Gilian The Dreamer Part 31

"Look at me," he cried; "look at me; am I not your true friend? I will do anything in the world for you." But he still went on torturing himself with his bramble branch, the most insensible of lovers.

She was annoyed at his want of the commonest courage or tact. "John Hielan'man! John Hielan'-man!" she said inwardly, trying a little coquetry of the downcast eyes to tempt him. For now she was desolate that she almost loved this gawky youth throbbing in sympathy with her tribulation.

"I believe you are my true friend, I believe you arc my true friend, and there is no one else," she said, blushing now with no coquetry, and if he had not been a fool and his fate against him, he might at a hand's movement or a word have had her in his arms. The word to say was sounding loud and strong within him; he took her (only, alas! in fancy) to his breast, but what was she the wiser?

"And I can do nothing?" he said pitifully. "Nothing!" said she; "you can do everything." "Show me how, then," he said eagerly. She had been gazing away from him with her eyes on Maam, that looked so sombre a home, and was certainly now so cruel a home, and she turned then, almost weeping, her breath rising and falling, audible to his ear, the sweetest of sounds.

"Will you take me away from here?" she asked in entreaty. "I must go away from here."

"I will take you anywhere you wish," said he.

He held out his hands in a gesture of sudden offering, and she felt a happiness as one who comes upon a familiar and kind face all unexpectedly in a strange country. Her face betrayed her gladness.

"I will take you, and who would be better pleased?" said Gilian.

She explained her intention briefly. She must leave Maam at the latest to-morrow night without being observed, and he must show her the way to Elasaid's shealing.

"Ah! give me the right," he said, "and I will take you to the world's end." He put out his hands and nigh encircled her, but shyness sent him back to a calmer distance.

"John Hielan'man!" she repeated to herself, annoyed at this tardiness, but she outwardly showed no knowledge of it.

They planned what only half in fun she called their elopement. He was to come across to Maam in the early morning.

CHAPTER XXIX--THE ELOPEMENT

He had ideas of his own as to how this enterprise should be conducted, but on Nan's advice he had gone about it in the fashion of Marget Maclean's novels, even to the ladder. It was not a rope ladder, but a common one of wood that Black Duncan was accustomed to use for ascent to his sleep in the loft.

Gilian, apprised by Nan of its exact situation, crept breathlessly into the barn, left his lantern at the door, and felt around with searching fingers. The place was all silent but for the seaman's snores as he slept the sleep of a landsman upon his coa.r.s.e pallet. Outside a c.o.c.k crew; its sudden alarm brought the sweat to Gilian's brow; he clutched with blind instinct, found what he wanted, turned and hastened from the dusty barn.

The house of Maam was jet-black among its trees, no light peeped even in Nan's room.

Carefully he put the ladder against the wall beneath her window, and as he did so he fancied he heard a movement above. He stood with his hand on one of the rungs, dubious, hesitating. For the first time a sense of the risks of the adventure swept into that mind of his, always the monopoly of imagination and the actor. He was ashamed to find himself half-wishing she might not come. He tried to think it was all a dream, and he pinched his arm to try and waken himself. But the blank black walls of Maam confronted him; the river was crying in its reeds; it was a real adventure that must be gone on with.

He lit the lantern. Through the open door of it as he did so the flood of light revealed his face anxious and haggard, his eyes uncertain. He closed the lantern and looked around.

Through the myriad holes that pierced the tin, pin-points of fire lanced the night, streaming in all directions, throwing the front of the house at once into cold relief with a rasping, harled, lime surface. The bushes were big ma.s.ses of shade; the trees, a little more remote, seemed to watch him with an irony that made him half ashamed. What an appalling night! Over him came the sentiments of the robber, the marauder, the murderer. As he held the lantern on his finger a faint wind swung it, and its lances of light danced rhythmic through the gloom. He put it under his plaid, and prepared to give the signal whistle. For the life of him he could not give it utterance; his lips seemed to have frozen, not with fear, for he was calm in that way, but with some commingling of emotions where fear was not at all. When he gave breath to his hesitating lips, it went through inaudible.

What he might have done then may only be guessed, for the opening of the window overhead brought an end to his hesitation.

"Is it you?" said Nan's voice, just a little revealing her anxiety in its whisper. He could not see her now that his lantern was concealed, but he looked up and fancied her eyes were shining more lambent than his own lantern that smelled unpleasantly.

He wet his lips with his tongue. "The ladder is ready; it's up against your window, don't you see it?" he said, also whispering, but astounded at the volume of his voice.

"Tuts!" she exclaimed impatiently, "why don't you show a light? How can I see it without a light?"

"Dare I?" he asked, astonished.

"Dare! dare! Oh dear!" she repeated. "Am I to do the daring and break my neck perhaps?"

Out flashed the lantern from beneath his plaid and he held it up to the window. Nan leant over and all his hesitation fled. He had never seen her more alluring. Her hair had become somehow unfastened, and, without untidiness, there lay a lock across her brow; all her blood was in her face, her eyes might indeed have been the flames he had fancied, for to the appeal of the lantern they flashed back from great and rolling depths of luminousness. Her lips seemed to have gathered up in sleep the wealth of a day of kissing. A screen of tartan that she had placed about her shoulders had slipped aside in her movement at the window and showed her neck, ivory pale and pulsing.

"Come along, come along!" he cried in an eager whisper, and he put up his arms, lantern and all, as if she were to jump. Something in his first look made her pause.

"Do you really want to go?" he asked, and she was drawing her screen by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still no sound in the night, except that the c.o.c.k crew at intervals over in the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of bog-myrtle drugged the air.

"Do I really want?" she repeated. "Mercy! what a question. It seems to me that yesterday would have been the best time to ask it. Are you rueing your bargain?" She looked at him with great dissatisfaction as he stood at the foot of the ladder, by no means a handsome cavalier, as he carried his plaid clumsily. He was made all the more eager by her coldness.

"Come, come!" he cried; "the house will be awake before you are ready, and I cannot be keeping this lantern lighted for fear some one sees it."

"We are safe for an hour yet, if we cared to waste the time," she said composedly, "and if you're sure you want it----"

"Want you, Nan," he corrected, "That's a little more like it," she said to herself, and she dropped the customary bundle at his feet He picked it up gingerly, as if it were a church relic; that it was a possession of hers, apparel apparently, made him feel a slight intoxication. No swithering now; he would carry out the adventure if it led to the end of the world! He hugged the bundle under his arm, as if it were a woman, and felt a fictional glow from the touch of it. "Well?" said she impatiently, for he was no longer looking at her, no longer, indeed, conceding her so little as the light of the lantern, which he had placed on the ground, so that its light was dissipated around, while none of it reached the top of the ladder.

"Well," she repeated sharply, for he had not answered.

He looked up with a start. "Are you not coming?" he said, with a tone to suggest that he was waiting impatiently.

She had the window wide open now; she leaned out on her arms ready to descend; the last rung of the ladder was a foot lower than the sill of the window; she looked in perplexity at her cavalier, for it was impossible to put much of grace into an emergence and a descent like this.

"I am just coming," she said, but still she made no other move, and he held up the lantern for her to sec the better.

"Well, be careful!" he advised, and he thought how delightful it was to have the right to say so much.

"O Gilian!" she said helplessly, "you are far from gleg."

He gazed ludicrously uncomprehending at her, and in his sense of almost conjugal right to the girl failed to realise her delicacy.

"Go round to the barn and make sure that Duncan is not moving; he's the only one I fear," she said. "Leave the lantern."

He did as he was told; he put the lantern on the ground; he went round again to the barn, put his head in, and satisfied himself that his seaman was still musical aloft. Then he hurried back. He found the lantern swinging on Nan's finger, and her composed upon the ground, to which she had made a speedy descent whenever he had disappeared.

"Oh! I wanted to help you," said he.

"Did you?" said she, looking for a sign of the humorist, but he was as solemn as a sermon.

They might have been extremely sedate in Miss Simpson's school in Edinburgh, but at that moment Miss Nan would have forgiven some apparent appreciation of her cleverness in getting him out of the way while she came feet first through a window. They stood for a moment in expectancy, as if something was going to happen, she still holding the lantern, trembling a little, as it might be with the cold, he with her bundle under his arm pressed affectionately.

"And--and--do we just go on?" she asked suggestively.

"The quicker the better," said he, but he made no movement to depart, for his mind was in the house of Maam, and he felt the father's sorrow and alarm at an empty bed, a daughter gone.

She put out an arm, flushing in the dark as she did so, as if to place it on his neck, but drew back and put the lantern fast behind her, lest her fervour had been noticed by the ironic and jealous night. He, she saw, could not notice; the thing was not in his mind.

"In the stories they just move off, then?" said she shyly. "There was the meeting, the meeting--no more, and they just went away?"

"And the sooner the better," said he, again leading the way at last, after taking the lantern from her, and "John Hielan'man, John Hielan'man!" she cried vexatiously within.