whipping and creaking and tossing in the night-time under the stars. How the dark appalled or soothed as the humour was, and the right of a first flower upon a tree would sometimes make him weep at the notion of the brevity of its period.
All the time Miss Mary listened patient and understanding. The high-backed chair compassed her figure so fully that she seemed to shrink to a child’s size. It was a twelve-window house, and so among the highest taxed in all the town, but in the parlour there were two blind windows and only one gave light to the interior, so that as she sat in her chair with her back to the window, her face in the shadow, leaning against the chair haffits with the aspect of weariness her brothers never had revealed to them, it seemed to Gilian the little figure and the ruddy face of a companion. She was silent for a moment after his confessions were completed, as if she had been wandering with him in the realm of fancy, and with wings less practised had taken longer to fly back to the narrow actual world. The boy had realised how much he had forgotten himself, and how strange all this story of his must be even to a child-companion with her face in the shadow of the chair haffits, and his eyes were faltering with shame.
“You are very thin, sweetheart,” said she, with the two lines darkly pencilled between her eyebrows. “You are far too white for a country boy; upon my word we must be taking the Captain’s word for it and putting your head in the cream.”
At this Gilian’s confusion increased. Here was another to misunderstand, and he had thought she was shivering to his fancy as he was himself. He turned to hide his disappointment. At once the lines disappeared. She rose and put an arm over his shoulder and stooped the little that was necessary to whisper in his ear.
“I know, I think I know,” said she; “but look, I’m very old and ancient. Oh, dear! I once had my own fancies, but I think they must have been sweat out of me in my constancy to my brothers’ oven-grate and roasting-jack. It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us, my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling for generations round the fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the constant complaint of the sea—tuts! am not I foolish to be weeping because a boy from Glen Aray has not learned to keep his lips closed on his innermost thought?”
Gilian looked up, and behold! she was in a little rain of tears, at least her eyes swam soft in moisture. It comforted him exceedingly, for it showed that after all she understood.
“If you were a little older,” she said, “so old as the merchants of the town that are all too much on the hunt for the bawbees and the world to sit down and commune with themselves, or if you were so old as my brothers there and so hardened, I would be the last to say my thoughts ever stirred an ell-length out of the customary track of breakfast, beds, dinner and supper. Do not think I do not love and reverence my brothers, mind you!” she added almost fiercely, rubbing with her lustre apron the table there was nothing to rub from save its polish. “Oh! they are big men and far-travelled men, and they have seen the wonderful sights. They used to get great thick letters franked from the Government with every post, and the Duke will be calling on them now and then in his chariot. They speak to me of nothing but the poorest, simplest, meanest transactions of the day because they think I cannot comprehend nor feel. Gilian, do you know I am afraid of them? Not of John the Captain, for he is different, with a tongue that goes, but I’m frightened when the General and the Cornal sit and look at me saying nothing because I am a woman.”
“I do not like people to sit looking at me saying nothing,” said Gilian, “because when I sit and look at people without saying anything I am reading them far in. But mostly I would sooner be making up things in my mind.”
“Ah!” said she, “that is because your mind is young and spacious; theirs, poor dears, are full of things that have actually happened, and they need not fancy the orra any more.”
They moved together out of the parlour and along the lobby that lighted it. With a low sill it looked upon the street that now was thronged with the funeral people passing home or among the shops, or from tavern to tavern. The funeral had given the town a holiday air, and baxters and dealers stood at their doors gossiping with their customers or by-goers. Country carts rumbled past, the horses moving slowly, reluctant to go back from this place of oats and stall to the furrows where the collar pressed constantly upon the shoulder. One or two gentlemen went by on horses—Achnatra and Major Hall and the through-other son of Lorn Campbell. The sun, westering, turned the clean rain-washed sand in the gutters of the street to gold, and there the children played and their calls and rhymes and laughter made so merry a world that the boy at the window, looking out upon it, felt a glow. He was now to be always with these fortunate children whom he knew so well ere ever he had changed words with them. He had a little dread of the magnitude and corners of this dwelling that was to be his in the future, and of the old men who sat in it all day saying nothing, but it was strange indeed (thought he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the death of the little old woman of Ladyfield—what they were his mind did not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a more intimate communion with the animals of the wilds and the voices of the woods and hills.
The woman as well as the boy must have been lost in thought, for neither of them noted the step upon the stair when the General and Cornal came back from the dregy. The brothers were in the lobby beside them before Miss Mary realised their presence. She turned with a flushed face and, as it were, put herself a little in front of the boy, so that half his figure found the shelter of a wing. The two brothers between them filled the width of the lobby, and yet they were not wide. But they were broad at the shoulders and once, no doubt, they filled their funeral suits that of their own stiffness seemed to stand out in all their old amplitude. The General was a white-faced rash of a man with bushy eyebrows, a clean-shaven parchment jowl, and a tremulous hand upon the knob of his malacca rattan; his brother the Cornal was less tall; he was of a purpled visage, and a crimson scar, the record of a wound from Corunna, slanted from his chin to the corner of his left eye.
“What wean is that?” he asked, standing in the lobby and casting a suspicious eye upon the boy, his voice as high as in a barrack yard. The General stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, but looking at Gilian from under his pent brows.
Into Miss Mary’s demeanour there had came as great a change as that which came upon the Pay-master when she broke in upon his vaunting. The lines dashed to her brow; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to.
“It is the oe from Ladyfield,” she explained.
“He’ll be making a noise in the house,” said the Cornal with a touch of annoyance. “I cannot stand boys; he’ll break things, I’m sure. When is he going away?”
“Are you one of the boys who cry after Major MacNicol, my old friend and comrade?” asked the General in a high squeaking voice. “If I had my stick at some of you, tormenting a gallant old soldier!” And as he spoke he lifted his cane by the middle and shook it at the limbs of the affrighted youth.
“O Dugald, Dugald, you know none of the children of this town ever annoyed the Major; it is only the keelies from the low-country who do so. And this is not the boy to make a mock of any old gentleman, I am sure.”
“I know he’ll make a noise and start me when I am thinking,” said the Cornal, still troubled. “Is it not very strange, Dugald, that women must be aye bringing in useless weans off the street to make noise and annoyance for their brothers?” He poked as he spoke with his stick at Gilian’s feet as he would at an animal crossing his path.
“It
