Gilian The Dreamer Part 22

This long unaccustomed courtesy found him awkwardly unprepared, and his fingers not closing quickly enough on the sweet it fell on the floor.

It rolled with an alarming noise far to the left, and stirred the congregation like a trumpet. Though little movement showed it, every eye was on the pew from which this disturbance came, and Miss Mary and Gilian knew it. Miss Mary did not flinch; she kept a steadfast eye straight in front of her, but to those behind her the sudden colour of her neck betrayed her culpability. Gilian was wretched, all the more because he heard a rustle of the skirts behind in Turner's pew, and his imagination saw Miss Nan suppressing her laughter with shaking hair and quite conscious that he had been the object of Miss Mary's attention.

He felt the blood that rushed to his body must betray itself behind. All the gowk in him came uppermost; he did not know what he was doing; he put the Bible awkwardly on the book-board in front of him, and it, too, slid to the floor with a noise even more alarming than that of the rolling sweet.

The Paymaster, clearing his throat harshly, wakened from a dover to the fact that these disturbances were in his own territory, and saw the lad's confusion. If that had not informed him the mischievous smile of Young Islay in Gilian's direction would have done so. He half turned his face to Gilian, and with shut lips whispered angrily:

"Thumbs! thumbs!" he said. "G.o.d forgive you for a gomeral!" And then he stared very sternly at Rixa, who saw the movement of the swollen neck above the 'kerchief, knew that the Paymaster was administering a reproof, and was comforted exceedingly by this prelude to the day's devotions.

Gilian left the book where it lay to conceal from those behind that he had been the delinquent. But he felt, at the same time, he was detected.

What a contrast the lady behind must find in his gawkiness compared with the correct and composed deportment of the Capital she had come from! He must be the rustic indeed to her, handling lollipops yet like a child, and tumbling books in a child's confusion. As if to give more acuteness to his picture of himself he saw a foil in Young Islay so trim and manly in the uniform old custom demanded for the Sunday parade, a shrewd upward tilt of the chin and lowering of the brow, his hand now and then at his cheeks, not so much to feel its pleasing roughness, as to show the fine fingers of which he was so conscious. It demanded all his strength to shake himself into equanimity, and Miss Mary felt rather than saw it.

What ailed him? Something unusual was perturbing him. An influence, an air, a current of uneasiness flowed from him and she shared his anxiety, not knowing what might be its source. His every att.i.tude was a new and unaccustomed one. She concluded he must be unwell, and a commotion set up in her heart, so that Dr. Colin's opening prayer went sounding past her a thing utterly meaningless like the wind among trees, and love that is like a high march wall separated her and her favourite from the world.

She surrendered even her scruples of kirk etiquette to put out a hand timidly as they stood together at the prayer, and touched Gilian softly on the sleeve with a gush of consolation in the momentary contact.

But he never felt the touch, or he thought it accidental, for he was almost feverishly waiting till that interminable prayer was ended that he might have the last proof of the presence of the girl behind him.

The crimson hangings of the canopy shook in the stridor of Dr. Colin's supplication, the hollows underneath the gallery rumbled a sleepy echo; Rixa breathed ponderously and thought upon his interlocutors, but no other life was apparent; it was a man crying in the wilderness, and outside in the playground of the world the children were yet calling and laughing content, the rooks among the beeches surveyed, carelessly, the rich lush policies of the Duke.

Gilian was waiting on the final proof, that was only in the girl's own voice. He remembered her of old a daring and entrancing vocalist, in the harmony one thread of gold among the hodden grey of those simple unstudied psalmodists.

The prayer concluded, the congregation, wearied their long stand, relapsed in their hard seats with a sense of satisfaction, the psalm was given out, the precentor stuck up on the desk before him the two tablets bearing the name of the tune, "Martyrs," and essayed at a beginning. He began too high, stopped and cleared his throat. "We will try it again,"

said he, and this time led the voices all in unison. Such a storm was in Gilian's mind that he could not for a little listen to hear what he expected. He had forgotten his awkwardness, he had forgotten his shame; his erratic and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship's interior listening to a girl's song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually there by some message in the notes, some soothing pa.s.sionate melancholy without relation to the words or to the tune, some inexplicable and mellow vibration he had felt first as he stood, a child, on the road from Kilmalieu, and a bird solitary in the winds, lifting with curious tilt of feathers over the marshy field, had piped dolorously some mystery of animal life man must have lost when he ceased to sleep stark naked to the stars. In his mind he traced the baffling accent, failing often to come upon it, anon finding it fill all his being with an emotion he had never known before.

Miss Mary was now more alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison of sluggish men's voices, women's eager earnest shrilling. It was as if he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the side a little to touch him and a.s.sure herself he was there.

And that awakened him! He listened with his workaday ears to separate from the clamour, as he once had done, the thread of golden melody. For a moment he was amazed and disappointed; no unusual voice was there. If Miss Nan was behind him, she was taking only a mute part in the praise, amused mildly perhaps--he could not blame--by this rough contrast with the more tuneful praise she was accustomed to elsewhere.

And then--then he distinguished her I No, he was wrong; no, he was right, there it was again, not so loud and clear as he had expected, but yet her magic, unmistakably, as surely as when first it sounded to him in "The Rover" and "The Man with the Coat of Green." A thrill went through him. He rose at the close of the psalm, and trod upon clouds more airily, high-breastedly, uplifted triumphantly, than Ronaig of Gaul who marched, in the story, upon plunging seas from land to land.

"He has been eating something wrong," concluded Miss Mary, finding ease of a kind in so poor an excuse for her darling's perturbation. It accounted to her for all his odd behaviour during the remainder of the service, for his muteness in the psalmody, his restless disregard of the sermon, his hurry to be out of the straight-backed, uncomfortable pew.

As he stood to his feet to follow the Paymaster she ventured a hand from behind upon his waist, pretending to hasten the departure, but in reality to get some pleasure from the touch. Again he never heeded; he was staring at the Maam pew, from which the General and his brother were slowly moving out.

There was no girl there!

He could scarcely trust his eyes. The aisle had a few women in it, moving decorously to the door with busy eyes upon each other's clothes; but no, she was not there, whose voice had made the few psalms of the day the sweetest of his experience. When he got outside the door and upon the entrance steps the whole congregation was before him; his glance went through it in a flash twice, but there was no Miss Nan. Her father and his brother walked up the street alone. Gilian realised that his imagination, and his imagination only, had tenanted the pew. She was not there!

CHAPTER XXIII--YOUNG ISLAY

"The clash in the kirkyard is worth half a dozen sermons," say the unregenerate, and though no kirkyard is about the Zion of our parish, the people are used to wait a little before home-going and talk of a careful selection of secular affairs; not about the prices of hoggs and queys, for that is Commerce, nor of Sat.u.r.day night's songs in the tavern, for that (in the Sabbath mind) is Sin. But of births, marriages, courtships, weather, they discourse. And Gilian, his head dazed, stood in a group with the Paymaster and Miss Mary, and some of the people of the glens, who were the ostensible reason for the palaver. At first he was glad of the excuse to wait outside, for to have gone the few yards that were necessary down the street and sat at Sunday's cold viands even with Peggy's brew of tea to follow would be to place a flight of stairs and a larch door between him and---- And what? What was he reluctant to sever from? He asked himself that with as much surprise as if he had been a stranger to himself. He felt that to go within at once would be to lose something, to go out of a most agreeable atmosphere. He was not hungry. To sit with old people over an austere table with no flowers on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh, in some flutter of the breast It was better to be out here in the sun among the chattering people, to have nothing between him and Glen Shira but a straight sweep of wind-blown highway. From the steps of the church he could see the Boshang Gate and the hazy ravines and jostling elbows of the hills in Shira Glen. He saw it all, and in one bound his spirit vaulted there, figuring her whose psalm he had but heard in the delusion of desire.

The Duke came lazily down the steps, threw a glance among his clan and tenantry, cast his plaid, with a fine grace, about his shoulders, touching his bonnet with a finger as hat or bonnet rose in salutation, and he went fair up in the middle of the street.

The conversation ceased, and people looked after him as on an Emperor.

"He's going to London on Tuesday, I hear," said Major Hall to Mr.

Spencer. It was the Majors great pride to know the prospective movements at the Castle sooner than any one else, and he was not above exchanging snuff-mulls with Wat Thomson, the ducal boot-brusher, if ducal news could only be got thereby.

"London, London; did you say, London, sir?" said the innkeeper, looking again with an envy after his Grace, the name at once stirring in him the clime from which he was an exile. And the smell of peaty clothes smote him on the nostril for the first time that day. He had been so many Sundays accustomed to it that as a rule he no longer perceived it, but now it rose in contrast to the beefy, beer-charged, comfortable odours of his native town.

"Ah! he's going on Tuesday," said the Paymaster, "but when Duke George's gone, there are plenty of Dukes to take his place. Every officer in his corps will be claiming a full command, quarrelling among themselves.

There'll be Duke Islay----"

"Hus--s--sh!" whispered Major Hall discreetly from the corner of his mouth. "Here's his young fellow coming up behind." Then loudly, "It's a very fine season indeed, Captain Campbell, a very fine season."

Young Islay came forward with a salute for the Captain and his sister.

He was Gilian's age and size, but of a different build, broader at the shoulder, fuller at the chest, black of hair, piercing of eye, with just enough and no more of a wholesome conceit of himself to give his Majesty's uniform justice. When he spoke it was with a clear and manly tone deep in the chest.

He shook hands all round, he was newly come home from the lowlands, his tunic was without speck or crease, his chin was smooth, his strong hands were white; as Gilian returned his greeting he felt himself in an enviable and superior presence.

Promptly, too, there came like a breath upon gla.s.s a remembrance of the ensign of the same corps who kissed his hand to Nan on just such another day of sunshine at Boshang Gate.

"Glad to see you back, Islay," said the Paymaster, proffering his Sabbath snuff-mull. "Faith, you do credit to the coat!" And he cast an admiring eye upon the young soldier.

Young Islay showed his satisfaction in his face.

"But it's a smaller coat than yours, Captain," said he, "and easier filled nowadays than when fighting was in fashion. I'm afraid the old school would have the better of us."

It was a touch of Gaelic courtesy to an elder, well-meant, pardonable; it visibly pleased the old gentleman to whom it was addressed, and he looked more in admiration than before upon this smart young officer.

"Up the Glen yet, Gilian?" said Islay, with the old schoolboy freedom, and Gilian carelessly nodded, his eyes once more roving on the road to Boshang Gate. Young Islay looked at him curiously, a little smile hovering about the corners of his lips, for he knew the dreamer's reputation.

The Paymaster gave a contemptuous "Humph!" "Up the Glen yet. You may well say it," said he. "And like to be. It's a fine clime for stirks."

Gilian did not hear it, but Miss Mary felt it sting to her very heart, and she moved away, pressing upon her favourite's arm to bring him with her. "We must be moving," said she; "Peggy will be scolding about the dinner spoiled with waiting."

But no one else seemed willing to break up the group. Young Islay had become the centre of attraction. MacGibbon and Major Hall, the Sheriff, Mr. Spencer and the dominie, listened to his words as to a sage, gratified by his robust and handsome youth, and the Turners had him by the arm and questioned him upon his experience. Major Mac-Nicol, ludicrous in a bottle-green coat with abrupt tails and an English beaver hat of an ancient pattern, jinked here and there among the people, tip-toeing, round shouldered, with eyes peering and alarmed, jerking his head across his shoulder at intervals to see that no musket barrel threatened, and at times, for a moment or two, he would hang upon the outskirts of Young Islay's _levee_, with a hand behind an ear to listen to his story, filled for a little s.p.a.ce with a wave of vague and bitter recollection that never broke upon the sh.o.r.e of solid understanding, enchanted by a gleam of red and gold, the colours of glory and of youth.

"Let us go home," whispered Miss Mary, pulling gently at Gilian's coat.

"Wait, wait, no hurry for cold kail hot again," said the Paymaster, every instinct for gossip alert and eager.

"And you showed him the qualities of a Highland riposte! Good lad! Good lad! I'm glad that Sandy and you learned something of the art of fence before they tried you in the Stirling fashion," General Turner was saying. "You'll be home for a while won't you? Come up and see us at Maam; no ceremony, a bird, a soldier's jug, and----"

"And a soldier's song from Miss Nan, I hope," continued the young officer, smiling. "That would be the best inducement of all I hear she's home again from the low country, and thought she would have been in church to-day."

"City ways, you know, Islay, city ways," said Turner, tapping the young fellow playfully on the shoulder with his cane. "She did not come down because she must walk! I wonder what Dr. Colin would say if he found me yoking a horse to save a three miles Sabbath daunder to the kirk. Come up and have your song, though, any day you like; I'll warrant you never heard better."

"I'm certain I never did," admitted Young Islay heartily.

"And when I think," said the General softly, more closely pressing the young fellow's arm, "that there might be no song now at all but for your readiness with an oar, I'm bound to make a tryst of it: say Tuesday."

"Certainly!" said Young Islay. "About my readiness with an oar, now, that was less skill than a boy's luck. I can tell you I was pretty frightened when I baled--good heavens, how long ago I--the water from the punt, and felt the storm would smother me!" He was flushing to speak of a thing so much to his credit, and sought relief from his feelings by a random remark to the Paymaster's boy.

"You mind?" said he, with a laughing look at Gilian, who wished now that he were in the more comfortable atmosphere of the Paymaster's parlour for he was lamentably outside the interests of this group. "You mind?"

he pressed again, as if the only victim of that storm and stranding could ever forget!