Gilian The Dreamer Part 20

PART II

CHAPTER XX--THE RETURN

When the General died, the household in the high burgh land suffered a change marvellous enough considering how little that old man musing in his parlour had had to do for years with its activities. Cornal Colin would sit of an evening with candles extravagantly burning more numerous than before to make up for the glowing heart extinguished; the long winter nights, black and stifling and immense around the burgh town, and the wind with a perpetual moan among the trees, would find him abandoned to his sorry self, looking into the fire, the week's paper on his knees unread, and him full of old remembrances and regrets. It had become for him a parlour full of ghosts. He could not, in October blasts, but think of Jamie yonder on the cold foreign field with no stone for his memorial; Dugald, so lately gone, an old man, bent and palsied, would return in the flicker of the candle, remitted to his prime, the very counterpart of the st.u.r.dy gallant on the wall. Sometimes he would talk with these wraiths, and Miss Mary standing still in the lobby, her heart tortured by his loneliness, would hear him murmuring in these phantom visitations. She would, perhaps, venture in now and then timidly, and take a seat unbidden on the corner of a chair near him, and embark on some topic of the day. For a little he would listen almost with a brightness, but brief, brief was the mood; very soon would he let his chin fall upon his breast, and with pouted lips relapse into his doleful meditation.

All life, all the interests, the activities of the town seemed to drift by him; folk saw him less and less often on the plain stones of the street; children grew up from pinafores to kilts, from kilts to breeches, never knowing of his presence in that community that at last he saw but of an afternoon in momentary glimpses from the window.

On a week-end, perhaps, the veterans would come up to cheer him if they could; tobacco that he nor any of his had cared for in that form would send its cloud among Miss Mary's dear naperies, but she never complained: they might have fumed her out of press and pantry if they brought her brother cheer. They talked loudly; they laughed boisterously; they acted a certain zest in life: for a little he would rouse to their entertainment, fiddling heedlessly with an empty gla.s.s, but anon he would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the door with one of her mother's candlesticks, felt as she had the light above her head and showed them down the stair as if she had been the last left at a funeral feast. Her shadow on the wall, dancing before her as she returned, seemed some mockery of the night.

Only Old Brooks could rouse the Cornal to some spirit of liveliness.

In a neighbourly compa.s.sion the dominie would come in of a Sunday or a Friday evening, leaving for an hour or two the books he was so fond of that he must have a little one in his pocket to feel the touch of when he could not be studying the pages. Seated in the Cornal's chair, he had a welcome almost blithe. For he was a man of great urbanity, sobered by thought upon the complexities of life, but yet with sparkling courage.

He found the brothers now contemptuous of the boy who showed no sign of adaptability or desire for that gallant career that had been theirs.

These, indeed, were the cold days for Gilian in a household indifferent to him save Miss Mary, who grew fonder every day, doting upon him like a lover for a score of reasons, but most of all because he was that rarity the perpetual child, and she must be loving somewhere.

"I have not seen the lad at school for a week now," Brooks said, compelled at last by long truancies.

"So?" said the Cornal, showing no interest "It is not my affair. John must look after his own recruit, who seems an uncommon tardy one, Mr.

Brooks--an uncommon tardy."

"But I get small satisfaction from the Captain."

"I daresay, I daresay; would you wonder at that in our Jock? He's my brother, but some way there is wanting in him the stuff of Jamie and of Dugald. Even in his throes upon his latter bed Dugald could see what Jock could never see--the doom in this lad's countenance. As for me, I was done with the fellow after the trick he played us in his story of the wreck on Ealan Dubh. I blame him, in a way, for my brother Dugald's stroke."

The dominie looked in a startled remonstrance. "I would not blame him for that, Cornal," he said: "that was what the Sheriff calls _d.a.m.num fatale_. Upon my word, though Gilian has been something of a heart-break to myself, I must say you give him but scant justice among you here."

"I can see in him but youth wasted, and the prodigal of that is spendthrift indeed."

"I would not just say wasted," protested the dominie. "There's the makings of a fine man in him if we give him but a shove in the right direction. He baffles me to comprehend, and yet"--this a little shamefacedly--"and yet I've brought him to my evening prayers. I would like guidance on the laddie. With him it's a spoon made or a horn spoiled. Sometimes I feel I have in him fine stuff and pliable, and I'll be trying to fathom how best to work it, but my experience has always been with more common metal, and I am feared, I'm feared, we may be botching him."

"That was done for us in the making of him," said the Cornal.

"I would not say that either, Cornal," said the dominie firmly. "But I'm wae to see him brought up on no special plan. The Captain seems to have given up his notion of the army for him."

"You can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink.

What's to be made of him? Here's he sixteen or thereabouts, and just a bairn over lesson-books at every chance."

Brooks smiled wistfully. "It is not the lesson-books, Cornal, not the lesson-books exactly. I wish it was, but books of any kind--come now, Cornal, you can hardly expect me to condemn them in the hands of youth,"

He fondled the little Horace in his pocket as a man in company may squeeze his wife's hand. "They made my bread and b.u.t.ter, did the books, for fifty years, and Gilian will get no harm there. The lightest of novelles and the thinnest of ballants have something precious for a lad of his kind."

The Cornal made no response; the issue was too trivial to keep him from his meditation. His chin sunk upon his chest as it would not have done had the dominie kept to the commoner channels of his gossip, that was generally on universal history, philosophy of a rough and ready rural kind, and theology handled with a freedom that would have seriously alarmed Dr. Colin if he could have heard his Session Clerk in the operation.

"Eh? Are you hearing me, Cornal?" he pressed, eager to compel something for the youth whose days were being wasted.

"Speak to Miss Mary," was all the Cornal would say. "I have nothing to do with him, and John's heedless now, for he knows his plan for the army is useless."

The dominie shook his head. "Man!" he cried. "I cannot even tell of his truancy there, for her heart's wrapped up in the youth. When she speaks to me about him her face is lighted up like a day in spring, and I dare not say cheep to shatter her illusion."

Gilian, alas! knew how little these old men now cared for him. The Cornal had long since ceased his stories; the Paymaster, coming in from his meridian in the Sergeant More, would pa.s.s him on the stair with as little notice as if he were a stranger in the street. Miss Mary was his only link between his dreams, his books, and the common life of the day, and it was she who at last made the move that sent him back to Ladyfield to learn with Cameron the shepherd--still there in the interests of the Paymaster who had whimsically remained tenant--the trade that was not perhaps best suited for him, but at least came somehow most conveniently to his practice. But for the loss of her consoling and continual company there would have been almost joy on his part at this returning to the scene of his childhood. He went back to it on a summer day figuring to himself the content, the carelessness that had been his there before, and thinking, poor fool, they were waiting where he had left them.

Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of Drimfern. A pleasant place for meditation, bleak in winter for the want of trees, but in other seasons in a bloom of colour.

Though he was there 'prentice to a hard calling, Gilian's life was more the gentle's than the shepherd's. He might be often on the hill, but it was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling, it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries of the countryside. A certain weeping effect of the mists on the ravines, one particular moaning sound of the wind among the rocks, had a strange solace for his ear, chording with some sweet melancholy of his spirit He loved it all, yet at times he would flee from the place as if a terror were at his heels and in a revolt against the narrowness of his life, hungering almost to starvation for some companionship, for some salve to an anxious mind, and, in spite of his shyness, bathe in the society of the town--an idler. The people as he rode past would indicate him with a toss of the head over their shoulders, and say, "The Paymaster's boy," and yet the down was showing on his lip. He would go up the street looking from side to side with an expectancy that had no object; he stared almost rudely at faces, seeking for he knew not what.

It was not the winters with their cold, their rain, their wind and darkness, that oppressed him most in his banishment, but the summers. In the winter the mists crowded so close about, and the snow so robbed the land of all variety, that Ladyfield house with its peats burning ceaselessly, its clean paven court, its store of books he had gathered there, was an enviable place for compactness and comfort, and he could feel as if the desirable world was in his immediate neighbourhood. Down in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth's manifest duty to do.

But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable.

For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them; the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the world. "Come away," said the breezes; pa.s.sing gipsies all jangling with tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling. When the summer was just on the turn at that most pitiful' of periods, the autumn, he must go more often down to town.

CHAPTER XXI--THE SORROWFUL SEASON

It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress, growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town.

He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have seemed--if not handsome altogether--at least notable and pleasant to any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it, puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his appearance on the street or on the highway put a new interest in the day.

The Paymaster was standing gossiping at the inn door with Mr. Spencer, Rixa, and General Turner himself--no less, for the ancient rancour at the moment was at rest.

"Here he comes," said old Mars sourly, as Gilian turned round the Arches into the town. "He's like Gillesbeg Aotram, always seeking for something he'll never find."

"Your failure!" said Turner playfully, but with poor inspiration, as in a moment he realised.

The Paymaster bridled. He had no answer to a truth so manifest to himself. In a lightning-flash he remembered his boast in the schoolroom at the dregy, and hoped Turner had not so good a memory as himself. He could only vent his annoyance on Gilian, who drew up his horse with a studied curvet--for still there was the play-actor in him to some degree.

"Down again?" said he with half a sneer. There is a way of leaning on a stick and talking over the shoulder at an antagonist that can be very trying to the antagonist if he has any sense of shyness.

"Down again," agreed Gilian uncomfortably, sorry he had had the courtesy to stop. The others moved away, for they knew the relations of the man and his adopted son were not of the pleasantest.

"An odd kind of farm training!" said the old officer. "I wish I could fathom whether you are dolt or deep one."

Gilian might have come off the horse and argued it, for he had an answer pat enough. He sat still and fingered the reins, looking at the old man with the puffed face, and the constricted bull neck, and self-satisfaction written upon every line of him, and concluding it was not worth while to explain to a nature so shallow. And the man, after all, was his benefactor: scrupulous about every penny he spent on himself, he had paid, at Miss Mary's solicitations, for the very horse the lad bestrode.

"Do you know what Turner said there?" asked the Paymaster, still with his contemptuous side to the lad. "He called you our failure. G.o.d, and it's true! Neither soldier nor shepherd seems to be in you, a muckle bulrush nodding to the winds of Heaven! See that st.u.r.dy fellow at the quay there?"

Gilian looked and saw Young Islay, a smart ensign home on leave from the county corps that even yet was taking so many fine young fellows from that community.

"There's a lad who's a credit to all about him, and he had not half your chances; do you know that?"

"He seems to have the knack of turning up for my poor comparison ever since I can mind," said Gilian, good-humouredly. "And somehow," he added, "I have a notion that he has but half my brains as well as half my chances." He looked up to see Turner still at the inn door. "General Turner," he cried, his face reddening and his heart stormy, "I hear that in your frank estimate I'm the Paymaster's failure; is it so bad as that? It seems, if I may say it, scarcely fair from one of your years to one of mine."

"Shut your mouth!" said the Paymaster coa.r.s.ely, as Turner came forward.

"You have no right to repeat what I said and show the man I took his insolence to heart."

"I said it; I don't deny," answered the General, coming forward from the group at the door and putting his hand in a friendly freedom on the horse's neck and looking up with some regret in Gilian's face. "One says many things in an impetus. Excuse a soldier's extravagance. I never meant it either for your ear or for unkindness. And you talk of ages: surely a man so much your senior has a little privilege?"