Gilian The Dreamer Part 36

"It is such a foolish thing," said he weakly, "a thing of interest only to the very young."

"And am I so old, my dear," she said, "not to have been young once? Do you think this little wee wife with her hair getting grey--not so grey either, though--was always in old maid dolours in her garret thinking of hoasts and headaches and cures for them, and her brothers' slippers and her own rheumatics on rainy days? Oh, my dear, my dear! you used to understand me as if it had been through gla.s.s--ay, from the first day you saw me, and my brother's sword must be sending me to my weeping; can you not understand me now? I am old, and the lowe of youth is down in its ember, but once I was as young--as young--as--as--as the girl you are thinking of."

He drew back, overwhelmed with confusion, but she found the grip of his coat again and followed up her triumph.

"Did you think I could not guess so little as that, my dear? Oh, Gilian, sometimes I'll be sitting in there all my lone greeting my eyes out over darning hose, and minding of what I have been and what I have seen, and the days that will never come any more. The two upstairs will be minding only to envy and to blame--me, I must be weeping as much for my sin as for my sorrow. Do I look so terrible old, Gilian, that you cannot think of me as not so bad-looking either, with a bonny eye, they said, and a jimp waist, and a foot like the honey-bee? It was only yesterday; ah, it was a hundred years ago! I was the sisterly slave. No dancing for me. No romping for Mary at hairst or Hogmanay. My father glooming and binding me motherless to my household tasks, so that Love went by without seeing me. My companions, and she the dearest of them all, enjoying life to the full, and me looking out at this melancholy window from year to year, and seeing the traffic of youth and all the rest of it go by."

She released his lapel and relapsed, all tears, upon her chair.

"Auntie, Auntie!" he cried, "do not let my poor affairs be vexing you."

He put, for the first time in his life, an arm about her waist, bending over her, with all forgotten for the moment save that she had longed for love and seemingly found it not. At the touch of his arm she trembled like a maiden in her teens and forced a smile upon her face. "Let me go," she said, and yet she gloried in that contact as she sat in the chair and he bent over her.

"And was there no one came the way?" he asked. "Was I not worth it, do you think?" she replied, yet smiling in her tears. "Oh, Gilian, not this old woman, mind you, but the woman I was. And yet--and yet, it is true, no one came; or if they came, they never came that I wanted." "And he?"

said Gilian.

She paused and sighed, her thin little hands, so white for all their toil in that hard barracks, playing upon her lap. "He never had the chance. My father's parlour had no welcome, a soldier's household left no vacant hours for an only daughter's gallivanting. I had to be content to look at him--the one I mean--from the window, see him in the church or pa.s.sing up and down the street. They had up Dr. Brash at me--I mind his horn specs, and him looking at my tongue and ordering a phlebotomy.

What I wanted was the open air, a chance of youth, and a dance on the green. Instead of that it was always 'Hof Mary!' and 'Here, Mary,' and 'What are you wasting your time for, Mary?'" She was all in a tremble, moist no more with tears, but red and troubled at her eyes. "And then--then--then he married her. If he had taken any one else it would not have seemed so hard. I think I hated her for it. It was long before I discovered they were chief, for my brothers that were out and in kept it from me for their own reasons, and they never kent my feeling. But when she was cried and married and kirked, each time it was a dagger at my heart. Amn't I the stupid old _cailleach_, my dear, to be talking of such a thing? But oh! to see them on the street together; to see him coming home on his furloughs--I am sure I could not be but unfond of her then! I mind once I wished her dead, that maybe he might--he might see something in me still. That was when Nan was born and--"

"What," cried Gilian, "and was he Nan's father? I--I did not know."

She turned upon him an old face spoiled by the memories of the moment.

"Who else would it be, my dear?" said she, as if that settled it. "And you are the first in the world I mentioned it to. He has never seen me close in the face to guess it for himself, before or since. It might have happened if I wished, after, but that was the punishment I gave myself for my unholy thought about my friend his wife."

"Ah, little Auntie, little Auntie," said he in Gaelic "Little Auntie, little Auntie!" No more than that, and yet his person was stormy with grief for her old sorrow. He put his arm about her neck now--surely never Highland lad did that before in their position, and tenderly, as if he had practised it for years, he pressed her to his breast and side.

"And is it all by now but a recollection?" said he softly.

"All by long syne," said she, dashing the tears from her face and clearing herself from that unusual embrace. "Sometimes I'll be thinking it was better as it was, for I see many wives and husbands, and the dead fire they sit at is less cheery than one made but never lighted. You mustn't be laughing at an old lady, Gilian."

"I would never be doing that, G.o.d knows," he answered solemnly.

"And I am sure you would not, my dear," she said, looking trustfully at him; "though sometimes I must be laughing at myself for such a folly.

Lads and la.s.ses have spoken to me about their courtships and their trials, and they never knew that I had anything but an old maid's notion of the thing. And that's the way with yourself, is it not, Gilian? Will you tell me now?"

Still he hung hesitating.

"Do you--are you fond of the girl?" said she and now it was he who was in the chair and she was bending over him.

"Do I not?" he cried, sudden and pa.s.sionate lest his confidence should fail. "Ay, with all my heart."

"Poor Gilian!" said she.

"Yes, poor Gilian!" he repeated bitterly, thinking on all that lay between him and the girl of his devotion. Now, if ever, was the time to tell the real object of his visit, how that those old surmisers upstairs were wider of the mark than the innkeeper, and that the person for whom the hunt was up through half the shire was sequestered in the lonely shealing hut on the moor of Karnes.

"I am sorry," she went on, and there was no mistake about it, for her grief was in her face. "I am sorry, but you must forget, my dear. It is easy--sometimes--to forget, Gilian; you must be just throng with work and duty, and by-and-by you'll maybe wonder at yourself having been in the notion of Nan Gordon's daughter, made like her mother (and G.o.d bless her!) for the vexation of youth, but never for sober satisfaction. I am wae for you, Gilian, and I cannot help you, though I would tramp from here to Carlisle in my bauchles if it would bring her to you."

"You maybe would not need to go so far," he answered abruptly. "There is a hut behind the hill there, and neither press nor fire nor candle nor companion in it, and Nan--Miss Nan, is waiting there for me to go back to her, and here I'm wasting precious hours. Do you not see that I'm burning like a fire?"

"And you have the girl in the moor?" she cried incredulously.

"That I have!" he answered, struck by the absolute possession her sentence suggested. "I have her there. I took her there. I took her from her father's home. She came willingly, and there she is, for me!"

He held out his arms with a gesture indescribable, elate, nervous with his pa.s.sion. "Auntie, think of it: you mind her eyes and her hair, yon turn of the neck, and her song? They're mine, I'm telling you."

"I mind them in her mother," said the little lady, stunned by this intelligence. "I mind them in her mother, and they were not at all, in her, for those who thought they were for them. This--this is a terrible thing, Gilian," she said piteously.

He rose, and "What could I do?" he asked. "I loved her, and was I to look at her father selling her to another one who never had her heart?"

"Are you sure you have it yourself, Gilian?" she asked, and her face was exceedingly troubled.

"It's a thing I never asked," he confessed carelessly. "Would she be where she is without it being so?"

"Where her mother's daughter might be in any caprice of spirit I would not like to guess," said Miss Mary, dubious. "And I think, if I was the man, it would be the first thing I would be making sure about."

"What would she fly with me for if it was not for love?" he asked.

"Ask a woman that," she went on. "Only a woman, and only some kinds of women, could tell you that. For a hundred reasons good enough for herself, though not for responsibility."

He bit his lips in perplexity, feeling all at sea, the only thing clear to his mind being that Nan was alone on the moor, her morning fire sending a smoke to the sky, expectation bringing her now and then to the door to see if her amba.s.sador was in view.

For the sake of that sweet vision he was bound to put another question to Miss Mary--to ask her if the reference by her brother to Old Islay bore the import he had given it. He braced himself to it--a most unpleasant task.

"It's true," she said. "Do you mean to tell me you did not know he was the man?" "I did not. And the money?" "Oh, the money!" said Miss Mary oddly, as if now a great deal was explained to her. "Did Nan hear anything of that?"

"She knows everything--except the man's name. She was too angry to hear that."

"Except the man's name," repeated Miss Mary. "She did not know it was Young Islay." She turned as she spoke, and busied herself with a duster where there was no need for it. And when she showed him her face again, there were tears there, not for her own old trials, but for his.

"You must go back there," she said firmly, though her lips were trembling, "and you will tell Miss Nan that whatever Old Islay would do, his son would never put that affront on her. At the worst, the money was no more than a tocher with the lad; it was their start in Drimlee and Maam that are now together for the sake of an old vanity of the factors.... You must tell all that," she went on, paying no heed to the perplexity in his face. "It would be unfair to do less, my dear; it will be wiser to do all. Then you will do the other thing--if need be--what you should have done first and foremost; youll find out if the girl is in earnest about yourself or only indulging a cantrip like her mother's daughter. Ask her--ask her--oh! what need I be telling you? If you have not the words in your heart I need not be putting them in your mouth.

Run away with you now!" and she pushed him to the door like a child that had been caressed and counselled.

He was for going eagerly without a word more, but she cried him back.

For a moment she clung to his arm as if she was reluctant to part with him.

"Oh!" she cried, laughing, and yet with tears in her voice, "a bonny-like man to be asking her without having anything to offer."

He would have interrupted her, but she would not let him.

"Go your ways," she told him, "and bring her back with you if you can.

Miss Mary has something in a stocking foot, and no long need for it."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII--THE PROMISE

When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was still making-down from the Paymaster's waistcoats. It was for that he used at last to show a new suit on the town by gentle degrees, the first Sunday the waistcoat, the next Sunday the waistcoat and trousers, and finally the complete splendour. Now he felt kenspeckle, not in any suit of material clothes but in a droll sense of nakedness. He had told his love and adventure in a place where walls heard and windows peered, and a rumour out of the ordinary went on the wind into every close and soared straight to the highest tenement--even to the garret rooms. He felt that the women at the wells, very busy, as they pretended, over their boynes and stoups, would whisper about him as he pa.s.sed, without looking up from their occupation.

Down the street towards the church there was scarcely any one to be seen except the children out for the mid-day airing from Brooks's school, and old Brooks himself going over to Kate Bell's for his midday waters with a daundering step as if he had no special object, and might as readily be found making for the quay or the coffee-house. The children were noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-al and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting, yet with a sorrow in the cadence.