Gilian The Dreamer Part 39

He went awkwardly off the customary track so that he might reach the shealing the quicker by a short cut that led through boggy gra.s.s. He stumbled in hags and tripped on ancient heather-tufts; the birds wheeled and mocked over him, something in their note most melancholy and menacing to his ear.

The loch with the islet was muttering in its sleep, and woke with the shriek of a thousand frightened birds when this phantom stumbled on its solitude. The tiny island even in the dusk rose black like a hea.r.s.e plume in the water. At his feet he felt upon a stone the tinkle of broken gla.s.s, and he stooped to feel. His finger came upon the portions of the broken cup, and he remembered, with shame for his own share in the scene, how Nan had punished his awkwardness by casting from her the vessel of which this was the fragment She had had her lips to this, her fingers had touched it; it was a gem to put in his pocket, and he put it there. He searched round again as he repeated in his mind all the incidents of that first morning in the moor, and a little farther on he came upon the ashes of their dead fire. Poor dead fire, grey old ashes, flame quenched, warmth departed, loneliness come--the reflections made him shiver.

As he stood there in what was now the dark night, he might have been a phantom mourning for the unrecoverable, the ghost of old revelries, the shade of pleasant bygone hearths and love the ancient.

He shook himself into the present world, and left behind the ashes of their fire and made for the shealing hut, all the way solacing himself with fancy. The girl was his, but he never let his mind linger on the numerous difficulties that lay inevitably between the present hour and his possession of her. He projected himself into the future with a blank unexplained behind, and saw them at unextinguishable hearths, love accompanying them through generations. Through the heather he brushed eagerly now, his eyes intent upon the dim summits of the brae from which again he should see the light of the shealing if it was there. Loch Little Fox, and Great Fox, and all the black and sobbing pools among the heather he pa.s.sed on the light feet of love, and when he came to the brae top and still found no beacon there, he was exceedingly dashed.

"I hope, I hope there is nothing wrong," he said aloud. And he hurried the faster.

The sky was full of clouds, all but a patch star-sown over Ben Bhreac, and all through the hollows and hags ran a wail of rain-wind most mournful. The birds that had been crying over the pools departed, and there was no sound of animal life. The wind moaned and the pools sobbed.

About the black edifice in which he thought was all he prized most dear on earth, blackness hung like a terror. Breathless he stood at the door.

It was wide open! It was wide open! It was wide open to the night wind!

As if a hand of ice had clutched him at the heart he shook and staggered back.

"G.o.d of Grace!" he cried in his mother tongue, then "Nan! Nan!" he called to the dark within. There was no answer, and a bird flew out above his head.

He cried no more there, but out he ran into the vacant moor and loudly he called to the night, "Nan! Nan!" till his voice seemed to himself some terrific chant of long-dead peoples come first to this strange land and crying for each other in the wilderness where they were lost.

"Nan! Nan!" he cried, sometimes entreating, sometimes peremptory, as though she might be hiding in the dark in some childish caprice. "Nan!

Nan!" he called plaintively, and he called sharply too and loudly, the possessor. The sides of Ben Bhreac woke to answer "Anan," as people reply in dreams; and the stars of heaven in their little garden over the hill had no interest whatever in his crying; they hung out cool and imperturbable, and the wind wailed, but not for his anxieties, on the reeds of Little Fox.

Then he pressed his hand upon his heart to still its uproar and strained his ears to listen. No sound of a girl's voice, no foot upon the heather. He could scarcely believe his senses. In his mind, as he approached the house she had seemed as essential a part of it as the sky was portion of the universe, and here she was gone!

"After all, she may be in the house asleep," he thought, cheating himself into a moment's comfort; and back he went again. He listened at the threshold for a breath: no sound came to him; the fire was all out, the air was the air of a dungeon. "Nan!" he called timidly. He got no reply.

Timidly now he stepped into that chamber that had been sacred to him before--the holy of holies--and fumbled with a steel. The sparks showed him his hands trembling, but at first he did not dare to look behind him for fears intangible. The dried heather stems caught the flame of the tinder; there was but a handful of them; they flared up in a moment's red glare on the interior, then died out crackling. It was enough to show him the place was empty. It showed him, too, his lantern, the poor companion of his adventure, lying on the floor as if it had been tumbled there in some hasty escape; he picked it up and lit it, the gleam lighting a ghastly face. And then he went out again, not knowing why or what he might do there, but bound to be moving and away from that empty sh.e.l.l where had been his kernel untasted. The wind had risen and was rising higher still. On Little Fox side he stood, a ludicrous object, with the pin-points of light p.r.i.c.king the darkness. He was there the dreamer and the hesitator, his eyes vacant. He wore a short ill-fitting jacket; his vest had come unb.u.t.toned in the haste of his clamber up the moor; his bonnet was drawn low upon his brow. As he cherished the lantern from the wind with his back bent he was no figure of the ideal lover, but yet some tragedy was in the look of him--some great and moving fate that might have made the night pity him. Down again to their little knowe he went, and cast himself upon it and surrendered to emotion. It was for him the grave of love, the new-reared mound of his affection. Even yet he could see where she had pressed down the heather as she reclined. Looking at the heather he remembered the white spray of his affection that she had said would be the sign of his fate. He went back quickly to the hut, the wind still puffing at his foolish lantern, and he found the heather gone. It comforted him exceedingly. She had gone, why or where he could not guess, but she had taken with her the token of his love and thereby left him her capitulation. His heather was at her heart!

Wearied utterly, as much by the stress of his pa.s.sions as by the ardours of the day, he took possession of her couch and slept till morning.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI--CONCLUSION

Fair day in the town, and cattle roved about the street, bellowing, the red and s.h.a.ggy fellows of the moors, mourning in Gaelic accent and with mild large eyes pondering on the mysteries of change. Behind them went the children, beating them lightly on the flanks with hazel wands, imagining themselves travellers over the markets of the world, and others, the older ones, the bolder ones, went from shop to shop for farings, eating, as they went, the parley-man and carvey-cake of the Fair day. Farmers and shepherds gossiped and bargained on the footpaths or on the gra.s.s before the New Inns; the Abercrombie clattered with convivial gla.s.s and sometimes rose the chorus to a noisy ditty of Lorn.

Old Brooks, with his academy shut for holiday, stood at the Church corner with a pocket full of halfpence for his bairns, and a little silver in his vest for the naughty ones he had thrashed with the ferule and grieved for. "To be good and clever is to be lucky enough," he said; "I must be kind to my poor dunces." Some of them, he saw, went with his gift straight to Marget Maclean's. "Ah," he said, smiling to himself, "they're after the novelles! I wish Virgil was so much the favourite, or even the Grammarian."

All in the pleasant sunshine the people walked abroad on the plain-stones; a piper of the company of Boboon the wanderer, with but two drones to his instrument, played the old rant of the clan as Duke George went past on a thoroughbred horse.

"Do you hear yon?" asked the Paymaster, opening the parlour window to let in that mountain strain his brother loved so truly.

The Cornal c.o.c.ked an ear, drew down s.h.a.ggy brows on his attention, and studied, musingly, the tune that hummed from the reeds below.

"'Baile Inneraora'!" said he. "I wish it was 'Bundle and Go.' That's the tune now for Colin Campbell, for old Colin Campbell, for poor Colin Campbell who once was young and wealthy. I've seen the day that rant would set something stirring here "--and he struck a bony hand upon his breast "Now there's not a move"--and he searched still with fingers above his heart. "Not a move! There's only a clod inside where once there was a bird."

He stood with his head a little to the side, listening to the piper till the tune died, half accomplished, at a tavern door. Then the children and the bellowing kine had the world to themselves again. The sound of carriage wheels came from the Cross, and of the children calling loud for bridal bowl-money.

"What's that?" asked the Cornal, waking from his reverie; and his brother put his head out at the window. He drew back at once with his face exceeding crimson.

"What is't?" said the Cornal, seeing his hesitation.

"A honeymoon pair," said the brother, and fumbled noisily with the newspaper he had in his hand.

"Poor creatures! And who is it? Though I never get over the door you'll tell me nothing."

The Paymaster answered shortly. "It's the pair from Maam," said he, and back to his paper again.

Up to his brow the Cornal put a trembling hand and seemed amazed and startled. Then he recollected, and a sad smile came to his visage.

"Not a clod altogether yet!" said he, half to himself and half to his brother. "I felt the flutter of a wing. But it's not your grief or mine this time, Jock; it's your poor recruit's."

"He's down in Miss Mary's room, and that's the place for the like of him."

"Is it?" said the Cornal. "Dugald understood him best of any of us; he saw this coming, and I mind that he grieved for the fellow."

"He's grieving plenty for himself, and let him!" said the Paymaster, setting aside his journal. "Look what he dropped from his pocket this morning. Peggy thought it was mine and she took it to me. Mine! Fancy that! I'm jalousing she was making a joke of me." He produced, as he spoke, a sc.r.a.p of paper with some verses on it and handed it to his brother.

The Cornal held the doc.u.ment far from his failing eyes and perused the writing. It was the first of those heart-wrung fancies that went to the making of the volume that lies before me as I write--the familiar lament for the lost "Maid of the Moor" that shepherds still are singing on his native hills.

"A ballant!" said he, wondering, and with some contempt.

"That's just what it is," said his brother. "There was never the like broke out in this family before, I'm glad to say."

The Cornal screwed his lips firmly. "It's what I would call going altogether too far," he said. "I'm feared your recruit will affront us again. A song, now! did you ever know the like of it? I'll not put up with it! Did you say he was down with Miss Mary?"

"I saw her laying the corner of the table," said the Paymaster, "and I'll warrant it was not to feed herself at this time of day."

The Cornal looked again at the verses, clearing his eyes with his hand, as if he might happily be mistaken. But no, there were the foolish lines, and some sentiments most unmanly frank of love and idleness among the moor and heather. He growled; he frowned below his s.h.a.ggy brows: "Come down this instant and put an end to it," said he.

"He's with Mary," his brother reminded him, hesitating.

"I don't care a curse if he was with the Duke," said the Cornal. "I'll end this carry-on in an honest and industrious family."

He led the way downstairs, the Paymaster following softly, both in their slippers. Noiselessly they pushed open the door of Miss Mary's room and gazed within. She and her darling were looking over the window at the tumultuous crowd of children scrambling for Young Islay's bowl-money scattered by Black Duncan in the golden syver sand. Miss Mary in that position could not but have her arm about his waist, and her hand unconsciously caressed the rough home-spun of his jacket. The brothers, un.o.bserved, stood silent in the doorway.

"That's the end of it!" said Gilian bitterly, as he came wholly into the room. His face, shone on by the sun that struck above the tall lands opposite from fiery clouds, was white to the lips. Miss Mary looked up into his eyes, mourning in her very inmost for his torture.

"I would say 'fair wind to her,' my dear, and a good riddance," said she, and yet without conviction in her tone.

"I will say 'fair wind' readily," he answered, "but I cannot be forgetting. I know she likes--she loves me still."

Miss Mary showed her pity in her face, but nothing at all had she to say.

"You are not doubting it, are you?" he cried eagerly; and, still unnoticed in the doorway, the Paymaster grimaced his contempt, but his brother, touched by some influence inexplicable, put the poem in his pocket and delayed the entry.

"Are you doubting?" again cried the lad, determined on his answer but dreading a denial.

"It is not your bowl-money the bairns are gathering at the Cross," said Miss Mary simply.

"True," he acknowledged; "but she went because she must. She loves me still, I'm telling you; she has my heather at her heart!"