That there was some unusual agitation in the town Gilian could gather as soon as he had set foot within the Arches in the early morning. It was in the air, it was mustering many women at the well. There they stood in loud and lingering groups, their stoups running over extravagantly while they kept the tap running, unconscious what they were about Or they had a furtive aspect as they whispered in the closes, their aprons wrapping their folded arms. At the door of the New Inns, Mr. Spencer was laying forth a theory of abduction. He had had English experience, he knew life; for the first time since he had come to this place of poor happenings he had found something he could speak upon with authority and an audience to listen with respect What his theory was, Gilian might have heard fully as he passed; but he was thinking of other things, and all that came to him were two or three words, and one of the errant sentences was seemingly about himself. That attracted all his attention. He gave a glance at the people at the door—the inn-keeper, MacGibbon, with an unusual Kilmarnock bonnet on that seemed to have been donned in a hurry; Rixa, in a great perturbation, having just come out of a shandry-dan with which he had been driving up Glen Shira; Major Paul, and Wilson the writer. The inn-keeper, who was the first to see the lad, stopped his speech with confusion and reddened. They gave him a stare and a curt acknowledgment of his passage of the time of day as the saying goes, looked after him as he passed round Old Islay’s corner, and found no words till he was out of sight.
“That puts an end to that notion, at any rate,” said the Sheriff, almost pleased to find the Londoner in the wrong with his surmises. And the others smiled at Mr. Spencer as people do who told you so. Two minutes ago they were half inclined to give some credit to the plausibility of his reasoning.
The inn-keeper was visibly disturbed. “Dear me! I have been doing the lad an injustice after all; I could have sworn he was the man in it if it was anybody.”
“Pooh!” said Rixa, “the Paymaster’s boy! I would as soon expect it of Gillesbeg Aotram.”
They went into the hostelry, and Gilian, halfway round the factor’s corner, was well-nigh ridden down by Turner on a roan horse spattered on the breast and bridle with the foam of a hard morn’s labour. He had scoured the countryside on every outward road, and come early at the dawn to the ferry-house and rapped wildly on the shutter. But nowhere were tidings of his daughter. Gilian felt a traitor to this man as he swept past, seeing nothing, with a face cruel and vengeful, the flanks of his horse streaked with crimson. The people shrunk back in their closes and their shop-doors as he passed all covered upon with the fighting passion that had been slumbering up the glen since ever he came home from the Peninsula.
It was the breakfast hour in the Paymaster’s. Miss Mary was going in with the Book and had but time to whisper welcome to her boy on the step of the door, for the brothers waited and the clock was on the stroke. Gilian had to follow her without a word of explanation. He was hungry; he welcomed the little respite the taking of food would give him from the telling of a confidence he felt ashamed to share with Miss Mary.
The Paymaster mumbled a blessing upon the vivours, then fed noisily, looking, when he looked at Gilian at all, but at the upper buttons of his coat as if through him, and letting not so little as the edge of his gaze fall upon his face. That was a studious contempt, and Gilian knew it, and there were many considerations that made him feel no injury at it. But the Cornal’s utter indifference—that sent his eye roaming unrecognising into Gilian’s and away again without a spark of recognition—was painful. It would have been an insufferable meal, even in his hunger, but for Miss Mary’s presence. The little lady would be smiling to him across the table without any provocation whenever her brothers’ eyes were averted, and the faint perfume of a silk shawl she had about her shoulders endowed the air with an odour of domesticity, womanhood, maternity.
For a long time nobody spoke, and the pigeons came boldly to the sill of the open window and cooed.
At last said the Paymaster, as if he were resuming a conversation: “I met him out there on horseback; the hunt is still up, I’m thinking.”
“Ay?” said the Cornal, as if he gripped the subject and waited the continuance of the narrative.
“He’ll have ranged the country, I’m thinking,” went on his brother. “I could not but be sorry for the man.”
Miss Mary cast upon him a look he seldom got from her, of warmth more than kinship, but she had nothing to say; her voice was long dumb in that parlour where she loved and feared, a woman subjugate to a sex far less worthy than her own and less courageous.
“Humph!” said the Cornal. He felt with nervous inquiry at his ragged chin, inspired for a second by old dreads of untidy morning parades.
“I had one consolation for my bachelordom in him,” went on the younger brother, and then he paused confused.
“And what might that be?” asked the Cornal.
“It’s that I’m never like to be in the same scrape with a child of mine,” he answered, pretending a jocosity that sat ill on him. Then he looked at Miss Mary a little shamefaced for a speech so uncommonly confidential.
The Cornal opened his mouth as if he would laugh, but no sound came.
“I’m minding,” said he, speaking slowly and in a muffled accent he was beginning to have always; “I’m minding when that same, cast in your face by the gentleman himself, greatly put you about Jock, Jock, I mind you were angry with Turner on that score! And no child to have the same sorrows over! Well—well——” He broke short and for the first time let his eyes rest with any meaning on Gilian sitting at the indulgence of a good morning’s appetite.
Miss Mary put about the breakfast dishes with a great hurry to be finished and out of this explosive atmosphere.
“There was an odd rumour—” said the Paymaster. He paused a moment, looking at the inattentive youth opposite him. He saw no reason to stay his confidences, and the Cornal was waiting expectingly on him. “An odd rumour up the way; I heard it first from that gabbling man Spencer at the Inns. It was that a young gentleman of our acquaintance might have had a hand in the affair. I could not say at the first whether the notion vexed or pleased me, but I assured him of the stupidity of it.” He looked his brother in the eyes, and fixing his attention cunningly dropped a lid to indicate that the young gentleman was beside them.
The Cornal laughed, this time with a sound.
“Lord,” he cried. “As if it was possible! You might go far in that quarter for anything of dare-deviltry so likeable. What’s more, is the girl daft? Her mother had caprice enough, but to give her her due she took up with men of spirit There was my brother Dugald—— But this one, what did Dugald call him—aye! on his very death-bed? The dreamer, the dreamer! It will hold true! Him, indeed!” And he had no more words for his contempt.
All the time, however, Gilian was luckily more or less separate from his company by many miles of fancy, behind the hills among the lochs watching the uprising of Nan, sharing her loneliness, seeing her feet brush the dew from the scented gall. But the Cornal’s allusion brought him to the parlour of his banishment, away from that dear presence. He listened now but said nothing. He feared his very accent would betray his secret.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Cornal again, “whoever is with her will rue it; mind, I’m telling you. It’s like mother like child.”
“I’m glad,” said the Paymaster, “I had nothing to do with the sex of them.” He puffed up as he spoke it; there was an irresistible comedy in the complacence of a man no woman was ever like to run after at his best. His sister looked at him; his brother chuckled noiselessly.
“You—you—you——” said the elder brother grimly, but again he did not finish the sentence.
The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might, ran over the morning’s sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old man’s voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine, the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened.
The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into the street where each passerby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was obviously canvassing the latest news.
“There’s her uncle away by,” said the Paymaster, straining his head to follow a figure passing on the other side of the street. “If they had kept a stricter eye on her from the first when they had her they might have saved themselves all this.”
“Stricter eye!” said the Cornal. “You ken as much about women as I ken about cattle. The veins of her body were full of caprice, that’s what ailed her, and for that is there any remede? I’m asking you. As if I did not ken the mother of her! Man, man, man! She was the emblem and type of all her sex, I’m thinking, wanting all sobriety, hating the thought of age in herself and unfriendly to the same in others. A kind of a splash on a fine day upon the deep sea, laughing over the surface of great depths. I knew her well, Dugald knew her——”
“You had every chance,” said the Paymaster, who nowadays found more courage to retort when his brother’s shortness and contempt annoyed him.
“More chance, of course I had,” said the Cornal. “I’m thinking you had mighty little from yon lady.”
“Anyway, here’s her daughter to seek,” said the Paymaster, feeling himself getting the worst of the encounter; “my own notion is that she’s on the road to Edinburgh. They say she had aye a crave for the place; perhaps there was a pair of breeches there behind her. Anyway, she’s making an ass of somebody!”
Gilian threw down the letter and stood to his feet with his face white. “You’re a liar!” said he.
No shell in any of their foreign battles more astounded the veterans he was facing with wide nostril and a face like chalk.
“God bless me, here’s a marvel!” cried the Cornal when he found voice.
“You—you—you damned sheep!” blurted the Paymaster. “Do you dare speak to me like that? For tuppence I would give you my rattan across the legs.” His face was purple with anger; the stock that ran in many folds about his neck seemed like a garotte. He lifted up his hand as if to strike, but his brother caught his arm.
“Let the lad alone,” said he. “If he had a little more of that in his make I would like him better.”
Together they stood, the old men, facing Gilian with his hands clenched, for the first time in his life the mutineer, feeling a curious heady satisfaction in the passion that braced him like a sword and astounded the men before him.
“It’s a lie!” he cried again, somewhat modifying his accusation. “I know where she is, and she’s not in Edinburgh nor on her way to it.”
“Very well,” said the Paymaster, “ye better go and tell Old Islay where she is; he’s put about at the loss of a daughter-in-law he paid through the nose for, they’re saying.”
The blow, the last he had expected, the last he had reason to look for, struck full and hard. He was blind then to the old men sneering at him there; his head seemed charged with coiling vapours; his heart, that had been dancing a second ago on the wave of passion, swamped and sank. He had no more to say; he passed them and left the room and went along the lobby to the stair-head, where he stood till the vapours had somewhat blown away.
Miss Mary bustled about her kitchen with a liveliness that might have deceived any one but Gilian, who knew her to be in a tremendous perturbation. She clattered among pans, wrestled with her maid over dishes and dusters, and kept her tongue incessantly going on household details. With a laughable transparency she turned in a little to the lad and said something about the weather. He sat down in a chair and gloomed into the fire, Miss Mary watching his every sigh, but yet seemingly intent upon her duties.
“Donacha Breck’s widow was over before we were up to-day, for something for her hoast,” she said. “She had tried hyssop and pennyroyal masked in two waters, but I gave her sal prunelle and told her to suck it till the cough stopped. There’s a great deal of trouble going about just now: sometimes I think——” She stopped incontinent and proceeded to sweep the floor, for she saw that Gilian was paying no attention to her. At length he looked at her and then with meaning to Peggy bent over her jaw-box.
“Peggy,” said Miss Mary, “go over and tell the mantua-maker that she did not put the leavings in the pocket of my jacket, and there must have been a good deal.”
Peggy dried her arms, tucked up the corner of her apron, and departed, fully aware of the stratagem, but no way betraying the fact When she was gone, Miss Mary faced him, disturbed and questioning.
“We had a quarrel in there,” said he shortly, “I am not going to put up with what they said about any friend of mine.”
She had no need to ask who he spoke of. “Is it very much to you?” said she, turning away and busy with her brush that she might be no spectator of his confusion. A great fear sprang up in her; the boy who had grown up a man for her in the space of a Sunday afternoon was capable of new developments even more rapid and extraordinary.
“It should be very much to anybody,” said he, “to anybody with the spark of a gentleman, when the old and the soured and the jealous——”
“I’m thinking you are forgetting, Gilian,” said she, facing him now with a flush upon her face.
“What? what?” he asked, perplexed. “You think I should be grateful. I cannot help it; you were the kind one and——”
“I was not thinking of that at all,” she rejoined “I was just thinking you had forgotten that I was their sister, and that I must be caring much for them. If my brothers have said anything to vex you, and that has been a too common thing—my sorrow!—in this house, you should be minding their years, my dear. It is the only excuse I can offer, and I am willing to make up for their shortcomings by every kindness.” And she smiled upon the lad with the most wonderful light of affection in her eyes.
“Oh,” he cried, “am I not sure of that, Auntie? You are too good to me. What am I to be complaining—the beggarly orphan?”
“Not that, my dear,” she cried courageously, “not that! In this house, when my brothers’ looks were at their blackest for you, there has always been goodwill and motherliness. But you must not be miscalling them that share our roof, the brothers of Dugald and of Jamie.” Her voice broke in a gasp of melancholy; she stretched an arm and dusted from a corner of the kitchen a cobweb that had no existence, her eyesight dim with unbrimming tears. At any other time than now Gilian would have been smitten by her grief, for was he not ever ready to make the sorrows of others his own? But he was frowning in a black-browed abstraction on the clay scroll of the kitchen floor, heartsick of his dilemma and the bitterness of the speeches he had just heard.
Miss Mary could not be long without observing, even in her own troubles, that he was unusually vexed. She was wise enough to know that a fresh start was the best thing to put them at an understanding.
“What did you come to tell me to-day?” she asked, composing herself upon a chair beside him and taking up some knitting, for hers were the fingers that were never idle.
“Come down to tell you? Come down to tell you?” he repeated, in surprise at her penetration, and in some confusion that he should so sharply be brought to his own business.
“Just so,” she said. “Do you think Miss Mary has no eyes, my dear, or that they are too old for common use? There was something troubling you as you came in at the door; I saw it in your face—ay, I heard it in your step on the stair.”
He fidgeted and evaded her eyes. “I heard outside that—that Turner’s daughter had not been got, and it vexed me a little.”
“Turner’s daughter!” she said. “It used to be Miss Nan; it was Miss Nan no further gone than Thursday, and for what need we be so formal to-day? You are not heeding John’s havers about your name being mixed up with the affair in a poor Sassanach inn-keeper’s story? Eh, Gilian?” And she eyed him shrewdly, more shrewdly than he was aware of.
Still he put her off. He could not take her into his confidence so soon after that cold plunge into truth in the parlour. He wanted to get out of doors and think it all over calmly. He pretended anger.
“What am I to be talked to like this for? All in this house are on me. Is it wonderful that I should have my share in the interest the whole of the rest of the parish has in this young lady lost?”
He rose to leave the room. Miss Mary stopped him with the least touch upon the arm, a lingering, gentle touch of the finger-tips, and yet caressing.
“Gilian,” she said softly, “do you think you can be deceiving me?M’eudail, m’ieudail!I know there is a great trouble in your mind, and is it not for me to share?”
“There is something, but I cannot tell you now what it is, though I came here to tell you,” he answered, making no step to go.
“Gilian,” said she, standing before him, and the light from the window touching her ear so that, beside the darkness of her hair (for she had off her cap), it looked like a pink flower, “Gilian, can you not be telling me? Do you think I cannot guess what ails you, nor fancy something for its cure?”
He saw from the shyness of her face that she had an inkling of at least the object of his interest.
“But I cannot be mentioning it here,” he said, feebly enough. “It’s a matter a man must cherish to himself alone, and not be airing before others. I felt, in there, to have it in my mind before two men who had worked and fought and adventured all their lives, and come to this at last, was a childish weakness.”
She caught hold of his coat lapel, and fingered it, and looked as she spoke, not at the face above her, but at some vision over his shoulder. “Before them, my dear,” she said. “That well might be, though even they have not always been the hard and selfish veterans. What about me, my dear? Can I not be understanding, think you, Gilian?”
“It is such a foolish thing,” said he weakly, “a thing of interest only to the very young.”
“And am I so old, my dear,” she said, “not to have been young once? Do you think this little wee wife with her hair getting grey—not so grey either, though—was always in old maid dolours in her garret thinking of hoasts and headaches and cures for them, and her brothers’ slippers and her own rheumatics on rainy days? Oh, my dear, my dear! you used to understand me as if it had been through glass—ay, from the first day you saw me, and my brother’s sword must be sending me to my weeping; can you not understand me now? I am old, and the lowe of youth is down in its ember, but once I was as young—as young—as—as—as the girl you are thinking of.”
He drew back, overwhelmed with confusion, but she found the grip of his coat again and followed up her triumph.
“Did you think I could not guess so little as that, my dear? Oh, Gilian, sometimes I’ll be sitting in there all my lone greeting my eyes out over darning hose, and minding of what I have been and what I have seen, and the days that will never come any more. The two upstairs will be minding only to envy and to blame—me, I must be weeping as much for my sin as for my sorrow. Do I look so terrible old, Gilian, that you cannot think of me as not so bad-looking either, with a bonny eye, they said, and a jimp waist, and a foot like the honey-bee? It was only yesterday; ah, it was a hundred years ago! I was the sisterly slave. No dancing for me. No romping for Mary at hairst or Hogmanay. My father glooming and binding me motherless to my household tasks, so that Love went by without seeing me. My companions, and she the dearest of them all, enjoying life to the full, and me looking out at this melancholy window from year to year, and seeing the traffic of youth and all the rest of it go by.”
She released his lapel and relapsed, all tears, upon her chair.
“Auntie, Auntie!” he cried, “do not let my poor affairs be vexing you.” He put, for the first time in his life, an arm about her waist, bending over her, with all forgotten for the moment save that she had longed for love and seemingly found it not. At the touch of his arm she trembled like a maiden in her teens and forced a smile upon her face. “Let me go,” she said, and yet she gloried in that contact as she sat in the chair and he bent over her.
“And was there no one came the way?” he asked. “Was I not worth it, do you think?” she replied, yet smiling in her tears. “Oh, Gilian, not this old woman, mind you, but the woman I was. And yet—and yet, it is true, no one came; or if they came, they never came that I wanted.” “And he?” said Gilian.
She paused and sighed, her thin little hands, so white for all their toil in that hard barracks, playing upon her lap. “He never had the chance. My father’s parlour had no welcome, a soldier’s household left no vacant hours for an only daughter’s gallivanting. I had to be content to look at him—the one I mean—from the window, see him in the church or passing up and down the street. They had up Dr. Brash at me—I mind his horn specs, and him looking at my tongue and ordering a phlebotomy. What I wanted was the open air, a chance of youth, and a dance on the green. Instead of that it was always ‘Hof Mary!’ and ‘Here, Mary,’ and ‘What are you wasting your time for, Mary?’” She was all in a tremble, moist no more with tears, but red and troubled at her eyes. “And then—then—then he married her. If he had taken any one else it would not have seemed so hard. I think I hated her for it. It was long before I discovered they were chief, for my brothers that were out and in kept it from me for their own reasons, and they never kent my feeling. But when she was cried and married and kirked, each time it was a dagger at my heart. Amn’t I the stupid oldcailleach, my dear, to be talking of such a thing? But oh! to see them on the street together; to see him coming home on his furloughs—I am sure I could not be but unfond of her then! I mind once I wished her dead, that maybe he might—he might see something in me still. That was when Nan was born and—”
“What,” cried Gilian, “and was he Nan’s father? I—I did not know.”
She turned upon him an old face spoiled by the memories of the moment. “Who else would it be, my dear?” said she, as if that settled it. “And you are the first in the world I mentioned it to. He has never seen me close in the face to guess it for himself, before or since. It might have happened if I wished, after, but that was the punishment I gave myself for my unholy thought about my friend his wife.”
“Ah, little Auntie, little Auntie,” said he in Gaelic “Little Auntie, little Auntie!” No more than that, and yet his person was stormy with grief for her old sorrow. He put his arm about her neck now—surely never Highland lad did that before in their position, and tenderly, as if he had practised it for years, he pressed her to his breast and side.
“And is it all by now but a recollection?” said he softly.
“All by long syne,” said she, dashing the tears from her face and clearing herself from that unusual embrace. “Sometimes I’ll be thinking it was better as it was, for I see many wives and husbands, and the dead fire they sit at is less cheery than one made but never lighted. You mustn’t be laughing at an old lady, Gilian.”
“I would never be doing that, God knows,” he answered solemnly.
“And I am sure you would not, my dear,” she said, looking trustfully at him; “though sometimes I must be laughing at myself for such a folly. Lads and lasses have spoken to me about their courtships and their trials, and they never knew that I had anything but an old maid’s notion of the thing. And that’s the way with yourself, is it not, Gilian? Will you tell me now?”
Still he hung hesitating.
“Do you—are you fond of the girl?” said she and now it was he who was in the chair and she was bending over him.
“Do I not?” he cried, sudden and passionate lest his confidence should fail. “Ay, with all my heart.”
“Poor Gilian!” said she.
“Yes, poor Gilian!” he repeated bitterly, thinking on all that lay between him and the girl of his devotion. Now, if ever, was the time to tell the real object of his visit, how that those old surmisers upstairs were wider of the mark than the innkeeper, and that the person for whom the hunt was up through half the shire was sequestered in the lonely shealing hut on the moor of Karnes.
“I am sorry,” she went on, and there was no mistake about it, for her grief was in her face. “I am sorry, but you must forget, my dear. It is easy—sometimes—to forget, Gilian; you must be just throng with work and duty, and by-and-by you’ll maybe wonder at yourself having been in the notion of Nan Gordon’s daughter, made like her mother (and God bless her!) for the vexation of youth, but never for sober satisfaction. I am wae for you, Gilian, and I cannot help you, though I would tramp from here to Carlisle in my bauchles if it would bring her to you.”
“You maybe would not need to go so far,” he answered abruptly. “There is a hut behind the hill there, and neither press nor fire nor candle nor companion in it, and Nan—Miss Nan, is waiting there for me to go back to her, and here I’m wasting precious hours. Do you not see that I’m burning like a fire?”
“And you have the girl in the moor?” she cried incredulously.
“That I have!” he answered, struck by the absolute possession her sentence suggested. “I have her there. I took her there. I took her from her father’s home. She came willingly, and there she is, for me!”
He held out his arms with a gesture indescribable, elate, nervous with his passion. “Auntie, think of it: you mind her eyes and her hair, yon turn of the neck, and her song? They’re mine, I’m telling you.”
“I mind them in her mother,” said the little lady, stunned by this intelligence. “I mind them in her mother, and they were not at all, in her, for those who thought they were for them. This—this is a terrible thing, Gilian,” she said piteously.
He rose, and “What could I do?” he asked. “I loved her, and was I to look at her father selling her to another one who never had her heart?”
“Are you sure you have it yourself, Gilian?” she asked, and her face was exceedingly troubled.
“It’s a thing I never asked,” he confessed carelessly. “Would she be where she is without it being so?”
“Where her mother’s daughter might be in any caprice of spirit I would not like to guess,” said Miss Mary, dubious. “And I think, if I was the man, it would be the first thing I would be making sure about.”
“What would she fly with me for if it was not for love?” he asked.
“Ask a woman that,” she went on. “Only a woman, and only some kinds of women, could tell you that. For a hundred reasons good enough for herself, though not for responsibility.”
He bit his lips in perplexity, feeling all at sea, the only thing clear to his mind being that Nan was alone on the moor, her morning fire sending a smoke to the sky, expectation bringing her now and then to the door to see if her ambassador was in view.
For the sake of that sweet vision he was bound to put another question to Miss Mary—to ask her if the reference by her brother to Old Islay bore the import he had given it. He braced himself to it—a most unpleasant task.
“It’s true,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me you did not know he was the man?” “I did not. And the money?” “Oh, the money!” said Miss Mary oddly, as if now a great deal was explained to her. “Did Nan hear anything of that?”
“She knows everything—except the man’s name. She was too angry to hear that.”
“Except the man’s name,” repeated Miss Mary. “She did not know it was Young Islay.” She turned as she spoke, and busied herself with a duster where there was no need for it. And when she showed him her face again, there were tears there, not for her own old trials, but for his.
“You must go back there,” she said firmly, though her lips were trembling, “and you will tell Miss Nan that whatever Old Islay would do, his son would never put that affront on her. At the worst, the money was no more than a tocher with the lad; it was their start in Drimlee and Maam that are now together for the sake of an old vanity of the factors.... You must tell all that,” she went on, paying no heed to the perplexity in his face. “It would be unfair to do less, my dear; it will be wiser to do all. Then you will do the other thing—if need be—what you should have done first and foremost; youll find out if the girl is in earnest about yourself or only indulging a cantrip like her mother’s daughter. Ask her—ask her—oh! what need I be telling you? If you have not the words in your heart I need not be putting them in your mouth. Run away with you now!” and she pushed him to the door like a child that had been caressed and counselled.
He was for going eagerly without a word more, but she cried him back. For a moment she clung to his arm as if she was reluctant to part with him.
“Oh!” she cried, laughing, and yet with tears in her voice, “a bonny-like man to be asking her without having anything to offer.”
He would have interrupted her, but she would not let him.
“Go your ways,” she told him, “and bring her back with you if you can. Miss Mary has something in a stocking foot, and no long need for it.”
When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was still making-down from the Paymaster’s waistcoats. It was for that he used at last to show a new suit on the town by gentle degrees, the first Sunday the waistcoat, the next Sunday the waistcoat and trousers, and finally the complete splendour. Now he felt kenspeckle, not in any suit of material clothes but in a droll sense of nakedness. He had told his love and adventure in a place where walls heard and windows peered, and a rumour out of the ordinary went on the wind into every close and soared straight to the highest tenement—even to the garret rooms. He felt that the women at the wells, very busy, as they pretended, over their boynes and stoups, would whisper about him as he passed, without looking up from their occupation.
Down the street towards the church there was scarcely any one to be seen except the children out for the mid-day airing from Brooks’s school, and old Brooks himself going over to Kate Bell’s for his midday waters with a daundering step as if he had no special object, and might as readily be found making for the quay or the coffee-house. The children were noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-al and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting, yet with a sorrow in the cadence.
Up the street some men sat on the Cross steps waiting the coming of the ferry-boat from Kilcatrine, for it was the day of the weekly paper. Old Islay went from corner to corner, looking eager out to sea, his hands deep in the pockets of his long coat. Major McNicol put his head cautiously out at his door that his servant lass held open and scanned the deadly world where Frenchmen lay in ambush. He caught a glimpse of Gilian spying from the pend close and darted in trembling, but soon came out again, with the maid patting him kindly and assuringly on the back. From close to close he made a tactical advance—swift dashes between on his poor bent old limbs, and he drew up by Gilian’s side.
“All’s well!” said he with a breath of relier. “Man! but they’re throng to-day; the place is fair botching with them.”
Gilian expressed some commonplace and left the shelter of the pend close and went up the street round the factor’s corner. He looked behind him there. The ferry-boat from Kilcatrine was in. Young Islay had stepped the first off the skiff and was speaking—not to his father, but to General Turner, whose horse, spattered with foam and white with autumn dust, a boy held at the quay head. The post-runner took a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to the men waiting at the Cross; they hastened into the vintners, and one of them read aloud to the company with no need to replenish his glass. Against the breast wall the tide at the full lapped with a pleasant sound. Mr. Spencer came out to the front of the Inns, smoking a segar, very perjink with a brocade waistcoat and a collar so high it rasped his ears.
Everything visible impressed itself that day acutely on Gilian as he went out of the town; not only as if he were naked but as if he were raw and feeling flesh, and he was glad when the turn of the road at the Arches hid this place from his view.
A voice cried behind him, and turning around he found Peggy running after him with a basket, Miss Mary’s afterthought for the fugitive girl on the moor.
Very quickly he sped up the hills; Nan ran out to meet him as he came up the brae from Little Fox. She had been crying in the morning till tears would come no longer, but now she was composed; at least her eyes were calm and her cheeks lost the pallor they had from a night almost sleepless in that lonely dwelling. As he saw her running out to meet him he filled with elation and with apprehension. She was so beautiful, so airy, so seemingly his alone as she ran out thus from their refuge, that he grudged the hours he had been gone from her.
“Oh,” she cried, “the Spring was no more welcome to the wood. I hope you have brought good news, Gilian.” And up she went to him and linked an arm through his with some of the composure of the companion and some of the ardour of the sweetheart.
“I think it’s all well,” said he, putting his arm round her as they went up towards the hut together.
“Is it only thinking?” she asked with disappointment in her voice, all the ardour gone from her face, and her arm withdrawn. “I was so certain it would be sureness for once. Will Miss Mary not help me? I am sorry I asked her. It was not right, perhaps, that my father’s daughter should be expecting anything from the sister of the Campbells of Keil.” She was all tremulous with vexed pride and disappointment.
“Miss Mary is your very kind friend, Nan,” he protested, “and she will help you as readily as she will help me.”
“I am to go down then?” she cried, uplifted again.
“Well, yes—that is, it is between ourselves.”
“That’s what I would be thinking myself, John Hielan’man,” she thought. And still with all her contempt for his shrinking uncertainty there was a real fondness that might in an hour have come to full blossom in that solitude where they so depended on each other.
“I was to ask you something,” he said.
“My wise Miss Mary!” said Nan to herself. “Women have all the wits.” But she said nothing aloud, waiting for his explanation.
“I thought there was no need of it myself, but she said she knew better.”
“Very likely she was right too,” said Nan. “And now you must tell me all about what is going on down-by. Are they looking for me? What is my father saying? Do they blame me?”
Gilian told her all he knew or thought desirable, as they went up to the hut and prepared for the first meal Nan had that day. It was good that the weather favoured them. No sign of its habitual rain and wind hung over the moorland. Soft clouds, white like the wool of lambs new-washed in running waters, hung motionless where the sky met the moor, but over them still was the deep blue, greying to the dip.
They lit a fire in the hut with scraps of candle-fir Gilian had picked up on the way from the town, and a cheerful flame illumined the mean interior, but in a while they preferred to go outside and sit by the edge of Little Fox. In a hollow there the wilds seemed more compact about them; the sense of solitude disappeared; it was just as if one of their berrying rambles in the woods behind Maam had been prolonged a little farther than usual Lazily they reclined upon the heather, soft and billowy to their arms; the kind air fanned them, a melody breathed from the rippling shore.
All the reading in Marget Maclean’s books, the shy mornings, the pondering eves, the ruminations lonely by wood and shore, had prepared Gilian for such an hour, and now he felt its magic. And as they sat thus on the bank of the little lake, Nan sung, forgetting herself in her song as she ever must be doing. The waves stilled to listen; the birds on the heather came closer; the clouds, like wool on the edge of Ben Bhreac, tarried and trembled. And Gilian, as he heard, forgetting all that ancient town below of unable elders and stagnant airs, illusion gone and glory past, its gossip at well and close, its rancours of clan and family, knew the message now of the bird that cried across the swampy meadow-land at Kilmalieu. Love, love, love—and death. It was the message of bird and flower, of wave and wind, the deep and constant note in Nan’s song, whatever the words might be. No more for a moment the rustic, the abashed shepherd, but with the secret of the world filling his heart, he crept closer to Nan’s side as she leaned upon the heather, and put an arm around her waist.
“Nan, Nan,” he cried, “could we not be here, you and I, alone together for ever?”
The gaudy bubble of her expectation burst; she released herself from his grasp with “John Hielan’-man! John Hielan’man!” in her mind.
“And was that Miss Mary’s question? I thought she was a more sensible friend to both of us.”
“Never a better,” said he. “She offered her all and——”
“What!” cried Nan, anger flaring in her face, “are you in the market too?”
He stammered an excuse.
“It was not a gift,” said he, “but to you and me; and that, indeed, was as much as Old Islay meant, to give him his due.”
“Old Islay, Old Islay!” she repeated, turning her face from him to hide its sudden remorse. “Islay, Islay,” she repeated to herself. He noticed the hand she leaned upon, so soft, so white, so beautiful, trembled in its nest among the heather. He was so taken up with it there among the heather, so much more beautiful than the fairest flower, that he did not notice how far he had given up his secret.
He caught the hand and fondled it, and still she repeated to herself like a coronach, “Islay, Islay.” For once more the rude arm was round her waist in Maam, and the bold soldier was kissing her on the lips.
Gilian stood up and “Oh!” he cried, as he looked from her to the landscape, and back from the landscape to her again, “Oh!” he cried, “I wondered, when you were gone in Edinburgh, what was wanting here. When Miss Mary told me you were come home, I felt it was the first time the sun had shone, and the birds had found a song.”
“Young Islay!” she still was thinking, hearing the dreamer but to compare him with the practitioner she knew.
And then the dreamer, remembering that his question was still unput, uttered it shyly and awkwardly. “Do you love me?” said he.
It was for this she had fled from Young Islay, who knew his mind and had no fear to speak it!
“Do I love you?” she repeated. “Are you not too hasty?”
“Am I?” he said, alarmed. And she sighed.
“Oh yes, of course you are! You know so little of me. You have taken me from my father’s house by a ladder at night, and share a moor with me, and you know I have no friend to turn to in the world but yourself. You have eyes and ears, and still you must be asking if it is not hasty to find out if I love you. It is a wonder you have the boldness to say the word itself.”
“Well,” he pursued gawkily, though he perceived her drift clearly, “here I am, and I do love you. Oh, what a poor word it is, that love, for the fire I feel inside me. There is no word for that, there is nothing but a song for it that some day I must be making. Love, quo’ she; oh, I could say that truly of the heather kissing your hand, ay, of the glaur your feet might walk on upon a wet day!”
“My best respects to you, Master Gilian!” said Nan. “You have the fine tongue in your head after all. What a pity we have been wasting such a grand opportunity for it here!” and there was an indulgence in her eye, though now and then the numb regret of a blunder made came upon her spirit.
“Will you come down with me?” he went on, far too precipitate for her fancy.
“When?” she asked, thoughtlessly robbing a heather-tuft bell by bell with idle fingers.
“Now; Miss Mary expects us this evening.”
“Miss Mary!” said she, a little amused and annoyed. “You would never have come to the bit but for her.”
“Perhaps not,” he confessed, “but here I am, and God bless her for bringing me to it! Will you—will you take my white heather now?” And he stood, something of a lout, with nervous hands upon his hips.
“It looks very pretty where it is,” she answered playfully. “And for what should I be decking myself in the wilderness?”
She wanted the obvious compliment, but this was a stock from a kail garden, and “Oh, John Hielan’man!” she cried aloud for the first time.
“You promised, you know,” he said lamely.
“That was yesterday, and this is to-day, and——” she could not finish for thinking of Young Islay.
“Must I be taking it to you?” he went on, making to move to the door of the hut where lay the symbol of his love and the token of her surrender.
“Wait! wait!” she cried, standing to her feet and approaching him. “Is that all there is in the bargain? Are there no luck-pennies at this sort of market?”
He understood her and kissed her with a heart furious within but in his movement hesitating, shy and awkward.
For her life she could not but recall the other—the more confident and practised one she had fled from. She drew off, red, to give her no more than her due, for the treachery of her mind.
“Leave it,” she said to him. “I will get it myself. Does anyone besides Miss Mary know we are here?”
“No.”
“Then she will tell nobody our secret. You will go down now. We could scarcely go together. You will go down now, and tell her I will follow in the dusk.”
“You have given me no answer, Nan,” he pleaded; “the heather!”
“The heather will be at my heart!” she cried hurriedly.
It was a promise that sang in his head as he went on his way, the herald of joy, the fool of illusion.