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 alusus 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 knowyouat 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.
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 theCourier.
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.
“Thereyouare!” 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.
“Areyou 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.
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.
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 thecurrachd—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 trueduine uasailput 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 not be good enough for you. You are to be a soldier, my father says, and he laughs as if it were something droll.”
“It is not droll at all,” said Gilian stammering, very much put out. “There are three old soldiers in our house and——”
“One of them Captain Mars, Captain Mars, Who never saw scars!” said the girl mischievously, familiar with the town’s song. “I hope you do not think of being a soldier like Mars. Perhaps that is what my father laughs at when he says the Paymaster is to make you a soldier.”
“Oh, that!” said Gilian, a little relieved. “I thought you were thinking I would not be man enough for a soldier.”
Nan opened the gate and came out to measure herself beside him. “You’re a little bigger than I am,” said she, somewhat regretfully. “Perhaps you will be big enough for a soldier. But what about that when you think you would sooner stay at home and pretend, than go with the army? Did you see the soldier who kissed his hand to me? The liberty!” And she laughed with odd gaiety as if her mood resented the soldier’s freedom.
“He was very thin and little,” said Gilian, enviously.
“I thought he was quite big enough,” said Nan promptly, “and he was so good-looking!”
“Was he?” asked Gilian gloomily. “Well, he was not like the Cornal or the General. They were real soldiers and have seen tremendous wars.”
“I daresay,” said Nan, “but no more than my father. I cannot but wonder at you; with the chance to be a soldier like my father or—or the General, being willing to sit at home pretending or play-acting it in school or——”
“I did not say I would prefer it,” said the boy; “I only said it could be done.”
“I believe you would sooner do it that way than the other,” she said, standing back from him, and looking with shrewd scrutiny. “Oh, I don’t like the kind of boy you are.”
“Except when you are singing, and then you like to have me listening because I understand,” said Gilian, smiling with pleasure at his own astuteness.
She reddened at his discovery and then laughed in some confusion. “You are thinking of the time I sang in the cabin to Black Duncan. You looked so white and curious sitting yonder in the dark, I could have stopped my song and laughed.”
“You could not,” he answered quite boldly, “because your eyes were——”
“Never mind that,” said she abruptly. “I was not speaking of singing or of eyes, but I’m telling you I like men, men, men, the kind of men who do things, brave things, hard things, like soldiers. Oh, I wish I was the soldier who kissed his hand to me! What is pretending and thinking? I can do that in a way at home over my sampler or my white seam. But to be commanding, and fighting the enemies of the country, to be good with the sword and the gun and strong with a horse, like my father!”
“I have seen your father,” said Gilian. “That is the kind of soldier I would like to be.” He said so, generously, with some of the Highland flauery; he said so meaning it, for Turner the bold, the handsome, the adventurer, the man with years of foreign life in mystery, was always the ideal soldier of Brooks’ school.
“You are a far nicer boy than I thought you were,” said she enjoying the compliment. “Only—only—I think when you can pretend so much to yourself you cannot so well do the things you pretend. You can be soldiering in your mind so like the real thing that you may never go soldiering at all. And of course that would not be the sort of soldier my father is.”
A mellowed wail of the bagpipe came from Strone, the last farewell of the departing soldiers; it was but a moment, then was gone. The wind changed from the land, suddenly the odours of the traffics of peace blew familiarly, the scents of gathered hay and the more elusive perfume of yellowing corn. A myriad birds, among them the noisy rooks the blackest and most numerous, sped home. In the bay the skiffs spread out their pinions, the halyards singing in the blocks, the men ye-hoing. For a space the bows rose and fell, lazy, reluctant to be moving in their weary wrestle with the sea, then tore into the blue and made a feather of white. Gilian looked at them and saw them the birds of night and sea, the birds of prey, the howlets of the brine, flying large and powerful throughout the under-sky that is salt and swinging and never lit by moon or star. And as the boats followed each other out of the bay, a gallant company, the crews leaned on tiller or on mast and sang their Gaeliciorramsthat ever have the zest of the oar, the melancholy of the wave.
As it were in a pious surrender to the influence of the hour, he and the girl walked slowly, silently, by the wayside, busy with their own imaginings. They were all alone.
Beyond the Boshang Gate is an entrance to the policies, the parks, the gardens, of the Duke, standing open with a welcome, a trim roadway edged with bush and tree. Into it Nan and Gilian walked, almost heedless, it might seem, of each other’s presence, she plucking wild flowers as she went from bush to bush, humming the refrain of the fishers’ songs, he with his eyes wide open looking straight before him yet with some vague content to have her there for his companion.
When they spoke again they were in the cloistered wood, the sea hidden by the massive trees.
“I will show you my heron’s nest,” said Gilian, anxious to add to the riches the ramble would confer on her.
She was delighted. Gilian at school had the reputation of knowing the most wonderful things of the woods, and few were taken into his confidence.
He led her a little from the path to the base of a tall tree with its trunk for many yards up as bare as a pillar.
“There it is,” he said, pointing upward to a knot of gathered twigs swaying in the upper branches.
“Oh! is it so high as that?” she cried, with disappointment. “What is the use of showing me that? I cannot see the inside and the birds.”
“But there are no birds now,” said Gilian; “they are flown long ago. Still I’m sure you can easily fancy them there. I see them quite plainly. There are three eggs, green-blue like the sky up the glen, and now—now there are three grey hairy little birds with tufts on their heads. Do you not see their beaks opening?”
“Of course I don’t,” said Nan impatiently, straining her eyes for the tree-top. “If they are all flown how can I see them?”
Gilian was disappointed with her. “But you think you see them, you think very hard,” he said, “and if you think very hard they will be there quite true.”
Nan stamped her foot angrily. “You are daft,” said she. “I don’t believe you ever saw them yourself.”
“I tell you I did,” he protested hotly.
“Were you up the tree?” she pressed, looking him through with eyes that then and always wrenched the prosaic truth from him.
He flushed more redly than in his eagerness of showing the nest, his eyes fell, he stammered.
“Well,” said he, “I did not climb the tree. What is the good when I know what is there? It is a heron’s nest.”
“But there might have been no eggs and no birds in it at all,” she argued.
“That’s just it,” said he eagerly. “Lots of boys would be for climbing and finding that out, and think how vexatious it would be after all that trouble! I just made the eggs and the young ones out of my own mind, and that is far better.”
At the innocence of the explanation Nan laughed till the woods rang. Her brown hair fell upon her neck and brow, the flowers tumbled at her feet all mingled and beautiful as if summer has been raining on its queen. A bird rose from the thicket, chuck-chucking in alarm, then fled, trailing behind him a golden chain of melody.