Gilian The Dreamer Part 7

Gilian went slowly forward, he was amazed and fascinated by this wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning, a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan that day was in a good humour, for his owners had released him at last from his weeks of tethering to the quay and this dull town and he was to depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian's history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners' tales of the sea.

A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel's ribs, the bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in benign weather moving home upon the sigh of G.o.d.

Black Duncan but wanted a good listener. He was not quite the world's traveller he would have Gilian believe; but he had voyaged in many outlandish parts and a Skyeman's memory is long and his is the isle where fancy riots. He made his simple ventures round the coast voyages terrible and unending. The bays, the water-mouths, the rocks, the bosky isles--he clothed them with delights, and made them float in the haze wherein a boy untravelled would envelop them.

"There's a story I know." said Gilian, "of a young son who went to a town where the king of Erin bides, and he found it full of music from end to end, every street humming with song."

"Oh, lad, I have been there," said the seaman, unabashed, his teeth very white in the brown of his smiling face. "You sail and sail in winds and drift in calms, and there is a place called Erin's Eye and a mountain rock behind it, and then you come upon the town of the king's daughter.

It is a town reeling with music; some people without the ears would miss it, you and Black Duncan would be jigging to the sound of it. The world, '_ille_ (and here's the sailorman who has sailed the seven seas and knows its worst and best), is a very grand place to such as understand and allow. I was born with a caul as we say; I know that I'll never drown, so that when winds crack I feel safe in the most staggering ship.

I have gone into foreign ports in the dead of night, our hail for light but answered by Sir Echo, and we would be waiting for light, with the smell of flowers and trees about us, and--"

"That would be worth sailing for," said Gilian, looking hard at the embers in the Carron stove.

"Or the beast of the wood might come roaring and bellowing to the sh.o.r.e."

"That would be very frightsome," said Gilian with a shiver. "I have made believe the hum of the bee in the heather at my ear as I lay on it in the summer was the roar of the wild beast a long way off; it was uncanny and I could make myself afraid of it, but when I liked it was the bee again and the heather was no higher than my knee."

The seaman laughed till the den rang. He poked the fire and the flame thrust out and made the boy and the man and the timbers and bunks dance and shake in the world between light and shadow. "You are the sharpest boy ever I conversed with," said he.

A run of the merriest, the sweetest, the most unconstrained laughter broke overhead like a bird's song. They looked up and found the square of blue sky broken at the hatch by a girl's head. A roguish face in a toss of brown hair, seen thus above them against the sky, seemed to Gilian the face of one of the fairies with which he had peopled the seaman's isle.

"There you go!" cried Black Duncan, noway astonished. "Did I not tell you never to come on board without halloo?"

"I cried," said the girl in a most pretty English that sounded all the sweeter beside the seaman's broken and harsh accent in a language foreign to him. "I cried 'O Duncan' twice and you never heard, so I knew you were asleep in your dingy old den." She swung herself down as she spoke and stood at the foot of the companion with the laugh renewed upon her lips, a gush of happy heart.

"Indeed, Miss Nan, and I was not sleeping at all," said Black Duncan, standing up and facing her; "if I was sleeping would there be a boy with me here listening to the stories of the times when I was scouring the oceans and not between here and the Clyde in your father's vessel?"

"Oh! a boy!" cried the girl, taken a little aback. "I did not know there was a boy."

"And a glen boy, too," said the seaman, speaking in a language wherein he knew himself more the equal of his master's daughter. "I told him of Erin O and the music in its streets, and he does not make fun of my telling like you, Miss Nan, because he understands."

The girl peered into the dark of the cabin at the face of Gilian that seemed unwontedly long and pallid in the half light, with eyes burning in sepulchral pits, repeating the flash of the embers. She was about his own age--at most no more than a month or two younger, but with a glance bold and a.s.sured that spoke of an early maturity.

"Oh! a Glen Aray boy," said she. "I never much care for them. You would be telling him some of the tales there is no word of truth in."

"The finest tales in the world are like that," said Black Duncan.

She sat on the edge of a bunk and swung a little drab jean shoe.

The glamour of Black Duncan's stories fled for Gilian before this presence like mist before a morning wind. So healthy, so ruddy, so abrupt, she was so much in the actual world that for him to be dreaming of others seemed a child's weakness.

"I was in the town with uncle," she said, "and I heard you were sailing away to-morrow, and I thought I would come and say good-bye."

She spoke as prettily in her Gaelic as in her English.

"Ah, _mo run_," said the seaman, putting out his arms as to embrace her, "am not I pleased that you should have Black Duncan in your mind so much as to come and say 'fair wind to your sail'?"

"And you'll bring me the beads next time?" she said hastily.

"That will I," said he, smiling; "but you must sing me a song now or I might forget them."

"Oh, I'll sing if----." She paused and looked doubtfully at Gilian, who was still open-mouthed at her breezy vehemence.

"Never mind the boy," said the seaman, stretching himself to enjoy the music at his ease; "if you make it 'The Rover' he will understand."

The afternoon was speeding. The sun had pa.s.sed the trees that round the Tolbooth walls and a beam from his majesty came boldly into the den by the companion. It struck a slanting pa.s.sage on the floor and revealed the figure of a girl at her ease dangling her feet upon a water anker with her hair a flood of spate-brown fallen back upon its fastening band. And the boy saw her again as it were quite differently from before, still the robust woman-child, but rich, ripe, blooded at the plump inviting lip, warm at the throbbing neck. About her hung a searching odour that overcame the common and vulgar odours of the ship, its bilge, its tar, its oak-bark tan, its herring scale, an odour he knew of woods in the wet spring weather. It made him think of short gra.s.ses and the dewdrop glittering in the wet leaf; then the sky shone blue against a tremble of airy leaf. The birch, the birch, he had it!

And having it he knew the secret of the odour. She had already the woman's trick of washing her hair in the young birch brewings.

"I will sing 'The Rover' and I will sing 'The Man with the Coat of Green,'" said she, with the generosity of one with many gifts. And she started upon her ditty. She had a voice that as yet was only in its making; it was but a promise of the future splendour, yet to Gilian, the hearer, it brought a new and potent joy. With 'The Rover' he lived in the woods, and set foot upon foreign wharves; 'The Man with the Coat of Green' had his company upon the morning adventures in the islands of fairydom. It was then, as in after years she was the woman serious, when her own songs moved her, with her dalliance and indifference gone. A tear trembled at her eyes at the trials of the folk she sang.

"You sing--you sing--you sing like the wind in the trees," said the seaman, stirred to unaccustomed pa.s.sion. The little cabin, when she was done, seemed to shrink from the limitless width of the world to the narrowness of a cell, and Gilian sat stunned. He had followed her song in a rapture she had seen and delighted in for all the apparent surrender of her emotion; she saw now the depth to which she had touched him, and was greatly pleased with this conquest of her art. Clearly he was no common Glen Aray boy, so she sang one or two more songs to show the variety of her budget, and the tears he could not restrain were her sweetest triumph. At last, "I must be going," said she. "Good-bye, Duncan, and do not be forgetting my beads." Then she dashed on deck, waiting no answer to that or to the friendly nod of parting to Gilian.

"Now isn't she a wonder?" asked the seaman, amused, astonished, proud.

"Did you ever hear singing like it?"

"I never did," said Gilian.

"Ah, she is almost as fine as a piper!" said the seaman. "She comes down here every time I am at the quay and she will be singing here till the timbers strain themselves to listen."

"I like her very much," said Gilian.

"Of course you do," the seaman cried, with a thump of his hard hand on the edge of his bunk, "and would it not be very curious indeed if you did not like her? I have heard women sing in many places--bold ones in Amsterdam, and the shy dancers of Bermuda, but never her equal, and she only a child. How she does it is the beat of me."

"I know," said Gilian, reddening a little to say so much to the seaman, but emboldened by the shadows he sat among. "The birds sing that way and the winds and the tide, because they have the feeling of it and they must. And when she sings she is 'The Rover,' or she is 'The Man with the Green Coat.'"

"Indeed, and it is very easy too when you explain," said the seaman, whether in earnest or in fun the boy could not make out "She is the strange one anyway, and they say General Turner, who's her father and the man this ship belongs to, is not knowing very well what to make of her. What is the matter with you?" For the boy's face was crimson as he looked up the quay after the girl from the deck where now they stood.

"Oh," said Gilian, "I was just wondering if that would be the family the Paymaster is not friendly with."

The seaman laughed. "That same!" said he. "And are you in the family feud too? If that is so you'll hear little of Miss Nan's songs, I'm thinking, and that is the folly of feuds. If I was you I would say nothing about the _Jean_, and the la.s.s who sang in her."

CHAPTER VIII--THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY

But Gilian was soon to hear the la.s.s again.

It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of social intercourse in each other's homes, where the winter nights, that otherwise had been long and dreary, pa.s.sed in harmless gaiety. The women would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly revealed for the shawls that must cover them. The men donned their best figured waistcoats and their newest stocks, and cursed the fashions that took them from their pipes and cards, but solaced themselves mightily with the bottle in the host's bedroom. From those friendly convocations, jealousies innumerable bred. It was not only that each other's gowns raised unchristian thoughts in the bosoms of the women, but in a community where each knew her neighbour and many were on equality, there must be selections, and rancour rose. And it was the true Highland rancour, concealing itself under a front of indifference and even politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning fiercely at the core.

A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff's servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster's house early in the forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in the Sheriff's the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive nights.

Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no invitation to the Sheriff's, and yet here was the hint of some convivial gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome to.

"What do you think it will be, John?" she asked the Paymaster, telling him what she had seen.

"Tuts," said he, "they'll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has an extra hard case at avizandum, not to be seen clearly through with a common creesh flame."