"Through the wood went that craven roar, the wood all its own and, a stranger, I listened to my own voice wake up Echo far off on Ben Dearg.

"The doors of Echo shut on the only thing I knew and was half friendly with in the Duke's wood, and down on me again came the quietest quietness.

"'Be taking thy feet from here' said I to myself, taking out my sailor-knife and scrugging my bonnet well on my brow. And there was no wind, not a breath, on Creag Dubh. The stars black out, the rough ground broken to my foot, the branches scraping unfriendly, I went on through the trees.

"When one goes up from the Leacann hunting road into the farm-lands he comes in a while on a space among the trees, clean shorn like the shearing of a hook but for white hay that lies there thick and rustling in the spring of the year. 'Black Duncan,' said I, 'be pulling thyself together, gristle and bone, for here's the fright that stirs about the dark with fingers and claws.' I was the first man (said my notion) who ever set foot on the braes of Argyll, newly from Erin and Argyll thick with ghosts; daytime or dark the woods were full of things that hate the stranger. Under my feet the rotting dust of the fir-trees felt soft and clogging, like the banks of new-delved graves. My back shivered again to the feel of the space behind me; in my bonnet stirred my hair. I went into the glade with a dry tongue rasping on the roof of my mouth.

"When the Terror came up against me, I could have laughed in my sudden ease of mind, for here at last was something to be sure of, in a way. And I gripped back as it gripped fast at me, feeling it hairy at the neck and the crook of the arms—a breathing and lusty body.

"'What have I here?' I asked, but never an answer. At my throat went ten clawed fingers, and there was Duncan at dismal battle, fighting for life with what he could not see, in his own home woods, but they so strange and never a friend to help!

"For a time I had no chance with the knife; but at last 'Steel, my darling!' said I, and I struck low in the soft spaces. 'Gloop,' said the knife, and Death was twisting at my feet.

"Did Duncan put hurry on his heels and fly? The hurry was not in me but the deep heart's wonder. My first dead thing that in life had ever struck back held me till the morning with a girl's enchantment I went down on a knee in the grass and felt him, a soft lump, freezing slowly from the heel to the knee, from the knee to the neck. Some rags of costume were on him, a kilt of coarse plaiding and a half-shirt of skin, soaked in sweat at the armpits and wet with blood at the end.

"I waited till the morning to see what I had. 'This,' said I, hunched on a mound, 'is all as it was before.' The first sound I heard was the squeal of a beast caught at the throat among the bracken, then a hind snored among the grass. The morning walked solemn among the trees, stopping at every step to listen; birds put their claws down and shook themselves free of sleep and dew; a polecat slinking past me started at my eye and went back to his hole. Began the fir-trees waving in the wind, and then the day was open wide and far.

"In the dark I had strained my eyes to see what was at my feet till my eyeballs creaked in their hollows, yet now I had no desire to turn about from the cheerful dawn and look behind, but I did it with my heart thudding.

"Nothing was there to see, lappered blood, nor mark of body on grass!

"My knife, without a stain on the steel of it, was still in my hand. I wiped it with a tuft of bracken, and I laughed with something of a bitterness.

"'So!' said I, 'the old story, the old story! It happened me before, and in a hundred years from now Black Duncan will be at the killing again.'"



CHAPTER XVII—THE STORM

The vessel, straining at the rope that bound her to the shore, lay with a clumsy shoulder over the bank that shelved abruptly into the great depths where slimy weeds entangled. Her sails were housed and snug, the men in the bows lay under the flapping corner of the jib and played at cards, though the noise of the raindrops on their canvas roof might well disturb them. Gilian made no pause; he ran up at the tale's conclusion, at a bound he was on the shore, staggering upon the rocks and slipping upon the greasy weeds till he came to the salt bent grass, and with firmer footing ran like a young deer for the shelter of the wood. The rain battered after him, the wind rose. In front, the wood, so still an hour before, in its winter slumber, with no birds now to mar its dreams, had of a sudden roused to the rumour of the storm. As by an instinct, the young trees on the edge seemed to shudder before the winds came to them. Their slim tips could not surely be bowing, even so little, to the gale that was yet behind Gilian. But he passed them and plunged under the tall firs, and he felt secure only when the ruddy needles of other years were a soft carpet underfoot It was true he found shelter here from the rain that slanted terrifically, but it was not for sanctuary from the elements he sought the rude aisles, though now he appreciated the peace of them. It was for escape from himself, from his sense of hopeless, inexplicable longing, from some tremendous convulsion of his mind created by Black Duncan's fable.

The wood was all a wood of fir, not old nor very young, but at that mid age when it has to all of country blood an invitation to odorous dusks and pathless wanderings below laced branches. The sun never could reach the heart of it, except at the hour of setting, when it flamed bloody through the pillars. The rain never seemed to penetrate, for the fir-needles underfoot grew more dusty year by year. But when the rain beat as it did now, through the whole of it went a sound of gobbling and drumming, and the wind, striking upon the trunks as if they were the strings of Ossian, harped a great and tremendous tune, wanting start or ending. And by-and-by there came company for Gilian as he sheltered in the wood. Birds of all kinds beat hurriedly through the trees and settled upon the boughs with a shudder of the quill, pleased to be out of the inclement open and cosily mantled in.

The boy went into the very inmost part of the wood without knowing the reason why thus he should fly from the ship that so recently had enchanted him, from the tales he loved. But in the soothing presence of the firs and the content of the animals sheltering from the storm, he found a momentary peace from the agitation that had set up in him, roused at the song of the girl, the story of the mariner. The emotions, the fears, longings, discontents that jangled through him as they had never done before relapsed to a mood level and calm, as if they, too, had sheltered from the storm like the birds upon the trees.

But by-and-by he became ashamed of his action, that must seem so foolish to the friends he had left in the ship without a word of explanation. His face flamed hotly at the thought of his rude departure. He would give a world to be able to go back again as if nothing had happened and sit unchallenged in the cosy den of the Jean. And musing thus he went through the wood till he came upon the bank of the Duglas, roaring grey and ragged, a robber from the hills, bearing spoil of the upper reaches, the town-lands, the open and windswept plains. It carried the trunks of great trees that had lain since other storms upon its banks, and with a great chafing and cracking no less than the wooden bridge from Clonary which the children were wont to cross from those parts on their way to school.

"That will go battering on the vessel," he thought, looking amazed at its ponderous beams flicking through the water and over the little cascades as if they had been feathers blown by an evening breeze. "That will go battering on the Jean" he thought, and of a sudden it seemed his manifest duty to warn the occupants of the ship to defend themselves from the unexpected attack.

He followed the bridge for a little, fascinated, wondering what was to become of it next in the tumult of waters till he came to the falls, where he had looked for a check to it. But it stayed no more than a moment on the lip of the precipice swung up a jagged edge above the deep, then crashed into the linn, where it seemed to swerve and turn, giddy with its adventure. Gilian stood spellbound on the banks looking at it so far down, then he turned, and cutting off the bend of the river, made for the shore.

He crashed through bracken and bramble and through the fir-wood again, startling the sheltering birds by his hurry, emerging upon the face of the brae in sight of the Jean and the sea. In his absence a great change had come upon the wave, upon the hilly distance, upon the whole countenance of nature. The rain was no longer in drumming torrents, but in a soft and almost imperceptible veil; but if the rain had lost the wind had gained. And as he passed from the edge of the wood, all the trees seemed to twang and creak, or cracked loudly, parting perhaps at some dear nerve where sap and beauty would no longer course. In every bush along the edge of the wood there seemed a separate chorus of voices, melodious and terrific, whistle and whoop, shriek and moan. Even the grass nodding in the wind lent a thin voice to the chorus, a voice such as only the sharp and sea-trained ear may comprehend, that beasts hear long before the wind itself is apparent, so that they remove themselves to the bieldy sides of the hills before tumult breaks.

But it was the aspect of the sea that most surprised the boy, for where before there had been but a dreaming plain of smiles there was the riot of waters. The black lips of the wave parted and showed the white fangs underneath, or spat the spume of passion into the face of the day. It looked as if every glen and every gully, every corry and eas on that mountainous coast was spending its breath upon the old sea, the poor old sea that would be let alone to dream and rest, but must suffer the humours of the mischievous winds.

It was but for a moment Gilian lent his eye to the open and troubled expanse. He saw there no sign of ship, but looking lower into shore he beheld the Jean in travail at the Duglas mouth. The tide had come fully in while he was absent, the delta that before had been so much lagoon and isle was become an estuary, where, in the unexpected tide and rush of the river, the logs of fir and oak were all adrift about the sides of the vessel. Every hand was busy. They poled off as best they might the huge trunks that battered at the carvel planks and pressed upon the twanging cable. Forward of the mast Black Duncan stood commanding in loud shouts that could not reach the boy through the wind's bellowing, and as he shouted, he lent, like a good seaman, vigour to a spar and pushed off the besieging timbers, all his weight aslant upon the wood, his arms tense, a great and wholesome figure of endeavour.

But not Black Duncan nor his striving seamen so busy in that confusion of wind and water were the first to catch the boy's eye. It was Nan, struggling by her captain's side at the unshipped tiller, and in the staggering ship seeking to send it home in the avoiding helm-head. Her hair blew round her with the vaunting spirit of a banner, her body in every move was rich with a sort of exaltation.

As yet the bridge had not reached them. It might have been checked altogether in the linn, or it might still be slowly grinding its way round the great bend of the river, that Gilian had cut off by his plunge through the wood. But at least he was there to alarm, for its assault, borne down on the spate, would be worse by far than that of the timber. He beat his way again, bent, through the wind, to the water-edge now so far in and separate from the ship, and cried out a loud warning. It seemed to himself as he did so the voice of an infant, so weak was it, so shrill and piping, buffeted about by Heaven's large and overwhelming utterance. They paid no heed at first, but by-and-by they heard him.

"The bridge! God! do you tell me?" cried Black Duncan in a visible consternation. "Is it far up?"

Gilian put his hand to his mouth and trumpeted his response.

"The bend! My sorrow! she's as good as on us then. We must be at our departures."

The mariners scurried about the deck; Black Duncan threw off the prisoning cable; there were shouts, swift looks, and a breathless pause; the Jean swung round before the corner of her jib laboured clumsily for a moment unbelieving of her release, then drifted slowly from the river mouth, her little boat and her tiller left behind, the first caught by the warring tree-trunks, the latter dashed from Nan's hands by the swing of an unfastened boom. As helpless as the logs she had been encountering, she was loose before the wind that drove her parallel with the shore at no safe distance from its fringe of rocks.

Gilian, scarcely knowing what he did, ran along the shore, following her course, looking at her with a wild eye. The men were calling to him, waving, pointing, but what they meant he could not surmise; all his interest was in the girl who stood motionless, seemingly aghast at her mishap, with her hair still blowing about her.

To the north where he was running, black masses of clouds were piling, and the sea, so far as the eye could reach, was weltering more cruelly than before. Seagulls screamed without ceasing, and the human imitation of their calls roused uncanny notions that they welcomed the vessel to her doom. She seemed so helpless, so hopeless, dashed upon by the spume of those furious lips, bit by the grinding teeth.

But yet he ran on and on over the salt grass or the old wrack that the sea-spray wet to a new slime, never pausing but for a moment now and then to try and understand what the men on deck were shouting to him.

Off the shore north of the Duglas is a rock called Ealan Dubh, or the Black Island, a single bare and rounded block without a blade of grass on it, that juts out of the sea in all weathers and tides and is grown on thickly with little shell-fish. To-day it could not be seen, but the situation of it was plain in the curling crest of the white waves that bent constantly over it Straight for this rock the Jean was driving and a great pity came over Gilian, a pity for himself as he anticipated the sickening crash upon the rock, the rip of the timber, the gurgle at the holes, the sundering of the bolted planks, the collapse of the mast, the ultimate horrible plunge. He was Black Duncan, the swimmer, fighting hard for life between the ship and the shore; he was the girl, with wet hair flapping blindly at the eyes, clinging with bleeding finger-nails to the rough shells that clustered on the rock. It was horrible, horrible! And then many tales from the shelves of Marget Maclean came to his memory where one in such circumstances had done a brave thing. To save the girl and bring her from the rock ashore—that was the thing to be done—but how? Even the sea fairy, as he had said, might be worth drowning for. Helplessly he looked up and down the shore. There was nothing to see but the torn fringe of the tide, the waving branches of the coast He had no more than grasped the solitude of the country-side (feeling himself something of God's proxy thus to be watching the destruction of the ship) when the Jean went upon the rock. Her shock upon it was not to be heard from the shore, and she did not break up all at once as he had anticipated; she paused as it might seem, quite willingly, in her career before the wind and slewed round a tarry broadside to the crested wave. She began to settle in the water by her riven quarter, but Gilian did not see that, for it came about slowly. All he could see was that Black Duncan and his men upon the higher part of the slanted deck were calling to him more loudly than before and pointing with frenzied gestures back in the direction whence they had come.

He looked back, he could not comprehend.

More loudly yet they called. They clustered, the three of them on the shrouds, and in one voice tried to bellow down the gale.

He could not understand. He turned a pitiful figure on the shore, his mind tumultuous with wrestling thoughts and dreads, with images of the rough depths where the girl's hair would sway like weed in a green haze in an everlasting stillness.

Again the seamen called, and it seemed, as he looked at their meaningless gesticulations, that the bowsprit of the vessel now pointed higher than before. The appalling story thus told to him had barely got home when he saw a change in the conduct of the seamen. They ceased to cry and wave; they looked no longer at him but in the direction whence he had come, and turning, he saw the vessel's little boat bobbing in the sea-troughs. It had an occupant too, a lad not greatly older than himself, using only a guiding oar, who so was directing the boat in the drifting waves towards the Ealan Dubh and the counter of the Jean.

Then the whole folly of his conduct, the meaning of the seamen's cries, the obvious and simple thing he should have done came to Gilian—he discovered himself the dreamer again. A deep contempt for himself came over him and he felt inclined to run back to the solace of the woods with a shame more burdensome than before, but the doings of the lad who had but to wade to pick up the lost boat and was now bearing down on the doomed vessel prevented him. He watched with a fascination the things being done that he should have done himself, he made himself, indeed, the lad who did them. It was as if in a dream, looking upon himself with a stranger's admiration, he saw the little boat led dexterously beside the vessel in spite of the tumbling waves, and Black Duncan, out upon her bowsprit, board her, lift his master's daughter in, and row laboriously ashore. Then Gilian turned and made a poor, contemptuous retreat.



CHAPTER XVIII—DISCOVERY

The town was dripping at its eaves and glucking full of waters at rone-mouths and syvers when he got into it after his disgraceful retreat He was alone in the street as he walked through it, a wet woebegone figure with a jacket-collar high up to the ears to meet the nip of the elements. Donacha Breck, leaning over his counter and moodily looking at the hens sheltering their wind-blown feathers under his barrow, saw him pass and threw over his shoulder to his wife behind a comment upon the eccentricity of the Paymaster's boy.

"He's scarcely all there," said he, "by the look of him. He's wandering about in the rah as if it was a fine summer day and the sun shining."

Crossing from the school to his lodging, an arm occupied by a great bundle of books, the other contending with an umbrella, was the dominie, and he started at the sight of his errant pupil who nearly ran against him before his presence was observed.

"Well, Gilian?" said he, a touch of irony in his accent, himself looking a droll figure, hunched round his books and turning like a weathercock jerkily to keep the umbrella between him and the wind that strained its whalebone ribs till they almost snapped.

Gilian stopped, looked hard at the ground, said never a word. And old Brooks, over him, gazed at the wet figure with puzzlement and pity.

"You beat me; you beat me quite!" said he. "There's the making of a fine man in you; you have sharpness, shrewdness, a kind of industry, or what may be doing for that same; every chance of a paternal kind—that's to say a home complete and comfortable—and still you must be acting like a wean! You were not at the school to-day. I'm keeping it from Miss Campbell as long as I can, but I'll be bound to tell her of your truancy this time."

He risked the surrounding hand a moment from his books, bent a little and tapped the boy's jacket pocket.

"Ay! A book again!" said he slyly. "What is it this time? But never mind; it does not matter. I'll warrant it is not Mr. Butter's Spellings nor Murray the Grammarian, but some trash of a novelle. Any exercise for your kind but the appointed task! I wish—I wish—Tuts! laddie, you are wet to the skin, haste ye home and get a heat."

Gilian did not need a second bidding; but ran up the street, without slacking his pace till he got to the foot of the Paymaster's stair, where the wind from the pend-close was howling most dismally. He lingered on the stair, extremely loth to face Miss Mary with a shame so plain upon his countenance as he imagined it must be. No way that he could tell the story of the Jean's disaster would leave out his sorry share in it. A quick ear heard him on the stair; the door opened.

"Oh, you rascal!" cried Miss Mary, her anxious face peering down at him. "You were never in the school till this time." She put her hand upon his bonnet and his sleeve and found them soaking. "Oh, I knew it! I knew it!" she cried. "Just steeping!"

He found an unexpected relief in her consternation at his condition and in her bustle to get him into dry clothing. After the experience he had come through, the storm and the spectacle he had seen as in a dream from the shore, he indulged in the cordiality and cosiness of the warm kitchen for a little with selfish gladness. But it was only for a little; the disaster to the vessel and the consciousness that his own part in the business would certainly come to light, overwhelmed him again, and it was a most dolorous face that looked at Miss Mary over the viands she had just put before him.

"What ails the callant?" she demanded in a tremble, staring at him.

He burst into tears, the first she had seen on his face since ever he had come to her house, and all her mother's heart was sore.

"What mischief were you in?" she asked, putting an arm about his neck, and her troubled face down upon his hair as he shook in his chair. "I am sure you were not to blame. It could not have been much, Gilian. Tuts! tuts!" And so she went on in a ludicrous way, coaxing him to indifference for the sin she fancied.

At last he told her the beginnings of his tragedy, that he had seen the Jean wrecked on Ealan Dubh, and the girl Nan on board of her. She was for a moment dumb with horror, believing the end had come to all upon the vessel, but on this Gilian speedily assured her, and "Oh, am n't I glad!" said she with a simple utterance and a transport on her visage that showed how deep was her satisfaction.

"How did they get ashore?" she asked,

"In the small boat," said Gilian uncomfortably. "It caught on the logs at the mouth of the river when she drifted off, and—and—"

"And a boy went out in it and brought them help!" she cried, finely uplifted in a delight that she had guessed the cause of his trepidation. "Oh, you darling! And not to say a word of it! Am not I the proud woman this day? My dear companion Nan's girl!"

She caught him fervently as he rose ashamed from his seat to explain or to make an escape from the punishment that was in her error, a punishment more severe than if he had been blamed. She was one never prone to the displays of love and rapture, but this time her joy overcame her, and she kissed him with something of a redness on her face. It was to the boy as if he had been smitten on the mouth. He drew back almost rudely in so great a confusion that it but confirmed her guess. "You must come and tell my brothers," said she, "this very moment. Don't say anything about the lass, but they'll be keen to hear about the vessel They sit there hearing nothing of the world's news, unless it comes to the fireside for them, and then I've noticed they're as ready to listen as Peggy would be at the Cross well."

She had him half way to the parlour before he thought of a protest, he had found such satisfaction in being relieved from her mistaken pride in him. Then he concluded it was as well to go through with it, thinking that if the rescue of the girl was not to be in the story, his own shortcomings need not emerge. She pushed him before her into the room; her brothers were seated at the fire, and they only turned when her voice, in a very unaccustomed excitement, broke the quietness of the chamber.

"Do you hear this?" she cried, and her hand on Gilian's shoulder; "a vessel's sunk on the Ealan Dubh."

"I knew there would be tales to tell of this," said the General. "The wind came too close on the frost. I mind at Toulouse——"

"And Gilian was down at the Waterfoot and saw it all," she broke in upon the reminiscence.

"Was he, faith?" said the Cornal. "I like my tales at first hand. Tell us all about it, laddie; what vessel was she?"

He wheeled his chair about as he spoke, and roused himself to attention. It was a curious group, too much like his old court-martial to be altogether to the boy's taste. For Miss Mary stood behind him, with an air of proud possession of him that was disquieting, and the two men seemed to expect from him some very exciting history indeed.

"Well, well!" said the Cornal, drumming with his fingers on his chair-arm impatiently, "you're in no great hurry with your budget. What vessel was it?"

"It was the Jean," said Gilian, bracing himself up for a plunge.

"Ye seem to be a wondrous lot mixed up with the fortunes of that particular ship," said the Cornal sourly. "What way did it happen?"

"She was in the mouth of the river," said Gilian, "and the spate of the river brought down the wooden bridge at Clonary. I saw it coming, and I cried to them, and Black Duncan cast off, leaving boat and tiller. She drove before the wind and went on Ealan Dubh, and sunk, and—that was all."

The story, as he told it, was as bald of interest as if it were a page from an old almanack.

"What came of the men?" said the Cornal. "The loss of the Jean does not amount to muckle; there was not a plank of her first timbers left in her."

"They got ashore in the small boat," said Gilian.

"Which was left behind, I think you said at first," said the Cornal, annoyed at some apparent link a missing in the chain of circumstance. "If the boat was left behind as well as the tiller—I think you mentioned the tiller—how did they get ashore in it? Did you see them get ashore?"

"I saw Black Duncan and the girl, but not the others," answered Gilian, all at once forgetting that some caution was needed here.

Up more straightly sat the Cornal, and fixed him with a stern eye.

"Oh, ay!" said he; "she was in the story too, and you fancied you might hide her. I would not wonder now but you had been in the vessel yourself."

Gilian was abashed at his own inadvertence, but he hastened to explain that he was on the shore watching the vessel when she struck.

"But you were on the vessel some time?" said the Cornal, detecting some reservation.

"Oh, Colin, Colin, I wonder at you!" cried Miss Mary, now in arms for her favourite, and utterly heedless of the frown her brother threw at her for her interference. "You treat the boy as if he was a vagabond and—"

"—Vagabond or no vagabond," said the Cornal, "he was where he should not be. I'm wanting but the truth from him, and that, it seems, is not very easy to get."

"You are not just at all," she protested. Then she went over and whispered something in his ear. His whole look changed; where had been suspicion came something of open admiration, but he gave it no expression on his tongue.

"Take your time, Gilian," said he; "tell us how the small boat got to the vessel."

"The boy went down to the river mouth," said Gilian, "and—"

"—The boy?" said the Cornal. "Well, if you must be putting it that idiotic way, you must; anyway, we're waiting on the story."

"—The boy went down to the river mouth and got into the small boat. She was half full of water and he baled her as well as he could with his bonnet, then pushed her off! She went up and down like a cork, and he was terrified. He thought when he went in first she would be heavy to row, but he found the lightness of her was the fearful thing. The wind slapped like a big open hand, and the water would scoop out on either side—"

"Take it easy, man, take it easy; slow march," said the Cornal. For Gilian had run into his narrative in one of his transports and the words could not come fast enough to his lips to keep up with his imagination. His face was quivering with the emotions appropriate to the chronicle.

"—Then I put out the oar astern——"

"—Humph! You did; that's a little more sensible way of putting it."

"I put the oar astern," said Gilian, never hearing the comment, but carried away by his illusion; "and the wind carried us up the way of Ealan Dubh. Sometimes the big waves would try to pull the oar from my hands, wanting fair play between their brothers and the ship. ('Havers!' muttered the Cornal.) And the spindrift struck me in the eyes like hands full of sand. I thought I would never get to the vessel. I thought she would be upset every moment, and I could not keep from thinking of myself hanging on to the keel and my fingers slipping in weariness."

"A little less thinking and more speed with your boat would be welcome," said the Cornal impatiently. "I'm sick sorry for them, waiting there on a wreck with so slow a rescue coming to them."

Gilian hesitated, with his illusion shattered, and, all unnerved, broke for the second time into tears.

"Look at that!" cried Miss Mary pitifully, herself weeping; "you are frightening the poor laddie out of his wits," and she soothed Gilian with numerous Gaelic endearments.

"Tuts! never mind me," said the Cornal, rising and coming forward to clap the boy on the head for the very first time. "I think we can guess the rest of the story. Can we not guess the rest of the story, Dugald?"

The General sat bewildered, the only one out of the secret, into which Miss Mary's whisper to the Cornal has not brought him.

"I am not good at guessing," said he; "a man at my time likes everything straight forward." And there was a little irritation in his tone.

"It's only this, Dugald," said his brother, "that here's a pluckier young fellow than we thought, and good prospects yet for a soger in the family. I never gave Jock credit for discretion, but, faith, he seems to have gone with a keen eye to the market for once in his life! If it was not for Gilian here, Turner was wanting a daughter this day; we could hardly have hit on a finer revenge."

"Revenge!" said the General, a flash jumping to his eyes, then dying away. "I would not have said that, Colin; I would not have said that. It is the phrase of a rough, quarrelsome young soldier, and we are elders who should be long by with it."

"Anyhow," said the Cornal, "here's the makings of a hero." And he beamed almost with affection on Gilian, now in a stupor at the complexity his day's doings had brought him to.

The Paymaster's rattan sounded on the stair, and "Here's John," said his sister. "He'll be very pleased, I'm sure."

It was anything but a pleased man who entered the room, his face puffed and red and his eyes searching around for his boy. He pointed a shaking finger at him.

"What, in God's name, do you mean by this?" he asked vaguely.

"Don't speak to the boy in that fashion," said the Cornal in a surprising new paternal key. "If he has been in mischief he has got out of it by a touch of the valiant—"

"Valiant!" cried the Paymaster with a sneer. "He made an ass of himself at the Waterfoot, and his stupidity would have let three or four people drown if Young Islay, a callant better than himself had not put out a boat and rescued them. The town's ringing with it."

The scar on the Cornal's face turned almost black. "Is that true that my brother says?" said he.

Gilian searched in a reeling head for some answer he could not find; his parched lips could not have uttered it, even if he had found it, so he nodded.

"Put me to my bed, somebody," said the General, breaking in suddenly on the shock of the moment, and staggering to one side a little as he spoke. "Put me to my bed, somebody. I am getting too old to understand!"



CHAPTER XIX—LIGHTS OUT!

AS he spoke he staggered to the side, and would have fallen but for his sister's readiness. About that tall rush of a brother she quickly placed an arm and kept him on his feet with infinite exertion, the while uttering endearments long out of fashion for her or him, but come suddenly, at this crisis, from the grave of the past—the past where she and Dugald had played as children, with free frank hearts loving each other truly.

"Put me to my bed," said he again thickly, and his eyes blurred with the utmost weariness. "Put me to my bed. O God! what is on me now? Put me to my bed."

"Dugald! Dugald! Dugald!" she cried. "My darling brother, here is Mary with you; it is just a turn." But as she said the flattering thing her face was hopeless. The odour of the southernwood on the window-sill changed at once to laurel, rain-drenched, dark, and waving over tombs for the boy spellbound on the floor. All his shameful perturbation vanished, a trifling thing before the great Perturber's presence.

The brothers went quickly beside their sister, and took him to his bedroom, furnished sparsely always by his own wish that denied indulgence in anything much beyond a soldier's campaign quarters.

Dr. Anderson came, and went, shaking hands with Miss Mary in the lobby and his eyes most sternly bent upon the inside of his hat "Before morning at the very most," he said in his odd low-country voice. No more than that, and still it thundered at her soul like an infernal doom. Up she gathered her apron, up to her face, and fled in among her pots and pans, and loudly she moved among them to drown her lamentation.

Dr. Colin came later and prayed in the two languages over a figure on the bed, and then went home to write another sermon than the one already started. The room he left was silent for a while, till of a sudden the eyes of the General opened and he looked upon the sorry company.

"Bring me MacGibbon," said he in a voice extremely sensible.

Gilian ran up the street and fetched the old comrade, who put his hand upon the General's head.

"Dugald, do you ken me?" said he.

"Do I ken you?" said the General with an unpractised smile. "You're the laddie that burned the master's cane. I would know your voice if you were in any guise, and what masquerade is this that you should be so old? We're to be the first to move in the morning, under arms at scream of day.... Lord, but I'm tired! Bob, Bob, they're not thinking of us at home in the old place I'll warrant, and to-morrow we may be stricken corpses for the king without so much as Macintyre's stretching-board to give us a soger's chest and shoulders."

"Was there anything I could do, Dugald?" said the comrade, a ludicrous man with his paunch now far beyond the limit of the soldier's belt he used to buckle easily, wearing in a clownish notion of deference to this soldier's passing a foolish small Highland bonnet he had donned in old campaigns.

"There was something running in my mind," said the man in the bed. "I think I would be wanting you to take word home in case anything happened. I was thinking of—of—of—what was her name, now? You know the one I mean—her ladyship in Glen Shira. Am I not stupid to forget it? that's the worst of the bottle! What was her name, now?... Battalion will form an hollow square.... The name, the name, what was it?... On the center companies, 'kwards wheel.... I'm wearied to the marrow of my bones, all but the right arm, that's like a feather, that's like a... By the right angle of the front face; sub-divisions to the right and left half wheel. Re-form the square. Hall! Dress!... What's that piper doing out there? MacVurich, come in! This is not a reel at a Skye wedding.... Let me see, I have the name on the tip of my tongue—what could it be, now? Steady, men!"

The door of the chamber was pushed in a little, and to Gilian's mouth his heart rose up at the manifestation, for what was this with no footstep on the wooden stair? About him he felt of a sudden cold airs waft, and the door ajar with no one entering glued his gaze upon its panels. The others in the room had not perceived it. Miss Mary, grown of a sudden plain and old, looked up in the Cornal's face, craving there for something for the ease of sorrow, as if he that had wandered so far and seen the Enemy so often and so ugly had some secret to share with her whereby this ancient trouble could be marred. There she found no consolation. No magician but only the brother looked over an untidy scarf and a limp high collar at the delirious man in bed. The Paymaster stood at the window frowning out upon the street; MacGibbon coughed in short dry jerky coughs, patted with a bony hand upon the coverlet, turned his head away. A stillness that was like a swoon came over all.

"Is that you, mother?" It was the General who broke the quiet, and his eyes were on his sister. A flush had fallen like a sunset on his face, his eyes were very clear and full, and, with his shaven cheeks, he might in the mitigate light of the chamber have been a lad new waked from an unpleasant dream. His sister put her head upon the pillow beside him and an arm about his shoulders.

"Oh, Dugald, Dugald!" said she, "it is not mother yet, but only Mary." And the bedstead shook with the stress of her grief.

"Mary, is it?" said he, shutting his eyes again. "What are you laughing at? I was not up there at all; I never saw her to-day, upon my word; I was just giving Black George an exercise no further than the Boshang Gate.... I'm saying, though, you need not let on about it to Colin... Colin, Colin, Colin, I wish we were home; the leaf must be fine and green upon Dunchuach.... They're over the river at Aldea Tajarda, and we push on to Cieudada.... What's that, Mackay? let go the girl! And you the Highland gentleman! Lo sien—sien—siento mucho, Senora."

"I am at your shoulder, Dugald, do you not know me?" asked the Cornal, gently putting his sister aside. His brother looked and smiled again, but did not seem to see him.

"What was her name? and I'll send her my love and duty, for, man, between us, I was fond of her,... There was a song she had:

The Rover went a-roving far upon the foreign seas, Oh, hail to thee, my dear, and fare-ye-weel.

Only it was in the Gaelic she sung it"

His voice, that was very weak and thin now, cracked, and no sound came though his lips moved.

Miss Mary took a cup and wet his lips. He seemed to think it a Communion, for again he shut his eyes, and "God," said he, "I am a sinful man to be sitting at Thy tables, but Thou knowest the soldier's trade, the soldier's sacrifice, and Thou art ready to forgive."

And still Gilian was in his bewilderment and fear about the open door. Had anything come in that was there beside them at the bed? Down in the kitchen Peggy poked the fire with less than her customary vigour, but between her cheerful and worldly occupation and this doleful room, felt Gilian, lay a space—a stairway full of dreads. All the stories he had heard of Death personified came to him fast upon each other, and they are numerous about winter fires in the Highland glens. He could fancy almost that he saw the plaided spectre by the bedside, arms akimbo, smiling ghastly, waiting till his prey was done with earthly conversation. It was horrible to be the only one in that chamber to know of the terrific presence that had entered at the door, and the boy's mouth parched with old, remote, unreasonable fears.

They did not disappear, those childish terrors, even when a kitten moved across the floor and began to toy with the vallance of the bed, explaining at once the door's opening. For might not the kitten, he thought, be more than Peggy's foundling be the other Thing disguised? He watched its gambols at the feet of that distressed household, watched its pawing at the fringe, turning round upon itself in playfulness, emblem surely of the cruel heedlessness of nature.

MacGibbon moved to the window and stood beside the Paymaster, saying no word, but looking out at the vacant street, its causeway still shining with the rain. They were turning their backs, as it were, on a sorrow irremediable. Miss Mary and the Cornal stood alone by the dying man. He lay like a log but that his left hand played restlessly on the coverlet, long in the fingers, sinewy at the wrist. Miss Mary took it in hers and put palm to palm, and caressed the back with her other hand with an overflowing of affection that murmured at her throat.

And now that MacGibbon did not see and the Cornal had blurred eyes upon his brother's boyish countenance, she felt free to caress, and she laid the poor hand against her cheek and coyly kissed it.

The General turned his look upon her wet face with a moment's comprehension. "Tuts! never mind, Mary, my dear," said he, "it might have been with Jamie yonder on the field, and there—there you have a son—in a manner—left to comfort you." Then he began to wander anew. "A son," said he, "a son. Whose son? Turner threw our sonlessness in our Jock's face, but it was in my mind there was a boy somewhere we expected something of."

Miss Mary beckoned on Gilian to come forward to the bedside. He rose from the chair he sat on in the farthest corner with his dreads and faltered over.

"What boy's this?" said the General, looking at him with surmising eyes. "He puts me in mind of—of—of—of an old tale somewhere with a sunny day in it. Nan! Nan! Nan!—that's the name. I knew I would come on it, for the sound of it was always like a sunny day in Portugal or Spain—He estado en Espana."

"This is the boy, Dugald," said Miss Mary; "this is just our Gilian."

"I see that. I know him finely," said the General, turning upon him a roving melancholy eye: "Jock's recruit.... Did you get back from your walk, my young lad? I never could fathom you, but perhaps you have your parts.... Well, well... what are ye dreaming on the day?... Eh? Ha! ha! ha! Aye dreaming, that was you; you'll be dreaming next that the lassie likes you. Mind, she jilted Jock, she jilted Colin, she jilted me; were we not the born idiots? yet still-and-on.... Sixty miles in twenty-four hours; good marching, lads, good marching, for half-starved men, and not the true heather-bred at that."

The voice was becoming weaker in every sentence, the flush was paling on the countenance. Standing by the bedside, the Cornal looked upon his brother with a most rueful visage, his face hoved up with tears.

"This beats all!" said he, and he turned and went beside the men at the window, leaving Miss Mary caressing still at the hand upon the coverlet, and with an arm about the boy.

"He was a strong, fine, wiry man in his time," said MacGibbon, looking over his shoulder at this end of a stormy life. "I mind him at Talavera; I think he was at his very best there."

The Paymaster looked, too, at the figure upon the bed, looked with a bent head, under lowered eyebrows, his lip and chin brown with snuffy tears.

"At sixteen he threw the cabar against the champion of the three shires, and though he was a sober man a bottle was neither here nor there with him," said the Cornal.

Miss Mary was upon her knees.

"The batteries are to open fire on San Vincent; seven eighteen-pounders and half a dozen howitzers are scarcely enough for that job. Tell Mackellar to move up two hundred yards farther on the right."

The General babbled again of his wars in a child's accent, that rose now and then stormily to the vehemence of the battle-field. "Columns deploy on the right centre company.... No, no, close column on the rear of the Grenadiers.... I wish, I wish.... Jock, Jock, where's your boy now? I cannot see him, I'm sore feared he's hiding in the sutler's vans. I knew him for a dreamer from the first day I saw him.... That's Williams gone and my step to Major come. God sain him! we could have better spared another man.... Halt, dress!"

He opened his eyes again and they fell upon Gilian. "You mind me of a boy I once knew," said he. "Poor boy, poor boy, what a pity of you! My sister Mary would have liked you. I think we never gave her her due, and indeed she had a generous hand."

"Here she's at your side, dear Dugald," said his sister, and her head went down upon his breast.

"So she is," said he, arousing to the fact; "I might be sure she would be there!" He disengaged the hand she had in hers, and wearily placed it for a moment on her hair with an awkward effort at fondling. "Are you tired, my dear?" he said, repeating it in the Gaelic. "It's a dreich dreich dying on a feather bed." He smiled once more feebly, and Gilian screamed, for the kitten had touched him on the leg.

"Go downstairs, this is no place for you, my dear," said Miss Mary; and he went willingly, hearing a stertorous breathing in the bed behind him.



PART II



CHAPTER XX—THE RETURN

When the General died, the household in the high burgh land suffered a change marvellous enough considering how little that old man musing in his parlour had had to do for years with its activities. Cornal Colin would sit of an evening with candles extravagantly burning more numerous than before to make up for the glowing heart extinguished; the long winter nights, black and stifling and immense around the burgh town, and the wind with a perpetual moan among the trees, would find him abandoned to his sorry self, looking into the fire, the week's paper on his knees unread, and him full of old remembrances and regrets. It had become for him a parlour full of ghosts. He could not, in October blasts, but think of Jamie yonder on the cold foreign field with no stone for his memorial; Dugald, so lately gone, an old man, bent and palsied, would return in the flicker of the candle, remitted to his prime, the very counterpart of the sturdy gallant on the wall. Sometimes he would talk with these wraiths, and Miss Mary standing still in the lobby, her heart tortured by his loneliness, would hear him murmuring in these phantom visitations. She would, perhaps, venture in now and then timidly, and take a seat unbidden on the corner of a chair near him, and embark on some topic of the day. For a little he would listen almost with a brightness, but brief, brief was the mood; very soon would he let his chin fall upon his breast, and with pouted lips relapse into his doleful meditation.

All life, all the interests, the activities of the town seemed to drift by him; folk saw him less and less often on the plain stones of the street; children grew up from pinafores to kilts, from kilts to breeches, never knowing of his presence in that community that at last he saw but of an afternoon in momentary glimpses from the window.

On a week-end, perhaps, the veterans would come up to cheer him if they could; tobacco that he nor any of his had cared for in that form would send its cloud among Miss Mary's dear naperies, but she never complained: they might have fumed her out of press and pantry if they brought her brother cheer. They talked loudly; they laughed boisterously; they acted a certain zest in life: for a little he would rouse to their entertainment, fiddling heedlessly with an empty glass, but anon he would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the door with one of her mother's candlesticks, felt as she had the light above her head and showed them down the stair as if she had been the last left at a funeral feast. Her shadow on the wall, dancing before her as she returned, seemed some mockery of the night.

Only Old Brooks could rouse the Cornal to some spirit of liveliness. In a neighbourly compassion the dominie would come in of a Sunday or a Friday evening, leaving for an hour or two the books he was so fond of that he must have a little one in his pocket to feel the touch of when he could not be studying the pages. Seated in the Cornal's chair, he had a welcome almost blithe. For he was a man of great urbanity, sobered by thought upon the complexities of life, but yet with sparkling courage.

He found the brothers now contemptuous of the boy who showed no sign of adaptability or desire for that gallant career that had been theirs. These, indeed, were the cold days for Gilian in a household indifferent to him save Miss Mary, who grew fonder every day, doting upon him like a lover for a score of reasons, but most of all because he was that rarity the perpetual child, and she must be loving somewhere.

"I have not seen the lad at school for a week now," Brooks said, compelled at last by long truancies.

"So?" said the Cornal, showing no interest "It is not my affair. John must look after his own recruit, who seems an uncommon tardy one, Mr. Brooks—an uncommon tardy."

"But I get small satisfaction from the Captain."

"I daresay, I daresay; would you wonder at that in our Jock? He's my brother, but some way there is wanting in him the stuff of Jamie and of Dugald. Even in his throes upon his latter bed Dugald could see what Jock could never see—the doom in this lad's countenance. As for me, I was done with the fellow after the trick he played us in his story of the wreck on Ealan Dubh. I blame him, in a way, for my brother Dugald's stroke."

The dominie looked in a startled remonstrance. "I would not blame him for that, Cornal," he said: "that was what the Sheriff calls damnum fatale. Upon my word, though Gilian has been something of a heart-break to myself, I must say you give him but scant justice among you here."

"I can see in him but youth wasted, and the prodigal of that is spendthrift indeed."

"I would not just say wasted," protested the dominie. "There's the makings of a fine man in him if we give him but a shove in the right direction. He baffles me to comprehend, and yet"—this a little shamefacedly—"and yet I've brought him to my evening prayers. I would like guidance on the laddie. With him it's a spoon made or a horn spoiled. Sometimes I feel I have in him fine stuff and pliable, and I'll be trying to fathom how best to work it, but my experience has always been with more common metal, and I am feared, I'm feared, we may be botching him."

"That was done for us in the making of him," said the Cornal.

"I would not say that either, Cornal," said the dominie firmly. "But I'm wae to see him brought up on no special plan. The Captain seems to have given up his notion of the army for him."

"You can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. What's to be made of him? Here's he sixteen or thereabouts, and just a bairn over lesson-books at every chance."

Brooks smiled wistfully. "It is not the lesson-books, Cornal, not the lesson-books exactly. I wish it was, but books of any kind—come now, Cornal, you can hardly expect me to condemn them in the hands of youth," He fondled the little Horace in his pocket as a man in company may squeeze his wife's hand. "They made my bread and butter, did the books, for fifty years, and Gilian will get no harm there. The lightest of novelles and the thinnest of ballants have something precious for a lad of his kind."

The Cornal made no response; the issue was too trivial to keep him from his meditation. His chin sunk upon his chest as it would not have done had the dominie kept to the commoner channels of his gossip, that was generally on universal history, philosophy of a rough and ready rural kind, and theology handled with a freedom that would have seriously alarmed Dr. Colin if he could have heard his Session Clerk in the operation.

"Eh? Are you hearing me, Cornal?" he pressed, eager to compel something for the youth whose days were being wasted.

"Speak to Miss Mary," was all the Cornal would say. "I have nothing to do with him, and John's heedless now, for he knows his plan for the army is useless."

The dominie shook his head. "Man!" he cried. "I cannot even tell of his truancy there, for her heart's wrapped up in the youth. When she speaks to me about him her face is lighted up like a day in spring, and I dare not say cheep to shatter her illusion."

Gilian, alas! knew how little these old men now cared for him. The Cornal had long since ceased his stories; the Paymaster, coming in from his meridian in the Sergeant More, would pass him on the stair with as little notice as if he were a stranger in the street. Miss Mary was his only link between his dreams, his books, and the common life of the day, and it was she who at last made the move that sent him back to Ladyfield to learn with Cameron the shepherd—still there in the interests of the Paymaster who had whimsically remained tenant—the trade that was not perhaps best suited for him, but at least came somehow most conveniently to his practice. But for the loss of her consoling and continual company there would have been almost joy on his part at this returning to the scene of his childhood. He went back to it on a summer day figuring to himself the content, the carelessness that had been his there before, and thinking, poor fool, they were waiting where he had left them.

Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of Drimfern. A pleasant place for meditation, bleak in winter for the want of trees, but in other seasons in a bloom of colour.

Though he was there 'prentice to a hard calling, Gilian's life was more the gentle's than the shepherd's. He might be often on the hill, but it was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling, it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries of the countryside. A certain weeping effect of the mists on the ravines, one particular moaning sound of the wind among the rocks, had a strange solace for his ear, chording with some sweet melancholy of his spirit He loved it all, yet at times he would flee from the place as if a terror were at his heels and in a revolt against the narrowness of his life, hungering almost to starvation for some companionship, for some salve to an anxious mind, and, in spite of his shyness, bathe in the society of the town—an idler. The people as he rode past would indicate him with a toss of the head over their shoulders, and say, "The Paymaster's boy," and yet the down was showing on his lip. He would go up the street looking from side to side with an expectancy that had no object; he stared almost rudely at faces, seeking for he knew not what.

It was not the winters with their cold, their rain, their wind and darkness, that oppressed him most in his banishment, but the summers. In the winter the mists crowded so close about, and the snow so robbed the land of all variety, that Ladyfield house with its peats burning ceaselessly, its clean paven court, its store of books he had gathered there, was an enviable place for compactness and comfort, and he could feel as if the desirable world was in his immediate neighbourhood. Down in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth's manifest duty to do.

But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable. For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them; the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the world. "Come away," said the breezes; passing gipsies all jangling with tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling. When the summer was just on the turn at that most pitiful' of periods, the autumn, he must go more often down to town.



CHAPTER XXI—THE SORROWFUL SEASON

It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress, growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town. He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have seemed—if not handsome altogether—at least notable and pleasant to any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it, puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his appearance on the street or on the highway put a new interest in the day.

The Paymaster was standing gossiping at the inn door with Mr. Spencer, Rixa, and General Turner himself—no less, for the ancient rancour at the moment was at rest.

"Here he comes," said old Mars sourly, as Gilian turned round the Arches into the town. "He's like Gillesbeg Aotram, always seeking for something he'll never find."

"Your failure!" said Turner playfully, but with poor inspiration, as in a moment he realised.

The Paymaster bridled. He had no answer to a truth so manifest to himself. In a lightning-flash he remembered his boast in the schoolroom at the dregy, and hoped Turner had not so good a memory as himself. He could only vent his annoyance on Gilian, who drew up his horse with a studied curvet—for still there was the play-actor in him to some degree.

"Down again?" said he with half a sneer. There is a way of leaning on a stick and talking over the shoulder at an antagonist that can be very trying to the antagonist if he has any sense of shyness.

"Down again," agreed Gilian uncomfortably, sorry he had had the courtesy to stop. The others moved away, for they knew the relations of the man and his adopted son were not of the pleasantest.

"An odd kind of farm training!" said the old officer. "I wish I could fathom whether you are dolt or deep one."

Gilian might have come off the horse and argued it, for he had an answer pat enough. He sat still and fingered the reins, looking at the old man with the puffed face, and the constricted bull neck, and self-satisfaction written upon every line of him, and concluding it was not worth while to explain to a nature so shallow. And the man, after all, was his benefactor: scrupulous about every penny he spent on himself, he had paid, at Miss Mary's solicitations, for the very horse the lad bestrode.

"Do you know what Turner said there?" asked the Paymaster, still with his contemptuous side to the lad. "He called you our failure. God, and it's true! Neither soldier nor shepherd seems to be in you, a muckle bulrush nodding to the winds of Heaven! See that sturdy fellow at the quay there?"

Gilian looked and saw Young Islay, a smart ensign home on leave from the county corps that even yet was taking so many fine young fellows from that community.

"There's a lad who's a credit to all about him, and he had not half your chances; do you know that?"

"He seems to have the knack of turning up for my poor comparison ever since I can mind," said Gilian, good-humouredly. "And somehow," he added, "I have a notion that he has but half my brains as well as half my chances." He looked up to see Turner still at the inn door. "General Turner," he cried, his face reddening and his heart stormy, "I hear that in your frank estimate I'm the Paymaster's failure; is it so bad as that? It seems, if I may say it, scarcely fair from one of your years to one of mine."

"Shut your mouth!" said the Paymaster coarsely, as Turner came forward. "You have no right to repeat what I said and show the man I took his insolence to heart."

"I said it; I don't deny," answered the General, coming forward from the group at the door and putting his hand in a friendly freedom on the horse's neck and looking up with some regret in Gilian's face. "One says many things in an impetus. Excuse a soldier's extravagance. I never meant it either for your ear or for unkindness. And you talk of ages: surely a man so much your senior has a little privilege?"

"Not to judge youth, sir, which he may have forgotten to understand," said Gilian, yet very red and uneasy, but with a wistful countenance. "If you'll think of it I'm just at the beginning of life, a little more shy of making the plunge perhaps than Young Islay there might be, or your own son Sandy, who's a credit to his corps, they say."

"Quite right, Gilian, and I ask your pardon," said the General, putting out his hand. "God knows who the failures of this life are; some of them go about very flashy semblances of success. In these parts we judge by the external signs, that are not always safest; for my son Sandy, who looks so thriving and so douce when he comes home, is after all a scamp whose hands are ever in his simple daddy's pockets." But this he said laughing, with a father's reservation.

The Paymaster stared at this encounter, in some ways so much beyond his comprehension. "Humph!" he ejaculated; and Gilian rode on, leaving in the group behind him an uncomfortable feeling that somehow, somewhere, an injustice had been done.

Miss Mary's face was at the window whenever his horse's hooves came clattering on the causeway—she knew the very clink of the shoes. "There's something wrong with the laddie to-day," she cried to Peggy; "he looks unco dejected;" and her own countenance fell in sympathy with her darling's mood.

She met him on the stair as if by accident, pretending to be going down to her cellar in the pend. They did not even shake hands; it is a formality neglected in these parts except for long farewells or unexpected meetings. Only she must take his bonnet and cane from him and in each hand take them upstairs as if she were leading thus two little children, her gaze fond upon the back of him.

"Well, auntie!" he said, showing at first no sign of the dejection she had seen from the window. "Here I am again. I met the Captain up at the inn door, and he seems to grudge me the occasional comfort of hearing any other voice than my own. I could scarcely tell him as I can tell you, that the bleating of the lambs gave me a sore heart. The very hills are grieving with them. I'm a fine farmer, am I not? Are you not vexed for me?" His lips could no longer keep his secret, their corners trembled with the excess of his feeling.

She put a thin hand upon his coat lapel, and with the other picked invisible specks of dust from his coat sleeve, her eyes revealing by their moisture a ready harmony with his sentiment.

"Farmer indeed!" said she with a gallant attempt at badinage; "you're as little for that, I'm afraid, as you're for the plough or the army." She led him into her room and set a chair for him as if he had been a prince, only to have an excuse for putting an arm for a moment almost round his waist. She leaned over him as he sat and came as close as she dared in contact with his hair, all the time a glow in her face.

"And what did you come down for?" she asked, expecting an old answer he never varied in.

He looked up and smiled with a touch of mock gallantry wholly new. "To see you, of course," said he, as though she had been a girl.

She was startled at this first revelation of the gallant in what till now had been her child. She flushed to the coils above her ear. Then she laughed softly and slapped him harmlessly on the back. "Get away with you," she said, "and do not make fun of a douce old maiden!" She drew back as she spoke and busily set about some household office, fearing, apparently, that her fondness had been made too plain.

"Do you know what the Captain said?" he remarked in a tone less hearty, moving about the room in a searching discontent.

"The old fool!" she answered irrelevantly, anticipating some unpleasantness. "He went out this morning in a tiravee about a button wanting from his waistcoat. It's long since I learned never to heed him much."

It was a story invented on the moment; in heavenly archives that sin of love is never indexed Her face had at once assumed a look of anxiety, for she felt that the encounter had caused Gilian's dejection as he rode down the street.

"What was he saying?" she asked at last, seeing there was no sign of his volunteering more. And she spoke with a very creditable show of indifference, and even hummed a little bar of song as she turned some airing towels on a winter-dyke beside the fire.

"Do you think I'm a failure, auntie?" asked he, facing her. "That was what he called me."

She was extremely hurt and angry.

"A failure!" she cried. "Did any one ever hear the like? God forgive me for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like his brothers than I'm like Duke George."

"You do not deny it!" said Gilian simply.

She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a transfiguration.

"My dear, my dear!" said she, "is there need for me to deny it? What are you yet but a laddie?"

He fingered the down upon his lip.

"But a laddie," she repeated, determined not to see. "All the world's before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants—do I not know them? Grant me patience with them!"

"It was General Turner's word," said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he wondered for a moment to see her flush.

"He might have had a kinder thought," said she, "with his own affairs, as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I'll warrant you do not know anything of that, but it's the clavers of the Crosswell." She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away from what had vexed her darling. "Old Islay has his schemes, they say, to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a place of greed and plot!"

"That Turner said it, showed he thought it!" said Gilian, not a whit moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings.

"Amn't I telling you?" said Miss Mary. "It's just his own sorrows souring him. There's Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye liked the laddie and he's young yet), and his daughter back from her schooling in Edinburgh, educated, or polished, or finished off as they call it—I hope she kens what she's to be after next, for I'm sure her father does not."

Gilian's breast filled with some strange new sense of sudden relief. It was as if he had been climbing out of an airless, hopeless valley, and emerged upon a hill-crest, and was struck there by the flat hand of the lusty wind and stiffened into hearty interest in the rolling and variegated world around. In a second, the taunt of the General of Maam was no more to him than a dream. A dozen emotions mastered him, and he tingled from head to foot, for the first time man.

"Oh, and she's back, is she?" said he with a crafty indifference, as one who expects no answer.

Miss Mary was not deceived. She had moved to the window and was looking down into the street where the children played, but the new tone of his voice, and the pause before it, gave her a sense of desertion, and she grieved. On the ridges of the opposite lands, sea-gulls perched and preened their feathers, pigeons kissed each other as they moved about the feet of the passers-by. A servant lass bent over a window in the dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was glorious with sun.



CHAPTER XXII—IN CHURCH

If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was absent, indeed! For he was riding through an air almost jocund, and his spirit sang within him. The burns bubbled merrily among the long grasses and the bracken, the myrtle cast a sharp and tonic sweetness all around. The mountain bens no more pricked the sky in solemn loneliness, but looked one to the other over the plains—companions, lovers, touched to warmth and passion by the sun of the afternoon. It was as if an empty world had been fresh tenanted. Gilian, as he rode up home, woke to wonder at his own cheerfulness. He reflected that he had been called a failure—and he laughed.

Next day he was up with the sun, and Cameron was amazed at this new zeal that sent him, crook in hand, to the hill for some wanderers of the flock, whistling blithely as he went. Long after he was gone he could see him, black against the sky, on the backbone of the mountain, not very active for a man in search of sheep. But what he could not see so far was Gilian's rapture as he looked upon the two glens severed by so many weary miles of roadway, but close together at his feet. And the chimneys of Maam (that looks so like an ancient castle at Dim Loch head) were smoking cheerily below. Looking down upon them he made a pretence to himself after a little that he had just that moment remembered who was now there. He even said the words to himself, "Oh! Nan—Miss Nan is there!" in the tone of sudden recollection, and he flushed in the cold breeze of the lonely mountain, half at the mention of the name, half at his own deceit with himself.

He allowed himself to fancy what the girl had grown to in her three years' absence among Lowland influences, that, by all his reading, must be miraculous indeed. He saw her a little older only than she had been when they sat in the den of the Jean or walked a magic garden, the toss of spate-brown hair longer upon her shoulders, a little more sedateness in her mien. About her still hung the perfume of young birch, and her gown was still no lower than her knees. He met her (still in his imagination upon the hill-top) by some rare chance, in the garden where they had strayed, and his coolness and ease were a marvel to himself.

"Miss Nan!" he cried. "They told me you were returned and——" What was to follow of the sentence he could not just now say.

She blushed to see him; his hand tingled at the contact with hers. She answered in a pleasant tone of Edinburgh gentility, like Lady Charlotte, and they walked a little way together, conversing wondrously upon life and books and poems, whose secrets they shared between them. He was able to hold her fascinated by the sparkle of his talk; he had never before felt so much the master of himself, and his head fairly hummed with high notions. They talked of their childhood——

Here Gilian dropped from the clouds, at first with a sense of some unpleasant memory undefined, then with shivering, ashamed, as his last meeting with the girl flashed before him, and he saw himself again fleeing, an incapable, from the sea-beach at Ealan Dubh.

If she should remember that so vividly as he did! The thought was one to fly from, and he sped down the hill furiously, and plied himself busily for the remainder of the day with an industry Cameron had never seen him show before. Upon him had obviously come a change of some wholesome and compelling kind. He knew it himself, and yet—he told himself—he could not say what it was.

Sunday came, and he went down to church in the morning as usual, but dressed with more scruples than was customary. Far up the glen the bell jangled through the trees of the Duke's policies, and the road was busy with people bound for the sermon of Dr. Colin. They walked down the glen in groups, elderly women with snow-white piped caps, younger ones with sober hoods, and all with Bibles carried in their napkins and southernwood or tansy between the leaves. The road was dry and sandy; they cast off their shoes, as was their custom, and walked barefoot, carrying them in their hands till they came to the plane-tree at the cross-roads, and put them on again to enter the town with fit decorum. The men followed, unhappy in their unaccustomed suits of broad-cloth or hodden, dark, flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular thoughts as they passed the licensed houses to some harmony with the sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered, smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth breathing peace.

The Paymaster and Miss Mary sat together in Keils pew, Gilian with them, conscious of a new silk cravat. But his mind almost unceasingly was set upon a problem whose solution lay behind him. Keils pew was in front, the Maam pew was at least seven rows behind, in the shadow of the loft, beneath the cushioned and gated preserve of the castle. One must not at any time look round, even for the space of a second, lest it should be thought he was guilty of some poor worldly curiosity as to the occupants of the ducal seat, and to-day especially, Gilian dared not show an unusual interest in the Turner pew. His acute ear had heard its occupants enter after a loud salutation from the elder at the plate to the General, he fancied there was a rustle of garments such as had not been heard there for three years. All other sounds in the church—the shuffle of feet, the chewing of sweets with which the worshippers in these parts always induce wakefulness, the noisy breathing of Rixa as he hunched in his corner beside the pulpit—seemed to stop while a skirt rustled. A glow went over him, and unknowing what he did he put forward his hand to take his Bible off the book-board.

Miss Mary from the corners of her eyes, and without turning her face in the slightest degree from the pulpit where Dr. Colin was soon to appear, saw the action. It was contrary to every form in that congregation; it was a shocking departure from the rule that no one should display sign of life (except in the covert conveyance of a lozenge under the napkin to the mouth, or a clearance of the throat), and she put a foot with pressure upon that of Gilian nearest her. Yet as she did so, no part of her body seen above the boards of the pew betrayed her movement.

Gilian flushed hotly, drew back his hand quickly, without having touched the book, and bent a stern gaze upon the stairs by which Dr. Colin would descend to his battlements.

It was a day of stagnant air, and the church swung with sleepy influences. The very pews and desks, the pillars of the loft and the star-crowned canopy of the pulpit, seemed in their dry and mouldy antiquity to give forth soporific dry accessions to that somnolent atmosphere, and the sun-rays, slanted over the heads of the worshippers, showed full of dust. Outside, through the tall windows, could be seen the beech-trees of the Avenue, and the crows upon them busy at their domestic affairs. Children in the Square cried to each other, a man's footsteps passed on the causeway, returned, and stopped below the window. Everybody knew it was Black Duncan the seaman, of an older church, and reluctant, yet anxious, to share in some of the Sabbath exercises.

Gilian, with the back of the pew coming up near his neck, wished fervently it had been built lower, for he knew how common and undignified his view from the rear must thus be made. Also he wished he could have had a secret eye that he might look unashamed in the direction of his interest He tingled with feeling when he fancied after a little (indeed, it was no more than fancy) that there was a perceptible odour of young birch. Again he was remitted to his teens, sitting transported in the Jean, soaring heavenward upon a song by a bold child with spate-brown hair. He put forward his hand unconsciously again, and this time he had the Bible on his knee before Miss Mary could check him.

She looked down with motionless horror at his fingers feverishly turning over the leaves, and saw that he had the volume upside down. Her pressure on his foot was delayed by astonishment. What could this conduct of his mean? He was disturbed about something; or perhaps he was unwell. And as she saw him still holding the volume upside down on his knee and continuing to look at it with absent eyes she put her mittened hand into the pocket of her silk gown, produced a large peppermint lozenge, and passed it into his hand.

This long unaccustomed courtesy found him awkwardly unprepared, and his fingers not closing quickly enough on the sweet it fell on the floor. It rolled with an alarming noise far to the left, and stirred the congregation like a trumpet. Though little movement showed it, every eye was on the pew from which this disturbance came, and Miss Mary and Gilian knew it. Miss Mary did not flinch; she kept a steadfast eye straight in front of her, but to those behind her the sudden colour of her neck betrayed her culpability. Gilian was wretched, all the more because he heard a rustle of the skirts behind in Turner's pew, and his imagination saw Miss Nan suppressing her laughter with shaking hair and quite conscious that he had been the object of Miss Mary's attention. He felt the blood that rushed to his body must betray itself behind. All the gowk in him came uppermost; he did not know what he was doing; he put the Bible awkwardly on the book-board in front of him, and it, too, slid to the floor with a noise even more alarming than that of the rolling sweet.

The Paymaster, clearing his throat harshly, wakened from a dover to the fact that these disturbances were in his own territory, and saw the lad's confusion. If that had not informed him the mischievous smile of Young Islay in Gilian's direction would have done so. He half turned his face to Gilian, and with shut lips whispered angrily:

"Thumbs! thumbs!" he said. "God forgive you for a gomeral!" And then he stared very sternly at Rixa, who saw the movement of the swollen neck above the 'kerchief, knew that the Paymaster was administering a reproof, and was comforted exceedingly by this prelude to the day's devotions.

Gilian left the book where it lay to conceal from those behind that he had been the delinquent. But he felt, at the same time, he was detected. What a contrast the lady behind must find in his gawkiness compared with the correct and composed deportment of the Capital she had come from! He must be the rustic indeed to her, handling lollipops yet like a child, and tumbling books in a child's confusion. As if to give more acuteness to his picture of himself he saw a foil in Young Islay so trim and manly in the uniform old custom demanded for the Sunday parade, a shrewd upward tilt of the chin and lowering of the brow, his hand now and then at his cheeks, not so much to feel its pleasing roughness, as to show the fine fingers of which he was so conscious. It demanded all his strength to shake himself into equanimity, and Miss Mary felt rather than saw it.

What ailed him? Something unusual was perturbing him. An influence, an air, a current of uneasiness flowed from him and she shared his anxiety, not knowing what might be its source. His every attitude was a new and unaccustomed one. She concluded he must be unwell, and a commotion set up in her heart, so that Dr. Colin's opening prayer went sounding past her a thing utterly meaningless like the wind among trees, and love that is like a high march wall separated her and her favourite from the world.

She surrendered even her scruples of kirk etiquette to put out a hand timidly as they stood together at the prayer, and touched Gilian softly on the sleeve with a gush of consolation in the momentary contact.

But he never felt the touch, or he thought it accidental, for he was almost feverishly waiting till that interminable prayer was ended that he might have the last proof of the presence of the girl behind him. The crimson hangings of the canopy shook in the stridor of Dr. Colin's supplication, the hollows underneath the gallery rumbled a sleepy echo; Rixa breathed ponderously and thought upon his interlocutors, but no other life was apparent; it was a man crying in the wilderness, and outside in the playground of the world the children were yet calling and laughing content, the rooks among the beeches surveyed, carelessly, the rich lush policies of the Duke.

Gilian was waiting on the final proof, that was only in the girl's own voice. He remembered her of old a daring and entrancing vocalist, in the harmony one thread of gold among the hodden grey of those simple unstudied psalmodists.

The prayer concluded, the congregation, wearied their long stand, relapsed in their hard seats with a sense of satisfaction, the psalm was given out, the precentor stuck up on the desk before him the two tablets bearing the name of the tune, "Martyrs," and essayed at a beginning. He began too high, stopped and cleared his throat. "We will try it again," said he, and this time led the voices all in unison. Such a storm was in Gilian's mind that he could not for a little listen to hear what he expected. He had forgotten his awkwardness, he had forgotten his shame; his erratic and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship's interior listening to a girl's song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually there by some message in the notes, some soothing passionate melancholy without relation to the words or to the tune, some inexplicable and mellow vibration he had felt first as he stood, a child, on the road from Kilmalieu, and a bird solitary in the winds, lifting with curious tilt of feathers over the marshy field, had piped dolorously some mystery of animal life man must have lost when he ceased to sleep stark naked to the stars. In his mind he traced the baffling accent, failing often to come upon it, anon finding it fill all his being with an emotion he had never known before.