Gilian The Dreamer Part 16

For the life of him he could not turn to go away. He rebelled against the Paymaster's service, and remained till the ship was in the river mouth beside him.

"Ho '_ille 'ille!_" Black Duncan cried upon him, leaning upon his tarry gunnle, and smiling to the sh.o.r.e like a man far-travelled come upon a friendly face in some foreign port. The wooded rock gave back the call with interest. Round about turned the seaman and viewed the southern sky. A black cloud was p.r.i.c.ked upon the spur of Cowal. "There's wind there," said he, "and water too! I'm thinking we are better here than below Otter this night. Nan, my dear, it is home you may get to-day, but not without a wetting. I told you not to come, and come you would."

She drummed with her heels upon the breaker, held up a merry chin, and smiled boldly at her father's captain. "Yes, you told me not to come, but you wanted me to come all the time. I know you did. You wanted songs, you wanted all the songs, and you had the ropes off the pawl before I had time to change my mind."

"You should go home now," said the seaman anxiously. "Here is our young fellow, and he will walk up to the town with you."

She pretented to see Gilian for the first time, staring at him boldly, with a look that made him certain she was thinking of the many times he had manifestly kept out of her way. It made him uneasy, but he was more uneasy when she spoke.

"The Paymaster's boy," said she. "Oh! he would lose himself on the way home, and the fairies might get him. When I go I must find my own way.

But I am not going now, Duncan. If it will rain, it will rain and be done with it, and then I will go home."

"Come on board," said Duncan to the boy. "Come on board, and see my ship, then; she is a little ship, but she is a brave one, I'm telling you; there is nothing of the first of her left for patches."

Gilian looked longingly at the magic decks confused with ropes, and the open companion faced him, leading to warm depths, he knew by the smoke that floated from the funnel. But he paused, for the girl had turned her head to look at the sea, and though he guessed somehow she might be willing to have him with her for his youth, he did not care to venture.

Then Black Duncan swore. He considered his invitation too much of a favour to have it treated so dubiously. Gilian saw it and went upon the deck.

Youth, that is so long (and all too momentary), and leaves for ever such a memory, soon, forgets. So it was that in a little while Gilian and Nan were on the friendliest of terms, listening to Black Duncan's stories.

As they listened, the girl sat facing the den stair, so that her eyes were lit to their depths, her lips were flaming red. The seaman and the boy sat in shadow. The seaman, stretched upon a bunk with his feet to the Carron stove, the boy upon a firkin, could see her every wave of fancy displayed upon her countenance. She was eager, she was piteous, she was laughing, in the right key of response always when the stories that were told were the straightforward things of a sailor's experience--storms, adventures, mishaps, pa.s.sion, or calm. She had grown as Gilian had grown, in mind as in body; and thinking so, he was pleased exceedingly. But the tales that the boy liked were the tales that were not true, and these, to Gilian's sorrow, she plainly did not care for; he could see it in the calmness of her features. When she yawned at a tale of Irish mermaidens he was dashed exceedingly, for before him again was the sceptic who had laughed at his heron's nest and had wantonly broken the crystal of the Lady's Linn. But by-and-by she sang, and oh!

all was forgiven her. This time she sang some songs of her father's, odd airs from English camp-fires, braggart of word, or with the melodious longings of men abroad from the familiar country, the early friend.

"I wish I was a soldier," he found himself repeating in his thought. "I wish I was a soldier, that such songs might be sung for me."

A fury at the futility of his existence seized him. He would give anything to be away from this life of ease and dream, away where things were ever happening, where big deeds were possible, where the admiration and desire were justified. He felt ashamed of his dreams, his pictures, his illusions. Up he got from his seat upon the firkin, and his head was in the shadows of the smoky timbers.

"Sit down, lad, sit down," said the seaman, lazy upon his arm upon the shelf. "There need be no hurry now; I hear the rain."

A moan was in the shrouds, the alarm of a freshening wind. Some drops trespa.s.sed on the cabin floor, then the rain pattered heavily on the deck. The odours of the ship pa.s.sed, and in their place came the smell of the cut timber on the sh.o.r.e, the oak's sharpness, the rough sweetness of the firs, all the essence, the remembrance of the years circled upon the ruddy trunks, their gatherings of storm and sunshine, of dew, showers, earth-sap, and the dripping influence of the constant stars.

"I cannot stay here, I cannot stay here! I must go," cried the lad, and he made to run on deck.

But Duncan put a hand out as the lowest step was reached, and set him back in his place.

"Sit you there!" said he. "I have a fine story you never heard yet And a fighting story too."

"What is it? What is it?" cried Nan. "Oh! tell us that one. Is it a true one?"

"It is true--in a way," said the seaman. "It was a thing that happened to myself."

Gilian delayed his going--the temptation of a new story was too much for him.

"Do you take frights?" Black Duncan asked him. "Frights for things that are not there at all?"

Gilian nodded.

"That is because it is in the blood," said the seaman; "that is the kind of fright of my story."

And this is the story Black Duncan told in the Gaelic.

CHAPTER XVI--THE DESPERATE BATTLE

"Black darkness came down on the wood of Creag Dubh, and there was I lost in the middle of it, picking my way among the trees. Fir and oak are in the wood. In the oak I could walk straight with my chin in the air, facing anything to come; in the fir the little branches scratched at my neck and eyes, and I had to crouch low and go carefully.

"I had been at a wedding in the farm-house of Leacann. Song and story had been rife about the fire; but song and story ever have an end, and there was I in the hollow of the wood after song and story were by, the door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them as I went. Not a star p.r.i.c.ked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet, though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the fin dust. I swept every one with a sh.e.l.l aside, hunting for my cracked fellow, and when I found him never was nut so sweet!

"Then came to me the queerest of notions, that some night before in this same wood I had lost a nut, and the darkness was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail under the lid of it. And yet the time or season that ever I cracked nuts in Creag Dubh was what I could never give name to.

"'Where was it? When was it?' said I to myself, bent double creeping under the young larch with my plaid drawn up to fend my eyes, and the black fright crept over me. An owl's whoop would have been cheery, or the snort of a hind--and Creag Dubh is in daytime stirring with bird and beast--but here was I stark lonely in the heart of it, never a sound about, far from the hunting road, and my mind back among the terrors of a thousand years ere ever the Feinne were sung.

"In this dreamy quirk of the mind I felt I was a hunter and a man of arms. I was searching for a something here in this ghostly wood. The cudgel and knife of folks I could not understand were coming on me!

Fast, fast, and hard I crunched my nuts, chewing sh.e.l.l and meat fiercely between my teeth to fill the skull of my head with noise and shut out the quietness. Never a taste of what I ate, sour or sweet. But so hard and fast I crunched that soon my store of nuts was done, and there I was helpless with my ears open to the roaring wave of sound that we call silence. I stood a little, and though my back grewed at the chill of the dreadful s.p.a.ces behind me, I held my breath to study the full fright of the hour. Something was coming to me; I knew it. When this thing happened before, when a skin was my kilt and my shanks were bare, whatever I had to meet had met me in the round s.p.a.ce among the candle-wood roots. The hair on my wrists stirred, a cry came to my throat and was over the edge of it and into the dark night like a man's heart scurrying craven to the door.

"Through the wood went that craven roar, the wood all its own and, a stranger, I listened to my own voice wake up Echo far off on Ben Dearg.

"The doors of Echo shut on the only thing I knew and was half friendly with in the Duke's wood, and down on me again came the quietest quietness.

"'Be taking thy feet from here' said I to myself, taking out my sailor-knife and scrugging my bonnet well on my brow. And there was no wind, not a breath, on Creag Dubh. The stars black out, the rough ground broken to my foot, the branches sc.r.a.ping unfriendly, I went on through the trees.

"When one goes up from the Leacann hunting road into the farm-lands he comes in a while on a s.p.a.ce among the trees, clean shorn like the shearing of a hook but for white hay that lies there thick and rustling in the spring of the year. 'Black Duncan,' said I, 'be pulling thyself together, gristle and bone, for here's the fright that stirs about the dark with fingers and claws.' I was the first man (said my notion) who ever set foot on the braes of Argyll, newly from Erin and Argyll thick with ghosts; daytime or dark the woods were full of things that hate the stranger. Under my feet the rotting dust of the fir-trees felt soft and clogging, like the banks of new-delved graves. My back shivered again to the feel of the s.p.a.ce behind me; in my bonnet stirred my hair. I went into the glade with a dry tongue rasping on the roof of my mouth.

"When the Terror came up against me, I could have laughed in my sudden ease of mind, for here at last was something to be sure of, in a way.

And I gripped back as it gripped fast at me, feeling it hairy at the neck and the crook of the arms--a breathing and l.u.s.ty body.

"'What have I here?' I asked, but never an answer. At my throat went ten clawed fingers, and there was Duncan at dismal battle, fighting for life with what he could not see, in his own home woods, but they so strange and never a friend to help!

"For a time I had no chance with the knife; but at last 'Steel, my darling!' said I, and I struck low in the soft s.p.a.ces. 'Gloop,' said the knife, and Death was twisting at my feet.

"Did Duncan put hurry on his heels and fly? The hurry was not in me but the deep heart's wonder. My first dead thing that in life had ever struck back held me till the morning with a girl's enchantment I went down on a knee in the gra.s.s and felt him, a soft lump, freezing slowly from the heel to the knee, from the knee to the neck. Some rags of costume were on him, a kilt of coa.r.s.e plaiding and a half-shirt of skin, soaked in sweat at the armpits and wet with blood at the end.

"I waited till the morning to see what I had. 'This,' said I, hunched on a mound, 'is all as it was before.' The first sound I heard was the squeal of a beast caught at the throat among the bracken, then a hind snored among the gra.s.s. The morning walked solemn among the trees, stopping at every step to listen; birds put their claws down and shook themselves free of sleep and dew; a polecat slinking past me started at my eye and went back to his hole. Began the fir-trees waving in the wind, and then the day was open wide and far.

"In the dark I had strained my eyes to see what was at my feet till my eyeb.a.l.l.s creaked in their hollows, yet now I had no desire to turn about from the cheerful dawn and look behind, but I did it with my heart thudding.

"Nothing was there to see, lappered blood, nor mark of body on gra.s.s!

"My knife, without a stain on the steel of it, was still in my hand.

I wiped it with a tuft of bracken, and I laughed with something of a bitterness.

"'So!' said I, 'the old story, the old story! It happened me before, and in a hundred years from now Black Duncan will be at the killing again.'"

CHAPTER XVII--THE STORM