Читать книгу Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure - Munro Neil - Страница 8

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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.