"I thought," he muttered, brokenly, "I thought I would never see red-coat again." Then he straightened his shoulders anew, and flexed the sinews of his knees, and pressed the palsied hand against the breeches' seam. The exertion brought a cough to his throat, a choking resistless cough of age and clogging humours. It was Time's mocking reminder that the morning parade was over for ever, and now the soldier must be at ease. He gasped and spluttered, his figure lost its tenseness, and from the fit of coughing he came back again an old and feeble man. He looked at his hand trembling against his waist, at his feet in their large and clumsy slippers; he looked at the picture of himself upon the wall, then quitted the room with something like a sob upon his lip.

"Man! he's in a droll key about it!" said the Paymaster, breaking the silence. "What in all the world is his vexation?"

Miss Mary put down her handkerchief impatiently and loaded Gilian at her side with embarrassing attentions.

"What—in—all—the—world—is—his vexation?" mocked the Cornal in the Captain's high and squeaking voice, reddening at the face and his scar purpling. "That's a terribly stupid question to put, Jock. What—in—all—the—world—is—his—vexation? If you had the soger's heart and your brother's past you would not be asking what an ancient's sorrow at his own lost strength might mean. Oh, man, man! make a pretence at spirit even if the Almighty denied it to you!"

He tossed the letter from him, almost in his brother's face.

The Paymaster held his anger in leash. He was incapable of comprehending and he was, too, afraid. With a forced laugh, he pressed the creases from the document.

"Oh, I'm glad enough to see the corps," said he, "if that's what you mean. If I have not your honours from the Army, I'm as fond of Geordie's uniform as any man of my years. I'll get the best billets in the town for——"

The Cornal scowled and interjected, "Ay, ay, and you'll make all the fraca that need be about the lads, and cock your hat to the fife, and march and act the veteran as if you were Moore himself, but you'll be far away from knowing what of their pomp and youth is stirring the hearts of your brother Dugald and me. The Army is all bye for us, Jock, Boney's by the heels; there's younger men upon the roster if the foreign route is called again in the barrack yard."

His glance fell upon Gilian, wide-eyed, wonderful, in the shade beside Miss Mary's chair, and he turned to him with a different accent.

"There you are!" said he, "my wan-faced warlock. What would Colin Campbell, Commander of the Bath, not give to be your age again and all the world before him? Do you say your prayers at night, laddie, before you go to your naked bed in the garret? I'll warrant Mary taught you that if she taught you nothing else. Pray every night then that Heaven may give you thew and heart and a touch of the old Hielan' glory that this mechanic body by my side has got through the world wanting. Oh, laddie, laddie, what a chance is yours! To hear the drum in the morning and see the sun glint on the line; to sail away and march with pipe or bugle in foreign countries; to have a thousand good companions round about the same camp-fires and know the lift and splendour of parades in captured towns. It's all bye for me; I'm an old pensioner rotting to the tomb in a landward burgh packed with relics like myself, and as; God's in heaven, I often wish I was with brother Jamie yonder fallen in my prime with a clod stopping the youth and spirit in my throat."

"Tut, tut, now we're in our flights!" said the Paymaster, not very audibly, so that in his transport the Cornal never heard.

"Are you for the Army?" asked the Cornal, like a recruiting sergeant bringing the question home to a lad at a country fair; and he fixed Gilian with an eye there was no baffling.

"I would—I would like it fine," said Gilian stammering, "if it was all like that."

"Like what?" asked the Cornal, subdued, and a hand behind his ear to listen.

"Like that—" repeated the boy, trembling though Miss Mary's fingers were on his. "All the morning time, all with trumpets and the same friends about the camp-fire. Always the lift inside and the notion to go on and on and——"

He stopped for want of English words to tell the sentiment completely.

The Cornal looked at him now wistfully.

"I would not say, Gilian," said he, "but what there might be the makings of a soger in you yet. If you have not the sinews for it you have the sense. You'll see a swatch on Friday of what I talked about and we'll—Come away this minute, Mary, and look me out my uniform. Jiggy Crawford! Young Jiggy that danced in the booze-house in Madrid! He was Ensign then and now he has his spurs and handles tartan. He is at the very topmost of the thing and I am going down, down, down, out, out, out, like this, and this, and this," and so saying he pinched out the candle flames one by one. The morning swept into the room, no longer with a rival, lighting up this parlour of old people, showing the wrinkles and the grey hairs and the parchment-covered knuckles, and in its midst the Paymaster's boy with a transfigured face and a head full of martial glory.



CHAPTER XI—THE SOUND OF THE DRUM

And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the town about him in a ferment of anticipation? In our sleeping community we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs.

He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor's door. Old Islay came out with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow.

"What is wrong in the place to-day?" asked his Grace with a flourish of his crop about him to the lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern doors. "Am I paying good day's wages for the like of that?"

Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. "It's the coming of the army," said he. "The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day. They would not do a hand's turn for an emperor."

"Humph!" said Duke George. "I wish I could throw off life's responsibilities so easily. The rogues! the rogues!" he mused, soothing his horse's neck with a fine and kindly hand. "I suppose it's in them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances. My father—well, well, let them be." His heels turned the horse in a graceful curvet "I'm saying, Islay," he cried over his shoulder, "have a free cask or two at the Cross in the morning."

But it was in the Paymaster's house that the fullest stress, the most nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster's snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who smiled behind his back. His brothers' slumbers in the silent parlour had been utterly destroyed till "Me-the-day!" Miss Mary had to cry at last when her maid brought back untasted viands, "I wish the army was never to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the better for this."

All this excitement sustained the tremulous feeling at the boy's heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier's experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal's character suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till she cried "The man's doited!" though she clearly liked it; to Gilian he began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales.

Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero. It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d'Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry "Well done!"; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every "whe—e—et" of the bullets at his ear bringing the moment's alarm to his teeth in a checked sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams, to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the battle-lines upon the page—the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting, commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the master's desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.

Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.

"At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?" said the dominie a little bitterly, a little humorously. "And what might it be this time?"

"Sogers," said the boy most red and awkward.

"Ay, ay," said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. "Soldiers is it? And the playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind. Soldiers! H'm! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you're going to meet Captain Campbell's most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts. Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and—my work's hopeless. Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act to-day you'll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better and—and—I maybe wished for worse."

That night Gilian went to bed in his garret while yet the daylight was abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.

He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable. The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.

The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor's corner there to stand awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited whispering, afraid like the Paymaster's boy to shatter the charm of that delightful terror. Then of a sudden the town roared and shook to a twofold rattle of the skins and the shrill of fifes as the corps from the north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the darkness to the rattle of the drums? The drums, the drums, the drums! Gilian stood entranced as they passed, looming large and innumerable in the darkness, unchallenged and uncheered by the bewildered citizens. It was the very entrance he could have chosen. For now they were ghosts, legions of the air in borrowed boots of the earth, shades of some army cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal's bloodiest stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving in to strike it at the vitals.



CHAPTER XII—ILLUSION

He followed them to the square, still with the drums pounding and the fifes shrilling, and now the town was awake in every window. At a word the Colonel on his horse dispelled the illusion. "Halt!" he cried; the drum and fife ceased, the arms grounded, the soldiers clamoured for their billets. Over the hill of Strone the morning paled, out of the gloom the phantom body came a corps most human, thirsty, hungry, travel-strained.

Gilian ran home and found the household awake but unconscious of the great doings in the town.

"What!" cried the Cornal, when he heard the news. "They came here this morning and this is the first we have of it." He was in a fever of annoyance. "Dugald, Dugald, are you hearing? The Army's in the town, it moved in when we were snoring and only the boy heard it. I hope Jiggy Crawford does not make it out a black affront to him that we were not there to welcome him. My uniform, Mary, my uniform, it should be aired and ironed, and here at my hand, and I'll warrant it's never out of the press yet. It was the boy that heard the drums; it was you that heard the drums, Gilian. Curse me, but I believe you'll make a soger yet!"

For the next few days, Gilian felt he must indeed be the soldier the Paymaster would make him, for soldiering was in the air. The red-coats gaily filled the street; parade and exercise, evening dance and the continuous sound of pipe and drum left no room for any other interest in life. Heretofore there was ever for the boy in his visions of the Army a background of unable years and a palsied hand, slow decay in a parlour, with every zest and glamour gone. But here in the men who stepped always to melody there was youth, seemingly a singular enjoyment of life, and watching them he was filled with envy.

When the day came that they must go he was inconsolable though he made no complaint. They went in the afternoon by the lowlands road that bends about the upper bay skirting the Duke's flower gardens, and with the Cornal and the Paymaster he went to see them depart, the General left at home in his parlour, unaccountably unwilling to say good-bye. The companies moved in a splendour of sunshine with their arms bedazzling to look upon, their pipers playing "Bundle and Go."

"Look at the young one!" whispered the Cornal in his brother's ear, nudging him to attention. Gilian was walking in step to the corps, his shoulders hack, his head erect, a hazel switch shouldered like a musket. But it was the face of him that most compelled attention for it revealed a multitude of emotions. His fancy ran far ahead of the tramping force thudding the dust on the highway. He was now the Army's child indeed, stepping round the world to a lilt of the bagpipes, with the currachd—the caul of safety—as surely his as it was Black Duncan the seaman's. There were battles in the open, and leaguering of towns, but his was the enchanted corps moving from country to country through victory, and always the same comrades were about the camp-fire at night. Now he was the foot-man, obedient, marching, marching, marching, all day, while the wayside cottars wondered and admired; now he was the fugleman, set before his company as the example of good and honest and handsome soldiery; now he was Captain—Colonel—General, with a horse between his knees, his easy body swaying in the saddle as he rode among the villages and towns. The friendly people ran (so his fancy continued) to their close-mouths to look upon his regiment passing to the roll and thunder of the drums and the cheery music of the pipes. Long days of march and battle, numerous nights of wearied ease upon the heather, if heather there should be, the applause of citadels, the smile of girls. The smile of girls! It came on him, that, with a rush of blood to his face and a strange tingling at the heart as the one true influence to make the soldier. For what should the soldier wander but to come again home triumphant, and find on the doorstep of his native place the smiling girls?

"Look at him, look at him!" cried the Cornal again with a nudge at his brother's arm. They were walking over the bridge and the pipes still were at their melody. Jiggy Crawford's braid shone like moving torches at his shoulder as the sun smote hot upon his horse and him. The trees upon the left leaned before the breeze to share this glory; far-off the lonely hills, the great and barren hills, were melancholy that they could not touch closer on the grandeur of man. As it were in a story of the shealings, the little ones of the town and wayside houses pattered in the rear of the troops, enchanted, their bare legs stretching to the rhythm of the soldiers' footsteps, the children of hope, the children of illusion and desire, and behind them, sad, weary, everything accomplished, the men who had seen the big wars and had many times marched thus gaily and were now no more capable.

"It is the last we'll ever see of it, John," said the Cornal. "Oh, man, man, if I were young again!" His foot was very heavy and slow as he followed the last he would witness of what had been his pride; his staff, that he tried to carry like a sword, roust go down now and then to seek a firmness in the sandy foot-way. Not for long at a time but in frequent flashes of remembrance he would throw back his shoulders and lift high his head and step out in time to the music.

The Paymaster walked between him and Gilian, a little more robust and youthful, altogether in a different key, a key critical, jealous of the soldier lads that now he could not emulate. They were smart enough, he confessed, but they were not what the 46th had been; Crawford had a good carriage on his horse but—but—he was not——

"Oh, do not haver, Jock," said the Cornal, angrily at last; "do not haver! They are stout lads, good lads enough, like what we were ourselves when first the wars summoned us, and Crawford, as he sits there, might very well be Dugald as I saw him ride about the bend of the road at San Sebastian and look across the sandy bay to see the rock we had to conquer. Let you and me say nothing that is not kind, Colin; have we not had our own day of it with the best? and no doubt when we were at the marching there were ancients on the roadside to swear we were never their equal. They are in there in the grass and bracken where you and I must some day join them and young lads still will be marching out to glory."

"In there among the grass and bracken," thought Gilian, turning a moment to look up the slope that leads to Kilmalieu. The laurel drugged the air with death's odour. "In the grasses and the bracken," said Gilian, singing it to himself as if it were a coronach. Was that indeed the end of it all, of the hope, the lilt, the glory? And then he had a great pity for the dead that in their own time had been on many a march like this. Their tombs are thick in Kilmalieu. It seemed so cruel, so heedless, so taunting thus to march past them with no obeisance or remembrance, that to them, the dead soldiers, all his heart went out, and he hated the quick who marched upon the highway.

But Crawford, like the best that have humour, had pity and pathos too. "Slow march!" he cried to his men, and the pipers played "Lochaber No More."

"He's punctilious in his forms," said the Paymaster, "but it's thoughtful of him too."

"There was never but true duine uasail put on the tartan of Argyll," said the Cornal.

The pipes ceased; the drums beat again, echoing from the Sgornach rock and the woody caverns of Blaranbui, Glenshira filled to the lip with rolling thunder, the sea lulled to a whisper on the shore. Gilian and the children were now all that were left to follow the soldiers, for the oldsters had cheered feebly and gone back. And as he walked close up on the rear of the troops, his mind was again on the good fortune of those that from warfare must return. To come home after long years, and go up the street so well acquaint, sitting bravely on his horse, paled in the complexion somewhat from a wound, perhaps with the scar of it as perpetual memorial, and to behold pity and pride in the look of them that saw him! It would be such a day as this, he chose, with the sun upon his braid and the sheen upon his horse's neck. The pipers would play merrily and yet with a melancholy too, and so crowded the causeways by the waiting community that even the windows must be open to their overflowing.

And as thus he walked and dreamt saying no word to any of the chattering bairns about him he was truly the Army's child. The Paymaster was right, and generous to choose for him so fine a calling; the Cornal made no error, the soldier's was the life for youth and spirit. He had no objection now to all their plans for his future, the Army was his choice.

It was then, at the Boshang Gate that leads to Dhuloch, Maam, Kilblaan and all the loveliness of Shira Glen, that even his dreaming eyes found Nan the girl within the gates watching the soldiers pass. Her face was flushed with transport, her little shoes beat time to the tread of the soldiers. They passed with a smile compelled upon their sunburnt faces, to see her so sweet, so beautiful, so sensible to their glory. And there was among them an ensign, young, slim, and blue-eyed; he wafted a vagabond kiss as he passed, blowing it from his finger-tips as he marched in the rear of his company. She tossed her hair from her temples as the moon throws the cloud apart and beamed brightly and merrily and sent him back his symbol with a daring charm.

Gilian's dream of the Army fled. At the sight of Nan behind the Boshang Gate he was startled to recognise that the girls he had thought of as smiling on the soldier's return had all the smile of this one, the nut-brown hair of this one, her glance so fearless and withal so kind and tender. At once the roll of the drums lost its magic for his ear; a caprice of sun behind a fleck of cloud dulled the splendour of the Colonel's braid; Gilian lingered at the gate and let the soldiers go their way.

For a little the girl never looked at him as he stood there with the world (all but her, perhaps) so commonplace and dull after the splendours of his mind. Her eyes were fixed upon the marching soldiers now nearing the Gearron and about her lips played the smile of wonder and pleasure.

At last the drumming ceased as the soldiers entered the wood of Strone, still followed by the children. In the silence that fell so suddenly, the country-side seemed solitary and sad. The great distant melancholy hills were themselves again with no jealousy of the wayside trees dreaming on their feet as they swayed in the lullaby wind. Nan turned with a look yet enraptured and seemed for the first time to know the boy was there on the other side of the gate alone.

"Oh!" she said, with the shudder of a woman's delight in her accent. "I wish I were a soldier."

"It might be good enough to be one," he answered, in the same native tongue her feeling had made her choose unconsciously to express itself.

"But this is the worst of it," she said, pitifully; "I am a girl, and Sandy is to be the soldier though he was too lazy to come down the glen to-day to see them away, and I must stay at home and work at samplers and seams and bake bannocks."

With wanton petulant fingers she pulled the haws from the hedge beside her, and took a strand of her hair between her teeth and bit it in her reverie of wilfulness.

"Perhaps," said Gilian, coming closer, "it is better to be at home and soldiering in your mind instead of marching and fighting." It was a thought that came to him in a flash and must find words, but somehow he felt ashamed when he had uttered them.

"I do not understand you a bit," said Nan, with a puzzled look in her face. "Oh, you mean to pretend to yourself," she added immediately. "That might be good enough for a girl, but surely it would not be good enough for you. You are to be a soldier, my father says, and he laughs as if it were something droll."

"It is not droll at all," said Gilian stammering, very much put out. "There are three old soldiers in our house and——"

"One of them Captain Mars, Captain Mars, Who never saw scars!" said the girl mischievously, familiar with the town's song. "I hope you do not think of being a soldier like Mars. Perhaps that is what my father laughs at when he says the Paymaster is to make you a soldier."

"Oh, that!" said Gilian, a little relieved. "I thought you were thinking I would not be man enough for a soldier."

Nan opened the gate and came out to measure herself beside him. "You're a little bigger than I am," said she, somewhat regretfully. "Perhaps you will be big enough for a soldier. But what about that when you think you would sooner stay at home and pretend, than go with the army? Did you see the soldier who kissed his hand to me? The liberty!" And she laughed with odd gaiety as if her mood resented the soldier's freedom.

"He was very thin and little," said Gilian, enviously.

"I thought he was quite big enough," said Nan promptly, "and he was so good-looking!"

"Was he?" asked Gilian gloomily. "Well, he was not like the Cornal or the General. They were real soldiers and have seen tremendous wars."

"I daresay," said Nan, "but no more than my father. I cannot but wonder at you; with the chance to be a soldier like my father or—or the General, being willing to sit at home pretending or play-acting it in school or——"

"I did not say I would prefer it," said the boy; "I only said it could be done."

"I believe you would sooner do it that way than the other," she said, standing back from him, and looking with shrewd scrutiny. "Oh, I don't like the kind of boy you are."

"Except when you are singing, and then you like to have me listening because I understand," said Gilian, smiling with pleasure at his own astuteness.

She reddened at his discovery and then laughed in some confusion. "You are thinking of the time I sang in the cabin to Black Duncan. You looked so white and curious sitting yonder in the dark, I could have stopped my song and laughed."

"You could not," he answered quite boldly, "because your eyes were——"

"Never mind that," said she abruptly. "I was not speaking of singing or of eyes, but I'm telling you I like men, men, men, the kind of men who do things, brave things, hard things, like soldiers. Oh, I wish I was the soldier who kissed his hand to me! What is pretending and thinking? I can do that in a way at home over my sampler or my white seam. But to be commanding, and fighting the enemies of the country, to be good with the sword and the gun and strong with a horse, like my father!"

"I have seen your father," said Gilian. "That is the kind of soldier I would like to be." He said so, generously, with some of the Highland flauery; he said so meaning it, for Turner the bold, the handsome, the adventurer, the man with years of foreign life in mystery, was always the ideal soldier of Brooks' school.

"You are a far nicer boy than I thought you were," said she enjoying the compliment. "Only—only—I think when you can pretend so much to yourself you cannot so well do the things you pretend. You can be soldiering in your mind so like the real thing that you may never go soldiering at all. And of course that would not be the sort of soldier my father is."

A mellowed wail of the bagpipe came from Strone, the last farewell of the departing soldiers; it was but a moment, then was gone. The wind changed from the land, suddenly the odours of the traffics of peace blew familiarly, the scents of gathered hay and the more elusive perfume of yellowing corn. A myriad birds, among them the noisy rooks the blackest and most numerous, sped home. In the bay the skiffs spread out their pinions, the halyards singing in the blocks, the men ye-hoing. For a space the bows rose and fell, lazy, reluctant to be moving in their weary wrestle with the sea, then tore into the blue and made a feather of white. Gilian looked at them and saw them the birds of night and sea, the birds of prey, the howlets of the brine, flying large and powerful throughout the under-sky that is salt and swinging and never lit by moon or star. And as the boats followed each other out of the bay, a gallant company, the crews leaned on tiller or on mast and sang their Gaelic iorrams that ever have the zest of the oar, the melancholy of the wave.

As it were in a pious surrender to the influence of the hour, he and the girl walked slowly, silently, by the wayside, busy with their own imaginings. They were all alone.

Beyond the Boshang Gate is an entrance to the policies, the parks, the gardens, of the Duke, standing open with a welcome, a trim roadway edged with bush and tree. Into it Nan and Gilian walked, almost heedless, it might seem, of each other's presence, she plucking wild flowers as she went from bush to bush, humming the refrain of the fishers' songs, he with his eyes wide open looking straight before him yet with some vague content to have her there for his companion.

When they spoke again they were in the cloistered wood, the sea hidden by the massive trees.

"I will show you my heron's nest," said Gilian, anxious to add to the riches the ramble would confer on her.

She was delighted. Gilian at school had the reputation of knowing the most wonderful things of the woods, and few were taken into his confidence.

He led her a little from the path to the base of a tall tree with its trunk for many yards up as bare as a pillar.

"There it is," he said, pointing upward to a knot of gathered twigs swaying in the upper branches.

"Oh! is it so high as that?" she cried, with disappointment. "What is the use of showing me that? I cannot see the inside and the birds."

"But there are no birds now," said Gilian; "they are flown long ago. Still I'm sure you can easily fancy them there. I see them quite plainly. There are three eggs, green-blue like the sky up the glen, and now—now there are three grey hairy little birds with tufts on their heads. Do you not see their beaks opening?"

"Of course I don't," said Nan impatiently, straining her eyes for the tree-top. "If they are all flown how can I see them?"

Gilian was disappointed with her. "But you think you see them, you think very hard," he said, "and if you think very hard they will be there quite true."

Nan stamped her foot angrily. "You are daft," said she. "I don't believe you ever saw them yourself."

"I tell you I did," he protested hotly.

"Were you up the tree?" she pressed, looking him through with eyes that then and always wrenched the prosaic truth from him.

He flushed more redly than in his eagerness of showing the nest, his eyes fell, he stammered.

"Well," said he, "I did not climb the tree. What is the good when I know what is there? It is a heron's nest."

"But there might have been no eggs and no birds in it at all," she argued.

"That's just it," said he eagerly. "Lots of boys would be for climbing and finding that out, and think how vexatious it would be after all that trouble! I just made the eggs and the young ones out of my own mind, and that is far better."

At the innocence of the explanation Nan laughed till the woods rang. Her brown hair fell upon her neck and brow, the flowers tumbled at her feet all mingled and beautiful as if summer has been raining on its queen. A bird rose from the thicket, chuck-chucking in alarm, then fled, trailing behind him a golden chain of melody.



CHAPTER XIII—A GHOST

I think that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and girl so enviable in their innocence and happiness. Gilian knelt and gathered up the flowers. It was, perhaps, more to hide his vexation than from courtesy that he did so, but the act was so unboylike, so deferring in its manner, that it restored to Nan as much of her good humour as her laughter had not brought back with it. As he lifted the flowers and put them together, there seemed to come from the fresh lush stalks of them some essence of the girl whose hands had culled and grasped them, a feeling of her warm palm. And when handing her the re-gathered flowers he felt the actual touch of her fingers, his head for a second swam. He wondered. For in the touch there had been something even more potent and pleasing than in the mother-touch of Miss Mary's hand that day when first he came to the town, the mother-touch that revealed a world not of kindness alone—for that was not new, he had it from the little old woman whose face was like a nut—but of understanding and sympathy.

"Have you any more wonders to show?" said Nan, now all in the humour of adventure.

"Nothing you would care for," he said. "There are lots of places just for thinking at, but——"

"I would rather them to be places to be seeing at," said Nan.

Gilian reflected, and "You know the Lady's Linn?" he said.

She nodded.

"Well," said he. "Do you know the story of it, and why it is called the Lady's Linn?"

Nan confessed her ignorance; but a story—oh, that was good enough!

"Come to the Linn and I'll show you the place, then," said Gilian, and he led her among the grasses, among the tall commanding brackens, upon the old moss that gave no whisper to the footfall, so that, for the nymphs among the trees, the pair of them might be comrades too, immortal. A few moments brought them to the Linn, a deep pool in the river bend, lying so calm that the blue field of heaven and its wisps of cloud astray like lambs were painted on its surface. Round about, the banks rose steep, magnificent with flowers.

"See," said Gilian, pointing to the reflection at their feet. "Does it not look like a piece of the sky tumbled among the grasses? I sometimes think, to see it like that, that to fall into it would be to tangle with the stars."

Nan only laughed and stooped to lift a stone.

She threw it into the very midst of the pool, and the mirror of the heavens was shattered.

"I never thought I could throw into the sky so far," she said mischievously, pleased as it seemed to spoil the illusion in so sudden and sufficient a manner.

"Oh!" he cried, pained to the quick, "you should not have done that, it will spoil the story."

"What is the story?" she said, sitting and looking down upon the troubled pool.

"You must wait till the water is calm again," said he, seating himself a little below her on the bank, and watching the water-rings subside. Then when the pool had regained its old placidity, with the flecked sky pictured on it, he began his Gaelic story.

"Once upon a time," said he, in the manner of the shealing tales, "there was a lady with eyes like the sea, and hair blowing like the tassel of the fir, and she was a daughter of the King in Knapdale, and she looked upon the world and she was weary. There came a little man to her from the wood and he said, 'Go seven days, three upon water and four upon land, and you will come to a place where the moon's sister swims, and there will be the earl's son and the husband.' The lady travelled seven days, three upon water and four upon land, and she came to the Linn where the sister of the moon was swimming. 'Where is my earl's son that is to be-my husband?' she asked: and the moon's sister said he was hunting in the two roads that lie below the river bed. The lady, who was the daughter of the King of Knapdale, shut her eyes that were like the sea, and tied in a cushion above her head her hair that was like the tassel of the fir, and broke the crystal door of dream and reached the two hunting roads in the bed of the river. 'We are two brothers,' said the watchers, standing at the end of the roads, 'and we are the sons of earls.' She thought and thought 'I am Sir Sleep,' said the younger. 'And will you be true?' said she. 'Almost half the time, he answered. She thought and thought. 'I am very weary,' she said. 'Then come with me,' said the other, 'I am the Older Brother.' She heard above her the clanging at the door of dream as she went with the Older Brother. And she was happy for evermore."

"Oh, that is a stupid story," said Nan. "It's not a true story at all. You could tell it to me anywhere, and why should we be troubled walking to the Linn?"

"Because this is the Lady's Linn," said Gilian, "and to be telling a story you must be putting a place in it or it will not sound true. And Gillesbeg Aotram who told me the story—"

"Gillesbeg Aotram!" she said in amaze. "He's daft. If I thought it was a daft man's story I had to hear I——"

"He's not daft at all," protested Gilian. "He's only different from his neighbours."

"That is being daft," said she. "But it is a very clever tale and you tell it very well. You must tell me more stories. Do you know any more stories? I like soldier stories. My father tells me a great many."

"The Cornal tells me a great many too," said Gilian, "but they are all true, and they do not sound true, and I have to make them all up again in my own mind. But this is not the place for soldier stories; every place has its own kind of story, and this is the place for fairy stories if you care for them."

"I like them well enough," she answered dubiously, "though I like better the stories where people are doing things."

They rose from their seat of illusion beside the Linn where the King of Knapdale's daughter broke the gate of sleep and dream. They walked into the Duke's flower garden. And now the day was done, the sun had gone behind Creag Dubh while they were sitting by the river; a grey-brown dusk wrapped up the country-side. The tall trees that were so numerous outside changed here to shorter darker foreign trees, and yews that never waved in winds, but seemed the ghosts of trees, to thickets profound, with secrets in their recesses. In and out among these unfamiliar growths walked Nan and her companion, their pathway crooking in a maze of newer wonders on either hand. One star peered from the sky, the faint wind of the afternoon had sunk to a hint of mingled and moving odours.

Gilian took the girl's hand, and thus together they went deeper into the garden among the flowers that perfumed the air till it seemed drugged and heavy. They walked and walked in the maze of intersecting roads whose pebbles grated to the foot, and, so magic the place, there seemed no end to their journey.

Nan became alarmed. "I wish I had never come," said she. "I want home." And the tears were very close upon her eyes.

"Yes, yes," said Gilian, leading her on through paths he had never seen before. "We will get out in a moment. I know—I think I know, the road. It is this way—no, it is this way—no, I am wrong."

But he did not cease to lead her through the garden. The long unending rows of gay flowers stretching in the haze of evening, the parterres spread in gaudy patches, the rich revelation of moss and grass between the trees and shrubs were wholly new to him; they stirred to thrills of wonder and delight.

"Isn't it fine, fine?" he asked her in a whisper lest the charm should fly.

She answered with a sob he did not hear, so keen his thrall to the enchantment. No sign of human habitation lay around except the gravelled walks; the castle towers were hid, the boat-strewn sea was on their left no more. Only the clumps of trees were there, the mossy grass, the flowers whose beauty and plenteousness mocked the posie in the girl's hands. They walked now silent, expectant every moment of the exit that somehow baffled, and at last they came upon the noble lawn. It stretched from their feet into a remote encroaching eve, no trees beyond visible, no break in all its grey-green flatness edged on either hand by wood. And now the sky had many stars.

Their gravelled path had ceased abruptly; before them the lawn spread like a lake, and they were shy to venture on its surface.

"Let us go on; I must go home, I am far from home," said Nan, in a trepidation, her flowers shed, her eyes moist with tears. And into her voice had come a strain of dependence on the boy, an accent more pleasing than any he had heard in her before.

"We must walk across there," he said, looking at the far-off vague edge; but yet he made no move to meet the wishes of the girl now clinging to his arm.

"Come, come," said she, and pressed him gently at the arm; but yet he stood dubious in the dusk.

"Are you afraid?" she asked, herself whispering, she could not tell why.

He felt his face burn at the reflection; he shook her hand off almost angrily. "Afraid!" said he. "Not I; what makes you think that? Only—only——" His eyes were staring at the lawn.

"Only what?" she whispered again, seeking his side for the comfort of his presence.

"It is stupid," he confessed, shame in his accent, "but they say the fairies dance there, and I think we might be looking for another way."

At the confession, Nan's mood of fear that Gilian had conferred on her was gone. She drew back and laughed with as much heartiness as at his story of the heron's nest. The dusk was all around and they were all alone, lost in a magic garden, but she forgot all in this new revelation of her companion's strange belief. She turned and ran across the lawn, crying as she went, "Follow me, follow me!" and Gilian, all the ecstasy of that lingering moment on the edge of fancy gone, ran after her, feeling himself a child of dream, and her the woman made for action.

A sadden opening in the thicket revealed the shore, the highway, the quay with its bobbing lamps, the town with its upper windows lighted. At the gateway of the garden the Cornal met them, He was close on them in the dusk before he knew them, and seeing Gilian he peered closely in the girl face.

"Who's this?" said he abruptly.

Gilian hesitated, vaguely fearing to reveal her identity, and Nan shrank back, all her memories of conversation in Maam telling her that here was an enemy.

Again the Cornal bent and looked more closely, lifting her chin up that he might see the better. She flashed a glance of defiance in his scarred old parchment face, and he drew his hand back as if he had been stung.

"Nan! Nan!" cried he, with a curious voice. "What witchery is this?" He was in a tremble, Then he started and laughed bitterly. "Oh no, not Nan!" said he. "Oh no, not Nan!" with the most rueful accent, almost chanting it as if it were a dirge.

"'It is Nan," said Gilian.

"It is her breathing image," said the old man. "It is Nan, no doubt, but not the Nan I knew."

She turned and sped home by the seaside, without farewell, alarmed at this oddity, and Gilian and the Cornal stood alone, the Cornal looking after her with a wistfulness in his very attitude.

"The same, the same, the very same!" said he to himself, in words the boy could plainly hear. "Her mother to the very defiance of her eye." He clutched Gilian rudely by the shoulder. "What," said he; "were you wandering about with that girl for? Answer me that. They told me you were off after the soldiers, and I came up here hoping it true. It would have been the daft but likeable cantrip I should have forgiven in any boy of mine; it would have shown some sign of a sogerly emprise. And here you are, with a lass wandering! Where were you?"

Gilian explained.

"In the flower garden? Ay! ay! A lassie on the roadside met your fancy more than Geordie's men of war. Thank God, I was never like that! And Turner's daughter above all! If she's like her mother in her heart as she's like her in the face, it might be a bitter notion for your future."

He led the way home, muttering to himself. "Nan! Nan! It gave me the start! It was nearly a stroke for me! The same look about her! She is dead, dead and buried, and in her daughter she defies us still!"



CHAPTER XIV—THE CORNAL'S LOVE STORY

Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot, her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by the lamp above the merchant's door. When she saw her brother coming with Gilian she ran forward on the footway, caught the boy by the hand and drew him in.

"I am very angry, oh, I am terribly angry with you!" she cried. "Do not speak a word to me." She pushed him into a chair and spread thick butter on a scone and thrust it in his hand. "To frighten us like this! The Captain is all over the town for you, and the General has sent men to drag for you about the quay."

Peggy the maid smiled over her mistress's shoulder at the youth. He ate his scone with great complacency, heartened by this token that something of Miss Mary's vexation was assumed. Not perhaps her vexation—for were her eyes not red as with weeping?—but her anger, if she had really been angry.

"You are a perfect heartbreak," she went on

"The Cornal heard you had run off after the sogers, and———"

"Would that vex you?" asked Gilian.

"It would not vex Colin; he would give his only infant, if he had one, to the army; but I was thinking of you left behind in the march about the loch-head, and lost and starving somewhere about the wood of Dunderave."

"I would not starve in Dunderave so long as the nut and bramble were there," said Gilian, rejoicing in her kindly perturbation. "And I could not be lost anywhere—"

"—Except in the Duke's flower garden, wasting the time with—with—a woman's daughter," said the Cornal, putting his head in at the kitchen door. He frowned upon his sister for her too prompt kindness to the rover, and she hid behind her a cup of new-skimmed cream. "Come upstairs and have a talk with Dugald and me," he went on to the boy.

"Will it not do in the morning?" asked Miss Mary, all shaking, dreading her darling's punishment.

"No," said the Cornal, "Now or never. Oh! you need have no fears that I would put him to the triangle."

"Then I may go too?" said Miss Mary.

The Cornal put the boy in front of him and pushed him towards the stair-foot. "You stay where you are," he said to his sister. "This will be a man's sederunt."

They went up the stair together and entered the parlour, to find the General half-sleeping in his lug-chair. He started at the apparition of the entering youth.

"You are not drowned after all," said he, "and there's my money gone that I spent for a gross of stenlock hooks to grapple you."

"Sit down there," said the Cornal, pointing to the chair in which Gilian had first stood court-martial. The bottle was brought forth from the cupboard; the glasses were ranged again by the General. In the grate a sea-coal fire burned brightly, its glance striking golden now and then upon the polished woodwork of the room and all its dusky corners, more golden, more warm, more generous, than the wan disheartened rays of the candles that shook a smoky flame above the board. Gilian waited his punishment with more wonderment than fear. What could be said to him for a misadventure? He had done no harm except to cause an hour or two of apprehension, and if he had been with one whose company was forbidden it had never been forbidden to him.

"It's a fine carry-on this," said the Cornal, breaking the silence. "Ay, it's a fine carry-on." He stretched the upper part of his body over the low table with his arms spread out, and looked into the boy's eyes with a glance more judicial than severe. "Here are we doing our best to make a man of you, more in a brag against gentry that need not be named in this house than for human kindness, though that is not wanting I assure you, and what must you be at but colloguing and, perhaps, plotting with the daughter of the gentry in question? I will not exactly say plotting," he hastened to amend, remembering apparently that before him were but the rudiments of a man. "I will not say plotting, but at least you were in a way to make us a laugh to the whole community. Do you know anything of the girl that you were with?"

"I met her in the school before she got her governess."

"Oh, ay! they must be making the leddy of her; that was the spoiling of her mother before her. As if old Brooks could not be learning any woman enough schooling to carry on a career in a kitchen. And have you seen her elsewhere?"

"I heard her once singing on her father's vessel," said Gilian.

"She was singing!" cried the Cornal, standing to his feet and thumping the table till the glasses rang. "Has she that art of the devil too? Her mother had it; ay! her mother had it, and it would go to your head like strong drink. Would it not, Dugald? You know the dame I mean."

"It was very taking, her song," said the General simply, playing with the empty glass, his eyes upon the table.

"And what now did she sing? Would it be——"

"It was 'The Rover' and 'The Man with the Coat of Green,'" said Gilian in an eager recollection.

"Man! did I not ken it?" cried the Cornal. "Oh! I kent it fine. 'The Rover' was her mother's trump card. I never gave a curse for a tune, but she had a way of lilting that one that was wonderful."

"She had, that," said the General, and he sighed.

The room, it seemed to Gilian, was a vault, a cavern of melancholy, with only the flicker of the coal to light it up in patches. These old men sighing were its ghosts or hermits, and he himself a worldling fallen invisible among their spoken thoughts. To him the Cornal no longer spoke directly; he was thinking aloud the thoughts alike of the General and himself—the dreams, the actions, the joys, the bitterness of youth. He sat back in his chair, relaxed, his hand wrinkled and grey, with no lusty blood rushing any more under the skin; upon the arms his fingers beating tattoo for his past.

"You'll be wondering that between the Turners and us is little love lost, though no doubt Miss Mary with her clinking tongue has given you a glisk of the reason. He'll be wondering, Dugald, he'll be wondering, I'll warrant. And, man, there's nothing by-ordinar wonderful in it, for are we not but human men? There was a woman in Little Elrig who took Dugald's fancy (if you will let me say it, Dugald), and he was willing to draw in with her and give her a name as reverend as any in the shire, for who are older than the Campbells of Keils? It's an old story, and in a way it was only yesterday: sometimes I think it must be only a dream. But, dream or waking, I can see plainly my brother Dugald there, home on leave, make visitation to Glen Shira. I have seen him ambling up there happy on his horse (it was Black Geordie, Dugald,—well I mind him), and coming down again at night with a glow upon his countenance. Miss Mary, she would be daffing with him on his return, with a 'How's her leddyship to-day, Dugald?' and he would be in a pleasant vexation at this guessing of what he thought his secret. It was no secret: was ever such a thing secret in the shire of Argyll? We all knew it. She was Mary's friend and companion; she would come to our house here on a Saturday; I see her plainly on that chair at the window."

The General turned with a gasp, following his brother's glance. "I wish to God you would not be so terribly precise," was what he said. And then he fingered at his glass anew.

"Many a time she sat there with our sister, the smell of the wallflower on the sill about her, and many a time she sang 'The Rover' in this room. In this very room, Dugald: isn't every word I'm saying true? Of course it is. God! as if a dream could be so fine! Well, well! my brother, who sits there all bye with such affairs, went away on another war. She was vexed. The woods of Shira Glen were empty for her after that, I have no doubt, now that their rambles were concluded; she was lonely on the Dhuloch-side, where many a time he convoyed her home in the summer gloaming. He came back a tired man, a man hashed about with wounds and voyaging, cold nights, wet marches, bitter cruel fare, not the same at all in make or fashion, or in gaiety, that went away. The girl—the girl was cold. I hate to say it, Dugald, but what is the harm in a story so old? She came about Miss Mary in this house as before, no way blate, but it was 'Hands off!' for the man who had so liked her."

He paused and stretched to fill his glass, but as he seized the bottle the hand shook so that he laid the vessel down in shame. The boy stood entranced, following the story intimately, guessing every coming sentence, filling up its bald outline with the pictures of his brain; riding with the General, almost in his prime and almost handsome, and hearing the woman sing in the window chair; feeling the soldier's return to a reception so cruel. The General said nothing, but sat musing, his eyes, wide and distant, on the board. And out in the street there was the traffic of the town, the high calls of lads in their boisterous evening play, the laugh of a girl. From the kitchen came the rattle of Peggy's operations, and in a low murmur Miss Mary's voice as she hummed to herself, her symptom of anxiety, as she was sieving the evening milk in the pantry.

The Cornal gulped the merest thimbleful of spirits and resumed in a different key.

"Then, then," said he, "then I became the family's fool. Oh, ay!"—and he laughed with a crackle at the throat and no merriment—"I was the family fool; there was aye a succession of them in our house, one after another, dancing to this woman's piping. For a while nobody saw it; Dugald never saw it, for he was sitting moping, wearying for some work anywhere away from this infernal clime of rain and sleep and old sorrows; Mary never noticed it—at least not for a little; she could not easily fancy her companion the character she was. But I would be meeting the girl here and there about the country, in the glen, in the town, as well as here in this very parlour where I had to sit and look indifferent, though—though my heart stounded, and I never met her but I felt a traitor to my brother. You will believe that, Dugald?" said he, recognition for a moment flashing to his eye.

And the General nodded, stretching himself weary on the chair.

"Oh, ay! even then I wished myself younger, for she was not long beyond her teens, and walking beside her I would be feeling musty and old, though I was not really old, as my picture there above the chimneypiece will show. I was not old, in heart—it pattered like a bairn's steps to every glimpse and sentence of her. I lost six months at this game, my corps calling me, but I could not drag myself away. Once I spoke of going, and she sang 'The Rover'—by God! it scaled me to her footsteps. I stayed for very pity of myself, seeing myself a rover indeed if I went, more distressed than ever gave the key to any song. The woods, the woods in spring; the country full of birds; Dhuloch lap-lapping on the shore; the summer with hay filling the field, and the sky blue from hill to hill, the nights of heather and star—oh, yes, she led me a pretty dance, I'm thinking, and sometimes I will be wondering if it was worth the paying for."

The Paymaster's house was grown very still. Gilian ceased to make the pictures in his mind.

"I met her ghost up there on the road this very night, and I had a hand below her chin," said the Cornal with a gulp.

"You did not dare, you did not dare!" cried his brother, an apple-red upon his check, and half rising in his chair.

"Surely, surely—in a ghost," said the Cornal. "I would never have mentioned it had it been herself. Sit down, Dugald. It was her daughter. I never saw her so close before, and the look of her almost gave me a stroke. It was what I felt when I first saw her mother with a younger man than you or I. Just like that I met them in the gloaming, with Turner very jaunty at her side, rapping his leg with his riding-cane, half a head higher than myself, a generation less in years. It was a cursed bitter pill, Dugald! Then I understood what you had meant and what Mary meant by her warnings. But I was cool—oh yes! I think I was cool. I only made to laugh and pass on, and she stopped me with her own hand. 'I kept it from you as long as I could,' she said: 'it was cruel, it was the blackest of sins, but this is the man for me.'"

"That was the man for her," echoed the General, his sentence stifled in a sigh.

"'This is the man for me.' Turner stood beside her, looking with an admiration, but to do him justice, ill at case, and with some—with some—with some pity for me. Oh! that stunned me! 'Is it so indeed?' I said in a little when I came to myself, feeling for the first time old. 'And must it be farewell with me as with my brother Dugald?'"

"You should not have said that at all," said the General. "I would not have said it."

"I daresay not; I daresay not," said the Cornal slowly, pondering on it. "But, mind you, I was in a curious position, finding myself the second fool of a family that had got fair warning. She birked up and took her gallant's arm. Said I then, 'We'll maybe get you yet; I have a younger brother still.' It was a stupid touch of bravado. 'Jock!' said she, laughing, all her sorrow for her misdoing gone; 'Jock! Not the three of you together; give me youth and action.' Then she went away with her new fancy, and I was left alone. I was left alone. I was left alone."

His voice, that had risen to a shout as he gave the woman's words, declined to a crackle, a choked harsh utterance that almost failed to cross the table.

Up got the General. "Never mind, never mind, Colin," said he as it were to a vexed child. "We took our scuds gamely, and there was no more to do. God knows we have had plenty since—made wanderers for the King, ill fed for the King, wounded and blooded for the King. What does it matter for one that was a girl and is now no more but a clod in Kilmalieu? I'm forgetting it all fast I would never be minding it at all but for you and Miss Mary there, and that picture of the man I was once, on the wall. I mind more of Badajos and San Sebastian—that was the roaring, the bloody, the splendid time!—than of the girl that played us on her string—three brothers at a single cast—a witch's fishing. What nonsense is this to be bringing up at our time of life? In the hearing of a wean too."

A cough choked him and he stopped. At Gilian, sitting still and seemingly uncomprehending, the Cornal looked as at a stranger. "So it is," said he; "just a wean! I forgot, some way. How old are you—sixteen? Nonsense! By the look of you I would say a hundred. Oh, you're an old-farrent one, sitting there with your lugs cocked. And what do you think is the moral of my story? Eh?—the moral of it? The lesson of it? What? What? What?"

Gilian had the answer in a flash. "It is to be younger than the other man; it is——"

"What?" cried the Cornal. "That's the moral? To be younger than the other man. No more than that? To be young? Old Brooks never put you to your AEsops when that's all you can make of it."

The General sat back and folded his soft thick hands upon his lap. He drew in his breath and blew it out again with the gasp of the wearied emerging from water. "Do you know, Dugald," said he, "there's something in that view of it? We were not young enough. We had too sober an eye on life. Youth is not in the straight back or the clear eye; there is something more, and—the person you mentioned had it, and has it yet."

"That's all havers," said the Cornal; "all havers. I was as jocular at the time as Jiggy Crawford himself. It did not come natural, but I could force myself to it. The blame was not with us. She was a wanton hussy first and last, and God be with her!"

He gripped the boy by the jacket collar. "Up and away," said he. "If my tale's in vain, there's no help for it. I cannot make it plainer. Do not be a fool, wasting the hours that are due to your tasks in loitering with the daughter of a woman who has her mother's eye and her mother's songs, and maybe her mother's heart."

He pushed the boy almost rudely out at the parlour door.



CHAPTER XV—ON BOARD THE "JEAN"

Gilian went up to his attic, stood looking blankly from the window at the skylights on the other side of the street, his head against the camecil of the room. He was bewildered and pleased. He was bewildered at this new candour of the Cornal that seemed to rank him for the first time more than a child; he was pleased to have his escapade treated in so tolerant a fashion, and to be taken into a great and old romance, though there was no active feud in it as in Marget Maclean's books. Besides, the sorrow of the old man's love story touched him. To find a soft piece in that old warrior so intent upon the past and a splutter of glory was astonishing, and it was pitiful too that it should be a tragedy so hopeless. He 'listed once more on the Cornal's side in the feud against Maam, even against Nan herself for her likeness to her mother, forgetting the charm of her song, the glamour at the gate, and all the magic of the garden. He determined to keep at a distance if he was to be loyal to those who had adopted him. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should vex the Paymaster and his brothers by indulging his mere love of good company in such escapades as he had in the ship and in the Duke's garden. There was no reason why—— His head unexpectedly bumped against the camceil of the room. He was startled at the accident. It revealed to him for the first time how time was passing and he was growing. When he had come first to the Paymaster's that drooping ceil was just within the reach of his outstretched hand; now he could touch it with his brow.

"Gilian! Gilian!" cried Miss Mary up the stair.

He went down rosy red, feeling some unrest to meet a woman so soon after the revelation of a woman's perfidy, so soon indeed after a love-tale told among men. The parlour, as he passed its slightly open door, was still; its candles guttered on the table. The fire was down to the ash. He knew, without seeing it, that the old men were seated musing as always, ancient and moribund.

Miss Mary gave him his supper. For a time she bustled round him, with all her vexation gone, saying nothing of his sederunt with her brothers. Peggy was at the well, spilling stoup after stoup to make her evening gossip the longer, and the great flagged kitchen was theirs alone.

"What—what was the Cornal saying to you?" at last she queried, busying herself as she spoke with some uncalled-for kitchen office to show the indifference of her question.

"Oh, he was not angry," said Gilian, thinking that might satisfy.

"I did not think he would be," she said. Then in a little again, reluctantly: "But what was he talking about?"

The boy fobbed it off again. "Oh, just about—about—a story about a woman in Little Elrig."

"Did you understand?" she said, stopping her fictitious task and gasping, at the same time scrutinising him closely.

"Oh, yes—no, not very well," he stammered, making a great work with his plate and spoon.

"Do not tell me that," she said, coming over courageously and laying her hand upon his shoulder. "I know you understand every word of the story, if it is the story I mean."

He did not deny it this time. "But I do not know whether it is the same story or not," he said, eagerly wishing she would change the subject.

"What I mean," said she, "is a story about a woman who was a friend of mine—and—and she quarrelled with my brothers. Is that the one?"

"That was the one," said he.

Miss Mary wrung her hands. "Oh!" she cried piteously, "that they should be thinking about that yet! wiser-like would it be for them to be sitting at the Book. Poor Nan! Poor Nan! my dear companion! Must they be blaming her even in the grave? You understand it very well. I know by your face you understand it. She should not have all the blame. They did not understand; they were older, more sedate than she was; their merriment was past; there was no scrap left of their bairnhood that even in the manliest man finds a woman's heart quicker than any other quality. I think she tried to—to—to—like them because they were my brothers, but the task beat her for all her endeavour. It is an old, dait story. I am wondering at them bringing it up to you. What do you think they would bring it up to you for?" And she scrutinised him shrewdly again.

"I think the girl the Cornal saw me with put him in mind of her mother," said Gilian, pushing the idea no further.

She still looked closely at him. "The girl cannot help that," said she. "She is very like her mother in some ways—perhaps in many. Maybe that was the Cornal's reason for telling you the story."

There was not, for once, the response of understanding in Gilian's face. She could say no more. Was he not a boy yet, perhaps with the impulse she and the Cornal feared, all undeveloped? And at any rate she dare not give him the watchword that all their remembrances led up to—the word Beware.

But Gilian guessed the word, and his assumption of ignorance was to prevent Miss Mary from guessing so much. Only he misunderstood. He looked upon the desire to keep him from the company of the people of Maam as due to the old rancours and jealousies, while indeed it was all in his interest.

But in any case he respected the feelings of the Paymaster's family, and thereafter for long he avoided as honestly as a boy might all intercourse with the girl, whom circumstance the mischievous, the henchman of the enemy, put in his way more frequently almost than any of her sex. He must be meeting her in the street, the lane, the market-place, in the highway, or in walks along the glen. He kept aloof as well as he might (yet ever thinking her for song and charm the most interesting girl he knew), and the days passed; the springs would be but a breath of rich brown mould and birch, the summers but a flash of golden days growing briefer every year, the winters a lessening interlude of storm and darkness.

Gilian grew like a sapling in all seasons, in mind and fancy as in body. Ever he would be bent above the books of Marget Maclean, getting deeper to the meaning of them. The most trivial, the most inadequate and common story had for him more than for its author, for under the poor battered phrase that runs through book and book, the universal gestures of bookmen, he could see history and renew the tragedies that suggested them at the outset. He was no more Brooks' scholar though he sat upon his upper forms, for, as the dominie well could see, he was launching out on barques of his own; the plain lessons ot the school were without any interest as they were without any difficulty to him. He roamed about the woods, he passed precious hours upon the shore, his mind plangent like the wave.

"A droll fellow that of the Paymaster's," they said of him in the town. For as he aged his shyness grew upon him, and he went about the community at ease with himself only when his mind was elsewhere.

"A remarkable young gentleman," said Mr. Spencer one day to the Paymaster. "I am struck by him, sir, I am struck. He has an air of cleverness, and yet they tell me he is—"

"He is what?" asked the Paymaster, lowering his brows suspicious on the innkeeper's hesitation.

"They tell me he is not so great a credit to old Brooks as he might expect," said the innkeeper, who was not lacking in boldness or plain speaking if pushed to it.

"Ay, they say that?" repeated the Paymaster, pinching his snuff vigorously. "Maybe they're right too. I'll tell you what. The lad's head is stuffed with wind. He goes about with notions swishing round inside that head of his, as much the plaything of nature as the reed that whistles in the wind at the riverside and fancies itself a songster."

Mr. Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that this was a delicate question. He let it pass unput.

Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy. The same day at their meridian in the "Abercrombie" he broached the topic.

"I'll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his hand."

"A crook in his hand?" said the Paymaster. "Would you have nothing else for him but a crook?"

"Well," said MacGibbon, "I supposed you would be for putting him into Ladyfield. If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for."

"Ladyfield!" cried the Paymaster. "There was no notion further from my mind. Farming, for all Duke George's reductions, is the last of trades nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a soger."

MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. "If you did I forgot," said he. "It never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your influence will be useful." And he changed the subject.

At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said, "when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go," was on an excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness. For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river's peaty flow; he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazily, and within him rose the whole charm and glamour of oceans and isles. Swimming in the briny deeps that washed the rocks, he felt in that solitude so sufficient, so much in harmony with the spirit of the place, its rumination, its content, its free and happy birds, as if he were Ellar in the fairy tale. The tide caressed; it put its arms round him; it laughed in the sunshine and kissed him shyly at the lips. Into the swooping concourse of the birds he would send, thus swimming, his brotherly halloo. They called back; they were not afraid, they need not be—he loved them.

To-day he had come down to the Waterfoot almost unknowing where he walked. Though the woods were bare there was the look of warmth in their brown and purple depths; only on the upper hills did the snow lie in patches. Great piles of trunks, the trunks of old fir and oak, lay above high-water mark. He turned instinctively to look for the ship they were waiting for, and behind him, labouring at a slant against the wind, was the Jean coming from the town to pick her cargo from this narrow estuary.

He was plucked at the heart by a violent wish to stay. At the poop he could see Black Duncan, and the seaman's histories, the seaman's fables all came into his mind again, and the sea was the very highway of content. The ship was all alone upon the water, not even the tan of a fisher's lug-sail broke the blue. A bracing heartening air blew from French Foreland And as he was looking spellbound upon the little vessel coming into the mouth of the river, he was startled by a strain of music. It floated, a rumour angelic, upon the air, coming whence he could not guess—surely not from the vessel where Black Duncan and two others held the deck alone?

It was for a time but a charm of broken melody in the veering wind, distinct a moment, then gone, then back a faint echo of its first clearness. It was not till the vessel came fairly opposite him that the singer revealed herself in Nan sitting on a water-breaker in the lee of the companion hatch.

For the life of him he could not turn to go away. He rebelled against the Paymaster's service, and remained till the ship was in the river mouth beside him.

"Ho 'ille 'ille!" Black Duncan cried upon him, leaning upon his tarry gunnle, and smiling to the shore like a man far-travelled come upon a friendly face in some foreign port. The wooded rock gave back the call with interest. Round about turned the seaman and viewed the southern sky. A black cloud was pricked upon the spur of Cowal. "There's wind there," said he, "and water too! I'm thinking we are better here than below Otter this night. Nan, my dear, it is home you may get to-day, but not without a wetting. I told you not to come, and come you would."

She drummed with her heels upon the breaker, held up a merry chin, and smiled boldly at her father's captain. "Yes, you told me not to come, but you wanted me to come all the time. I know you did. You wanted songs, you wanted all the songs, and you had the ropes off the pawl before I had time to change my mind."

"You should go home now," said the seaman anxiously. "Here is our young fellow, and he will walk up to the town with you."

She pretented to see Gilian for the first time, staring at him boldly, with a look that made him certain she was thinking of the many times he had manifestly kept out of her way. It made him uneasy, but he was more uneasy when she spoke.

"The Paymaster's boy," said she. "Oh! he would lose himself on the way home, and the fairies might get him. When I go I must find my own way. But I am not going now, Duncan. If it will rain, it will rain and be done with it, and then I will go home."

"Come on board," said Duncan to the boy. "Come on board, and see my ship, then; she is a little ship, but she is a brave one, I'm telling you; there is nothing of the first of her left for patches."

Gilian looked longingly at the magic decks confused with ropes, and the open companion faced him, leading to warm depths, he knew by the smoke that floated from the funnel. But he paused, for the girl had turned her head to look at the sea, and though he guessed somehow she might be willing to have him with her for his youth, he did not care to venture.

Then Black Duncan swore. He considered his invitation too much of a favour to have it treated so dubiously. Gilian saw it and went upon the deck.

Youth, that is so long (and all too momentary), and leaves for ever such a memory, soon, forgets. So it was that in a little while Gilian and Nan were on the friendliest of terms, listening to Black Duncan's stories. As they listened, the girl sat facing the den stair, so that her eyes were lit to their depths, her lips were flaming red. The seaman and the boy sat in shadow. The seaman, stretched upon a bunk with his feet to the Carron stove, the boy upon a firkin, could see her every wave of fancy displayed upon her countenance. She was eager, she was piteous, she was laughing, in the right key of response always when the stories that were told were the straightforward things of a sailor's experience—storms, adventures, mishaps, passion, or calm. She had grown as Gilian had grown, in mind as in body; and thinking so, he was pleased exceedingly. But the tales that the boy liked were the tales that were not true, and these, to Gilian's sorrow, she plainly did not care for; he could see it in the calmness of her features. When she yawned at a tale of Irish mermaidens he was dashed exceedingly, for before him again was the sceptic who had laughed at his heron's nest and had wantonly broken the crystal of the Lady's Linn. But by-and-by she sang, and oh! all was forgiven her. This time she sang some songs of her father's, odd airs from English camp-fires, braggart of word, or with the melodious longings of men abroad from the familiar country, the early friend.

"I wish I was a soldier," he found himself repeating in his thought. "I wish I was a soldier, that such songs might be sung for me."

A fury at the futility of his existence seized him. He would give anything to be away from this life of ease and dream, away where things were ever happening, where big deeds were possible, where the admiration and desire were justified. He felt ashamed of his dreams, his pictures, his illusions. Up he got from his seat upon the firkin, and his head was in the shadows of the smoky timbers.

"Sit down, lad, sit down," said the seaman, lazy upon his arm upon the shelf. "There need be no hurry now; I hear the rain."

A moan was in the shrouds, the alarm of a freshening wind. Some drops trespassed on the cabin floor, then the rain pattered heavily on the deck. The odours of the ship passed, and in their place came the smell of the cut timber on the shore, the oak's sharpness, the rough sweetness of the firs, all the essence, the remembrance of the years circled upon the ruddy trunks, their gatherings of storm and sunshine, of dew, showers, earth-sap, and the dripping influence of the constant stars.

"I cannot stay here, I cannot stay here! I must go," cried the lad, and he made to run on deck.

But Duncan put a hand out as the lowest step was reached, and set him back in his place.

"Sit you there!" said he. "I have a fine story you never heard yet And a fighting story too."

"What is it? What is it?" cried Nan. "Oh! tell us that one. Is it a true one?"

"It is true—in a way," said the seaman. "It was a thing that happened to myself."

Gilian delayed his going—the temptation of a new story was too much for him.

"Do you take frights?" Black Duncan asked him. "Frights for things that are not there at all?"

Gilian nodded.

"That is because it is in the blood," said the seaman; "that is the kind of fright of my story."

And this is the story Black Duncan told in the Gaelic.



CHAPTER XVI—THE DESPERATE BATTLE

"Black darkness came down on the wood of Creag Dubh, and there was I lost in the middle of it, picking my way among the trees. Fir and oak are in the wood. In the oak I could walk straight with my chin in the air, facing anything to come; in the fir the little branches scratched at my neck and eyes, and I had to crouch low and go carefully.

"I had been at a wedding in the farm-house of Leacann. Song and story had been rife about the fire; but song and story ever have an end, and there was I in the hollow of the wood after song and story were by, the door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them as I went. Not a star pricked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet, though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the fin dust. I swept every one with a shell aside, hunting for my cracked fellow, and when I found him never was nut so sweet!

"Then came to me the queerest of notions, that some night before in this same wood I had lost a nut, and the darkness was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail under the lid of it. And yet the time or season that ever I cracked nuts in Creag Dubh was what I could never give name to.

"'Where was it? When was it?' said I to myself, bent double creeping under the young larch with my plaid drawn up to fend my eyes, and the black fright crept over me. An owl's whoop would have been cheery, or the snort of a hind—and Creag Dubh is in daytime stirring with bird and beast—but here was I stark lonely in the heart of it, never a sound about, far from the hunting road, and my mind back among the terrors of a thousand years ere ever the Feinne were sung.

"In this dreamy quirk of the mind I felt I was a hunter and a man of arms. I was searching for a something here in this ghostly wood. The cudgel and knife of folks I could not understand were coming on me! Fast, fast, and hard I crunched my nuts, chewing shell and meat fiercely between my teeth to fill the skull of my head with noise and shut out the quietness. Never a taste of what I ate, sour or sweet. But so hard and fast I crunched that soon my store of nuts was done, and there I was helpless with my ears open to the roaring wave of sound that we call silence. I stood a little, and though my back grewed at the chill of the dreadful spaces behind me, I held my breath to study the full fright of the hour. Something was coming to me; I knew it. When this thing happened before, when a skin was my kilt and my shanks were bare, whatever I had to meet had met me in the round space among the candle-wood roots. The hair on my wrists stirred, a cry came to my throat and was over the edge of it and into the dark night like a man's heart scurrying craven to the door.