"Here's my father," she said, quickly sitting at the harpsichord again, with her face away from it and the candle-light. Into the room stepped the General, never knowing he had come upon a storm. Their silence surprised him. He looked suspiciously at the lad, who still stood on the floor with his hat in his hand.

"You're not going yet, Islay?" said he, and there was no answer.

"Have you two quarrelled?" he asked, again glancing at his daughter's averted face.

Young Islay stammered his reply. "I have been a fool, General, that's all," said he. "I brought the manners of the Inn, as your daughter says, into your house, and--"

The father caught him by the sleeve and bent a most stern eye.

"Well, well?" he pushed.

"And--the rest, I think, should be between yourself and me," said Young Islay, looking at Nan now with her back to them, and he and the father went out of the room.

CHAPTER XXV--THE EAVESDROPPER

There was no moon, but the sky hung thick with stars, and the evening was a rare dusk where bush and tree stood half revealed, things sinister, concealing the terrific elements of dreams. Over the hills came Gilian, a pa.s.sionate pilgrim of the night. The steeps, the gullies, the hazel thickets he trod were scarcely real for him, he pa.s.sed them as if in a swoon, he felt himself supreme, able to step from ben to ben, inspired by the one exaltation that puts man above all toils, fears, weariness and doubts, brother of the April eagle, cousin-german of the remote and soaring star.

He approached the house of Maam by a rough sheep-path along the side of the burn, leaped from boulder to boulder to keep the lights of the house in view, brushed eagerly through the bracken, ran masterfully in the flats. When he came close to the house, caution was necessary lest late harvesters should discover him. He went round on the outside of the orchard hedge, behind the milk-house wall, and stood in the concealment of a little alder planting. The house was lit in several windows, it struck--thought he--warm upon a neck and flashed back in a melting eye within; his heart drummed furiously.

In the farmyard the workers were preparing to depart for the night from their long day of toil. All but the last of the horses had been stabled; the shepherds were returning from the fanks; two women, the weariness of their bodies apparent in their att.i.tudes even in the dusk, stood for a little in the yard, then with arms round each other's waists went towards the cot-house, singing softly as they went. The General's voice in Gaelic rose over all but the river's murmur, as he called across the wattle gate to a herd-boy bearing in peat for the night and morning fires. And the night was all wrapt in an odour of bog myrtle and flowers.

That outer world, for once, had no interest for Gilian; his eyes were on the windows, and though the interior of Maam was utterly unknown to him from actual sight, he was fancying it in every detail. He knew the upper room where Nan slept; he had watched the light come to it and disappear, every night since she had returned, though he could not guess how in that eminent flame she was reading the memorials, the letters, the diaries of her lost lowland life and weeping for her solitude.

The light was not there now; it was too early in the evening, so she must be in the room whose two windows shone on the gra.s.s between the house and the barn. He could see them plainly as he stood in the planting, and he busied himself, forgetting all the outside interests of the house, in picturing its interior. Nan, he told himself, sat sewing or reading within, still the tall lady of his day-dreams, for he had not yet seen her since her return.

And then he heard her harpsichord, its unfamiliar music amazing him by its relation to some world he did not know, the world from which she had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed only to rough men's voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with a.s.sociations of life genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan so far removed as then from him, the home-staying dreamer. Up rose his startled judgment and called him fool.

But hark! her voice came in and joined the harpsichord--surely this time he was not mistaken? Her voice! it was certainly her voice! He held his breath to listen for fear he should lose the softest note as it came from her lips. Now he was well repaid for his nights of traverse on the hills, his watching, his disappointment! The very night held breath to listen to that song, not the song that had been sung in the _Jean_, but another, the song of a child no more, but of a woman, full of pa.s.sion, antique love and sorrow, of the unsatisfied and yearning years.

The music ceased; the night for a s.p.a.ce swooned into a numb and desolate silence. Then in the field behind, the last corncrake harshly called; a shepherd whistled on his dogs; a cart rumbled over the cobbles, making for the shed. The sound of the river as it came to him among the alder-trees seemed the sound the wave makes in the ears of the sinking and exhausted swimmer.

Gilian turned over in his pocket a lucky flint arrowhead, and wished for a glimpse of Nan.

He had no sooner done so than her shadow showed upon the blind, hurried and nervous as in some affright.

His heart leaped; he made a step forward as if he would storm that citadel of his fancy, but he checked himself on a saner thought that he was imbuing the shadow with fears that were not there. He drew a deep breath and turned his lucky arrowhead again. For a second or two there was no response. Then another shadow came upon the blinds--a man's, striding for a little back and forward, as if in perturbation. Who could it be? the trembling outsider asked himself. Not the father; there was no queue to the shadow, and a vague suggestion of the General's voice had come but a moment before from another part of the steading. Not the uncle? This was no long, bent, bearded apparition, but the figure of youth. Gilian promptly fancied himself the substance of the shadow in that envied light and presence, seeing the glow of fire and candle in Nan's eyes as she turned to the accepted lover. "Nan, Nan!" he whispered, "I love you! I love you!"

A faint breath from a new point came through the trees, the dryads sighing for all this pitiful illusion. It struck chill upon his face; he shivered and prepared to set off for home across the hill. A last reluctant glance was thrown at the window, and he had turned towards the milk-house wall when a sound of opening doors arrested him. Now he could not escape un.o.bserved; he withdrew into the shadow of the trees again.

The General and another came out and stood midway between the house and the planting. There they spoke in constrained words that did not at first reach him. Against the grey dun of the sky he could separate their figures, but he could not guess the ident.i.ty of the General's companion.

In a second or two they moved nearer and he was an unwilling listener, though a keenly interested one.

"Come, come," said the General, in a tone of some annoyance, "you had me out to hear your explanation, and now I'm to be kept chittering in the night air till you range your inside for words."

The other murmured something in a voice that did not intelligently reach the planting.

"Ay, you did, did you?" said the General in reply, very dryly, and then he paused. "I'll warrant you found a tartar," he said in a little.

The other answered softly in a word or two.

There was another pause, and then the General laughed, not with much geniality. "That was all the news you brought me out here for?" said he.

"Come, come, the lady can look after herself so far as that goes. Either that or she's not her mother's child. And yet--and yet, I would not be saying. Edinburgh and all their low-country notions make some difference; I see them in her. This is not the girl I sent off south on a mail-gig--just like a parcel. Curse the practice that we must be risking the things of our affection among strangers!"

There was no more than the brief and m.u.f.fled answer, like that of a man ashamed.

"I've seen that before," said the General stiffly. "It's not uncommon at the age, but it's unusual to take the old gentleman into the garden at night without his bonnet to tell him so little as that."

The answer, still m.u.f.fled to the listener in the planting, poured forth quickly.

"Highland," said the General, "queer Highlands! And it must be now or never with us, must it? Well, young gentleman, you have nerve at least,"

and he quoted a Gaelic proverb. He put his hand on the shoulder of the other and leaned to whisper. Gilian could make the action out against the sky. Then "Good-night" and the father's footsteps went back to the door and the unknown proceeded down the glen.

On an impulse irresistible, Gilian followed at a discreet distance, keeping on the verges of the gra.s.s beside the road, so that his footsteps might not betray him. All the night was tenantless but for themselves and some birds that called dolefully in the woods. The river, broadened by the burns on either hand that joined it, grew soon to a rapid and tumultuous current washing round the rushy bends, and the Dhu Loch when they came to it had a ripple on its sh.o.r.e, so that they were at the bridge and yet the one who led was not aware that he was followed. He leaned upon the crenelated parapet and hummed a strain of song as Gilian came up to him with a swinging step, now on the footway.

Young Islay started at this approach without warning, but he was not afraid. He peered into Gilian's face when he had come up to him.

"Oh, you!" said he. "I got quite a start, I thought at first it was Drimmin dorran's ghost." This, laughingly, of a shade with a reputation for haunting these evening solitudes.

"You're late on the road?" he went on curiously.

"No later than yourself," answered Gilian, vaguely grieving to find that this was the substance of his shadow on the blind and the audience for Miss Nan's entertainment.

"Oh! I was--I was on a visit," said Young Islay. He went closer up to Gilian and added eagerly, as one glad to unbosom, "Man! did you ever hear--did you ever hear Miss Nan sing?"

"Long ago," said Gilian; "it's an old story." "Lucky man!" said Young Islay enviously, "to be here so long to listen when I was far away."

"She was away herself a good deal," said Gilian, "but when we heard her we quite appreciated our opportunities, I a.s.sure you."

"Did you, faith?" said Young Islay, with a jealous tone. "You seem," he went on, "to have made very little use of them. I wonder where the eyes of you could be. I never saw her, really, till an hour or two ago. I never heard her sing before, but yet, some way----" He hesitated in embarra.s.sment.

Gilian made no answer. He felt it the most natural thing in the world that any one seeing and hearing Nan should appreciate herself and her singing. There was no harm in that.

The night was solemn with the continual cry of the owls that abound in the woody shoulder of Duntorvil; a sweet balmy influence loaded the air, stars gathered in patches between drifts of cloud. For some distance the young men walked together silent, till Young Islay spoke.

"I've been away seeing the world," said he hurriedly, like a man at a confession, "not altogether with my father's wish, who would sooner I stayed at home and farmed Drimlee; moving from garrison to garrison, giving my mind no hearth to stay at for more than a night at a time, and I've been missing the chance of my life. I went up the way there an hour or two since--Young Islay, a soldier, coa.r.s.e, ashamed of sentiment, and now I go down another man altogether. I would not say it to any one but yourself; you're a sort of sentimental person in a wholesale way; you'll understand. Eh, what? You'll understand!" He threw out his chest; breathed fully. "I'm a new man, I'm telling you. I wonder where the eyes of you fellows were?"

Even yet Gilian did not grudge Young Islay the elation that was so manifest.

"You understand, we did not see much of her in these parts lately, much more than yourself. I have not seen her myself since she returned. Has she changed much?"

"Much!" exclaimed Young Islay, laughing. "My son! she is not the girl I knew at all. When I went in there--into the room up, there you know, I was--I was--baffled to know her. I think I expected to see the same girl I had--I had--you mind, brought the boat out to, the same loose hair, the same--you know, I never expected to see a princess in Maam. A princess, mind you, and she looked all the more that because her uncle met me at the stair-foot as I was going in. A sour old scamp yon! He was teasing out his beard, and, 'A nice piece there,' said he, nodding at the door, 'and I'm sure her father would be glad to have her off his hands.' I laughed and----"

"I would have struck him on the jaw," said Gilian with great heat.

"Oh!" said Young Islay, astonishment in his voice. He said no more for a little. Then, "I was not very well pleased myself with the remark when I went into the room and saw the lady it referred to. You're not--you're not chief in that quarter, are you?"