A cough choked him and he stopped. At Gilian, sitting still and seemingly uncomprehending, the Cornal looked as at a stranger. "So it is," said he; "just a wean! I forgot, some way. How old are you--sixteen? Nonsense! By the look of you I would say a hundred. Oh, you're an old-farrent one, sitting there with your lugs c.o.c.ked. And what do you think is the moral of my story? Eh?--the moral of it? The lesson of it? What? What? What?"

Gilian had the answer in a flash. "It is to be younger than the other man; it is----"

"What?" cried the Cornal. "That's the moral? To be younger than the other man. No more than that? To be young? Old Brooks never put you to your aesops when that's all you can make of it."

The General sat back and folded his soft thick hands upon his lap. He drew in his breath and blew it out again with the gasp of the wearied emerging from water. "Do you know, Dugald," said he, "there's something in that view of it? We were not young enough. We had too sober an eye on life. Youth is not in the straight back or the clear eye; there is something more, and--the person you mentioned had it, and has it yet."

"That's all havers," said the Cornal; "all havers. I was as jocular at the time as Jiggy Crawford himself. It did not come natural, but I could force myself to it. The blame was not with us. She was a wanton hussy first and last, and G.o.d be with her!"

He gripped the boy by the jacket collar. "Up and away," said he. "If my tale's in vain, there's no help for it. I cannot make it plainer. Do not be a fool, wasting the hours that are due to your tasks in loitering with the daughter of a woman who has her mother's eye and her mother's songs, and maybe her mother's heart."

He pushed the boy almost rudely out at the parlour door.

CHAPTER XV--ON BOARD THE "JEAN"

Gilian went up to his attic, stood looking blankly from the window at the skylights on the other side of the street, his head against the camecil of the room. He was bewildered and pleased. He was bewildered at this new candour of the Cornal that seemed to rank him for the first time more than a child; he was pleased to have his escapade treated in so tolerant a fashion, and to be taken into a great and old romance, though there was no active feud in it as in Marget Maclean's books.

Besides, the sorrow of the old man's love story touched him. To find a soft piece in that old warrior so intent upon the past and a splutter of glory was astonishing, and it was pitiful too that it should be a tragedy so hopeless. He 'listed once more on the Cornal's side in the feud against Maam, even against Nan herself for her likeness to her mother, forgetting the charm of her song, the glamour at the gate, and all the magic of the garden. He determined to keep at a distance if he was to be loyal to those who had adopted him. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should vex the Paymaster and his brothers by indulging his mere love of good company in such escapades as he had in the ship and in the Duke's garden. There was no reason why---- His head unexpectedly b.u.mped against the camceil of the room. He was startled at the accident. It revealed to him for the first time how time was pa.s.sing and he was growing. When he had come first to the Paymaster's that drooping ceil was just within the reach of his outstretched hand; now he could touch it with his brow.

"Gilian! Gilian!" cried Miss Mary up the stair.

He went down rosy red, feeling some unrest to meet a woman so soon after the revelation of a woman's perfidy, so soon indeed after a love-tale told among men. The parlour, as he pa.s.sed its slightly open door, was still; its candles guttered on the table. The fire was down to the ash. He knew, without seeing it, that the old men were seated musing as always, ancient and moribund.

Miss Mary gave him his supper. For a time she bustled round him, with all her vexation gone, saying nothing of his sederunt with her brothers.

Peggy was at the well, spilling stoup after stoup to make her evening gossip the longer, and the great flagged kitchen was theirs alone.

"What--what was the Cornal saying to you?" at last she queried, busying herself as she spoke with some uncalled-for kitchen office to show the indifference of her question.

"Oh, he was not angry," said Gilian, thinking that might satisfy.

"I did not think he would be," she said. Then in a little again, reluctantly: "But what was he talking about?"

The boy fobbed it off again. "Oh, just about--about--a story about a woman in Little Elrig."

"Did you understand?" she said, stopping her fict.i.tious task and gasping, at the same time scrutinising him closely.

"Oh, yes--no, not very well," he stammered, making a great work with his plate and spoon.

"Do not tell _me_ that," she said, coming over courageously and laying her hand upon his shoulder. "I know you understand every word of the story, if it is the story I mean."

He did not deny it this time. "But I do not know whether it is the same story or not," he said, eagerly wishing she would change the subject.

"What I mean," said she, "is a story about a woman who was a friend of mine--and--and she quarrelled with my brothers. Is that the one?"

"That was the one," said he.

Miss Mary wrung her hands. "Oh!" she cried piteously, "that they should be thinking about that yet! wiser-like would it be for them to be sitting at the Book. Poor Nan! Poor Nan! my dear companion! Must they be blaming her even in the grave? You understand it very well. I know by your face you understand it. She should not have all the blame. They did not understand; they were older, more sedate than she was; their merriment was past; there was no sc.r.a.p left of their bairnhood that even in the manliest man finds a woman's heart quicker than any other quality. I think she tried to--to--to--like them because they were my brothers, but the task beat her for all her endeavour. It is an old, dait story. I am wondering at them bringing it up to you. What do you think they would bring it up to you for?" And she scrutinised him shrewdly again.

"I think the girl the Cornal saw me with put him in mind of her mother,"

said Gilian, pushing the idea no further.

She still looked closely at him. "The girl cannot help that," said she.

"She is very like her mother in some ways--perhaps in many. Maybe that was the Cornal's reason for telling you the story."

There was not, for once, the response of understanding in Gilian's face.

She could say no more. Was he not a boy yet, perhaps with the impulse she and the Cornal feared, all undeveloped? And at any rate she dare not give him the watchword that all their remembrances led up to--the word Beware.

But Gilian guessed the word, and his a.s.sumption of ignorance was to prevent Miss Mary from guessing so much. Only he misunderstood. He looked upon the desire to keep him from the company of the people of Maam as due to the old rancours and jealousies, while indeed it was all in his interest.

But in any case he respected the feelings of the Paymaster's family, and thereafter for long he avoided as honestly as a boy might all intercourse with the girl, whom circ.u.mstance the mischievous, the henchman of the enemy, put in his way more frequently almost than any of her s.e.x. He must be meeting her in the street, the lane, the market-place, in the highway, or in walks along the glen. He kept aloof as well as he might (yet ever thinking her for song and charm the most interesting girl he knew), and the days pa.s.sed; the springs would be but a breath of rich brown mould and birch, the summers but a flash of golden days growing briefer every year, the winters a lessening interlude of storm and darkness.

Gilian grew like a sapling in all seasons, in mind and fancy as in body.

Ever he would be bent above the books of Marget Maclean, getting deeper to the meaning of them. The most trivial, the most inadequate and common story had for him more than for its author, for under the poor battered phrase that runs through book and book, the universal gestures of bookmen, he could see history and renew the tragedies that suggested them at the outset. He was no more Brooks' scholar though he sat upon his upper forms, for, as the dominie well could see, he was launching out on barques of his own; the plain lessons ot the school were without any interest as they were without any difficulty to him. He roamed about the woods, he pa.s.sed precious hours upon the sh.o.r.e, his mind plangent like the wave.

"A droll fellow that of the Paymaster's," they said of him in the town. For as he aged his shyness grew upon him, and he went about the community at ease with himself only when his mind was elsewhere.

"A remarkable young gentleman," said Mr. Spencer one day to the Paymaster. "I am struck by him, sir, I am struck. He has an air of cleverness, and yet they tell me he is--"

"He is what?" asked the Paymaster, lowering his brows suspicious on the innkeeper's hesitation.

"They tell me he is not so great a credit to old Brooks as he might expect," said the innkeeper, who was not lacking in boldness or plain speaking if pushed to it.

"Ay, they say that?" repeated the Paymaster, pinching his snuff vigorously. "Maybe they're right too. I'll tell you what. The lad's head is stuffed with wind. He goes about with notions swishing round inside that head of his, as much the plaything of nature as the reed that whistles in the wind at the riverside and fancies itself a songster."

Mr. Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that this was a delicate question. He let it pa.s.s unput.

Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy. The same day at their meridian in the "Abercrombie" he broached the topic.

"I'll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his hand."

"A crook in his hand?" said the Paymaster. "Would you have nothing else for him but a crook?"

"Well," said MacGibbon, "I supposed you would be for putting him into Ladyfield. If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for."

"Ladyfield!" cried the Paymaster. "There was no notion further from my mind. Farming, for all Duke George's reductions, is the last of trades nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a soger."

MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. "If you did I forgot," said he. "It never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your influence will be useful." And he changed the subject.

At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said, "when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go," was on an excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness.

For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river's peaty flow; he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazily, and within him rose the whole charm and glamour of oceans and isles.

Swimming in the briny deeps that washed the rocks, he felt in that solitude so sufficient, so much in harmony with the spirit of the place, its rumination, its content, its free and happy birds, as if he were Ellar in the fairy tale. The tide caressed; it put its arms round him; it laughed in the sunshine and kissed him shyly at the lips. Into the swooping concourse of the birds he would send, thus swimming, his brotherly halloo. They called back; they were not afraid, they need not be--he loved them.

To-day he had come down to the Waterfoot almost unknowing where he walked. Though the woods were bare there was the look of warmth in their brown and purple depths; only on the upper hills did the snow lie in patches. Great piles of trunks, the trunks of old fir and oak, lay above high-water mark. He turned instinctively to look for the ship they were waiting for, and behind him, labouring at a slant against the wind, was the _Jean_ coming from the town to pick her cargo from this narrow estuary.

He was plucked at the heart by a violent wish to stay. At the p.o.o.p he could see Black Duncan, and the seaman's histories, the seaman's fables all came into his mind again, and the sea was the very highway of content. The ship was all alone upon the water, not even the tan of a fisher's lug-sail broke the blue. A bracing heartening air blew from French Foreland And as he was looking spellbound upon the little vessel coming into the mouth of the river, he was startled by a strain of music. It floated, a rumour angelic, upon the air, coming whence he could not guess--surely not from the vessel where Black Duncan and two others held the deck alone?

It was for a time but a charm of broken melody in the veering wind, distinct a moment, then gone, then back a faint echo of its first clearness. It was not till the vessel came fairly opposite him that the singer revealed herself in Nan sitting on a water-breaker in the lee of the companion hatch.