← catalogue

Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure

by Neil Munro · English · Gutenberg #22211 · 566,955 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure

Author: Neil Munro


        
Release date: August 1, 2007 [eBook #22211]
                Most recently updated: March 31, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22211

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GILIAN THE DREAMER: HIS FANCY, HIS LOVE AND ADVENTURE ***




GILIAN THE DREAMER

Gilian the Dreamer, His Fancy, His Love and Adventure

By Neil Munro

Author of ‘John Splendid’ ‘The Lost Pibroch’ &c.

1899




GILIAN THE DREAMER




PART I




CHAPTER I--WHEN THE GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED

Rain was beating on the open leaf of plane and beech, and rapping at the
black doors of the ash-bud, and the scent of the gean-tree flourish hung
round the road by the river, vague, sweet, haunting, like a recollection
of the magic and forgotten gardens of youth. Over the high and numerous
hills, mountains of deer and antique forest, went the mist, a slattern,
trailing a ragged gown. The river sucked below the banks and clamoured
on the cascades, drawn unwillingly to the sea, the old gluttonous sea
that must ever be robbing the glens of their gathered waters. And the
birds were at their loving, or the building of their homes, flying among
the bushes, trolling upon the bough. One with an eye, as the saying
goes, could scarcely pass among this travail of the new year without
some pleasure in the spectacle, though the rain might drench him to
the skin. He could not but joy in the thrusting crook of the fern and
bracken; what sort of heart was his if it did not lift and swell to see
the new fresh green blown upon the grey parks, to see the hedges burst,
the young firs of the Blaranbui prick up among the slower elder pines
and oaks?

Some of the soul and rapture of the day fell with the rain upon the
boy. He hurried with bare feet along the river-side from the glen to the
town, a bearer of news, old news of its kind, yet great news too, but
now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the
gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the
turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness
of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in
gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind
seemed to be for his peculiar ear. The nod of the saugh leaf on the
banks was a salutation. There is, in a flutter of the tree’s young
plumage, some hint of communication whose secret we lose as we age, and
the boy, among it, felt the warmth of companionship. But the sights were
for the errant moments of his mind; his thoughts, most of the way, were
on his message.

He was a boy with a timid and wondering eye, a type to be seen often in
those parts, and his hair blew from under his bonnet, a toss of white
and gold, as it blew below the helms of the old sea-rovers. He was from
Ladyfield, hastening as I say with great news though common news enough
of its kind--the news that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead.

If this were a tale of the imagination, and my task was not a work of
history but to pleasure common people about a hearth, who ever love the
familiar emotions in their heroes, I would credit my hero with grief.
For here was his last friend gone, here was he orphaned for ever. The
door of Ladyfield, where he was born and where he had slept without an
absent night since first his cry rose there, a coronach in the ears of
his dying mother, would be shut against him; the stranger would bar the
gates at evening, the sheep upon the hills would have another keel-mark
than the old one on their fleecy sides. Surely the sobs that sometimes
rose up in his throat were the utter surrender of sorrow; were the tears
that mingled with the rain-drops on his cheek not griefs most bitter
essence? For indeed he had loved the old shrunk woman, wrinkled and
brown like a nut, with a love that our race makes no parade of, but
feels to the very core.

But in truth, as he went sobbing in his loneliness down the river-side,
a regard for the manner of his message busied him more than the matter
of it. It was not every Friday a boy had a task so momentous had the
chance to come upon households with intelligence so unsettling. They
would be sitting about the table, perhaps, or spinning by the fire, the
good-wife of Ladyfield still for them a living, breathing body, home
among her herds, and he would come in among them and in a word bring her
to their notice in all death’s great monopoly. It was a duty to be done
with care if he would avail himself of the whole value of so rare a
chance. A mere clod would be for entering with a weeping face, to
blurt his secret in shaking sentences, or would let it slip out in an
indifferent tone, as one might speak of some common occurrence.
But Gilian, as he went, busied himself on how he should convey most
tellingly the story he brought down the glen. Should he lead up to his
news by gradual steps or give it forth like an alarum? It would be a
fine and rare experience to watch them for a little, as they looked and
spoke with common cheerfulness, never guessing why he was there, then
shock them with the intelligence, but he dare not let them think he
felt so little the weightiness of his message that his mind was ready
to dwell on trivialities. Should it be in Gaelic or in English he should
tell them? Their first salutations would be in the speech of the glens;
it would be, “Oh Gilian, little hero! fair fellow! there you are! sit
down and have town bread, and sugar on its butter,” and if he followed
the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between “_Tha
bean Lecknamban air falbh_” and “The wife of Ladyfield is gone,” there
must be some careful choice. The Gaelic of it was closer on the feelings
of the event; the words some way seemed to make plain the emptiness of
the farmhouse. When he said them, the people would think all at once
of the little brown wrinkled dame, no more to be bustling about
the kitchen, of her wheel silent, of her foot no more upon the blue
flagstones of the milk-house, of her voice no more in the chamber where
they had so often known her hospitality. The English, indeed, when he
thought of it with its phrase a mere borrowing from the Gaelic, seemed
an affectation. No, it must be in the natural tongue his tidings should
be told. He would rap at the door hurriedly, lift the sneck before any
response came, go in with his bonnet in his hand, and say “_Tha bean
Lecknamban air falbh_” with a great simplicity.

And thus as he debated and determined in his mind, he was hastening
through a country that in another mood would be demanding his
attention almost at every step of the way. Ladyfield is at the barren
end of the glen--barren of trees, but rich in heather, and myrtle, and
grass--surrounded by full and swelling hills. The river, but for the
gluttonous sea that must be sucking it down, would choose, if it might,
to linger in the valley here for ever, and in summer it loiters on many
pretences, twining out and in, hiding behind Baracaldine and the bushes
of Tom-an-Dearc, and pretending to doze in the long broad levels of
Kincreggan, so that it may not too soon lose its freedom in so magic
a place. But the glen opens out anon, woods and parks cluster, and the
Duke’s gardens and multitudes of roads come into view. The deer stamp
and flee among the grasses, flowers grow in more profusion than up the
glen where no woods shelter. There are trim houses by the wayside, with
men about the doors talking with loud cheerfulness, and laughing in the
way of inn-frequenters. A gateway from solitude, an entrance to a region
where the most startling and varied things were ever happening, to a boy
from the glen this town end of the valley is a sample of Paradise for
beauty and interest. Gilian went through it with his blue eyes blurred
to-day, but for wont he found it full of charms and fancies. To go under
its white-harled archways on a market day was to come upon a new
world, and yet not all a new world, for its spectacles of life and
movement--the busy street, the clanging pavement, the noisy closes, the
quay ever sounding with the high calls of mariners and fishers--seemed
sometimes to strike a chord of memory. At the first experience of this
busy community, the innumerable children playing before the school,
and the women with wide flowing clothes, and flowered bonnets on
their heads, though so different from the children of the glen and its
familiar dames with piped caps, or maids with snooded locks--all was
pleasant to his wondering view. He seemed to know and understand them
at the first glance, deeper even than he knew or understood the common
surroundings of his life in Ladyfield; he felt at times more comfort in
the air of those lanes and closes though unpleasantly they might smell
(if it was the curing season and the gut-pots reeked at the quay) than
in the winds of the place he came from, the winds of the wilds, so
indifferent to mankind, the winds of the woods, sacred to the ghosts,
among whom a boy in a kilt was an intruder, the winds of the hills, that
come blowing from round the universe and on the most peaceful days are
but momentary visitors, stopping but to tap with a branch at the window,
or whistle mockingly in a vent.

In spite of their mockery of him, Gilian always loved the children of
the town. At first when they used to see him come through the arches
walking hurriedly, feeling his feet in unaccustomed shoes awkward and
unmanageable, and the polish of his face a thing unbearable, they would
come up in wonder on his heels and guess at his identity, then taunt him
for the rustic nature of his clothing.

“Crotal-coat, crotal-coat, there are peats in your brogues!” they would
cry; or “Hielan’-man, hielan’-man, go home for your _fuarag_ and brose!”

They were strange new creatures to him, foreigners quite, and cruel,
speaking freely a tongue he knew not but in broken parts, yet deep in
his innermost there was a strange feeling that he was of their kind. He
wished he could join them in their English play, or better far, that he
might take them to the eagle’s nest in Stob Bhan, or the badgers’ hamlet
in Blaranbui, or show them his skill to fetch the deer at a call, in the
rutting time, from the mud-wallows above Carnus. But even yet, he was
only a stranger to the boys of the town, and as he went down the street
in the drenching rain that filled the syvers to overflowing and rose
in a smoke from the calm waters of the bay, they cried “Crotal-coat,
crotal-coat,” after him.

“Ah,” said he to himself, inly pleased at their ignorance, “if I cared,
could I not make them ashamed, by telling them they were mocking a boy
without a home?”

Kept by the rain closer than usual to the shelter of the closes, the
scamps to-day went further than ever in their efforts to annoy the
stranger; they rolled stones along the causey so that they caught him
on the heels, and they ran out at the back ends of their closes as he
passed, and into others still before him, so that his progress down the
town was to run a gauntlet of jeers. But he paid no heed; he was of
that gifted nature that at times can treat the most bitter insults with
indifference, and his mind was taken up with the manner of his message.

When he came to the Cross-houses he cast about for the right close in a
place where they were so numerous that they had always confused him, and
a middle-aged woman with bare thick arms came out to help him.

“You’ll be looking for some one?” said she in Gaelic, knowing him no
town boy.

He was standing as she spoke to him in a close that had seemed the one
he sought, and he turned to tell her where he was going.

“Oh yes,” said the woman, “I know her well. And you’ll be from the glen,
and what’s your errand in the town to-day? You are from Drimfern? No,
Ladyfield! It is a fine place Ladyfield; and how is the goodwife there?”

“She is dead,” said Gilian hurriedly.

“God, and that is a pity too!” said the woman, content now that the
news was hers. “You are in the very close you are looking for,” and she
turned and hurried up the street to spread the news as fast as could be.

The boy turned away, angry with himself to have blurted out his news to
the first stranger with the curiosity to question him, and halfway up
the stairs he had to pause a little to get in the right mood for his
errand. Then he went up the remaining steps and rapped at the door.

“Come in,” cried a frank and hearty woman’s voice. He put down the sneck
with his thumb and pushed in the door and followed.

A little window facing the sea gave light to the interior, that would
have been dull and mean but for the brilliant delf upon the dresser rack
and the cleanliness of all things and the smiling faces of Jean Clerk
and her sister. The hum of Jean’s wheel had filled the chamber as he
entered; now it was stilled and the spinner sat with the wool pinched in
her fingers, as she welcomed her little relative. Her sister--Aliset Dhu
they called her, and if black she was, it had been long ago, for now her
hair was like the drifted snow--stood behind her, looking up from her
girdle where oaten bannocks toasted.

He stood with his bonnet in his hand. Against his will the grief of his
loss swept over him more masterfully than it had yet done, for those two
sisters had never been seen by him before except in the company of their
relative the little old woman with a face like a nut, and the sobs
that shook him were checked by no reflection of the play-actor. He was
incapable of utterance.

“O my boy, my boy!” cried Jean Clerk. “Do I not know your story?
I dreamt last night I saw a white horse galloping over Tombreck to
Ladyfield and the rider of him had his face in his plaid. Peace with
her, and her share of Paradise!”

And thus my hero, who thought so much upon the way of his message, had
no need to convey it any way at all.




CHAPTER II--THE PENSIONERS

“Go round,” said Jean Clerk, “and tell the Paymaster; he’ll be the sorry
man to lose his manager.”

“Will he be in his house?” asked Gilian, eating the last of his town
bread with butter and sugar.

“In his house indeed!” cried Jean, her eyes still red with weeping. “It
is easy to see you are from the glen, when at this time of day you would
be for seeking a gentleman soldier in his own house in this town. No!
no! go round to Sergeant More’s change-house, at the quay-head, and
you’ll find the Captain there with his cronies.”

So round went Gilian, and there he came upon the pensioners, with
Captain John Campbell, late Paymaster of his Majesty’s 46th Foot, at
their head.

The pensioners, the officers, ah! when I look up the silent street of
the town nowadays and see the old houses empty but for weavers, and
merchants, and mechanics, people of useful purposes but little manly
interest, and know that all we have of martial glory is a dust under a
score of tombstones in the yard, I find it ill to believe that ever wars
were bringing trade for youth and valour to our midst. The warriors are
gone; they do not fight their battles over any more at a meridian dram,
or late sitting about the bowl where the Trinidad lemon floated in
slices on the philtre of joy. They are up bye yonder in the shadow of
the rock with the sea grumbling constantly beside them, and their names
and offices, and the dignities of their battles, and the long number of
their years, are carved deeply, but not deeply enough, for what is there
of their fame and valour to the fore when the threshing rain and the
crumbling frost have worn the legend off the freestone slab? We are left
stranded high and dry upon times of peace, but the old war-dogs, old
heroes, old gentles of the stock and cane--they had seen the glories
of life, and felt the zest of it. Bustling times! the drums beat at the
Cross in those days, the trumpeters playing alluringly up the lanes to
young hearts to come away; pipers squeezed out upon their instruments
the fine tunes that in the time I speak of no lad of Gaelic blood could
hear but he must down with the flail or sheep-hook and on with the
philabeg and up with the sword. Gentlemen were for ever going to wars
or coming from them; were they not of the clan, was not the Duke their
cousin, as the way of putting it was, and by his gracious offices many
a pock-pudding English corps got a colonel with a touch of the Gaelic
in his word of command as well as in his temper. They went away
ensigns--some of them indeed went to the very tail of the rank and file
with Mistress Musket the brown besom--and they came back Majors-General,
with wounds and pensions. “Is not this a proud day for the town with
three Generals standing at the Cross?” said the Paymaster once, looking
with pride at his brother and Turner of Maam and Campbell of Strachur
standing together leaning on their rattans at a market. It was in the
Indies I think that this same brother the General, parading his command
before a battle, came upon John, an ensign newly to the front with a
draft from the sea.

“Who sent you here, brother John?” said he, when the parade was over.
“You would be better at home in the Highlands feeding your mother’s
hens.”

In one way it might have been better, in another way it was well enough
for John Campbell to be there. He might have had the luck to see more
battles in busier parts of the world, as General Dugald did, or Colin,
who led the Royal Scots at Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo; but he
might have done worse, for he of all those gallants came home at the end
a hale man, with neither sabre-cut nor bullet. To give him his due he
was willing enough to risk them all. It bittered his life at the last,
that behind his back his townspeople should call him “Old Mars,” in an
irony he was keen enough to feel the thrust of.

     “Captain Mars, Captain Mars,
     Who never saw wars,”

said Evan MacColl, the bard of the parish, and the name stuck as the
bye-names of that wonderful town have a way of doing.

“Old Mars,” Paymaster, sat among the pensioners in the change-house of
the Sergeant More when Gilian came to the door. His neck overflowed in
waves of fat upon a silk stock that might have throttled a man who had
not worn the king’s stock in hot lands over sea; his stockings fitted
tightly on as neat a leg as ever a kilt displayed, though the kilt was
not nowadays John Campbell’s wear but kerseymore knee-breeches. He had a
figured vest strewn deep with snuff that he kept loose in a pocket (the
regiment’s gold mull was his purse), and a scratch wig of brown sat
askew on his bullet head, raking with a soldier’s swagger. He had his
long rattan on the table before him, and now and then he would lift its
tasseled head and beat time lightly to the chorus of Dugald MacNicol’s
song. Dugald was Major once of the 1st Royals; he had carried the sword
in the Indies, East and West, and in the bloody Peninsula, and came
home with a sabre-slash on the side of the head, so that he was a little
weak-witted. When he would be leaving his sister’s door to go for the
meridian dram at the quay-head he would dart for cover to the Cross,
then creep from close to close, and round the church, and up the Ferry
Land, in a dread of lurking enemies; yet no one jeered at his want, no
boy failed to touch his bonnet to him, for he was the gentleman in the
very weakest moment of his disease. He had but one song in his budget:

     “O come  and   gather round   me,  lads,
         and   help  the  chorus through,
     When I tell you how we fought the French
         on the plains of Waterloo.”

He sang it in a high quavering voice with curious lapses in the vigour
of his singing and cloudings in the fire of his eyes, so that now and
then the company would have to jolt him awake to give the air more
lustily. Colonel Hall was there (of St John’s) and Captain Sandy
Campbell of the Marines, Bob MacGibbon, old Lochgair, the Fiscal with
a ruffled shirt, and Doctor Anderson. The Paymaster’s brothers were
not there, for though he was the brother with the money they were
field-officers and they never forgot it.

The chorus was ringing, the glasses and the Paymaster’s stick were
rapping on the table, the Sergeant More, with a blue brattie tied tight
across his paunch to lessen its unsoldierly amplitude, went out and in
with the gill-stoups, pausing now and then on the errand to lean against
the door of the room with the empty tray in his hand, drumming on it
with his finger-tips and joining in the officers’ owercome.

He turned in the middle of a chorus, for the boy was standing abashed in
the entry, his natural fears at meeting the Paymaster greatly increased
by the sound of revelry.

“Well, little hero,” said the Sergeant More, in friendly Gaelic, “are
you seeking any one?”

“I was sent to see the Paymaster, if it’s your will,” said Gilian, with
his eyes falling below the scrutiny of this swarthy old sergeant.

“The Paymaster!” cried the landlord, shutting the door of the room ere
he said it, and uplifting farmed hands, “God’s grace! do not talk of the
Paymaster here! He is Captain Campbell, mind, late of his Majesty’s 46th
Foot, with a pension of £4 a week, and a great deal of money it is
for the country to be paying to a gentleman who never saw of wars but
skirmish with the Syke. Nothing but Captain, mind you, and do not forget
the salute, so, with the right hand up and thumb on a line with the
right eyebrow. But could your business not be waiting? If it is Miss
Mary who sent for him it is not very reasonable of her, for he is here
no longer than twenty minutes, and it is not sheepshead broth day, I
know, because I saw her servant lass down at the quay for herrings an
hour ago. Captain, mind, it must be that for him even with old soldiers
like myself. I would not dare Paymaster him, it is a name that has a
trade ring about it that suits ill with his Highland dignity. Captain,
Captain!”

Gilian stood in front of this spate of talk, becoming more diffident and
fearful every moment. He had never had any thought as to how he should
tell the Paymaster that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead, that was a
task he had expected to be left to some one else, but Jean Clerk and
her sister had a cunning enough purpose in making him the bearer of the
news.

“I am to tell him the goodwife of Ladyfield is dead,” he explained,
stammering, to the Sergeant More.

“Dead!” said John More. “Now is not that wonderful?” He leaned against
the door as he had leaned many a time against sentry-box and barrack
wall, and dwelt a little upon memory. “Is not that wonderful? The first
time I saw her was at a wedding in Karnes, Lochow, and she was the
handsomest woman in the room, and there were sixty people at the
wedding from all parts, and sixty-nine roasted hens at the supper. Well,
well--dead! blessings with her; did I not know her well? Yes, and I knew
her husband too, Long Angus, since the first day he came to Ladyfield
for Old Mar--for the Paymaster--till the last day he came down the
glen in a cart, and he was the only sober body in the funeral, perhaps
because it was his own. Many a time I wondered that the widow did so
well in the farm for Captain Campbell, with no man to help her, the
sowing and the shearing, the dipping and the clipping, ploughmen and
herds to keep an eye on, and bargains to make with wool merchants and
drovers. Oh! she was a clever woman, your grandmother. And now she’s
dead. Well, it’s a way they have at her age! And the Paymaster must be
told, though I know it will vex him greatly, because he is a sort of man
who does not relish changes. Mind now you say Captain; you need not say
Captain Campbell, but just Captain, and maybe a ‘sir’ now and then. I
suppose you could not put off telling him for a half-hour or thereabouts
longer, when he would be going home for dinner any way; it is a pity
to spoil an old gentleman’s meridian dram with melancholy news. No. You
were just told to come straight away and tell him--well, it is the good
soldier who makes no deviation from the word of command. Come away in
then and--Captain mind--and the salute.”

The Sergeant More threw open the door of the room, filled up the space
a second and gave a sort of free-and-easy salute. “A message for you,
Captain,” said he.

The singing was done. The Major’s mind was wandering over the plains of
Waterloo to guess by the vacancy of his gaze; on his left Bob MacGibbon
smoked a black segar, the others talked of townsmen still in the army
and of others buried under the walls of Badajos. They all turned when
the Sergeant More spoke, and they saw him push before him into the room
the little boy of Ladyfield with his bonnet in his hand and his eyes
restless and timid like pigeons at a strange gate fluttering.

“Ho! Gilian, it is you?” said the Paymaster, with a very hearty voice;
then he seemed to guess the nature of the message, for his voice
softened from the loud and bumptious tone it had for ordinary. “How is
it in Lecknamban?” he asked in the Gaelic, and Gilian told him, minding
duly his “sir” and his “Captain” and his salute.

“Dead!” said the Paymaster, “Blessings with her!” Then he turned to his
companions and in English--“The best woman in the three parishes and the
cleverest. She could put her hand to anything and now she’s no more. I
think that’s the last of Ladyfield for me. I liked to go up now and then
and go about the hill and do a little bargaining at a wool market, or
haggle over a pound with a drover at the fair, but the farm did little
more than pay me and I had almost given it up when her husband died.”

He looked flushed and uncomfortable. His stock seemed to fit him more
tightly than before and his wig sat more askew than ever upon his
bald head. For a little he seemed to forget the young messenger still
standing in the room, no higher than the table whereon the glasses
ranged. Gilian turned his bonnet about in his hand and twisted the
ribbons till they tore, then he thought with a shock of the scolding he
would get for spoiling his Sunday bonnet, but the thought was quickly
followed by the recollection that she who would have scolded him would
chide no more.

The pensioners shared their attention between the Paymaster and the boy.
While the Paymaster gave them the state of his gentleman farming (about
which the town was always curious), they looked at him and wondered at
a man who had seen the world and had £4 a week of a pension wasting life
with a paltry three-hundred sheep farm instead of spending his money
royally with a bang. When his confidence seemed likely to carry their
knowledge of his affairs no further than the town’s gossip had already
brought it, they lost their interest in his reflections and had time to
feel sorry for the boy. None of them but knew he was an orphan in the
most grievous sense of the term, without a relative in the wide world,
and that his future was something of a problem.

Bob MacGibbon--he was Captain in the 79th--leaned forward and tried to
put his hand upon the child’s shoulder, not unkindly, but with a rough
playfulness of the soldier. Gilian shrank back, his face flushing
crimson, then he realised the stupidity of his shyness and tried
to amend it by coming a little farther into the room and awkwardly
attempting the salute in which the Sergeant More had tutored him. The
company was amused at the courtesy, but no one laughed. In a low voice
the Paymaster swore. He was a man given to swearing with no great
variety in his oaths, that were merely a camp phrase or two at the most,
repeated over and over again, till they had lost all their original
meanings and could be uttered in front of Dr. Colin himself without
any objection to them. In print they would look wicked, so they must
be fancied by such as would have the complete picture of the elderly
soldier with the thick neck and the scratch wig. The Sergeant More
had gently withdrawn himself and shut the door behind him the more
conveniently to hear what reception the messenger’s tidings would
meet with from the Paymaster. And the boy felt himself cut off most
helplessly from escape out of that fearful new surrounding. It haunted
him for many a day, the strong smell of the spirits and the sharp
odour of the slices floating in the glasses, for our pensioners
were extravagant enough to flavour even the cold midday drams of the
Abercrombie with the lemon’s juice. Gilian shifted from leg to leg and
turned his bonnet continuously, and through his mind there darted many
thoughts about this curious place and company that he had happened upon.
As they looked at him he felt the darting tremor of the fawn in the
thicket, but alas he was trapped! How old they were! How odd they looked
in their high collars and those bands wound round their necks! They were
not farmers, nor shepherds, nor fishermen, nor even shopkeepers; they
were people with some manner of life beyond his guessing. The Paymaster
of course he knew; he had seen him often come up to Ladyfield, to talk
to the goodwife about the farm and the clipping, to pay her money twice
yearly that was called wages, and was so little that it was scarcely
worth the name. Six men in a room, all gentle (by their clothes), all
with nothing better to do than stare at a boy who could not stare back!
How many things they had seen; how many thoughts they must share between
them! He wished himself on the other side of Aora river in the stillness
of Kincreggan wood, or on the hill among the sheep--anywhere away from
the presence of those old men with the keen scrutiny in their eyes,
doubtless knowing all about him and seeing his very thoughts. Had they
been shepherds, or even the clever gillies that sometimes came to the
kitchen of Ladyfield on nights of _ceilidh_ or gossip, he would have
felt himself their equal. He would have been comfortable in feeling
that however much they might know about the hills, and woods, and wild
beasts, it was likely enough better known to himself, who lived among
them and loved them. And the thoughts of the gillie, and the shepherd,
were rarely beyond his shrewd guess as he looked at them; they had
but to say a word or two, and he knew the end of their story from the
beginning. But these old gentlemen were as far beyond his understanding
as Gillesbeg Aotram, the wanderer who came about the glens and was
called daft by the people who did not know, as Gilian did, that he was
wiser than themselves.

The Paymaster took his rattan and knocked noisily on the table for the
landlord.

The Sergeant More stepped softly on his tiptoes six steps into the
kitchen, then six steps noisily back again and put his head in.

“What’s your will, Captain?” said he, polishing a tray with the corner
of his brattie.

“Give this boy some dinner, for me,” said the Paymaster. “There is
nothing at our place to-day but herrings, and it’s the poorest of meals
for melancholy. Miss Mary would make it all the more melancholy with her
weeping over the goodwife of Ladyfield.”

Gilian went out with the Sergeant More and made a feeble pretence at
eating his second dinner that day.




CHAPTER III--THE FUNERAL

All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either
side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira
and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west,
full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the
rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the
rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road
by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with the broken blossom.

The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside
the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes
under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon
their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions,
the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing
melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the
wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears
of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but
unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun
shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of
the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the
laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster
in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the
garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs
its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her
richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the
stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowers
they would not pluck. Sometimes they will put a cap on the side of a
cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grinning face will
create a moment’s laughter, but it is soon checked and they walk among
the graves in a more seemly peace.

They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside
her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the
coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it.
The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people
moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook
a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a
table tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times
before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him
anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love
or merriment.

The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily,
and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster’s dram at the “lifting”
 at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old
Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times
before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge,
except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day
bring the massive masonry down. “Ha! ha! is that not good?” demanded the
Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. “I told him he
would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he
would be first.”

The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with
vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the
box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by
Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the
sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was
Colonel.

“I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt,” said Mr. William
Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make
his way among the people here, “It is quite the style, quite the style,
sir.”

“Do you think so, now?” asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment.

“I do, indeed,” said Mr. Spencer, “it is very genteel and just as the
gentry like it.”

The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye.

“Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer,” he asked, “with any idea of
making distinctions? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do
not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years
and I am the first man-of-business in the family.”

The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man! he had much to learn of Highland
punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he
had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee’d gun
that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far
behind them, alone on the top of the bridge.

“Is there no one with the boy?” he asked. “And where is he to stay now
that his grandmother is dead?”

The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to
himself.

“Am not I the _golan_?” said he. “I forgot about the fellow, and I told
the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I’m
putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It
must be seen to, it must be seen to.”

Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way
he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed.
“Oh,” said he, “Jean Clerk’s a relative; he’ll be going to bide there.”

They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with
his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass
button would burst with a crack like a gun; Rixa puffing and stretching
himself; Major Dugald ducking his head and darting his glance about from
side to side looking for the enemy; Mr. Spencer, tall, thin, with the
new strapped breeches and a London hat, blowing his nose with much noise
in a Barcelona silk handkerchief. All the way before them the crowd went
straggling down in blacks with as much hurry as the look of the thing
would permit, to reach the schoolhouse where the Paymaster had laid out
the last service of meat and drink for the mourners. The tide was out;
a sandy beach strewn with stones and clumps of seaweed gave its saline
odour to the air; lank herons came sweeping down from the trees over
Croitivile, and stalked about the water’s edge. There was only one sound
in nature beyond the soughing of the wind in the shrubbery of the Duke’s
garden, it was the plaintive call of a curlew as it flew over the stable
park. A stopped and stagnant world, full of old men and old plaints, the
dead of the yard behind, the solemn and sleepy town before.

The boy was the only person left in the rear of the Paymaster and his
friends; he was standing on the bridge, fair in the middle of the way.
Though the Paymaster cried he was not heard, so he walked back and up to
the boy while the others went on their way to the schoolhouse, where old
Brooks the dominie was waiting among the jars and oatcakes and funeral
biscuits with currants and carvie in them.

Gilian was standing with the weepers off his cuffs and the crape off his
bonnet; he had divested himself of the hateful things whenever he found
himself alone, and he was listening with a rapt and inexpressive face to
the pensive call of the curlew as it rose over the fields, and the tears
were dropping down his cheeks.

“Oh, _‘ille_, what’s the matter with you?” asked the Paymaster in
Gaelic, struck that sorrow should so long remain with a child.

Gilian started guiltily, flushed to the nape of his neck and stammered
an explanation or excuse.

“The bird, the bird!” said he, turning and looking at the dolorous piper
of the marsh.

“Man!” said the Paymaster in English, looking whimsically at this
childish expression of surprise. “Man! you’re a queer callant too. Are
there no curlews about Ladyfield that you should be in such a wonder at
this one? Just a plain, long-nebbed, useless bird, not worth powder
and shot, very douce in the plumage, and always at the same song like
MacNicol the Major.”

The little fellow broke into a stammering torrent of Gaelic. “What does
it say, what does it say?” he asked: “it is calling, calling, calling,
and no one will answer it; it is telling something, and I cannot
understand. Oh, I am sorry for it, and----”

“You must be very hungry, poor boy,” said the Paymaster. “Come away
down, and Miss Mary will give you dinner. Did you ever taste rhubarb
tart with cream to it? I have seen you making umbrellas with the rhubarb
up the glen, but I’m sure the goodwife did not know the real use of it.”

Gilian paid no heed to the speaker, but listened with streaming eyes to
the wearied note of the bird that still cried over the field. Then the
Paymaster swore a fiery oath most mildly, and clutched the boy by the
jacket sleeve and led him homeward.

“Come along,” said he, “come along. You’re the daftest creature ever
came out of the glen, and what’s the wonder of it, born and bred among
stirks and sheep on a lee-lone country-side with only the birds to speak
to?”

The two went down the road together, the Paymaster a little wearied with
his years and weight or lazied by his own drams, leaning in the
least degree upon the shoulder of the boy. They made an odd-looking
couple--dawn and the declining day, Spring and ripe Autumn, illusion and
an elderly half-pay officer in a stock and a brown scratch wig upon a
head that would harbour no more the dreams, the poignancies of youth.
Some of the mourners hastening to their liquor turned at the Cross and
looked up the road to see if they were following, and they were struck
vaguely by the significance of the thing.

“Dear me,” said the Fiscal, “is not Old Mars getting very bent and
ancient?”

“He is, that!” said Rixa, who was Sheriff Maclachlan to his face. “I
notice a glass or two makes a wonderful difference on him this year back
ever since he had his little bit towt. That’s a nice looking boy; I like
the aspect of him; it’s unusual. What a pity the Paymaster never had a
wife or sons of his own.”

“You say what is very true, Sheriff,” said Mr. Spencer. “I think there
is something very sad in the spectacle, sir, of an old gentleman with
plenty of the world in his possession going down to the bourne with not
a face beside him to mind of his youth.”

But indeed the Paymaster was not even reminded of his own youth by
this queer child on whom he leaned. He had never been like this, a shy
frightened dreaming child taken up with fancies and finding omens and
stories in the piping of a fowl. Oh! no, he had been a bluff, hearty,
hungry boy, hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a
bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy
beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sister
Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever
girl, with a nerve that a harsh word set thrilling.

“Did Jean Clerk say anything about where you are to sleep to-night?” he
asked him, still speaking the Gaelic in which he knew the little fellow
was most at home.

“I suppose I’ll just stay in my own bed in Lady-field,” said Gilian,
apparently little exercised by the thought of his future, and dividing
some of his attention to the Paymaster with the sounds and sights of
nature by the way, the thrust of the bracken crook between the crannies
of the Duke’s dykes, the gummy buds of the limes and chestnuts, the
straw-gathering birds on the road, the heron so serenely stalking on the
shore, and the running of the tiny streams upon the beach that smoked
now in the heat of the sun.

The Paymaster seemed confounded. He swelled his neck more fully in the
stock, cleared his throat with a loud noise, took a great pinch of
snuff from his waistcoat pocket and spent a long time in disposing of it
Gilian was in a dream far off from the elderly companion and the smoking
shore; his spirit floated over the glen and sometimes farther still,
among the hill gorges that were always so full of mystery to him, or
farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities,
towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings
were, in the tales the shepherds told about the peat fires on _ceilidh_
nights.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep in the town tonight,” said the
Paymaster, at last somewhat relieved of his confusion by the boy’s
indifference; “the truth is we are shutting up Ladyfield for a little.
You could not stay alone in it at any rate, and did Jean Clerk not
arrange that you were to stay with her after this?”

“No,” said Gilian simply, even yet getting no grasp of his homelessness.

“And where are you going to stay?” asked the Paymaster testily.

“I don’t know,” said the boy.

The Paymaster spoke in strange words under his breath and put on a
quicker pace and went through the town, even past the schoolhouse,
where old Brooks stood at the door in his long surtout saying a
Latin declension over to himself as if it were a song, and into the
Crosshouses past the tanned women standing with their hands rolled up
in their aprons, and up to Jean Clerk’s door. He rapped loudly with his
rattan. He rapped so loudly that the inmates knew this was no common
messenger, and instead of crying out their invitation they came together
and opened the door. The faces of the sisters grew rosy red at the sight
of the man and the boy before him.

“Come away in, Captain,” said Jean, assuming an air of briskness the
confusion of her face belied. “Come away in, I am proud to see you at my
door.”

The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but
refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled
English.

“Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you?” he asked.

“I did, that!” said Jean Clerk, lifting her brattie and preparing to
weep, “and it’ll be the last time I’ll ever be inside its hospitable
door.”

“And you gave the key to Cameron the shepherd?”

“I did,” said Jean, wondering what was to come next.

The Paymaster changed his look and his accent, and spoke again with
something of a pawky humour that those who knew him best were well aware
was a sign that his temper was at its worst.

“Ay,” said he, “and you forgot about the boy. What’s to be done with
him? I suppose you would leave him to rout with the kye he was bred
among, or haunt the rocks with the sheep. I was thinking myself coming
down the road there, and this little fellow with me without a friend in
the world, that the sky is a damp ceiling sometimes, and the grass of
the field a poor meal for a boy’s stomach. Eh! what say you, Mistress
Clerk?” And the old soldier heaved a thumbful of snuff from his
waistcoat pocket.

“The boy’s no kith nor kin of mine,” said Jean Clerk, “except a very
far-out cousin’s son.” She turned her face away from both of them and
pretended to be very busy folding up her plaid, which, as is well known,
can only be done neatly with the aid of the teeth and thus demands some
concealment of the face. The sister passed behind the Paymaster and the
boy and startled the latter with a sly squeeze of the wrist as she did
so.

“Do you tell me, my good woman,” demanded the Paymaster, “that you would
set him out on the road homeless on so poor an excuse as that? Far-out
cousin here or far-out cousin there, he has no kin closer than yourself
between the two stones of the parish. Where’s your Hielan’ heart,
woman?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my heart, Captain Campbell,” said Jean
tartly, “but my pocket’s empty. If you think the boy’s neglected you
have a house of your own to take him into; it would be all the better
for a young one in it, and you have the money to spend that Jean Clerk
has not.” All this with a very brave show of spirit, but with something
uncommonly moist about the eyes.

The Paymaster, still clutching the boy at the shoulder, turned on his
heel to go, but a side glance at Jean Clerk’s face again showed him
something different from avarice or anger.

“You auld besom you!” said he, dunting the floor with his rattan, “I see
through you now; you think you’ll get him put off on me. I suppose if I
refused to take him in, you would be the first to make of him.”

The woman laughed through her tears. “Oh, but you are the gleg-eyed
one, Captain. You may be sure I would not see my cousin’s grandchild
starving, and I’ll not deny I put him in your way, because I never knew
a Campbell of Kiels, one of the old bold race, who had not a kind heart
for the poor, and I thought you and your sister could do better than two
old maiden women in a garret could do by him.”

“You randy!” said he, “and that’s the way you would portion your poor
relations about the countryside. As if I had not plenty of poor friends
of my own! And what in all the world am I to make of the youth?”

“You’ll have nothing to do with the making of him, Captain Campbell,”
 said Jean Clerk, now safe and certain that the boy’s future was assured.
“It’ll be Miss Mary will have the making of him, and I ken the lady well
enough--with my humble duty to her--to know she’ll make him a gentleman
at the very least.”

“Tuts,” said the Paymaster, “Sister Mary’s like the rest of you; she
would make a milksop of the boy if I was foolish enough to take him home
to her. He’ll want smeddum and manly discipline; that’s the stuff to
make the soldier. The uneasy bed to sleep on, the day’s task to be done
to the uttermost. I’ll make him the smartest ensign ever put baldrick
on--that’s if I was taking him in hand,” he added hastily, realising
from the look of the woman that he was making a complete capitulation.

“And of course you’ll take him, Captain Campbell,” cried Jean Clerk in
triumph. “I’m sure you would sooner take him and make a soldier of him
than leave him with me--though before God he was welcome--to grow up
harvester or herd.”

The Paymaster took a ponderous snuff, snorted, and went off down the
stair with the boy still by the hand, the boy wide-eyed wondering,
unable to realise very clearly whether he was to be made a soldier or a
herd there and then. And when the door closed behind them Jean Clerk and
her sister sat down and wept and laughed in a curious mingling of sorrow
and joy--sorrow that the child had to be turned from their door and out
of their lives with even the pretence at inhospitality, and joy that
their device had secured for him a home and future more comfortable than
the best their straitened circumstances could afford.




CHAPTER IV--MISS MARY

The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper
flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to
an honest merchant whose regular payment of his rent did not prevent the
Paymaster, every time he stepped through the close, from dunting with
his cane on the stones with the insolence of a man whose birth and his
father’s acres gave him a place high above such as earned their living
behind a counter.

“There you are, Sandy!” he would call, “doing no trade as usual; you’ll
not have sold a parcel of pins or a bolt of tape to-day, I suppose.
Where am I to get my rent, I wonder, next Martinmas?”

The merchant would remonstrate. “I’ve done very well to-day, Captain,”
 he would say. “I have six bolls of meal and seven yards of wincey going
up the glen in the Salachary cart.”

“Pooh, pooh, what’s that to the time of war? I’ll tell you this, Sandy,
I’ll have to roup out for my rent yet.” And by he would sail, as red in
the face as a bubbly-jock, swelling his neck over his stock more largely
than ever, and swinging his rattan by its tassel or whacking with it on
his calves, satisfied once more to have put this merchant-body in his
own place.

To-day he paid no heed to the merchant, when, having just keeked in at
the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a
minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. “I’m going
to leave you with my sister Mary,” he explained. “You’ll think her
a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a
well-meaning creature.”

Gilian thought no one could be more droll than this old man himself.
Before indifferent to him, he had, in the past hour, grown to be afraid
of him as a new mysterious agent who had his future in his hands. And
to go up the stairs of this great high house, with its myriad windows
looking out upon the busiest part of the street, and others gazing
over the garden and the sea, was an experience new and bewildering. The
dwelling abounded in lobbies and corridors, in queer corners where the
gloom lurked, and in doors that gave glimpses of sombre bedsteads and
high-backed austere chairs, of china painted with the most wonderful
designs (loot of the old Indian palaces), of swords and sabretaches hung
on walls, and tables polished to such degree that they reflected their
surroundings.

They went into a parlour with its window open, upon the window-sill a
pigeon mourning among pots of wallflowers and southernwood that filled
the entering air with sweetness. A room with thin-legged chairs, with
cupboards whose lozens gave view to punch-bowls and rummers and silver
ladles, a room where the two brothers would convene at night while John
was elsewhere, and in a wan candle light sit silent by the hour before
cooling spirits, musing on other parlours elsewhere in which spurs had
jingled under the board, musing on comrades departed. It was hung around
with dark pictures in broad black frames, for the most part pictures
of battles, “Fontenoy,” “Stemming the Rout at Steinkirk,” “Blenheim
Field,” and--a new one--“Vittoria.” There were pictures of men too, all
with soldier collars high upon the nape of the neck, and epaulettes on
their shoulders, whiskered, keen-eyed young men--they were the brothers
in their prime when girls used to look after them as they went by
on their horses. And upon the mantlebrace, flanked by tall silver
candlesticks, was an engraving of John, Duke of Argyll, Field-Marshal.

“Look at that man there,” said the Paymaster, pointing to the noble and
arrogant head between the candles, “that was a soldier’s soldier. There
is not his like in these days. If you should take arms for your king,
boy, copy the precept and practice of Duke John. I myself modelled me
on his example, and that, mind you, calls for dignity and valour and
education and every manly part and----”

“Is that you blethering away in there, John?” cried a high female voice
from the spence.

The Paymaster’s voice surrendered half its confidence and pride, for
he never liked to be found vaunting before his sister, who knew his
qualities and had a sense of irony.

“Ay! it’s just me, Mary,” he cried back, hastening to the door. “I have
brought a laddie up here to see you.”

“It would be wiser like to bring me a man,” cried the lady, coming into
the room. “I’m wearied of washing sheets and blankets for a corps of
wrunkled old brothers that have no gratitude for my sisterly slavery.
Keep me! who’s _ballachan_ is that?”

She was a little thin woman, of middle age, with a lowland cap of lace
that went a little oddly with the apron covering the front of the merino
gown from top to toe. She had eyes like sloes, and teeth like pearls
that gleamed when she smiled, and by constant trying to keep herself
from smiling at things, she had worn two lines up and down between her
eyebrows. A dear fond heart, a darling hypocrite, a foolish bounteous
mother-soul without chick or child of her own, and yet with tenement for
the loves of a large family. She fended, and mended, and tended for her
soldier brothers, and they in the selfish blindness of their sex never
realised her devotion. They sat, and over punch would talk of war, and
valour, and devotion, and never thought that here, within their very
doors, was a constant war in their behalf against circumstances, in
their interest an unending valour that kept the little woman bustling on
her feet, and shrewd-eyed over her stew-pans, while weariness and pain
itself, and the hopeless unresponse and ingratitude of the surroundings,
rendered her more appropriate place between the bed-sheets.

“What _ballachan_ is this?” she asked, relaxing the affected acidity of
her manner and smoothing out the lines upon her brow at the sight of
the little fellow in a rough kilt, standing in a shy unrest upon the
spotless drugget of her parlour floor. She waited no answer, but went
forward as she spoke, as one who would take all youth to her heart, put
a hand on his head and stroked his fair hair. It was a touch wholly
new to the boy; he had never felt before that tingling feeling that a
woman’s hand, in love upon his head, sent through all his being. At the
message of it, the caress of it, he shivered and looked up at her face
in surprise.

“What do you think of him, Mary?” asked the brother. “Not a very stout
chap, I think, but hale enough, and if you stuck his head in a pail of
cream once a day you might put meat on him. He’s the _oe_ from Ladyfield;
surely you might know him even with his boots on.”

“Dear, dear,” she said; “you’re the Gilian I never saw but at a
distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield.
O little hero, am I not sorry for the goodwife? You have come for your
pick of the dinner----”

“Do you think we could make a soldier of him?” broke in the Paymaster,
carrying his rattan like a sword and throwing back his shoulders.

“A soldier!” she said, casting a shrewd glance at the boy in a red
confusion. “We might make a decenter man of him. Weary be on the
soldiering! I’m looking about the country-side and I see but a horde of
lameter privatemen and half-pay officers maimed in limb or mind sitting
about the dram bottle, hoved up with their vain-glory, blustering and
blowing, instead of being honest, eident lairds and farmers. I never saw
good in a soldier yet, except when he was away fighting and his name
was in the _Courier_ as dead or wounded. Soldiers, indeed! sitting
round there in the Sergeant More’s tavern, drinking, and roaring, and
gossiping like women--that I should miscall my sex! No, no, if I had a
son----

“Well, well, Mary,” said the Paymaster, breaking in again upon this
tirade, “here’s one to you. If you’ll make the man of him I’ll try to
make him the soldier.”

She understood in a flash! “And is he coming here?” she asked in an
accent the most pleased and motherly. A flush came over her cheeks and
her eyes grew and danced. It was as if some rare new thought had come
to her, a sentiment of poetry, the sound of a forgotten strain of once
familiar song.

“I’m sure I am very glad,” she said simply. She took the boy by the
hand, she led him into the kitchen, she cried “Peggy, Peggy,” and when
her servant appeared she said, “Here’s our new young gentleman, Peggy,”
 and stroked his hair again, and Peggy smiled widely and looked about for
something to give him, and put a bowl of milk to his lips.

“Tuts!” cried Miss Mary, “it’s not a calf we have; we will not spoil his
dinner. But you may skim it and give him a cup of cream.”

The Paymaster, left in the parlour among the prints of war and warriors,
stood a moment with his head bent and his fingers among the snuff
listening to the talk of the kitchen that came along the spence and
through the open doors.

“She’s a queer body, Mary,” said he to himself, “but she’s taking to the
brat I think--oh yes, she’s taking to him.” And then he hurried down
the stair and up round the church corner to the schoolhouse where the
company, wearied waiting on his presence, were already partaking of his
viands. It was a company to whom the goodwife of Ladyfield, the quiet
douce widow, had been more or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this
occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on. They were there not
so much mourners as the guests of Captain Campbell, nigh on a dozen
of half-pay officers who had escaped the shambles of Europe, with the
merchants of the place, and some of the farmers of the glen, the banker,
the Sheriff, the Fiscal and the writers of whom the town has ever had
more than a fair share. Dr. Colin had blessed the viands and gone away;
he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views
about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts
had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of
relief, and old Baldy Bain, “Copenhagen” as they called him, who was
precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his
glass up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the
presence of the clergyman. The food and drink were spread on two
long tables; the men stood round or sat upon the forms their children
occupied in school hours. The room was clamant with the voices of the
company. Gathered in groups, they discussed everything under heaven
except the object of their meeting--the French, the sowing, the
condition of the hogs, the Duke’s approaching departure for London, the
storm, the fishing. They wore their preposterous tall hats on the backs
of their heads with the crape bows over the ears, they lifted up the
skirts of their swallow-tail coats and hung them on their arms with
their hands in their breeches pockets. And about them was the odour
of musty, mildewed broadcloth, taken out of damp presses only on such
occasions.

Mr. Spencer, standing very straight and tall and thin, so that his
trousers at the foot strained tightly at the straps under his insteps,
looked over the assembly, and with a stranger’s eye could not but be
struck by its oddity. He was seeing--lucky man to have the chance!--the
last of the old Highland burgh life and the raw beginnings of the
new; he was seeing the real _doaine-uasail_, gentry of ancient family,
colloguing with the common merchants whose day was coming in; he was
seeing the embers of the war in a grey ash, officers, merchants, bonnet
lairds, and tenants now safe and snug and secure in their places because
the old warriors had fought Boney. The schoolroom was perfumed with the
smoke of peat, for it was the landward pupils’ week of the fuelling,
and they were accustomed to bring each his own peat under his arm every
morning. The smoke swirled and eddied out into the room and hung about
the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of
Europe over the fireplace. Looking at this map and sipping now and then
a glass of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself
“Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” He wore a queue tied with a broad
black ribbon that reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his
attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man himself was little more
than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died
of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is
still upon his peninsula.

“You are at your studies?” said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side
with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for
the son of a plain Portioner of Glen Shira who was to be seen any day
coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather
emptily in front of his kilt.

Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper.

“I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer,” said he, “I
know it by heart--all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut
my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some
of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I’m but
looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria,
Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black
dots no more ken-speckle than the township of Camus up the glen. Wars,
wars, bloody wars! have we indeed got to the last of them?”

“Indeed I hope so, sir,” said the innkeeper, “for my wife has become
very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the
rejoicings, and if every war set a woman’s mind running to extravagance
in clothing, the fewer we have the better.”

“If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas! it’s my fate to have lost
mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the
colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General?”

He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies *
because it was the fashion of the country, but never ate nor drank at
them.

     * Dregy: The Scots equivalent of the old English _Dirge-
     ale_, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon
     in the office for the dead, “_Dirige, Domine meus_,”

“You were speaking, General Turner?” said Campbell.

Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its motto “_Tu ne cede
malis_,” and smiled blandly, as he always did when it was brought to his
recollection that he had won more than soldiers’ battles when the odds
against him were three to one.

“I was just telling Mr. Spencer that Waterloo looks like being the last
of the battles, General, and that one bit of Brooks’ map here is just
as well known to some of us as the paths and woods and waters of Glen
Shira.”

“I’m not very well acquaint with Glen Shira myself,” was all the General
said, looking at the map for a moment with eyes that plainly had no
interest in the thing before them, and then he turned to a nudge of the
Paymaster’s arm.

Turner smiled again knowingly to Mr. Spencer. “I put my brogues in it
that time,” said he in a discreet tone. “I forgot that the old gentleman
and his brothers were far better acquaint with Glen Shira in my wife’s
maiden days than I was myself. But that’s an old story, Mr. Spencer,
that you are too recent an incomer to know the shades and meanings of.”

“I daresay, sir, I daresay,” said Mr. Spencer gravely. “You are a most
interesting and sensitive people, and I find myself often making the
most unhappy blunders.”

“Interesting is not the word, I think, Mr. Spencer,” said General Turner
coldly; “we refuse to be interesting to any simple Sassenach.” Then he
saw the confusion in the innkeeper’s face and laughed. “Upon my word,”
 he said, “here I’m as touchy as a bard upon a mere phrase. This is very
good drink, Mr. Spencer; your purveyance, I suppose?”

“I had the privilege, sir,” said the innkeeper. “Captain Campbell gave
the order----”

“Captain Campbell!” said the General, putting down his glass and
drinking no more. “I was not aware that he was at the costs of this
dregy. Still, no matter, you’ll find the Campbells a good family to have
dealings with of any commercial kind, pernick-etty and proud a bit, like
all the rest of us, with their bark worse than their bite.”

“I find them quite the gentlemen,” said the innkeeper.

Turner laughed again.

“Man!” said he, “take care you do not put your compliment just exactly
that way to them; you might as well tell Dr. Colin he was a surprisingly
good Christian.”

Old Brooks, out of sheer custom, sat on the high stool at his desk and
hummed his declensions to himself, or the sing-song _Arma virumque cano_
that was almost all his Latin pupils remembered of his classics when
they had left school. The noise of the assembly a little distressed him;
at times he would fancy it was his scholars who were clamouring before
him, and he checked on his lips a high peremptory challenge for silence,
flushing to think how nearly he had made himself ridiculous. From his
stool he could see over the frosted glass of the lower window sash into
the playground where it lay bathed in a yellow light, and bare-legged
children played at shinty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a
little wooden ball. The town’s cows were wandering in for the night
from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide
petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked
well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road
overhung with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering
through in lighter splashes on the shade. Within, the drink was running
to its dregs, and piles of oatcake farls lay yet untouched. One by
one the company departed. The glen folks solemnly shook hands with
the Paymaster, as donor of the feast, and subdued their faces to a sad
regret for this “melancholy occasion, Captain Campbell”; then went over
to the taverns in the tenements and kept up their drinking and their
singing till late in the evening; the merchants and writers had gone
earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer,
superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The
afternoon was sinking into the calm it ever has in this place, drowsing,
mellowing; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners,
gathered at the head of the schoolroom near the door, seemed silent as
his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and
kept it up with his head while he surveyed the interior. Grammars and
copy-books, pens in long tin boxes, the terrible black tawse he never
used but reluctantly, and the confiscated playthings of the children who
had been guilty of encroaching upon the hours of study with the trifles
of leisure, were heaped within. They were for the most part the common
toys of the country-side, and among them was a whistle made of young
ash, after the fashion practised by children, who tap upon the bark to
release it from its wood, slip off the bark entire upon its sap, and cut
the vent or blow-hole. Old Brooks took it in his hand and a smile went
over his visage.

“General Turner,” he cried up the room, “here’s an oddity I would like
to show you,” and he balanced the pipe upon his long fingers, and the
smile played about his lips as he looked at it.

Turner came up, and “A whistle,” said he. “What’s the story?”

“Do you know who owns it?” asked Brooks.

“Sandy, I suppose,” said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his
only son. “At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and
this may very well be the rogue’s contrivance.” He took the pipe in hand
and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. “Man,” said he, “that
makes me young again! I wish I was still at the age when that would
pipe me to romance.”

The schoolmaster smiled still. “It is not Master Sandy’s,” said he.
“Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made
it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the
time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer.”

“Ah! the witch!” cried the General, his face showing affection and
annoyance. “That’s the most hoyden jade I’m sure you ever gave the
ferule to.”

“I never did that,” said the schoolmaster.

“Well, at least she’s the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not
more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it
off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling
wretch ever kept a sergeant’s section of lovers at her skirts. I
wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high
schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some
sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the
meadow.”

Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a
moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the
moor-fowl pipes in spring. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “It is all,
my General, we get from life and knowledge--a very thin and apparently
meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of
us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not
so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of
the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden
whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General,
is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn
my fees and Queen Anne’s Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what
your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by
my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one
mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that’s the music that may
be inopportune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an
ashen stick made by the performer during the morning’s sacred exercise.”

The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old
Brooks was doing, and among them was the Paymaster. He was redder in the
face than ever, and his wig was almost off his head, it was so slewed
aside.

“Giving the General a lesson?” he asked with some show at geniality. He
leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he
leaned on he had placed many a shilling as Candlemas and Han’sel Monday
offerings when he was a schoolboy, before the farming, before the army
and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house
up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee-lone homester among her
wanderers returned.

“I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan,” said
Old Brooks pleasantly. “A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I assure
you.”

“Oh! I have heard of her,” said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of
maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with
the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was
insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very
hotly.

“And you have heard of a very handsome little lady,” said he,
“remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted
daughter.”

The Paymaster had an unpleasant little laugh that when he chose he could
use with the sting of a whip though accompanied by never a word. He
flicked the surplus of his snuff from his stock and gave this annoying
little laugh, but he did not allow it to go unaccompanied, for he had
overheard the General’s speech to Mr. Spencer.

“No doubt she’s all you say or think,” said he dryly, “I’m sure I’m no
judge, but there’s a rumour abroad that she’s a big handful. A want of
discipline perhaps, no more than that--”

“You know the old saying, Captain,” said the General, “bachelors’ bairns
are aye well trained.”

The Paymaster started in a temper, and “I have a son,” said he,
“and----”

The General smiled with meaning.

“----A son; at least I’ll make him that, and I’ll show you something of
training!”

Turner smiled anew, with a mock little bow and a wave of the fingers, a
trick picked up abroad and maddening in its influence on a man with the
feeling that it meant he was too small to have words with.

“I’ll train him--I’ll train him to hate your very name,” said the
Paymaster with an oath.

“I’m obliged for your cake and wine,” said the General, still smiling,
“and I wish you all good day.” He lifted his hat and bowed and left the
room.

“This is a most unfortunate contretemps,” said Brooks, all trembling.
“If I had thought a little whistle, a mere _tibia_ of ash, had power to
precipitate this unlucky and unseemly belligerence I would never have
opened my desk.”

The great bell upon the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an
acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer
boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the
clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up
the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street
was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves, so that even in the
schoolroom the ear throbbed to the loud proclamation. Into the avenue
streamed the schools of crows from their wanderings on the braes of
Shira, and the children ceased their shinty play and looked up at the
flying companies, and called a noisy song--

     “Crow, crow, fly away home,
     Your fires are out and your children gone.”

“That’s a most haughty up-setting crew, and the queue-haired rover the
worst of the lot!” said the Paymaster, still red and angry. “What I
say’s true, Brooks; it’s true I tell you! You’ll not for your life put
it out of the boy’s head when you have the teaching of him; he must hate
the Turners like poison. Mind that now, mind that now!”

And turning quickly on his heels, the Paymaster went out of the
schoolroom.




CHAPTER V--THE BROTHERS

Gilian, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary’s room. She gave him
soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut
for him the tenderest portions of the hen; she gave him most generously
of cheese--not the plain skim-milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the
leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made
of the overnight and morning’s milk, poured cream and all into the
yearning-tub. And as she served him, her tongue went constantly upon
themes of many varieties, but the background of them all, the conclusion
of them all, was the greatness of her brothers. Ah! she was a strange
little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly
displayed to its object is an affection discreditable.

“You will go far,” said she to Gilian, “before you will come on finer
men. They are getting old and done, but once I knew them tall and strong
and strapping, not their equals in all the armies. And what they have
seen of wars, my dear! They were ever going or coming from them, and
sometimes I would not know where they were out in the quarrelsome world
but for a line in the _Saturday Post_ or the _Courier_ or maybe an old
hint in the General Almanack itself. Perhaps when you become acquainted
with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at
any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life
and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them
nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light-footed laddies, running about
the pastures there gallivanting with the girls. But that, my dear, was
long ago, and I feel myself the old woman indeed when I see them so
stiff and solemn sitting in there over their evening glass.”

“I have never seen them; were they at the funeral?” asked Gilian, his
interest roused in such survivals of the past.

“That they were,” said Miss Mary; “a funeral now is their only
recreation. But perhaps you would not know them because they are not at
all like the Captain. He was a soldier too, in a way, but they were the
ancient warriors. Come into the room here and I will show you, if you
have finished your dinner.”

Gilian went with her into the parlour again among the prints and the
hanging swords, that now he knew the trade and story of the men who sat
among them, were imbued with new interests.

Miss Mary pointed to the portraits. “That was Colin and Dugald before
they went away the second time,” she said. “We had one of James too---he
died at Corunna--but it was the only one, and we gave it to a lady of
the place who was chief with him before he went away, and dwined a great
deal after his death. And that’s his sword. When it came home from Spain
by MacFarlane, the carrier round from Dumbarton, I took it out and it
was clagged in the scabbard with a red glut. It was a sore memorial to
an only sister.”

The boy stood in the middle of the floor feeling himself very much older
than he had done in the morning. The woman’s confidences made him almost
a man, for before he had been spoken to but as a child, though his
thoughts were far older than his years. Those relics of war, especially
the sheath that had the glut of life in it corrupting when it came back
with the dead man’s chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium.
The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the
shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all
the wonders or the shepherds’ battle stories round the fire, and he was
in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the
fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting
each other down. He saw--so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the
floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon
his vest--the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the
man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a
reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not
much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword
come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull
hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face when the terrible
life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils
expanded, his eyes glistened; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with
curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it was
the loudest sound in the room.

“What is it, dear?” she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder,
speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always
to her lips.

“I do not know,” said he, ashamed. “I was just thinking of your brother
who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword.”

She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair
skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. “I think,”
 said she, “I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor
story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not
once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman’s heart.”

“I saw the battle,” said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known
before.

“I know you did,” said she.

“And I saw him dead.”

“_Ochame!_”

“And I saw you dropping the sword when you tugged it from the scabbard,
and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite
clean.”

“Indeed I did I,” said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so
plainly set before her. “You are uncanny--no, no, you are not uncanny,
you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel when
her dead brother’s sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the
brothers of other sisters was on its blade. That’s my only grievance
with those soldier brothers of mine. I said I did not think much of the
soldiers; oh! boy, I love them all. I sometimes grieve that God made me
a woman that I might not be putting on the red coat too, and following
the drum. And still and on, I would have no son of mine a soldier.
Three fozy, foggy brothers--what did the armies do for them? They never
sharpened their wits, but they sit and dover and dream, dream, even-on,
never knowing all that’s in their sister Mary’s mind. And here you are,
a boy, yet you get to my thoughts in a flash. Oh! I think I am going to
be very fond of you.”

Gilian was amazed that at last some one understood him. No one ever did
at Ladyfield; his dreams, his fancies, his spectacles of the inner eye
were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little
lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable.
He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes
in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each
other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told
her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the
smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the
mists streaming along the ravines. He told her--or rather he made her
understand, for his language was simple--how at sudden outer influences
his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off
horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set
him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin’s court
that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter
tale. How the joy of the swallow was his in its first darting flights
among the eaves of the old barn, and how when it sped at the summer’s
end he went with it across shires and towns, along the surface of
winding rivers, even over the seas to the land of everlasting sun. How
the sound of the wave on the rock moved him and set him with the ships
and galleys, the great venturers whipping and creaking and tossing in
the night-time under the stars. How the dark appalled or soothed as the
humour was, and the right of a first flower upon a tree would sometimes
make him weep at the notion of the brevity of its period.

All the time Miss Mary listened patient and understanding. The
high-backed chair compassed her figure so fully that she seemed to
shrink to a child’s size. It was a twelve-window house, and so among the
highest taxed in all the town, but in the parlour there were two blind
windows and only one gave light to the interior, so that as she sat in
her chair with her back to the window, her face in the shadow, leaning
against the chair haffits with the aspect of weariness her brothers
never had revealed to them, it seemed to Gilian the little figure and
the ruddy face of a companion. She was silent for a moment after his
confessions were completed, as if she had been wandering with him in the
realm of fancy, and with wings less practised had taken longer to fly
back to the narrow actual world. The boy had realised how much he had
forgotten himself, and how strange all this story of his must be even to
a child-companion with her face in the shadow of the chair haffits, and
his eyes were faltering with shame.

“You are very thin, sweetheart,” said she, with the two lines darkly
pencilled between her eyebrows. “You are far too white for a country
boy; upon my word we must be taking the Captain’s word for it and
putting your head in the cream.”

At this Gilian’s confusion increased. Here was another to misunderstand,
and he had thought she was shivering to his fancy as he was himself. He
turned to hide his disappointment. At once the lines disappeared. She
rose and put an arm over his shoulder and stooped the little that was
necessary to whisper in his ear.

“I know, I think I know,” said she; “but look, I’m very old and ancient.
Oh, dear! I once had my own fancies, but I think they must have
been sweat out of me in my constancy to my brothers’ oven-grate and
roasting-jack. It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us,
my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling for
generations round the fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the
constant complaint of the sea--tuts! am not I foolish to be weeping
because a boy from Glen Aray has not learned to keep his lips closed on
his innermost thought?”

Gilian looked up, and behold! she was in a little rain of tears, at
least her eyes swam soft in moisture. It comforted him exceedingly, for
it showed that after all she understood.

“If you were a little older,” she said, “so old as the merchants of the
town that are all too much on the hunt for the bawbees and the world
to sit down and commune with themselves, or if you were so old as my
brothers there and so hardened, I would be the last to say my thoughts
ever stirred an ell-length out of the customary track of breakfast,
beds, dinner and supper. Do not think I do not love and reverence my
brothers, mind you!” she added almost fiercely, rubbing with her lustre
apron the table there was nothing to rub from save its polish. “Oh!
they are big men and far-travelled men, and they have seen the wonderful
sights. They used to get great thick letters franked from the Government
with every post, and the Duke will be calling on them now and then in
his chariot. They speak to me of nothing but the poorest, simplest,
meanest transactions of the day because they think I cannot comprehend
nor feel. Gilian, do you know I am afraid of them? Not of John
the Captain, for he is different, with a tongue that goes, but I’m
frightened when the General and the Cornal sit and look at me saying
nothing because I am a woman.”

“I do not like people to sit looking at me saying nothing,” said Gilian,
“because when I sit and look at people without saying anything I am
reading them far in. But mostly I would sooner be making up things in my
mind.”

“Ah!” said she, “that is because your mind is young and spacious;
theirs, poor dears, are full of things that have actually happened, and
they need not fancy the orra any more.”

They moved together out of the parlour and along the lobby that lighted
it. With a low sill it looked upon the street that now was thronged with
the funeral people passing home or among the shops, or from tavern to
tavern. The funeral had given the town a holiday air, and baxters and
dealers stood at their doors gossiping with their customers or by-goers.
Country carts rumbled past, the horses moving slowly, reluctant to go
back from this place of oats and stall to the furrows where the collar
pressed constantly upon the shoulder. One or two gentlemen went by
on horses--Achnatra and Major Hall and the through-other son of Lorn
Campbell. The sun, westering, turned the clean rain-washed sand in the
gutters of the street to gold, and there the children played and their
calls and rhymes and laughter made so merry a world that the boy at the
window, looking out upon it, felt a glow. He was now to be always with
these fortunate children whom he knew so well ere ever he had changed
words with them. He had a little dread of the magnitude and corners of
this dwelling that was to be his in the future, and of the old men who
sat in it all day saying nothing, but it was strange indeed (thought
he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the
children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more
full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made
warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the
window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the
death of the little old woman of Ladyfield--what they were his mind did
not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with
no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a more intimate communion
with the animals of the wilds and the voices of the woods and hills.

The woman as well as the boy must have been lost in thought, for neither
of them noted the step upon the stair when the General and Cornal came
back from the dregy. The brothers were in the lobby beside them before
Miss Mary realised their presence. She turned with a flushed face and,
as it were, put herself a little in front of the boy, so that half his
figure found the shelter of a wing. The two brothers between them filled
the width of the lobby, and yet they were not wide. But they were broad
at the shoulders and once, no doubt, they filled their funeral suits
that of their own stiffness seemed to stand out in all their old
amplitude. The General was a white-faced rash of a man with bushy
eyebrows, a clean-shaven parchment jowl, and a tremulous hand upon the
knob of his malacca rattan; his brother the Cornal was less tall; he
was of a purpled visage, and a crimson scar, the record of a wound from
Corunna, slanted from his chin to the corner of his left eye.

“What wean is that?” he asked, standing in the lobby and casting a
suspicious eye upon the boy, his voice as high as in a barrack yard.
The General stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, but looking at Gilian
from under his pent brows.

Into Miss Mary’s demeanour there had came as great a change as that
which came upon the Pay-master when she broke in upon his vaunting. The
lines dashed to her brow; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained
accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to.

“It is the _oe_ from Ladyfield,” she explained.

“He’ll be making a noise in the house,” said the Cornal with a touch of
annoyance. “I cannot stand boys; he’ll break things, I’m sure. When is
he going away?”

“Are you one of the boys who cry after Major MacNicol, my old friend
and comrade?” asked the General in a high squeaking voice. “If I had my
stick at some of you, tormenting a gallant old soldier!” And as he
spoke he lifted his cane by the middle and shook it at the limbs of the
affrighted youth.

“O Dugald, Dugald, you know none of the children of this town ever
annoyed the Major; it is only the keelies from the low-country who do
so. And this is not the boy to make a mock of any old gentleman, I am
sure.”

“I know he’ll make a noise and start me when I am thinking,” said the
Cornal, still troubled. “Is it not very strange, Dugald, that women
must be aye bringing in useless weans off the street to make noise and
annoyance for their brothers?” He poked as he spoke with his stick at
Gilian’s feet as he would at an animal crossing his path.

“It is a strange cantrip, Mary,” said the General; “I suppose you’ll be
going to give him something. It is give, give all the day in this house
like Sergeant Scott’s cantiniers.”

“Indeed and you need not complain of the giving,” said Miss Mary: “there
was nobody gave with a greater extravagance than yourself when you had
it to give, and nobody sends more gangrels about the house than you.”

“Give the boy his meat and let him go,” said the Cornal roughly.

“He’s not going,” said Miss Mary, turning quite white and taking the
pin carefully out of her shawl and as carefully putting it in again. And
having done this quite unnecessary thing she slipped her hand down
and warmly clasped unseen the fingers of the boy in the folds of her
bombazine gown.

“Not going? I do not understand you, Mary; as you grow older you grow
stupider. Does she not grow stupider, Dugald?” said the Cornal.

“She does,” said the General. “I think she does it to torment us, just.”
 He was tired by this discussion; he turned and walked to the parlour.

Miss Mary mustered all her courage, and speaking with great rapidity
explained the situation. The boy was the Ladyfield boy; the Paymaster
was going to keep him hereafter.

The Cornal stood listening to the story as one in a trance. There was a
little silence when she had done, and he broke it with a harsh laugh.

“Ah! and what is he going to make of this one?” he asked.

“That’s to be seen,” said Miss Mary; “he spoke of the army.”

“Fancy that now!” said the Cornal with contempt. “Let me see him,” he
added suddenly.

“Let me see the seeds of soldiery.” He put out a hand and--not roughly
but still with more force than Gilian relished--drew him from the
protection of the gown and turned his face to the window. He put his
hand under the boy’s chin; Gilian in the touch felt an abhorrence of the
hard, clammy fingers that had made dead men, but his eyes never quailed
as he looked up in the scarred face. He saw a mask; there was no getting
to the secrets behind that purple visage. Experience and trial, emotions
and passions had set lines there wholly new to him, and his fancy
refused to go further than just this one thought of the fingers that had
made dead men.

The Cornal looked him deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and
with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his
knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt.

“Man! Jock’s the daft recruiter,” he said coarsely with an oath. “What’s
this but a clerk? There’s not the spirit in the boy to make a drummer of
him. There’s no stuff for sogering here.”

Miss Mary drew Gilian to her again and stiffened her lips. “You have
nothing to do with it, Colin; it’s John’s house and if he wants to keep
the boy he’ll do it. And I’m sure if you but took the trouble to think
that he is a poor orphan with no kith nor kin in the world, you would be
the first to take him in at the door.”

The Cornal’s face visibly relaxed its sternness. He looked again more
closely at the boy.

“Come away into our parlour here, and the General and I will have a
crack with you,” said he, leading the way.

Miss Mary gave the boy’s hand a gentle squeeze, and softly pushed him in
after her brother, shut the door behind them, and turned and went down
to the kitchen.




CHAPTER VI--COURT-MARTIAL

Gilian was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of
the room where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of
the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with
scrupulous care in the very centre of the table; his brother lifted
two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the
bottle, fastidious to a hair’s breadth as if he had been laying out
columns of troops. It was the formula of the afternoon; sometimes they
never put a lip to the glass, but it was always necessary that the
bottle should be in the party. For a space that seemed terribly long
to the boy they said no word but looked at him. The eyes of the Cornal
seemed to pierce him through; the General in a while seemed to forget
his presence, turning upon him a flat, vacant eye. Gilian leaned upon
his other foot and was on the verge of crying at his situation. The
day had been far too crowded with strangers and new experience for
his comfort; he felt himself cruelly plucked out of his own sufficient
company and jarred by contact with a very complex world.

With a rude loud sound that shook the toddy ladles in the cupboard the
Cornal cleared his throat.

“How old are you?” he asked, and this roused the General, who came back
from his musings with a convulsive start, and repeated his brother’s
question.

“Twelve,” said Gilian, first in Gaelic out of instinct, and hurriedly
repeating it in English lest he should offend the gentlemen.

“Twelve,” said the Cornal, thinking hard. “You are not very bulky for
your age. Is he now, Dugald?”

“He is not very bulky for his age,” said the General, after a moment’s
pause as if he were recalling all the boys he knew of that age, or
remitting himself to the days before his teens.

“And now, between ourselves,” said the Cornal, leaning over with a show
of intimacy and even friendliness, “have you any notion yourself of
being a soger?”

“I never thought anything about it,” Gilian confessed in a low tone. “I
can be anything the Captain would like me to be.”

“Did you ever hear the like?” cried the Cornal, looking in amazement at
his brother. “He never thought anything about it, but he can be anything
he likes. Is not that a good one? Anything he likes!” And he laughed
with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like
blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the
sword-slash struck it open in Corunna.

“Anything he likes!” echoed the General, laughing huskily till he
coughed and choked. They both sat smiling grimly with no more sound till
it seemed to the boy he must be in a dream, looking at the creations of
his brain. The step of a fly could have been heard in the room almost,
so sunk was it in silence, but outside, as in another world, a band of
children filled the street with the chant of “Pity be”--chant of the
trumpeters of the Lords.

Gilian never before heard that song with which the children were used to
accompany the fanfare of the scarlet-coated musicians who preceded
the Lords Justiciary on their circuit twice a year; but the words came
distinctly to him in by the open window where the wallflower nodded, and
he joined silently in his mind the dolorous chorus and felt himself the
prisoner, deserving of every pity.

“Sit ye down there,” at last said the Cornal, “with my brother the
General’s leave.” And he waved to the high-backed haffit chair Miss Mary
had so sparely filled an hour ago. Then he withdrew the stopper of the
bottle, poured a tiny drop of the spirits into both tumblers, and drank
“The King and his Arms,” a sentiment the General joined in with his hand
tremulous around the glass.

“Listen to me,” said the Cornal, “and here I speak, I think, for
my brother the General, who has too much to be thinking about to be
troubling with these little affairs. Listen to me. I fought in Corunna,
in Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, and at Waterloo I led the Royals up
against the yetts of hell. Did I not, Dugald?”

“You did that,” said Dugald, withdrawing himself again from a muse over
the records of victory. And then he bent a lustreless eye upon his own
portrait, so sombre and gallant upon the wall, with the gold of the lace
and epaulettes a little tarnished.

“I make no brag of it, mind you,” said the Cornal, waving his hand as if
he would be excused for mentioning it. “I am but saying it to show that
I ken a little of bloody wars, and the art and trade of sogering. There
are gifts demanded for the same that seriatim I would enumerate. First
there is natural strength and will. All other trades have their limits,
when a man may tell himself, ‘That’s the best I can do,’ and shut his
book or set down the tool with no disgrace in the relinquishment.
But a soger’s is a different ploy; he must stand stark against all
encountering, nor cry a parley even with the lance at his throat. Oh,
man! man! I had a delight in it in my time for all its trials. I
carried claymore (so to name it, ours was a less handsome weapon, you’ll
observe), in the ranting, roving humour of a boy; I sailed and marched;
it was fine to touch at foreign ports; it was sweet to hear the drums
beat revally under the vines; the camp-fire, the--”

“And it would be on the edge of a wood,” broke in the boy in Gaelic;
“the logs would roar and hiss. The fires would be in yellow dots along
the countryside, and the heather would be like a pillow so soft and
springy under the arm. Round about, the soldiers would be standing,
looking at the glow, their faces red and flickering, and behind would be
the black dark of the wood like the inside of a pot, a wood with ghosts
and eerie sounds and----”

He stammered and broke down under the astounded gaze of the Cornal and
the General, who stood to their feet facing his tense and thrilled small
figure. A wave of shame-heat swept over him at his own boldness.

Outside, the children’s voices were fading in the distance as they
turned the corner of the church singing “Pity be.”

     “Pity be on poor prisoners, pity be on them:
     Pity be on poor prisoners, if they come back again,”

they sang; the air softened into a fairy lullaby heard by an ear at eve
against the grassy hillock, full of charm, instinct with dream, and the
sentiment of it was as much the boy’s within as the performers’ without.

“This is the kind of play-actor John would make a soldier of,” said the
Cornal, turning almost piteously to his brother. “It beats all! Where
did you learn all that?” he demanded harshly, scowling at the youth and
sitting down again.

“He has the picture of it very true, now, has he not?” said the General.
“I mind of many camps just like that, with the cork-trees behind and old
Sir George ramping and cursing in his tent because the pickets hailed,
and the corncrake would be rasping, rasping, a cannon-carriage badly
oiled, among the grass.”

Gilian sank into the chair again, his face in shadow.

“Discipline and reverence for your elders and superiors are the first
lesson you would need, my boy,” said the Cornal, taking a tiny drop of
the spirits again and touching the glass of his brother, who had done
likewise. “Discipline and reverence; discipline and reverence. I was
once cocky and putting in my tongue like you where something of sense
would have made me keep it between my teeth. Once in Spain, an ensign, I
found myself in a wine-shop or change-house, drinking as I should
never have been doing if I had as muckle sense as a clabbie-doo, with
a dragoon major old enough to be my father. He was a pock-pudding
Englishman, a great hash of a man with the chest of him slipped down
below his belt, and what was he but bragging about the rich people he
came of, and the rich soil they flourished on, its apple-orchards and
honey-flowers and its grass knee-deep in June. ‘Do you know,’ said I, ‘I
would not give a yard’s breadth of the shire of Argyll anywhere north of
Knapdale at its rockiest for all your lush straths, and if it comes to
antique pedigrees here am I, Clan Diarmid, with my tree going down to
Donacha Dhu of Lochow.’ That was insolence, ill-considered, unnecessary,
for this major of dragoons, as I tell you, might be my father and I was
but a raw ensign.”

“I’ll warrant you were home-sick when you said it,” said the General.

“Was I not?” cried the brother. “‘Twas that urged me on. For one of my
company, just a minute before, had been singing Donacha Ban’s song of
‘Ben Dorain,’ and no prospect in the world seemed so alluring to me then
as a swath of the land I came from.”

“I know ‘Ben Dorain,’” said Gilian timidly, “and I think I could tell
just the way you felt when you heard the man singing it in a foreign
place.”

“Come away, then, my twelve-year-old warlock,” said the Cornal,
mockingly, yet wondering too.

“This is a real oddity,” said the General, drawing his chair a little
nearer the boy.

“I heard a forester sing ‘Ben Dorain’ last Hogmanay at home--I mean in
Ladyfield; he was not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words
here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the
hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the
hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo
was in the wood.”

“That was very unlucky about the cuckoo before breakfast,” said the
Cornal, and he quoted a Gaelic proverb.

“Oh! if I was in a foreign place and some one sang that song I would be
very, very sick for home. I would be full of thoughts about the lochs
and the hunting roads, the slope of the braes and stripes of black
fir on them; the crying of cattle, the sound of burn and _eas_ and the
voices of people I knew would be dragging my heart home. I would be
saying, ‘Oh! you strangers, you do not understand. You have not the want
at your hearts,’ and there would be one little bit of the place at home
as plain to my view as that picture.”

As he spoke, Gilian pointed at “The Battle of Vittoria.” The brothers
turned and looked as if it was something quite new and strange to them.
Up rose the Cornal and went closer to peer at it.

“Confound it!” said he. “You’re there with your tale of a ballant, and
you point at the one picture ever I saw that gave me the day-dreaming. I
never see that smudgy old print but I’m crying on the cavalry that made
the Frenchmen rout.”

From where he sat the boy could make out the picture in every detail. It
was a scene of flying and broken troops, of men on the wings of terror
and dragoons riding them down. There was at the very front of the
picture, in a corner, among the flying Frenchmen pursued by the horses,
the presentment of a Scottish soldier, wounded, lying upon his back with
his elbows propped beneath him so that he had his head up, looking at
the action, a soldier of a thin long habit of body, a hollow face and
high cheekbones.

Gilian forgot the two old men in the room with him when he looked
intently on this soldier in the throes; he stood up from the chair, went
forward and put a finger as high as he could to point out the particular
thing he referred to. “That’s a man,” said he, “and he’s afraid. He does
not hear the guns, nor the people crying, but he hears the horses’ feet
thudding on the grass, and he thinks they will go over him and crush his
bones.”

“Curse me,” cried the Cornal, “but you have the thing to a nicety.
That’s the man’s notion, for a guinea, for I have been in his case
myself, and the thud of horses was a sound that filled the world. Sit
down, sit down!” he went on sharply, as if he had of a sudden found
something to reproach himself with in any complacent recognition of this
child’s images. “You are not canny; how old are you?”

Gilian was trembling and parched at the lips now, awake to the enormity
of his forwardness. “I am twelve,” he repeated.

“It is a cursed lie,” said the Cornal hotly; “you’re a hundred; don’t
tell me!”

He was actually a little afraid of those manifestations, so unusual and
so remarkable. His excitement could with difficulty be concealed. Very
restlessly he moved about in his chair, and turned his look from the
General to the boy and back again, but the General sat with his chin in
his breast, his mind a vacancy.

“Look at the General there; you’re fairly scunnering him with your
notions,” said the Cornal. “I must speak to John about this. A soldier
indeed! You’re not fit for it, lad; you have only the makings of a
dominie. Sit you there, and we’ll see what John has to say about this
when he comes in: it is going on seven, and he’ll be back from the dregy
in time for his supper.”

Gilian sat trembling in his chair; the brothers leaned back in theirs
and breathed heavily and said no word, and never even stretched a hand
to the bottle of spirits. A solemn quiet again took possession of
the house, but for a door that slammed in the lower flat, shaking the
dwelling; the lulled sound of women’s conversation at the oven-grate was
utterly stilled. The pigeons came to the sill a moment, mourned and flew
away; the carts did not rumble any more in the street; the children’s
chorus was altogether lost. A feeling came over the boy that he had been
here or somewhere like it before, and he was fascinated, wondering what
next would happen. A tall old clock in the lobby, whose pendulum swung
so slowly that at first he had never realised its presence, at last
took advantage of the silence and swung itself into his notice with a
tick-tack. The silence seemed to thicken and press upon his ears;
no striving after fancy could bring the boy far enough off from that
strange convention, and try as he might to realise himself back in
his familiar places by the riverside at Ladyfield, the wings of his
imagining failed in their flight and he tumbled again into that austere
parlour sitting with two men utterly beyond his comprehension.

There was, at last, one sound that gave a little comfort, and checked
the tears that had begun to gather on the edges of his eyes. It came
from the direction of the kitchen; it was a creaking of the wooden
stairs; it was a faint shuffle of slippers in the lobby; then there was
a hush outside the door deeper even than the stillness within. Gilian
knew, as if he could see through the brown panelling, that a woman was
standing out there listening with her breath caught up and wondering
at the quiet within, yet afraid to open a door upon the mystery. The
brothers did not observe it; all this was too faint for their old ears,
though plainly heard by a child of the fields whose ear against the
grass could detect the marching of insects and the tunnelling of worms.
But for that he would have screamed--but for the magic air of friendship
and sympathy that flowed to him through chink and keyhole from the good
heart loud-beating outside; in that kind air of fond companionship (even
with a door between) there was comfort. In a little the slippers sped
back along the lobby, the stair creaked, in the lower flat a door
slammed. Gilian felt himself more deserted and friendless than ever, and
a few moments more would have found him break upon the appalling still
with sobs of cowardly surrender, but the church bell rang. It was the
first time he had heard its evening clamour, that, however far it might
search up the glens, never reached Lady-field, so deep among the hills,
and he had no more than recovered from the bewildering influence of its
unexpected alarm when the foot of the Paymaster sounded heavily on the
stair.

“You’re here at last,” said the Cornal, without looking at him.

“I was a thought later than I intended,” said the Paymaster quickly,
putting his cane softly into a corner. “I had a little encounter with
that fellow Turner and it put by the time.”

“What--Jamie?”

“No; Charlie.”

“Man! I wonder at you, John,” said the Cornal with a contempt in his
utterance and a tightening of the corner of his lips. “I wonder at you
changing words with him. What was it you were on?”

The Paymaster explained shortly, guardedly, because of Gilian’s
presence, and as he spoke the purple of the Cornal’s face turned to
livid and the scar became a sickly yellow. He rose and thumped his fist
upon the table.

“That was his defiance, was it?” he cried. “We are the old sonless
bachelors, are we, and the name’s dead with the last of us? And you
argued with him about that! I would have put a hand on his cravat and
throttled him.”

The Paymaster was abashed, but “Just consider, Colin,” he pleaded. “I
am not so young as I was, and a bonny-like thing it would be to throttle
him on the ground he gave.”

“Old Mars!” cried the Cornal, with a sneer. “Man! but MacColl hit your
character when he made his song; you were always well supplied by luck
with excuses for not fighting.”

To the General the Paymaster turned with piteous appeal. “Dugald,” said
he, “I’ll leave it to you if Colin’s acting fairly. Did ever I disgrace
the name of Campbell, or Gael, or soger?”

“I never said you did,” cried the Cornal. “All I said was that fate was
a scurvy friend to you and seldom put you face to face with your foe
on any clear issue. Perhaps I said too much; I’m hot-tempered, I know;
never mind my taunt, John. But you’ll allow it’s galling to have a
beggarly upstart like Turner throwing our bachelorhood in our teeth. Now
if we had sons, or a son, one of us, I’ll warrant we could bring him up
with more credit than Turner brings up his long-lugged Sandy, or that
randy lass of his.”

“Isn’t that what I told him?” said the Paymaster, scooping a great heap
of dust into his nostrils, and feverishly rubbing down the front of his
vest with a large handkerchief. “I wish----”

He stopped suddenly; he looked hard at Gilian, whose presence in the
shadow of the big chair he had seemingly forgotten; seeing him gaze
thus and pause, the Cornal turned too and looked at the youth, and the
General shrugged himself into some interest in the same object. Before
the gaze of the three brothers, the boy’s skin burned; his eyes dropped.

“This is a queer callant you’ve brought us here,” said the Cornal,
nudging his brother and nodding in Gilian’s direction. “I’ve seen some
real diverts in my time, but he beats all. And you have a notion to
make a soger of him, they tell me. You heard that yourself, didn’t you,
General?”

The General made no reply, for he was looking at the portrait of himself
when he was thirty-five, and to sit doing nothing in a house would have
been torture.

“I only said it in the by-going to Mary,” explained the Paymaster
humbly. “The nature for sogering is the gift of God, and the boy may
have it or he may not; it is too soon to say.”

“There’s no more of the soger in him than there is of the writer in me!”
 cried the Cornal; “but there’s something by-ordinar in him all the same.
It’s your affair, John, but--” He stopped short and looked again at
Gilian and hummed and ha’d a little and fingered his stock. “Man, do you
know I would not say but here’s your son for you.”

“That’s what I thought myself,” said the Paymaster, “and that’s what I
said. I’ll make him a soger if I can, and I’ll make him hate the name of
Turner whether or not.”

And all this time Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of
old men’s passion with his child’s fancy. He found this new world into
which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in
the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare
and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little
alarming. Soldiering--with the man before him in the picture, sitting
propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample on
him--seemed the last trade on earth; as for hate, that might be easier
and due to his benefactor, but it would depend very much on the Turners.

When the brothers released him from their den, and he went to Miss Mary,
standing at the kitchen door, eager for his company, with a flush on her
cheek and a bright new ribbon at her neck, he laid those points before
her.

“Tuts!” said she, pressing food on him--her motherhood’s only cure for
all a child’s complaints--“they’re only haverils. They cannot make a
soger of you against your will. As for the Turners--well, they’re no
very likeable race, most of them in my mind. A dour, sour, up-setting
clan of no parentage. Perhaps that does not much matter, so long as
people are honest and well-doing; we are all equals before God except in
head and heart, but there’s something too in our old Hielan’ notion that
the closest kith of the King are aye most kindly, because the habit is
born in them to be freehanded and unafraid. Am not I the _oinseach_ to
be sticking up for pedigrees? Perhaps it is because our own is so good.
Kiels was ours three hundred years, and my grandfather was good-brother
to an earl--a not very good nor honest lord they say--and the Turners
were only portioners and tenants as far back as we ken.”

“I liked the look of the one with his hair in a tail,” said Gilian, and
he wondered if she was angry at his admiration of the enemy, when he saw
her face grow red.

--“Oh! the General!” she exclaimed, but never a word more, good or ill.




CHAPTER VII--THE MAN ON THE QUAY

It has always happened that the first steps of a boy from the glen have
been to the quay. There the ships lie clumsily on their bulging sides in
the ebb till the tar steams and blisters in the sun, or at the full they
lift and fall heavily like a sigh for the ocean’s expanse as they feel
themselves prisoners to the rings and pawls. Their chains jerk and ease
upon the granite edges of the wall or twang tight across the quay so
that the mariners and fishermen moving about their business on this
stone-thrust to the sea must lift their clumping boots high to step
across those tethers of romance. At a full tide one walking down the
quay has beside him the dark aspiring bulwarks of the little but brave
adventurers, their seams gazing to the heat, their carvel timbers
striped by the ooze and brine of many oceans and the scum of ports. Upon
their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek; the
iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red; the companions are portals to
smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen
lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of
no roaming and remembering the tumbling waters and the far-off harbours
that must ever be more alluring than the harbours where we be. From the
ivy of the church the little birds come chaffering and twittering
among the shrouds, and the pigeon will perch upon a spar, so that the
sea-gull, the far-searcher, must wonder as he passes on a slant
of silent leathers at its daring thus to utilise the device of the
outermost seas and the most vehement storms. And side by side with
these, the adventurers, are the skiffs and smacks of the fishermen,
drilled in rows, brought bow up, taut on their anchors with their
lug-sails down on their masts to make deck tents for shelter from sun
or rain. With those sturdy black gabbarls and barques and those bronze
fishers, the bay from the quay to the walls of the Duke’s garden, in its
season, stirs with life.

More than once when he had come to the town Gilian looked a little way
off from the Cross upon this busy concourse in the bay and wished that
he might venture on the quay, but the throng of tall, dark-shirted
fishermen and seafarers frightened him so that he must stand aloof
guessing at the nearer interest of the spectacle. Now that he was a town
boy with whole days in which to muster courage, he spurred himself up to
walk upon the quay at the first opportunity. It was the afternoon, the
tide lapped high upon the slips and stairs, a heaving lazy roll of water
so clear that the star-fish on the sandy bottom might plainly be seen
through great depths. The gunnies of the ships o’ertopped by many feet
the quay-wall and their chains rose slanting, tight from the rings. The
fishermen and their boats were far down on Cowal after signs of herring;
the bay was given up to barque and gabbart alone. For once a slumber
seemed to lie upon the place for ordinary so throng and cheerful; the
quay was Gilian’s alone as he stepped wonderingly upon it and turned
an eye to the square ports open for an airing to the dens. In all the
company of the ships thus swaying at the quay-side there was no sign
of life beyond the smoke that rose from the stunted funnels. The boy’s
fancy played among the masts like the birds from the ivy. These were
the galleys of Inishtore, that rode upon the seven seas for a king’s son
with a hauberk of gold. The spicy isles, the silver sands, the songs the
_graugach_ sang below the prows when the sea dashed--they came all into
his vision of those little tarred hulks of commerce. He thought how fine
it would be to set foot upon those decks and loose the fastenings, and
drop down the sea-slope of the shepherds’ stories till he came upon
Ibrisail, happy isle of play and laughter, where the sun never drops
below the ocean’s marge.

In one of the vessels behind him, as he mused, a seaman noiselessly
thrust his head out at a companion to look the hour upon the town’s
clock, and the boy, pale, fair-haired, pondering, with eyes upon the
shrouds of a gabbart, forced himself by his stillness and inaction upon
the man’s notice. He was a little, stout, well-built man, with a face
tanned by sunshine and salt air to the semblance of Spanish mahogany,
with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black.
His dress was singularly perjink, cut trim and tight from a blue cloth,
the collar of a red shirt rolled over on the bosom, a pair of simple
gold rings pierced the ears. As he looked at the boy, he was humming
very softly to himself a Skye song, and he stopped in the midst of it
with “So ‘_iile_, have you lost your ship?” A playful scamp was revealed
in his smile.

Gilian turned round with a start of alarm, for he had been on some
coracle of fancy, sailing upon magic seas, and thus to break upon his
reverie with the high Gaelic of Skye was to plunge him in chilling
waters.

“_Thig an so_--come here,” said the seaman, beckoning, setting an easy
foot upon the deck.

Gilian went slowly forward, he was amazed and fascinated by this
wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning,
a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan
that day was in a good humour, for his owners had released him at last
from his weeks of tethering to the quay and this dull town and he was to
depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian’s
history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed
its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners’ tales of the
sea.

A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times
a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel’s ribs, the
bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor
lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming
every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless
sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the
bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in
benign weather moving home upon the sigh of God.

Black Duncan but wanted a good listener. He was not quite the world’s
traveller he would have Gilian believe; but he had voyaged in many
outlandish parts and a Skyeman’s memory is long and his is the isle
where fancy riots. He made his simple ventures round the coast voyages
terrible and unending. The bays, the water-mouths, the rocks, the bosky
isles--he clothed them with delights, and made them float in the haze
wherein a boy untravelled would envelop them.

“There’s a story I know.” said Gilian, “of a young son who went to a
town where the king of Erin bides, and he found it full of music from
end to end, every street humming with song.”

“Oh, lad, I have been there,” said the seaman, unabashed, his teeth very
white in the brown of his smiling face. “You sail and sail in winds and
drift in calms, and there is a place called Erin’s Eye and a mountain
rock behind it, and then you come upon the town of the king’s daughter.
It is a town reeling with music; some people without the ears would miss
it, you and Black Duncan would be jigging to the sound of it. The world,
‘_ille_ (and here’s the sailorman who has sailed the seven seas and
knows its worst and best), is a very grand place to such as understand
and allow. I was born with a caul as we say; I know that I’ll never
drown, so that when winds crack I feel safe in the most staggering ship.
I have gone into foreign ports in the dead of night, our hail for light
but answered by Sir Echo, and we would be waiting for light, with the
smell of flowers and trees about us, and--”

“That would be worth sailing for,” said Gilian, looking hard at the
embers in the Carron stove.

“Or the beast of the wood might come roaring and bellowing to the
shore.”

“That would be very frightsome,” said Gilian with a shiver. “I have made
believe the hum of the bee in the heather at my ear as I lay on it in
the summer was the roar of the wild beast a long way off; it was uncanny
and I could make myself afraid of it, but when I liked it was the bee
again and the heather was no higher than my knee.”

The seaman laughed till the den rang. He poked the fire and the flame
thrust out and made the boy and the man and the timbers and bunks dance
and shake in the world between light and shadow. “You are the sharpest
boy ever I conversed with,” said he.

A run of the merriest, the sweetest, the most unconstrained laughter
broke overhead like a bird’s song. They looked up and found the square
of blue sky broken at the hatch by a girl’s head. A roguish face in
a toss of brown hair, seen thus above them against the sky, seemed to
Gilian the face of one of the fairies with which he had peopled the
seaman’s isle.

“There you go!” cried Black Duncan, noway astonished. “Did I not tell
you never to come on board without halloo?”

“I cried,” said the girl in a most pretty English that sounded all
the sweeter beside the seaman’s broken and harsh accent in a language
foreign to him. “I cried ‘O Duncan’ twice and you never heard, so I knew
you were asleep in your dingy old den.” She swung herself down as she
spoke and stood at the foot of the companion with the laugh renewed upon
her lips, a gush of happy heart.

“Indeed, Miss Nan, and I was not sleeping at all,” said Black Duncan,
standing up and facing her; “if I was sleeping would there be a boy with
me here listening to the stories of the times when I was scouring the
oceans and not between here and the Clyde in your father’s vessel?”

“Oh! a boy!” cried the girl, taken a little aback. “I did not know there
was a boy.”

“And a glen boy, too,” said the seaman, speaking in a language wherein
he knew himself more the equal of his master’s daughter. “I told him
of Erin O and the music in its streets, and he does not make fun of my
telling like you, Miss Nan, because he understands.”

The girl peered into the dark of the cabin at the face of Gilian that
seemed unwontedly long and pallid in the half light, with eyes burning
in sepulchral pits, repeating the flash of the embers. She was about his
own age--at most no more than a month or two younger, but with a glance
bold and assured that spoke of an early maturity.

“Oh! a Glen Aray boy,” said she. “I never much care for them. You would
be telling him some of the tales there is no word of truth in.”

“The finest tales in the world are like that,” said Black Duncan.

She sat on the edge of a bunk and swung a little drab jean shoe.

The glamour of Black Duncan’s stories fled for Gilian before this
presence like mist before a morning wind. So healthy, so ruddy, so
abrupt, she was so much in the actual world that for him to be dreaming
of others seemed a child’s weakness.

“I was in the town with uncle,” she said, “and I heard you were sailing
away to-morrow, and I thought I would come and say good-bye.”

She spoke as prettily in her Gaelic as in her English.

“Ah, _mo run_,” said the seaman, putting out his arms as to embrace her,
“am not I pleased that you should have Black Duncan in your mind so much
as to come and say ‘fair wind to your sail’?”

“And you’ll bring me the beads next time?” she said hastily.

“That will I,” said he, smiling; “but you must sing me a song now or I
might forget them.”

“Oh, I’ll sing if----.” She paused and looked doubtfully at Gilian, who
was still open-mouthed at her breezy vehemence.

“Never mind the boy,” said the seaman, stretching himself to enjoy the
music at his ease; “if you make it ‘The Rover’ he will understand.”

The afternoon was speeding. The sun had passed the trees that round the
Tolbooth walls and a beam from his majesty came boldly into the den by
the companion. It struck a slanting passage on the floor and revealed
the figure of a girl at her ease dangling her feet upon a water anker
with her hair a flood of spate-brown fallen back upon its fastening
band. And the boy saw her again as it were quite differently from
before, still the robust woman-child, but rich, ripe, blooded at
the plump inviting lip, warm at the throbbing neck. About her hung a
searching odour that overcame the common and vulgar odours of the ship,
its bilge, its tar, its oak-bark tan, its herring scale, an odour he
knew of woods in the wet spring weather. It made him think of short
grasses and the dewdrop glittering in the wet leaf; then the sky shone
blue against a tremble of airy leaf. The birch, the birch, he had it!
And having it he knew the secret of the odour. She had already the
woman’s trick of washing her hair in the young birch brewings.

“I will sing ‘The Rover’ and I will sing ‘The Man with the Coat of
Green,’” said she, with the generosity of one with many gifts. And she
started upon her ditty. She had a voice that as yet was only in its
making; it was but a promise of the future splendour, yet to Gilian, the
hearer, it brought a new and potent joy. With ‘The Rover’ he lived in
the woods, and set foot upon foreign wharves; ‘The Man with the Coat
of Green’ had his company upon the morning adventures in the islands of
fairydom. It was then, as in after years she was the woman serious, when
her own songs moved her, with her dalliance and indifference gone. A
tear trembled at her eyes at the trials of the folk she sang.

“You sing--you sing--you sing like the wind in the trees,” said the
seaman, stirred to unaccustomed passion. The little cabin, when she
was done, seemed to shrink from the limitless width of the world to the
narrowness of a cell, and Gilian sat stunned. He had followed her
song in a rapture she had seen and delighted in for all the apparent
surrender of her emotion; she saw now the depth to which she had touched
him, and was greatly pleased with this conquest of her art. Clearly he
was no common Glen Aray boy, so she sang one or two more songs to show
the variety of her budget, and the tears he could not restrain were
her sweetest triumph. At last, “I must be going,” said she. “Good-bye,
Duncan, and do not be forgetting my beads.” Then she dashed on deck,
waiting no answer to that or to the friendly nod of parting to Gilian.

“Now isn’t she a wonder?” asked the seaman, amused, astonished, proud.
“Did you ever hear singing like it?”

“I never did,” said Gilian.

“Ah, she is almost as fine as a piper!” said the seaman. “She comes down
here every time I am at the quay and she will be singing here till the
timbers strain themselves to listen.”

“I like her very much,” said Gilian.

“Of course you do,” the seaman cried, with a thump of his hard hand on
the edge of his bunk, “and would it not be very curious indeed if you
did not like her? I have heard women sing in many places--bold ones in
Amsterdam, and the shy dancers of Bermuda, but never her equal, and she
only a child. How she does it is the beat of me.”

“I know,” said Gilian, reddening a little to say so much to the seaman,
but emboldened by the shadows he sat among. “The birds sing that way
and the winds and the tide, because they have the feeling of it and they
must. And when she sings she is ‘The Rover,’ or she is ‘The Man with the
Green Coat.’”

“Indeed, and it is very easy too when you explain,” said the seaman,
whether in earnest or in fun the boy could not make out “She is the
strange one anyway, and they say General Turner, who’s her father and
the man this ship belongs to, is not knowing very well what to make of
her. What is the matter with you?” For the boy’s face was crimson as he
looked up the quay after the girl from the deck where now they stood.

“Oh,” said Gilian, “I was just wondering if that would be the family the
Paymaster is not friendly with.”

The seaman laughed. “That same!” said he. “And are you in the family
feud too? If that is so you’ll hear little of Miss Nan’s songs, I’m
thinking, and that is the folly of feuds. If I was you I would say
nothing about the _Jean_, and the lass who sang in her.”




CHAPTER VIII--THE SHERIFF’S SUPPER PARTY

But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.

It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the
lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk
made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of
social intercourse in each other’s homes, where the winter nights, that
otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women
would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or
their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly
revealed for the shawls that must cover them. The men donned their best
figured waistcoats and their newest stocks, and cursed the fashions that
took them from their pipes and cards, but solaced themselves mightily
with the bottle in the host’s bedroom. From those friendly convocations,
jealousies innumerable bred. It was not only that each other’s gowns
raised unchristian thoughts in the bosoms of the women, but in a
community where each knew her neighbour and many were on equality,
there must be selections, and rancour rose. And it was the true Highland
rancour, concealing itself under a front of indifference and even
politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning
fiercely at the core.

A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were
submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the
wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff’s
servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster’s house early in the
forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this
purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in
the Sheriff’s the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive
nights.

Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no
invitation to the Sheriff’s, and yet here was the hint of some convivial
gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome
to.

“What do you think it will be, John?” she asked the Paymaster, telling
him what she had seen.

“Tuts,” said he, “they’ll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has
an extra hard case at avizandum, not to be seen clearly through with a
common creesh flame.”

“That’s aye you,” cried Miss Mary, indignant “People might slap you in
the face and you would have no interest.”

She hastened to Peggy in the kitchen and Peggy shared her wonder, though
she was not permitted to see her annoyance. A plan was devised to find
out what this extravagance of candle might portend.

The maid took her water-stoups and went up to the Cross Well, where
women were busy at that hour of the day plying for the water of
Bealloch-an-uarain, that bubbles up deep in the heart of the hills, and
brings the coolness and refreshment of the shady wood into the burgh
street in the most intense days of summer warmth. She filled her stoups
composedly, set them down and gossiped, upset them as by accident, and
waited patiently her turn to fill them anew. Thus by twenty minutes’
skilful loitering she secured from the baxter’s daughter the news that
there was a supper at the Sheriff’s that very night, and that very large
tarts were at the firing in the baxter’s oven.

“Oh, indeed!” cried Miss Mary, when her emissary brought to her those
tidings. “Then it seems the Campbells of Keil are not good enough
company for Sheriff Maclachlan’s supper parties! My brother the Cornal,
and my brother the Major-General, would have their own idea about that
if so small a trifle as Madam’s tart supper and green tea was worth
their notice or annoyance.”

She was visibly disturbed, yet put on a certain air of indifference that
scarcely deceived even Peggy. The worst of it was there was no one
with whom she could share her annoyance, for, if the Paymaster had no
sympathy, the other two brothers were unapproachable. Gilian found her
in a little rain of tears. She started with shame at his discovery, and
set herself to a noisy handling of dinner dishes that by this time he
knew well enough were not in her daily office of industry. And she said
never a word--she that never heard his foot upon the stair without
a smile of pleasure, or saw his face at the door without a mother’s
challenge to his appetite.

“What is wrong, aunty?” he said in the Gaelic, using the term it had
been agreed would best suit the new relationship.

“Just nothing at all, my dear,” she said without looking round. “What
would be wrong?”

“But you are crying,” protested Gilian, alarmed lest he in some way
should have been the cause of her distress.

“Am I?” said Miss Mary. “And if I am, it is just for a silly thing only
a woman would mind, a slight from people not worth heeding.” And then
she told, still shamefacedly, her story.

Gilian was amazed.

“I did not think you cared for suppers and teas,” he said. “The last
time you went to the Sheriffs you said you would far sooner be at home,
and--”

“Did I?” said she. Then she smiled to find some one who knew it was
not the outing she immediately prized. “Indeed, what you say is true,
Gilian. I’m an old done dame, and it was wiser for the like of me to
be sitting knitting at the fire than going on diverts to their bohea
parties and clashing supper tables. But it’s not myself I’m angry for.
Oh, no! they might leave me alone for ever and a day and I would care
not a pin-head, but it’s Dugald I’m thinking of--a Major-General--one of
the only three in the shire, and Colin--a Cornal--and both of Keils. The
Sheriff’s lady might leave me out of her routs if she pleasured it, but
she has no cause to put my brothers to an insult like this.” She said
“my brothers” with a high hard sound of stern and proud possession that
was very fine to hear. Even Gilian, as yet only beginning to know the
love and pride of this little woman, had, at her accent, a sudden deep
revealing of her devoted heart.

“It is the Turners’ doing,” she said, feverishly rubbing a warming pan
whose carved lid from Zaandam blinked and gleamed like the shining face
of a Dutch skipper over his dram. “I know them; because my brother
must be quarrelling with them, their half-sister must be taking up the
quarrel and shutting her door in our faces.”

“The Turners! Then I hate them too,” cried Gilian, won to the
Paymaster’s side by the sorrow of Miss Mary.

“Oh, you must not say that, my dear,” she cried, appalled. “It is not
your affair at all, and the Turners are not to blame because the Sheriff
is under the thumb of his madam. The Turners have their good points as
well as the rest of us, and--”

“They have a daughter,” said Gilian, almost unconsciously, for there had
come flooding into his mind a vision of the sombre vessel’s cabin, shot
over by a ray of sunshine, wherein a fairy sang of love and wandering.
And then he regretted he had spoke of hate for any of her name, for
surely (he thought) there should be no hate in the world for any that
had her blood and shared her home.

Surely in her people, knowing her so warm, so lovely, so kind, so
gifted, there could be no cruelty and wrong.

“I would not say I hated any one if I were you, my dear,” said Miss
Mary; “but I would keep a cool side to the Turners, father, or daughter,
or son. Their daughter that you speak of was the cause of this new
quarrel. The Captain miscalled her to her father, which was not right,
for indeed she’s a bonny lassie, and they tell me she sings--”

“Like the mavis,9’ cried Gilian, still in his Gaelic and in a transport
of recollection.

“Where did you hear her?” asked Miss Mary.

Gilian, flushed and uneasy, told her of the performance in the ship.
Finding a listener neither inattentive nor without sympathy, he went
further still and told of the song’s effect upon him, and that the
sweetness of it still abiding made his hatred of her people impossible.

“She’ll do for looks too,” said Miss Mary. “She takes them with her
singing from her mother, who was my dear companion before this trouble
rose.”

“Oh! she looks like--like--like the _gruagach_ girl in the story,” said
Gilian, remembering the tale of the sea-maiden who sat on the shore and
dressed her hair with a comb of gold.

“I hope she’s not so uncanny,” said Miss Mary with a laugh, “for the
_gruagach_ combed till a sweetheart came (that I should be talking of
such daft-like things!), and he was drowned and that was the end of
him.”

“Still--still,” said Gilian, “the _gruagach_ was worth the drowning
for.”

Miss Mary looked at him with a sigh for a spirit so much to be envied.

“This may be but a chapter in a very old tale,” said she. “It was with
a lass the feud came in.” A saying full of mystery to the boy. Then she
changed the conversation back to her own affairs. “We’ll take a walk out
in the gloaming and see all the Sheriff’s friends,” said she, “and
all the Sheriff’s friends in this supper are Turner’s friends and the
Paymaster’s enemies.”

The night of the Sheriff’s supper party came with heavy showers and a
sky swept by clouds that let through glimpse of moon nor star. The town
lay in pitch darkness, all silent except for the plash of the sea upon
the shore or its long roll on the Ramparts. A deserted and wind-swept
street, its white walls streaming with waters, its outer shutters on the
ground fiats barred to darkness, its gutters running over--it was the
last night on which any one with finery and a notion for comfort would
choose for going abroad to parties. Miss Mary, sitting high at her
parlour window with Gilian, looked out through the blurred pane with
satisfaction upon all this inclemency.

“Faith,” said she, “I wish them joy of their party whoever they be
that share it!” Then all at once her mood changed to one of pity as the
solitary street showed a moving light upon its footway. “Oh!” she cried.
“There’s Donacha Breck’s lantern and his wife will be with him. And
to-day she was at me for my jelly for a cold! I wish--I wish she was not
over the door this night; it will be the death of her. To-morrow I must
send her over the last of my Ladyfield honey.”

From the window and in the darkness of the night, it was impossible to
tell who were for the Sheriffs party, so Miss Mary in the excess of her
curiosity must be out after a time and into the dripping darkness, with
Gilian by her side for companionship. It was an adventure altogether to
his liking. As he walked up and down the street on its darker side he
could think upon the things that were happening behind the drawn blinds
and bolted shutters. It was as if he was the single tenant of a sleeping
star and guessing at the mysteries of a universe. Stories were happening
behind the walls, fires were glimmering, suppers were set, each family
for the time being was in a world of its own, split off from its
neighbours by the darkness.

A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam
in water.

Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady
Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years
ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully.

“It’s gone; I knew it would be gone,” she said in a whisper to Gilian,
withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep
sounded a little way down the street.

He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank
expanse of the moaning sea round the corner of a tall tenement filled
him with new and moving emotions.

“There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa’s
sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her
lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That’s two pair
at least for the Sheriff’s party.”

“Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there?”
 said Gilian.

She shook his arm with startled affright.

“Ask! ask!” she exclaimed. “If you dared let on to any one we even heard
there was a party, I would--I would--be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we
must hold our heads a bit higher than that.”

She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement.

“Major Hall and his sister are there,” she said, showing darkened
windows. “And the Camerons and the Frasers,” she added later, informed
by the same signs of absence.

Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and
bolted up their doors, then retreated to their homes behind. More dark
than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few
windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in
the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation.

And yet the town was not all asleep but for the Sheriff’s party and
Miss Mary and the Paymaster’s boy, for there came from the Abercrombie,
though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of carousal. It
was not, this time, the old half-pay officers but a lower plane of the
burgh’s manhood, the salvage and the wreckage of the wars, privatemen
and sergeants, by a period of strife and travel made in some degree
unfit for the tame ways of peace in a stagnant burgh. They told the old
tales of the bivouac; they sang its naughty or swaggering songs. By a
plain deal door and some glasses of spirit they removed themselves from
the dull town drowsing in the night, and in the light of the Sergeant
More’s cruisie moved again in the sacked towns of Ciudad Rodrigo,
Badajos and San Sebastian, gorged anew, perhaps, with blood and lust.

Miss Mary and Gilian passed the door of the Sergeant More hurriedly, she
deaf to its carousal, he remembering all at once and finding wake anew
his first feelings when he stood in the same room before the half-pay
officers at their midday drams. He had become a little tired of this
quest all to gratify an old maid’s curiosity, he wished he could be home
again and in his attic room with his candle and his story book, or his
abundant and lively thoughts. But there was one other task before Miss
Mary. She could not forbear so little as a glance at the exterior of
the Sheriff’s dwelling where the enemies of her home (as so she now must
fancy them) were trying to be happy without the company of the Campbells
of Keils. When they were in front of it every window shone across the
grass-plot, some of them open so that the sound of gaiety came clearly
to the woman and the boy. Miss Mary stood woebegone, suffused in tears.

“And there are my dear brothers at home yonder, their lee-lone, silent,
sitting in a parlour! Oh! it is shameful, it is shameful! And all for a
hasty word about a lass!”

Gilian before this curious sorrow was dumb. Silently he tried to lead
the little lady away from the place, but she would not go, and would not
be comforted. Then there came from the open windows the beginning of a
song. At the first note Gilian thrilled in every nerve.

“Fancy that now!” said Miss Mary, checking her tears. “No more than
a wean and here she must be singing at supper parties as brave as the
mother before her. It’s a scandal! And it shows the bitterness of the
quarrel to have her here, for she was never here at supper before.”

“But is she not fine?” said Gilian, with a passion in his utterance.

Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a
song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a
sweetness almost magic.

“Is she not fine?” he said again, clutching with eager hands at the
rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that
alluring melody.

“Oh, the dear! the dear!” sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the
strain. “When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that
too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful
woman here on any quarrel for her!”

The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a
shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the
sea moaning in the trees behind the town.

“What--what--what are we here for?” said he, beholding for the first
time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and
sensitive a dame.

She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought
him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense
of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!

“You may well ask,” she said, moving away from that alluring house-front
with its inmates so indifferent to the passions in the dark without And
her sobs were not yet finished. “Because I prize my brothers,” said
she, “and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead
companion’s child?” She hurried her pace away from that house whose
windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged
reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious
that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then
she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.

“Do you like that girl?” said she.

“I like her--when she sings,” said he.

“Oh! it was always that,” she went on helplessly “My poor brothers!
They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very
much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that
brought them together.” Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful
exclamation: “Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but
for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing
here with you? She may have her mother’s nature as well as her mother’s
songs.”

For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not
put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled
in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the
street, now deserted but for themselves and a man’s footsteps sounding
on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming.
It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming
upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross
Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.

“It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell,” he said, in a shrill high
dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the
guttural Highland burghers.

She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason
for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.

“You have left the Sheriff’s early to-night,” said he. “I was asked, but
I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when
I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here.”

“I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of,”
 said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. “The mantua-maker tells me the latest
fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edinburgh.” She
saw in his face the innkeeper’s apology for his common sin against
the Gaelic vanity. “We were just out for an airing,” she added, taking
Gilian’s hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning.

“I thought, ma’am, you were at the Sheriffs,” said Mr. Spencer.

“Oh! there is a party in the Sheriff’s, is there?” she said. “That is
very nice; they have a hospitable house and many friends. I must
hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little
troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave
them to go out myself.”

She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that
died in her twenty years before. She said “Good-night,” and then she was
gone.

Mr. Spencer’s footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he
resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not
on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while
this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her
cheek.




CHAPTER IX--ACADEMIA

In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old
Brooks’ school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own,
but by the luck that attends on such as have God’s gift to begin
with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them
lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The
magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the
fascination they had before, even when they had mocked with cries of
“Crotal-coat, Crotal-coat,” did not very bravely stand a close trial.
He was not dismayed at this; he did as we must all be doing through life
and changed one illusion for another. It is a wonderful rich world for
dreams, and he had a different one every day, as he sat in the peaty
odour of instruction.

Old Brooks would perch high on his three-legged stool conning over some
exercise while his scholars in their rows behind the knife-hewn inky
desks hummed like bees upon their tasks. The hornbooks of the little
ones at the bottom of the room would sometimes fall from their hands in
the languor of that stagnant atmosphere, but the boys of the upper forms
were ever awake for mischief. To the teaching of the Dominie they would
come with pockets full of playthings, sometimes animals from the woods
and fields about the town--frogs, moles, hedgehogs, or fledgeling birds.
Brooks rarely suspected the presence of these distractions in his sacred
grove, for he was dull of vision and preferred to see his scholars about
him in a vague mist rather than wear in their presence the great horn
spectacles that were privy to his room in Crombie’s Land. The town’s
clock staring frankly in at the school windows conveyed to him no
knowledge of the passing enemy, and, as his watch had been for a
generation but a bulge upon his vest, he must wait till the hour struck
ere he knew it was meridian and time to cross the playground and into
Kate Bell’s for his glass of waters. “Silence till I return!” he would
say, whipping on his better coat and making for the door that had no
sooner shut on him than tumult reigned.

On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster
making for the house of the Sergeant More. “I cannot understood,”
 would the Paymaster say, “what makes you take your drams in so common
a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a
fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company! MacNicol and
Major Hall--and--and--myself and some of the best in the burgh; yet
you must be frequenting a low tavern with only merchants and mice and
fisherman to say ‘Good health’ to.”

Master Brooks had always his answer very pat.

“I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books,” he would say
drily. “And told with a greater ingenuity--not to mention veracity--than
pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between
ourselves, I’m not for war at all, but for the far finer and more
wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!” (and here would he
grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an
old acquaintance,) “Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though
we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so
short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us,
so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the
back room of Kate’s there where the merchants discourse upon their bales
and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the
country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their
way of it.”

“It’s aye the old story with you,” the Paymaster would say tolerantly.
“You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of
wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope
you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy’s
head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a
possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer.”

“The boy’s made, Captain Campbell,” said the schoolmaster one day at
this. “He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house
or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what
he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can
make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I’ve had many a curious student
yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was
a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such
rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere
but as the tinkler learns--by the roadside and in the wood.”

“I know he’s a droll one,” said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a
thoughtful brow, “but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have
turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it
in with your tawse.”

The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse
mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance
and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse-ness of
youth made its presence necessary in his desk.

“Captain Campbell,” said he, “it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom
into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a _lusus naturo_, that
is all; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as
an idiot when it is not, and then no tawse or ferule will avail.”

And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the
school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him
the restraints were galling shackles. When the classes would be humming
in the drowsy afternoon and the sharp high voice of old Brooks rose
above the murmur as he taught some little class in the upper corner, the
boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of
him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes
at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp
contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a
new edge on their instruments. Oh! the outer world was ever the world
of charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat in that constrained and
humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to
his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing,
himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were
a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow
in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets
went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept
himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so
peremptorily called.

If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty,
mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the
post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much
alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from
the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old
lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple
for hue, with eyebrows arching high in a perpetual surprise at so
hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was
suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but
one at a time. Marget Maclean’s little shop was the dullest in the
street, but it was the anteroom of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed
books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of
them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer
through her glasses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the
book she thought most suited for her customer.

“You will find that a good one,” she would say. “The one you mention
is not at all good; it was very fashionable last spring, but it is not
asked for now at all.” And in proof that the volume she recommended
was quite genteel, she would add: “That one was up at the Castle last
Saturday. Lady Charlotte’s maid, you will notice, wet all the pages
crying over the places where the lover went to sea another voyage. It
is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not
remember what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not
recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great
deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice
in a book.”

“You have none of Mr. Scott’s poetry?” asked Gilian one day, moved
thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars.

“Scott, Scott,” said Miss Marget. “Now let me think, my dear.”

She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bobbed behind her
ears as she tilted up her head and glanced along the shelves for what
she knew was not there.

“No, my boy,” she said. “We have none of Mr. Scott’s works at present.
There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but,” here
she frowned slightly, “I do not think you are old enough for poetry.
It is too romantic, and--it lingers in the memory. I have not read him
myself though I hear he is clever--in a way. I would not say that I
object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him to my young customers.”

So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The
Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea
without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the
granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood
within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and
streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up
the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round
the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge
with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be
the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” “Moll Flanders,” or
“Belinda,” the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but
no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea
was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in
fancy by many pages. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his
imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling
below or beating in petulant waves and he floated, as it were, between
sea and sky, as free from earth’s clogging influence as the gannet that
soared above.

He sought the Ramparts because for a boy of his age to read in books,
except as a task of the school, was something shameful; and he had been
long accustomed to the mid-air trip upon the walls ere some other boys
discovered him guilty, flushing and trembling with a story book in his
hand. They looked with astonishment at their discovery and were prepared
to jeer when his wits came to his rescue. He tore out one or two leaves
of the book, twisted them into a rough semblance of a boat and cast them
in the water.

“Watch,” said he, “you’ll see the big ones are sunk sooner than the
little ones.”

“Do not tear the good book,” said one of the boys, Young Islay, shocked,
or pretending to be so, at the destruction.

“Oh! it’s only a stupid story,” said Gilian, tearing again at the
treasure, with an agony that could have been no greater had it been his
heart. He had to forego many books from Marget Maclean to make up for
this one, but at least he had escaped the irony of his companions.

Yet not books were his first lovers and friends and teachers, so much as
the creatures of the wild, and the aspects of nature. Often the Dominie
missed him from his accustomed place at the foot of the class, and there
was no explanation to offer when he returned. He had suffered again the
wood’s fascination. In the upper part of the glen he had been content
with little clumps and plantings, the caldine woods of Kincreggan or the
hazels whereof the shepherds made their crooks. But the forest lay for
miles behind the town, a great land of shade and pillars where the winds
roved and tangled. It abounded in wild life, and sounded ever in spring
and summer with songs and cries. Into its glades he would wander and
stand delirious to the solitude, tingling to the wild. The dim vistas
about him had no affrights; he was at home, he was the child of the
tranquil, the loving mother, whose lap is the pasture-land and forest.
Autumn fills those woods with the very breath of melancholy, no birds
will sing in the multitudinous cloisters except the birds of the night
whose melody is one doleful and mocking note. The bracken burns and
withers, lush grass rots and whitens above the fir-roots, the birds flit
from shade to shade with no carolling. And over all will stand the trees
sleeping with their heads a-nod.

He would walk among the noisy fallen leaves, posturing the heroes of his
reading or his own imagination about him in the landscape--a pleasant
recreation. He would set Bruce the king himself sitting at a cave-mouth,
a young gentleman with a queue like Turner’s, pondering upon freedom,
while the spiders wrought for his instruction; deer breaking from covert
to dash away, or moving in stately herds across the forest openings,
became a foreign cavalry. Sometimes he would take a book to the upper
hunting-roads, where rarely any intrusion came except from some gillie
or fisher of the lochs far back in the moors, and stretched on dry
bracken he would read and dream for hours.

It was in such an attitude Young Islay found him on the Saturday after
the episode on the Ramparts. Gilian was in the midst of the same book,
trying hard to fill up the gaps that his sacrifice of leaves had brought
into the narrative, and Young Islay going a-fishing in the moor-lochs,
a keen sportsman all alone, stood over him a very much surprised
discoverer.

He gave an halloo that brought Gilian to his feet alarmed, for it
happened to fit in with some passage in his mind where foes cried. In
vain the book went behind the Paymaster’s boy; Islay saw the ragged
pages.

“Oh!” he cried, “you’ll not cheat me this time; you’re reading.” An
annoying contempt was in his manner, and as he stood with his basket
slung upon his back, and his rod in the crook of an arm, like a gun,
a straight, sturdy lad of neat limb, a handsome face, and short black
curls, he was, for a moment, more admirable in Gilian’s eyes than the
hero of the book he was ashamed to show.

“I had it in my pocket,” said Gilian, in a poor, ineffective
explanation, relinquishing the volume with a grudge to the examination
of this cynic.

“You pretended on the Ramparts you were tearing it up like any other
boy,” said Young Islay, “and I was sure you were doing nothing of the
kind.” He turned over the pages with scornful fingers. “It’s not a
school-book, there’s not a picture in it, it’s full of talking--fancy
being here with that rubbish, when you might be fishing with me!”

Gilian snatched the volume from him. “You don’t know anything about it!”
 he cried.

“I know _you_ at any rate,” said Young Islay craftily. “You were ashamed
of your book; you come here often with books; you do nothing like
anybody else; you should have been a girl!”

All the resentment of the Paymaster’s boy sprung to his head at this
taunt; he threw the book down and dashed a small fist in Young Islay’s
face. There he found a youth not slow to reply. Down went the rod and
the book, and with the fishing-basket swinging and beating at his back,
Young Islay fell upon the zealous student. Gilian’s arms, as he defended
or aimed futile blows, felt, in a little, as heavy as lead. Between
each blow he aimed there seemed to be a great space of time, and yet his
enemy was striking with rapidity.

“Are you beaten?” at last cried Young Islay, drawing back for a truce.

“No,” said Gilian, gasping. “I’m only tired,’’ but he looked bloody and
vanquished.

“It’s the same thing,” said Young Islay, picking up his rod. “You can
do nothing with your hands; I--I can do anything.” And he drew up with a
bantam’s vanity. He moved off. The torn book was in his path. He kicked
it before him like a football until he reached the ditch beside the
hunting road, and there he left it. A little later Gilian saw him in a
distant vista of the trees as an old hunter of the wood, with a gun
in his hand and his spoil upon his back, breasting the brae with long
strides, a figure of achievement altogether admirable.




CHAPTER X--ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE

Marget Maclean (or one of her sisters) was accustomed when the mails
contained a letter on His Majesty’s Service for the Paymaster, to put
on a bonnet, and in a mild flurry cross the street, feeling herself a
sharer in the great matters of State. So important was the mission
that she had been known even to shut her shop door for the time of
her absence upon eager and numerous youths waiting the purchase of her
superior “black man,” a comfit more succulent with her than with Jenny
Anderson in Crombie’s Land, or on older patrons seeking the hire of the
new sensation in literature--something with a tomb by Mrs. Radcliffe.

“Tell your mistress I wish to see her,” she would say on these occasions
with great pomp to Peggy, but even Miss Mary was not sufficiently close
to State to be entrusted with the missive. “Goodday, Miss Campbell, I
called to see Captain John on important business,” and the blue document
with its legend and seal would be clutched with mittened hands tight to
the faded bodice.

Miss Mary shared some of this awe for State documents; at least she
helped out the illusion that they were worth all this anxiety on the
part of the post-office, and she would call the Paymaster from
his breakfast. His part on the other hand was to depreciate their
importance. He would take the most weighty and portentous with an air of
contempt.

“What’s this, Miss Maclean?” he would say impatiently with the
snuff-pinch suspended between his pocket and his nose. “A king’s letter.
Confound the man! what can he be wanting now?” Then with a careless
forefinger he would break the seal and turn the paper outside in,
heedless (to all appearance) as if it were an old copy of the _Courier_.

One day such a letter sent his face flaming as he returned to the
breakfast table. He looked at Miss Mary, sitting subdued behind her urn
and Gilian at her side, and then at his brothers, hardly yet awake
in the early morning, whose breakfasts in that small-windowed room it
needed two or three candles to illuminate.

“The county corps is coming south this way,” said he, with a great
restraint upon his feelings.

Cornal Colin turned on him a lustreless eye.

“What havers are you on now, John?” said he, with no pause in the
supping of his porridge. Dugald paid no heed. With a hand a little
palsied he buttered a scone, and his lower lip was dropped and his eyes
were vacant, showing him far absent in the spirit. Conversation was
never very rife at the Paymaster’s breakfast table.

“I’m telling you the county corps is coming south,” said Mars, with what
for him to the field officer was almost testiness. “Here’s a command for
billeting three hundred men on Friday night on their way to Dumbarton.”

Up stood the Cornal with a face transfigured. He stretched across the
table and almost rudely clutched the paper from his brother’s hand, cast
a fast glance at the contents and superscription, then sat again and
gave a little choked cheer, the hurrah of spent youth and joyfulness.
“Curse me! but it’s true,” he cried to the General. “The old 91st under
Crawford--Jiggy Crawford we called him for his dance in the ken at
Madrid before he exchanged--Friday, Friday; where’s my uniform, Mary?
They’ll be raw recruits, I’ll warrant, not the old stuff, but--are you
hearing, Dugald? Oh! the Army, the Army! Let me see--yes, it says six
pipers and thirty band. My medals, Mary, are they in the shuttle of my
kist yet? The 91st--God! I wish it was our own; would I not show them!
You are not hearing a word I am saying, Dugald.”

He paused in a feverish movement in his chair, thrust off from him
with a clatter of dishes and a spilling of milk the breakfast still
unfinished, and stared with annoyance at the General. Dugald picked at
his fish with no appetite, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, a silent old
man palsied on one side, with a high bald head full of visions. “What’s
that about the Argyls?” he said at last, with a start, brought to by the
tone and accent of his brother.

Cornal Colin cleared his throat, and read the notification of the billet

“Friday, did you say Friday?” asked Dugald, all abstraction gone.

“This very Friday.”

The old man rose and threw back his shoulders with some of the gallantry
of his prime. He walked without a word to the window and looked at the
deserted street. Ten--fifteen--twenty years fell from his back as thus
he stood in the mingled light of the wan reluctant morning and the
guttering candles on the table. To Miss Mary, looking at him there
against the morning light, his figure--black and indefinite--was the
figure that went to Spain, the strong figure, the straight figure, the
figure that filled its clothes with manliness. There was but the oval
of the bald high head to spoil the illusion. He turned again and looked
into the candle-lit room, but seeing nothing there, for all his mind was
elsewhere.

“I thought,” he muttered, brokenly, “I thought I would never see
red-coat again.” Then he straightened his shoulders anew, and flexed the
sinews of his knees, and pressed the palsied hand against the breeches’
seam. The exertion brought a cough to his throat, a choking resistless
cough of age and clogging humours. It was Time’s mocking reminder that
the morning parade was over for ever, and now the soldier must be at
ease. He gasped and spluttered, his figure lost its tenseness, and from
the fit of coughing he came back again an old and feeble man. He looked
at his hand trembling against his waist, at his feet in their large and
clumsy slippers; he looked at the picture of himself upon the wall, then
quitted the room with something like a sob upon his lip.

“Man! he’s in a droll key about it!” said the Paymaster, breaking the
silence. “What in all the world is his vexation?”

Miss Mary put down her handkerchief impatiently and loaded Gilian at her
side with embarrassing attentions.

“What--in--all--the--world--is--his vexation?” mocked the Cornal in the
Captain’s high and squeaking voice, reddening at the face and his
scar purpling. “That’s a terribly stupid question to put, Jock.
What--in--all--the--world--is--his--vexation? If you had the soger’s
heart and your brother’s past you would not be asking what an ancient’s
sorrow at his own lost strength might mean. Oh, man, man! make a
pretence at spirit even if the Almighty denied it to you!”

He tossed the letter from him, almost in his brother’s face.

The Paymaster held his anger in leash. He was incapable of comprehending
and he was, too, afraid. With a forced laugh, he pressed the creases
from the document.

“Oh, I’m glad enough to see the corps,” said he, “if that’s what you
mean. If I have not your honours from the Army, I’m as fond of Geordie’s
uniform as any man of my years. I’ll get the best billets in the town
for----”

The Cornal scowled and interjected, “Ay, ay, and you’ll make all the
fraca that need be about the lads, and cock your hat to the fife, and
march and act the veteran as if you were Moore himself, but you’ll
be far away from knowing what of their pomp and youth is stirring the
hearts of your brother Dugald and me. The Army is all bye for us, Jock,
Boney’s by the heels; there’s younger men upon the roster if the foreign
route is called again in the barrack yard.”

His glance fell upon Gilian, wide-eyed, wonderful, in the shade beside
Miss Mary’s chair, and he turned to him with a different accent.

“There _you_ are!” said he, “my wan-faced warlock. What would Colin
Campbell, Commander of the Bath, not give to be your age again and all
the world before him? Do you say your prayers at night, laddie, before
you go to your naked bed in the garret? I’ll warrant Mary taught you
that if she taught you nothing else. Pray every night then that Heaven
may give you thew and heart and a touch of the old Hielan’ glory that
this mechanic body by my side has got through the world wanting. Oh,
laddie, laddie, what a chance is yours! To hear the drum in the morning
and see the sun glint on the line; to sail away and march with pipe or
bugle in foreign countries; to have a thousand good companions round
about the same camp-fires and know the lift and splendour of parades in
captured towns. It’s all bye for me; I’m an old pensioner rotting to the
tomb in a landward burgh packed with relics like myself, and as; God’s
in heaven, I often wish I was with brother Jamie yonder fallen in my
prime with a clod stopping the youth and spirit in my throat.”

“Tut, tut, now we’re in our flights!” said the Paymaster, not very
audibly, so that in his transport the Cornal never heard.

“_Are_ you for the Army?” asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant
bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed
Gilian with an eye there was no baffling.

“I would--I would like it fine,” said Gilian stammering, “if it was all
like that.”

“Like what?” asked the Cornal, subdued, and a hand behind his ear to
listen.

“Like that--” repeated the boy, trembling though Miss Mary’s fingers
were on his. “All the morning time, all with trumpets and the same
friends about the camp-fire. Always the lift inside and the notion to go
on and on and----”

He stopped for want of English words to tell the sentiment completely.

The Cornal looked at him now wistfully.

“I would not say, Gilian,” said he, “but what there might be the makings
of a soger in you yet. If you have not the sinews for it you have
the sense. You’ll see a swatch on Friday of what I talked about and
we’ll--Come away this minute, Mary, and look me out my uniform. Jiggy
Crawford! Young Jiggy that danced in the booze-house in Madrid! He was
Ensign then and now he has his spurs and handles tartan. He is at the
very topmost of the thing and I am going down, down, down, out, out,
out, like this, and this, and this,” and so saying he pinched out the
candle flames one by one. The morning swept into the room, no longer
with a rival, lighting up this parlour of old people, showing the
wrinkles and the grey hairs and the parchment-covered knuckles, and in
its midst the Paymaster’s boy with a transfigured face and a head full
of martial glory.




CHAPTER XI--THE SOUND OF THE DRUM

And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian
up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the
town about him in a ferment of anticipation? In our sleeping community
we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the
people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs
made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in
the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room
of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their
midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down
the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working
for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open
windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs.

He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor’s door. Old
Islay came out with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow.

“What is wrong in the place to-day?” asked his Grace with a flourish of
his crop about him to the lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern
doors. “Am I paying good day’s wages for the like of that?”

Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. “It’s the coming of the army,” said
he. “The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day.
They would not do a hand’s turn for an emperor.”

“Humph!” said Duke George. “I wish I could throw off life’s
responsibilities so easily. The rogues! the rogues!” he mused, soothing
his horse’s neck with a fine and kindly hand. “I suppose it’s in
them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances.
My father--well, well, let them be.” His heels turned the horse in a
graceful curvet “I’m saying, Islay,” he cried over his shoulder, “have a
free cask or two at the Cross in the morning.”

But it was in the Paymaster’s house that the fullest stress, the most
nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster’s
snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as
he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited
half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who
smiled behind his back. His brothers’ slumbers in the silent parlour had
been utterly destroyed till “Me-the-day!” Miss Mary had to cry at last
when her maid brought back untasted viands, “I wish the army was never
to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a
respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the
better for this.”

All this excitement sustained the tremulous feeling at the boy’s
heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier’s
experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in
a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered
to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as
he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though
sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his
familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal’s character
suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a
pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till
she cried “The man’s doited!” though she clearly liked it; to Gilian he
began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales.

Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero.
It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d’Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to
the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry “Well
done!”; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at
Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain
in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every “whe--e--et” of the
bullets at his ear bringing the moment’s alarm to his teeth in a checked
sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams,
to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the
battle-lines upon the page--the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the
blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge
and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of
Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting,
commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly
embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and
he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the
master’s desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the
vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.

Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled
down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.

“At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?” said the dominie a little
bitterly, a little humorously. “And what might it be this time?”

“Sogers,” said the boy most red and awkward.

“Ay, ay,” said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him
with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. “Soldiers is it? And the
playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind.
Soldiers! H’m! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in
vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you’re going to
meet Captain Campbell’s most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade
early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts.
Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a
boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of
heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and--my work’s hopeless.
Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act
to-day you’ll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better
and--and--I maybe wished for worse.”

That night Gilian went to bed in his garret while yet the daylight was
abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the
garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the
soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.

He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up
to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay
guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and
unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat
up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was
nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he
had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was
again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in
veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable.
The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more
the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that
throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in
darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering
to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the
approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family
of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of
his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.

The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down
the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that
dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have
been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the
Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and
the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the
causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of
them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as
he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor’s corner there to stand
awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There
was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a
beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the
drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the
drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited
whispering, afraid like the Paymaster’s boy to shatter the charm of
that delightful terror. Then of a sudden the town roared and shook to
a twofold rattle of the skins and the shrill of fifes as the corps
from the north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept
through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick
of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he
should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through
the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying
no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the
darkness to the rattle of the drums? The drums, the drums, the drums!
Gilian stood entranced as they passed, looming large and innumerable in
the darkness, unchallenged and uncheered by the bewildered citizens. It
was the very entrance he could have chosen. For now they were ghosts,
legions of the air in borrowed boots of the earth, shades of some army
cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal’s bloodiest
stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did
not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving
in to strike it at the vitals.




CHAPTER XII--ILLUSION

He followed them to the square, still with the drums pounding and the
fifes shrilling, and now the town was awake in every window. At a word
the Colonel on his horse dispelled the illusion. “Halt!” he cried; the
drum and fife ceased, the arms grounded, the soldiers clamoured for
their billets. Over the hill of Strone the morning paled, out of
the gloom the phantom body came a corps most human, thirsty, hungry,
travel-strained.

Gilian ran home and found the household awake but unconscious of the
great doings in the town.

“What!” cried the Cornal, when he heard the news. “They came here this
morning and this is the first we have of it.” He was in a fever of
annoyance. “Dugald, Dugald, are you hearing? The Army’s in the town, it
moved in when we were snoring and only the boy heard it. I hope Jiggy
Crawford does not make it out a black affront to him that we were not
there to welcome him. My uniform, Mary, my uniform, it should be aired
and ironed, and here at my hand, and I’ll warrant it’s never out of the
press yet. It was the boy that heard the drums; it was you that heard
the drums, Gilian. Curse me, but I believe you’ll make a soger yet!”

For the next few days, Gilian felt he must indeed be the soldier the
Paymaster would make him, for soldiering was in the air. The red-coats
gaily filled the street; parade and exercise, evening dance and the
continuous sound of pipe and drum left no room for any other interest in
life. Heretofore there was ever for the boy in his visions of the Army a
background of unable years and a palsied hand, slow decay in a parlour,
with every zest and glamour gone. But here in the men who stepped always
to melody there was youth, seemingly a singular enjoyment of life, and
watching them he was filled with envy.

When the day came that they must go he was inconsolable though he made
no complaint. They went in the afternoon by the lowlands road that bends
about the upper bay skirting the Duke’s flower gardens, and with the
Cornal and the Paymaster he went to see them depart, the General left
at home in his parlour, unaccountably unwilling to say good-bye. The
companies moved in a splendour of sunshine with their arms bedazzling to
look upon, their pipers playing “Bundle and Go.”

“Look at the young one!” whispered the Cornal in his brother’s ear,
nudging him to attention. Gilian was walking in step to the corps, his
shoulders hack, his head erect, a hazel switch shouldered like a musket.
But it was the face of him that most compelled attention for it revealed
a multitude of emotions. His fancy ran far ahead of the tramping force
thudding the dust on the highway. He was now the Army’s child
indeed, stepping round the world to a lilt of the bagpipes, with the
_currachd_--the caul of safety--as surely his as it was Black Duncan the
seaman’s. There were battles in the open, and leaguering of towns,
but his was the enchanted corps moving from country to country through
victory, and always the same comrades were about the camp-fire at night.
Now he was the foot-man, obedient, marching, marching, marching, all
day, while the wayside cottars wondered and admired; now he was the
fugleman, set before his company as the example of good and honest and
handsome soldiery; now he was Captain--Colonel--General, with a horse
between his knees, his easy body swaying in the saddle as he rode among
the villages and towns. The friendly people ran (so his fancy continued)
to their close-mouths to look upon his regiment passing to the roll and
thunder of the drums and the cheery music of the pipes. Long days of
march and battle, numerous nights of wearied ease upon the heather, if
heather there should be, the applause of citadels, the smile of girls.
The smile of girls! It came on him, that, with a rush of blood to his
face and a strange tingling at the heart as the one true influence to
make the soldier. For what should the soldier wander but to come again
home triumphant, and find on the doorstep of his native place the
smiling girls?

“Look at him, look at him!” cried the Cornal again with a nudge at his
brother’s arm. They were walking over the bridge and the pipes still
were at their melody. Jiggy Crawford’s braid shone like moving torches
at his shoulder as the sun smote hot upon his horse and him. The trees
upon the left leaned before the breeze to share this glory; far-off
the lonely hills, the great and barren hills, were melancholy that they
could not touch closer on the grandeur of man. As it were in a story of
the shealings, the little ones of the town and wayside houses pattered
in the rear of the troops, enchanted, their bare legs stretching to the
rhythm of the soldiers’ footsteps, the children of hope, the children
of illusion and desire, and behind them, sad, weary, everything
accomplished, the men who had seen the big wars and had many times
marched thus gaily and were now no more capable.

“It is the last we’ll ever see of it, John,” said the Cornal. “Oh, man,
man, if I were young again!” His foot was very heavy and slow as he
followed the last he would witness of what had been his pride; his
staff, that he tried to carry like a sword, roust go down now and then
to seek a firmness in the sandy foot-way. Not for long at a time but in
frequent flashes of remembrance he would throw back his shoulders and
lift high his head and step out in time to the music.

The Paymaster walked between him and Gilian, a little more robust and
youthful, altogether in a different key, a key critical, jealous of the
soldier lads that now he could not emulate. They were smart enough, he
confessed, but they were not what the 46th had been; Crawford had a good
carriage on his horse but--but--he was not----

“Oh, do not haver, Jock,” said the Cornal, angrily at last; “do
not haver! They are stout lads, good lads enough, like what we were
ourselves when first the wars summoned us, and Crawford, as he sits
there, might very well be Dugald as I saw him ride about the bend of the
road at San Sebastian and look across the sandy bay to see the rock we
had to conquer. Let you and me say nothing that is not kind, Colin; have
we not had our own day of it with the best? and no doubt when we were at
the marching there were ancients on the roadside to swear we were never
their equal. They are in there in the grass and bracken where you and
I must some day join them and young lads still will be marching out to
glory.”

“In there among the grass and bracken,” thought Gilian, turning a moment
to look up the slope that leads to Kilmalieu. The laurel drugged the
air with death’s odour. “In the grasses and the bracken,” said Gilian,
singing it to himself as if it were a coronach. Was that indeed the end
of it all, of the hope, the lilt, the glory? And then he had a great
pity for the dead that in their own time had been on many a march
like this. Their tombs are thick in Kilmalieu. It seemed so cruel,
so heedless, so taunting thus to march past them with no obeisance or
remembrance, that to them, the dead soldiers, all his heart went out,
and he hated the quick who marched upon the highway.

But Crawford, like the best that have humour, had pity and pathos too.
“Slow march!” he cried to his men, and the pipers played “Lochaber No
More.”

“He’s punctilious in his forms,” said the Paymaster, “but it’s
thoughtful of him too.”

“There was never but true _duine uasail_ put on the tartan of Argyll,”
 said the Cornal.

The pipes ceased; the drums beat again, echoing from the Sgornach rock
and the woody caverns of Blaranbui, Glenshira filled to the lip with
rolling thunder, the sea lulled to a whisper on the shore. Gilian and
the children were now all that were left to follow the soldiers, for the
oldsters had cheered feebly and gone back. And as he walked close up on
the rear of the troops, his mind was again on the good fortune of those
that from warfare must return. To come home after long years, and go up
the street so well acquaint, sitting bravely on his horse, paled in
the complexion somewhat from a wound, perhaps with the scar of it as
perpetual memorial, and to behold pity and pride in the look of them
that saw him! It would be such a day as this, he chose, with the sun
upon his braid and the sheen upon his horse’s neck. The pipers would
play merrily and yet with a melancholy too, and so crowded the causeways
by the waiting community that even the windows must be open to their
overflowing.

And as thus he walked and dreamt saying no word to any of the chattering
bairns about him he was truly the Army’s child. The Paymaster was right,
and generous to choose for him so fine a calling; the Cornal made
no error, the soldier’s was the life for youth and spirit. He had
no objection now to all their plans for his future, the Army was his
choice.

It was then, at the Boshang Gate that leads to Dhuloch, Maam, Kilblaan
and all the loveliness of Shira Glen, that even his dreaming eyes found
Nan the girl within the gates watching the soldiers pass. Her face was
flushed with transport, her little shoes beat time to the tread of the
soldiers. They passed with a smile compelled upon their sunburnt faces,
to see her so sweet, so beautiful, so sensible to their glory. And
there was among them an ensign, young, slim, and blue-eyed; he wafted
a vagabond kiss as he passed, blowing it from his finger-tips as he
marched in the rear of his company. She tossed her hair from her temples
as the moon throws the cloud apart and beamed brightly and merrily and
sent him back his symbol with a daring charm.

Gilian’s dream of the Army fled. At the sight of Nan behind the Boshang
Gate he was startled to recognise that the girls he had thought of
as smiling on the soldier’s return had all the smile of this one, the
nut-brown hair of this one, her glance so fearless and withal so kind
and tender. At once the roll of the drums lost its magic for his ear;
a caprice of sun behind a fleck of cloud dulled the splendour of the
Colonel’s braid; Gilian lingered at the gate and let the soldiers go
their way.

For a little the girl never looked at him as he stood there with
the world (all but her, perhaps) so commonplace and dull after the
splendours of his mind. Her eyes were fixed upon the marching soldiers
now nearing the Gearron and about her lips played the smile of wonder
and pleasure.

At last the drumming ceased as the soldiers entered the wood of Strone,
still followed by the children. In the silence that fell so suddenly,
the country-side seemed solitary and sad. The great distant melancholy
hills were themselves again with no jealousy of the wayside trees
dreaming on their feet as they swayed in the lullaby wind. Nan turned
with a look yet enraptured and seemed for the first time to know the boy
was there on the other side of the gate alone.

“Oh!” she said, with the shudder of a woman’s delight in her accent. “I
wish I were a soldier.”

“It might be good enough to be one,” he answered, in the same native
tongue her feeling had made her choose unconsciously to express itself.

“But this is the worst of it,” she said, pitifully; “I am a girl, and
Sandy is to be the soldier though he was too lazy to come down the glen
to-day to see them away, and I must stay at home and work at samplers
and seams and bake bannocks.”

With wanton petulant fingers she pulled the haws from the hedge beside
her, and took a strand of her hair between her teeth and bit it in her
reverie of wilfulness.

“Perhaps,” said Gilian, coming closer, “it is better to be at home and
soldiering in your mind instead of marching and fighting.” It was a
thought that came to him in a flash and must find words, but somehow he
felt ashamed when he had uttered them.

“I do not understand you a bit,” said Nan, with a puzzled look in her
face. “Oh, you mean to pretend to yourself,” she added immediately.
“That might be good enough for a girl, but surely it would no

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/22211