Читать книгу Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure - Munro Neil - Страница 11

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Gilian, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary’s room. She gave him soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut for him the tenderest portions of the hen; she gave him most generously of cheese—not the plain skim-milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made of the overnight and morning’s milk, poured cream and all into the yearning-tub. And as she served him, her tongue went constantly upon themes of many varieties, but the background of them all, the conclusion of them all, was the greatness of her brothers. Ah! she was a strange little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly displayed to its object is an affection discreditable.

“You will go far,” said she to Gilian, “before you will come on finer men. They are getting old and done, but once I knew them tall and strong and strapping, not their equals in all the armies. And what they have seen of wars, my dear! They were ever going or coming from them, and sometimes I would not know where they were out in the quarrelsome world but for a line in the Saturday Post or the Courier or maybe an old hint in the General Almanack itself. Perhaps when you become acquainted with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light-footed laddies, running about the pastures there gallivanting with the girls. But that, my dear, was long ago, and I feel myself the old woman indeed when I see them so stiff and solemn sitting in there over their evening glass.”

“I have never seen them; were they at the funeral?” asked Gilian, his interest roused in such survivals of the past.

“That they were,” said Miss Mary; “a funeral now is their only recreation. But perhaps you would not know them because they are not at all like the Captain. He was a soldier too, in a way, but they were the ancient warriors. Come into the room here and I will show you, if you have finished your dinner.”

Gilian went with her into the parlour again among the prints and the hanging swords, that now he knew the trade and story of the men who sat among them, were imbued with new interests.

Miss Mary pointed to the portraits. “That was Colin and Dugald before they went away the second time,” she said. “We had one of James too—he died at Corunna—but it was the only one, and we gave it to a lady of the place who was chief with him before he went away, and dwined a great deal after his death. And that’s his sword. When it came home from Spain by MacFarlane, the carrier round from Dumbarton, I took it out and it was clagged in the scabbard with a red glut. It was a sore memorial to an only sister.”

The boy stood in the middle of the floor feeling himself very much older than he had done in the morning. The woman’s confidences made him almost a man, for before he had been spoken to but as a child, though his thoughts were far older than his years. Those relics of war, especially the sheath that had the glut of life in it corrupting when it came back with the dead man’s chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium. The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all the wonders or the shepherds’ battle stories round the fire, and he was in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting each other down. He saw—so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon his vest—the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face when the terrible life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils expanded, his eyes glistened; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it was the loudest sound in the room.

“What is it, dear?” she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder, speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always to her lips.

“I do not know,” said he, ashamed. “I was just thinking of your brother who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword.”

She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. “I think,” said she, “I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman’s heart.”

“I saw the battle,” said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known before.

“I know you did,” said she.

“And I saw him dead.”

“Ochame!”

“And I saw you dropping the sword when you tugged it from the scabbard, and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite clean.”

“Indeed I did I,” said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so plainly set before her. “You are uncanny—no, no, you are not uncanny, you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel when her dead brother’s sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the brothers of other sisters was on its blade. That’s my only grievance with those soldier brothers of mine. I said I did not think much of the soldiers; oh! boy, I love them all. I sometimes grieve that God made me a woman that I might not be putting on the red coat too, and following the drum. And still and on, I would have no son of mine a soldier. Three fozy, foggy brothers—what did the armies do for them? They never sharpened their wits, but they sit and dover and dream, dream, even-on, never knowing all that’s in their sister Mary’s mind. And here you are, a boy, yet you get to my thoughts in a flash. Oh! I think I am going to be very fond of you.”

Gilian was amazed that at last some one understood him. No one ever did at Ladyfield; his dreams, his fancies, his spectacles of the inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the mists streaming along the ravines. He told her—or rather he made her understand, for his language was simple—how at sudden outer influences his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin’s court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter tale. How the joy of the swallow was his in its first darting flights among the eaves of the old barn, and how when it sped at the summer’s end he went with it across shires and towns, along the surface of winding rivers, even over the seas to the land of everlasting sun. How the sound of the wave on the rock moved him and set him with the ships and galleys, the great venturers 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 is a strange cantrip, Mary,” said the General; “I suppose you’ll be going to give him something. It is give, give all the day in this house like Sergeant Scott’s cantiniers.”

“Indeed and you need not complain of the giving,” said Miss Mary: “there was nobody gave with a greater extravagance than yourself when you had it to give, and nobody sends more gangrels about the house than you.”

“Give the boy his meat and let him go,” said the Cornal roughly.

“He’s not going,” said Miss Mary, turning quite white and taking the pin carefully out of her shawl and as carefully putting it in again. And having done this quite unnecessary thing she slipped her hand down and warmly clasped unseen the fingers of the boy in the folds of her bombazine gown.

“Not going? I do not understand you, Mary; as you grow older you grow stupider. Does she not grow stupider, Dugald?” said the Cornal.

“She does,” said the General. “I think she does it to torment us, just.” He was tired by this discussion; he turned and walked to the parlour.

Miss Mary mustered all her courage, and speaking with great rapidity explained the situation. The boy was the Ladyfield boy; the Paymaster was going to keep him hereafter.

The Cornal stood listening to the story as one in a trance. There was a little silence when she had done, and he broke it with a harsh laugh.

“Ah! and what is he going to make of this one?” he asked.

“That’s to be seen,” said Miss Mary; “he spoke of the army.”

“Fancy that now!” said the Cornal with contempt. “Let me see him,” he added suddenly.

“Let me see the seeds of soldiery.” He put out a hand and—not roughly but still with more force than Gilian relished—drew him from the protection of the gown and turned his face to the window. He put his hand under the boy’s chin; Gilian in the touch felt an abhorrence of the hard, clammy fingers that had made dead men, but his eyes never quailed as he looked up in the scarred face. He saw a mask; there was no getting to the secrets behind that purple visage. Experience and trial, emotions and passions had set lines there wholly new to him, and his fancy refused to go further than just this one thought of the fingers that had made dead men.

The Cornal looked him deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt.

“Man! Jock’s the daft recruiter,” he said coarsely with an oath. “What’s this but a clerk? There’s not the spirit in the boy to make a drummer of him. There’s no stuff for sogering here.”

Miss Mary drew Gilian to her again and stiffened her lips. “You have nothing to do with it, Colin; it’s John’s house and if he wants to keep the boy he’ll do it. And I’m sure if you but took the trouble to think that he is a poor orphan with no kith nor kin in the world, you would be the first to take him in at the door.”

The Cornal’s face visibly relaxed its sternness. He looked again more closely at the boy.

“Come away into our parlour here, and the General and I will have a crack with you,” said he, leading the way.

Miss Mary gave the boy’s hand a gentle squeeze, and softly pushed him in after her brother, shut the door behind them, and turned and went down to the kitchen.