Gilian The Dreamer Part 26

"Chief!" repeated Gilian. "You're ahead of me even in seeing the lady."

"Oh well, that's all right," said Young Islay, seemingly relieved. "Look here; I'm gone, that's the long and the short of it! I'm seeing a week or two of hard work before me convincing her ladyship that a young ensign in a marching regiment is maybe worth her smiling on."

Gilian turned cold with apprehension. This, indeed, was a revelation of love-making in garrison fashion.

"You don't know the girl at all," he said.

"So much the better," said Young Islay; "that means that she does not know me, and that's all the better start for me, perhaps. It's a great advantage, for I've noticed that they're all the most interested--the s.e.x of them--in a novelty. I have a better chance than the best man in these parts, that has been under her eye all the time I was away. I'll have stiff work, perhaps, but I want her, and between ourselves, and not to make a brag of it, I'll have her. Youll not breathe that," he added, turning in apprehension, stopping opposite Gilian and putting his hand on his coat lapel. "I am wrong to mention it at all even to you, but I must out with what I feel to somebody. The thing is dirling in my blood. Listen, do you hear that?" He threw out his chest again, held his breath, and Gilian could almost swear he heard his heart throb with feeling.

"Does she want you? That's the question, I suppose," said Gilian weakly.

"That is not the question at all, it's do I want her? There must be a beginning somewhere. Look at me; I'm strong, young, not very ugly (at least they tell me), I'm the grandson of Long Islay, who had a name for gallantry; the girl has no lover--Has she?" he asked eagerly, suddenly dropping his confidence.

"Not that I'm aware of," said Gilian.

"Well, there you are! What more is to be said? In these things one has but to wish and win--at least that's been my training and my conviction.

Here she's lonely--I could see it in her; the company of her father is not likely to be long for her, and her Uncle Jamie is not what you would call a cheerful spark. Upon my soul, I believe I could get her if I was a hunchback.... Mind, I'm not lightlying the lady; I could not do that in this mood, but I'm fair taken with her; she beats all ever I saw. You know the feeling? No, you don't; you're too throng at book notions. G.o.d!

G.o.d! G.o.d! I'm all ashake!"

He looked at Gilian, trying in the dark to make out how he was taking this, to make sure he was not laughing at him. Gilian, on the contrary, was feeling very solemn. He felt that this was a dangerously effective mood for a lover, and he knew the lad before him would always bring it to actual wooing if it got that length. He had no answer, and Young Islay again believed him the abstracted dreamer.

"I have this advantage," he went on, unable to resist. "She likes soldiers; she said as much; it was in her mother and in her; she likes action, she likes spirit. She has them herself in faith! she almost boxed my ears when--when--but I could swear she was rather tickled at my impudence."

"Your impudence!" repeated Gilian, "were you in that mood?"

"Oh, well, you know--I had the boldness to----

"To what?" said Gilian; apprehending some disaster.

"Just a trifle," said Young Islay, shrewdly affecting indifference. "A soldier's compliment; we are too ready with them in barrack-yards, you know." And he sighed as he remembered the red ripe lips, the warm breath on his face, and the tingling influence of the skin he touched under the kerchief.

They walked on in silence again for a while. The night grew dark with gathering clouds. Lights far out at sea showed the trailing fishers; a flaring torch told of a trawler's evening fortune made already. And soon they were at the Duke's lodge and Gilian's way up Glen Aray lay before him. He was pausing to say good-night, confused, troubled by what he had heard, feeling he must confess his own regard for the girl and not let this comparative stranger so buoyantly outdo him in admiration.

"Now," said he, hesitating, "what would you think I was in Glen Shira myself for?"

"Eh?" said Young Islay, scarcely hearing, and he hummed the refrain of the lady's song.

"In Glen Shira; what was I doing there?" repeated Gilian. He wanted no answer. "It was on the odd chance that I might see Miss Nan. We are not altogether without some taste in these parts, though wanting the advantage of travel and garrison gallantry. I was in the garden when you were inside. I heard her singing, and I think I got closer on herself and her song than you did."

"My dear Gilian," said Young Islay, "I once fought you for less than that." He laughed as he said it. "If you mean," he went on, "that you are in love with Miss Nan, that's nothing to wonder at, the miracle would be for you to be indifferent. We're in the same hunt, are we then?

Well, luck to the winner! I can say no fairer than that. Only you'll have to look sharp, my boy, for I'm not going to lose any time, I a.s.sure you. If you're going to do all your courtship of yon lady from outside her window, you'll not make much progress, I'm thinking. Good-night; good-night!" He went off laughing, and when he had gone away a few yards Gilian, walking slowly homewards, heard him break whistling into the air that Nan had sung in the parlour of Maam.

CHAPTER XXVI--AGAIN IN THE GARDEN

Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone.

Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay's corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over the bridge whence she must sometime come. Years after he would stop again upon the blue slab and recall with a pensive pleasure those old hours of expectation.

For days he loitered in vain, the wonder of the Inns and its frequenters. Nan never appeared. To her father a letter had come; the Duke had come up on the back of it; there had been long discourse and a dram of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his Grace's cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower on Nan as he pa.s.sed into the house behind her father, and come out anon smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her father would have her constant in his sight, though it was only, as it seemed, to pleasure an averted eye.

By-and-by Gilian turned his lucky flint one morning in a fortunate inspiration, and had no sooner done so than he remembered a very plausible excuse for going to a farm at the very head of Glen Shira. He started forth with the certainty, somehow, that he should meet the lady at last.

He had transacted his business and was on his way to the foot of the glen when he came upon her at Boshang Gate. Her back was to him; she was looking out to sea, leaning upon the bars as if she were a weary prisoner.

She turned at the sound of his footstep, a stranger utterly to his eyes and imagination, but not to his instinct, her hair bound, her apparel mature and decorous, her demeanour womanly. And he had been looking all the while for a little girl grown tall, with no external difference but that!

She took an impulsive step towards him as he hesitated with his hand dubious between his side and his bonnet, a pleasant, even an eager smile upon her face.

"You are quite sure you are you?" she said, holding out her hand before he had time to say a word. "For I was standing there thinking of you, a little white-faced fellow in a kilt, and here comes your elderly wraith at my back like one of Black Duncan's ghosts!"

"I would be the more certain it was myself," he answered, "if you had not been so different from what I expected."

"Oh! then you had not forgotten me altogether?" she said, waiting her answer, a mere beginner in coquetry emboldened to practice by the slightly rustic awkwardness of the lad.

"Not--not altogether," said he, unhappily accepting the common locution of the town, that means always more than it says.

A spark of humour flashed to merriment in her eyes and died to a demure ember again before he noticed it. "Here's John Hielan'man," she said to herself, and she recalled, not to Gilian's credit in the comparison, the effrontery of Young Islay.

The situation was a little awkward, for he held her hand too long, taking all the pleasure he could from a sudden conviction that in all the times he had seen Glen Shira it had never seemed fully furnished and habitable till now. This creature, so much the mistress of herself, and dainty and cheerful, made up for all its solitude; she was the one thing (he felt) wanting to make complete the landscape.

Her blush and a feeble effort to disengage her hand brought him to himself.

"I am pleased to see you back," said he shyly, as he released her. "I had not forgotten--oh no, I had not forgotten you. It would be easy to convince you of that, I think, but in all my recollection of Miss Nan I had more of the girl in the den of the _Jean_ in my mind than the Edinburgh lady."

"You'll be meaning that I am old and--and pretty no longer," said she.

"Upon my word, you are honestly outspoken in these parts nowadays." She pouted, with lines of annoyance upon her brow, which seriously disturbed him, and so obviously that she was compelled to laugh.

Not a word could he find to say to raillery which was quite new to him, and so for the sake of both of them as they stood at the gate Miss Nan had to ply an odd one-sided conversation till he found himself at his ease. By-and-by his shyness forsook him.

The sun was declining; the odours of the traffic of peace blew from the land; one large and ruddy star lit over Strone. The fishers raised their sails, and as their prows beat the sea they chanted the choruses of the wave.

A recollection of all this having happened before seized them together; she looked at him with a smile upon her lips, and he was master of her thought before she had expressed it.

"I know exactly what you are thinking of," he said.

"It was the odd thing about you that you often did," she replied. "It's a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan'man," she thought.

"You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke's garden," he said. "It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I'm as old--as old as the hills." He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with bra.s.s.

"As old as the hills," he went on, eager to display himself, and also to show he appreciated her advantages. "Do you know I begin to find them irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body, like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the glens."

She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to some women makes a strange appeal.

"One sees much among strangers," she confessed. "I thought you had been out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked of the army for you?"

"The army," he said, wincing imperceptibly. "Oh! that was the Paymaster's old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it was?" He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.