Gilian The Dreamer Part 5

"I know he'll make a noise and start me when I am thinking," said the Cornal, still troubled. "Is it not very strange, Dugald, that women must be aye bringing in useless weans off the street to make noise and annoyance for their brothers?" He poked as he spoke with his stick at Gilian's feet as he would at an animal crossing his path.

"It is a strange cantrip, Mary," said the General; "I suppose you'll be going to give him something. It is give, give all the day in this house like Sergeant Scott's cantiniers."

"Indeed and you need not complain of the giving," said Miss Mary: "there was n.o.body gave with a greater extravagance than yourself when you had it to give, and n.o.body sends more gangrels about the house than you."

"Give the boy his meat and let him go," said the Cornal roughly.

"He's not going," said Miss Mary, turning quite white and taking the pin carefully out of her shawl and as carefully putting it in again. And having done this quite unnecessary thing she slipped her hand down and warmly clasped unseen the fingers of the boy in the folds of her bombazine gown.

"Not going? I do not understand you, Mary; as you grow older you grow stupider. Does she not grow stupider, Dugald?" said the Cornal.

"She does," said the General. "I think she does it to torment us, just."

He was tired by this discussion; he turned and walked to the parlour.

Miss Mary mustered all her courage, and speaking with great rapidity explained the situation. The boy was the Ladyfield boy; the Paymaster was going to keep him hereafter.

The Cornal stood listening to the story as one in a trance. There was a little silence when she had done, and he broke it with a harsh laugh.

"Ah! and what is he going to make of this one?" he asked.

"That's to be seen," said Miss Mary; "he spoke of the army."

"Fancy that now!" said the Cornal with contempt. "Let me see him," he added suddenly.

"Let me see the seeds of soldiery." He put out a hand and--not roughly but still with more force than Gilian relished--drew him from the protection of the gown and turned his face to the window. He put his hand under the boy's chin; Gilian in the touch felt an abhorrence of the hard, clammy fingers that had made dead men, but his eyes never quailed as he looked up in the scarred face. He saw a mask; there was no getting to the secrets behind that purple visage. Experience and trial, emotions and pa.s.sions had set lines there wholly new to him, and his fancy refused to go further than just this one thought of the fingers that had made dead men.

The Cornal looked him deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt.

"Man! Jock's the daft recruiter," he said coa.r.s.ely with an oath. "What's this but a clerk? There's not the spirit in the boy to make a drummer of him. There's no stuff for sogering here."

Miss Mary drew Gilian to her again and stiffened her lips. "You have nothing to do with it, Colin; it's John's house and if he wants to keep the boy he'll do it. And I'm sure if you but took the trouble to think that he is a poor orphan with no kith nor kin in the world, you would be the first to take him in at the door."

The Cornal's face visibly relaxed its sternness. He looked again more closely at the boy.

"Come away into our parlour here, and the General and I will have a crack with you," said he, leading the way.

Miss Mary gave the boy's hand a gentle squeeze, and softly pushed him in after her brother, shut the door behind them, and turned and went down to the kitchen.

CHAPTER VI--COURT-MARTIAL

Gilian was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of the room where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with scrupulous care in the very centre of the table; his brother lifted two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the bottle, fastidious to a hair's breadth as if he had been laying out columns of troops. It was the formula of the afternoon; sometimes they never put a lip to the gla.s.s, but it was always necessary that the bottle should be in the party. For a s.p.a.ce that seemed terribly long to the boy they said no word but looked at him. The eyes of the Cornal seemed to pierce him through; the General in a while seemed to forget his presence, turning upon him a flat, vacant eye. Gilian leaned upon his other foot and was on the verge of crying at his situation. The day had been far too crowded with strangers and new experience for his comfort; he felt himself cruelly plucked out of his own sufficient company and jarred by contact with a very complex world.

With a rude loud sound that shook the toddy ladles in the cupboard the Cornal cleared his throat.

"How old are you?" he asked, and this roused the General, who came back from his musings with a convulsive start, and repeated his brother's question.

"Twelve," said Gilian, first in Gaelic out of instinct, and hurriedly repeating it in English lest he should offend the gentlemen.

"Twelve," said the Cornal, thinking hard. "You are not very bulky for your age. Is he now, Dugald?"

"He is not very bulky for his age," said the General, after a moment's pause as if he were recalling all the boys he knew of that age, or remitting himself to the days before his teens.

"And now, between ourselves," said the Cornal, leaning over with a show of intimacy and even friendliness, "have you any notion yourself of being a soger?"

"I never thought anything about it," Gilian confessed in a low tone. "I can be anything the Captain would like me to be."

"Did you ever hear the like?" cried the Cornal, looking in amazement at his brother. "He never thought anything about it, but he can be anything he likes. Is not that a good one? Anything he likes!" And he laughed with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the sword-slash struck it open in Corunna.

"Anything he likes!" echoed the General, laughing huskily till he coughed and choked. They both sat smiling grimly with no more sound till it seemed to the boy he must be in a dream, looking at the creations of his brain. The step of a fly could have been heard in the room almost, so sunk was it in silence, but outside, as in another world, a band of children filled the street with the chant of "Pity be"--chant of the trumpeters of the Lords.

Gilian never before heard that song with which the children were used to accompany the fanfare of the scarlet-coated musicians who preceded the Lords Justiciary on their circuit twice a year; but the words came distinctly to him in by the open window where the wallflower nodded, and he joined silently in his mind the dolorous chorus and felt himself the prisoner, deserving of every pity.

"Sit ye down there," at last said the Cornal, "with my brother the General's leave." And he waved to the high-backed haffit chair Miss Mary had so sparely filled an hour ago. Then he withdrew the stopper of the bottle, poured a tiny drop of the spirits into both tumblers, and drank "The King and his Arms," a sentiment the General joined in with his hand tremulous around the gla.s.s.

"Listen to me," said the Cornal, "and here I speak, I think, for my brother the General, who has too much to be thinking about to be troubling with these little affairs. Listen to me. I fought in Corunna, in Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, and at Waterloo I led the Royals up against the yetts of h.e.l.l. Did I not, Dugald?"

"You did that," said Dugald, withdrawing himself again from a muse over the records of victory. And then he bent a l.u.s.treless eye upon his own portrait, so sombre and gallant upon the wall, with the gold of the lace and epaulettes a little tarnished.

"I make no brag of it, mind you," said the Cornal, waving his hand as if he would be excused for mentioning it. "I am but saying it to show that I ken a little of b.l.o.o.d.y wars, and the art and trade of sogering. There are gifts demanded for the same that seriatim I would enumerate. First there is natural strength and will. All other trades have their limits, when a man may tell himself, 'That's the best I can do,' and shut his book or set down the tool with no disgrace in the relinquishment.

But a soger's is a different ploy; he must stand stark against all encountering, nor cry a parley even with the lance at his throat. Oh, man! man! I had a delight in it in my time for all its trials. I carried claymore (so to name it, ours was a less handsome weapon, you'll observe), in the ranting, roving humour of a boy; I sailed and marched; it was fine to touch at foreign ports; it was sweet to hear the drums beat revally under the vines; the camp-fire, the--"

"And it would be on the edge of a wood," broke in the boy in Gaelic; "the logs would roar and hiss. The fires would be in yellow dots along the countryside, and the heather would be like a pillow so soft and springy under the arm. Round about, the soldiers would be standing, looking at the glow, their faces red and flickering, and behind would be the black dark of the wood like the inside of a pot, a wood with ghosts and eerie sounds and----"

He stammered and broke down under the astounded gaze of the Cornal and the General, who stood to their feet facing his tense and thrilled small figure. A wave of shame-heat swept over him at his own boldness.

Outside, the children's voices were fading in the distance as they turned the corner of the church singing "Pity be."

"Pity be on poor prisoners, pity be on them: Pity be on poor prisoners, if they come back again,"

they sang; the air softened into a fairy lullaby heard by an ear at eve against the gra.s.sy hillock, full of charm, instinct with dream, and the sentiment of it was as much the boy's within as the performers' without.

"This is the kind of play-actor John would make a soldier of," said the Cornal, turning almost piteously to his brother. "It beats all! Where did you learn all that?" he demanded harshly, scowling at the youth and sitting down again.

"He has the picture of it very true, now, has he not?" said the General.

"I mind of many camps just like that, with the cork-trees behind and old Sir George ramping and cursing in his tent because the pickets hailed, and the corncrake would be rasping, rasping, a cannon-carriage badly oiled, among the gra.s.s."

Gilian sank into the chair again, his face in shadow.

"Discipline and reverence for your elders and superiors are the first lesson you would need, my boy," said the Cornal, taking a tiny drop of the spirits again and touching the gla.s.s of his brother, who had done likewise. "Discipline and reverence; discipline and reverence. I was once c.o.c.ky and putting in my tongue like you where something of sense would have made me keep it between my teeth. Once in Spain, an ensign, I found myself in a wine-shop or change-house, drinking as I should never have been doing if I had as muckle sense as a clabbie-doo, with a dragoon major old enough to be my father. He was a pock-pudding Englishman, a great hash of a man with the chest of him slipped down below his belt, and what was he but bragging about the rich people he came of, and the rich soil they flourished on, its apple-orchards and honey-flowers and its gra.s.s knee-deep in June. 'Do you know,' said I, 'I would not give a yard's breadth of the shire of Argyll anywhere north of Knapdale at its rockiest for all your lush straths, and if it comes to antique pedigrees here am I, Clan Diarmid, with my tree going down to Donacha Dhu of Lochow.' That was insolence, ill-considered, unnecessary, for this major of dragoons, as I tell you, might be my father and I was but a raw ensign."

"I'll warrant you were home-sick when you said it," said the General.

"Was I not?" cried the brother. "'Twas that urged me on. For one of my company, just a minute before, had been singing Donacha Ban's song of 'Ben Dorain,' and no prospect in the world seemed so alluring to me then as a swath of the land I came from."

"I know 'Ben Dorain,'" said Gilian timidly, "and I think I could tell just the way you felt when you heard the man singing it in a foreign place."