Rain was beating on the open leaf of plane and beech, and rapping at the black doors of the ash-bud, and the scent of the gean-tree flourish hung round the road by the river, vague, sweet, haunting, like a recollection of the magic and forgotten gardens of youth. Over the high and numerous hills, mountains of deer and antique forest, went the mist, a slattern, trailing a ragged gown. The river sucked below the banks and clamoured on the cascades, drawn unwillingly to the sea, the old gluttonous sea that must ever be robbing the glens of their gathered waters. And the birds were at their loving, or the building of their homes, flying among the bushes, trolling upon the bough. One with an eye, as the saying goes, could scarcely pass among this travail of the new year without some pleasure in the spectacle, though the rain might drench him to the skin. He could not but joy in the thrusting crook of the fern and bracken; what sort of heart was his if it did not lift and swell to see the new fresh green blown upon the grey parks, to see the hedges burst, the young firs of the Blaranbui prick up among the slower elder pines and oaks?
Some of the soul and rapture of the day fell with the rain upon the boy. He hurried with bare feet along the river-side from the glen to the town, a bearer of news, old news of its kind, yet great news too, but now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind seemed to be for his peculiar ear. The nod of the saugh leaf on the banks was a salutation. There is, in a flutter of the tree’s young plumage, some hint of communication whose secret we lose as we age, and the boy, among it, felt the warmth of companionship. But the sights were for the errant moments of his mind; his thoughts, most of the way, were on his message.
He was a boy with a timid and wondering eye, a type to be seen often in those parts, and his hair blew from under his bonnet, a toss of white and gold, as it blew below the helms of the old sea-rovers. He was from Ladyfield, hastening as I say with great news though common news enough of its kind—the news that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead.
If this were a tale of the imagination, and my task was not a work of history but to pleasure common people about a hearth, who ever love the familiar emotions in their heroes, I would credit my hero with grief. For here was his last friend gone, here was he orphaned for ever. The door of Ladyfield, where he was born and where he had slept without an absent night since first his cry rose there, a coronach in the ears of his dying mother, would be shut against him; the stranger would bar the gates at evening, the sheep upon the hills would have another keel-mark than the old one on their fleecy sides. Surely the sobs that sometimes rose up in his throat were the utter surrender of sorrow; were the tears that mingled with the rain-drops on his cheek not griefs most bitter essence? For indeed he had loved the old shrunk woman, wrinkled and brown like a nut, with a love that our race makes no parade of, but feels to the very core.
But in truth, as he went sobbing in his loneliness down the river-side, a regard for the manner of his message busied him more than the matter of it. It was not every Friday a boy had a task so momentous had the chance to come upon households with intelligence so unsettling. They would be sitting about the table, perhaps, or spinning by the fire, the good-wife of Ladyfield still for them a living, breathing body, home among her herds, and he would come in among them and in a word bring her to their notice in all death’s great monopoly. It was a duty to be done with care if he would avail himself of the whole value of so rare a chance. A mere clod would be for entering with a weeping face, to blurt his secret in shaking sentences, or would let it slip out in an indifferent tone, as one might speak of some common occurrence. But Gilian, as he went, busied himself on how he should convey most tellingly the story he brought down the glen. Should he lead up to his news by gradual steps or give it forth like an alarum? It would be a fine and rare experience to watch them for a little, as they looked and spoke with common cheerfulness, never guessing why he was there, then shock them with the intelligence, but he dare not let them think he felt so little the weightiness of his message that his mind was ready to dwell on trivialities. Should it be in Gaelic or in English he should tell them? Their first salutations would be in the speech of the glens; it would be, “Oh Gilian, little hero! fair fellow! there you are! sit down and have town bread, and sugar on its butter,” and if he followed the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between “Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh” and “The wife of Ladyfield is gone,” there must be some careful choice. The Gaelic of it was closer on the feelings of the event; the words some way seemed to make plain the emptiness of the farmhouse. When he said them, the people would think all at once of the little brown wrinkled dame, no more to be bustling about the kitchen, of her wheel silent, of her foot no more upon the blue flagstones of the milk-house, of her voice no more in the chamber where they had so often known her hospitality. The English, indeed, when he thought of it with its phrase a mere borrowing from the Gaelic, seemed an affectation. No, it must be in the natural tongue his tidings should be told. He would rap at the door hurriedly, lift the sneck before any response came, go in with his bonnet in his hand, and say “Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh” with a great simplicity.
And thus as he debated and determined in his mind, he was hastening through a country that in another mood would be demanding his attention almost at every step of the way. Ladyfield is at the barren end of the glen—barren of trees, but rich in heather, and myrtle, and grass—surrounded by full and swelling hills. The river, but for the gluttonous sea that must be sucking it down, would choose, if it might, to linger in the valley here for ever, and in summer it loiters on many pretences, twining out and in, hiding behind Baracaldine and the bushes of Tom-an-Dearc, and pretending to doze in the long broad levels of Kincreggan, so that it may not too soon lose its freedom in so magic a place. But the glen opens out anon, woods and parks cluster, and the Duke’s gardens and multitudes of roads come into view. The deer stamp and flee among the grasses, flowers grow in more profusion than up the glen where no woods shelter. There are trim houses by the wayside, with men about the doors talking with loud cheerfulness, and laughing in the way of inn-frequenters. A gateway from solitude, an entrance to a region where the most startling and varied things were ever happening, to a boy from the glen this town end of the valley is a sample of Paradise for beauty and interest. Gilian went through it with his blue eyes blurred to-day, but for wont he found it full of charms and fancies. To go under its white-harled archways on a market day was to come upon a new world, and yet not all a new world, for its spectacles of life and movement—the busy street, the clanging pavement, the noisy closes, the quay ever sounding with the high calls of mariners and fishers—seemed sometimes to strike a chord of memory. At the first experience of this busy community, the innumerable children playing before the school, and the women with wide flowing clothes, and flowered bonnets on their heads, though so different from the children of the glen and its familiar dames with piped caps, or maids with snooded locks—all was pleasant to his wondering view. He seemed to know and understand them at the first glance, deeper even than he knew or understood the common surroundings of his life in Ladyfield; he felt at times more comfort in the air of those lanes and closes though unpleasantly they might smell (if it was the curing season and the gut-pots reeked at the quay) than in the winds of the place he came from, the winds of the wilds, so indifferent to mankind, the winds of the woods, sacred to the ghosts, among whom a boy in a kilt was an intruder, the winds of the hills, that come blowing from round the universe and on the most peaceful days are but momentary visitors, stopping but to tap with a branch at the window, or whistle mockingly in a vent.
In spite of their mockery of him, Gilian always loved the children of the town. At first when they used to see him come through the arches walking hurriedly, feeling his feet in unaccustomed shoes awkward and unmanageable, and the polish of his face a thing unbearable, they would come up in wonder on his heels and guess at his identity, then taunt him for the rustic nature of his clothing.
“Crotal-coat, crotal-coat, there are peats in your brogues!” they would cry; or “Hielan’-man, hielan’-man, go home for your fuarag and brose!”
They were strange new creatures to him, foreigners quite, and cruel, speaking freely a tongue he knew not but in broken parts, yet deep in his innermost there was a strange feeling that he was of their kind. He wished he could join them in their English play, or better far, that he might take them to the eagle’s nest in Stob Bhan, or the badgers’ hamlet in Blaranbui, or show them his skill to fetch the deer at a call, in the rutting time, from the mud-wallows above Carnus. But even yet, he was only a stranger to the boys of the town, and as he went down the street in the drenching rain that filled the syvers to overflowing and rose in a smoke from the calm waters of the bay, they cried “Crotal-coat, crotal-coat,” after him.
“Ah,” said he to himself, inly pleased at their ignorance, “if I cared, could I not make them ashamed, by telling them they were mocking a boy without a home?”
Kept by the rain closer than usual to the shelter of the closes, the scamps to-day went further than ever in their efforts to annoy the stranger; they rolled stones along the causey so that they caught him on the heels, and they ran out at the back ends of their closes as he passed, and into others still before him, so that his progress down the town was to run a gauntlet of jeers. But he paid no heed; he was of that gifted nature that at times can treat the most bitter insults with indifference, and his mind was taken up with the manner of his message.
When he came to the Cross-houses he cast about for the right close in a place where they were so numerous that they had always confused him, and a middle-aged woman with bare thick arms came out to help him.
“You’ll be looking for some one?” said she in Gaelic, knowing him no town boy.
He was standing as she spoke to him in a close that had seemed the one he sought, and he turned to tell her where he was going.
“Oh yes,” said the woman, “I know her well. And you’ll be from the glen, and what’s your errand in the town to-day? You are from Drimfern? No, Ladyfield! It is a fine place Ladyfield; and how is the goodwife there?”
“She is dead,” said Gilian hurriedly.
“God, and that is a pity too!” said the woman, content now that the news was hers. “You are in the very close you are looking for,” and she turned and hurried up the street to spread the news as fast as could be.
The boy turned away, angry with himself to have blurted out his news to the first stranger with the curiosity to question him, and halfway up the stairs he had to pause a little to get in the right mood for his errand. Then he went up the remaining steps and rapped at the door.
“Come in,” cried a frank and hearty woman’s voice. He put down the sneck with his thumb and pushed in the door and followed.
A little window facing the sea gave light to the interior, that would have been dull and mean but for the brilliant delf upon the dresser rack and the cleanliness of all things and the smiling faces of Jean Clerk and her sister. The hum of Jean’s wheel had filled the chamber as he entered; now it was stilled and the spinner sat with the wool pinched in her fingers, as she welcomed her little relative. Her sister—Aliset Dhu they called her, and if black she was, it had been long ago, for now her hair was like the drifted snow—stood behind her, looking up from her girdle where oaten bannocks toasted.
He stood with his bonnet in his hand. Against his will the grief of his loss swept over him more masterfully than it had yet done, for those two sisters had never been seen by him before except in the company of their relative the little old woman with a face like a nut, and the sobs that shook him were checked by no reflection of the play-actor. He was incapable of utterance.
“O my boy, my boy!” cried Jean Clerk. “Do I not know your story? I dreamt last night I saw a white horse galloping over Tombreck to Ladyfield and the rider of him had his face in his plaid. Peace with her, and her share of Paradise!”
And thus my hero, who thought so much upon the way of his message, had no need to convey it any way at all.
“Go round,” said Jean Clerk, “and tell the Paymaster; he’ll be the sorry man to lose his manager.”
“Will he be in his house?” asked Gilian, eating the last of his town bread with butter and sugar.
“In his house indeed!” cried Jean, her eyes still red with weeping. “It is easy to see you are from the glen, when at this time of day you would be for seeking a gentleman soldier in his own house in this town. No! no! go round to Sergeant More’s change-house, at the quay-head, and you’ll find the Captain there with his cronies.”
So round went Gilian, and there he came upon the pensioners, with Captain John Campbell, late Paymaster of his Majesty’s 46th Foot, at their head.
The pensioners, the officers, ah! when I look up the silent street of the town nowadays and see the old houses empty but for weavers, and merchants, and mechanics, people of useful purposes but little manly interest, and know that all we have of martial glory is a dust under a score of tombstones in the yard, I find it ill to believe that ever wars were bringing trade for youth and valour to our midst. The warriors are gone; they do not fight their battles over any more at a meridian dram, or late sitting about the bowl where the Trinidad lemon floated in slices on the philtre of joy. They are up bye yonder in the shadow of the rock with the sea grumbling constantly beside them, and their names and offices, and the dignities of their battles, and the long number of their years, are carved deeply, but not deeply enough, for what is there of their fame and valour to the fore when the threshing rain and the crumbling frost have worn the legend off the freestone slab? We are left stranded high and dry upon times of peace, but the old war-dogs, old heroes, old gentles of the stock and cane—they had seen the glories of life, and felt the zest of it. Bustling times! the drums beat at the Cross in those days, the trumpeters playing alluringly up the lanes to young hearts to come away; pipers squeezed out upon their instruments the fine tunes that in the time I speak of no lad of Gaelic blood could hear but he must down with the flail or sheep-hook and on with the philabeg and up with the sword. Gentlemen were for ever going to wars or coming from them; were they not of the clan, was not the Duke their cousin, as the way of putting it was, and by his gracious offices many a pock-pudding English corps got a colonel with a touch of the Gaelic in his word of command as well as in his temper. They went away ensigns—some of them indeed went to the very tail of the rank and file with Mistress Musket the brown besom—and they came back Majors-General, with wounds and pensions. “Is not this a proud day for the town with three Generals standing at the Cross?” said the Paymaster once, looking with pride at his brother and Turner of Maam and Campbell of Strachur standing together leaning on their rattans at a market. It was in the Indies I think that this same brother the General, parading his command before a battle, came upon John, an ensign newly to the front with a draft from the sea.
“Who sent you here, brother John?” said he, when the parade was over. “You would be better at home in the Highlands feeding your mother’s hens.”
In one way it might have been better, in another way it was well enough for John Campbell to be there. He might have had the luck to see more battles in busier parts of the world, as General Dugald did, or Colin, who led the Royal Scots at Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo; but he might have done worse, for he of all those gallants came home at the end a hale man, with neither sabre-cut nor bullet. To give him his due he was willing enough to risk them all. It bittered his life at the last, that behind his back his townspeople should call him “Old Mars,” in an irony he was keen enough to feel the thrust of.
said Evan MacColl, the bard of the parish, and the name stuck as the bye-names of that wonderful town have a way of doing.
“Old Mars,” Paymaster, sat among the pensioners in the change-house of the Sergeant More when Gilian came to the door. His neck overflowed in waves of fat upon a silk stock that might have throttled a man who had not worn the king’s stock in hot lands over sea; his stockings fitted tightly on as neat a leg as ever a kilt displayed, though the kilt was not nowadays John Campbell’s wear but kerseymore knee-breeches. He had a figured vest strewn deep with snuff that he kept loose in a pocket (the regiment’s gold mull was his purse), and a scratch wig of brown sat askew on his bullet head, raking with a soldier’s swagger. He had his long rattan on the table before him, and now and then he would lift its tasseled head and beat time lightly to the chorus of Dugald MacNicol’s song. Dugald was Major once of the 1st Royals; he had carried the sword in the Indies, East and West, and in the bloody Peninsula, and came home with a sabre-slash on the side of the head, so that he was a little weak-witted. When he would be leaving his sister’s door to go for the meridian dram at the quay-head he would dart for cover to the Cross, then creep from close to close, and round the church, and up the Ferry Land, in a dread of lurking enemies; yet no one jeered at his want, no boy failed to touch his bonnet to him, for he was the gentleman in the very weakest moment of his disease. He had but one song in his budget:
He sang it in a high quavering voice with curious lapses in the vigour of his singing and cloudings in the fire of his eyes, so that now and then the company would have to jolt him awake to give the air more lustily. Colonel Hall was there (of St John’s) and Captain Sandy Campbell of the Marines, Bob MacGibbon, old Lochgair, the Fiscal with a ruffled shirt, and Doctor Anderson. The Paymaster’s brothers were not there, for though he was the brother with the money they were field-officers and they never forgot it.
The chorus was ringing, the glasses and the Paymaster’s stick were rapping on the table, the Sergeant More, with a blue brattie tied tight across his paunch to lessen its unsoldierly amplitude, went out and in with the gill-stoups, pausing now and then on the errand to lean against the door of the room with the empty tray in his hand, drumming on it with his finger-tips and joining in the officers’ owercome.
He turned in the middle of a chorus, for the boy was standing abashed in the entry, his natural fears at meeting the Paymaster greatly increased by the sound of revelry.
“Well, little hero,” said the Sergeant More, in friendly Gaelic, “are you seeking any one?”
“I was sent to see the Paymaster, if it’s your will,” said Gilian, with his eyes falling below the scrutiny of this swarthy old sergeant.
“The Paymaster!” cried the landlord, shutting the door of the room ere he said it, and uplifting farmed hands, “God’s grace! do not talk of the Paymaster here! He is Captain Campbell, mind, late of his Majesty’s 46th Foot, with a pension of £4 a week, and a great deal of money it is for the country to be paying to a gentleman who never saw of wars but skirmish with the Syke. Nothing but Captain, mind you, and do not forget the salute, so, with the right hand up and thumb on a line with the right eyebrow. But could your business not be waiting? If it is Miss Mary who sent for him it is not very reasonable of her, for he is here no longer than twenty minutes, and it is not sheepshead broth day, I know, because I saw her servant lass down at the quay for herrings an hour ago. Captain, mind, it must be that for him even with old soldiers like myself. I would not dare Paymaster him, it is a name that has a trade ring about it that suits ill with his Highland dignity. Captain, Captain!”
Gilian stood in front of this spate of talk, becoming more diffident and fearful every moment. He had never had any thought as to how he should tell the Paymaster that the goodwife of Ladyfield was dead, that was a task he had expected to be left to some one else, but Jean Clerk and her sister had a cunning enough purpose in making him the bearer of the news.
“I am to tell him the goodwife of Ladyfield is dead,” he explained, stammering, to the Sergeant More.
“Dead!” said John More. “Now is not that wonderful?” He leaned against the door as he had leaned many a time against sentry-box and barrack wall, and dwelt a little upon memory. “Is not that wonderful? The first time I saw her was at a wedding in Karnes, Lochow, and she was the handsomest woman in the room, and there were sixty people at the wedding from all parts, and sixty-nine roasted hens at the supper. Well, well—dead! blessings with her; did I not know her well? Yes, and I knew her husband too, Long Angus, since the first day he came to Ladyfield for Old Mar—for the Paymaster—till the last day he came down the glen in a cart, and he was the only sober body in the funeral, perhaps because it was his own. Many a time I wondered that the widow did so well in the farm for Captain Campbell, with no man to help her, the sowing and the shearing, the dipping and the clipping, ploughmen and herds to keep an eye on, and bargains to make with wool merchants and drovers. Oh! she was a clever woman, your grandmother. And now she’s dead. Well, it’s a way they have at her age! And the Paymaster must be told, though I know it will vex him greatly, because he is a sort of man who does not relish changes. Mind now you say Captain; you need not say Captain Campbell, but just Captain, and maybe a ‘sir’ now and then. I suppose you could not put off telling him for a half-hour or thereabouts longer, when he would be going home for dinner any way; it is a pity to spoil an old gentleman’s meridian dram with melancholy news. No. You were just told to come straight away and tell him—well, it is the good soldier who makes no deviation from the word of command. Come away in then and—Captain mind—and the salute.”
The Sergeant More threw open the door of the room, filled up the space a second and gave a sort of free-and-easy salute. “A message for you, Captain,” said he.
The singing was done. The Major’s mind was wandering over the plains of Waterloo to guess by the vacancy of his gaze; on his left Bob MacGibbon smoked a black segar, the others talked of townsmen still in the army and of others buried under the walls of Badajos. They all turned when the Sergeant More spoke, and they saw him push before him into the room the little boy of Ladyfield with his bonnet in his hand and his eyes restless and timid like pigeons at a strange gate fluttering.
“Ho! Gilian, it is you?” said the Paymaster, with a very hearty voice; then he seemed to guess the nature of the message, for his voice softened from the loud and bumptious tone it had for ordinary. “How is it in Lecknamban?” he asked in the Gaelic, and Gilian told him, minding duly his “sir” and his “Captain” and his salute.
“Dead!” said the Paymaster, “Blessings with her!” Then he turned to his companions and in English—“The best woman in the three parishes and the cleverest. She could put her hand to anything and now she’s no more. I think that’s the last of Ladyfield for me. I liked to go up now and then and go about the hill and do a little bargaining at a wool market, or haggle over a pound with a drover at the fair, but the farm did little more than pay me and I had almost given it up when her husband died.”
He looked flushed and uncomfortable. His stock seemed to fit him more tightly than before and his wig sat more askew than ever upon his bald head. For a little he seemed to forget the young messenger still standing in the room, no higher than the table whereon the glasses ranged. Gilian turned his bonnet about in his hand and twisted the ribbons till they tore, then he thought with a shock of the scolding he would get for spoiling his Sunday bonnet, but the thought was quickly followed by the recollection that she who would have scolded him would chide no more.
The pensioners shared their attention between the Paymaster and the boy. While the Paymaster gave them the state of his gentleman farming (about which the town was always curious), they looked at him and wondered at a man who had seen the world and had £4 a week of a pension wasting life with a paltry three-hundred sheep farm instead of spending his money royally with a bang. When his confidence seemed likely to carry their knowledge of his affairs no further than the town’s gossip had already brought it, they lost their interest in his reflections and had time to feel sorry for the boy. None of them but knew he was an orphan in the most grievous sense of the term, without a relative in the wide world, and that his future was something of a problem.
Bob MacGibbon—he was Captain in the 79th—leaned forward and tried to put his hand upon the child’s shoulder, not unkindly, but with a rough playfulness of the soldier. Gilian shrank back, his face flushing crimson, then he realised the stupidity of his shyness and tried to amend it by coming a little farther into the room and awkwardly attempting the salute in which the Sergeant More had tutored him. The company was amused at the courtesy, but no one laughed. In a low voice the Paymaster swore. He was a man given to swearing with no great variety in his oaths, that were merely a camp phrase or two at the most, repeated over and over again, till they had lost all their original meanings and could be uttered in front of Dr. Colin himself without any objection to them. In print they would look wicked, so they must be fancied by such as would have the complete picture of the elderly soldier with the thick neck and the scratch wig. The Sergeant More had gently withdrawn himself and shut the door behind him the more conveniently to hear what reception the messenger’s tidings would meet with from the Paymaster. And the boy felt himself cut off most helplessly from escape out of that fearful new surrounding. It haunted him for many a day, the strong smell of the spirits and the sharp odour of the slices floating in the glasses, for our pensioners were extravagant enough to flavour even the cold midday drams of the Abercrombie with the lemon’s juice. Gilian shifted from leg to leg and turned his bonnet continuously, and through his mind there darted many thoughts about this curious place and company that he had happened upon. As they looked at him he felt the darting tremor of the fawn in the thicket, but alas he was trapped! How old they were! How odd they looked in their high collars and those bands wound round their necks! They were not farmers, nor shepherds, nor fishermen, nor even shopkeepers; they were people with some manner of life beyond his guessing. The Paymaster of course he knew; he had seen him often come up to Ladyfield, to talk to the goodwife about the farm and the clipping, to pay her money twice yearly that was called wages, and was so little that it was scarcely worth the name. Six men in a room, all gentle (by their clothes), all with nothing better to do than stare at a boy who could not stare back! How many things they had seen; how many thoughts they must share between them! He wished himself on the other side of Aora river in the stillness of Kincreggan wood, or on the hill among the sheep—anywhere away from the presence of those old men with the keen scrutiny in their eyes, doubtless knowing all about him and seeing his very thoughts. Had they been shepherds, or even the clever gillies that sometimes came to the kitchen of Ladyfield on nights of ceilidh or gossip, he would have felt himself their equal. He would have been comfortable in feeling that however much they might know about the hills, and woods, and wild beasts, it was likely enough better known to himself, who lived among them and loved them. And the thoughts of the gillie, and the shepherd, were rarely beyond his shrewd guess as he looked at them; they had but to say a word or two, and he knew the end of their story from the beginning. But these old gentlemen were as far beyond his understanding as Gillesbeg Aotram, the wanderer who came about the glens and was called daft by the people who did not know, as Gilian did, that he was wiser than themselves.
The Paymaster took his rattan and knocked noisily on the table for the landlord.
The Sergeant More stepped softly on his tiptoes six steps into the kitchen, then six steps noisily back again and put his head in.
“What’s your will, Captain?” said he, polishing a tray with the corner of his brattie.
“Give this boy some dinner, for me,” said the Paymaster. “There is nothing at our place to-day but herrings, and it’s the poorest of meals for melancholy. Miss Mary would make it all the more melancholy with her weeping over the goodwife of Ladyfield.”
Gilian went out with the Sergeant More and made a feeble pretence at eating his second dinner that day.
All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west, full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with the broken blossom.
The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions, the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowers they would not pluck. Sometimes they will put a cap on the side of a cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grinning face will create a moment’s laughter, but it is soon checked and they walk among the graves in a more seemly peace.
They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it. The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a table tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love or merriment.
The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily, and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster’s dram at the “lifting” at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge, except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day bring the massive masonry down. “Ha! ha! is that not good?” demanded the Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. “I told him he would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he would be first.”
The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was Colonel.
“I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt,” said Mr. William Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make his way among the people here, “It is quite the style, quite the style, sir.”
“Do you think so, now?” asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment.
“I do, indeed,” said Mr. Spencer, “it is very genteel and just as the gentry like it.”
The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye.
“Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer,” he asked, “with any idea of making distinctions? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years and I am the first man-of-business in the family.”
The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man! he had much to learn of Highland punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee’d gun that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far behind them, alone on the top of the bridge.
“Is there no one with the boy?” he asked. “And where is he to stay now that his grandmother is dead?”
The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to himself.
“Am not I the golan?” said he. “I forgot about the fellow, and I told the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I’m putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It must be seen to, it must be seen to.”
Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed. “Oh,” said he, “Jean Clerk’s a relative; he’ll be going to bide there.”
They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass button would burst with a crack like a gun; Rixa puffing and stretching himself; Major Dugald ducking his head and darting his glance about from side to side looking for the enemy; Mr. Spencer, tall, thin, with the new strapped breeches and a London hat, blowing his nose with much noise in a Barcelona silk handkerchief. All the way before them the crowd went straggling down in blacks with as much hurry as the look of the thing would permit, to reach the schoolhouse where the Paymaster had laid out the last service of meat and drink for the mourners. The tide was out; a sandy beach strewn with stones and clumps of seaweed gave its saline odour to the air; lank herons came sweeping down from the trees over Croitivile, and stalked about the water’s edge. There was only one sound in nature beyond the soughing of the wind in the shrubbery of the Duke’s garden, it was the plaintive call of a curlew as it flew over the stable park. A stopped and stagnant world, full of old men and old plaints, the dead of the yard behind, the solemn and sleepy town before.
The boy was the only person left in the rear of the Paymaster and his friends; he was standing on the bridge, fair in the middle of the way. Though the Paymaster cried he was not heard, so he walked back and up to the boy while the others went on their way to the schoolhouse, where old Brooks the dominie was waiting among the jars and oatcakes and funeral biscuits with currants and carvie in them.
Gilian was standing with the weepers off his cuffs and the crape off his bonnet; he had divested himself of the hateful things whenever he found himself alone, and he was listening with a rapt and inexpressive face to the pensive call of the curlew as it rose over the fields, and the tears were dropping down his cheeks.
“Oh, ‘ille, what’s the matter with you?” asked the Paymaster in Gaelic, struck that sorrow should so long remain with a child.
Gilian started guiltily, flushed to the nape of his neck and stammered an explanation or excuse.
“The bird, the bird!” said he, turning and looking at the dolorous piper of the marsh.
“Man!” said the Paymaster in English, looking whimsically at this childish expression of surprise. “Man! you’re a queer callant too. Are there no curlews about Ladyfield that you should be in such a wonder at this one? Just a plain, long-nebbed, useless bird, not worth powder and shot, very douce in the plumage, and always at the same song like MacNicol the Major.”
The little fellow broke into a stammering torrent of Gaelic. “What does it say, what does it say?” he asked: “it is calling, calling, calling, and no one will answer it; it is telling something, and I cannot understand. Oh, I am sorry for it, and——”
“You must be very hungry, poor boy,” said the Paymaster. “Come away down, and Miss Mary will give you dinner. Did you ever taste rhubarb tart with cream to it? I have seen you making umbrellas with the rhubarb up the glen, but I’m sure the goodwife did not know the real use of it.”
Gilian paid no heed to the speaker, but listened with streaming eyes to the wearied note of the bird that still cried over the field. Then the Paymaster swore a fiery oath most mildly, and clutched the boy by the jacket sleeve and led him homeward.
“Come along,” said he, “come along. You’re the daftest creature ever came out of the glen, and what’s the wonder of it, born and bred among stirks and sheep on a lee-lone country-side with only the birds to speak to?”
The two went down the road together, the Paymaster a little wearied with his years and weight or lazied by his own drams, leaning in the least degree upon the shoulder of the boy. They made an odd-looking couple—dawn and the declining day, Spring and ripe Autumn, illusion and an elderly half-pay officer in a stock and a brown scratch wig upon a head that would harbour no more the dreams, the poignancies of youth. Some of the mourners hastening to their liquor turned at the Cross and looked up the road to see if they were following, and they were struck vaguely by the significance of the thing.
“Dear me,” said the Fiscal, “is not Old Mars getting very bent and ancient?”
“He is, that!” said Rixa, who was Sheriff Maclachlan to his face. “I notice a glass or two makes a wonderful difference on him this year back ever since he had his little bit towt. That’s a nice looking boy; I like the aspect of him; it’s unusual. What a pity the Paymaster never had a wife or sons of his own.”
“You say what is very true, Sheriff,” said Mr. Spencer. “I think there is something very sad in the spectacle, sir, of an old gentleman with plenty of the world in his possession going down to the bourne with not a face beside him to mind of his youth.”
But indeed the Paymaster was not even reminded of his own youth by this queer child on whom he leaned. He had never been like this, a shy frightened dreaming child taken up with fancies and finding omens and stories in the piping of a fowl. Oh! no, he had been a bluff, hearty, hungry boy, hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sister Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever girl, with a nerve that a harsh word set thrilling.
“Did Jean Clerk say anything about where you are to sleep to-night?” he asked him, still speaking the Gaelic in which he knew the little fellow was most at home.
“I suppose I’ll just stay in my own bed in Lady-field,” said Gilian, apparently little exercised by the thought of his future, and dividing some of his attention to the Paymaster with the sounds and sights of nature by the way, the thrust of the bracken crook between the crannies of the Duke’s dykes, the gummy buds of the limes and chestnuts, the straw-gathering birds on the road, the heron so serenely stalking on the shore, and the running of the tiny streams upon the beach that smoked now in the heat of the sun.
The Paymaster seemed confounded. He swelled his neck more fully in the stock, cleared his throat with a loud noise, took a great pinch of snuff from his waistcoat pocket and spent a long time in disposing of it Gilian was in a dream far off from the elderly companion and the smoking shore; his spirit floated over the glen and sometimes farther still, among the hill gorges that were always so full of mystery to him, or farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities, towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings were, in the tales the shepherds told about the peat fires on ceilidh nights.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep in the town tonight,” said the Paymaster, at last somewhat relieved of his confusion by the boy’s indifference; “the truth is we are shutting up Ladyfield for a little. You could not stay alone in it at any rate, and did Jean Clerk not arrange that you were to stay with her after this?”
“No,” said Gilian simply, even yet getting no grasp of his homelessness.
“And where are you going to stay?” asked the Paymaster testily.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.
The Paymaster spoke in strange words under his breath and put on a quicker pace and went through the town, even past the schoolhouse, where old Brooks stood at the door in his long surtout saying a Latin declension over to himself as if it were a song, and into the Crosshouses past the tanned women standing with their hands rolled up in their aprons, and up to Jean Clerk’s door. He rapped loudly with his rattan. He rapped so loudly that the inmates knew this was no common messenger, and instead of crying out their invitation they came together and opened the door. The faces of the sisters grew rosy red at the sight of the man and the boy before him.
“Come away in, Captain,” said Jean, assuming an air of briskness the confusion of her face belied. “Come away in, I am proud to see you at my door.”
The Paymaster stepped in, still gripping the boy by the shoulder, but refused to sit down. He spoke very short and dry in his best travelled English.
“Did you lock up the Ladyfield house as I told you?” he asked.
“I did, that!” said Jean Clerk, lifting her brattie and preparing to weep, “and it’ll be the last time I’ll ever be inside its hospitable door.”
“And you gave the key to Cameron the shepherd?”
“I did,” said Jean, wondering what was to come next.
The Paymaster changed his look and his accent, and spoke again with something of a pawky humour that those who knew him best were well aware was a sign that his temper was at its worst.
“Ay,” said he, “and you forgot about the boy. What’s to be done with him? I suppose you would leave him to rout with the kye he was bred among, or haunt the rocks with the sheep. I was thinking myself coming down the road there, and this little fellow with me without a friend in the world, that the sky is a damp ceiling sometimes, and the grass of the field a poor meal for a boy’s stomach. Eh! what say you, Mistress Clerk?” And the old soldier heaved a thumbful of snuff from his waistcoat pocket.
“The boy’s no kith nor kin of mine,” said Jean Clerk, “except a very far-out cousin’s son.” She turned her face away from both of them and pretended to be very busy folding up her plaid, which, as is well known, can only be done neatly with the aid of the teeth and thus demands some concealment of the face. The sister passed behind the Paymaster and the boy and startled the latter with a sly squeeze of the wrist as she did so.
“Do you tell me, my good woman,” demanded the Paymaster, “that you would set him out on the road homeless on so poor an excuse as that? Far-out cousin here or far-out cousin there, he has no kin closer than yourself between the two stones of the parish. Where’s your Hielan’ heart, woman?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my heart, Captain Campbell,” said Jean tartly, “but my pocket’s empty. If you think the boy’s neglected you have a house of your own to take him into; it would be all the better for a young one in it, and you have the money to spend that Jean Clerk has not.” All this with a very brave show of spirit, but with something uncommonly moist about the eyes.
The Paymaster, still clutching the boy at the shoulder, turned on his heel to go, but a side glance at Jean Clerk’s face again showed him something different from avarice or anger.
“You auld besom you!” said he, dunting the floor with his rattan, “I see through you now; you think you’ll get him put off on me. I suppose if I refused to take him in, you would be the first to make of him.”
The woman laughed through her tears. “Oh, but you are the gleg-eyed one, Captain. You may be sure I would not see my cousin’s grandchild starving, and I’ll not deny I put him in your way, because I never knew a Campbell of Kiels, one of the old bold race, who had not a kind heart for the poor, and I thought you and your sister could do better than two old maiden women in a garret could do by him.”
“You randy!” said he, “and that’s the way you would portion your poor relations about the countryside. As if I had not plenty of poor friends of my own! And what in all the world am I to make of the youth?”
“You’ll have nothing to do with the making of him, Captain Campbell,” said Jean Clerk, now safe and certain that the boy’s future was assured. “It’ll be Miss Mary will have the making of him, and I ken the lady well enough—with my humble duty to her—to know she’ll make him a gentleman at the very least.”
“Tuts,” said the Paymaster, “Sister Mary’s like the rest of you; she would make a milksop of the boy if I was foolish enough to take him home to her. He’ll want smeddum and manly discipline; that’s the stuff to make the soldier. The uneasy bed to sleep on, the day’s task to be done to the uttermost. I’ll make him the smartest ensign ever put baldrick on—that’s if I was taking him in hand,” he added hastily, realising from the look of the woman that he was making a complete capitulation.
“And of course you’ll take him, Captain Campbell,” cried Jean Clerk in triumph. “I’m sure you would sooner take him and make a soldier of him than leave him with me—though before God he was welcome—to grow up harvester or herd.”
The Paymaster took a ponderous snuff, snorted, and went off down the stair with the boy still by the hand, the boy wide-eyed wondering, unable to realise very clearly whether he was to be made a soldier or a herd there and then. And when the door closed behind them Jean Clerk and her sister sat down and wept and laughed in a curious mingling of sorrow and joy—sorrow that the child had to be turned from their door and out of their lives with even the pretence at inhospitality, and joy that their device had secured for him a home and future more comfortable than the best their straitened circumstances could afford.