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Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at different reduction ratios. Those too large to be entirely included in one exposure are filmed beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to right and top to bottom, as many frames as required. The following diagrams illustrate the method: Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent §tre filmds d des taux de reduction diff^rents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul clichd, il est film6 d partir de Tangle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images ndcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthode. rrata pelure, 1 d D 32X 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 * w r f Gilian the Dreamer ^ 7 ilian the Dreamer His Fancy His Love and Adventure ^ By Neil Munro Author o/'John Splendid' *The Lost Pibroch ' Gff. /,/, r I Toronto The Copp Clark Co. Ltd. 1899 J I CONTENTS PART I. CHAP. 4 I. WHEN THE GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED II. THE PENSIONERS III. THE FUNERAL IV. MISS MARY . V. THE BROTHERS VI. COURT-MARTIAL VII. THE MAN ON THE QUAY VIII. THE sheriff's SUPPER PARTY IX. ACADEMIA ... X. ON HIS majesty's SERVICE XI. THE SOUND OF THE DRUM XII. ILLUSION . . . XIII. A GHOST XIV. THE CORNAl's LOVE SIORY XV. ON BOARD THE " JEAM " XVI. THE DESPERATE BATTLE XVII. THE STORM XVIII. DISCOVERY . XIX. LIGHTS OUT ! rAi;E 9 18 30 43 61 75 90 lOI "5 127 135 142 156 16s 177 190 195 205 215 vin CONTENTS PART 11. CHAP. XX. THE RETURN XXI. THE SORROWFUL SEASON XXn. IN CHURCH . XXIIl. YOUNG ISLAY XXIV. MAAM HOUSE XXV. THE EAVESDROPPER XXVI. AGAIN IN THE GARDEN XXVII. ALARM . . XXVIII. GILIAN's OPPORTUNITY XXIX. THE ELOPEMENT . XXX. AMONG THE HEATHER XXXI. DEFIANCE XXXII. AN OLD maid's SECRET XXXIII. THE PROMISE XXXI\ . CHASE . XXXV. AN EMFIY HUT XXXVI. CONCLUSION . ■■Aon 232 241 262 <* •^ ^ *■ I I 290 306 340 352 361 37+ 3H3 3«9 395 '1 Gilian the Dre amer -t PART J CHAPTER I WHEK THE GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED Ra:n was beating on the open leaf of plane and beech, and rapping at the black doors of the ash- bud and the scent of the gean-tree flourish hune round the road by the river, vague, sweet, haunl? l.ke a recollection of the magic and forgott;n gardel' of youth Over the high and numerous hills moun! tarns of deer and antique forest, went the mist a hlT/n^t f ^ "^^''' S°"'"- The river sucked below the banks and clamoured on the cascades drawn unw.lhngly to the sea. the old gluttonous ^a that must ever be robbing the glens of their gathered wa ers. A„d the birds were at their loving! or the bu, Idmg of their homes, flying among the bushes trolhng upon the bough. One with an eye, as .h' say.nggoes, could scarcely pass among L travail of the new year without some pleasure in the spectac^, though the rain might drench him to the skm. He could not but joy in the thrusting crook 10 GILIAN THE DREAMER of the fern and bracken ; what sort of heart was his if it did not lift and swell to see the new fresh green blown upon the grey parks, to see the hedges burst, the young firs of the Blaranbui prick up among the slower elder pines and oaks ? Some of the soul and rapture of the day fell wich the rain upon the boy. He hurried with bare feet along the river-side from the glen to the town, a bearer of news, old news of its kind, yet great news too, but now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind seemed to be for his peculiar ear. The nod of the saugh leaf on the banks was a salutation. There is, in a flutter of the tree's young plumage, some hint of communication whose secret we lose as we age, and the boy, among it, felt the warmth of companionship. But the sights were for the errant moments of his mind ; his thoughts, most of the way, were on his message. He was a boy with a timid and wondering eye, a type to be seen often in those parts, and his hair blew from under his bonnet, a toss of white and gold, as it blew below the helms of the old sea-rovers. He was from Ladyfield, hastening as I say with great news though common news enough of its kind — the news that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead. If this were a tale of the imagination, and my task WHEN GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED ii was not a work of history but to pleasure common people about a hearth, who ever love the familiar emotions in their heroes, I would credit my hero with grief. For here was his last friend gone, here was he orphaned for ever. The door of Ladyfield, where he was born and where he had slept without an absent night since first his cry rose there, a coronach in the ears of his dying mother, would be shut against him ; the stranger would bar the gates at evening, the sheep upon the hills would have another k.:( 1-mark than the old one on their fleecy sides. Surely the sobs that sometimes rose up in his thro 't were the utter surrender of sorrow; were the tears tliat mingled vvith the rain-drops on his cheek rot griefs most bitter essence ? For indeed he had loved the old shrunk woman, wrinkled and brown like a nut, with a love that our race makes no parade of, but feels to the very core. But in truth, as he went sobbing in his loneliness down the river-side, a regard for the manner of his message busied him more than the matter of it. It was not every Friday a boy had a task so momentous had the chance to come upon households with intelli- gence so unsettling. They would be sitting about the table, perhaps, or spinning by the fire, the good- wife of Ladyfield still for them a living, breathing body, home among her herds, and he would come in among them and in a word bring her to their notice in all death's great monopoly. It was a duty to be done with care if he would avail himself of the whole value of so rare a chance. A mere clod would be for entering with a weeping face, to blurt his secret in 12 GILIAN THE DREAMER shaking sentences, or would let it slip out in an indifferent tone, as one might speak of some common occurrence. But Gilian, as he went, busied himself on how he should convey most tellingly the story he brought down the glen. Should he lead up to his news by gradual steps or give it forth like an alarum ? It would be a fine and rare experience to watch them for a little, as they looked and spoke with common cheerfulness, never guessing why he was there, then shock them with the intelligence, but he dare not let them think he felt so little the weightiness of his message that his mind was ready to dwell on trivi- alities. Should it be in Gaelic or in English he should tell them ? Their first salutations would be in the speech of the glens ; it would be, " Oh Gilian, little hero ! fair fellow 1 there you are 1 sit down and have town bread, and sugar on its butter," and if he followed the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between " Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh " and " The wife of Ladyfield is gone," there must be some careful choice. The Gaelic of it was closer on the feelings of the event ; the words some way seemed to make plain the emptiness of the farmhouse. When he said them, the people would think all at once of the little brown wrinkled dame, no more to be bustling about the kitchen, of her wheel silent, of her foot no more upon the blue flagstones of the milk- house, of her voice no more in the chamber where they had so often known her hospitality. The English, indeed, when he thought of it with its phrase a mere borrowing from the Gaelic, seemed an affectation. No, it must be in the natural tongue his tidings should WHEN GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED 13 be told. He would rap at the door hurriedly, lift the sneck before any response came, go in with his bonnet in his hand, and say " Tlia bean Lecknamban air falbh " with a great simplicity. And thus as he debated and determined in hi.; mind, he was hastening through a country that in another mood would be demanding his attention almost at every step of the way. Ladyfield is at the barren end of the glen — barren of trees, but rich in heather, and myrtle, and grass — surrounded by full and swelling hills. The river, but for the gluttonous sea that must be sucking it down, would choose, if it might, to linger in the valky here for ever, and in summer it loiters on many pretences, twining out and in, hiding behind Baracaldine and the bushes of Tom-an-Dearc, and pretending to doze in the long broad levels of Kincreggan, so that it may not too soon lose its freedom in so magic a place. But the glen opens out anon, woods and parks cluster, and the Duke's gardens and multitudes of roads come into view. The deer stamp and flee among the grasses, flowers grow in more profusion than up the glen where no woods shelter. There are trim houses by the wayside, with men about the doors talking with loud cheerfulness, and laughing in the way of inn-frequenters. A gateway from solitude, an en- trance to a region where the most startling and varied things were ever happening, to a boy from the glen this town end of the valley is a sample of Paradise for beau«-y and interest. Gilian went through it with his blue eyes blurred to-day, but for wont he found it full of charms and fancies. To go under its white- p H GILIAN THE DREAMER harled archways on a market day was to come upon a new world, and yet not all a new world, for its spectacles of life and movement — the busy streeti the clanging pavement, the noisy closes, the quay ever sounding with the high calls of manners and fishers — seemed sometimes to strike a chord of memory. At the first experience of this bury com- munity, the innumerable children playing before the school, and the women with wide flowing clothes, and flowered bonnets on their heads, though so different from the children of the glen and its familiar dames with piped caps, or maids with snooded locks — all was pleasant to his wondering view. He seemed to know and understand them at the first glance, deeper even than he knew or understood the common surroundings of his life in Ladyfield ; he felt at times more comfort in the air of those lanes and closes though unpleasantly they might smell (if it was the curing season and the gut-pots reeked at the quay) than in the winds of the place he came from, the winds of the wilds, so indifferent to mankind, the winds of the woods, sacred to the ghosts, among whom a boy in a kilt was an intruder, the winds of the hills, that come blowing from round the universe and on the most peaceful days are but momentary visitors, stopping but to tap with a branch at the window, or whistle mockingly in a vent. In spite of their mockery of him, Gilian always loved the children of the town. At first when they used to see him come through the arches walking hurriedly, feeling his feet in unaccustomed shoes awkward and unmanageable, and the polish of his -■** :.i« t WHEN GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED 15 face a thing unbearable, they would come up in wonder on his heels and guess at his identity, then taunt him for the rustic nature of his clothing. *' Crotal-coat, crotal-coat, there are peats in your brogues ! " they would cry ; or " Hielan'-man, hielan'- man, go home for your ftiarag and brose 1 " They were strange new creatures to him, foreigners quite, and cruel, speaking freely a tongue he knew not but in broken parts, yet deep in his innermost there was a strange feeling that he was of their kind. He wished he could join them in their English play, or better far, that he might take them to the eagle's nest in Stob Bhan, or the badgers' hamlet in Blaranbui, or show them his skill to fetch the deer at a call, in the rutting time, from the mud-wallows above Camus. But even yet, he was only a stranger to the boys of the town, and as he went down the street in the drenching rain that filled the syvers to overflowing and rose in a smoke from the <:alm waters of the bay, they cried "Crotal-coat, crotal-coat,'* after him. "Ah," said he to himself, inly pleased at their ignorance, " if I cared, could I not make them ashamed, by telling them they were mocking a boy without a home ? " Kept by the rain closer than usual to the shelter of the closes, the scamps to-day went further than ever in their efforts to annoy the stranger; they rolled stones along the causey so that they caught him on the heels, and they ran out at the back ends of their closes as he passed, and into others still before him, so that his progress down the town was i6 GILIAN THE DREAMER to run a gauntlet of jeers. But he paid no heed ; he was of that gifted nature that at times can treat the most bitter insults with indifference, and his mind was taken up with the manner of his mes- sage. When he came to the Cross-houses he cast about for the right close in a place where they were so numerous that they had always confused him, and a middle-aged woman with bare thick arms cavne out to help him. " You'll be looking for some one ? " said she in Gaelic, knowing him no town boy. He was standing as she spoke to him in a close that had seemed the one he sought, and he turned to tell her where he was going. "Oh yes," said the woman, "I know her well. And you'll be from the glen, and what's your errand in the town to-day ? You are from Drimfern ? No, Ladyfield I It is a fine place Ladyfield ; and how is the goodwife there ? " *' She is dead," said Gilian hurriedly. " God, and that is a pity too I " said the womin, content now that the news was hers. " You are in the very close you are looking for," and she turned and hurried up the street to spread the news as fast as could be. The boy turned away, angry with himself to have blurted out his news to the first stranger with the curiosity to question him, and halfway up the stairs he had to pause a little to get in the right mood for his errand. Then he went up the remaining steps and rapped at the door. WHEN GEAN-TREE BLOSSOMED 17 "Come in," cried a frank and hearty woman's voice. He put down the sneck with his thumb and pushed in the door and followed. A little window facing the sea gave light to the interior, that would have been dull and mean but for the brilliant deif upon the dresser rack and the cleanliness of all things and the smiling faces of Jean Clerk and her sister. The hum of Jean's wheel had filled the chamber as he entered ; now it was stilled and the spinner sat with the wool pinched in her fingers, as she welcomed her little relative. Her sister — Aliset Dhu they called her, and if black she was, it had been long ago, for now her hair was like the drifted snow — stood behind her, looking up from her girdle where oaten bannocks toasted. He stood with his bonnet in his hand. Against his will the grief of his loss swept over him more masterfully than it had yet done, for those two sisters had never been seen by him befoie except in the company of their relative the little old woman with a face like a nut, and the sobs that shook him were checked by no reflection of the play-actor. He was incapable of utterance. " O my boy, my boy 1 " cried Jean Clerk. " Do I not know your story ? I dreamt last night I saw a white horse galloping over Tombreck to Ladyfield and the rider of him had his face in his plaid. Peace with her, and her share of Paradise 1 " And thus my hero, who thought so much upon the way of his message, had no need to convey it any way at all. B CHAPTER II THE PENSIONERS "Go round," said Jean Clerk, "and tell the Pay- master ; he'll be the sorry man to lose his manager." " Will he be in his house ? " asked Gilian, eating the last of his town bread with butter and sugar. " In his house indeed ! " cried Jean, her eyes ' .ill red with weeping. " It is easy to see you are from the glen, when at this time of day you would be for seeking a gentleman soldier in his own house in this town. No! no! go round to Sergeant Morc's change-house, at the quay-head, and you'll find the Captain there with his cronies." So round went Gilian, and there he came upon the pensioners, with Captain John Campbell, late Paymaster of his Majesty's 46th Foot, at their head. The pensioners, the officers, ah ! when I look up the silent street of the town nowadays and see the old houses empty but for weavers, and merchants, and mechanics, people of useful purposes but little manly interest, and know that all we have of martial glory is a dust under a score of tombstones in the yard, I find it ill to believe that ever wars were THE PENSIONERS 19 I bringing trade for youth and valour to our mitlst. The warriors arc gone ; they do not fight their battles over any more at a meridian dram, or late sitting about the bowl where the Trinidad lemon floated in slices on the philtre of joy. They are up bye yonder in the shadow of the rock with the sea grumbling constantly beside them, and their names and offices, and the dignities of their battles, and the long number of their years, are carved deeply, but not deeply enough, for what is there of their fame and valour to the fore when the threshing rain and the crumbling frost have worn the legend off the freestone slab ? We are left stranded high and dry upon times of peace, but the old war-dogs, old heroes, old gentles of the stock and cane — they had seen the glories of life, and felt the zest of it. Bustling times I the drums beat at the Cross in those days, the trumpeters playing alluringly up the lanes to young hearts to come away; pipers squeezed out upon their instruments the fine tunes that in the time I speak of no lad of Gaelic blood could hear but he must down with the flail or sheep- hook and on with the philabeg and up with the sword. Gentlemen were for ever going to wars or coming from them ; were they not of the clan, was not the Duke their cousin, as the way of putting it was, and by his gracious offices many a pock- pudding English corps got a colonel with a touch of the Gaelic in his word of command as well as in his temper. They went away ensigns — some of them indeed went to the very tail of the rank and file with Mistress Musket the brown besom — and they came mmmmmmmmtmm 20 GILIAN THE DREAMER t . J li ■ back Majors-General, with wounds and pensions. " Is not this a proud day for the town with three Generals standing at the Cross ? " said the Pay- master once, looking with pride at his brother and Turner of Maam and Campbell of Strachur standing together leaning on their rattans at a market. It was in the Indies I think that this same brother the General, parading his command before a battle, came upon John, an ensign newly to the front with a draft from the sea. " Who sent you here, brother John ? " said he, when the parade was over. " You would be better at home in the Highlands feeding your mother's hens." In one way it might have been better, in another way it was well enough for John Campbell to be there. He might have had the luck to see more battles in busier parts of the world, as General Dugall did, or Colin, who led the Royal Scots at Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo; but he might have done worse, for he of all those gallants came home at the end a hale man, with neither sabre-cut nor bullet. To give him his due he was willing enough to risk them all. It bittered his life at the last, that behind his back his townspeople should call him " Old Mars," in an irony he was keen enough to feel the thrust of. Captain Mars, Captain Mars, Who never saw wars, said Evan MacCoU, the bard of the parish, and the name stuck as the bye-names of that wonderful town have a wa}' of doing. THE PENSIONERS 21 *' Old Mars," Paymaster, sat among the pensioners in the change-house of the Sergeant More when Gilian came to the door. His neck overflowed in waves of fat upon a silk stock that might have throttled a man who had not worn the king's stock in hot lands over sea ; his stockings fitted tightly on as neat a leg as ever a kilt displayed, though the kilt was not nowadays John Campbell's wear but kcrseymore knee-breeches. He had a figured vest strewn deep with snuff that he kept loose in a pocket (the regiment's gold mull was his purse), and a scratch wig of brown sat askew on his bullet head, raking with a soldier's swagger. He had his long rattan on the table before him, and now and then he would lift its tasseled head and beat time lightly to the chorus of Dugald MacNicol's song, Dugald was Major once of the ist Royals ; he had carried the sword in the Indies, East and West, and in the bloody Peninsula, and came home with a sabre-slash on the side of the head, so that he was a little weak-witted. When he would be leaving his sister's door to go for the meridian dram at the quay-head he would dart for cover to the Cross, then creep from close to close, and round the church, and up the Ferry Land, in a dread of lurking enemies; yet no one jeered at his want, no boy failed to touch his bonnet to him, for he was the gentleman in the very weakest moment of his disease. He had but one song in his budget : O come and gather round me, lads, and help the chorus through, When I tell you how we fought the French on the plains of Waterloo, 22 GILIAN THE DREAMER -l He sang it in a high quavering voice with curious lapses in the vigour of his singing and cloudings in the fire of his eyes, so that now and then the com- pany would have to jolt him awake to give the air more lustily. Colonel Hall was there (of St. John's) and Captain Sandy Campbell of the Marines, Bob MacGibbon, old Lochgair, the Fiscal with a ruffled shirt, and Doctor Anderson. The Paymaster's brothers were not there, for though he was the brother with the money they were field-officers and they never forgot it. The chorus was ringing, the glasses and the Pay- master's stick were rapping on the table, the Sergeant More, with a blue brattic tied tight across his paunch to lessen its unsoldierly amplitude, went out and in with the gill-stoups, pausing now and then on the errand to lean against the door of the room with the empty tray in his hand, drumming on it with his finger-tips and joining in the officers' owercome. He turned in the middle of a chorus, for the boy was standing abashed in the entry, his natural fears at meeting the Paymaster greatly increased by the sound of revelry. "Well, little hero," said the Sergeant More, in friendly Gaelic, " are you seeking any one ? " " I was sent to see the Paymaster, if it's your will," said Gilian, with his eyes falling below the scrutiny of this swarthy old sergeant. " The Paymaster ! " cried the landlord, shutting the door of the room ere he said it, and uplifting alarmed hands, " God's grace ! do not talk of the • I THE PENSIONERS 23 Payinastcr here ! lie is Captain Campbell, mind, late of his Majesty's 46th Foot, with a pension of £4 a week, and a great deal of money it is for the country to be paying to a gentleman who never saw of wars but skirmish with the Syke. Nothing but Captain, mind you, and do net forget the salute, so, with the right hand up and inumb on a line with the right eyebrow. But couid your business not be waiting? If it is Miss Mary who sent for him it is not very reasonable of her, for he is here no longer than twenty minutes, and it is not sheepshead broth day, I know, because 1 saw her servant lass down at the quay for herrings an hour ago. Captain, n.ind, it must be that for him even with old soldiers like myself. I would not dare Paymaster him, it is a name that has a trade ring about it that suits ill with his Highland dignity. Captain, Captain ! " Gilian stood in front of this spate of talk, becom- ing more diffident and fearful every moment. He had never had any thought as to how he should tell the Paymaster that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead, that was a task he had expected to be left to some one else, but Jean Clerk and her sister had a cunning enough purpose in making him the bearer of the news. " I am to tell him the goodwife of Ladyfield is dead," he explained, stammering, to the Sergeant More. " Dead ! " said John More. " Now is not that wonderful ? " He leaned against the door as he had leaned many a time against sentry-box and barrack wall, and dwelt a little upon memory. " Is ■■9 mmm^ 24 GILIAN THE DREAMER I ni (i not that wonderful ? The first time I saw her was at a wedding in Karnes, Lochow, and she was the handsomest woman in the room, and there were sixty people at the wedding from all parts, and sixty-nine roasted hens at the supper. Well, well — dead I blessings with her ; did I not know her well ? Yes, and I knew her husband too, Long Angus, since the first day he came to Lady field for Old Mar — for the Paymaster — till the last day he came down the glen in a cart, and he was the only sober body in the funeral, perhaps because it was his own. Many a time I wondered that the widow did so well in the farm for Captain Campbell, with no man to help her, the sowing and the shearing, the dipping and the clipping, ploughmen and herds to keep an eye on, and bargains to make with wool merchants and drovers. Oh I she was a clever woman, your grandmother. And now she'j dead. Well, it's a way they have at her age 1 And the Paymaster must be told, though I know it will vex him greatly, because he is a sort of man who does not relish changes. Mind now you say Captain ; you need not say Captain Campbell, but just Captain, and maybe a ' sir ' now and then. I suppose you could not put off telling him for a half-hour or thereabouts longer, when he would be going home for dinner any way ; it is a pity to spoil an old gentleman's meridian dram with melancholy news. No. You were just told to come straight away and tell hirn — well, it is the good soldier who makes no deviation from the word of command. Come away in then and — Captain mind — and the salute,'" X. I THE PENSIONERS 25 The Sergeant More threw open the door of the room, filled up the space a second and gave a sort of free-and-easy salute. " A message for you, Captain," said he. The singing was done. The Major's mind was wandering over the plains of Waterloo to guess by the vacancy of his gaze ; on his left Bob MacGibbon smoked a black segar, the others talked of townsmen still in the army and of others buried under the walls of Badt ios. They all turned when the Sergeant More -. e, and they saw him push before him into the room the little boy of Ladyfield with his bonnet in his hand and his eyes restless and timid like pigeons at a strange gate fluttering. " Ho I Gilian, it is you ? " said the Paymaster, with a very hearty voice ; then he seemed to guess the nature of the message, for his voice softened from the loud and bumptious tone it had for ordinary. " How is it in Lecknamban ? " he asked in the Gaelic, and Gilian told him, minding duly his " sir " and his " Captain " and his salute. " Dead 1 " said the Paymaster, " Blessings with her ! " Then he turned to his companions and in English — "The best woman in the three parishes and the cleverest. She could put her hand to an}^- thing and now she's no more. I think that's the last of Ladyfield for me. I liked to go up now and then and go about the hill and do a little bargaining at a wool market, or haggle over a pound with a drover at the fair, but the farm did little more than pay me and I had almost given it up when her husband died." ^fmsmw^amss 26 GILIAN THE DREAMER fj 8 I :f lie looked flushed and uncomfortable. His stock seemed to fit him more tightly than before and his wig sat more askew than ever upon his bald head. For a little he seemed to forget the young messenger still standing in the room, no higher than the table whereon the glasses ranged. Gilian turned his bonnet about in his hand and twisted the ribbons till they tore, then he thought with a shock of the scolding he would get for spoiling his Sunday bonnet, but the thought was quickly followed by the recollection that she who would have scolded him would chide no more. The pensioners shared their attention betv/een the Paymaster and the boy. While the Paymaster gave them the state of his gentleman farming (about which the town was always curious), they looked at him and wondered at a man who had seen the world and had £4 a week of a pension wasting life with a paltry three-hundred sheep farm instead of spending his money royally with a bang. When his confidence seemed likely to carry their knowledge of his affairs no further than the town's gossip had already brought it, they lost their interest in his reflections and had time to feel sorry for the boy. None of them but knew he was an orphan in the most grievous sense of the term, without a relative in the wide world, and that his future was something of a problem. Bob MacGibbon — he was Captain in the 79th — leaned forward and tried to put his hand upon the child's shoulder, not unkindly, but with a rough i.lnyfulness of the soldier. Gilian shrank back, his face flushing crimson, then he realised the stupidity J THE PENSIONERS 27 of his shyness and tried to amend it by coming a Httlc farther into the room and awkv/ardly attempting the salute in which the Sergeant More had tutored him. The company was amused at the courtesy, but no one laughed. In a low voice the Paymaster swore. He was a man given to swearing with no great variety in his oaths, that were merely a camp phrase or two at the most, repeated over and over again, till they had lost all their original meanings and could be uttered in front of Dr. Colin himself without any objection to them. In print they would look wicked, so they must be fancied by such as would have the complete picture of the elderly soldier with the thick neck and the scratch wig. The Ser- geant More had gently withdrawn himself and shut the door behind him the more conveniently to hear what reception the messenger's tidings would meet witii from the Paymaster. And the boy felt himself cut off most helplessly from escape out of that fearful new surrounding. It haunted him for many a day, the strong smell of the spirits and the sharp odour of the slices floating in the glasses, for our pensioners were extravagant enough to flavour even the cold midday drams of the Abercrombie with the lemon's juice. Gihan shifted from leg to leg and turned his bonnet continuously, and through his mind there darted many thoughts about this curious place and company that he had happened upon. As they looked at him he felt the darting tremor of the fawn in the thicket, but alas he was trapped ! How old they were ! How odd they looked in their high collars and those bands wound round their necks ! They i 28 GILIAN THE DREAMER were not farmers, nor shepherds, nor fishermen, nor even shopkeepers; they were people with some manner of Hfe beyond his guessing. The Paymaster of course he knew ; he had seen him often come up to Lady field, to talk to the goodwife about the farm and the clipping, to pay her money twice yearly that was called wages, and was so little that it was scarcely worth the name. Six men in a room, all gentle (by their clothes), all with nothing better to do than stare at a boy who could not stare back I How many things they had seen ; how many thoughts they must share between them 1 He wished himself on the other side of Aora river in the stillness of Kin- creggan wood, or on the hill among the sht-sp — any- where away from the presence of those old men with the keen scrutiny in their eyes, doubtless knowing all about him and seeing his very thoughts. Had they been shepherds, or even the clever gillies that sometimes came to the kitchen of Ladyfield on nights of ceilidh or gossip, he would have felt him- self their equal. He would have been comfortable in feeling that however much they might know about the hills, and woods, and wild beasts, it was likely enough better known to himself, who lived among them and loved them. And the thoughts of the gillie, and the shepherd, were rarely beyond his shrewd guess as he looked at them ; they had but to say a word or two, and he knew the end of their story from the beginning. But these old gentle- men were as far beyond his understanding as Gillesbeg Aotram, the wanderer who came about the glens and was called daft by the people who did THE PENSIONERS The Sergeant More stepped softly on his tiptoes .X steps ,uto tl.e kitchen, then six steps noisi v back again and put his head in ^ atZwit'h r" ^"'' C-P'=""?"^^W he, polishinj. a tray with the corner of his brattie . y"'*^^.^'^- There is nothing at our place to-div but herrings, and it's the poorest of meals for mela i- choly. M.SS Mary would make it all the m2 jnejncholy with her weeping over the UdwiH Gilian went out with the Sergeant More and »ade a feeble pretence at eating hi second dVrl^ s*' CHAPTER III ■i: 1 1 I THE FUNERAL All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochovvside on either bide from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west, full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with the broken blossom. The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions, the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing melan- choly one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting I i THE FUNERAL 31 <■*'- but unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowci^ chey would not pluck. Some- times they will put a cap on the side of a cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grin- ning face will create a moment's laughter, but it lo soon checked and they walk among the graves in a more seemly peace. They buried the goodwife of Ladyficld in her appointed place beside her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it. The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a tabic tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love or merriment. The men were on their way home over the New 3i GILIAN THE DREAMER I ■,f. Bridge, treading heavily, and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster's dram at the " lifting " at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times before, of Long Dan Maclntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge, except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day bring the massive masonry down. " Hal ha 1 is that not good ? " demanded the Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. " I told him he would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he would be first." The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was Colonel. " I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt," said Mr. William Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make his way among the people here. " It is quite the style, quite the style, sir." " Do you think so, now ? " asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment. " I do, indeed," said Mr. Spencer, " it is very genteel and just as the gentry like it." The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye. " Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer," he THE FUNERAL 33 Fiscal, asked, "with any idea of making distinctions ? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years and I am the first man-of- business in the family." The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man ! he had much to learn of Highland punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee'd gun that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far behind them, alone on the top of the bridge. " Is there no one with the boy ? " he asked. " And where is he to stay now that his grandmother is dead?" The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to himself. " Am not I the golan ? " said he. " I forgot about the fellow, and I told the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I'm putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It must be seen to, it must be seen to." Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed. "Oh," said he, "Jean Clerk's a relative; he'll be going to bide there." They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass button would burst with a crack like a gun ; Rixa puffing and stretching himself ; Major Dugald ducking his head c 34 GILIAN THE DREAMER ii J i! and darting his glance about from side to side looking for the enemy ; Mr. Spencer, tall, thin, with the new strapped breeches and a London hat, blowing his nose with much noise in a Barcelona silk handkerchief. All the way before them the crowd went straggling down in blacks with as much hurry as the loo!: of the thing would permit, to reach the schoolhouse where the Paymaster had laid out the last service of meat and drink for the mourners. The tide was out ; a sandy beach strewn with stones and clumps of seaweed gave its saline odour to the air ; lank herons came sweeping down from the trees over Croitivile, and stalked about the water's edge. There was only one sound in nature beyond the soughing of the wind in the shrubbery of the Duke's garden, it was the plaintive call of a curlew as it flew over the stable park. A stopped and stagnant world, full of old men and old plaints, the dead of the yard behind, the solemn and sleepy town before. The boy was the only person left in the rear of the Paymaster and his friends ; he was standing on the bridge, fair in the middle of the way. Though the Paymaster cried he was not heard, so he walked back and up to the boy while the others went on their way to the schoolhouse, where old Brooks the dominie was waiting among the jars and oatcakes and funeral biscuits with currants and carvie in them. Gilian was standing with the weepers off his cuffs and the crape off his bonnet ; he had divested him- self of the hateful things whenever he found himself alone^ and he was listening with a rapt and inex- ( ■*, — 4 THE FUNERAL 35 pressive face to the pensive call of the curlew as it rose over the fields, and the tears were dropping down his cheeks. "Oh, '/7/t', what's the matter with you?" asked the Paymaster in Gaelic, struck that sorrow should so long remain with a child. Gilian started guiltily, flushed to the nape of his neck and stammered an explanation or excuse. " The bird, the bird ! " said he, turning and looking at the dolorous piper of the marsh. " Man ! " said the Paymaster in English, looking whimsically at this childish expression of surprise. " Man ! you're' a queer callant too. Are there no curlews about Ladyfield that you should be in such a wonder at this one ? Just a plain, long-nebbed, useless bird, not worth powder and shot, very douce in the plumage, and always at the same song like MacNicol the Major." The little fellow broke into a stammering torrent of Gaelic. " What does it say, what does it say ? " he asked : " it is calling, calling, calling, and no one will answer it ; it is telling something, and I cannot understand. Oh, I am sorry for it, and " " You must be very hungry, poor boy," said the Paymaster. "Come away down, and Miss Mary will give you dinner. Did you ever taste rhubarb tart with cream to it ? I have seen you making umbrellas with the rhubarb up the glen, but I'm sure the goodwife did not know the real use of it." Gilian paid no heed to the speaker, but listened with streaming eyes to the wearied note of the bird that still cried over the field. Then the Paymaster it 36 GILIAN THE DREAMER ;■ I: ,' if 1! swore a fiery oath most mildly, and clutched the boy by the jacket sleeve and led him homeward. " Come along," said he, " come along. You're the daftest creature ever came out of the glen, and what's the wonder of it, born and bred among stirks and sheep on a lee-lone country-side with only the birds to speak to ? " The two went down the road together, the Pay- master a little wearied with his years and weight or lazied by his own drams, leaning in the least degree upon the shoulder of the boy. They made an odd- looking couple — dawn and the declining day. Spring and ripe Autumn, illusion and an elderly half-pay officer in a stock and a brown scratch wig upon a head that would harbour no more the dreams, the poignancies of youth. Some of the mourners hastening to their liquor turned at the Cross and looked up the road to see if they were following^ and they were struck vaguely by the significance of the thing. " Dear me," said the Fiscal, " is not Old Mars getting very bent and ancient ? " " He is, that ! " said Rixa, who was Sheriff Maclachlan to his face. " I notice a glass or two makes a wonderful difference on him this year back ever since he had his little bit towt. That's a nice looking boy ; I like the aspect of him ; it's unusual. What a pity the Paymaster never had a wife or sons of his own." "You say what is very true, Sheriff," said Mr. Spencer. " I think there is something very sad in the spectacle, sir, of an old gentleman with plenty of the \ THE FUNERAL 37 world in his possession going down to the bourne with not a face beside him to mind of his youth." But indeed the Paymaster was not even reminded of his own youth by this queer child on whom he leaned. He had never been like this, a shy frightened dreaming child taken up with fancies and finding omens and stories in the piping of a fowl. Oh ! no, he had been a bluff, hearty, hungry boy, hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sistet* Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever girl, with a nerve that a harsh word set thrilling. " Did Jean Clerk say anything about where you are to sleep to-night ? " he asked him, still speaking the Gaelic in which he knew the little fellow was most at home. *' I suppose I'll just stay in my own bed in Lady- field," said Gilian, apparently little exercised by the thought of his future, and dividing some of his atten- tion to the Paymaster with the sounds and sights of nature by the way, the thrust of the bracken crook between the crannies of the Duke's dykes, the gummy buds of the limes and chestnuts, the straw- gathering birds on the road, the heron so serenely stalking on the shore, and the running of the tiny streams upon the beach that smoked now in the heat of the sun. The Paymaster seemed confounded. He swelled his neck more fully in the stock, cleared his throat with a loud noise, took a great pinch of snuff from 38 GILIAN THE DREAMER li I n his waistcoat pocket and spent a long time in dis- posing of it. Gilian was in a dream far off from the elderly companion and the smoking shore ; his spirit floated over the glen and sometimes farther still, among the hill gorges that were always so full of mystery to him, or farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities, towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings were, in the tales the shepherds told about t)ie peat fires on ceilidh nights. " I'm afraid you'll have to sleep in the town to- night," said the Paymaster, at last somewhat relieved of his confusion by the boy's indifference ; " the truth is we are shutting up Ladyfield for a little. You could not stay alone in it at any rate, and did Jean Clerk not arrange that you were to stay with her after this ? " " No," said Gilian simply, even yet getting no grasp of his homelessness. " And where are you going to stay ? " asked ihe Paymaster testily. " I don't know," said the boy. The Paymaster spoke in strange words under his breath and put on a quicker pac.*^ and went through the town, even past the sdK)(;ihouse, where old Brooks stood at the door in Suii long surtout saying a Latin declension over to himself as if it were a song, and into the Crosshouses past the tanned women standing with their hands rolled up in their aprons, and up to Jean Clerk's door. He rapped loudly with his rattan. He rapped so loudly that the inmates knew this was no common messenger, THE FUNERAL 39 and instead of crying out their invitation they came together and opened the door. The faces of the sisters grew rosy retl at the sight of the man and the boy before him. "Come away in, Captain," said Jean, assuming an air of briskness the confusion of her face belied. " Come away in, I am proud to see you at my door." The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled English. " Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you ? " he asked. " I did, that ! " said Jean Clerk, lifting her brattie and preparing to weep, " and it'll be the last time I'll ever be inside its hospitable door." "And you gave the key to Cameron the shep- herd?" " I did," said Jean, wondering what was to come next. The Paymaster changed his look and his accent, and spoke again with something of a pawky humour that those who knew him best were well aware was a sign that his temper was at its worst. " Ay," said he, " and you forgot about the boy. What's to be done with him ? I suppose you would leave him to rout with the kye he was bred among, or haunt the rocks with the sheep. I was thinking myself coming down the road there, and this little fellow with me without a friend in the world, that the sky is a damp ceiling sometimes, and the grass of the field a poor meal for a boy's stomach. Eh 1 n 1 40 GILIAN THE DREAMER II r (I'l :;ii ii; Ilil what say you, Mistress Clerk ? " And the old soldier heaved a thumbful of snufF from his waist- coat pocket. " The boy's no kith nor kin of mine," said Jean Clerk, "except a very far-out cousin's son." She turned her face away from both of them and pre- tended to be very busy folding up her plaid, which, as is well known, can only be done neatly with the aid of the teeth and thus demands some concealment of the face. The sister passed behind the Pay- master and the boy and startled the latter with a sly squeeze of the wrist as she did so. "Do you tell me, my good woman," demanded the Paymaster, " that you would set him out on the road homeless on so poor an excuse as that ? Far- out cousin here or far-out cousin there, he has no kin closer than yourself between the two stones of the parish. Where's your Hielan' heart, woman? " "There's nothing wrong with my heart, Captain Campbell," said Jean tartly, "but my pocket's empty. If you think the boy's neglected you have a house of your own to take him into ; it would be all the better for a young one in it, and you have the monej> to spend that Jean Clerk has not." All this with a very brave show of spirit, but with something uncommonly moist about the eyes. The Paymaster, still clutching the boy at the shoulder, turned on his heel to go, but a side glance at Jean Clerk's face again showed him something diiferent from avarice or anger. " You auld besom you 1 " said he, dunting the floor with his rattan, " I see through you now ; you I THE FUNERAL 41 think you'll get him put off on me. I suppose if I refused to take him in, you would be the first to make of him." The woman laughed through her tears. " Oh, but you are the gleg-eyed one, Captain. You may be sure I would not see my cousin's grandchild starving, and I'll not deny I put him in your way, because I never knew a Campbell of Klels, one of the old bold race, who had not a kind heart for the poor, and I thought you and your sister could do better than two old maiden women in a garret could do by him." " You randy ! " said he, " and that's the way you would portion your poor relations about the country- side. As if I had not plenty of poor friends of my own I And what in all the world am I to make of the youth ? " - "You'll have nothing to do with the making of him, Captain Campbell," said Jean Clerk, now safe and certain that the boy's future was assured. " It'll be Miss Mary will have the making of him, and I ken the lady well enough — with my humble duty to her — to know she'll make him a gentleman at the very least." " Tuts," said the Paymaster, " Sister Mary's like the rest of you ; she would make a milksop of the boy if I was foolish enough to take him home to her. He'll want smeddum and manly discipline ; that's the stuff to make the solJier. The uneasy bed to sleep on, the day's tasJ. to be done to the uttermost. I'll make him the smartest ensign ever put baldrick on — that's if I was taking him in r^^ ■ff^^^^p PPlMi m 42 GILIAN THE DREAMER t H; hand," he added hastily, realising from the look of the woman that he was making a complete capitulation. " And of course you'll take him. Captain Camp- bell," cried Jean Clerk in triumph. " I'm sure you would sooner take him and make a soldier of him than leave him with me — though before God he was welcome — to grow up harvester or herd." The Paymaster took a ponderous snuff, snorted, and went off down the stair with the boy still by the hand, the boy wide-eyed wondering, unable to realise very clearly whether he was to be made a soldier or a herd there and then. And when the door closed behind them Jean Clerk and her sister sat down and wept and laughed in a curious mingling of sorrow and joy — sorrow that the child had to be turned from their door and out of their lives with even the pretence at inhospitality, and joy that their device had secured for him a home and future more comfortable than the best their straitened circumstances could afford. i 1 i: CHAPTER IV MISS MARY The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to an honest merchant whose regular payment of his rent did not prevent the Paymaster, every time he stepped through the close, from dunting with his cane on the stones with the insolence of a man whose birth and his father's acres gave him a place high above such as earned their living behind a counter. " There you are, Sandy ! " he would call, " doing no trade as usual ; you'll not have sold a parcel of pins or a bolt of tape to-day, I suppose. Where am I to get my rent, I wonder, next Martinmas ? " The merchant would remonstrate. "I've done very well to-day, Captain," he would say. " I have six bolls of meal and seven yards of wincey going up the glen in the Salachary cart." " Pooh, pooh, what's that to the time of war ? I'll tell you this, Sandy, I'll have to roup out for my rent yet." And by he would sail, as red in the face as a bubbly-jock, swelling his neck over his stock more largely than ever, and swinging his rattan by its tassel 44 GILIAN THE DREAMER >;>' or whacking with it on his calves, satisfied once more to have put this merchant-body in his own place. To-day he paid no heed to the merchant, when, having just keeked in at the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. " I'm going to leave you with my sister Mary," he ex- plained. " You'll think her a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a well- meaning creature." Gilian thought no one could be more droll than this old man himself. Before indifferent to him, he had, in the past hour, grown to be afraid of him as a new mysterious agent who had his future in his hands. And to go up the stairs of this great high house, with its myriad windows looking out upon the busiest part of the street, and others gazing over the garden and the sea, was an experience new and bewildering. The dwelling abounded in lobbies and corridors, in queer corners where the gloom lurked, and in doors that gave glimpses of sombre bedsteads and high- backed austere chairs, of china painted with the most wonderful designs (loot of the old Indian palaces), of swords and sabretaches hung on walls, and tables polished to such degree that they reflected their sur- roundings. They went into a parlour with its window open, upon the window-sill a pigeon mourning among pots of wallflowers and southernwood that filled the entering air with sweetness. A room with thin- legged chairs, with cupboards whose lozens gave view to punch-bowls and rummers and silver ladles, a room TM MISS MARY 45 I open, pots the thin- view I room where the two brothers would convene at night while John was elsewhere, and in a wan candle light sit silent by the hour before cooling spirits, musing on other parlours elsewhere in which spurs had jingled under the board, musing on comrades departed. It was hung around with dark pictures in broad black frames, for the most part pictures of battles, " Fonte- noy," " Stemming the Rout at Steinkirk," " Blenheim Field," and — a new one — "Vittoria." There were pictures of men too, all with soldier collars high upon the nape of the neck, and epaulettes on their shoulders, whiskered, keen-eyed young men — they were the brothers in their prime when girls used to look after them as they went by on their horses. And upon the mantlebrace, flanked by tall silver candlesticks, was an engraving of John, Duke of Argyll, Field- Marshal. " Look at that man there," said the Paymaster, pointing to the noble and arrogant head between the candles, " that was a soldier's soldier. There is not his like in these days. If you should take arms for your king, boy, copy the precept and practice of Duke John. I myself modelled me on his example, and that, mind you, calls for dignity and valour and educa- tion and every manly part and " " Is that you blethering away in there, John ? " cried a high female voice from the spence. The Paymaster's voice surrendered half its con- fidence and pride, for he never liked to be found vaunting before his sister, who knew his qualities and had a sense of irony. "Ay I it's just me, Mary," he cried back, hastening 46 GILIAN THE DREAMER i ^ . J I to the door. " I have brought a laddie up here to see you." " It would be wiser like to bring me a man," cried the lady, coming into the room. " I'm wearied of washing sheets and blankets for a corps of wrunkled old brothers that have no gratitude for my sisterly slavery. Keep me ! who's ballachan is that ? " She was a little thin woman, of middle age, with a lowland cap of lace that went a little oddly with the apron covering the front of the merino gown from top to toe. She had eyes like sloes, and teeth like pc... 13 that gleamed when she smiled, and by constant trying to keep herself from smiling at things, she had w ^^n t' „ 'ines up and down between her eyebrows. A dear fond heart, a darling hypocrite, a foolish bounteous mother-soul without chick or child of her own, and yet with tenement for the loves of a large family. She fended, and mended, and tended for her soldier brothers, and they in the selfish blindness of their sex never realised her devotion. They sat, and over punch would talk of war, and valour, and de- votion, and never thought that here, within their very doors, was a constant war in their behalf against circumstances, in their interest an unending valour that kept the little woman bustling on her feet, and shrewd-eyed over her stew-pans, while weariness and pain itself, and the hopeless unresponse and in- gratitude of the surroundings, rendered her more appropriate place between the bed-sheets. " What ballachan is this ? " she asked, relaxing the affected acidity of her manner and smoothing out the lines upon her brow at the sight of the little fellow in MISS MARY 47 the tlie iw in a rough kilt, standing in a shy unrest upon the spot- less drugget of her parlour floor. She waited no answer, but went forward as she spoke, as one who would take all youth to her heart, put a hand on his head and stroked his fair hair. It was a touch wholly new to the boy; he had never felt before that tingling feeling that a woman's hand, in love upon his head, sent through all his being. At the message of it, the caress of it, he shivered and looked up at her face in surprise. " What do you think of him, Mary ? " asked the brother. " Not a very stout chap, I think, but hale enough, and if you stuck his head in a pail of cream once a day you might put meat on him. He's the oc from Ladyfield ; surely you might know him even with his boots on." " Dear, dear," she said ; " you're the Gilian I never saw but at a distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield. O little hero, am I not sorry for the good wife ? You have come for your pick of the dinner " " Do you think we could make a soldier of him ? " broke in the Paymaster, carrying his rattan like a sword and throwing back his shoulders. " A soldier ! " she said, casting a shrewd glance at the boy in a red confusion. " We might make a decenter man of him. Weary be on the soldiering ! I'm looking about the country-side and I see but a horde of lameter privatemen and half-pay officers maimed in limb or mind sitting about the dram bottle, hoved up with their vain-glory, blustering and blowing, instead of being honest, eident lairds and 48 GILIAN THE DREAMER i '■/ ■' 1 i: n] farmers. I never saw good in a soldier yet, except when he was away fighting and his name was in the Courier as dead or wounded. Soldiers, indeed ! sitting round there in the Sergeant More's tavern» drinking, and roaring, and gossiping like women — that I should miscall my sex 1 No, no, if I had a son " Well, well, Mary," said the Paymaster, breaking in again upon this tirade, " here's one to you. If you'll make the man of him I'll try to make him the soldier." She understood in a flash ! " And is he coming here ? " she asked in an accent the most pleased and motherly. A flush came over her cheeks and her eyes grew and danced. It was as if some rare new thought had come to her, a sentiment of poetry, the sound of a forgotten straiii of once familiar song. " I'm sure I am very glad," she said simply. She took the boy by the hand, she led him into the kitchen, she cried *' Peggy, Peggy," and when her servant appeared she said, " Here's our new young gentleman, Peggy," and stroked his hair again, and Peggy smiled widely and looked about for something to give him, and put a bowl of milk to his lips. " Tuts 1 " cried Miss Mary, " it's not a calf we have ; we will not spoil his dinner. But you may skim it and give him a cup of cream." The Paymaster, left in the parlour among the prints of war and warriors, stood a moment with his head bent and his fingers among the snuff listening to the talk of the kitchen that came along the spence and through the open doors. MISS MARY 49 " She's a queer body, Mary," said he to himself, " but she's taking to the brat I think — oh yes, she's taking to him." And then he hurried down the stair and up round the church corner to the schoolhouse where the company, wearied waiting on his presence, were already partaking of his viands. It was a company to whom the goodwife of Ladyfield, the quiet douce widow, had been more or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on. They were there not so much mournersasthe guests of Captain Campbell, nigh on a dozen of half-pay officers who had escaped the shambles of Europe, with the merchants of the place, and some of the farmers of the glen, the banker, the Sheriff, the Fiscal and the writers of whom the town has ever had more than a fair share. Dr. Colin had blessed the viands and gone away ; he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of relief, and old Baldy Bain, " Copenhagen " as they called him, who was precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his glass up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the presence of the clergyman. The food and drink were spread on two long tables ; the men stood round or sat upon the forms their children occupied in school hours. The room was clamant with the voices of the com- pany. Gathered in groups, they discussed every- thing under heaven except the object of their meet- ing—the French, the sowing, the condition of the i 50 GILIAN THE DREAMER : I I r. hogs, the Duke's approaching departure for London, the storm, the fishing. They wore their preposterous tall hats on the backs of their heads with the crape bows over the ears, they lifted up the skirts of their swallow-tail coats and hung them on their arms with their hands in their breeches pockets. And about them was the odour of musty, mildewed broadcloth, taken out of damp presses only on such occasions. Mr. Spencer, standing very straight and tall and thin, so that his trousers at the foot strained tightly at the straps under his insteps, looked over the assembly, and with a stranger's eye could not but be struck by its oddity. He was seeing — lucky man to have the chance ! — the last of the old Highland burgh life and the raw beginnings of the new ; he was seeing the real doame-uasatl, gentry of ancient family, colloguing with the common merchants whose day was coming in ; he was seeing the embers of the war in a grey ash, officers, merchants, bonnet lairds, and tenants now safe and snug and secure in their places because the old warriors had fought Boney. The schoolroom was perfumed with the smoke of peat, for it was the landward pupils' week of the fuelling, and they were accustomed to bring each his own peat under his arm every morning. The smoke swirled and eddied out into the room and hung about the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of Europe over the fireplace. Look- ing at this map and sipping now and then a glass of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself " Merrily danced the Quaker's wife." He wore a queue tied with a broad black ribbon that I MISS MARY 51 reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man him- self was little more than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is still upon his peninsula. " You are at your studies ? " said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for the son of a plain Portioner of Glen Shira who was to be seen any day coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather emptily in front of his kilt. Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper. " I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer," said he, *' I know it by heart — all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I'm but looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria, Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black dots no more ken- speckle than the township of Carnus up the glen. Wars, wars, bloody wars 1 have we indeed got to the last of them ? " " Indeed I hope so, sir," said the innkeeper, " for my wife has become very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the rejoicings, and if every war set a woman's mind running to extrava- gance in clothing, the fewer we have the better." " If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas ! it's my T t t' 52 GILIAN THE DREAMER r ^ ! 1 ; * i J i I i 1 fate to have lost mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General ?" He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies * because it was the fashion of the country, but never ate nor drank at them. " You were speaking, General Turner ? " said Campbell. Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its motto " Tu ne cede malis," and smiled blandly, as he always did when it was brought to his recollection that he had won more than soldiers' battles when the odds against him were three to one. " I was just telling Mr. Spencer that Waterloo looks like being the last of the battles, General, and that one bit of Brooks' map here is just as well known to some of us as the paths and woods and wat<^ 's of Glen Shira." "I'm not very well acquaint with Glen Shira myself," was all the General said, looking at the map for a moment with eyes that plainly had no interest in the thing before them, and then he turned to a nudge of the Paymaster's arm. Turner smiled again knowingly to Mr. Spencer. " I put my brogues in it that time," said he in a discreet tone. " I forgot that the old gentleman and his brothers were far better acquaint with Glen Shira in my wife's maiden days than I was myself. But that's an old story, Mr. Spencer, that you are too * Dregy : The Scots equivalent of the old English Dirge-ale, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon in the office for the dead, " Dirige, Dominc mens." I 1 MISS MARY S3 recent an incomer to know the shades and meanings of." " I daresay, sir, I daresay," said Mr. Spencer gravely. " You are a most interesting and sensitive people, and I find myself often making the most unhappy blunders." " Interesting is not the word, I think, Mr. Spencer," said General Turner coldly ; " we refuse to be interesting to any simple Sassenach." Then he saw the confusion in the innkeeper's face and laughed. " Upon my word," he said, " here I'm as touchy as a bard upon a mere phrase. This is very good drink, Mr. Spencer ; your purveyance, I suppose ? " " I had the privilege, sir," said the innkeeper. " Captain Campbell gave the order " " Captain Campbell ! " said the General, putting down his glass and drinking no more. " I was not aware that he was at the costs of this dregy. Still, no matter, you'll find the Campbells a good family to have dealings with of any commercial kind, pernick- etty and proud a bit, like all the rest of us, with their bark worse than their bite." " I find them quite the gentlemen," said the inn- keeper. Turner laughed again. " Man ! " said he, " take care you do not put your compliment just exactly that way to them ; you might as well tell Dr. Colin he was a surprisingly good Christian." Old Brooks, out of sheer custom, sat on the high stool at his desk and hummed his declensions to ft mim rmm 54 GILIAN THE DREAMER himself, or the sing-song Arma virumque cano that was almost all his Latin pupils remembered of his classics when they had left school. The noise of the assembly a little distressed him ; at times he would fancy it was his scholars who were clamouring before him, and he checked on his lips a high peremptory challenge for silence, flushing to think how nearly he had made himself ridiculous. From his stool he could see over the frosted glass of the lower window sash into the playground where it lay bathed in a yellow light, and bare-legged children played at shinty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a little wooden ball. The town's cows were wandering in for the night from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road overhung with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering through in lighter splasnes on the shade. Within, the drink was running to its dregs, and piles of oat- cake farls lay yet untouched. One by one the company departed. The glen folks solemnly shook hands with the Paymaster, as donor of the feast, and subdued their faces to a sad regret for this " melancholy occasion, Captain Campbell " ; then went over to the taverns in the tenements and kept up their drinking and their singing till late in the even- ing ; the merchants and writers had gone earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer, superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The afternoon was sinking; t ; : MISS MARY 55 1 % r into the cal" it ever has in this place, drowsing, mellowing ; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners, gathered at the head of the school- room near the door, seemed silent as his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and kept it up with his head while he surveyed the interior. Grammars and copy-books, pens in long tin boxes, the terrible black tawse he never used but reluctantly, and the confiscated playthings of the children who had been guilty of encroaching upon the hours of study with the trifles of leisure, were heaped within. They were for the most part the common toys of the country-side, and among them was a whistle made of young ash, after the fashion practised by children, who tap upon the bark to release it from its wood, slip off the bark entire upon its sap, and cut the vent or blow-hole. Old Brooks took it in his hand and a smile went over his visage. " General Turner," he cried up the room, " here's an oddity I would like to show you," and he balanced the pipe upon his long fingers, and the smile played about his lips as he looked at it. Turner came up, and " A whistle," said he. " What's the story ? " " Do you know who owns it ? " asked Brooks. " Sandy, I suppose," said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his only son. " At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and this may very well be the rogue's contrivance." He took the pipe in hand and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. " Man," said he, " that makes me young again 1 T 56 GILIAN THE DREAMER I t \ : i i i J li ! 1 1 ; ) r I wish I was still at the age when that would pipe me to romance." The schoolmaster smiled still. " It is not Master Sandy's," said he. "Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan ? She made it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer." " Ah ! the witch 1 " cried the General, his face showing affection and annoyance. "That's the most hoyden jade I'm sure you ever gave the ferule to." " I never did that," said the schoolmaster. " Well, at least she's the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint. She takes it off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling wretch ever kept a sergeant's section of lovers at her skirts. I wish j'ou could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the meadow." Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the moor-fowl pipes in spring. " Do you hear that ? " he asked. " It is all, my General, we get from life and know- ledge — a very thin and apparently meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of us make it out and some of us do not, be- cause, as it happens, we are not so happily constituted. ^ MISS MARY 57 If You would have your daughter a patient Martha of the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General, is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn my fees and Queen Anne's Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you : there is one mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that's the music that may be inoppor- tune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an ashen stick made by the performer during the morning's sacred exercise." The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old Brooks was doing, and among them was the Paymaster. He was redder in the face than ever, and his wig was almost off his head, it was so slewe;d aside. " Giving the General a lesson ? " he asked with some show at geniality. He leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he leaned on he had placed many a shilling as Candlemas and Han'sel Monday offerings when he was a school- boy, before the farming, before the army and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee- lone homester among her wanderers returned. " I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan," said Old Brooks pleasantly. " A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I assure you." i t ii t rf ii I 58 GILIAN THE DREAMER " Oh, I have heard of her," said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very hotly. "And you have heard of a very handsome little lady," said he, "remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted daughter." The Paymaster had an unpleasant little laugh that when he chose he could use with the sting of a whip though accompanied by never a word. He flicked the surplus of his snuff from his stock and gave this annoying little laugh, but he did not allow it to go unaccompanied, for he had overheard the General's speech to Mr. Spencer. " No doubt she's all you say or think," said he dryly, " I'm sure I'm no judge, but there's a rumour abroad that she's a big handful. A want of discipline perhaps, no more than that " "You know the old saying, Captain," said the General, "bachelors' bairns are aye well trained." The Paymaster started in a temper, and " I have a son," said he, " and " The General smiled with meaning. " A son ; at least I'll make him that, and I'll show you sometl' ng of training " Turner smiled anew, with a mock little bow and a wave of the fingers, a trick picked up abroad and maddening in its influence on a man with the feeling that it meant he was too small to have words with. n til / MISS MARY "I'll train him-l'll train him to hate your very name," said the Paymaster with an oath ^ " I'm obliged for your cake and wine," said the General, st.ll smiling, "and I wish you all JnH room' "' ""'' '" '"' '"" """^^ -^^ '"ft the "This is a most unfortunate contretemps," said Brooks, all trembling. "If J had thought 1 little whistle, a mere tibia of ash, had power to precipitate ■«s unlucky and unseemly belligerence I would never have opened my desk." The great bell upon the roof of the church swung upon ,ts arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed agamst the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew and Its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens Near at hand the air of the playground'and of the street was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves so that even in the schoolroom the ear throbbed to the loud proclamation. Into the avenue streamed he schools of crows from their wanderings on the braes of Sh.ra, and the children ceased their sJ.inty play and looked up at the flying companies, and called a noisy son?— r , uu Crow, crow, fly away home. Your fires are out and your children gone. "That^s a most haughty up-setting crew, and the queue-haired rover the worst of the lot ! " said the laymaster, still red and angry. "What I say's true, Brooks; it's true I tell you I You'll not for 6o GILIAN THE DREAMER your life put it out of the boy's head when you have the teaching of him ; he must hate the Turners like poison. Mind that now, mind that now ! " And turning quickly on his heels, the Paymaster went out of the schoolroom. i i: i. ,7« ave like 5ter $ t ' <' CHAPTER V THE BROTHERS GiLiAN, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary's room. She gave him soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen ; she cut for him the tenderest portions of the hen ; she gave him most generously of cheese— not the plain skim- milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made of the overnight and morning's milk, poured cream and all into the yearning-tub. And as she served him, her tongue went constantly upon themes of many varieties, but the background of them all, the conclusion of them ail, was the greatness of her brothers. Ah I she was a strange little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly displayed to its object is an affection discreditable. "You will go far," said she to Gilian, "before you will come on finer men. They are getting old and done, but once I knew them tall and strong and strapping, not their equals in all the armies. And what they have seen of wars, my dear ! They were ever going or coming from them, and sometimes I would not know where they were out in the quarrel- 62 GILIAN THE DREAMER wl ii ' iS; some world but for a line in the Saturday Post or the Courier or maybe an old hint in the General Almanack itself. Perhaps when you become acquainted with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light- footed laddies, running about the pastures there gallivanting with the girls. But that, my dear, was long ago, and I feel myself the old woman indeed when I see them so stiff and solemn sitting in there over their evening glass." " I have never seen them ; were they at the funeral ? " asked Gilian, his interest roused in such survivals of the past. " That they were," said Miss Mary ; " a funeral now is the?'r only recreation. But perhaps you would not know them because they are not at all like the Captain. He was a soldier too, in a way, but they were the ancient warriors. Come into the room here and I will show you, if you have finished your dinner." Gilian went with her into the parlour again among the prints and the hanging swords, that now he knew the trade and story of the men who sat among them, were imbued with new interests. Miss Mary pointed to the portraits. " That was Colin and Dugald before they went away the second time," she said. " We had one of James too — he died at Corunna — but it was the only one, and we gave it to a lady of the place who was chief with I k}'.^ ^■■x.^ Il i n THE BROTHERS 63 him before he went away, and dwincd a great deal after his death. And that's his sword. When it came home from Spain by MacFarlane, the carrier round from Dumbarton, I took it out and it was clagged in the scabbard with a red glut. It was a sore memorial to an only sister." The boy stood in the middle of the floor feeling himself very much older than he had done in the morning. The woman's confidences made him almost a man, for before he had been spoken to but as a child, though his thoughts were far older than his years. Those relics of war, especially the sheath that had the glut of life in it corrupting when it came back with the dead man's chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium. The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all the wonders of the shepherds' battle stories round the fire, and he was in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting each other down. He saw — so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon his vest — the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face 64 GILIAN THE DREAMER n f , p when the terrible life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils expanded, his eyes glistened ; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it was the loudest sound in the room. " What is it, dear ? " she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder, speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always to her lips. " I do not know," said he, ashamed. " I was just thinking of your brother who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword." She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. " I think," said she, " I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman's heart." " I saw the battle," said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known before. " I know you did," said she. " And I saw him dead." " Oc/iame / " " And I saw you dropping the sword when yovl tugged it from the scabbard, and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite clean." " Indeed I did!" said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so plainly set before her. " You are uncanny — no, no, you are not uncanny, you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel THE BROTHERS 65 when her dead brother's sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the brothers of other sisters was on its blade. That's my only grievance with those soldier brothers of mine. I said I did not think much of the soldiers ; oh ! boy, I love them all I sometimes grieve that God made me a woman that I might not be putting on the red coat too, and follow- ing the drum. And still and on, I would have no son of mine a soldier. Three fozy, foggy brothers— what did the armies do for them ? They never sharpened theirwits, but they sit and dover and dream, dream, even-on, never knowing all that's in their sister Mary's mind. And here you are, a boy, yet you get to my thoughts in a flash. Oh ! I think I am going to be very fond of you." Gilian was amazed that at last some one under- stood him. No one ever did at Ladyfield ; his dreams, his fancies, his spectacles of the inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd litde lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the mists streaming along the ravines. He told her— or rather he made her understand, for his language was simple— how at sudden outer influences his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the B 7^ 66 CILIAN THE DREAMER (i ; \ 1 1 I' ' '. I <* i i ii ! highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin's court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter tale. How the joy of the swallow was his in its first darting flights among the eaves of the old barn, and how when it sped at the summer's end he went with it across shires and towns, along the surface of winding rivers, even over the seas to the land of everlasting sun. How the sound of the wave on the rock moved him and set him with the ships and galleys, the great venturers whipping and creaking and tossing in the night-time under the stars. How the dark appalled or soothed as the humour was, and the sight of a first flower upon a tree would sometimes make him weep at the notion of the brevity of its period. All the time Miss Mary listened patient and under- standing. The high-backed chair compassed her figure so fully that she seemed to shrink to a child's size. It was a twelve-window house, and so among the highest taxed in all the town, but in the parlour there were two blind windows and only one gave light to the interior, so that as she sat in her chair with her back to the window, her face in the shadow, leaning against the chair hafilts with the aspect of weariness her brothers never had revealed to th m it seemed to Gilian the little figure and the face of a companion. She was silent for a rr. ,ent after his confessions were completed, as if she liad been wandering with him in the realm of fancy, and with wings less practised had taken longer to fly back to the narrow actual world. The boy had II / ient had ind fly lad THE BROTHERS 67 realised how much he had forgotten himself, and how strange all this story of his must be even to a child-companion with her face in the shadow of the chair haffits, and his eyes were faltering with shame. *' You are very thin, sweetheart," said she, with the two lines darkly pencilled between her eyebrows. " You arc far too white for a country boy ; upon my word we must be taking the Captain's word for it and putting your head in the cream." At this Gilian's confusion increased. Here was another to misunderstand, and he had thought she was shivering to his fancy as he was himself. He turned to hide his disappointment. At once the lines disappeared. She rose and put an arm over his shoulder and stooped the little that was necessary to whisper in his ear. " I know, I think I knov%" said she j " but look, I'm very old and ancient. Oh, dear! I once had my own fancies, but I think they must have been sweat out of me in my constancy to my brothers' oven-grate and roasting-jack. It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us, my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling for generations round the fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the constant complaint of the sea — tuts I am not I foolish to be weeping because a boy from Glen Aray has not learned to keep his lips closed on his innermost thought ? " Gilian looked up, and behold ! she was in a little riin of tears, at least her eyes swam soft in moisture. It comforted him exceedingly, for it showed that after all she understood. wmm mm ■■ii n > 1 I I 68 GILIAN THE DREAMER I. -I •I ■« M?- :! " If you were a little older," she said, " so old as the merchants of the town that are all too much on the hunt for the bawbees and the world to sit down and commune with themselves, or if you were so old as my brothers there and so hardened, I would be the last to say my thoughts ever stirred an ell- length out of the customary track of breakfast, beds, dinner and supper. Do not think I do not love and reverence my brothers, mind you I " she added almost fiercely, rubbing with her lustre apron the table there was nothing to rub from save its polish. " Oh I they are big men and far-travelled men, and they have seen the wonderful sights. They used to get great thick letters franked from the Government with every post, and the Duke will be calling on them now and then in his chariot. They speak to me of nothing but the poorest, simplest, meanest transactions of the day because they think I cannot comprehend nor feel. Gilian, do you know I am afraid of them ? Not of John the Captain, for he is different, with a tongue that goes, but I'm frightened when the General and the Cornal sit and look at me baying nothing because I am a Vvoman." " I do not like people to sit looking at me saying nothing," said Gilian, " because when I sit and look at people VvHhout saying anything I am reading them far in. But m< stly I would sooner be making up things in my mind." "Ah!" said she, "that is because your mind is young and spacious ; theirs, poor dears, are full of things that have actually happened, and they need not fancy the orra any more." I -.1 ^ THE BROTHERS 69 IS of iq6 They moved together out of the parlour and along the lobby that lighted it. With a low sill it looked upon the street that now was thronged with the funeral people passing home or among the shops, or from tavern to tavern. The funeral had given the town a holiday air, and baxters and dealers stood at their doors gossiping with their customers or by- goers. Country carts rumbled past, the horses moving slowly, reluctant to go back from this place of oats and stall to the furrows where the -collar pressed constantly upon the shoulder. One or two gentlemen went by on horses' — Achnatra and Major Hall and the through-other son of Lorn Campbell. The sun, westering, turned the clean rain-washed sand in the gutters of the street to gold, and there the children played and their calls and rhymes and laughter made so merry a world that the boy at the window, looking out upon it, felt a glow. He was now to be always with these fortunate children whom he knew so well ere ever he had changed words with them. He had a little dread of the magnitude and corners of this dwelling that was to be his in the future, and of the old men who sat in it all day saying nothing, but it was strange indeed (thought he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the death of the httle old woman of Lady- - : .:^ROPERTY OF PUBLIC LIBRARY. mrr mmmmmm mm ■ ■' 70 GILIAN THE DREAMER field — what they were his mind did not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a mere intimate communion with the animals of the wild.^ and the voices of the woods and hills. Thi^i woman as well as the boy must have been lost in thought, for neither of them noted the step upon the stair when the General and Cornal came back from the dregy. The brothers were in the lobby beside them before Miss Mary realised their presence. She turned with a flushed face and, as it were, put herself a little in front of the boy, so that half his figure found the shelter of a wing. The two brothers between them filled the width of the lobby, and yet they were not wide. But they were broad at the shoulders and once, no doubt, they filled their funeral suits that of their own stifTness seemed to stand out in all their old amplitude. The General was a white-faced rash of a man with bushy eyebrows, a clean-shaven parchment jowl, and a tremulous hand upon the knob of his malacca rattan ; his brother the Cornal was less tall ; he was of a purpled visage, and a crimson scar, the record of a wound from Corunna, slanted from his chin to the corner of his left eye. " What wean is that ? " he asked, standing in the lobby and casting a suspicious eye upon the boy, his voice as high as in a barrack yard. The General stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, but looking at Gilian from under his pent brows. Into Miss Mary's demeanour there had come as great a change as that which came upon the Pay- f i THE BROTHERS a can; the the ay- master when she broke in upon his vaunting. The lines dashed to her brow ; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to. " It is the oe from Ladyfield," she explained. " He'll be making a noise in the house," said the Comal with a touch of annoyance. " I cannot stand boys ; he'll break things, I'm sure. When is he going away ? " "Are you one of the boys who cry after Major MacNicol, my old friend and comrade ? " asked the General in a high squeaking voice. " If I had my stick at some of you, tormenting a gallant old soldier ! " And as he spoke he lifted his cane by the middle and shook it at the limbs of the affrighted youth. " O Dugald, Dugald, you know none of the children of this town ever annoyed the Major ; it is only the keelies from the low-country who do so. And this is not the boy to make a mock of any old gentleman, I am sure." " I know he'll make a noise and start me when I am thinking," said the Cornal, still troubled. " Is it not very strange, Dug.^id, that women must be aye bringing in useless weans off the street to make noise and annoyance for their brothers ? " He poked as he spoke with his stick at Gilian's feet as he would at an animal crossing his path. " It is a strange cantrip, Mary," said the General ; " I suppose you'll be going to give him something. It is give, give all the day in this house like Sergeant Scott's cantinicrs." f wmmngm^m 72 GILIAN THE DREAMER " Indeed and you need not complain of the giving," said Miss Mary : " there was nobody gave with a greater extravagance than yourself when you had it to give, and nobody sends more gangrels about the house than you." " Give the boy his meat and let him go," said the Cornal roughly. " He's not going," said Miss Mary, turning quite white and taking the pin carefully out of her shawl and as carefully putting it in again. And having done this quite unnecessary thing she slipped her hand down and warmly clasped unseen the fingers of the boy in the folds of her bombazine gown. "Not going? I do not understand you, Mary; as you grow older you grow stupider. Does she not grow stupider, Dugald ? " said the Cornal. " She does," said the General. " I think she docs it to torment us, just." He was tired by this dis- cussion ; he turned and walked to the parlour. Miss Mary mustered all her courage, and speaking with great rapidity explained the situation. The boy was the Ladyfield boy ; the Paymaster was going to keep him hereafter. The Cornal stood listening to the story as one in a tr?nce. There was a little silence when she had done, and he broke it with a harsh laugh. *' Ah ! and what is he going to make of this one ? " he asked. " That's to be seen," said Miss Mary ; " he spoke of the army." " Fancy that now 1 " said the Cornal with con- tempt. " Let me see him," he added suddenly. '.' 'M m THE BROTHERS 73 ^he ^as 1 in lad i. his ' okc 3n- ily. " Let me see the seeds of soldiery." He put out a hand and — not roughly but still with more force than Gilian relished — drew him from the protection of the gown and turned his face to the window. He put his hand under the boy's chin ; Gilian in the touch felt an abhorrence of the hard, clammy fingers that had made dead men, but his eyes never quailed as he looked up in the scarred face. He saw a mask ; there was no getting to the secrets behind that purple visage. Experience and trial, emotions and passions had set lines there wholly new to him, and his fancy refused to go further than just this one thought of the fingers that had made dead men. The Cornal looked him deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of con- tempt. " Man ! Jock's the daft recruiter," he said coarsely with an oath. " What's this but a clerk ? There's not the spirit in the boy to make a drummer of him. There's no stuff for sogering here." Miss Mary drew Gilian to her again and stiffened her lips. "You have nothing to do with it, Colin ; it's John's house and if he wants to keep the boy he'll do it. And I'm sure if you but took the trouble to think that he is a poor orphan with no kith nor kin in the world, you would be the first to take him in at the door." The Cornal's face visibly relaxed its sternness. He looked again more closely at the boy. "Come away into our parlour here, an 1 the f ^ 111 I 'I #- 74 GILIAN THE DREAMER General and I will have a crack with you," said he, leading the way. Miss Mary gave the boy's hand a gentle squeeze, and s-)ftly pushed him in after her brother, shut the door behind them, and turned and went down to the kitchen. t I M CHAPTER VI COURT-MARTIAL GiLiAN was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of the room' where he faced the two brothers as they sat at cither side of the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with scrupulous care in the very centre of the table • his brother lifted two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the bottle, fastidious to a hair's breadth as if he had been kying out columns of troops. It was the formula of the after- noon ; sometimes they never put a lip to the glass, but it was always necessary that the bottle should be in the party. For a space that seemed terribly long to the boy they said no word but looked at him. The eyes of the Gonial seemed to pierce him through '; the General in a while seemed to forget his presence' turnmg upon him a flat, vacant eye. Gilian leaned upon his other foot and was on the verge of cryin^^ at his situation. The day had been far too crowded with strangers and new experience for his comfort • he felt himself cruelly plucked out of his own sufficient company and jarred by contact with a very complex world. If :'r- \ 76 GILIAN THE DREAMER iiM 1' ■ ■ ■■ \ ■i! i u With a rude loud sound that shook the toddy ladles in the cupboard the Cornal cleared his throat. " How old are you ? " he asked, and this roused the General, who came back from his musings with a convulsive start, and repeated his brother's question. "Twelve," said Gilian, first in Gaelic out of instinct, and hurriedly repeating it in English lest he should offend the gentlemen. " Twelve," said the Cornal, thinking hard. " You are not very bulky for your age. Is he now, Dugald?" ^\ "He is not very bulky for his age," said the General, after a moment's pause as if he were recall- ing all the boys he knew of that age, or remitting himself to the days before his teens. " And now, between ourselves," said the Cornal, leaning over with a show of intimacy and even friendliness, " have you any notion yourself of being a soger ? " " I never thought anything about it," Gilian confessed in a low tone. " I can be anything the Captain would like me to be." " Did you ever hear the like ? " cried the Cornal, looking in amazement at his brother. " He never thought anything about it, but he can be anything he likes. Is not that a good one ? Anything he likes I " And he laughed with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the sword-slash struck it open in Corunna. •' Anything he likes ! " echoed the General, laugh- COURT-MARTIAL n ivy ind lien |g^" ing huskily till he coughed and choked. They both sat smiling grimly with no more sound till it seemed to the boy he must be in a dream, looking at the creations of his brain. The step of a fly could have been heard in the room almost, so sunk was it in silence, but outside, as in another world, a band of children filled the street with the chant of " Pity be " — chant of the trumpeters of the Lords. Gilian never before heard that song with which the children were used to accompany the fanfare of the scarlet-coated musicians who preceded the Lords Justiciary on their circuit twice a year ; but the words came distinctly to him in by the open window where the wallflower nodded, and he joined silently in his mind the dolorous chorus and felt himself the prisoner, deserving of every pity. " Sit ye down there," at last said the Cornal, " with my brother the General's leave." And he waved to the high-backed haffit chair Miss Mary had so sparely filled an hour ago. Then he with- drew the stopper of the bottle, poured a tiny drop of the spirits into both tumblers, and drank " The King and his Arms," a sentiment the General joined in with his hand tremulous around the glass. " Listen to me," said the Cornal, " and here I speak, I think, for my brother the General, who has too much to be thinking about to be troubling with these little affairs. Listen to me. I fought in Corunna, in Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, and at Waterloo I led the Royals up against the yetts of hell. Did I not, Diigald ? " "You did that," said Dugald, withdrawing himself : li 78 GILIAN THE DREAMER I . ':il :' i i ,i ' t 1 '. again from a muse over the records of victory. And then he bent a lustreless eye upon his own portrait, so sombre and gallant upon the wall, with the gold of the lace and epaulettes a little tarnished. " I make no brag of it, mind you," said the Cornal, waving his hand as if he would be excused for mentioning it. " I am but saying it to show that I ken a little of bloody wars, and the art and trade of sogering. There are gifts demanded for the same that seriatim I would enumerate. First there is natural strength and will. All other trades have their limits, when a man may tell himself, * That's the best I can do,' and shut his book or set down the tool with no disgrace in the relinquish- ment. But a soger's is a different ploy ; he must stand stark against all encountering, nor cry a parley even with the lance at his throat. Oh, man ! man 1 I had a delight in it in my time for all its trials. I carried claymore (so to name it, ours was a less handsome weapon, you'll observe), in the ranting, roving humour of a boy ; I sailed and marched ; it was fine to touch at foreign ports ; it was sweet to hear the drums beat revally under the vines ; the camp-fire, the " " And it would be on the edge of a wood," broke in the boy in Gaelic ; " the logs would roar and hiss. The fires would be in yellow dots along the country- side, and the heather would be like a pillow so soft and springy under the arm. Round about, the soldiers would be standing, looking at the glow, their faces red and flickering, and behind would be COURT-MARTIAL 79 the roke liiss. 1 soft the |low, be the black dark of the wood like the inside of a pot, a wood with ghosts and eerie sounds and " He stammered and broke down under the astounded gaze of the Cornal and the General, Vi/ho stood to their feet facing his tense and thrilled small figure. A wave of shame-heat swept over him at his own boldness. Outside, the children's voices were fading in the distance as they turned the corner of the church singing " Pity be." Pity be on poor prisoners, pity be on tlicm ; Pity be on poor prisoners, if they come back again, they sang ; the air softened into a fairy lullaby heard by an ear at eve against the grassy hillock, full of charm, instinct with dream, and the sentiment of it was as much the boy's within as the performers' without. " This is the kind of play-actor John would make a soldier of," said the Cornal, turning almost piteously to his brother. " It beats all ! Where did you learn all that ? " he demanded harshly, scowling at the youth and sitting down again. " He has the picture of it very true, now, has he not ? " said the General. " I mind of many camps just like that, with the cork-trees behind and old Sir George ramping and cursing in his tent because the pickets hailed, and the corncrake would be rasping, rasping, a cannon-carriage badly oiled, among the grass," Gilian sank into the chair again, his face in shadow. wr V\ 80 GILIAN THE DREAMER ii li I ' ' It; Ii 1 1 i lit ill m " Discipline and reverence for your elders and superiors are the first lesson you would need, my boy," said the Comal, taking a tiny drop of the spirits again and touching the glass of his brother, who had done likewise. " Discipline and reverence ; discipline and reverence. I was once tocky and putting in my tongue like you where something of sense would have made me keep it between my teeth. Once in Spain, an ensign, 1 found myself in a wine-shop or change-house, drinking as I should never have been doing if I had as muckle sense as a clabbie-doo, with a dragoon major old enough to be my father. He was a pock-pudding Englishman, a great hash of a man with the chest of him slipped down below his belt, and what was he but bragging about the rich people he came of, and the rich soil they flourished on, its apple-orchards and honey- flowers and its grass knee-deep in June. * Do you know,' said I, * I would not give a yard's breadth of the shire of Argyll anywhere north of Knapdale at its rockiest for all your lush straths, and if it comes to antique pedigrees here am I, Clan Diarmid, with my tree going down to Donacha Dhu of Lochow.' That was insolence, ill-considered, unnecessary, for this major of dragoons, as I tell you, might be my father and I was but a raw ensign." " I'll warrant you were home-sick when you said it," said the General. •' Was I not ? " cried the brother. " 'Twas that urged me on. For one of my company, just a minute before, had been singing Donacha Ban's song of ' Ben Dorain,' and no prospect in the world \. 'su COURT-MARTIAL 8i id seemed so alluring to mc then as a swath of the land I came from." "I know *Ben Dorain,'" said Gilian timidly, "and I think I could tell just the way you felt when you heard the man singing it in a foreign place." " Come away, then, my twelve-year-old warlock," said the Cornal, mockingly, yet wondering too. *' This is a real oddity," said the General, drawing his chair a little nearer the boy. " I heard a forester sing ' Ben Dorain ' last Hogmanay at home — I mean in Ladyfield ; he w.is not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo was in the wood." " That was very unlucky about the cuckoo before breakfast," said the Cornal, and he quoted a Gaelic proverb. " Oh ! if I was in a foreign place and some one sang that song I would be very, very sick for home. I would be full of thoughts about the lochs and the hunting roads, the slope of the braes and stripes of black fir on them ; the crying of cattle, the sound of burn and eas and the voices of people I knew would be dragging my heart home. I would be saying, * Oh ! you strangers, you do not understand. You have not the want at your hearts,' and there would be one little bit of the place at home as plain to my view as that picture." As he spoke Gilian pointed at " The Battle of '11: 82 GILI/vN TFIE DREAMER \ i ti ' ViLloria." The brothers turned and looked as i( ^.t was sionicthing quite new and strange to them. Up rose the Cornal and went closer to peer at it. ** Confound it !" said he. " You're there with your talc of a ballant, and you point at the one picture ever I saw that gave nie the dnv-dreaminfr. I never see that smudgy old print but I'm crying on the cavalry that made the Frenchmen rout." From v;herc he -^at the boy could make out the picture in every detail. It was a sce.ie of flying and broken troops, of men on the v/ings of terror and drasTOons ridinrr thcvn do-'.vn. There was at the very front of the picture, in a corner, among the fiy'^S Frenchmen pursued by the horses, th.e presentment of a Scottish soldier, wounded, lying upon his back with his elbows propped beneath him so that he had his head up, looking at the action, a soldier of a thin long habit of body, a hollow face and high check- bones. Gilian forcrot the tvv'o old men in the room with hlra when he looked intently on this soldier in the throes ; he stood up from the chair, went forward and put a finger as high as he could to point out the pnrticular thing he referred to. "That's a man," said he, " and he's afraid. He does not hear the guns, nor the people crying, but he hears the horses' feet thudding on the grass, and lie thinks they v.'illgo over him and crush his bones." "Curse mc," cried the Cornal, "but you have the thing to a nicety. That's the man's notion, for a g iinca, for I have been in his case myself, and tlic thud of horses was a sound that filled the v/orld. Sit COURT-MARTIAL ^'3 with the •ward ut the man/' the lorscs' ,viU go down, sit down ! " he went on sharply, as if he had of a sudden found something to reproach himself with in an}' complacent recognition of this child's images. " You are not canny ; how old arc you ? " Gilian was trembling and parched at the lips now, awake to the enormity of his forwardness. " I am twelve," hi repeated. " It is a cursed lie," said the Cornal hotly ; " you're a hundred ; don't tell me ! " He was actually a little afraid of those mani- festations, so unusual and so rcmarlvable. Mis excitement could with difficulty be concealed. Very restlessly he moved about in his chair, and turned his look from the General to the boy and back again, but the General sat with his chin in his breast, his mind a vacancy. " Look at the General there ; you're fairly scun- nering him with your notions," said the Cornal, " I must speak to John about this. A soldier indeed ! You're not fit for it, lad ; you have only the makings of a dominie. Sit you there, and we'll see what John has to say about this when he comes in : it is going on seven, and he'll be back from the dregy in time for his supper." Gilian sat trem.bling in his chair; the brothers leaned back in thcifs and breathed heavily and said no word, and never even stretched a hand to the bottle of spirits. A solemn quiet again took pos- session of the house, but for a door that slammed in the lower flat, shaking the dwelling; the lulled sound of women's conversation at the oven-grate was utterly stilled. The pigeons came to the rill a ff5 84 GILIAN THE DREAMER |m| i moment, mourned and flew away ; the carts did not rumble any more in the street ; the children's chorus was altogether lost. A feeling came over the boy that he had been here or somewhere like it before, and he was fascinated, wondering what next would happen. A tall old clock in the lobby, whose pen- dulum swung so slowly that at first he had never realis-^d its presence, at last took advantage of the silence and swung itself into his notice with a tick — tack. The silence seemed to thicken and press upon his ears ; no striving after fancy could bring the boy far enough oflf from that strange convention, and try as he might to realise himself back in his familiar places by the riverside at Ladyfield, the wings of his ima- gining failed in their flight and he tumbled again into that austere parlour sitting with two men utterly beyond his comprehension. There was, at last, one sound that gave a little comfort, and checked the tears that had begun to gather on the edges of his eyes. It came from ihe direction of the kitchen ; it was a creaking of the wooden stairs ; it was a faint shuffle of slippers in "be lobby ; then there was a hush outside the door deeper even than the stillness within. Gilian knew, as if he could see through the brown panelling, that a woman was standing out there listening with her breath caught up and wondering at the quiet within, yet afraid to open a door upon the mystery. The brothers did not observe it ; all this was too faint for their old ears, though plainly heard by a child of the fields whose ear against the grass could detect the marching of ^^ COURT-MARTIAL 85 i not lorus : boy efore, kvould pen- never of the tick— i upon le boy [ try as places is ima- lin into utterly a little :gun to e from ing of ippers de the"* Gilian nelling, ig with le quiet )on tlie it ; all though whose hing of ■^ ', I insects and the tunnelling of worms. But for that he would have screamed — hut for the magic air of friendship and sympathy that flowed to him through chink and keyhole from the good heart loud-beating outside; in that kind air of fond companionship (even with a door between) there was comfort. In a little the slippers sped back along the lobby, the stair creaked, in the lovv'er flat a door slammed. Gilian felt himself more deserted and friendless than ever, and a few moments more would have found him break upon the appalling still with sobs of cowardly surrender, but the church bell rang. It was the first time he had heard its evening clamour, that, however far it might search up the glens, never reached Lad}'- field, so deep among the hills, and he had no more than recovered from the bewildering influence of its unexpected alarm when the foot of the Paymaster sounded heavily on the stair. "You're here at last," said the Cornal, without looking at him. " I was a thought later than I intended," said the Paymaster quickl}', putting his cane softly into a corner. " I had a little encounter with that fellow Turner and it put by the time." "What— Jamie?" " No ; Charlie." " Man I I wonder at you, John," said the Corn::! with a contempt in his utterance and a tightening of the corner of his lips. " I wonder at you changing words with him. What was it you were on ? " The Paymaster explained shortly, guardedly, because of Gilian's presence, and as he spoke the ho GILIAN THE DREAMER 1 1 f' 'i 'I tr l! iii i I i ■ ■' i purple of the Cornal's face turned to livid and the scar became a sickly yellow. He rose and thumped his f7st upon the table. " That was his defiance, was it ? " he cried. " We are the old sonlcss bachelors, are we, and the name's dead with the last of us ? And you argued with him about that I I would have put a hand on his cravat and throttled him." The Paymaster was abashed, but "Just consider, Colin," he pleaded. " I am not so young as I was, and a bonny-like thing it would be to throttle him on the ground he gave." v^^Old Mars!" cried the Cornal, with a sneer, " Man ! but MacColl hit your character when he made his song ; you were always well supplied by luck with excuses for not fighting." To the General the Paymaster turned with piteous appeal. " Dugald," said he, " I'll leave it to you if Colin's acting fairly. Did ever I disgrace the name of Campbell, or Gael, or soger ? " " I never said you did," cried the Cornal. " All I said was that fate was a scurvy friend to you and seldom put you face to face with your foe on any clear issue. Perhaps I said too much ; I'm hot- tempered, I know; never mind my taunt, John. But you'll allow it's galling to have a beggarly up- start like Turner throwing our bachelorhood in our teeth. Now if we had sons, or a son, ore; of us, I'll warrant we could bring him up with more credit than Turner brings up his long-lugged Sandy, or that randy lass of his." ^* Isn't that what I told him ? " said the Paymaster^ COURT-MARTIAL 87 instcr^ scooping a great heap of dust into his nostrils, and feverishly rubbing down the front of his vest with a large handkerchief. " I wish " He stopped suddenly ; he looked hard at Gilian, whose presence in the shadow of the big chair he had seemingly forgotten ; seeing him gaze thus and pause, the Cornai turned too and looked at the youth, and the General shrugged himself into some interest in the same object. Before the gaze of the three brothers, the boy's skin burned ; his eyes dropped. " This is a queer sallant you've brought us here," said the Cornai, nudging his brother and nodding in Gilian's direction. *' I've seen some real diverts in my time, but he beats ali. And you have a notion to make a soger of him, they tell me. You heard that yourself, didn't you, General ? " The General made no reply, for he was looking at the portrait of himself when he was thirty-live, and to sit doing nothing in a house would have been torture. " I only said it in the b^^-going to Mary," explained the Paymaster humbly. *' The nature for sogcring is the gift of God, and the boy may have it or he ma}'' not ; it is too soon to say." " Tlicre's no more of the soger in bin: than there is of the writer in me ! " cried the Cornai ; " but there's something by-ordinar in him all the same. It's your affair, John, but — " He stopped short and looked again at Gilian and hummed and ha'd a little and fingered his stock. " ]\Ian, do you know I would not say but here's your son for you." "That's what I thought myself," said the Pay- ■'.t 88 GII^IAN THE DREAMER I 1 it i ; r master, "and that's what I said. I'll make him a soger if I can, and I'll make him hate the name of Turner whether or not." And all this time Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of old men's passion with his child's fancy. He found this new world into which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little alarming. Soldiering — with the man before him in the picture, sitting propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample en him — seemed the last trade on earth ; as for hate^ that might be easier and due to his benefactor, but it would depend very much on the Turners. When the brothers released him from their den, and he went to Miss Mary, standing at the kitchen door, eager for his company, with a flush on her cheek and a bright new ribbon at her neck, he laid those p)oints before her. ** Tuts ! " said she, pressing food on him — her motherhood's only cure for all a child's complaints — ** they're only haverils. They cannot make a soger of you against your will. As for the Turners — well, they're no very likeable race, most of them in my mind. A dour, soar, up-setting clan of no parentage. Perhaps that does not much maiter, so long as people are honest and well-doing ; we are all equals before God except in head and heart, but there's something too in our old Hielan' notion that the closest kith of the King are ayr most kindly, because the hal. it is born f • COURT-MARTIAL g in them to be freehanded and unafraid. Am not I the omseach to be sticking up for pedigrees ? Perhaps It IS because our own is so good. Kiels Z. three hundred years, and n,/grandfa^ ^^^0"" uiey say— and the Turners were onlvDortinn^r. „ ^ tenants as far back as we ken » P^^^'^^^^^ and .aiv^rGit;rd;i::nredi'f's:;^^'---- . his^adn^ation of the enerJ^efL-- a >™;dtuiood:;!;.' " -'^ '•^^'^™^''' ^- -- I ( » f^ ^ n i t CHAPTER VII THE MAN ON THE QUAY It has always happened that the first steps of a boy from the glen have been to the quay. There the ships lie clumsily on their bulging sides in the ebb till the tar steams and blisters in the sun, or at the full they lift and fall heavily like a sigh for the ocean's expanse as they feel themselves prisoners to the rings and pawls. Their chains jerk and ease upon the granite edges of the wall or twang tight across the quay so that the mariners and fishermen moving about their business on this stone-thrust to the sea must lift their clumping boots high to step across those tethers of romance. At a full tide one walk- ing down the quay has beside him the dark aspiring bulwarks of the little but brave adventurers, their seams gazing to the heat, their carvel timbers striped by the ooze and brine of many oceans and the scum of ports. Upon their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek ; the iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red ; the companions are portals to smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of no roaming THE MAN ON THE QUAY 91 •mg 1 nuns and remembering the tumbling waters and the far- oflf harbours that must ever be more alluring than the harbours where we be. From the ivy of the church the little birds come chafTcring and twittering among the shrouds, and the pigeon will perch upon a spar, so that the sea-gull, the far-searcher, must wonder as he passes on a slant of silent feathers at its daring thus to utilise the dcficr of the outermost seas and the most vehement storms. And side by side with these, the adventurers, are the skiffs and smacks of the fishermen, drilled in rows, brought bow up, taut on their anchors with their lug-sails down on their masts to make deck tents for shelter from sun or rain. With those sturdy black gabbarts and barques and those bronze fishers, the bay from the quay to the walls of the Duke's garden, in its season, stirs with life. More than once when he had come to the town Gilian looked a little way off from the Cross upon this busy concourse in the bay and wished that he might venture on the quay, but the throng of tall, dark-shirted fishermen and seafarers frightened him so that he must stand "^oof guessing at the nearer interest of the spectacle. Now that he was a town boy with whole days in which to muster courage, he spurred himself up to walk upon the quay at the first opportunity. It was the afternoon, the tide lapped high upon the slips and stairs, a heaving lazy roll of water so clear that the star-fish on the sandy bottom might plainly be seen through great depths. The gunnies of the ships o'ertopped by many feet t.hc quay-wall and their chains rose slanting, tight ■Hi! i I ^i I 9* GILIAN THE DREAMER \\ul fe '1 from the rings. The fishermen and their boats were far down on Cowal after signs of herring ; the bay was given up to barque and gabbart alone. For once a slumber seemed to lie upon the place for ordinary so throng and cheerful ; the quay was Gilian's alone as he stepped wonderingly upon it and turned an eye to the square ports open for an airing to the dens. In all the company of the ships thus swaying at the quay-side there was no sign of life beyond the smoke that rose from the stunted funnels. The boy's fancy played among the masts like the birds from the ivy. These were the galleys of Inishtore, that rode upon the seven seas for a king's son with a hauberk of gold. The spicy isles, the silver sands, the songs the gratigach sang below the prows when the sea dashed — they came all into his vision of those little tarred hulks of commerce. He thought how fine it would be to set foot upon those decks and loose the fastenings, and drop down the sea-slope of the shepherds' stories till he came upon Ibrisail, happy isle of play and laughter, where the sun never drops below the ocean's marge. In one of the vessels behind him, as he mused, a seaman noiselessly thrust his head out at a companion to look the hour upon the town's clock, and the boy, pale, fair-haired, pondering, with eyes upon the shrouds of a gabbart, forced himself by his stillness and inaction upon the man's notice. He was a little, stout, well-built man, with a face tanned by sun- shine and salt air to the semblance of Spanish mahogany, with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black. His dress was i^ I THE MAN ON THE QUAV 9i , a iion py. ithe singularly pcrjink, cut trim and tight from a blue cloth, the collar of a red shirt rolled over on the bosom, a pair of simple gold rings pierced the ears. As he looked at the boy, he was humming very softly to himself a Skye song, and he stopped in the midst of it with " So *iUc, have you lost your ship ? " A playful scamp was revealed in his smile. Gilian turned rt)und with a start of alarm, for he had been on some coracle of fancy, sailing upon magic seas, and thus to break upon his reverie with the high Gaelic of Skye was to plunge him in chilling waters. *^ T/iig an so — come here," said the seaman, beckoning, setting an easy foot upon the deck. Gilian went slowly forward. He was amazed and fascinated by this wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning, a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan that day was in a good humour, for his owners h^.d released him at last from his weeks of tethering to the quay and t^is dull town and he was to depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian's history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners' tales of the sea. A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel's ribs, the bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, j'et confirming every guess he >. ■Sr. 1^. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 1.25 14^ ^50 * m IM IIM IM l|Z2 Ilk '""^ 2.0 1-4 1111.6 "/a ^ /a ^ .% >■' w^ *? ^s^' />^ 0} M Hiotographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N . M580 (716) 872-4503 4 ^p ,\ ' 102 GILIAN THE DREAMER concealing itself under a front of indifference and even politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning fiercely at the core. A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff's servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster's house early in the forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in the Sheriff's the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive nights. Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no invitation to the Sheriff's, and yet here was the hint of some convivial gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome to. " What do you think it will be, John ? " she asked the Paymaster, telling him what she had seen. " Tuts," said he, " they'll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has an extra hard case at aviz- andum, not to be seen clearly through with a common creesh flame." " That's aye you," cried Miss Mary, indignant. ** People might slap you in the face and you would have no interest." She hastened to Peggy in the kitchen and Peggy shared her wonder, though she was not permitted to see her annoyance. A plan was devised to find out what this extravagance of candle might portend. ' THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY 103 The maid took her water-stoups and went up to the Cross Well, where women were busy at that hour of the day plying for the water of Bealloch-an- uarain, that bubbles up deep in the heart of the hills, and brings the coolness and refreshment of the shady wood into the burgh street in the most intense days of summer warmth. She filled her stoups composedly, set them down and gossiped, upset them as by accident, and waited patiently her turn to fill them anew. Thus by twenty minutes' skilful loitering she secured from the baxter's daughter the news that there was a supper at the Sheriff's that very night, and that very large tarts were at the firing in the baxter's oven. " Oh, indeed I " cried Miss Mary, when her emissary brought to her those tidings. "Then it seems the Campbells of Keil are not good enough company for Sheriff Maclachlan's supper parties ! My brother the Comal, and my brother the Major- General, would have their own idea about that if so small a trifle as Madam's tart supper and green tea was worth their notice or annoyance." She was visibly disturbed, yet put on a certain air of indifference that scarcely deceived even Peggy. The worst of it was there was no one with whom she could share her annoyance, for, if the Paymaster had no sympathy, the other two brothers were unapproachable. Gilian found her in a little rain of tears. She started with shame at his discovery, and set herself to a noisy handling of dinner dishes that by this time he knew well enough were not in her daily office of industry. And she said never a 104 GILIAN THE DREAMER ; I . word — she that never heard his foot upon the stair without a smile of pleasure, or saw his face at the door without a mother's challenge to his appetite. " What is wrong, aunty ? " he said in the Gaelic, using the term it had been agreed would best suit the new relationship. " Just nothing at all, my dear," she said without looking round. " What would be wrong ? " ** But you are crying," protested Gilian, alarmed lest he in some way should have been the cause of her distress. " Am I ? " said Miss Mary. " And if I am, it is just for a silly thing only a woman would mind, a slight from people not worth heeding." And then she told, still shamefacedly, her story. Gilian was amazed. "I did not think yoi cared for suppers and teas," he said. "The last time you went to the Sheriff's you said you would far sooner be at home, and " " Did I ? " said she. Then she smiled to find some one who knew it was not the outing she immediately prized. " Indeed, what you say is true, Gilian. I'm an old done dame, and it was wiser for the like of me to be sitting knitting at the fire than going on diverts to their bohea parties and clashing supper tables. But it's not myself I'm angry for. Oh, no I they might leave me alone for ever and a day and I would care not a pin-head, but it's Dugald I'm thinking of — a Major-General — one of the only three in the shire, and Colin — a Comal — and both of Keils. The Sheriffs lady might leave me THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY 105 out of her routs if she pleasured it, but she has no cause to put my brothers to an insult like this." She said " my brothers " with a high hard sound of stern and proud possession that was very fine to hear. Even Gilian, as yet only beginning to know the love and pride of this little woman, had, at her accent, a sudden deep revealing of her devoted heart. "It is the Turners' doing," she said, feverishly rubbing a warming pan whose carved lid from Zaandam blinked and gleamed like the shining face of a Dutch skipper over his dram. " I know them ; because my brother must be quarrelling with the t, their half-sister must be taking up the quarrel and shutting her door in our faces." " The 1 luners I Then I hate them too," cried Gilian, won to the Paymaster's side by the sorrow of Miss Mary. " Oh, you must not say that, my dear," she cried, appalled. " It is not your affair at all, and the Turners are not to blame because the Sheriff is under the thumb of his madam. The Turners have their good points as well as the rest of us, and " "They have a daughter," said Gilian, almost unconsciously, for there had come flooding into his mind a vision of the sombre vessel's cabin, shot over by a ray of sunshine, wherein a fairy sang of love and wandering. And then he regretted he had spoke of hate for any of her name, for surely (he thought) there should be no hate in the world for any that had her blood and shared her home. ill I ' i M 1' J III t • 1 06 GILIAN THE DREAMER Surely in her people, knowing her so warm, so lovely, so kind, so gifted, there could be no cruelty and wrong. " I would not say I hated any one if I were you, my dear," said Miss Mary ; " but I would keep a cool side to the Turners, father, or daughter, or son. Their daughter that you speak of was the cause of this new quarrel. The Captain miscalled her to her father, which was not right, for indeed she's a bonny lasE'e, and they tell me she sings " " Like the mavis," cried Gilian, still in his Gaelic and in a transport of recollection. " Where did you hear her ? " asked Miss Mary. Gilian, flushed and uneasy, told her of the per- formance in the ship. Finding a listener neither inattentive nor without sympathy, he went further still and told of the song's effect upon him, and that the sweetness of it still abiding made his hatred of her people impossible. " She'll do for looks too," said Miss Mary. " She takes them with her singing from her mother, who was my dear companion before this trouble rose." " Oh ! she looks like — like — like the gniagach girl in the story," said Gilian, remembering the talc of the sea-maiden who sat on the shore and dressed her hair with a comb of gold. " I hope ::he's not so uncanny," said Miss Mary with a laugh, " for the gntagach combed till a sweet- heart came (that I should be talking of such daft- like things !), and he was drowned and that was the end of him." THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY 107 "Still — still," said Gilian, "the gniagach was worth the drowning for." Miss Mary looked at him with a sigh for a spirit so much to be envied. " This may be but a chapter in a very old tale," said she. "It was with a lass the feud came in." A saying full of mystery to the boy. Then she changed the conversation back to her own affairs. " We'll take a walk out in the gloaming and see all the Sheriff's friends," said she, " and all the Sheriff's friends in this supper are Turner's friends and the Paymaster's enemies." The night of the Sheriff's supper party came with heavy showers and a sky swept by clouds that let through glimpse of moon nor star. The town lay in pitch darkness, all silent except for the plash of the sea upon the shore or its long roll on the Ramparts. A deserted and wind-swept street, its white walls streaming with waters, its outer shutters on the ground flats barred to darkness, its gutters running over — it was the last night on which any one with finery and a notion for comfort would choose for going abroad to parties. Miss Mary, sitting high at her parlour window with Gilian, looked out through the blurred pane with satisfaction upon all this inclemency. " Faith," said she, " I wish them joy of their party whoever they be that shrre it I " Then all at once her mood changed to one of pity as the solitary street showed a moving light upon its footway. " Oh I " jhe cried. " There's Doracha Breck's lantern and his wife will be with him. P d to-day r i' ■I * a 1 V ♦ io8 GILIAN THE DREAMER she was at me for my jelly for a cold I I wish — I wish she was not over the door this night ; it will be the death of her. To-morrow I must send her over the last of my Ladyfield honey." From the window and in the darkness of the night, it was impossible to tell who were for the Sheriff's party, so Miss Mary in the excess of her curiosity must be out after a time and into the dripping darkness, with Gilian by her side for companionship. It was an adventure altogether to his liking. As he walked up and down the street on its darker side he could think upon the things that were happening behind the drawn blinds and bolted shutters. It was as if he was the single tenant of a sleeping star and guessing at the mys- teries of a universe. Stories were happening behind the walls, fires were glimmering, suppers were set, each family for the time being was in a world of its own, split off from its neighbours by the darkness. A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam in water. Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully. " It's gone ; I knew it would be gone," she said in a whisper to Gilian, withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep sounded a little way down the street. He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank expanse of the moaning sea round the THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY 109 corner of a tall tenement filled him with new and moving emotions. "There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa's sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That's two pair at least for the Sheriffs party." "Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there ? " said Gilian. She shook his arm with startled affright. " Ask I ask I " she exclaimed. " If you dared let on to any one we even heard there was a party, I would — I would — be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we must hold our heads a bit higher than that." She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement. " Major Hall and his sister are there," she said, showing darkened windows. " And the Camerons and the Frasers," she added later, informed by the same signs of absence. Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and bolted up their doors, then re- treated to their homes behind. More dark than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation. And yet the tdwn was not all asleep but for the Sheriff's party and Miss Mary and the Paymaster's boy, for there came from the Abercrombie, though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of 4 r M '! no GILIAN THE DREAMER H ;i^ II ! carousal. It was not, this time, the old half-pay officers but a lower plane of the burgh's manhood, the salvage and the wreckage of the wars, privatemen and sergeants, by a period of strife and travel made in some degree unfit for the tame ways of peace in a stagnant burgh. They told the old tales of the bi- vouac ; they sang its naughty or swaggering songs. By a plain deal door and some glasses of spirit they removed themselves from the dull town drowsing in the night, and in the light of the Sergeant More's cruisie moved again in the sacked towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos and San Sebastian, gorged anew, perhaps, with blood and lust. Miss Mary and Gilian passed the door of the Ser- geant More hurriedly, she deaf to its carousal, he remembering all at once and finding wake anew his first feelings when he stood in the same room before the half-pay officers at their midday drams. He had become a little tired of this quest all to gratify an old maid's curiosity, he wished he could be home again and in his attic room with his candle and his story book, or his abundant and lively thoughts. But there was one other task before Miss Mary. She could not forbear so little as a glance at the exterior of the Sherifi"'s dwelling where the enemies of her home (as so she now must fancy them) were trying to be happy without the company of the Campbells of Keils. When they were in front of it every window shone across the grass-plot, some of them open so that the sound of gaiety came clearly to the woman and the boy. Miss Mary stood woebegone, suffused in tears. H ,!; THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY iii "And there are my dear brothers at home yonder, their Icc-lone, silent, sitting in a parlour 1 Oh 1 it is shameful, it is shameful! And all for a hasty word about a lass ! " Gilian before this curious sorrow was dumb. Silently he tried to lead the little lady away from the plaje, but she would not go, and would not be com- forted. Then there came from the open windows the beginning of a song. At the first note Gilian thrilled in every nerve. " Fancy that now I " said Miss Mary, checking her tears. " No more than , a wean and here she must be singing at supper parties as brave as the mother before her. It's a scandal ! And it shows the bitterness of the quarrel to have her here, for she was never here at supper before." " But is she not fine ? " said Gilian, with a passion in his utterance. Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a sweetness almost magic. " Is she not fine ?" he said again, clutching with eager hands at the rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that alluring melody. " Oh, the dear ! the dear ! " sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the strain. " When I heard her first I thouG:ht it was her mother, and that too was her favourite song ! Oh, the dear ! the dear I and I to be the sinful woman here on any quarrel for her!" The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and i 112 GILIAN THE DREAMER r; n i I 'I Gilian fell back with a shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the sea moan- ing in the trees behind the town. " What — what — what are we here for ? " said he, beholding for the first time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and sensitive a dame. She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought him too young to under- stand the outrage this must be on her every sense of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence I " You may well ask," she said, moving away from that alluring house-front with its inmates so in- different to the passions in the dark without. And her sobs were not yet finished. " Because I prize my brothers," said she, "and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead companion's child ? " She hurried her pace away from that house whose windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious that he v;as there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face. " Do you like that girl ? " said she. " I like her — when she sings," said he. " Oh ! it was always that," she went on helplessly. " My poor brothers 1 They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very much per- haps ; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that brought them together." Then she stopped a THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY 113 moment with a pitiful exclamation : " Oh I I was the instrument of providence in their case ; but for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing here with you ? She may have her mother's nature as well as her mother's songs." For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the street, now deserted but for themselves and a man's footsteps sounding on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming. It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage. " It is an inclement evening. Miss Campbell," he said, in a shrill high dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the guttural Highland burghers. She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street. " You have left the Sheriffs early to-night," said he. " I was asked, but I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here." " I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of," said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. "The mantua-maker tells me the latest fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edin- H M 4 IT U i t 114 GILIAN THE DREAMER burgh." She saw in his face the innkeeper's apology for his common sin against the Gaelic vanity. " We were just out for an airing," she added, taking Gilian's hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning. "I thought, ma'am, you were at the Sheriff's," said Mr. Spencer. " Oh 1 there is a party in the Sheriff's, is there ? " she said. " That is very nice ; they have a hospit- able house and many friends. I must hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave them to go out myself." She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that died in her twenty years before. She said " Good-night," and then she was gone. Mr. Spencer's footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not on London town, and old friencs there, but upon the odd thing that while this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her cheek. I . i ' ^ CHAPTER IX ACADEMIA In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old Brooks' school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own, but by the luck that attends on such as have God's gift to begin with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the fascination they had before, even when they had mocked with cries of " Crotal-coat, Crotal- coat," did not very bravely stand a close trial. He was not dismayed at this ; he did as we must all be doing through life and changed one illusion for another. It is a wonderful rich world for dreams^ and he had a different one every day, as he sat in the peaty odour of instruction. Old Brooks would perch high on his three-legged stool conning over some exercise while his scholars in their rows behind the knife-hewn inky desks hummed like bees upon their tasks. The horn- books of the little ones at the bottom of the room would sometimes fall from their hands in the languor Ml' ,1 ! ii6 GILIAN THE DREAMER JC I * 1? ! of that stagnant atmosphere, but the boys of the upper forms were ever awake for mischief. To the teaching of the Dominie they would come with pockets full of playthings, sometimes animals from the woods and fields about the town — frogs, moles, hedgehogs, or fledgeling birds. Brooks rarely sus- pected the presence of these distractions in his sacred grove, for he was dull of vision and pre- ferred to see his scholars about him in a vague mist rather than wear in their presence the great horn spectacles that were privy to his room in Crombie's Land. The town's clock staring frankly in at the school windows conveyed to him no know- ledge of the passing enemy, and, as his watch had been for a generation but a bulge upon his vest, he must wait till the hour struck ere he knew it was meridian and time to cross the playground and into Kate Bell's for his glass of waters. " Silence till I return I " he would say, whipping on his better coat and making for the door that had no sooner shut on him than tumult reigned. On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster making for the house of the Sergeant More. " I cannot understood," would the Paymaster say, " what makes you take your drams in so common a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company I MacNicol and Major Hall — and — and — myself, and some of the best in the burgh ; yet you must be fre- quenting a low tavern with only merchants and mechanics and fisherman to say * Good health ' to." ACADEMIA "7 Master Brooks had always his answer very pat. " I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books," he would say drily. "And told with a greater ingenuity — not to mention veracity — than pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between ourselves, I'ni not for war at all, but for the far finer and more whuiosome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain ! " (and here would he grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an old acquaintance,) " Captain, Captain ! it is not a world for war though we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellow- ship, so short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us, so kind with all their faults ! I find more of the natural human in the back room of Kate's there where the merchants dis- course upon their bales and accompts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their way of it." " It's aye the old story with you," the Paymaster would say tolerantly. " You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of wars, its marchings-oflf and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy's head. Eh ? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer." "The boy's made. Captain Campbell," said the schoolmaster one day at this. " He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house i ■I 'i ii8 GILIAN THE DREAMER or felt my fcrulc-cnd. He is of the dream nature and he will be what he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I've had many a curious student yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere but as the tinkler learns — by the roadside and in the wood." " I know he's a droll one," said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a thoughtful brow, " but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it in with your tawse." The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse- ness of youth made its presence necessary in his desk. ** Captain Campbell," said he, " it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a lustis naiurcc, that is all ; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as an idiot when it is not, and then no tawse or ferule will avail." And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him the restraints were galling shackles. When the I ACADEMIA 119 classes woulil be luimming in the drowsy afternoon and tlic sharp high voice of old Brooks rose above the murmur as he taught some little class in the upper corner, the boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a new edge on their instruments. Oh ! the outer world was ever the wc:' ' )f charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat j that constrained and humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing, himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so peremptorily called. If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty, mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple for hue, with eyebrows arching high in i n ▼ IH! 120 GILIAN THE DREAMER a perpetual surprise at so hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but one at a time. Marget Maclean's little shop was the dullest in the street, but it was the ante- room of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer through her glasses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the book she thought most suited for her customer. "You will find that a good om," she would say. " The one you mention is not at all good ; it was very fashionable last spring, but it is not asked for now at all." And in proof that the volume she recommended was quite genteel, she would add : "That one was up at the Castle last Saturday. Lady Charlotte's maid, you will notice, wet all the pages crying over the places where the lover v/ent to sea another voyage. It is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not remem- ber what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice in a book." " You have none of Mr. Scott's poetry ? " asked Gilian one day, moved thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars. " Scott, Scott," said Miss Marget. •' Now let me think, my dear." ACADEMIA 121 She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bo^''2d behind her ears as she tihed up her head and glanced along the shelves for what she knew was not there. "No, my boy," she said. "We have none of Mr. Scott's works ?>t present. There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but," here she frowned slightly, " I do not think you are old enough for poetry. It is too romantic, and — it lingers in the memory. I have not read him myself lliough I hear he is clever— in a way. I would not say that I object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recom- mend him to my young customers." So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be the " Mysteries of Udolpho," " Thaddeus of Warsaw," " Moll Flanders," or " Belinda," the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in fancy by I ^r- 122 GILIAN THE DREAMER many pngcs. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling below or beating in petulant waves and he floated, as it were, between sea and sky, as free from earth's clogging influence as the gannet that soared above. He sought the Ramparts because for a boy of his age to read in books, except as a task of the school, was something shameful ; and he had been long accustomed to the mid-air trip upon the walls ere some other boys discovered him guilty, flushing and trembling with a story book in his hand. They looked with astonishment at their discovery and were prepared to jeer when his wits came to his rescue. He tore out one or two leaves of the book, twisted them into a rough semblance of a boat and cast them in the water. " Watch," said he, " you'll see the big ones are sunk sooner than the little ones." " Do not tear the good book," said one of the boys, Young Islay, shocked, or pretending to be so, at the destruction. " Oh 1 it's only a stupid story," said Gilian, tear- ing again at the treasure, with an agony that could have been no greater had it been his heart. He had to forego many books from Marget Maclean to make up for this one, but at least he had escaped the irony of his companions. Yet not books were his first lovers and friends and teachers, so much as the creatures of the wild, and the aspects of nature. Often the Dominie missed him from his accustomed place at the foot of ACADEMIA 123 the class, and there was no explanation to offer when he returned. He had suffered again the wood's fascination. In the upper part of the glen he had been content with little clumps and plantings, the caldine woods of Kincreggan or the hazels whereof the shepherds made their crooks. But the forest lay for miles behind the town, a great land of shade and pillars where the winds roved and tangled. It abounded in wild life, and sounded ever in spring and summer with songs and cries. Into its glades he would wander and stand delirious to the solitude, tingling to the wild. The dim vistas about him had no affrights ; he was at home, he was the child of the tranquil, the loving mother, whose lap is the pasture-land and forest. Autumn fills those woods with the very breath of melancholy, no birds will sing in the multitudinous cloisters except the birds of the night whose melody is one doleful and mocking note. The bracken burns and withers, lush grass rots and whitens above the fir- roots, the birds flit from shade to shade with no carolling. And over all will stand the trees sleeping with their heads a-nod. He would walk among the noisy fallen leaves, posturing the heroes of his reading or his own imagination about him in the landscape — a pleasant recreation. He would set Bruce the king himself sitting at a cave-mouth, a young gentleman with a queue like Turner's, pondering upon freedom, while the spiders wrought for his instruction ; deer break- ing from covert to dash away, or moving in stately herds across the forest openings, became a foreiQ:n i f] i 124 GILIAN THE DREAMER [1 : i cavalry. Sometimes he would take a book to the upper hunting-roads, where rarely any intrusion came except from some gillie or fisher of the lochs far back in the moors, and stretched on dry bracken he would read and dream for hours. It was in such an attitude Young Islay found him on the Saturday after the episode on the Ramparts. Gilian was in the midst of the same book, trying hard to fill up the gaps that his sacrifice of leaves had brought into the narrative, and Young Islay going a-fishing in the moor-lochs, a keen sportsman all alone, stood over him a very much surprised discoverer. He gave an halloo that brought Gilian to his feet alarmed, for it happened to fit in with some passage in his mind where foes cried. In vain the book went behind the Paymaster's boy; Islay saw the ragged pages. "Oh ! " he cried, "you'll not cheat me this time ; you're reading." An annoying contempt was in his manner, and as he stood with his basket slung upon his back, and his rod in the crook of an arm, like a gun, a straight, sturdy lad of neat limb, a handsome face, and short black curls, he was, for a moment, more admirable in Gilian's eyes than the hero of the book he was ashamed to show. " I had it in my pocket," said Gilian, in a poor, ineffeclive explanation, relinquishing the volume with a grudge to the examination of this cynic. " You pretended on the Ramparts you were tear- ing it up like any other boy," said Young Islay, "and I was sure you were doing nothing of the ACADEMIA 125 kind." He turned over the pages with scornful fingers. "It's not a school-book, there's not a picture in it, it's full of talking — fancy being here with that rubbish, when you might be fishing with me!" Gilian snatched the volume from him. *' You don't know anything about it ! " he cried. " I know you at any rate," said Young Islay craftily. " You were ashamed of your book ; you come here often with books ; you do nothing like anybody else ; you should have been a girl ! " All the resentment of the Pavmaster's boy sprung to his head at this taunt ; he threw the book down and dashed a small fist in Young Islay's face. There he found a youth not slow to reply. Down went the rod and the book, and with the fishing-basket swinging and beating at his back. Young Islay fell upon the zealous student. Gilian's arms, as he defended or aimed futile blows, felt, in a little, as heavy as lead. Between each blow he aimed there seemed to be a great space of time, and yet his enemy was striking with rapidity. *♦ Are you beaten ? " at last cried Young Islay, drawing back for a truce. "No," said Gilian, gasping. "I'm only tired,'' but he looked bloody and vanquished. " It's the same thing," said Young Islay, picking up his rod. " You can do nothing with your hands; I — I can do anything." And he drew up with a bantam's vanity. He moved off. The torn book was in his path. He kicked it before him like a football until he reached the ditch beside the hunt- 11! If: i 1 126 GILIAN THE DREAMER ing road, and there he left it. A little later Gilian saw him in a distant vista of the trees as an old hunter of the wood, with a gun in his hand and his spoil upon his back, breasting the brae with long strides, a figure of achievement altogether admir- able. |i ^f in Id lis ir- CHAPTER X ON HIS MAJESTY'S SERVICE Marget Maclean (or one of her sisters) was accus- tomed when the mails contained a letter on His Majesty's Service for the Paymaster, to put on a bonnet, and in a mild flurry cross the street, feeling herself a sharer in the great matters of State. So important was the mission that she had been known even to shut her shop door for the time of her absence upon eager and numerous youths waiting the purchase of her superior " black man," a comfit more succulent with her than with Jenny Anderson in Crombie's Land, or on older patrons seeking the hire of the new sensation in literature — something with a tomb by Mrs. RadclifTe. " Tell your mistress I wish to see her," she would say on these occasions with great pomp to Peggy, but even Miss Mary was not sufficiently close to State to be entrusted with the missive. " Good day, Miss Campbell, I called to sec Captain John on important business," and the blue document with its legend and seal would be clutched with mittened hands tight to the faded bodice. Miss Mary shared some of this awe for State ft Sf 1 1 i 1 1 1 h ' l;i ' 128 GILIAN THE DREAMER documents ; at least she helped out the illusion that they were worth all this anxiety on the part of the post-office, and she would call the Paymaster from his breakfast. His part on the other hand was to depreciate their importance. He would take the most weighty and portentous with an air of contempt. "What's this, Miss Maclean?" he would say impatiently with the snuff-pinch suspended between his pocket and his nose. "A king's letter. Con- found the man ! what can he be v/anting now ? " Then with a careless forefinger he would break the seal and turn the paper outside in, heedless (to all appearance) as if it were an old copy of the Courier. One day such a letter sent his face flaming as he returned to the breakfast table. He looked at Miss Mary, sitting subdued behind her urn and Gilian at her side, and then at his brothers, hardly yet awake in the early morning, whose breakfasts in that small- windowed room it needed two or three candles to illuminate. "The county corps is coming south this way," said he, with a great restraint upon his feelings. Cornal Colin turned on him a lustreless eye. " What havers are you on now, John ? " said he, with no pause in the supping of his porridge. Dugald paid no heed. With a hand a little palsied he buttered a scone, and his lower lip was dropped and his eyes were vacant, showing him far absent in the spirit. Conversation was never very rife at the Paymaster's breakfast table. " I'm telling you the county corps is coming south," ON HIS MAJESTY'S SERVICE 129 said Mars, with what for him to the field officer was almost testiness. " Here's a command for billeting three hundred men on Friday night on their way to Dumbarton." Up stood the Cornal with a face transfigured. He stretched across the table and almost rudely clutched the paper from his brother's hand, cast a fast glance at the contents and superscription, then sat again and gave a little choked cheer, the hurrah of spent youth and joyfulness. "Curse me! but it's true," he cried to the General. "The old 91st under Crawford — Jiggy Crawford we called him for his dance in the ken at Madrid before he exchanged — Friday, Friday; Where's my uniform, Mary? They'll be raw recruits, I'll warrant, not the old stuff, but — are you hear- ing, Dugald ? Oh ! the Army, the Army ! Let me see — yes, it says six pipers and thirty band. My medals, Mary, are they in the shottle of my kist yet ? The 91st — God! I wish it was our own; would I not show them ! You are not hearing a word I am saying, Dugald." He paused in a feverish movement in his chair, thrust off from him with a clatter of dishes and a spilling of milk the breakfast still unfinished, and stared with annoyance at the General. Dugald picked at his fish with no appetite, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, a silent old man palsied on one side, with a high bald head full of visions. " What's that about the Argylls?" he said at last, with a start, brought to by the tone aod accent of his brother. I i: ' ill.. 130 GILIAN THE DREAMER Cornal Colin cleared his throat, and read the notification of the billet. " Friday, did you say Friday ?" asked Dugald, all abstraction gone. " This very Friday." The old man rose and threw back his shoulders with some of the gallantry of his prime. He walked without a word to the window and looked at the deserted street. Ten — fifteen — twenty years fell from his back as thus he stood in the mingled light of the wan reluctant morning and the gutfering candles on the table. To Miss Mary, looking at him there against the morning light, his figure — black and indefinite — was the figure that went to Spain, the strong figure, the straight figure, the figure that filled its clothes with manliness. There was but the oval of the bald high head to spoil the illusion. He turned again and looked into the candle-lit room, but seeing nothing there, for all his mind was else- where. " I thought," he muttered, brokenly, " I thought I would never see red-coat again." Then he straight- ened his shoulders anew, and flexed the sinews of his knees, and pressed the palsied hand against the breeches' seam. The exertion brought a cough to his throat, a choking resistless cough of age and clogging humours. It was Time's mocking reminder that the morning parade was over for ever, and now the soldier must be at ease. He gasped and splut- tered, his figure lost its tenseness, and from the fit of coughing he came back again an old and feeble man. He looked at his hand trembling against his waist, 1 ON HIS MAJESTY'S SERVICE 131 at his feet in their large and clumsy slippers ; he looked at the picture of himself upon the wall, then quitted the room with something like a sob upon his lip. "Man! he's in a droll key about it! "said thef Paymaster, breaking the silence. " What in all the world is his vexation ? " Miss Mary put down her handkerchief impatiently and loaded Gilian at her side with embarrassing attentions. "What — in — all — the — world — is — his vexation?" mocked the Comal in the Captain's high and squeaking voice, reddening at the face and his scar purpling. " That's a terribly stupid question to put, Jock. What — in — all — the — world — is — his — vexa- tion ? If you had the soger's heart and your brother's past you would not be asking what an ancient's sorrow at his own lost strength might mean. Oh, man, man ! make a pretence at spirit even if the Almighty denied it to you ! " He tossed the letter from him, almost in his brother's face. The Paymaster held his anger in leash. He was incapable of comprehending and he was, too, afraid. With a forced laugh, he pressed the creases from the document. "Oh, I'm glad enough to see the corps," said he, " if that's what you mean. If I have not your honours from the Army, I'm as fond of Geordie's uniform as any man of my years. I'll get the best billets in the town for " The Cornal scowled and interjected, " Ay, ay, and [ji^H I' 132 GILIAN THE DREAMER 'i * I f ■$ you'll make all the fraca that need be about the lads, and cock your hat to the fife, and march and act the veteran as if you were Moore himself, but you'll be far away from knowing what of their pomp and youth is stirring the hearts of your brother Dugald and me. The Army is all bye for us, Jock, Boney's by the heels ; there's younger men upon the roster if the foreign route is called again in the barrack yard." His glance fell upon Gilian, wide-eyed, wonderful, in the shade beside Miss Mary's chair, and he turned to him with a different accent. " There ^OM are!" said he, "my wan-faced war- lock. What would Colin Campbell, Commander of the Bath, not give to be your age again and all the world before him ? Do you say your prayers at night, laddie, before you go to your naked bed in the garret ? I'll warrant Mary taught you that if she taught you nothing else. Pray every night then that Heaven may give j'ou thew and heart and a touch of the old Hielan' glory that this mechanic body by my side has got through the world wanting. Oh, laddie, laddie, what a chance is yours ! To hear the drum in the morning and st^ the sun glint on the line ; to sail away and march with pipe or bugle in foreign countries ; to have a thousand good companions round about the same camp-fires and know the lift and splendour of parades in captured towns. It's all bye for me; I'm an old pensioner rotting to the tomb in a landward burgh packed with relics like myself, and as God's in heaven, I often wish I was with brother Jamie yonder fallen in my ^v .».:A^.^jj.s.-^i :.iiife.-. I or HIS MAJESTY'S SERVICE 133 prime with a clod stopping the youth and spirit in my throat." " Tut, tut, now weVc in our flights 1 " said the Pay- master, not very audibly, so that in his transport the Comal never heard. " Are you for the Army ? " asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed Gilian with an eye there was no baffling. " I would — I would like it fine," said Gilian stam- mering, " if it was all like that." " Like what ? " asked the Cornal, subdued, and a hand behind his ear to listen. ** Like that — " repeated the boy, trembling though Miss Mary's fingers were on his. " All the morning time, all with trumpets and the same friends about the camp-fire. Always the lift inside and the notion to go on and on and " He stopped for want of English words to tell the sentiment completely. The Cornal looked at him now wistfully. " I would not say, Gilian," said he, " but what there might be the makings of a soger in you yet. li you have not the sinews for it you have the sense. You'll see a swatch on Friday of what I talked about and we'll — Come away this minute, Mary, and look me out my uniform. Jiggy Crawford ! Young Jiggy that danced in the booze-house in Madrid ! He was Ensign then and now he has his spurs and handles tartan. He is at the very topmost of the thing and I am going down, down, down, out, out, out, like this, and this, and this," and so saying he II; ■i:( ! f I ii 134 GILIAN THE DREAMER pinched out the candle flames one by one The morning swept into the room, no longer with a rival, lighting up this parlour of old people, showing the wnnkles and the grey hairs and the parchment- covered knuckles, and in its midst the Paymaster's boy With a transfigured face and a head full of martial glory. *" Sv;; 'f .:" CHAPTER XI THE SOUND OF THE DRUM And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the town about him in a ferment of anticipation ? In our sleeping community we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs. He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor's door. Old Islay came o'it with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow. " What is wrong in the place to-day ? " asked his Grace with a flourish of his crop about him to the 11 'I 'I! T 136 GILIAN THE DREAMER H lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern doors. "Am I paying good day's wages for the like of that?" Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. " It's the coming of the army," said he. " The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day. They would not do a hand's turn for an emperor." " Humph ! " said Duke George. " I wish I could throw off life's responsibilities so easily. The rogues ! the rogues I " he mused, soothing his horse's neck with a fine and kindly hand. " I suppose it's in them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances. My father — well, well, let them be." His heels turned the horse in a graceful curvet. " I'm saying, Islay," he cried over his shoulder, " have a free cask or two at the Cross in the morning." But it was in the Paymaster's house that the fullest stress, the most nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster's snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who smiled behind his back. His brothers' slumbers in the silent parlour had been utterly destroyed till " Me-the-day ! " Miss Mary had to cry at last when her maid brought back untasted viands, " I wish the army was never to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the better for this." THE SOUND OF THE DRUM '37 I All this excitement sustained the tremulous feel- ing at the boy's heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier's experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal's character suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till she cried " The man's doited ! " though she clearly liked it ; to Gilian he began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales. Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero. It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d'Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to the chin ; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry " Well done ! " ; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every " whe — e — et " of the bullets at his ear bringing the moment's alarm to his teeth in a checked sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams, to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the battle- lines upon the page — the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the blistered and bruised plaster of the wall 'I i |i': 1 138 GILIAN THE DREAMER ■■', < ^ :l 'f to see horsemen at the charge and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting, commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the master's desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie. Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him. " At the play-acting again. Master Gilian ? " said the dominie a little bitterly, a little humorously. " And what might it be this time ? " Sogers," said the boy most red and awkward. Ay, ay," said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. "Soldiers is it? And the pla}'- ground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind. Soldiers I H'm ! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you're going to meet Captain Campbell's most darling wish. Eh ? You have begun the trade early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts. Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and — my work's hopeless. Laddie, laddie,