Gilian The Dreamer Part 3

"Dear, dear," she said; "you're the Gilian I never saw but at a distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield.

O little hero, am I not sorry for the goodwife? You have come for your pick of the dinner----"

"Do you think we could make a soldier of him?" broke in the Paymaster, carrying his rattan like a sword and throwing back his shoulders.

"A soldier!" she said, casting a shrewd glance at the boy in a red confusion. "We might make a decenter man of him. Weary be on the soldiering! I'm looking about the country-side and I see but a horde of lameter privatemen and half-pay officers maimed in limb or mind sitting about the dram bottle, hoved up with their vain-glory, bl.u.s.tering and blowing, instead of being honest, eident lairds and farmers. I never saw good in a soldier yet, except when he was away fighting and his name was in the _Courier_ as dead or wounded. Soldiers, indeed! sitting round there in the Sergeant More's tavern, drinking, and roaring, and gossiping like women--that I should miscall my s.e.x! No, no, if I had a son----

"Well, well, Mary," said the Paymaster, breaking in again upon this tirade, "here's one to you. If you'll make the man of him I'll try to make him the soldier."

She understood in a flas.h.!.+ "And is he coming here?" she asked in an accent the most pleased and motherly. A flush came over her cheeks and her eyes grew and danced. It was as if some rare new thought had come to her, a sentiment of poetry, the sound of a forgotten strain of once familiar song.

"I'm sure I am very glad," she said simply. She took the boy by the hand, she led him into the kitchen, she cried "Peggy, Peggy," and when her servant appeared she said, "Here's our new young gentleman, Peggy,"

and stroked his hair again, and Peggy smiled widely and looked about for something to give him, and put a bowl of milk to his lips.

"Tuts!" cried Miss Mary, "it's not a calf we have; we will not spoil his dinner. But you may skim it and give him a cup of cream."

The Paymaster, left in the parlour among the prints of war and warriors, stood a moment with his head bent and his fingers among the snuff listening to the talk of the kitchen that came along the spence and through the open doors.

"She's a queer body, Mary," said he to himself, "but she's taking to the brat I think--oh yes, she's taking to him." And then he hurried down the stair and up round the church corner to the schoolhouse where the company, wearied waiting on his presence, were already partaking of his viands. It was a company to whom the goodwife of Ladyfield, the quiet douce widow, had been more or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on. They were there not so much mourners as the guests of Captain Campbell, nigh on a dozen of half-pay officers who had escaped the shambles of Europe, with the merchants of the place, and some of the farmers of the glen, the banker, the Sheriff, the Fiscal and the writers of whom the town has ever had more than a fair share. Dr. Colin had blessed the viands and gone away; he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of relief, and old Baldy Bain, "Copenhagen" as they called him, who was precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his gla.s.s up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the presence of the clergyman. The food and drink were spread on two long tables; the men stood round or sat upon the forms their children occupied in school hours. The room was clamant with the voices of the company. Gathered in groups, they discussed everything under heaven except the object of their meeting--the French, the sowing, the condition of the hogs, the Duke's approaching departure for London, the storm, the fis.h.i.+ng. They wore their preposterous tall hats on the backs of their heads with the c.r.a.pe bows over the ears, they lifted up the skirts of their swallow-tail coats and hung them on their arms with their hands in their breeches pockets. And about them was the odour of musty, mildewed broadcloth, taken out of damp presses only on such occasions.

Mr. Spencer, standing very straight and tall and thin, so that his trousers at the foot strained tightly at the straps under his insteps, looked over the a.s.sembly, and with a stranger's eye could not but be struck by its oddity. He was seeing--lucky man to have the chance!--the last of the old Highland burgh life and the raw beginnings of the new; he was seeing the real _doaine-uasail_, gentry of ancient family, colloguing with the common merchants whose day was coming in; he was seeing the embers of the war in a grey ash, officers, merchants, bonnet lairds, and tenants now safe and snug and secure in their places because the old warriors had fought Boney. The schoolroom was perfumed with the smoke of peat, for it was the landward pupils' week of the fuelling, and they were accustomed to bring each his own peat under his arm every morning. The smoke swirled and eddied out into the room and hung about the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of Europe over the fireplace. Looking at this map and sipping now and then a gla.s.s of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself "Merrily danced the Quaker's wife." He wore a queue tied with a broad black ribbon that reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man himself was little more than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is still upon his peninsula.

"You are at your studies?" said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for the son of a plain Portioner of Glen s.h.i.+ra who was to be seen any day coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather emptily in front of his kilt.

Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper.

"I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer," said he, "I know it by heart--all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I'm but looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria, Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black dots no more ken-speckle than the towns.h.i.+p of Camus up the glen. Wars, wars, b.l.o.o.d.y wars! have we indeed got to the last of them?"

"Indeed I hope so, sir," said the innkeeper, "for my wife has become very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the rejoicings, and if every war set a woman's mind running to extravagance in clothing, the fewer we have the better."

"If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas! it's my fate to have lost mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General?"

He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies *

because it was the fas.h.i.+on of the country, but never ate nor drank at them.

* Dregy: The Scots equivalent of the old English _Dirge- ale_, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon in the office for the dead, "_Dirige, Domine meus_,"

"You were speaking, General Turner?" said Campbell.

Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its motto "_Tu ne cede malis_," and smiled blandly, as he always did when it was brought to his recollection that he had won more than soldiers' battles when the odds against him were three to one.

"I was just telling Mr. Spencer that Waterloo looks like being the last of the battles, General, and that one bit of Brooks' map here is just as well known to some of us as the paths and woods and waters of Glen s.h.i.+ra."

"I'm not very well acquaint with Glen s.h.i.+ra myself," was all the General said, looking at the map for a moment with eyes that plainly had no interest in the thing before them, and then he turned to a nudge of the Paymaster's arm.

Turner smiled again knowingly to Mr. Spencer. "I put my brogues in it that time," said he in a discreet tone. "I forgot that the old gentleman and his brothers were far better acquaint with Glen s.h.i.+ra in my wife's maiden days than I was myself. But that's an old story, Mr. Spencer, that you are too recent an incomer to know the shades and meanings of."

"I daresay, sir, I daresay," said Mr. Spencer gravely. "You are a most interesting and sensitive people, and I find myself often making the most unhappy blunders."

"Interesting is not the word, I think, Mr. Spencer," said General Turner coldly; "we refuse to be interesting to any simple Sa.s.senach." Then he saw the confusion in the innkeeper's face and laughed. "Upon my word,"

he said, "here I'm as touchy as a bard upon a mere phrase. This is very good drink, Mr. Spencer; your purveyance, I suppose?"

"I had the privilege, sir," said the innkeeper. "Captain Campbell gave the order----"

"Captain Campbell!" said the General, putting down his gla.s.s and drinking no more. "I was not aware that he was at the costs of this dregy. Still, no matter, you'll find the Campbells a good family to have dealings with of any commercial kind, pernick-etty and proud a bit, like all the rest of us, with their bark worse than their bite."

"I find them quite the gentlemen," said the innkeeper.

Turner laughed again.

"Man!" said he, "take care you do not put your compliment just exactly that way to them; you might as well tell Dr. Colin he was a surprisingly good Christian."

Old Brooks, out of sheer custom, sat on the high stool at his desk and hummed his declensions to himself, or the sing-song _Arma virumque cano_ that was almost all his Latin pupils remembered of his cla.s.sics when they had left school. The noise of the a.s.sembly a little distressed him; at times he would fancy it was his scholars who were clamouring before him, and he checked on his lips a high peremptory challenge for silence, flus.h.i.+ng to think how nearly he had made himself ridiculous. From his stool he could see over the frosted gla.s.s of the lower window sash into the playground where it lay bathed in a yellow light, and bare-legged children played at s.h.i.+nty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a little wooden ball. The town's cows were wandering in for the night from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road overhung with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering through in lighter splashes on the shade. Within, the drink was running to its dregs, and piles of oatcake farls lay yet untouched. One by one the company departed. The glen folks solemnly shook hands with the Paymaster, as donor of the feast, and subdued their faces to a sad regret for this "melancholy occasion, Captain Campbell"; then went over to the taverns in the tenements and kept up their drinking and their singing till late in the evening; the merchants and writers had gone earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer, superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The afternoon was sinking into the calm it ever has in this place, drowsing, mellowing; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners, gathered at the head of the schoolroom near the door, seemed silent as his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and kept it up with his head while he surveyed the interior. Grammars and copy-books, pens in long tin boxes, the terrible black tawse he never used but reluctantly, and the confiscated playthings of the children who had been guilty of encroaching upon the hours of study with the trifles of leisure, were heaped within. They were for the most part the common toys of the country-side, and among them was a whistle made of young ash, after the fas.h.i.+on practised by children, who tap upon the bark to release it from its wood, slip off the bark entire upon its sap, and cut the vent or blow-hole. Old Brooks took it in his hand and a smile went over his visage.

"General Turner," he cried up the room, "here's an oddity I would like to show you," and he balanced the pipe upon his long fingers, and the smile played about his lips as he looked at it.

Turner came up, and "A whistle," said he. "What's the story?"

"Do you know who owns it?" asked Brooks.

"Sandy, I suppose," said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his only son. "At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and this may very well be the rogue's contrivance." He took the pipe in hand and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. "Man," said he, "that makes me young again! I wish I was still at the age when that would pipe me to romance."

The schoolmaster smiled still. "It is not Master Sandy's," said he.

"Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer."

"Ah! the witch!" cried the General, his face showing affection and annoyance. "That's the most hoyden jade I'm sure you ever gave the ferule to."

"I never did that," said the schoolmaster.

"Well, at least she's the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling wretch ever kept a sergeant's section of lovers at her skirts. I wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the meadow."

Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the moor-fowl pipes in spring. "Do you hear that?" he asked. "It is all, my General, we get from life and knowledge--a very thin and apparently meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not so happily const.i.tuted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General, is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn my fees and Queen Anne's Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that's the music that may be inopportune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an ashen stick made by the performer during the morning's sacred exercise."

The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old Brooks was doing, and among them was the Paymaster. He was redder in the face than ever, and his wig was almost off his head, it was so slewed aside.

"Giving the General a lesson?" he asked with some show at geniality. He leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he leaned on he had placed many a s.h.i.+lling as Candlemas and Han'sel Monday offerings when he was a schoolboy, before the farming, before the army and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee-lone homester among her wanderers returned.

"I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan," said Old Brooks pleasantly. "A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I a.s.sure you."

"Oh! I have heard of her," said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very hotly.

"And you have heard of a very handsome little lady," said he, "remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted daughter."

The Paymaster had an unpleasant little laugh that when he chose he could use with the sting of a whip though accompanied by never a word. He flicked the surplus of his snuff from his stock and gave this annoying little laugh, but he did not allow it to go unaccompanied, for he had overheard the General's speech to Mr. Spencer.

"No doubt she's all you say or think," said he dryly, "I'm sure I'm no judge, but there's a rumour abroad that she's a big handful. A want of discipline perhaps, no more than that--"

"You know the old saying, Captain," said the General, "bachelors' bairns are aye well trained."

The Paymaster started in a temper, and "I have a son," said he, "and----"