I think that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and girl so enviable in their innocence and happiness. Gilian knelt and gathered up the flowers. It was, perhaps, more to hide his vexation than from courtesy that he did so, but the act was so unboylike, so deferring in its manner, that it restored to Nan as much of her good humour as her laughter had not brought back with it. As he lifted the flowers and put them together, there seemed to come from the fresh lush stalks of them some essence of the girl whose hands had culled and grasped them, a feeling of her warm palm. And when handing her the re-gathered flowers he felt the actual touch of her fingers, his head for a second swam. He wondered. For in the touch there had been something even more potent and pleasing than in the mother-touch of Miss Mary’s hand that day when first he came to the town, the mother-touch that revealed a world not of kindness alone—for that was not new, he had it from the little old woman whose face was like a nut—but of understanding and sympathy.
“Have you any more wonders to show?” said Nan, now all in the humour of adventure.
“Nothing you would care for,” he said. “There are lots of places just for thinking at, but——”
“I would rather them to be places to be seeing at,” said Nan.
Gilian reflected, and “You know the Lady’s Linn?” he said.
She nodded.
“Well,” said he. “Do you know the story of it, and why it is called the Lady’s Linn?”
Nan confessed her ignorance; but a story—oh, that was good enough!
“Come to the Linn and I’ll show you the place, then,” said Gilian, and he led her among the grasses, among the tall commanding brackens, upon the old moss that gave no whisper to the footfall, so that, for the nymphs among the trees, the pair of them might be comrades too, immortal. A few moments brought them to the Linn, a deep pool in the river bend, lying so calm that the blue field of heaven and its wisps of cloud astray like lambs were painted on its surface. Round about, the banks rose steep, magnificent with flowers.
“See,” said Gilian, pointing to the reflection at their feet. “Does it not look like a piece of the sky tumbled among the grasses? I sometimes think, to see it like that, that to fall into it would be to tangle with the stars.”
Nan only laughed and stooped to lift a stone.
She threw it into the very midst of the pool, and the mirror of the heavens was shattered.
“I never thought I could throw into the sky so far,” she said mischievously, pleased as it seemed to spoil the illusion in so sudden and sufficient a manner.
“Oh!” he cried, pained to the quick, “you should not have done that, it will spoil the story.”
“What is the story?” she said, sitting and looking down upon the troubled pool.
“You must wait till the water is calm again,” said he, seating himself a little below her on the bank, and watching the water-rings subside. Then when the pool had regained its old placidity, with the flecked sky pictured on it, he began his Gaelic story.
“Once upon a time,” said he, in the manner of the shealing tales, “there was a lady with eyes like the sea, and hair blowing like the tassel of the fir, and she was a daughter of the King in Knapdale, and she looked upon the world and she was weary. There came a little man to her from the wood and he said, ‘Go seven days, three upon water and four upon land, and you will come to a place where the moon’s sister swims, and there will be the earl’s son and the husband.’ The lady travelled seven days, three upon water and four upon land, and she came to the Linn where the sister of the moon was swimming. ‘Where is my earl’s son that is to be-my husband?’ she asked: and the moon’s sister said he was hunting in the two roads that lie below the river bed. The lady, who was the daughter of the King of Knapdale, shut her eyes that were like the sea, and tied in a cushion above her head her hair that was like the tassel of the fir, and broke the crystal door of dream and reached the two hunting roads in the bed of the river. ‘We are two brothers,’ said the watchers, standing at the end of the roads, ‘and we are the sons of earls.’ She thought and thought ‘I am Sir Sleep,’ said the younger. ‘And will you be true?’ said she. ‘Almost half the time, he answered. She thought and thought. ‘I am very weary,’ she said. ‘Then come with me,’ said the other, ‘I am the Older Brother.’ She heard above her the clanging at the door of dream as she went with the Older Brother. And she was happy for evermore.”
“Oh, that is a stupid story,” said Nan. “It’s not a true story at all. You could tell it to me anywhere, and why should we be troubled walking to the Linn?”
“Because this is the Lady’s Linn,” said Gilian, “and to be telling a story you must be putting a place in it or it will not sound true. And Gillesbeg Aotram who told me the story—”
“Gillesbeg Aotram!” she said in amaze. “He’s daft. If I thought it was a daft man’s story I had to hear I——”
“He’s not daft at all,” protested Gilian. “He’s only different from his neighbours.”
“That is being daft,” said she. “But it is a very clever tale and you tell it very well. You must tell me more stories. Do you know any more stories? I like soldier stories. My father tells me a great many.”
“The Cornal tells me a great many too,” said Gilian, “but they are all true, and they do not sound true, and I have to make them all up again in my own mind. But this is not the place for soldier stories; every place has its own kind of story, and this is the place for fairy stories if you care for them.”
“I like them well enough,” she answered dubiously, “though I like better the stories where people are doing things.”
They rose from their seat of illusion beside the Linn where the King of Knapdale’s daughter broke the gate of sleep and dream. They walked into the Duke’s flower garden. And now the day was done, the sun had gone behind Creag Dubh while they were sitting by the river; a grey-brown dusk wrapped up the country-side. The tall trees that were so numerous outside changed here to shorter darker foreign trees, and yews that never waved in winds, but seemed the ghosts of trees, to thickets profound, with secrets in their recesses. In and out among these unfamiliar growths walked Nan and her companion, their pathway crooking in a maze of newer wonders on either hand. One star peered from the sky, the faint wind of the afternoon had sunk to a hint of mingled and moving odours.
Gilian took the girl’s hand, and thus together they went deeper into the garden among the flowers that perfumed the air till it seemed drugged and heavy. They walked and walked in the maze of intersecting roads whose pebbles grated to the foot, and, so magic the place, there seemed no end to their journey.
Nan became alarmed. “I wish I had never come,” said she. “I want home.” And the tears were very close upon her eyes.
“Yes, yes,” said Gilian, leading her on through paths he had never seen before. “We will get out in a moment. I know—I think I know, the road. It is this way—no, it is this way—no, I am wrong.”
But he did not cease to lead her through the garden. The long unending rows of gay flowers stretching in the haze of evening, the parterres spread in gaudy patches, the rich revelation of moss and grass between the trees and shrubs were wholly new to him; they stirred to thrills of wonder and delight.
“Isn’t it fine, fine?” he asked her in a whisper lest the charm should fly.
She answered with a sob he did not hear, so keen his thrall to the enchantment. No sign of human habitation lay around except the gravelled walks; the castle towers were hid, the boat-strewn sea was on their left no more. Only the clumps of trees were there, the mossy grass, the flowers whose beauty and plenteousness mocked the posie in the girl’s hands. They walked now silent, expectant every moment of the exit that somehow baffled, and at last they came upon the noble lawn. It stretched from their feet into a remote encroaching eve, no trees beyond visible, no break in all its grey-green flatness edged on either hand by wood. And now the sky had many stars.
Their gravelled path had ceased abruptly; before them the lawn spread like a lake, and they were shy to venture on its surface.
“Let us go on; I must go home, I am far from home,” said Nan, in a trepidation, her flowers shed, her eyes moist with tears. And into her voice had come a strain of dependence on the boy, an accent more pleasing than any he had heard in her before.
“We must walk across there,” he said, looking at the far-off vague edge; but yet he made no move to meet the wishes of the girl now clinging to his arm.
“Come, come,” said she, and pressed him gently at the arm; but yet he stood dubious in the dusk.
“Are you afraid?” she asked, herself whispering, she could not tell why.
He felt his face burn at the reflection; he shook her hand off almost angrily. “Afraid!” said he. “Not I; what makes you think that? Only—only——” His eyes were staring at the lawn.
“Only what?” she whispered again, seeking his side for the comfort of his presence.
“It is stupid,” he confessed, shame in his accent, “but they say the fairies dance there, and I think we might be looking for another way.”
At the confession, Nan’s mood of fear that Gilian had conferred on her was gone. She drew back and laughed with as much heartiness as at his story of the heron’s nest. The dusk was all around and they were all alone, lost in a magic garden, but she forgot all in this new revelation of her companion’s strange belief. She turned and ran across the lawn, crying as she went, “Follow me, follow me!” and Gilian, all the ecstasy of that lingering moment on the edge of fancy gone, ran after her, feeling himself a child of dream, and her the woman made for action.
A sadden opening in the thicket revealed the shore, the highway, the quay with its bobbing lamps, the town with its upper windows lighted. At the gateway of the garden the Cornal met them, He was close on them in the dusk before he knew them, and seeing Gilian he peered closely in the girl face.
“Who’s this?” said he abruptly.
Gilian hesitated, vaguely fearing to reveal her identity, and Nan shrank back, all her memories of conversation in Maam telling her that here was an enemy.
Again the Cornal bent and looked more closely, lifting her chin up that he might see the better. She flashed a glance of defiance in his scarred old parchment face, and he drew his hand back as if he had been stung.
“Nan! Nan!” cried he, with a curious voice. “What witchery is this?” He was in a tremble, Then he started and laughed bitterly. “Oh no, not Nan!” said he. “Oh no, not Nan!” with the most rueful accent, almost chanting it as if it were a dirge.
“‘ItisNan,” said Gilian.
“It is her breathing image,” said the old man. “It is Nan, no doubt, but not the Nan I knew.”
She turned and sped home by the seaside, without farewell, alarmed at this oddity, and Gilian and the Cornal stood alone, the Cornal looking after her with a wistfulness in his very attitude.
“The same, the same, the very same!” said he to himself, in words the boy could plainly hear. “Her mother to the very defiance of her eye.” He clutched Gilian rudely by the shoulder. “What,” said he; “were you wandering about with that girl for? Answer me that. They told me you were off after the soldiers, and I came up here hoping it true. It would have been the daft but likeable cantrip I should have forgiven in any boy of mine; it would have shown some sign of a sogerly emprise. And here you are, with a lass wandering! Where were you?”
Gilian explained.
“In the flower garden? Ay! ay! A lassie on the roadside met your fancy more than Geordie’s men of war. Thank God, I was never like that! And Turner’s daughter above all! If she’s like her mother in her heart as she’s like her in the face, it might be a bitter notion for your future.”
He led the way home, muttering to himself. “Nan! Nan! It gave me the start! It was nearly a stroke for me! The same look about her! She is dead, dead and buried, and in her daughter she defies us still!”
Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot, her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by the lamp above the merchant’s door. When she saw her brother coming with Gilian she ran forward on the footway, caught the boy by the hand and drew him in.
“I am very angry, oh, I am terribly angry with you!” she cried. “Do not speak a word to me.” She pushed him into a chair and spread thick butter on a scone and thrust it in his hand. “To frighten us like this! The Captain is all over the town for you, and the General has sent men to drag for you about the quay.”
Peggy the maid smiled over her mistress’s shoulder at the youth. He ate his scone with great complacency, heartened by this token that something of Miss Mary’s vexation was assumed. Not perhaps her vexation—for were her eyes not red as with weeping?—but her anger, if she had really been angry.
“You are a perfect heartbreak,” she went on
“The Cornal heard you had run off after the sogers, and———”
“Would that vex you?” asked Gilian.
“It would not vex Colin; he would give his only infant, if he had one, to the army; but I was thinking of you left behind in the march about the loch-head, and lost and starving somewhere about the wood of Dunderave.”
“I would not starve in Dunderave so long as the nut and bramble were there,” said Gilian, rejoicing in her kindly perturbation. “And I could not be lost anywhere—”
“—Except in the Duke’s flower garden, wasting the time with—with—a woman’s daughter,” said the Cornal, putting his head in at the kitchen door. He frowned upon his sister for her too prompt kindness to the rover, and she hid behind her a cup of new-skimmed cream. “Come upstairs and have a talk with Dugald and me,” he went on to the boy.
“Will it not do in the morning?” asked Miss Mary, all shaking, dreading her darling’s punishment.
“No,” said the Cornal, “Now or never. Oh! you need have no fears that I would put him to the triangle.”
“Then I may go too?” said Miss Mary.
The Cornal put the boy in front of him and pushed him towards the stair-foot. “You stay where you are,” he said to his sister. “This will be a man’s sederunt.”
They went up the stair together and entered the parlour, to find the General half-sleeping in his lug-chair. He started at the apparition of the entering youth.
“You are not drowned after all,” said he, “and there’s my money gone that I spent for a gross of stenlock hooks to grapple you.”
“Sit down there,” said the Cornal, pointing to the chair in which Gilian had first stood court-martial. The bottle was brought forth from the cupboard; the glasses were ranged again by the General. In the grate a sea-coal fire burned brightly, its glance striking golden now and then upon the polished woodwork of the room and all its dusky corners, more golden, more warm, more generous, than the wan disheartened rays of the candles that shook a smoky flame above the board. Gilian waited his punishment with more wonderment than fear. What could be said to him for a misadventure? He had done no harm except to cause an hour or two of apprehension, and if he had been with one whose company was forbidden it had never been forbidden to him.
“It’s a fine carry-on this,” said the Cornal, breaking the silence. “Ay, it’s a fine carry-on.” He stretched the upper part of his body over the low table with his arms spread out, and looked into the boy’s eyes with a glance more judicial than severe. “Here are we doing our best to make a man of you, more in a brag against gentry that need not be named in this house than for human kindness, though that is not wanting I assure you, and what must you be at but colloguing and, perhaps, plotting with the daughter of the gentry in question? I will not exactly say plotting,” he hastened to amend, remembering apparently that before him were but the rudiments of a man. “I will not say plotting, but at least you were in a way to make us a laugh to the whole community. Do you know anything of the girl that you were with?”
“I met her in the school before she got her governess.”
“Oh, ay! they must be making the leddy of her; that was the spoiling of her mother before her. As if old Brooks could not be learning any woman enough schooling to carry on a career in a kitchen. And have you seen her elsewhere?”
“I heard her once singing on her father’s vessel,” said Gilian.
“She was singing!” cried the Cornal, standing to his feet and thumping the table till the glasses rang. “Has she that art of the devil too? Her mother had it; ay! her mother had it, and it would go to your head like strong drink. Would it not, Dugald? You know the dame I mean.”
“It was very taking, her song,” said the General simply, playing with the empty glass, his eyes upon the table.
“And what now did she sing? Would it be——”
“It was ‘The Rover’ and ‘The Man with the Coat of Green,’” said Gilian in an eager recollection.
“Man! did I not ken it?” cried the Cornal. “Oh! I kent it fine. ‘The Rover’ was her mother’s trump card. I never gave a curse for a tune, but she had a way of lilting that one that was wonderful.”
“She had, that,” said the General, and he sighed.
The room, it seemed to Gilian, was a vault, a cavern of melancholy, with only the flicker of the coal to light it up in patches. These old men sighing were its ghosts or hermits, and he himself a worldling fallen invisible among their spoken thoughts. To him the Cornal no longer spoke directly; he was thinking aloud the thoughts alike of the General and himself—the dreams, the actions, the joys, the bitterness of youth. He sat back in his chair, relaxed, his hand wrinkled and grey, with no lusty blood rushing any more under the skin; upon the arms his fingers beating tattoo for his past.
“You’ll be wondering that between the Turners and us is little love lost, though no doubt Miss Mary with her clinking tongue has given you a glisk of the reason. He’ll be wondering, Dugald, he’ll be wondering, I’ll warrant. And, man, there’s nothing by-ordinar wonderful in it, for are we not but human men? There was a woman in Little Elrig who took Dugald’s fancy (if you will let me say it, Dugald), and he was willing to draw in with her and give her a name as reverend as any in the shire, for who are older than the Campbells of Keils? It’s an old story, and in a way it was only yesterday: sometimes I think it must be only a dream. But, dream or waking, I can see plainly my brother Dugald there, home on leave, make visitation to Glen Shira. I have seen him ambling up there happy on his horse (it was Black Geordie, Dugald,—well I mind him), and coming down again at night with a glow upon his countenance. Miss Mary, she would be daffing with him on his return, with a ‘How’s her leddyship to-day, Dugald?’ and he would be in a pleasant vexation at this guessing of what he thought his secret. It was no secret: was ever such a thing secret in the shire of Argyll? We all knew it. She was Mary’s friend and companion; she would come to our house here on a Saturday; I see her plainly on that chair at the window.”
The General turned with a gasp, following his brother’s glance. “I wish to God you would not be so terribly precise,” was what he said. And then he fingered at his glass anew.
“Many a time she sat there with our sister, the smell of the wallflower on the sill about her, and many a time she sang ‘The Rover’ in this room. In this very room, Dugald: isn’t every word I’m saying true? Of course it is. God! as if a dream could be so fine! Well, well! my brother, who sits there all bye with such affairs, went away on another war. She was vexed. The woods of Shira Glen were empty for her after that, I have no doubt, now that their rambles were concluded; she was lonely on the Dhuloch-side, where many a time he convoyed her home in the summer gloaming. He came back a tired man, a man hashed about with wounds and voyaging, cold nights, wet marches, bitter cruel fare, not the same at all in make or fashion, or in gaiety, that went away. The girl—the girl was cold. I hate to say it, Dugald, but what is the harm in a story so old? She came about Miss Mary in this house as before, no way blate, but it was ‘Hands off!’ for the man who had so liked her.”
He paused and stretched to fill his glass, but as he seized the bottle the hand shook so that he laid the vessel down in shame. The boy stood entranced, following the story intimately, guessing every coming sentence, filling up its bald outline with the pictures of his brain; riding with the General, almost in his prime and almost handsome, and hearing the woman sing in the window chair; feeling the soldier’s return to a reception so cruel. The General said nothing, but sat musing, his eyes, wide and distant, on the board. And out in the street there was the traffic of the town, the high calls of lads in their boisterous evening play, the laugh of a girl. From the kitchen came the rattle of Peggy’s operations, and in a low murmur Miss Mary’s voice as she hummed to herself, her symptom of anxiety, as she was sieving the evening milk in the pantry.
The Cornal gulped the merest thimbleful of spirits and resumed in a different key.
“Then, then,” said he, “then I became the family’s fool. Oh, ay!”—and he laughed with a crackle at the throat and no merriment—“I was the family fool; there was aye a succession of them in our house, one after another, dancing to this woman’s piping. For a while nobody saw it; Dugald never saw it, for he was sitting moping, wearying for some work anywhere away from this infernal clime of rain and sleep and old sorrows; Mary never noticed it—at least not for a little; she could not easily fancy her companion the character she was. But I would be meeting the girl here and there about the country, in the glen, in the town, as well as here in this very parlour where I had to sit and look indifferent, though—though my heart stounded, and I never met her but I felt a traitor to my brother. You will believe that, Dugald?” said he, recognition for a moment flashing to his eye.
And the General nodded, stretching himself weary on the chair.
“Oh, ay! even then I wished myself younger, for she was not long beyond her teens, and walking beside her I would be feeling musty and old, though I was not really old, as my picture there above the chimneypiece will show. I was not old, in heart—it pattered like a bairn’s steps to every glimpse and sentence of her. I lost six months at this game, my corps calling me, but I could not drag myself away. Once I spoke of going, and she sang ‘The Rover’—by God! it scaled me to her footsteps. I stayed for very pity of myself, seeing myself a rover indeed if I went, more distressed than ever gave the key to any song. The woods, the woods in spring; the country full of birds; Dhuloch lap-lapping on the shore; the summer with hay filling the field, and the sky blue from hill to hill, the nights of heather and star—oh, yes, she led me a pretty dance, I’m thinking, and sometimes I will be wondering if it was worth the paying for.”
The Paymaster’s house was grown very still. Gilian ceased to make the pictures in his mind.
“I met her ghost up there on the road this very night, and I had a hand below her chin,” said the Cornal with a gulp.
“You did not dare, you did not dare!” cried his brother, an apple-red upon his check, and half rising in his chair.
“Surely, surely—in a ghost,” said the Cornal. “I would never have mentioned it had it been herself. Sit down, Dugald. It was her daughter. I never saw her so close before, and the look of her almost gave me a stroke. It was what I felt when I first saw her mother with a younger man than you or I. Just like that I met them in the gloaming, with Turner very jaunty at her side, rapping his leg with his riding-cane, half a head higher than myself, a generation less in years. It was a cursed bitter pill, Dugald! Then I understood what you had meant and what Mary meant by her warnings. But I was cool—oh yes! I think I was cool. I only made to laugh and pass on, and she stopped me with her own hand. ‘I kept it from you as long as I could,’ she said: ‘it was cruel, it was the blackest of sins, but this is the man for me.’”
“That was the man for her,” echoed the General, his sentence stifled in a sigh.
“‘This is the man for me.’ Turner stood beside her, looking with an admiration, but to do him justice, ill at case, and with some—with some—with some pity for me. Oh! that stunned me! ‘Is it so indeed?’ I said in a little when I came to myself, feeling for the first time old. ‘And must it be farewell with me as with my brother Dugald?’”
“You should not have said that at all,” said the General. “I would not have said it.”
“I daresay not; I daresay not,” said the Cornal slowly, pondering on it. “But, mind you, I was in a curious position, finding myself the second fool of a family that had got fair warning. She birked up and took her gallant’s arm. Said I then, ‘We’ll maybe get you yet; I have a younger brother still.’ It was a stupid touch of bravado. ‘Jock!’ said she, laughing, all her sorrow for her misdoing gone; ‘Jock! Not the three of you together; give me youth and action.’ Then she went away with her new fancy, and I was left alone. I was left alone. I was left alone.”
His voice, that had risen to a shout as he gave the woman’s words, declined to a crackle, a choked harsh utterance that almost failed to cross the table.
Up got the General. “Never mind, never mind, Colin,” said he as it were to a vexed child. “We took our scuds gamely, and there was no more to do. God knows we have had plenty since—made wanderers for the King, ill fed for the King, wounded and blooded for the King. What does it matter for one that was a girl and is now no more but a clod in Kilmalieu? I’m forgetting it all fast I would never be minding it at all but for you and Miss Mary there, and that picture of the man I was once, on the wall. I mind more of Badajos and San Sebastian—that was the roaring, the bloody, the splendid time!—than of the girl that played us on her string—three brothers at a single cast—a witch’s fishing. What nonsense is this to be bringing up at our time of life? In the hearing of a wean too.”
A cough choked him and he stopped. At Gilian, sitting still and seemingly uncomprehending, the Cornal looked as at a stranger. “So it is,” said he; “just a wean! I forgot, some way. How old are you—sixteen? Nonsense! By the look of you I would say a hundred. Oh, you’re an old-farrent one, sitting there with your lugs cocked. And what do you think is the moral of my story? Eh?—the moral of it? The lesson of it? What? What? What?”
Gilian had the answer in a flash. “It is to be younger than the other man; it is——”
“What?” cried the Cornal. “That’s the moral? To be younger than the other man. No more than that? To be young? Old Brooks never put you to your Æsops when that’s all you can make of it.”
The General sat back and folded his soft thick hands upon his lap. He drew in his breath and blew it out again with the gasp of the wearied emerging from water. “Do you know, Dugald,” said he, “there’s something in that view of it? We were not young enough. We had too sober an eye on life. Youth is not in the straight back or the clear eye; there is something more, and—the person you mentioned had it, and has it yet.”
“That’s all havers,” said the Cornal; “all havers. I was as jocular at the time as Jiggy Crawford himself. It did not come natural, but I could force myself to it. The blame was not with us. She was a wanton hussy first and last, and God be with her!”
He gripped the boy by the jacket collar. “Up and away,” said he. “If my tale’s in vain, there’s no help for it. I cannot make it plainer. Do not be a fool, wasting the hours that are due to your tasks in loitering with the daughter of a woman who has her mother’s eye and her mother’s songs, and maybe her mother’s heart.”
He pushed the boy almost rudely out at the parlour door.
Gilian went up to his attic, stood looking blankly from the window at the skylights on the other side of the street, his head against the camecil of the room. He was bewildered and pleased. He was bewildered at this new candour of the Cornal that seemed to rank him for the first time more than a child; he was pleased to have his escapade treated in so tolerant a fashion, and to be taken into a great and old romance, though there was no active feud in it as in Marget Maclean’s books. Besides, the sorrow of the old man’s love story touched him. To find a soft piece in that old warrior so intent upon the past and a splutter of glory was astonishing, and it was pitiful too that it should be a tragedy so hopeless. He ‘listed once more on the Cornal’s side in the feud against Maam, even against Nan herself for her likeness to her mother, forgetting the charm of her song, the glamour at the gate, and all the magic of the garden. He determined to keep at a distance if he was to be loyal to those who had adopted him. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should vex the Paymaster and his brothers by indulging his mere love of good company in such escapades as he had in the ship and in the Duke’s garden. There was no reason why—— His head unexpectedly bumped against the camceil of the room. He was startled at the accident. It revealed to him for the first time how time was passing and he was growing. When he had come first to the Paymaster’s that drooping ceil was just within the reach of his outstretched hand; now he could touch it with his brow.
“Gilian! Gilian!” cried Miss Mary up the stair.
He went down rosy red, feeling some unrest to meet a woman so soon after the revelation of a woman’s perfidy, so soon indeed after a love-tale told among men. The parlour, as he passed its slightly open door, was still; its candles guttered on the table. The fire was down to the ash. He knew, without seeing it, that the old men were seated musing as always, ancient and moribund.
Miss Mary gave him his supper. For a time she bustled round him, with all her vexation gone, saying nothing of his sederunt with her brothers. Peggy was at the well, spilling stoup after stoup to make her evening gossip the longer, and the great flagged kitchen was theirs alone.
“What—what was the Cornal saying to you?” at last she queried, busying herself as she spoke with some uncalled-for kitchen office to show the indifference of her question.
“Oh, he was not angry,” said Gilian, thinking that might satisfy.
“I did not think he would be,” she said. Then in a little again, reluctantly: “But what was he talking about?”
The boy fobbed it off again. “Oh, just about—about—a story about a woman in Little Elrig.”
“Did you understand?” she said, stopping her fictitious task and gasping, at the same time scrutinising him closely.
“Oh, yes—no, not very well,” he stammered, making a great work with his plate and spoon.
“Do not tellmethat,” she said, coming over courageously and laying her hand upon his shoulder. “I know you understand every word of the story, if it is the story I mean.”
He did not deny it this time. “But I do not know whether it is the same story or not,” he said, eagerly wishing she would change the subject.
“What I mean,” said she, “is a story about a woman who was a friend of mine—and—and she quarrelled with my brothers. Is that the one?”
“That was the one,” said he.
Miss Mary wrung her hands. “Oh!” she cried piteously, “that they should be thinking about that yet! wiser-like would it be for them to be sitting at the Book. Poor Nan! Poor Nan! my dear companion! Must they be blaming her even in the grave? You understand it very well. I know by your face you understand it. She should not have all the blame. They did not understand; they were older, more sedate than she was; their merriment was past; there was no scrap left of their bairnhood that even in the manliest man finds a woman’s heart quicker than any other quality. I think she tried to—to—to—like them because they were my brothers, but the task beat her for all her endeavour. It is an old, dait story. I am wondering at them bringing it up to you. What do you think they would bring it up to you for?” And she scrutinised him shrewdly again.
“I think the girl the Cornal saw me with put him in mind of her mother,” said Gilian, pushing the idea no further.
She still looked closely at him. “The girl cannot help that,” said she. “She is very like her mother in some ways—perhaps in many. Maybe that was the Cornal’s reason for telling you the story.”
There was not, for once, the response of understanding in Gilian’s face. She could say no more. Was he not a boy yet, perhaps with the impulse she and the Cornal feared, all undeveloped? And at any rate she dare not give him the watchword that all their remembrances led up to—the word Beware.
But Gilian guessed the word, and his assumption of ignorance was to prevent Miss Mary from guessing so much. Only he misunderstood. He looked upon the desire to keep him from the company of the people of Maam as due to the old rancours and jealousies, while indeed it was all in his interest.
But in any case he respected the feelings of the Paymaster’s family, and thereafter for long he avoided as honestly as a boy might all intercourse with the girl, whom circumstance the mischievous, the henchman of the enemy, put in his way more frequently almost than any of her sex. He must be meeting her in the street, the lane, the market-place, in the highway, or in walks along the glen. He kept aloof as well as he might (yet ever thinking her for song and charm the most interesting girl he knew), and the days passed; the springs would be but a breath of rich brown mould and birch, the summers but a flash of golden days growing briefer every year, the winters a lessening interlude of storm and darkness.
Gilian grew like a sapling in all seasons, in mind and fancy as in body. Ever he would be bent above the books of Marget Maclean, getting deeper to the meaning of them. The most trivial, the most inadequate and common story had for him more than for its author, for under the poor battered phrase that runs through book and book, the universal gestures of bookmen, he could see history and renew the tragedies that suggested them at the outset. He was no more Brooks’ scholar though he sat upon his upper forms, for, as the dominie well could see, he was launching out on barques of his own; the plain lessons ot the school were without any interest as they were without any difficulty to him. He roamed about the woods, he passed precious hours upon the shore, his mind plangent like the wave.
“A droll fellow that of the Paymaster’s,” they said of him in the town. For as he aged his shyness grew upon him, and he went about the community at ease with himself only when his mind was elsewhere.
“A remarkable young gentleman,” said Mr. Spencer one day to the Paymaster. “I am struck by him, sir, I am struck. He has an air of cleverness, and yet they tell me he is—”
“He is what?” asked the Paymaster, lowering his brows suspicious on the innkeeper’s hesitation.
“They tell me he is not so great a credit to old Brooks as he might expect,” said the innkeeper, who was not lacking in boldness or plain speaking if pushed to it.
“Ay, they say that?” repeated the Paymaster, pinching his snuff vigorously. “Maybe they’re right too. I’ll tell you what. The lad’s head is stuffed with wind. He goes about with notions swishing round inside that head of his, as much the plaything of nature as the reed that whistles in the wind at the riverside and fancies itself a songster.”
Mr. Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that this was a delicate question. He let it pass unput.
Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy. The same day at their meridian in the “Abercrombie” he broached the topic.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his hand.”
“A crook in his hand?” said the Paymaster. “Would you have nothing else for him but a crook?”
“Well,” said MacGibbon, “I supposed you would be for putting him into Ladyfield. If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for.”
“Ladyfield!” cried the Paymaster. “There was no notion further from my mind. Farming, for all Duke George’s reductions, is the last of trades nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a soger.”
MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. “If you did I forgot,” said he. “It never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your influence will be useful.” And he changed the subject.
At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said, “when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go,” was on an excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness. For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river’s peaty flow; he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazily, and within him rose the whole charm and glamour of oceans and isles. Swimming in the briny deeps that washed the rocks, he felt in that solitude so sufficient, so much in harmony with the spirit of the place, its rumination, its content, its free and happy birds, as if he were Ellar in the fairy tale. The tide caressed; it put its arms round him; it laughed in the sunshine and kissed him shyly at the lips. Into the swooping concourse of the birds he would send, thus swimming, his brotherly halloo. They called back; they were not afraid, they need not be—he loved them.
To-day he had come down to the Waterfoot almost unknowing where he walked. Though the woods were bare there was the look of warmth in their brown and purple depths; only on the upper hills did the snow lie in patches. Great piles of trunks, the trunks of old fir and oak, lay above high-water mark. He turned instinctively to look for the ship they were waiting for, and behind him, labouring at a slant against the wind, was theJeancoming from the town to pick her cargo from this narrow estuary.
He was plucked at the heart by a violent wish to stay. At the poop he could see Black Duncan, and the seaman’s histories, the seaman’s fables all came into his mind again, and the sea was the very highway of content. The ship was all alone upon the water, not even the tan of a fisher’s lug-sail broke the blue. A bracing heartening air blew from French Foreland And as he was looking spellbound upon the little vessel coming into the mouth of the river, he was startled by a strain of music. It floated, a rumour angelic, upon the air, coming whence he could not guess—surely not from the vessel where Black Duncan and two others held the deck alone?
It was for a time but a charm of broken melody in the veering wind, distinct a moment, then gone, then back a faint echo of its first clearness. It was not till the vessel came fairly opposite him that the singer revealed herself in Nan sitting on a water-breaker in the lee of the companion hatch.
For the life of him he could not turn to go away. He rebelled against the Paymaster’s service, and remained till the ship was in the river mouth beside him.
“Ho ‘ille ‘ille!” Black Duncan cried upon him, leaning upon his tarry gunnle, and smiling to the shore like a man far-travelled come upon a friendly face in some foreign port. The wooded rock gave back the call with interest. Round about turned the seaman and viewed the southern sky. A black cloud was pricked upon the spur of Cowal. “There’s wind there,” said he, “and water too! I’m thinking we are better here than below Otter this night. Nan, my dear, it is home you may get to-day, but not without a wetting. I told you not to come, and come you would.”
She drummed with her heels upon the breaker, held up a merry chin, and smiled boldly at her father’s captain. “Yes, you told me not to come, but you wanted me to come all the time. I know you did. You wanted songs, you wanted all the songs, and you had the ropes off the pawl before I had time to change my mind.”
“You should go home now,” said the seaman anxiously. “Here is our young fellow, and he will walk up to the town with you.”
She pretented to see Gilian for the first time, staring at him boldly, with a look that made him certain she was thinking of the many times he had manifestly kept out of her way. It made him uneasy, but he was more uneasy when she spoke.
“The Paymaster’s boy,” said she. “Oh! he would lose himself on the way home, and the fairies might get him. When I go I must find my own way. But I am not going now, Duncan. If it will rain, it will rain and be done with it, and then I will go home.”
“Come on board,” said Duncan to the boy. “Come on board, and see my ship, then; she is a little ship, but she is a brave one, I’m telling you; there is nothing of the first of her left for patches.”
Gilian looked longingly at the magic decks confused with ropes, and the open companion faced him, leading to warm depths, he knew by the smoke that floated from the funnel. But he paused, for the girl had turned her head to look at the sea, and though he guessed somehow she might be willing to have him with her for his youth, he did not care to venture.
Then Black Duncan swore. He considered his invitation too much of a favour to have it treated so dubiously. Gilian saw it and went upon the deck.
Youth, that is so long (and all too momentary), and leaves for ever such a memory, soon, forgets. So it was that in a little while Gilian and Nan were on the friendliest of terms, listening to Black Duncan’s stories. As they listened, the girl sat facing the den stair, so that her eyes were lit to their depths, her lips were flaming red. The seaman and the boy sat in shadow. The seaman, stretched upon a bunk with his feet to the Carron stove, the boy upon a firkin, could see her every wave of fancy displayed upon her countenance. She was eager, she was piteous, she was laughing, in the right key of response always when the stories that were told were the straightforward things of a sailor’s experience—storms, adventures, mishaps, passion, or calm. She had grown as Gilian had grown, in mind as in body; and thinking so, he was pleased exceedingly. But the tales that the boy liked were the tales that were not true, and these, to Gilian’s sorrow, she plainly did not care for; he could see it in the calmness of her features. When she yawned at a tale of Irish mermaidens he was dashed exceedingly, for before him again was the sceptic who had laughed at his heron’s nest and had wantonly broken the crystal of the Lady’s Linn. But by-and-by she sang, and oh! all was forgiven her. This time she sang some songs of her father’s, odd airs from English camp-fires, braggart of word, or with the melodious longings of men abroad from the familiar country, the early friend.
“I wish I was a soldier,” he found himself repeating in his thought. “I wish I was a soldier, that such songs might be sung for me.”
A fury at the futility of his existence seized him. He would give anything to be away from this life of ease and dream, away where things were ever happening, where big deeds were possible, where the admiration and desire were justified. He felt ashamed of his dreams, his pictures, his illusions. Up he got from his seat upon the firkin, and his head was in the shadows of the smoky timbers.
“Sit down, lad, sit down,” said the seaman, lazy upon his arm upon the shelf. “There need be no hurry now; I hear the rain.”
A moan was in the shrouds, the alarm of a freshening wind. Some drops trespassed on the cabin floor, then the rain pattered heavily on the deck. The odours of the ship passed, and in their place came the smell of the cut timber on the shore, the oak’s sharpness, the rough sweetness of the firs, all the essence, the remembrance of the years circled upon the ruddy trunks, their gatherings of storm and sunshine, of dew, showers, earth-sap, and the dripping influence of the constant stars.
“I cannot stay here, I cannot stay here! I must go,” cried the lad, and he made to run on deck.
But Duncan put a hand out as the lowest step was reached, and set him back in his place.
“Sit you there!” said he. “I have a fine story you never heard yet And a fighting story too.”
“What is it? What is it?” cried Nan. “Oh! tell us that one. Is it a true one?”
“It is true—in a way,” said the seaman. “It was a thing that happened to myself.”
Gilian delayed his going—the temptation of a new story was too much for him.
“Do you take frights?” Black Duncan asked him. “Frights for things that are not there at all?”
Gilian nodded.
“That is because it is in the blood,” said the seaman; “that is the kind of fright of my story.”
And this is the story Black Duncan told in the Gaelic.