"Not to judge youth, sir, which he may have forgotten to understand,"

said Gilian, yet very red and uneasy, but with a wistful countenance.

"If you'll think of it I'm just at the beginning of life, a little more shy of making the plunge perhaps than Young Islay there might be, or your own son Sandy, who's a credit to his corps, they say."

"Quite right, Gilian, and I ask your pardon," said the General, putting out his hand. "G.o.d knows who the failures of this life are; some of them go about very flashy semblances of success. In these parts we judge by the external signs, that are not always safest; for my son Sandy, who looks so thriving and so douce when he comes home, is after all a scamp whose hands are ever in his simple daddy's pockets." But this he said laughing, with a father's reservation.

The Paymaster stared at this encounter, in some ways so much beyond his comprehension. "Humph!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; and Gilian rode on, leaving in the group behind him an uncomfortable feeling that somehow, somewhere, an injustice had been done.

Miss Mary's face was at the window whenever his horse's hooves came clattering on the causeway--she knew the very clink of the shoes.

"There's something wrong with the laddie to-day," she cried to Peggy; "he looks unco dejected;" and her own countenance fell in sympathy with her darling's mood.

She met him on the stair as if by accident, pretending to be going down to her cellar in the pend. They did not even shake hands; it is a formality neglected in these parts except for long farewells or unexpected meetings. Only she must take his bonnet and cane from him and in each hand take them upstairs as if she were leading thus two little children, her gaze fond upon the back of him.

"Well, auntie!" he said, showing at first no sign of the dejection she had seen from the window. "Here I am again. I met the Captain up at the inn door, and he seems to grudge me the occasional comfort of hearing any other voice than my own. I could scarcely tell him as I can tell you, that the bleating of the lambs gave me a sore heart. The very hills are grieving with them. I'm a fine farmer, am I not? Are you not vexed for me?" His lips could no longer keep his secret, their corners trembled with the excess of his feeling.

She put a thin hand upon his coat lapel, and with the other picked invisible specks of dust from his coat sleeve, her eyes revealing by their moisture a ready harmony with his sentiment.

"Farmer indeed!" said she with a gallant attempt at badinage; "you're as little for that, I'm afraid, as you're for the plough or the army."

She led him into her room and set a chair for him as if he had been a prince, only to have an excuse for putting an arm for a moment almost round his waist. She leaned over him as he sat and came as close as she dared in contact with his hair, all the time a glow in her face.

"And what did you come down for?" she asked, expecting an old answer he never varied in.

He looked up and smiled with a touch of mock gallantry wholly new. "To see you, of course," said he, as though she had been a girl.

She was startled at this first revelation of the gallant in what till now had been her child. She flushed to the coils above her ear. Then she laughed softly and slapped him harmlessly on the back. "Get away with you," she said, "and do not make fun of a douce old maiden!" She drew back as she spoke and busily set about some household office, fearing, apparently, that her fondness had been made too plain.

"Do you know what the Captain said?" he remarked in a tone less hearty, moving about the room in a searching discontent.

"The old fool!" she answered irrelevantly, antic.i.p.ating some unpleasantness. "He went out this morning in a tiravee about a b.u.t.ton wanting from his waistcoat. It's long since I learned never to heed him much."

It was a story invented on the moment; in heavenly archives that sin of love is never indexed Her face had at once a.s.sumed a look of anxiety, for she felt that the encounter had caused Gilian's dejection as he rode down the street.

"What was he saying?" she asked at last, seeing there was no sign of his volunteering more. And she spoke with a very creditable show of indifference, and even hummed a little bar of song as she turned some airing towels on a winter-d.y.k.e beside the fire.

"Do you think I'm a failure, auntie?" asked he, facing her. "That was what he called me."

She was extremely hurt and angry.

"A failure!" she cried. "Did any one ever hear the like? G.o.d forgive me for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like his brothers than I'm like Duke George."

"You do not deny it!" said Gilian simply.

She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a transfiguration.

"My dear, my dear!" said she, "is there need for me to deny it? What are you yet but a laddie?"

He fingered the down upon his lip.

"But a laddie," she repeated, determined not to see. "All the world's before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants--do I not know them?

Grant me patience with them!"

"It was General Turner's word," said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he wondered for a moment to see her flush.

"He might have had a kinder thought," said she, "with his own affairs, as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I'll warrant you do not know anything of that, but it's the clavers of the Crosswell." She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away from what had vexed her darling. "Old Islay has his schemes, they say, to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a place of greed and plot!"

"That Turner said it, showed he thought it!" said Gilian, not a whit moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings.

"Amn't I telling you?" said Miss Mary. "It's just his own sorrows souring him. There's Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye liked the laddie and he's young yet), and his daughter back from her schooling in Edinburgh, educated, or polished, or finished off as they call it--I hope she kens what she's to be after next, for I'm sure her father does not."

Gilian's breast filled with some strange new sense of sudden relief. It was as if he had been climbing out of an airless, hopeless valley, and emerged upon a hill-crest, and was struck there by the flat hand of the l.u.s.ty wind and stiffened into hearty interest in the rolling and variegated world around. In a second, the taunt of the General of Maam was no more to him than a dream. A dozen emotions mastered him, and he tingled from head to foot, for the first time man.

"Oh, and _she's_ back, is she?" said he with a crafty indifference, as one who expects no answer.

Miss Mary was not deceived. She had moved to the window and was looking down into the street where the children played, but the new tone of his voice, and the pause before it, gave her a sense of desertion, and she grieved. On the ridges of the opposite lands, sea-gulls perched and preened their feathers, pigeons kissed each other as they moved about the feet of the pa.s.sers-by. A servant la.s.s bent over a window in the dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was glorious with sun.

CHAPTER XXII--IN CHURCH

If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was absent, indeed! For he was riding through an air almost jocund, and his spirit sang within him. The burns bubbled merrily among the long gra.s.ses and the bracken, the myrtle cast a sharp and tonic sweetness all around.

The mountain bens no more p.r.i.c.ked the sky in solemn loneliness, but looked one to the other over the plains--companions, lovers, touched to warmth and pa.s.sion by the sun of the afternoon. It was as if an empty world had been fresh tenanted. Gilian, as he rode up home, woke to wonder at his own cheerfulness. He reflected that he had been called a failure--and he laughed.

Next day he was up with the sun, and Cameron was amazed at this new zeal that sent him, crook in hand, to the hill for some wanderers of the flock, whistling blithely as he went. Long after he was gone he could see him, black against the sky, on the backbone of the mountain, not very active for a man in search of sheep. But what he could not see so far was Gilian's rapture as he looked upon the two glens severed by so many weary miles of roadway, but close together at his feet. And the chimneys of Maam (that looks so like an ancient castle at Dim Loch head) were smoking cheerily below. Looking down upon them he made a pretence to himself after a little that he had just that moment remembered who was now there. He even said the words to himself, "Oh! Nan--Miss Nan is there!" in the tone of sudden recollection, and he flushed in the cold breeze of the lonely mountain, half at the mention of the name, half at his own deceit with himself.

He allowed himself to fancy what the girl had grown to in her three years' absence among Lowland influences, that, by all his reading, must be miraculous indeed. He saw her a little older only than she had been when they sat in the den of the _Jean_ or walked a magic garden, the toss of spate-brown hair longer upon her shoulders, a little more sedateness in her mien. About her still hung the perfume of young birch, and her gown was still no lower than her knees. He met her (still in his imagination upon the hill-top) by some rare chance, in the garden where they had strayed, and his coolness and ease were a marvel to himself.

"Miss Nan!" he cried. "They told me you were returned and----" What was to follow of the sentence he could not just now say.

She blushed to see him; his hand tingled at the contact with hers. She answered in a pleasant tone of Edinburgh gentility, like Lady Charlotte, and they walked a little way together, conversing wondrously upon life and books and poems, whose secrets they shared between them. He was able to hold her fascinated by the sparkle of his talk; he had never before felt so much the master of himself, and his head fairly hummed with high notions. They talked of their childhood----

Here Gilian dropped from the clouds, at first with a sense of some unpleasant memory undefined, then with shivering, ashamed, as his last meeting with the girl flashed before him, and he saw himself again fleeing, an incapable, from the sea-beach at Ealan Dubh.

If she should remember that so vividly as he did! The thought was one to fly from, and he sped down the hill furiously, and plied himself busily for the remainder of the day with an industry Cameron had never seen him show before. Upon him had obviously come a change of some wholesome and compelling kind. He knew it himself, and yet--he told himself--he could not say what it was.

Sunday came, and he went down to church in the morning as usual, but dressed with more scruples than was customary. Far up the glen the bell jangled through the trees of the Duke's policies, and the road was busy with people bound for the sermon of Dr. Colin. They walked down the glen in groups, elderly women with snow-white piped caps, younger ones with sober hoods, and all with Bibles carried in their napkins and southernwood or tansy between the leaves. The road was dry and sandy; they cast off their shoes, as was their custom, and walked barefoot, carrying them in their hands till they came to the plane-tree at the cross-roads, and put them on again to enter the town with fit decorum.

The men followed, unhappy in their unaccustomed suits of broad-cloth or hodden, dark, flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular thoughts as they pa.s.sed the licensed houses to some harmony with the sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered, smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth breathing peace.

The Paymaster and Miss Mary sat together in Keils pew, Gilian with them, conscious of a new silk cravat. But his mind almost unceasingly was set upon a problem whose solution lay behind him. Keils pew was in front, the Maam pew was at least seven rows behind, in the shadow of the loft, beneath the cushioned and gated preserve of the castle. One must not at any time look round, even for the s.p.a.ce of a second, lest it should be thought he was guilty of some poor worldly curiosity as to the occupants of the ducal seat, and to-day especially, Gilian dared not show an unusual interest in the Turner pew. His acute ear had heard its occupants enter after a loud salutation from the elder at the plate to the General, he fancied there was a rustle of garments such as had not been heard there for three years. All other sounds in the church--the shuffle of feet, the chewing of sweets with which the worshippers in these parts always induce wakefulness, the noisy breathing of Rixa as he hunched in his corner beside the pulpit--seemed to stop while a skirt rustled. A glow went over him, and unknowing what he did he put forward his hand to take his Bible off the book-board.

Miss Mary from the corners of her eyes, and without turning her face in the slightest degree from the pulpit where Dr. Colin was soon to appear, saw the action. It was contrary to every form in that congregation; it was a shocking departure from the rule that no one should display sign of life (except in the covert conveyance of a lozenge under the napkin to the mouth, or a clearance of the throat), and she put a foot with pressure upon that of Gilian nearest her. Yet as she did so, no part of her body seen above the boards of the pew betrayed her movement.

Gilian flushed hotly, drew back his hand quickly, without having touched the book, and bent a stern gaze upon the stairs by which Dr. Colin would descend to his battlements.

It was a day of stagnant air, and the church swung with sleepy influences. The very pews and desks, the pillars of the loft and the star-crowned canopy of the pulpit, seemed in their dry and mouldy antiquity to give forth soporific dry accessions to that somnolent atmosphere, and the sun-rays, slanted over the heads of the worshippers, showed full of dust. Outside, through the tall windows, could be seen the beech-trees of the Avenue, and the crows upon them busy at their domestic affairs. Children in the Square cried to each other, a man's footsteps pa.s.sed on the causeway, returned, and stopped below the window. Everybody knew it was Black Duncan the seaman, of an older church, and reluctant, yet anxious, to share in some of the Sabbath exercises.

Gilian, with the back of the pew coming up near his neck, wished fervently it had been built lower, for he knew how common and undignified his view from the rear must thus be made. Also he wished he could have had a secret eye that he might look unashamed in the direction of his interest He tingled with feeling when he fancied after a little (indeed, it was no more than fancy) that there was a perceptible odour of young birch. Again he was remitted to his teens, sitting transported in the _Jean_, soaring heavenward upon a song by a bold child with spate-brown hair. He put forward his hand unconsciously again, and this time he had the Bible on his knee before Miss Mary could check him.

She looked down with motionless horror at his fingers feverishly turning over the leaves, and saw that he had the volume upside down.

Her pressure on his foot was delayed by astonishment. What could this conduct of his mean? He was disturbed about something; or perhaps he was unwell. And as she saw him still holding the volume upside down on his knee and continuing to look at it with absent eyes she put her mittened hand into the pocket of her silk gown, produced a large peppermint lozenge, and pa.s.sed it into his hand.