her daughter to seek,” said the Paymaster, feeling

himself getting the worst of the encounter; “my own notion is that she’s

on the road to Edinburgh. They say she had aye a crave for the place;

perhaps there was a pair of breeches there behind her. Anyway, she’s

making an ass of somebody!”

Gilian threw down the letter and stood to his feet with his face white.

“You’re a liar!” said he.

No shell in any of their foreign battles more astounded the veterans he

was facing with wide nostril and a face like chalk.

“God bless me, here’s a marvel!” cried the Cornal when he found voice.

“You--you--you damned sheep!” blurted the Paymaster. “Do you dare speak

to me like that? For tuppence I would give you my rattan across the

legs.” His face was purple with anger; the stock that ran in many folds

about his neck seemed like a garotte. He lifted up his hand as if to

strike, but his brother caught his arm.

“Let the lad alone,” said he. “If he had a little more of that in his

make I would like him better.”

Together they stood, the old men, facing Gilian with his hands clenched,

for the first time in his life the mutineer, feeling a curious heady

satisfaction in the passion that braced him like a sword and astounded

the men before him.

“It’s a lie!” he cried again, somewhat modifying his accusation. “I know

where she is, and she’s not in Edinburgh nor on her way to it.”

“Very well,” said the Paymaster, “ye better go and tell Old Islay where

she is; he’s put about at the loss of a daughter-in-law he paid through

the nose for, they’re saying.”

The blow, the last he had expected, the last he had reason to look for,

struck full and hard. He was blind then to the old men sneering at him

there; his head seemed charged with coiling vapours; his heart, that had

been dancing a second ago on the wave of passion, swamped and sank. He

had no more to say; he passed them and left the room and went along the

lobby to the stair-head, where he stood till the vapours had somewhat

blown away.

CHAPTER XXXII--AN OLD MAID’S SECRET

Miss Mary bustled about her kitchen with a liveliness that might

have deceived any one but Gilian, who knew her to be in a tremendous

perturbation. She clattered among pans, wrestled with her maid over

dishes and dusters, and kept her tongue incessantly going on household

details. With a laughable transparency she turned in a little to the lad

and said something about the weather. He sat down in a chair and gloomed

into the fire, Miss Mary watching his every sigh, but yet seemingly

intent upon her duties.

“Donacha Breck’s widow was over before we were up to-day, for something

for her hoast,” she said. “She had tried hyssop and pennyroyal masked in

two waters, but I gave her sal prunelle and told her to suck it till

the cough stopped. There’s a great deal of trouble going about just now:

sometimes I think----” She stopped incontinent and proceeded to sweep

the floor, for she saw that Gilian was paying no attention to her. At

length he looked at her and then with meaning to Peggy bent over her

jaw-box.

“Peggy,” said Miss Mary, “go over and tell the mantua-maker that she

did not put the leavings in the pocket of my jacket, and there must have

been a good deal.”

Peggy dried her arms, tucked up the corner of her apron, and departed,

fully aware of the stratagem, but no way betraying the fact When she was

gone, Miss Mary faced him, disturbed and questioning.

“We had a quarrel in there,” said he shortly, “I am not going to put up

with what they said about any friend of mine.”

She had no need to ask who he spoke of. “Is it very much to you?” said

she, turning away and busy with her brush that she might be no spectator

of his confusion. A great fear sprang up in her; the boy who had grown

up a man for her in the space of a Sunday afternoon was capable of new

developments even more rapid and extraordinary.

“It should be very much to anybody,” said he, “to anybody with the spark

of a gentleman, when the old and the soured and the jealous----”

“I’m thinking you are forgetting, Gilian,” said she, facing him now with

a flush upon her face.

“What? what?” he asked, perplexed. “You think I should be grateful. I

cannot help it; you were the kind one and----”

“I was not thinking of that at all,” she rejoined “I was just thinking

you had forgotten that I was their sister, and that I must be caring

much for them. If my brothers have said anything to vex you, and that

has been a too common thing--my sorrow!--in this house, you should be

minding their years, my dear. It is the only excuse I can offer, and I

am willing to make up for their shortcomings by every kindness.” And she

smiled upon the lad with the most wonderful light of affection in her

eyes.

“Oh,” he cried, “am I not sure of that, Auntie? You are too good to me.

What am I to be complaining--the beggarly orphan?”

“Not that, my dear,” she cried courageously, “not that! In this house,

when my brothers’ looks were at their blackest for you, there has always

been goodwill and motherliness. But you must not be miscalling them that

share our roof, the brothers of Dugald and of Jamie.” Her voice broke in

a gasp of melancholy; she stretched an arm and dusted from a corner

of the kitchen a cobweb that had no existence, her eyesight dim with

unbrimming tears. At any other time than now Gilian would have been

smitten by her grief, for was he not ever ready to make the sorrows of

others his own? But he was frowning in a black-browed abstraction on

the clay scroll of the kitchen floor, heartsick of his dilemma and the

bitterness of the speeches he had just heard.

Miss Mary could not be long without observing, even in her own troubles,

that he was unusually vexed. She was wise enough to know that a fresh

start was the best thing to put them at an understanding.

“What did you come to tell me to-day?” she asked, composing herself

upon a chair beside him and taking up some knitting, for hers were the

fingers that were never idle.

“Come down to tell you? Come down to tell you?” he repeated, in surprise

at her penetration, and in some confusion that he should so sharply be

brought to his own business.

“Just so,” she said. “Do you think Miss Mary has no eyes, my dear, or

that they are too old for common use? There was something troubling you

as you came in at the door; I saw it in your face--ay, I heard it in

your step on the stair.”

He fidgeted and evaded her eyes. “I heard outside that--that Turner’s

daughter had not been got, and it vexed me a little.”

“Turner’s daughter!” she said. “It used to be Miss Nan; it was Miss Nan

no further gone than Thursday, and for what need we be so formal to-day?

You are not heeding John’s havers about your name being mixed up with

the affair in a poor Sassanach inn-keeper’s story? Eh, Gilian?” And she

eyed him shrewdly, more shrewdly than he was aware of.

Still he put her off. He could not take her into his confidence so soon

after that cold plunge into truth in the parlour. He wanted to get out

of doors and think it all over calmly. He pretended anger.

“What am I to be talked to like this for? All in this house are on me.

Is it wonderful that I should have my share in the interest the whole of

the rest of the parish has in this young lady lost?”

He rose to leave the room. Miss Mary stopped him with the least touch

upon the arm, a lingering, gentle touch of the finger-tips, and yet

caressing.

“Gilian,” she said softly, “do you think you can be deceiving me?

_M’eudail, m’ieudail!_ I know there is a great trouble in your mind, and

is it not for me to share?”

“There is something, but I cannot tell you now what it is, though I came

here to tell you,” he answered, making no step to go.

“Gilian,” said she, standing before him, and the light from the window

touching her ear so that, beside the darkness of her hair (for she had

off her cap), it looked like a pink flower, “Gilian, can you not

be telling me? Do you think I cannot guess what ails you, nor fancy

something for its cure?”

He saw from the shyness of her face that she had an inkling of at least

the object of his interest.

“But I cannot be mentioning it here,” he said, feebly enough. “It’s a

matter a man must cherish to himself alone, and not be airing before

others. I felt, in there, to have it in my mind before two men who had

worked and fought and adventured all their lives, and come to this at

last, was a childish weakness.”

She caught hold of his coat lapel, and fingered it, and looked as she

spoke, not at the face above her, but at some vision over his shoulder.

“Before them, my dear,” she said. “That well might be, though even they

have not always been the hard and selfish veterans. What about me, my

dear? Can I not be understanding, think you, Gilian?”

“It is such a foolish thing,” said he weakly, “a thing of interest only

to the very young.”

“And am I so old, my dear,” she said, “not to have been young once? Do

you think this little wee wife with her hair getting grey--not so grey

either, though--was always in old maid dolours in her garret thinking of

hoasts and headaches and cures for them, and her brothers’ slippers

and her own rheumatics on rainy days? Oh, my dear, my dear! you used to

understand me as if it had been through glass--ay, from the first day

you saw me, and my brother’s sword must be sending me to my weeping; can

you not understand me now? I am old, and the lowe of youth is down in

its ember, but once I was as young--as young--as--as--as the girl you

are thinking of.”

He drew back, overwhelmed with confusion, but she found the grip of his

coat again and followed up her triumph.

“Did you think I could not guess so little as that, my dear? Oh, Gilian,

sometimes I’ll be sitting in there all my lone greeting my eyes out over

darning hose, and minding of what I have been and what I have seen, and

the days that will never come any more. The two upstairs will be minding

only to envy and to blame--me, I must be weeping as much for my sin as

for my sorrow. Do I look so terrible old, Gilian, that you cannot think

of me as not so bad-looking either, with a bonny eye, they said, and a

jimp waist, and a foot like the honey-bee? It was only yesterday; ah, it

was a hundred years ago! I was the sisterly slave. No dancing for me. No

romping for Mary at hairst or Hogmanay. My father glooming and binding

me motherless to my household tasks, so that Love went by without seeing

me. My companions, and she the dearest of them all, enjoying life to the

full, and me looking out at this melancholy window from year to year,

and seeing the traffic of youth and all the rest of it go by.”

She released his lapel and relapsed, all tears, upon her chair.

“Auntie, Auntie!” he cried, “do not let my poor affairs be vexing you.”

He put, for the first time in his life, an arm about her waist, bending

over her, with all forgotten for the moment save that she had longed for

love and seemingly found it not. At the touch of his arm she trembled

like a maiden in her teens and forced a smile upon her face. “Let me

go,” she said, and yet she gloried in that contact as she sat in the

chair and he bent over her.

“And was there no one came the way?” he asked. “Was I not worth it, do

you think?” she replied, yet smiling in her tears. “Oh, Gilian, not this

old woman, mind you, but the woman I was. And yet--and yet, it is true,

no one came; or if they came, they never came that I wanted.” “And he?”

said Gilian.

She paused and sighed, her thin little hands, so white for all their

toil in that hard barracks, playing upon her lap. “He never had the

chance. My father’s parlour had no welcome, a soldier’s household left

no vacant hours for an only daughter’s gallivanting. I had to be content

to look at him--the one I mean--from the window, see him in the church

or passing up and down the street. They had up Dr. Brash at me--I mind

his horn specs, and him looking at my tongue and ordering a phlebotomy.

What I wanted was the open air, a chance of youth, and a dance on the

green. Instead of that it was always ‘Hof Mary!’ and ‘Here, Mary,’ and

‘What are you wasting your time for, Mary?’” She was all in a tremble,

moist no more with tears, but red and troubled at her eyes. “And

then--then--then he married her. If he had taken any one else it would

not have seemed so hard. I think I hated her for it. It was long before

I discovered they were chief, for my brothers that were out and in kept

it from me for their own reasons, and they never kent my feeling. But

when she was cried and married and kirked, each time it was a dagger at

my heart. Amn’t I the stupid old _cailleach_, my dear, to be talking

of such a thing? But oh! to see them on the street together; to see him

coming home on his furloughs--I am sure I could not be but unfond of her

then! I mind once I wished her dead, that maybe he might--he might see

something in me still. That was when Nan was born and--”

“What,” cried Gilian, “and was he Nan’s father? I--I did not know.”

She turned upon him an old face spoiled by the memories of the moment.

“Who else would it be, my dear?” said she, as if that settled it. “And

you are the first in the world I mentioned it to. He has never seen me

close in the face to guess it for himself, before or since. It might

have happened if I wished, after, but that was the punishment I gave

myself for my unholy thought about my friend his wife.”

“Ah, little Auntie, little Auntie,” said he in Gaelic “Little Auntie,

little Auntie!” No more than that, and yet his person was stormy with

grief for her old sorrow. He put his arm about her neck now--surely

never Highland lad did that before in their position, and tenderly, as

if he had practised it for years, he pressed her to his breast and side.

“And is it all by now but a recollection?” said he softly.

“All by long syne,” said she, dashing the tears from her face and

clearing herself from that unusual embrace. “Sometimes I’ll be thinking

it was better as it was, for I see many wives and husbands, and the dead

fire they sit at is less cheery than one made but never lighted. You

mustn’t be laughing at an old lady, Gilian.”

“I would never be doing that, God knows,” he answered solemnly.

“And I am sure you would not, my dear,” she said, looking trustfully at

him; “though sometimes I must be laughing at myself for such a folly.

Lads and lasses have spoken to me about their courtships and their

trials, and they never knew that I had anything but an old maid’s notion

of the thing. And that’s the way with yourself, is it not, Gilian? Will

you tell me now?”

Still he hung hesitating.

“Do you--are you fond of the girl?” said she and now it was he who was

in the chair and she was bending over him.

“Do I not?” he cried, sudden and passionate lest his confidence should

fail. “Ay, with all my heart.”

“Poor Gilian!” said she.

“Yes, poor Gilian!” he repeated bitterly, thinking on all that lay

between him and the girl of his devotion. Now, if ever, was the time to

tell the real object of his visit, how that those old surmisers upstairs

were wider of the mark than the innkeeper, and that the person for whom

the hunt was up through half the shire was sequestered in the lonely

shealing hut on the moor of Karnes.

“I am sorry,” she went on, and there was no mistake about it, for her

grief was in her face. “I am sorry, but you must forget, my dear. It is

easy--sometimes--to forget, Gilian; you must be just throng with work

and duty, and by-and-by you’ll maybe wonder at yourself having been in

the notion of Nan Gordon’s daughter, made like her mother (and God bless

her!) for the vexation of youth, but never for sober satisfaction. I am

wae for you, Gilian, and I cannot help you, though I would tramp from

here to Carlisle in my bauchles if it would bring her to you.”

“You maybe would not need to go so far,” he answered abruptly. “There is

a hut behind the hill there, and neither press nor fire nor candle nor

companion in it, and Nan--Miss Nan, is waiting there for me to go back

to her, and here I’m wasting precious hours. Do you not see that I’m

burning like a fire?”

“And you have the girl in the moor?” she cried incredulously.

“That I have!” he answered, struck by the absolute possession her

sentence suggested. “I have her there. I took her there. I took her from

her father’s home. She came willingly, and there she is, for me!”

He held out his arms with a gesture indescribable, elate, nervous with

his passion. “Auntie, think of it: you mind her eyes and her hair, yon

turn of the neck, and her song? They’re mine, I’m telling you.”

“I mind them in her mother,” said the little lady, stunned by this

intelligence. “I mind them in her mother, and they were not at all, in

her, for those who thought they were for them. This--this is a terrible

thing, Gilian,” she said piteously.

He rose, and “What could I do?” he asked. “I loved her, and was I to

look at her father selling her to another one who never had her heart?”

“Are you sure you have it yourself, Gilian?” she asked, and her face was

exceedingly troubled.

“It’s a thing I never asked,” he confessed carelessly. “Would she be

where she is without it being so?”

“Where her mother’s daughter might be in any caprice of spirit I would

not like to guess,” said Miss Mary, dubious. “And I think, if I was the

man, it would be the first thing I would be making sure about.”

“What would she fly with me for if it was not for love?” he asked.

“Ask a woman that,” she went on. “Only a woman, and only some kinds

of women, could tell you that. For a hundred reasons good enough for

herself, though not for responsibility.”

He bit his lips in perplexity, feeling all at sea, the only thing clear

to his mind being that Nan was alone on the moor, her morning fire

sending a smoke to the sky, expectation bringing her now and then to the

door to see if her ambassador was in view.

For the sake of that sweet vision he was bound to put another question

to Miss Mary--to ask her if the reference by her brother to Old Islay

bore the import he had given it. He braced himself to it--a most

unpleasant task.

“It’s true,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me you did not know he was

the man?” “I did not. And the money?” “Oh, the money!” said Miss Mary

oddly, as if now a great deal was explained to her. “Did Nan hear

anything of that?”

“She knows everything--except the man’s name. She was too angry to hear

that.”

“Except the man’s name,” repeated Miss Mary. “She did not know it was

Young Islay.” She turned as she spoke, and busied herself with a duster

where there was no need for it. And when she showed him her face again,

there were tears there, not for her own old trials, but for his.

“You must go back there,” she said firmly, though her lips were

trembling, “and you will tell Miss Nan that whatever Old Islay would do,

his son would never put that affront on her. At the worst, the money was

no more than a tocher with the lad; it was their start in Drimlee

and Maam that are now together for the sake of an old vanity of the

factors.... You must tell all that,” she went on, paying no heed to the

perplexity in his face. “It would be unfair to do less, my dear; it will

be wiser to do all. Then you will do the other thing--if need be--what

you should have done first and foremost; youll find out if the girl is

in earnest about yourself or only indulging a cantrip like her mother’s

daughter. Ask her--ask her--oh! what need I be telling you? If you have

not the words in your heart I need not be putting them in your mouth.

Run away with you now!” and she pushed him to the door like a child that

had been caressed and counselled.

He was for going eagerly without a word more, but she cried him back.

For a moment she clung to his arm as if she was reluctant to part with

him.

“Oh!” she cried, laughing, and yet with tears in her voice, “a

bonny-like man to be asking her without having anything to offer.”

He would have interrupted her, but she would not let him.

“Go your ways,” she told him, “and bring her back with you if you can.

Miss Mary has something in a stocking foot, and no long need for it.”

CHAPTER XXXIII--THE PROMISE

When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he

stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him

swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the

colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was

seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was

still making-down from the Paymaster’s waistcoats. It was for that he

used at last to show a new suit on the town by gentle degrees, the first

Sunday the waistcoat, the next Sunday the waistcoat and trousers, and

finally the complete splendour. Now he felt kenspeckle, not in any suit

of material clothes but in a droll sense of nakedness. He had told his

love and adventure in a place where walls heard and windows peered,

and a rumour out of the ordinary went on the wind into every close and

soared straight to the highest tenement--even to the garret rooms. He

felt that the women at the wells, very busy, as they pretended, over

their boynes and stoups, would whisper about him as he passed, without

looking up from their occupation.

Down the street towards the church there was scarcely any one to be seen

except the children out for the mid-day airing from Brooks’s school, and

old Brooks himself going over to Kate Bell’s for his midday waters with

a daundering step as if he had no special object, and might as readily

be found making for the quay or the coffee-house. The children were

noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish

pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who

frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-al

and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting,

yet with a sorrow in the cadence.

Up the street some men sat on the Cross steps waiting the coming of the

ferry-boat from Kilcatrine, for it was the day of the weekly paper. Old

Islay went from corner to corner, looking eager out to sea, his hands

deep in the pockets of his long coat. Major McNicol put his head

cautiously out at his door that his servant lass held open and scanned

the deadly world where Frenchmen lay in ambush. He caught a glimpse of

Gilian spying from the pend close and darted in trembling, but soon came

out again, with the maid patting him kindly and assuringly on the back.

From close to close he made a tactical advance--swift dashes between on

his poor bent old limbs, and he drew up by Gilian’s side.

“All’s well!” said he with a breath of relier. “Man! but they’re throng

to-day; the place is fair botching with them.”

Gilian expressed some commonplace and left the shelter of the pend close

and went up the street round the factor’s corner. He looked behind him

there. The ferry-boat from Kilcatrine was in. Young Islay had stepped

the first off the skiff and was speaking--not to his father, but to

General Turner, whose horse, spattered with foam and white with autumn

dust, a boy held at the quay head. The post-runner took a newspaper from

his pocket and handed it to the men waiting at the Cross; they hastened

into the vintners, and one of them read aloud to the company with no

need to replenish his glass. Against the breast wall the tide at the

full lapped with a pleasant sound. Mr. Spencer came out to the front of

the Inns, smoking a segar, very perjink with a brocade waistcoat and a

collar so high it rasped his ears.

Everything visible impressed itself that day acutely on Gilian as he

went out of the town; not only as if he were naked but as if he were

raw and feeling flesh, and he was glad when the turn of the road at the

Arches hid this place from his view.

A voice cried behind him, and turning around he found Peggy running

after him with a basket, Miss Mary’s afterthought for the fugitive girl

on the moor.

Very quickly he sped up the hills; Nan ran out to meet him as he came up

the brae from Little Fox. She had been crying in the morning till tears

would come no longer, but now she was composed; at least her eyes

were calm and her cheeks lost the pallor they had from a night almost

sleepless in that lonely dwelling. As he saw her running out to meet him

he filled with elation and with apprehension. She was so beautiful, so

airy, so seemingly his alone as she ran out thus from their refuge, that

he grudged the hours he had been gone from her.

“Oh,” she cried, “the Spring was no more welcome to the wood. I hope you

have brought good news, Gilian.” And up she went to him and linked an

arm through his with some of the composure of the companion and some of

the ardour of the sweetheart.

“I think it’s all well,” said he, putting his arm round her as they went

up towards the hut together.

“Is it only thinking?” she asked with disappointment in her voice, all

the ardour gone from her face, and her arm withdrawn. “I was so certain

it would be sureness for once. Will Miss Mary not help me? I am sorry I

asked her. It was not right, perhaps, that my father’s daughter should

be expecting anything from the sister of the Campbells of Keil.” She was

all tremulous with vexed pride and disappointment.

“Miss Mary is your very kind friend, Nan,” he protested, “and she will

help you as readily as she will help me.”

“I am to go down then?” she cried, uplifted again.

“Well, yes--that is, it is between ourselves.”

“That’s what I would be thinking myself, John Hielan’man,” she thought.

And still with all her contempt for his shrinking uncertainty there was

a real fondness that might in an hour have come to full blossom in that

solitude where they so depended on each other.

“I was to ask you something,” he said.

“My wise Miss Mary!” said Nan to herself. “Women have all the wits.” But

she said nothing aloud, waiting for his explanation.

“I thought there was no need of it myself, but she said she knew

better.”

“Very likely she was right too,” said Nan. “And now you must tell me

all about what is going on down-by. Are they looking for me? What is my

father saying? Do they blame me?”

Gilian told her all he knew or thought desirable, as they went up to the

hut and prepared for the first meal Nan had that day. It was good that

the weather favoured them. No sign of its habitual rain and wind hung

over the moorland. Soft clouds, white like the wool of lambs new-washed

in running waters, hung motionless where the sky met the moor, but over

them still was the deep blue, greying to the dip.

They lit a fire in the hut with scraps of candle-fir Gilian had picked

up on the way from the town, and a cheerful flame illumined the mean

interior, but in a while they preferred to go outside and sit by the

edge of Little Fox. In a hollow there the wilds seemed more compact

about them; the sense of solitude disappeared; it was just as if one

of their berrying rambles in the woods behind Maam had been prolonged

a little farther than usual Lazily they reclined upon the heather, soft

and billowy to their arms; the kind air fanned them, a melody breathed

from the rippling shore.

All the reading in Marget Maclean’s books, the shy mornings, the

pondering eves, the ruminations lonely by wood and shore, had prepared

Gilian for such an hour, and now he felt its magic. And as they sat thus

on the bank of the little lake, Nan sung, forgetting herself in her song

as she ever must be doing. The waves stilled to listen; the birds on the

heather came closer; the clouds, like wool on the edge of Ben Bhreac,

tarried and trembled. And Gilian, as he heard, forgetting all that

ancient town below of unable elders and stagnant airs, illusion gone

and glory past, its gossip at well and close, its rancours of clan and

family, knew the message now of the bird that cried across the swampy

meadow-land at Kilmalieu. Love, love, love--and death. It was the

message of bird and flower, of wave and wind, the deep and constant note

in Nan’s song, whatever the words might be. No more for a moment the

rustic, the abashed shepherd, but with the secret of the world filling

his heart, he crept closer to Nan’s side as she leaned upon the heather,

and put an arm around her waist.

“Nan, Nan,” he cried, “could we not be here, you and I, alone together

for ever?”

The gaudy bubble of her expectation burst; she released herself from his

grasp with “John Hielan’-man! John Hielan’man!” in her mind.

“And was that Miss Mary’s question? I thought she was a more sensible

friend to both of us.”

“Never a better,” said he. “She offered her all and----”

“What!” cried Nan, anger flaring in her face, “are you in the market

too?”

He stammered an excuse.

“It was not a gift,” said he, “but to you and me; and that, indeed, was

as much as Old Islay meant, to give him his due.”

“Old Islay, Old Islay!” she repeated, turning her face from him to hide

its sudden remorse. “Islay, Islay,” she repeated to herself. He noticed

the hand she leaned upon, so soft, so white, so beautiful, trembled in

its nest among the heather. He was so taken up with it there among the

heather, so much more beautiful than the fairest flower, that he did not

notice how far he had given up his secret.

He caught the hand and fondled it, and still she repeated to herself

like a coronach, “Islay, Islay.” For once more the rude arm was round

her waist in Maam, and the bold soldier was kissing her on the lips.

Gilian stood up and “Oh!” he cried, as he looked from her to the

landscape, and back from the landscape to her again, “Oh!” he cried, “I

wondered, when you were gone in Edinburgh, what was wanting here. When

Miss Mary told me you were come home, I felt it was the first time the

sun had shone, and the birds had found a song.”

“Young Islay!” she still was thinking, hearing the dreamer but to

compare him with the practitioner she knew.

And then the dreamer, remembering that his question was still unput,

uttered it shyly and awkwardly. “Do you love me?” said he.

It was for this she had fled from Young Islay, who knew his mind and had

no fear to speak it!

“Do I love you?” she repeated. “Are you not too hasty?”

“Am I?” he said, alarmed. And she sighed.

“Oh yes, of course you are! You know so little of me. You have taken me

from my father’s house by a ladder at night, and share a moor with me,

and you know I have no friend to turn to in the world but yourself. You

have eyes and ears, and still you must be asking if it is not hasty to

find out if I love you. It is a wonder you have the boldness to say the

word itself.”

“Well,” he pursued gawkily, though he perceived her drift clearly, “here

I am, and I do love you. Oh, what a poor word it is, that love, for the

fire I feel inside me. There is no word for that, there is nothing but a

song for it that some day I must be making. Love, quo’ she; oh, I could

say that truly of the heather kissing your hand, ay, of the glaur your

feet might walk on upon a wet day!”

“My best respects to you, Master Gilian!” said Nan. “You have the fine

tongue in your head after all. What a pity we have been wasting such a

grand opportunity for it here!” and there was an indulgence in her eye,

though now and then the numb regret of a blunder made came upon her

spirit.

“Will you come down with me?” he went on, far too precipitate for her

fancy.

“When?” she asked, thoughtlessly robbing a heather-tuft bell by bell

with idle fingers.

“Now; Miss Mary expects us this evening.”

“Miss Mary!” said she, a little amused and annoyed. “You would never

have come to the bit but for her.”

“Perhaps not,” he confessed, “but here I am, and God bless her for

bringing me to it! Will you--will you take my white heather now?” And he

stood, something of a lout, with nervous hands upon his hips.

“It looks very pretty where it is,” she answered playfully. “And for

what should I be decking myself in the wilderness?”

She wanted the obvious compliment, but this was a stock from a kail

garden, and “Oh, John Hielan’man!” she cried aloud for the first time.

“You promised, you know,” he said lamely.

“That was yesterday, and this is to-day, and----” she could not finish

for thinking of Young Islay.

“Must I be taking it to you?” he went on, making to move to the door of

the hut where lay the symbol of his love and the token of her surrender.

“Wait! wait!” she cried, standing to her feet and approaching him. “Is

that all there is in the bargain? Are there no luck-pennies at this sort

of market?”

He understood her and kissed her with a heart furious within but in his

movement hesitating, shy and awkward.

For her life she could not but recall the other--the more confident and

practised one she had fled from. She drew off, red, to give her no more

than her due, for the treachery of her mind.

“Leave it,” she said to him. “I will get it myself. Does anyone besides

Miss Mary know we are here?”

“No.”

“Then she will tell nobody our secret. You will go down now. We could

scarcely go together. You will go down now, and tell her I will follow

in the dusk.”

“You have given me no answer, Nan,” he pleaded; “the heather!”

“The heather will be at my heart!” she cried hurriedly.

It was a promise that sang in his head as he went on his way, the herald

of joy, the fool of illusion.

CHAPTER XXXIV--CHASE

When he had gone and was no farther than the shoulder of the brae lying

between the hut and Little Fox, and there was no longer any chance of

his turning to repeat his wild adieux, Nan went into the old hut and put

the sprig of white heather at her bosom, and gave way to a torrent of

tears. She could not have done so in the sunshine outside, but in that

poor interior, even with the day spying through the roof, she had the

sense of seclusion. She cried for grief and bitterness. No folly she

had ever committed seemed so great as this her latest, that she should

blindly have fled from a danger unmeasured into a situation that

abounded with difficulties. She blamed herself, she blamed her father,

she blamed Gilian for his inability to be otherwise than God had made

him. In contrast to his gawky shyness--the rusticity of the farm and

hill, rose up constant in her remembrance the confident young gentleman

she had run away from without so much as a knowledge of his name. She

cried, and the afternoon came, a blush of fire and flowing gold upon

the hills, the purple of the steeps behind her darkened; upon Big Fox

behind, some wild duck floated and gossiped.

She was still at her crying, a maiden altogether disconsolate, with no

notion of where next she should turn to, afraid to go home yet never

once thinking of going to Miss Mary’s refuge as she had promised, and

the world was all dolorous round her, when a step sounded near the door.

She started in terror and shrank into the darkest corner of the hut.

The footstep came not quite close to the door; it was as if the stranger

feared to find a house empty and hesitated before setting foot on the

threshold. From where she stood she could not see him, though his breath

was to be heard, short and panting. The square of the open door was

filled with green and purple--the green of the rank nettle, the purple

of the bell-heather she had been always careful to spare as she had gone

in and out.

Who could it be? Her first thought was of some fisherman or sportsman

late upon the hill and attracted by the smoke of the hut that had so

long known no fire. Then she thought of her father, more kindly and more

contrite to him than she had ever felt before. If it was her father,

what should she do? Would she run out and dare all for his forgiveness

of her folly, and take his terms if that were possible now that her name

and his were ridiculous through all the shire? But it could not be her

father. Her father would not be alone and----

Into the square of light stepped Young Islay! He was all blown with the

hurry of his ascent after hearing from Black Duncan (who had heard from

Elasaid) that Nan had been there in the morning, and now there was no

sign of life about the silent hut except the bluereek that rose over the

mouldering thatch. He was a brave youth, but for once he feared to try

his fate.

As he stood in the doorway and looked into the dark interior, where a

poor fire smouldered in the centre of the floor, he seemed so woebegone

that Nan could not but smile in spite of her trepidation. He but looked

a second, then turned to seek her elsewhere.

As he turned away she called faintly, all blushing and all tears, but

yet with a smile on her face that never sat so sweetly there as when

her feelings mingled. He started as at the voice of a ghost, and hung

hesitating on the threshold till she stepped from her gloomy corner into

the light of the afternoon. As he saw her where a moment before was

a vacancy he could scarcely believe his eyes. But he did not hesitate

long. In an instant, encouraged by her tears and smiles, he had an arm

round her.

“Nan! Nan!” he cried, “I have found you! I never was so happy in my

life!”

For a moment she did not put him off; and he took her hesitation for

content.

“What did it mean? Were you flying from me?” he asked.

All her hardships, all the wrong and degradation leaped into her

recollection. She withdrew herself firmly from that embrace that might

be the embrace of love and possession or of simple companionship in

trial.

“I would never have been here but for you,” said she. “Did you--did you

pay much?”

“Ah!” he cried ruefully, “there’s where you do me injustice! Did you

know me so little--and indeed you know me but little enough, more’s my

sorrow--did you know me so little that you must believe me a savage to

be guilty of a crime like that? Must I be saying that before God I did

not know that my father and--and--”

“--And my father.”

“--And your father, though I would be the last to charge him, were

scheming in any commercial way on my behalf? Come, come, I was not

blate, was I? the last time we were together; my impudence was not in

the style of a man who would go the other way about a wooing, was it?”

“Then you did not know?” She blushed and paused.

“I knew nothing,” he protested. “I knew nothing but that I loved you,

and you know that too if telling can inform you. I told my father that,

and he was well enough pleased, and I could not guess he would make a

fool of me and a victim of you in my absence.”

She stood trembling to this revelation of his innocence, and, once more

the confident lover, Young Islay tried to take her in his arms.

She ran from him, not the young lady of Edinburgh but a merry-hearted

child, making for the side of Little Fox, the air as she went flapping

her gown till it beat gaily like a flag. She ran light-footed, laughing

in her sudden ease of mind, and on the more distant of the two slopes

of Cruach-an-Lochain, antlers rose inquiring; then a red deer looked and

listened, forgetting to crop the poor grass at his feet.

For a second or two Young Islay paused, wondering at her caprice;

then he caught the spirit of it and followed with a halloo. A pleasant

quarry--the temptation of it made his blood tingle as no sport in the

world could do; his halloo came back in echoes from the hill, jocund and

hearty echoes, and Sir Deer at a bound went far to the rear among the

bracken.

Nan sped panting yet laughing. Then she heard his cry. “I am coming, I

am coming,” he called. It might have been the pibroch of the dawn, the

hopeful conquering dawn on valley rims. She put more vigour into her

flight; her lips set hard; she thought if he caught her before she

reached the spot where Gilian last had kissed her, she must be his for

good.

“Run as you like, I am coming,” cried her pursuer, and he was easily

overtaking her. Then he saw how hard and earnestly she strove. With a

grimace to himself, he slackened his pace and let her gain ground. “I

must be doing my best for Gilian,” she thought; but as she risked a

glance over her shoulder and saw the pursuit decline, saw his face

handsome and laughing and eager, full of the fun of the adventure,

across a widening space, saw him kiss his hand to her as he ran

leisurely, she forgot that she had meant to run for fair play and

Gilian, and she, too, slackened her pace.

A moment more and he caught her, and she relapsed in his arms with a

sigh of exertion and surrender.

“Faith, you are worth running for!” said he, turning her to him to

see into her eyes. For a little he looked at the flushed and beautiful

countenance. Her bosom throbbed against his breast; her head thrown

back, showed the melting passion of her eyes like slumbering lakes only

half hid by her trembling lids, her lips red and full, tempting, open

upon pearls. She was his, he told himself, all his, and yet--and yet,

he had half a regret that now he had caught he need chase no more--the

regret of the hunter when the deer is home, of the traveller who has

reached the goal after pleasant journeyings.

His pause was but for a moment, then on her lips he pressed his; on all

her glowing face fell the fever of his kisses.

“Nan, Nan!” he whispered, “you are mine, did I not tell you?”

“I suppose I am,” she whispered faintly. Then to herself, “Poor Gilian!”

“And yet,” said he, “I’m not worth it.”

“I daresay not,” she confessed, nestling the more closely in his arras.

“But you won me when you saved my life.”

“Did I?” said he. “How very wise of me! Give me a kiss, then!”

She tried to free herself, and the white heather at her neck fell

between them. She stooped for it and he to get her kiss, but she was

first successful. To him she held out the twig of pale bells.

“The kiss or that; you can have either,” she said. “One is love and the

other is luck.”

“Then, sweetheart, I’ll have both,” said Young Islay.

CHAPTER XXXV--AN EMPTY HUT

The town bell rang, the little shops were shuttered. Miss Mary, with a

new cap on to do justice to the occasion, had sat for hours with Gilian

at the window, waiting; the Cornal was in bed, and the Paymaster,

dubious but not unpleased, was up at MacGibbon’s telling the story over

a game of dambrod. And still Nan did not appear. There was a sign of

changing weather above Strone, and Gilian was full of sorrow to think of

the girl travelling to him through darkness and rain, so he started out

to meet her by the only path on which she must come.

He reached the lochs as the night was drawing in. The moor was sounding

loud and eerie with the call of large birds. Very cold and uncharitable,

a breeze came from Cruach-an-Lochain, and in the evening dusk the

country seemed most woefully poor and uninhabitable. So it appeared to

Gilian for a moment when at last he came to the head of the brae where

he should have his first sight of the light that could make that wild as

warm and hospitable and desirable as a king’s court. There was no light

now! At first he doubted his eyesight; then he thought he was not at the

right point of view; then he was compelled to confess to himself that

darkness was assuredly where before had been a bright spot like one of

the stars that shine in murky heavens in the midst of storms to prove

that God does not forget.

She had been kept, the dear heart, he told himself; she had been kept by

her modesty waiting for the dusk, and fallen asleep for weariness.

He went awkwardly off the customary track so that he might reach the

shealing the quicker by a short cut that led through boggy grass. He

stumbled in hags and tripped on ancient heather-tufts; the birds

wheeled and mocked over him, something in their note most melancholy and

menacing to his ear.

The loch with the islet was muttering in its sleep, and woke with the

shriek of a thousand frightened birds when this phantom stumbled on

its solitude. The tiny island even in the dusk rose black like a hearse

plume in the water. At his feet he felt upon a stone the tinkle of

broken glass, and he stooped to feel. His finger came upon the portions

of the broken cup, and he remembered, with shame for his own share in

the scene, how Nan had punished his awkwardness by casting from her the

vessel of which this was the fragment She had had her lips to this, her

fingers had touched it; it was a gem to put in his pocket, and he put

it there. He searched round again as he repeated in his mind all the

incidents of that first morning in the moor, and a little farther on he

came upon the ashes of their dead fire. Poor dead fire, grey old ashes,

flame quenched, warmth departed, loneliness come--the reflections made

him shiver.

As he stood there in what was now the dark night, he might have been a

phantom mourning for the unrecoverable, the ghost of old revelries, the

shade of pleasant bygone hearths and love the ancient.

He shook himself into the present world, and left behind the ashes of

their fire and made for the shealing hut, all the way solacing himself

with fancy. The girl was his, but he never let his mind linger on the

numerous difficulties that lay inevitably between the present hour and

his possession of her. He projected himself into the future with a

blank unexplained behind, and saw them at unextinguishable hearths, love

accompanying them through generations. Through the heather he brushed

eagerly now, his eyes intent upon the dim summits of the brae from which

again he should see the light of the shealing if it was there. Loch

Little Fox, and Great Fox, and all the black and sobbing pools among

the heather he passed on the light feet of love, and when he came to the

brae top and still found no beacon there, he was exceedingly dashed.

“I hope, I hope there is nothing wrong,” he said aloud. And he hurried

the faster.

The sky was full of clouds, all but a patch star-sown over Ben Bhreac,

and all through the hollows and hags ran a wail of rain-wind most

mournful. The birds that had been crying over the pools departed, and

there was no sound of animal life. The wind moaned and the pools sobbed.

About the black edifice in which he thought was all he prized most dear

on earth, blackness hung like a terror. Breathless he stood at the door.

It was wide open! It was wide open! It was wide open to the night wind!

As if a hand of ice had clutched him at the heart he shook and staggered

back.

“God of Grace!” he cried in his mother tongue, then “Nan! Nan!” he

called to the dark within. There was no answer, and a bird flew out

above his head.

He cried no more there, but out he ran into the vacant moor and loudly

he called to the night, “Nan! Nan!” till his voice seemed to himself

some terrific chant of long-dead peoples come first to this strange land

and crying for each other in the wilderness where they were lost.

“Nan! Nan!” he cried, sometimes entreating, sometimes peremptory, as

though she might be hiding in the dark in some childish caprice. “Nan!

Nan!” he called plaintively, and he called sharply too and loudly, the

possessor. The sides of Ben Bhreac woke to answer “Anan,” as people

reply in dreams; and the stars of heaven in their little garden over

the hill had no interest whatever in his crying; they hung out cool and

imperturbable, and the wind wailed, but not for his anxieties, on the

reeds of Little Fox.

Then he pressed his hand upon his heart to still its uproar and strained

his ears to listen. No sound of a girl’s voice, no foot upon the

heather. He could scarcely believe his senses. In his mind, as he

approached the house she had seemed as essential a part of it as the sky

was portion of the universe, and here she was gone!

“After all, she may be in the house asleep,” he thought, cheating

himself into a moment’s comfort; and back he went again. He listened at

the threshold for a breath: no sound came to him; the fire was all out,

the air was the air of a dungeon. “Nan!” he called timidly. He got no

reply.

Timidly now he stepped into that chamber that had been sacred to him

before--the holy of holies--and fumbled with a steel. The sparks showed

him his hands trembling, but at first he did not dare to look behind him

for fears intangible. The dried heather stems caught the flame of the

tinder; there was but a handful of them; they flared up in a moment’s

red glare on the interior, then died out crackling. It was enough to

show him the place was empty. It showed him, too, his lantern, the poor

companion of his adventure, lying on the floor as if it had been tumbled

there in some hasty escape; he picked it up and lit it, the gleam

lighting a ghastly face. And then he went out again, not knowing why or

what he might do there, but bound to be moving and away from that empty

shell where had been his kernel untasted. The wind had risen and was

rising higher still. On Little Fox side he stood, a ludicrous object,

with the pin-points of light pricking the darkness. He was there the

dreamer and the hesitator, his eyes vacant. He wore a short ill-fitting

jacket; his vest had come unbuttoned in the haste of his clamber up

the moor; his bonnet was drawn low upon his brow. As he cherished the

lantern from the wind with his back bent he was no figure of the ideal

lover, but yet some tragedy was in the look of him--some great and

moving fate that might have made the night pity him. Down again to

their little knowe he went, and cast himself upon it and surrendered to

emotion. It was for him the grave of love, the new-reared mound of his

affection. Even yet he could see where she had pressed down the heather

as she reclined. Looking at the heather he remembered the white spray of

his affection that she had said would be the sign of his fate. He went

back quickly to the hut, the wind still puffing at his foolish lantern,

and he found the heather gone. It comforted him exceedingly. She had

gone, why or where he could not guess, but she had taken with her the

token of his love and thereby left him her capitulation. His heather was

at her heart!

Wearied utterly, as much by the stress of his passions as by the ardours

of the day, he took possession of her couch and slept till morning.

CHAPTER XXXVI--CONCLUSION

Fair day in the town, and cattle roved about the street, bellowing, the

red and shaggy fellows of the moors, mourning in Gaelic accent and with

mild large eyes pondering on the mysteries of change. Behind them went

the children, beating them lightly on the flanks with hazel wands,

imagining themselves travellers over the markets of the world, and

others, the older ones, the bolder ones, went from shop to shop for

farings, eating, as they went, the parley-man and carvey-cake of the

Fair day. Farmers and shepherds gossiped and bargained on the footpaths

or on the grass before the New Inns; the Abercrombie clattered with

convivial glass and sometimes rose the chorus to a noisy ditty of Lorn.

Old Brooks, with his academy shut for holiday, stood at the Church

corner with a pocket full of halfpence for his bairns, and a little

silver in his vest for the naughty ones he had thrashed with the ferule

and grieved for. “To be good and clever is to be lucky enough,” he said;

“I must be kind to my poor dunces.” Some of them, he saw, went with his

gift straight to Marget Maclean’s. “Ah,” he said, smiling to himself,

“they’re after the novelles! I wish Virgil was so much the favourite, or

even the Grammarian.”

All in the pleasant sunshine the people walked abroad on the

plain-stones; a piper of the company of Boboon the wanderer, with but

two drones to his instrument, played the old rant of the clan as Duke

George went past on a thoroughbred horse.

“Do you hear yon?” asked the Paymaster, opening the parlour window to

let in that mountain strain his brother loved so truly.

The Cornal cocked an ear, drew down shaggy brows on his attention, and

studied, musingly, the tune that hummed from the reeds below.

“‘Baile Inneraora’!” said he. “I wish it was ‘Bundle and Go.’ That’s

the tune now for Colin Campbell, for old Colin Campbell, for poor Colin

Campbell who once was young and wealthy. I’ve seen the day that rant

would set something stirring here “--and he struck a bony hand upon

his breast “Now there’s not a move”--and he searched still with fingers

above his heart. “Not a move! There’s only a clod inside where once

there was a bird.”

He stood with his head a little to the side, listening to the piper till

the tune died, half accomplished, at a tavern door. Then the children

and the bellowing kine had the world to themselves again. The sound of

carriage wheels came from the Cross, and of the children calling loud

for bridal bowl-money.

“What’s that?” asked the Cornal, waking from his reverie; and his

brother put his head out at the window. He drew back at once with his

face exceeding crimson.

“What is’t?” said the Cornal, seeing his hesitation.

“A honeymoon pair,” said the brother, and fumbled noisily with the

newspaper he had in his hand.

“Poor creatures! And who is it? Though I never get over the door you’ll

tell me nothing.”

The Paymaster answered shortly. “It’s the pair from Maam,” said he, and

back to his paper again.

Up to his brow the Cornal put a trembling hand and seemed amazed and

startled. Then he recollected, and a sad smile came to his visage.

“Not a clod altogether yet!” said he, half to himself and half to his

brother. “I felt the flutter of a wing. But it’s not your grief or mine

this time, Jock; it’s your poor recruit’s.”

“He’s down in Miss Mary’s room, and that’s the place for the like of

him.”

“Is it?” said the Cornal. “Dugald understood him best of any of us; he

saw this coming, and I mind that he grieved for the fellow.”

“He’s grieving plenty for himself, and let him!” said the Paymaster,

setting aside his journal. “Look what he dropped from his pocket this

morning. Peggy thought it was mine and she took it to me. Mine! Fancy

that! I’m jalousing she was making a joke of me.” He produced, as he

spoke, a scrap of paper with some verses on it and handed it to his

brother.

The Cornal held the document far from his failing eyes and perused the

writing. It was the first of those heart-wrung fancies that went to the

making of the volume that lies before me as I write--the familiar lament

for the lost “Maid of the Moor” that shepherds still are singing on his

native hills.

“A ballant!” said he, wondering, and with some contempt.

“That’s just what it is,” said his brother. “There was never the like

broke out in this family before, I’m glad to say.”

The Cornal screwed his lips firmly. “It’s what I would call going

altogether too far,” he said. “I’m feared your recruit will affront us

again. A song, now! did you ever know the like of it? I’ll not put up

with it! Did you say he was down with Miss Mary?”

“I saw her laying the corner of the table,” said the Paymaster, “and

I’ll warrant it was not to feed herself at this time of day.”

The Cornal looked again at the verses, clearing his eyes with his hand,

as if he might happily be mistaken. But no, there were the foolish

lines, and some sentiments most unmanly frank of love and idleness among

the moor and heather. He growled; he frowned below his shaggy brows:

“Come down this instant and put an end to it,” said he.

“He’s with Mary,” his brother reminded him, hesitating.

“I don’t care a curse if he was with the Duke,” said the Cornal. “I’ll

end this carry-on in an honest and industrious family.”

He led the way downstairs, the Paymaster following softly, both in their

slippers. Noiselessly they pushed open the door of Miss Mary’s room and

gazed within. She and her darling were looking over the window at the

tumultuous crowd of children scrambling for Young Islay’s bowl-money

scattered by Black Duncan in the golden syver sand. Miss Mary in that

position could not but have her arm about his waist, and her hand

unconsciously caressed the rough home-spun of his jacket. The brothers,

unobserved, stood silent in the doorway.

“That’s the end of it!” said Gilian bitterly, as he came wholly into

the room. His face, shone on by the sun that struck above the tall lands

opposite from fiery clouds, was white to the lips. Miss Mary looked up

into his eyes, mourning in her very inmost for his torture.

“I would say ‘fair wind to her,’ my dear, and a good riddance,” said

she, and yet without conviction in her tone.

“I will say ‘fair wind’ readily,” he answered, “but I cannot be

forgetting. I know she likes--she loves me still.”

Miss Mary showed her pity in her face, but nothing at all had she to

say.

“You are not doubting it, are you?” he cried eagerly; and, still

unnoticed in the doorway, the Paymaster grimaced his contempt, but his

brother, touched by some influence inexplicable, put the poem in his

pocket and delayed the entry.

“Are you doubting?” again cried the lad, determined on his answer but

dreading a denial.

“It is not your bowl-money the bairns are gathering at the Cross,” said

Miss Mary simply.

“True,” he acknowledged; “but she went because she must. She loves me

still, I’m telling you; she has my heather at her heart!”

Miss Mary understood. She looked at her dreamer and stifled a sigh. Then

she saw her brothers in the doorway, silent, and her hand went down and

met his and fondled it for his assurance as on the day he first stood,

the frightened stranger, on that floor, and she had sheltered his

shyness in the folds of her bombazine gown.

THE END