"The same and not all the same," he admitted. "I can make it exactly the same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other way, some sad way I cannot explain."

The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees.

There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady's breathing, that to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers.

And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other rumour to the ear.

"Listen," said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that grey gra.s.sy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady's arm.

"Faith, and you are _not_ blate," said she whimsically, but indifferent to remove herself from a grasp so innocent.

She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature.

A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt attention. She withdrew her arm gently.

"Hush, hush!" he said. "Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?"

"I do?" she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly sense of laughter as at a child "Bees and midges, late things like ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies."

"They are, of course they are," he protested, laughing. "At least a second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet"--his humour came back--"even yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other path."

"What, and waste ten minutes more!" she cried "Follow me, follow me!"

And she sped swiftly over the trim gra.s.s, bruising the odours of the night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself, very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity.

He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book again to please or to deceive the Philistine.

"I thought we could bring it all back again--that was the object of my rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past."

They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.

"And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you ever written anything?"

He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he had read in Marget Maclean's books that were still the favourites of his leisure hours.

"It'll be in that like other things," she said with some sense of her own cruelty. "You must be dreaming it when you might be making it."

"I never had the inspiration----"

"What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!" she pointed out.

"But now, of course---"

"Just the weather, Gilian," she hastened to interject. "A bonny night with stars, the scent of flower, a misty garden--I could find some inspiration in them myself for poetry, and I make no pretence at it."

"There was a little more," he said meaningly; "but no matter, that may wait," and he proceeded immediately to the making of a poem as he went, the subject a night of stars and a maiden. They had got into the dark upper end of the town overhung by the avenue trees, the lands were spotted with the lemon lights of the evening candles, choruses came from the New Inns where fishermen from Cowal met to spend a shilling or two in the illusion of joy. Mr. Spencer saw them as he pa.s.sed and was suffused by a kindly glow of uncommon romance. He saw, as he thought, a pair made for each other because they were of an age and of a size (as if that meant much); what should they be but lovers coming from the gardens of Duke George in such a night and the very heavens twinkling with the courtship of the stars? He looked and sighed. Far off in the south was an old tale of his own; the lady upstairs eternally whining because she must be banished to the wilds away from her roaring native city was not in it. "Lucky lad!" said he to himself. "He is not so shy as we thought him." They came for a moment under the influence of the swinging lamp above his door, then pa.s.sed into the dusk. He went into his public room, and "Mary," he cried to a maid, "a little drop of the French for Sergeant Cameron and me. You will allow me, Sergeant? I feel a little need of an evening brace." And he drank, for the sake of bygone dusks, with his customer.

Nan and Gilian now walked on the pavement, a discreet distance apart.

She stopped at the mantua-makers door. He lingered on the parting, eager to prolong it. The street was deserted; from the Sergeant More's came the sound of song; some fallen leaves ran crisp along the stones, blown by an air of wind. He had her by the hand, still loath to leave, when suddenly the door of the mantua-maker's opened and out came a little woman, who, plunging from the splendour of two penny dips into the outer mirk, ran into his arms before she noticed his presence. She drew back with an apology uttered in Gaelic in her hurried perturbation. It was Miss Mary.

"Auntie," he said, no more.

She glanced at his companion and started as if in fear, shivered, put out a hand and bade her welcome home.

"Dear me! Miss Nan," said she, "amn't I proud to see you back? What a tall lady you have grown, and so like--so like----" She stopped embarra.s.sed.

Her hand had gone with an excess of kindness upon the girl's arm ere she remembered all that lay between them and the heyday of another Nan than this. Of Gilian she seemed to take no notice, which much surprised him with a sense of something wanting.

At last they parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster's house.

CHAPTER XXVII--ALARM

Nan's uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature's caprice with sheep and crop, man's injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons, nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life's dolours, would be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard--a fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man's face--he looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable, then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more than ever.

He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a tryst of her own making. She was indifferent--I have no excuse for her, and she's my poor heroine--about his wasted hours so long as she had her days illumined by some flicker of life and youth. He never knew how often it was from weeping over a letter from Edinburgh, or a song familiar elsewhere, upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam--and Young Islay was for reasons away in the Lowlands--this dreamer of the wild, with the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts.

So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers have ever been meeting in the woods of these glens without saying to each other why.

Gilian went little to town in that weather, he was getting credit with Miss Mary, if not with her brothers, for a new interest in his profession. Nor did Nan. Her father did not let her go much without himself, he had his own reasons for keeping her from hearing the gossip of the streets.

A week or two pa.s.sed. The corn, in the badger's moon, yellowed and hung; silent days of heat haze, all breathless, came on the country; the stubble fields filled at evening with great flights of birds moving south. A spirit like Nan's, that must ever be in motion, could not but irk to share such a doleful season; she went more than ever about the house of Maam sighing for lost companions, and a future not to be guessed at. Only she would cheer up when she had her duties done for the afternoon and could run out to the hillside to meet Gilian if he were there.

She was thus running, actually with a song on her lips, one day, when she ran into the arms of her uncle as he came round the corner of the barn.

"Where away?" said he shortly, putting her before him, with his hands upon her shoulders.

She reddened, but answered promptly, for there was nothing clandestine in her meetings on the bare hillside with Gilian.

"The berries again," she said. "Some of the people from Glen Aray are coming over."

"Some of the people," he repeated ironically; "that means one particular gentleman. My la.s.sie, there's an end coming to that."

He drew a large-jointed coa.r.s.e hand through his tangled beard and chuckled to himself.

"Are you aware of that?" he went on. "An end coming to it. Oh! I see things; I'm no fool: I could have told your father long ago, but he's putting an end to it in his own way, and for his own reasons."

"I have no idea what you mean," she said, surprised at the portentous tone. She was not a bit afraid of him, though he was so little in sympathy with her youth, so apparently in antagonism to her.

"What would you say to a man?" he asked cunningly.

"It would depend, uncle," she said readily and cheerfully, though a sudden apprehension smote her at the heart. "It would depend on what he said to me first."

The old man grinned callously as the only person in the secret.

"Suppose he said: 'Come away home, wife, I've paid a bonny penny for ye'?"

"Perhaps I would say, if I was in very good humour at the time, 'You've got a bonny wife for your bonny penny.' More likely I would be throwing something at him, for I have my Uncle Jamie's temper they say, but I'm n.o.body's wife, and for want of the asking I'm not likely to be."

"Well, we'll see," said the uncle oracularly. Then abruptly, "Have you heard that your father's got an appointment?"