Gilian The Dreamer Part 23

"I remember very well," said Gilian in an Anglified accent that renewed all Miss Mary's apprehension, for it showed an artificial mood. "I came out of that with small credit," he went on, sparing himself nothing. "I suppose I would have risked my life half a dozen times over to be of any service; what was wanting was the sense to know what I should do. There you had the advantage of me. And did you really bail the boat with your bonnet?"

"Faith I did!" said Young Islay, laughing.

"I knew it," said Gilian. "I knew your feelings and your acts as well as if it had been myself that had been there. I wish my comprehension of the act to be done was as ready as my imagination. I wish--"

A shyness throttled the words in his mouth when he found all the company looking upon him, all amused or a little pitiful except the dominie, whose face had a kindly respect and curiosity, and Miss Mary, who was looking wistfully in his eyes.

"There are two worlds about us," said Brooks; "the manifest, that is as plain as a horn-book from A to Ampersand; the other, that is in the mind of man, no iota less real, but we are few that venture into it further than the lintel of the door." And he had about his eyes an almost fatherly fondness for Gilian, who felt that in the words were some justification for him, the dreamer.

The street was emptying, one by one the people had dispersed. Young Islay's group broke up, and went their several ways. The Paymaster and Miss Mary and Gilian went in to dinner.

"What's the matter with you, my dear?" whispered Miss Mary at the turn of the stair when her brother had gone within.

"Matter?" said Gilian, surprised at her discovery. "Nothing that I know of. What makes you think there is anything the matter with me?"

She stopped him at the stair-head, and here in the dusk of it she was again the young companion. "Gilian, Gilian," said she, with stress in her whisper and a great affection in the face of her. "Do you think I can be deceived? You are ill; or something troubles you. What were you eating?"

He laughed loudly; he could not help it at so prosaic a conclusion.

"What carry-on is that on the stair on a Lord's day?" cried the Paymaster angrily and roughly from his room as he tugged short-tempered at the buckle of his Sabbath stock.

"Then there's something bothering you, my dear," said Miss Mary again, paying no heed to the interruption. And Gilian could not release his arm from her restraint.

"Is there, Auntie?" said he. "Perhaps. And still I could not name it.

Come, come, what's the sense of querying a man upon his moods?"

"A man!" said Miss Mary.

"On the verge at least," said he, with a confidence he had never had in his voice before, taking a full breath in his chest.

"A man!" said she again. And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced, trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart.

"I wish, I wish," said she all trembling, "the children did not grow at all!"

CHAPTER XXIV--MAAM HOUSE

Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its surface like a looking-gla.s.s or shivers in icy winds. Round about the bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e.

To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings, and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant, her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about her head, her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom generous--she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that hers was a soldier's fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a tombstone--the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.

What she missed of the strident town was the cl.u.s.tering round of fellow creatures, the eternal drumming of neighbour hearts, the feet upon the pavement and the eager faces all around that were so full of interest they did not let her seek into the depths of her, where lay the old Highland sorrows that her richest notes so wondrously expressed. The tumult for herl Constant touch with the active, the gay! Solitude oppressed her like a looming disease. Sometimes, as in those mornings when she looked abroad from her window upon the Glen, she felt sick of her own company, terrified at the pathetic profound to which the landscape made her sink. Then she wept, and then she shook the mood from her angrily and flashed about the house of Maam like a sunbeam new-washed by the rain.

Her father used to marvel at those sudden whims of silence and of song.

He would come in on some poor excuse from his stable or cunningly listen above his book and try to understand; but he, the man of action, the soldier, the child of undying ambitions, was far indeed from comprehension. Only he was sure of her affection. She would come and sit upon his knee, with arms around his neck, indulgent madly in a child's caresses. Her uncle James, finding them thus sometimes, would start at an illusion, for it looked as if her mother was back again, and her father, long so youthful of aspect, seemed the sweetheart husband once more.

"Ah! you randy!" he would say to his niece, scowling upon her; "the sooner you get a man the better!"

"If there is one in the world half so handsome as my father--yes," she would answer merrily, nestling more fondly in the General's breast, till he rose and put her off with laughing confusion.

"Away! away!" he would cry in pretended annoyance. "You make my grey hairs ridiculous."

"Where are they?" she would say, running her white fingers over his head and daintily refastening the ribbon of that antiquated queue that made him always look the chevalier. She treated him, in all, less like a father than a lover, exceedingly proud of him, untiring of his countless tales of campaign and court, uplifted marvellously with his ambitious dreams of State preferment. For General Turner was but pa.s.sing the time in Maam till by favour promised a foreign office was found for him elsewhere.

"And when the office comes," said he, "then I leave my girl. It is the one thing that sobers me."

"Not here! not here!" she cried, alarm in eye and tone. So he found, for the first time, her impatience with the quiet of Maam. He was, for a little, dumb with regret that this should be her feeling.

"Where better, where safer, my dear?" he asked.

"Come up to the bow-window." And he led her where she could see their native glen from end to end.

In the farm-towns the cots were displayed; smoke rose from their chimneys in the silent air, grey blue banners of peace. "Bide at home, my dear," said he softly, "bide at home and rest. I thought you would have been glad to be back from towns among our own kindly people in the land your very heart-blood sprang from. Quiet, do you say? True, true,"

and still he surveyed the valley himself with solemn eyes. "But there is content here, and every hearth there would make you welcome if it was only for your name, even if the world was against you."

She saw the reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy.

Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. "Is it not homely?" said he, dreading her reply. "I can bear it--with you," she answered pitifully. "But if you go abroad, it would kill me. I must have something that is not here; I must have youth and life--and--life."

"At your age I would not have given Maam and the glen about it for my share of Paradise."--"But now?" said she.

He turned hastily from the window and nervously paced the room.

"No matter about me," he answered in a little. "Ah! you're your mother's child. I wish--I wish I could leave you content here." He felt at his chin with a nervous hand, muttered, looked on her askance, pitied himself that when he went wandering he must not have the consoling thought that she was safe and happy in her childhood's home.

"I wish I had never sent you away," he said. "You would have been more content to-day. But that's the manner of the world, we must pay our way as we go, in inns and in knowledge."

She ran up with tripping feet and kissed him rapturously.

"No lowland tricks!" he cried, pleased and yet ashamed at a display unusual in these parts. "Fancy if some one saw you!"

"Then let them look well again," she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the a.s.sault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a c.h.i.n.k of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and dandled on his knee.

"I wish," said he again, while she neatly tied the knot upon his queue, "I wish we had a husband for you, good or--indifferent, before I go."

"Not indifferent, father," she laughed. "Surely the best would not be too good for your daughter! As if I wanted a husband of any kind!"

"True, true," he answered thoughtfully. "You are young yet. The best would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman's well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no less. Can you guess him?"

"The Paymaster's Boy," said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.

Her father laughed.

"Pooh!" he exclaimed. "Is that all you have of our news here that you don't know Gilian's farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield?

He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very humorous now when I think of it."

"I told him he never would," said Nan, with no note of triumph in the accuracy of her prediction. "I thought he could play-act the thing in his mind too well ever to be the thing itself."