“Black darkness came down on the wood of Creag Dubh, and there was I lost in the middle of it, picking my way among the trees. Fir and oak are in the wood. In the oak I could walk straight with my chin in the air, facing anything to come; in the fir the little branches scratched at my neck and eyes, and I had to crouch low and go carefully.
“I had been at a wedding in the farm-house of Leacann. Song and story had been rife about the fire; but song and story ever have an end, and there was I in the hollow of the wood after song and story were by, the door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them as I went. Not a star pricked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet, though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the fin dust. I swept every one with a shell aside, hunting for my cracked fellow, and when I found him never was nut so sweet!
“Then came to me the queerest of notions, that some night before in this same wood I had lost a nut, and the darkness was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail under the lid of it. And yet the time or season that ever I cracked nuts in Creag Dubh was what I could never give name to.
“‘Where was it? When was it?’ said I to myself, bent double creeping under the young larch with my plaid drawn up to fend my eyes, and the black fright crept over me. An owl’s whoop would have been cheery, or the snort of a hind—and Creag Dubh is in daytime stirring with bird and beast—but here was I stark lonely in the heart of it, never a sound about, far from the hunting road, and my mind back among the terrors of a thousand years ere ever the Feinne were sung.
“In this dreamy quirk of the mind I felt I was a hunter and a man of arms. I was searching for a something here in this ghostly wood. The cudgel and knife of folks I could not understand were coming on me! Fast, fast, and hard I crunched my nuts, chewing shell and meat fiercely between my teeth to fill the skull of my head with noise and shut out the quietness. Never a taste of what I ate, sour or sweet. But so hard and fast I crunched that soon my store of nuts was done, and there I was helpless with my ears open to the roaring wave of sound that we call silence. I stood a little, and though my back grewed at the chill of the dreadful spaces behind me, I held my breath to study the full fright of the hour. Something was coming to me; I knew it. When this thing happened before, when a skin was my kilt and my shanks were bare, whatever I had to meet had met me in the round space among the candle-wood roots. The hair on my wrists stirred, a cry came to my throat and was over the edge of it and into the dark night like a man’s heart scurrying craven to the door.
“Through the wood went that craven roar, the wood all its own and, a stranger, I listened to my own voice wake up Echo far off on Ben Dearg.
“The doors of Echo shut on the only thing I knew and was half friendly with in the Duke’s wood, and down on me again came the quietest quietness.
“‘Be taking thy feet from here’ said I to myself, taking out my sailor-knife and scrugging my bonnet well on my brow. And there was no wind, not a breath, on Creag Dubh. The stars black out, the rough ground broken to my foot, the branches scraping unfriendly, I went on through the trees.
“When one goes up from the Leacann hunting road into the farm-lands he comes in a while on a space among the trees, clean shorn like the shearing of a hook but for white hay that lies there thick and rustling in the spring of the year. ‘Black Duncan,’ said I, ‘be pulling thyself together, gristle and bone, for here’s the fright that stirs about the dark with fingers and claws.’ I was the first man (said my notion) who ever set foot on the braes of Argyll, newly from Erin and Argyll thick with ghosts; daytime or dark the woods were full of things that hate the stranger. Under my feet the rotting dust of the fir-trees felt soft and clogging, like the banks of new-delved graves. My back shivered again to the feel of the space behind me; in my bonnet stirred my hair. I went into the glade with a dry tongue rasping on the roof of my mouth.
“When the Terror came up against me, I could have laughed in my sudden ease of mind, for here at last was something to be sure of, in a way. And I gripped back as it gripped fast at me, feeling it hairy at the neck and the crook of the arms—a breathing and lusty body.
“‘What have I here?’ I asked, but never an answer. At my throat went ten clawed fingers, and there was Duncan at dismal battle, fighting for life with what he could not see, in his own home woods, but they so strange and never a friend to help!
“For a time I had no chance with the knife; but at last ‘Steel, my darling!’ said I, and I struck low in the soft spaces. ‘Gloop,’ said the knife, and Death was twisting at my feet.
“Did Duncan put hurry on his heels and fly? The hurry was not in me but the deep heart’s wonder. My first dead thing that in life had ever struck back held me till the morning with a girl’s enchantment I went down on a knee in the grass and felt him, a soft lump, freezing slowly from the heel to the knee, from the knee to the neck. Some rags of costume were on him, a kilt of coarse plaiding and a half-shirt of skin, soaked in sweat at the armpits and wet with blood at the end.
“I waited till the morning to see what I had. ‘This,’ said I, hunched on a mound, ‘is all as it was before.’ The first sound I heard was the squeal of a beast caught at the throat among the bracken, then a hind snored among the grass. The morning walked solemn among the trees, stopping at every step to listen; birds put their claws down and shook themselves free of sleep and dew; a polecat slinking past me started at my eye and went back to his hole. Began the fir-trees waving in the wind, and then the day was open wide and far.
“In the dark I had strained my eyes to see what was at my feet till my eyeballs creaked in their hollows, yet now I had no desire to turn about from the cheerful dawn and look behind, but I did it with my heart thudding.
“Nothing was there to see, lappered blood, nor mark of body on grass!
“My knife, without a stain on the steel of it, was still in my hand. I wiped it with a tuft of bracken, and I laughed with something of a bitterness.
“‘So!’ said I, ‘the old story, the old story! It happened me before, and in a hundred years from now Black Duncan will be at the killing again.’”
The vessel, straining at the rope that bound her to the shore, lay with a clumsy shoulder over the bank that shelved abruptly into the great depths where slimy weeds entangled. Her sails were housed and snug, the men in the bows lay under the flapping corner of the jib and played at cards, though the noise of the raindrops on their canvas roof might well disturb them. Gilian made no pause; he ran up at the tale’s conclusion, at a bound he was on the shore, staggering upon the rocks and slipping upon the greasy weeds till he came to the salt bent grass, and with firmer footing ran like a young deer for the shelter of the wood. The rain battered after him, the wind rose. In front, the wood, so still an hour before, in its winter slumber, with no birds now to mar its dreams, had of a sudden roused to the rumour of the storm. As by an instinct, the young trees on the edge seemed to shudder before the winds came to them. Their slim tips could not surely be bowing, even so little, to the gale that was yet behind Gilian. But he passed them and plunged under the tall firs, and he felt secure only when the ruddy needles of other years were a soft carpet underfoot It was true he found shelter here from the rain that slanted terrifically, but it was not for sanctuary from the elements he sought the rude aisles, though now he appreciated the peace of them. It was for escape from himself, from his sense of hopeless, inexplicable longing, from some tremendous convulsion of his mind created by Black Duncan’s fable.
The wood was all a wood of fir, not old nor very young, but at that mid age when it has to all of country blood an invitation to odorous dusks and pathless wanderings below laced branches. The sun never could reach the heart of it, except at the hour of setting, when it flamed bloody through the pillars. The rain never seemed to penetrate, for the fir-needles underfoot grew more dusty year by year. But when the rain beat as it did now, through the whole of it went a sound of gobbling and drumming, and the wind, striking upon the trunks as if they were the strings of Ossian, harped a great and tremendous tune, wanting start or ending. And by-and-by there came company for Gilian as he sheltered in the wood. Birds of all kinds beat hurriedly through the trees and settled upon the boughs with a shudder of the quill, pleased to be out of the inclement open and cosily mantled in.
The boy went into the very inmost part of the wood without knowing the reason why thus he should fly from the ship that so recently had enchanted him, from the tales he loved. But in the soothing presence of the firs and the content of the animals sheltering from the storm, he found a momentary peace from the agitation that had set up in him, roused at the song of the girl, the story of the mariner. The emotions, the fears, longings, discontents that jangled through him as they had never done before relapsed to a mood level and calm, as if they, too, had sheltered from the storm like the birds upon the trees.
But by-and-by he became ashamed of his action, that must seem so foolish to the friends he had left in the ship without a word of explanation. His face flamed hotly at the thought of his rude departure. He would give a world to be able to go back again as if nothing had happened and sit unchallenged in the cosy den of the Jean. And musing thus he went through the wood till he came upon the bank of the Duglas, roaring grey and ragged, a robber from the hills, bearing spoil of the upper reaches, the town-lands, the open and windswept plains. It carried the trunks of great trees that had lain since other storms upon its banks, and with a great chafing and cracking no less than the wooden bridge from Clonary which the children were wont to cross from those parts on their way to school.
“That will go battering on the vessel,” he thought, looking amazed at its ponderous beams flicking through the water and over the little cascades as if they had been feathers blown by an evening breeze. “That will go battering on theJean” he thought, and of a sudden it seemed his manifest duty to warn the occupants of the ship to defend themselves from the unexpected attack.
He followed the bridge for a little, fascinated, wondering what was to become of it next in the tumult of waters till he came to the falls, where he had looked for a check to it. But it stayed no more than a moment on the lip of the precipice swung up a jagged edge above the deep, then crashed into the linn, where it seemed to swerve and turn, giddy with its adventure. Gilian stood spellbound on the banks looking at it so far down, then he turned, and cutting off the bend of the river, made for the shore.
He crashed through bracken and bramble and through the fir-wood again, startling the sheltering birds by his hurry, emerging upon the face of the brae in sight of theJeanand the sea. In his absence a great change had come upon the wave, upon the hilly distance, upon the whole countenance of nature. The rain was no longer in drumming torrents, but in a soft and almost imperceptible veil; but if the rain had lost the wind had gained. And as he passed from the edge of the wood, all the trees seemed to twang and creak, or cracked loudly, parting perhaps at some dear nerve where sap and beauty would no longer course. In every bush along the edge of the wood there seemed a separate chorus of voices, melodious and terrific, whistle and whoop, shriek and moan. Even the grass nodding in the wind lent a thin voice to the chorus, a voice such as only the sharp and sea-trained ear may comprehend, that beasts hear long before the wind itself is apparent, so that they remove themselves to the bieldy sides of the hills before tumult breaks.
But it was the aspect of the sea that most surprised the boy, for where before there had been but a dreaming plain of smiles there was the riot of waters. The black lips of the wave parted and showed the white fangs underneath, or spat the spume of passion into the face of the day. It looked as if every glen and every gully, every corry and eas on that mountainous coast was spending its breath upon the old sea, the poor old sea that would be let alone to dream and rest, but must suffer the humours of the mischievous winds.
It was but for a moment Gilian lent his eye to the open and troubled expanse. He saw there no sign of ship, but looking lower into shore he beheld theJeanin travail at the Duglas mouth. The tide had come fully in while he was absent, the delta that before had been so much lagoon and isle was become an estuary, where, in the unexpected tide and rush of the river, the logs of fir and oak were all adrift about the sides of the vessel. Every hand was busy. They poled off as best they might the huge trunks that battered at the carvel planks and pressed upon the twanging cable. Forward of the mast Black Duncan stood commanding in loud shouts that could not reach the boy through the wind’s bellowing, and as he shouted, he lent, like a good seaman, vigour to a spar and pushed off the besieging timbers, all his weight aslant upon the wood, his arms tense, a great and wholesome figure of endeavour.
But not Black Duncan nor his striving seamen so busy in that confusion of wind and water were the first to catch the boy’s eye. It was Nan, struggling by her captain’s side at the unshipped tiller, and in the staggering ship seeking to send it home in the avoiding helm-head. Her hair blew round her with the vaunting spirit of a banner, her body in every move was rich with a sort of exaltation.
As yet the bridge had not reached them. It might have been checked altogether in the linn, or it might still be slowly grinding its way round the great bend of the river, that Gilian had cut off by his plunge through the wood. But at least he was there to alarm, for its assault, borne down on the spate, would be worse by far than that of the timber. He beat his way again, bent, through the wind, to the water-edge now so far in and separate from the ship, and cried out a loud warning. It seemed to himself as he did so the voice of an infant, so weak was it, so shrill and piping, buffeted about by Heaven’s large and overwhelming utterance. They paid no heed at first, but by-and-by they heard him.
“The bridge! God! do you tell me?” cried Black Duncan in a visible consternation. “Is it far up?”
Gilian put his hand to his mouth and trumpeted his response.
“The bend! My sorrow! she’s as good as on us then. We must be at our departures.”
The mariners scurried about the deck; Black Duncan threw off the prisoning cable; there were shouts, swift looks, and a breathless pause; theJeanswung round before the corner of her jib laboured clumsily for a moment unbelieving of her release, then drifted slowly from the river mouth, her little boat and her tiller left behind, the first caught by the warring tree-trunks, the latter dashed from Nan’s hands by the swing of an unfastened boom. As helpless as the logs she had been encountering, she was loose before the wind that drove her parallel with the shore at no safe distance from its fringe of rocks.
Gilian, scarcely knowing what he did, ran along the shore, following her course, looking at her with a wild eye. The men were calling to him, waving, pointing, but what they meant he could not surmise; all his interest was in the girl who stood motionless, seemingly aghast at her mishap, with her hair still blowing about her.
To the north where he was running, black masses of clouds were piling, and the sea, so far as the eye could reach, was weltering more cruelly than before. Seagulls screamed without ceasing, and the human imitation of their calls roused uncanny notions that they welcomed the vessel to her doom. She seemed so helpless, so hopeless, dashed upon by the spume of those furious lips, bit by the grinding teeth.
But yet he ran on and on over the salt grass or the old wrack that the sea-spray wet to a new slime, never pausing but for a moment now and then to try and understand what the men on deck were shouting to him.
Off the shore north of the Duglas is a rock called Ealan Dubh, or the Black Island, a single bare and rounded block without a blade of grass on it, that juts out of the sea in all weathers and tides and is grown on thickly with little shell-fish. To-day it could not be seen, but the situation of it was plain in the curling crest of the white waves that bent constantly over it Straight for this rock theJeanwas driving and a great pity came over Gilian, a pity for himself as he anticipated the sickening crash upon the rock, the rip of the timber, the gurgle at the holes, the sundering of the bolted planks, the collapse of the mast, the ultimate horrible plunge. He was Black Duncan, the swimmer, fighting hard for life between the ship and the shore; he was the girl, with wet hair flapping blindly at the eyes, clinging with bleeding finger-nails to the rough shells that clustered on the rock. It was horrible, horrible! And then many tales from the shelves of Marget Maclean came to his memory where one in such circumstances had done a brave thing. To save the girl and bring her from the rock ashore—that was the thing to be done—but how? Even the sea fairy, as he had said, might be worth drowning for. Helplessly he looked up and down the shore. There was nothing to see but the torn fringe of the tide, the waving branches of the coast He had no more than grasped the solitude of the country-side (feeling himself something of God’s proxy thus to be watching the destruction of the ship) when theJeanwent upon the rock. Her shock upon it was not to be heard from the shore, and she did not break up all at once as he had anticipated; she paused as it might seem, quite willingly, in her career before the wind and slewed round a tarry broadside to the crested wave. She began to settle in the water by her riven quarter, but Gilian did not see that, for it came about slowly. All he could see was that Black Duncan and his men upon the higher part of the slanted deck were calling to him more loudly than before and pointing with frenzied gestures back in the direction whence they had come.
He looked back, he could not comprehend.
More loudly yet they called. They clustered, the three of them on the shrouds, and in one voice tried to bellow down the gale.
He could not understand. He turned a pitiful figure on the shore, his mind tumultuous with wrestling thoughts and dreads, with images of the rough depths where the girl’s hair would sway like weed in a green haze in an everlasting stillness.
Again the seamen called, and it seemed, as he looked at their meaningless gesticulations, that the bowsprit of the vessel now pointed higher than before. The appalling story thus told to him had barely got home when he saw a change in the conduct of the seamen. They ceased to cry and wave; they looked no longer at him but in the direction whence he had come, and turning, he saw the vessel’s little boat bobbing in the sea-troughs. It had an occupant too, a lad not greatly older than himself, using only a guiding oar, who so was directing the boat in the drifting waves towards the Ealan Dubh and the counter of theJean.
Then the whole folly of his conduct, the meaning of the seamen’s cries, the obvious and simple thing he should have done came to Gilian—he discovered himself the dreamer again. A deep contempt for himself came over him and he felt inclined to run back to the solace of the woods with a shame more burdensome than before, but the doings of the lad who had but to wade to pick up the lost boat and was now bearing down on the doomed vessel prevented him. He watched with a fascination the things being done that he should have done himself, he made himself, indeed, the lad who did them. It was as if in a dream, looking upon himself with a stranger’s admiration, he saw the little boat led dexterously beside the vessel in spite of the tumbling waves, and Black Duncan, out upon her bowsprit, board her, lift his master’s daughter in, and row laboriously ashore. Then Gilian turned and made a poor, contemptuous retreat.
The town was dripping at its eaves and glucking full of waters at rone-mouths and syvers when he got into it after his disgraceful retreat He was alone in the street as he walked through it, a wet woebegone figure with a jacket-collar high up to the ears to meet the nip of the elements. Donacha Breck, leaning over his counter and moodily looking at the hens sheltering their wind-blown feathers under his barrow, saw him pass and threw over his shoulder to his wife behind a comment upon the eccentricity of the Paymaster’s boy.
“He’s scarcely all there,” said he, “by the look of him. He’s wandering about in the rah as if it was a fine summer day and the sun shining.”
Crossing from the school to his lodging, an arm occupied by a great bundle of books, the other contending with an umbrella, was the dominie, and he started at the sight of his errant pupil who nearly ran against him before his presence was observed.
“Well, Gilian?” said he, a touch of irony in his accent, himself looking a droll figure, hunched round his books and turning like a weathercock jerkily to keep the umbrella between him and the wind that strained its whalebone ribs till they almost snapped.
Gilian stopped, looked hard at the ground, said never a word. And old Brooks, over him, gazed at the wet figure with puzzlement and pity.
“You beat me; you beat me quite!” said he. “There’s the making of a fine man in you; you have sharpness, shrewdness, a kind of industry, or what may be doing for that same; every chance of a paternal kind—that’s to say a home complete and comfortable—and still you must be acting like a wean! You were not at the school to-day. I’m keeping it from Miss Campbell as long as I can, but I’ll be bound to tell her of your truancy this time.”
He risked the surrounding hand a moment from his books, bent a little and tapped the boy’s jacket pocket.
“Ay! A book again!” said he slyly. “What is it this time? But never mind; it does not matter. I’ll warrant it is not Mr. Butter’s Spellings nor Murray the Grammarian, but some trash of a novelle. Any exercise foryourkind but the appointed task! I wish—I wish—Tuts! laddie, you are wet to the skin, haste ye home and get a heat.”
Gilian did not need a second bidding; but ran up the street, without slacking his pace till he got to the foot of the Paymaster’s stair, where the wind from the pend-close was howling most dismally. He lingered on the stair, extremely loth to face Miss Mary with a shame so plain upon his countenance as he imagined it must be. No way that he could tell the story of theJean’sdisaster would leave out his sorry share in it. A quick ear heard him on the stair; the door opened.
“Oh, you rascal!” cried Miss Mary, her anxious face peering down at him. “You were never in the school till this time.” She put her hand upon his bonnet and his sleeve and found them soaking. “Oh, I knew it! I knew it!” she cried. “Just steeping!”
He found an unexpected relief in her consternation at his condition and in her bustle to get him into dry clothing. After the experience he had come through, the storm and the spectacle he had seen as in a dream from the shore, he indulged in the cordiality and cosiness of the warm kitchen for a little with selfish gladness. But it was only for a little; the disaster to the vessel and the consciousness that his own part in the business would certainly come to light, overwhelmed him again, and it was a most dolorous face that looked at Miss Mary over the viands she had just put before him.
“What ails the callant?” she demanded in a tremble, staring at him.
He burst into tears, the first she had seen on his face since ever he had come to her house, and all her mother’s heart was sore.
“What mischief were you in?” she asked, putting an arm about his neck, and her troubled face down upon his hair as he shook in his chair. “I am sure you were not to blame. It could not have been much, Gilian. Tuts! tuts!” And so she went on in a ludicrous way, coaxing him to indifference for the sin she fancied.
At last he told her the beginnings of his tragedy, that he had seen theJeanwrecked on Ealan Dubh, and the girl Nan on board of her. She was for a moment dumb with horror, believing the end had come to all upon the vessel, but on this Gilian speedily assured her, and “Oh, am n’t I glad!” said she with a simple utterance and a transport on her visage that showed how deep was her satisfaction.
“How did they get ashore?” she asked,
“In the small boat,” said Gilian uncomfortably. “It caught on the logs at the mouth of the river when she drifted off, and—and—”
“And a boy went out in it and brought them help!” she cried, finely uplifted in a delight that she had guessed the cause of his trepidation. “Oh, you darling! And not to say a word of it! Am not I the proud woman this day? My dear companion Nan’s girl!”
She caught him fervently as he rose ashamed from his seat to explain or to make an escape from the punishment that was in her error, a punishment more severe than if he had been blamed. She was one never prone to the displays of love and rapture, but this time her joy overcame her, and she kissed him with something of a redness on her face. It was to the boy as if he had been smitten on the mouth. He drew back almost rudely in so great a confusion that it but confirmed her guess. “You must come and tell my brothers,” said she, “this very moment. Don’t say anything about the lass, but they’ll be keen to hear about the vessel They sit there hearing nothing of the world’s news, unless it comes to the fireside for them, and then I’ve noticed they’re as ready to listen as Peggy would be at the Cross well.”
She had him half way to the parlour before he thought of a protest, he had found such satisfaction in being relieved from her mistaken pride in him. Then he concluded it was as well to go through with it, thinking that if the rescue of the girl was not to be in the story, his own shortcomings need not emerge. She pushed him before her into the room; her brothers were seated at the fire, and they only turned when her voice, in a very unaccustomed excitement, broke the quietness of the chamber.
“Do you hear this?” she cried, and her hand on Gilian’s shoulder; “a vessel’s sunk on the Ealan Dubh.”
“I knew there would be tales to tell of this,” said the General. “The wind came too close on the frost. I mind at Toulouse——”
“And Gilian was down at the Waterfoot and saw it all,” she broke in upon the reminiscence.
“Was he, faith?” said the Cornal. “I like my tales at first hand. Tell us all about it, laddie; what vessel was she?”
He wheeled his chair about as he spoke, and roused himself to attention. It was a curious group, too much like his old court-martial to be altogether to the boy’s taste. For Miss Mary stood behind him, with an air of proud possession of him that was disquieting, and the two men seemed to expect from him some very exciting history indeed.
“Well, well!” said the Cornal, drumming with his fingers on his chair-arm impatiently, “you’re in no great hurry with your budget. What vessel was it?”
“It was theJean,” said Gilian, bracing himself up for a plunge.
“Ye seem to be a wondrous lot mixed up with the fortunes of that particular ship,” said the Cornal sourly. “What way did it happen?”
“She was in the mouth of the river,” said Gilian, “and the spate of the river brought down the wooden bridge at Clonary. I saw it coming, and I cried to them, and Black Duncan cast off, leaving boat and tiller. She drove before the wind and went on Ealan Dubh, and sunk, and—that was all.”
The story, as he told it, was as bald of interest as if it were a page from an old almanack.
“What came of the men?” said the Cornal. “The loss of theJeandoes not amount to muckle; there was not a plank of her first timbers left in her.”
“They got ashore in the small boat,” said Gilian.
“Which was left behind, I think you said at first,” said the Cornal, annoyed at some apparent link a missing in the chain of circumstance. “If the boat was left behind as well as the tiller—I think you mentioned the tiller—how did they get ashore in it? Did you see them get ashore?”
“I saw Black Duncan and the girl, but not the others,” answered Gilian, all at once forgetting that some caution was needed here.
Up more straightly sat the Cornal, and fixed him with a stern eye.
“Oh, ay!” said he; “she was in the story too, and you fancied you might hide her. I would not wonder now but you had been in the vessel yourself.”
Gilian was abashed at his own inadvertence, but he hastened to explain that he was on the shore watching the vessel when she struck.
“But you were on the vessel some time?” said the Cornal, detecting some reservation.
“Oh, Colin, Colin, I wonder at you!” cried Miss Mary, now in arms for her favourite, and utterly heedless of the frown her brother threw at her for her interference. “You treat the boy as if he was a vagabond and—”
“—Vagabond or no vagabond,” said the Cornal, “he was where he should not be. I’m wanting but the truth from him, and that, it seems, is not very easy to get.”
“You are not just at all,” she protested. Then she went over and whispered something in his ear. His whole look changed; where had been suspicion came something of open admiration, but he gave it no expression on his tongue.
“Take your time, Gilian,” said he; “tell us how the small boat got to the vessel.”
“The boy went down to the river mouth,” said Gilian, “and—”
“—The boy?” said the Cornal. “Well, if you must be putting it that idiotic way, you must; anyway, we’re waiting on the story.”
“—The boy went down to the river mouth and got into the small boat. She was half full of water and he baled her as well as he could with his bonnet, then pushed her off! She went up and down like a cork, and he was terrified. He thought when he went in first she would be heavy to row, but he found the lightness of her was the fearful thing. The wind slapped like a big open hand, and the water would scoop out on either side—”
“Take it easy, man, take it easy; slow march,” said the Cornal. For Gilian had run into his narrative in one of his transports and the words could not come fast enough to his lips to keep up with his imagination. His face was quivering with the emotions appropriate to the chronicle.
“—Then I put out the oar astern——”
“—Humph!Youdid; that’s a little more sensible way of putting it.”
“I put the oar astern,” said Gilian, never hearing the comment, but carried away by his illusion; “and the wind carried us up the way of Ealan Dubh. Sometimes the big waves would try to pull the oar from my hands, wanting fair play between their brothers and the ship. (‘Havers!’ muttered the Cornal.) And the spindrift struck me in the eyes like hands full of sand. I thought I would never get to the vessel. I thought she would be upset every moment, and I could not keep from thinking of myself hanging on to the keel and my fingers slipping in weariness.”
“A little less thinking and more speed with your boat would be welcome,” said the Cornal impatiently. “I’m sick sorry for them, waiting there on a wreck with so slow a rescue coming to them.”
Gilian hesitated, with his illusion shattered, and, all unnerved, broke for the second time into tears.
“Look at that!” cried Miss Mary pitifully, herself weeping; “you are frightening the poor laddie out of his wits,” and she soothed Gilian with numerous Gaelic endearments.
“Tuts! never mind me,” said the Cornal, rising and coming forward to clap the boy on the head for the very first time. “I think we can guess the rest of the story. Can we not guess the rest of the story, Dugald?”
The General sat bewildered, the only one out of the secret, into which Miss Mary’s whisper to the Cornal has not brought him.
“I am not good at guessing,” said he; “a man at my time likes everything straight forward.” And there was a little irritation in his tone.
“It’s only this, Dugald,” said his brother, “that here’s a pluckier young fellow than we thought, and good prospects yet for a soger in the family. I never gave Jock credit for discretion, but, faith, he seems to have gone with a keen eye to the market for once in his life! If it was not for Gilian here, Turner was wanting a daughter this day; we could hardly have hit on a finer revenge.”
“Revenge!” said the General, a flash jumping to his eyes, then dying away. “I would not have said that, Colin; I would not have said that. It is the phrase of a rough, quarrelsome young soldier, and we are elders who should be long by with it.”
“Anyhow,” said the Cornal, “here’s the makings of a hero.” And he beamed almost with affection on Gilian, now in a stupor at the complexity his day’s doings had brought him to.
The Paymaster’s rattan sounded on the stair, and “Here’s John,” said his sister. “He’ll be very pleased, I’m sure.”
It was anything but a pleased man who entered the room, his face puffed and red and his eyes searching around for his boy. He pointed a shaking finger at him.
“What, in God’s name, do you mean by this?” he asked vaguely.
“Don’t speak to the boy in that fashion,” said the Cornal in a surprising new paternal key. “If he has been in mischief he has got out of it by a touch of the valiant—”
“Valiant!” cried the Paymaster with a sneer. “He made an ass of himself at the Waterfoot, and his stupidity would have let three or four people drown if Young Islay, a callant better than himself had not put out a boat and rescued them. The town’s ringing with it.”
The scar on the Cornal’s face turned almost black. “Is that true that my brother says?” said he.
Gilian searched in a reeling head for some answer he could not find; his parched lips could not have uttered it, even if he had found it, so he nodded.
“Put me to my bed, somebody,” said the General, breaking in suddenly on the shock of the moment, and staggering to one side a little as he spoke. “Put me to my bed, somebody. I am getting too old to understand!”
AS he spoke he staggered to the side, and would have fallen but for his sister’s readiness. About that tall rush of a brother she quickly placed an arm and kept him on his feet with infinite exertion, the while uttering endearments long out of fashion for her or him, but come suddenly, at this crisis, from the grave of the past—the past where she and Dugald had played as children, with free frank hearts loving each other truly.
“Put me to my bed,” said he again thickly, and his eyes blurred with the utmost weariness. “Put me to my bed. O God! what is on me now? Put me to my bed.”
“Dugald! Dugald! Dugald!” she cried. “My darling brother, here is Mary with you; it is just a turn.” But as she said the flattering thing her face was hopeless. The odour of the southernwood on the window-sill changed at once to laurel, rain-drenched, dark, and waving over tombs for the boy spellbound on the floor. All his shameful perturbation vanished, a trifling thing before the great Perturber’s presence.
The brothers went quickly beside their sister, and took him to his bedroom, furnished sparsely always by his own wish that denied indulgence in anything much beyond a soldier’s campaign quarters.
Dr. Anderson came, and went, shaking hands with Miss Mary in the lobby and his eyes most sternly bent upon the inside of his hat “Before morning at the very most,” he said in his odd low-country voice. No more than that, and still it thundered at her soul like an infernal doom. Up she gathered her apron, up to her face, and fled in among her pots and pans, and loudly she moved among them to drown her lamentation.
Dr. Colin came later and prayed in the two languages over a figure on the bed, and then went home to write another sermon than the one already started. The room he left was silent for a while, till of a sudden the eyes of the General opened and he looked upon the sorry company.
“Bring me MacGibbon,” said he in a voice extremely sensible.
Gilian ran up the street and fetched the old comrade, who put his hand upon the General’s head.
“Dugald, do you ken me?” said he.
“Do I ken you?” said the General with an unpractised smile. “You’re the laddie that burned the master’s cane. I would know your voice if you were in any guise, and what masquerade is this that you should be so old? We’re to be the first to move in the morning, under arms at scream of day.... Lord, but I’m tired! Bob, Bob, they’re not thinking of us at home in the old place I’ll warrant, and to-morrow we may be stricken corpses for the king without so much as Macintyre’s stretching-board to give us a soger’s chest and shoulders.”
“Was there anything I could do, Dugald?” said the comrade, a ludicrous man with his paunch now far beyond the limit of the soldier’s belt he used to buckle easily, wearing in a clownish notion of deference to this soldier’s passing a foolish small Highland bonnet he had donned in old campaigns.
“There was something running in my mind,” said the man in the bed. “I think I would be wanting you to take word home in case anything happened. I was thinking of—of—of—what was her name, now? You know the one I mean—her ladyship in Glen Shira. Am I not stupid to forget it? that’s the worst of the bottle! What was her name, now?...Battalion will form an hollow square.... The name, the name, what was it?...On the center companies, ‘kwards wheel.... I’m wearied to the marrow of my bones, all but the right arm, that’s like a feather, that’s like a...By the right angle of the front face; sub-divisions to the right and left half wheel. Re-form the square. Hall! Dress!... What’s that piper doing out there? MacVurich, come in! This is not a reel at a Skye wedding.... Let me see, I have the name on the tip of my tongue—what could it be, now?Steady, men!”
The door of the chamber was pushed in a little, and to Gilian’s mouth his heart rose up at the manifestation, for what was this with no footstep on the wooden stair? About him he felt of a sudden cold airs waft, and the door ajar with no one entering glued his gaze upon its panels. The others in the room had not perceived it. Miss Mary, grown of a sudden plain and old, looked up in the Cornal’s face, craving there for something for the ease of sorrow, as if he that had wandered so far and seen the Enemy so often and so ugly had some secret to share with her whereby this ancient trouble could be marred. There she found no consolation. No magician but only the brother looked over an untidy scarf and a limp high collar at the delirious man in bed. The Paymaster stood at the window frowning out upon the street; MacGibbon coughed in short dry jerky coughs, patted with a bony hand upon the coverlet, turned his head away. A stillness that was like a swoon came over all.
“Is that you, mother?” It was the General who broke the quiet, and his eyes were on his sister. A flush had fallen like a sunset on his face, his eyes were very clear and full, and, with his shaven cheeks, he might in the mitigate light of the chamber have been a lad new waked from an unpleasant dream. His sister put her head upon the pillow beside him and an arm about his shoulders.
“Oh, Dugald, Dugald!” said she, “it is not mother yet, but only Mary.” And the bedstead shook with the stress of her grief.
“Mary, is it?” said he, shutting his eyes again. “What are you laughing at? I was not up there at all; I never saw her to-day, upon my word; I was just giving Black George an exercise no further than the Boshang Gate.... I’m saying, though, you need not let on about it to Colin... Colin, Colin, Colin, I wish we were home; the leaf must be fine and green upon Dunchuach.... They’re over the river at Aldea Tajarda, and we push on to Cieudada.... What’s that, Mackay? let go the girl! And you the Highland gentleman!Lo sien—sien—siento mucho, Senora.”
“I am at your shoulder, Dugald, do you not know me?” asked the Cornal, gently putting his sister aside. His brother looked and smiled again, but did not seem to see him.
“What was her name? and I’ll send her my love and duty, for, man, between us, I was fond of her,... There was a song she had: