"You--you--you----" said the elder brother grimly, but again he did not finish the sentence.

The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might, ran over the morning's sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old man's voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine, the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened.

The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into the street where each pa.s.serby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was obviously canva.s.sing the latest news.

"There's her uncle away by," said the Paymaster, straining his head to follow a figure pa.s.sing on the other side of the street. "If they had kept a stricter eye on her from the first when they had her they might have saved themselves all this."

"Stricter eye!" said the Cornal. "You ken as much about women as I ken about cattle. The veins of her body were full of caprice, that's what ailed her, and for that is there any remede? I'm asking you. As if I did not ken the mother of her! Man, man, man! She was the emblem and type of all her s.e.x, I'm thinking, wanting all sobriety, hating the thought of age in herself and unfriendly to the same in others. A kind of a splash on a fine day upon the deep sea, laughing over the surface of great depths. I knew her well, Dugald knew her----"

"You had every chance," said the Paymaster, who nowadays found more courage to retort when his brother's shortness and contempt annoyed him.

"More chance, of course I had," said the Cornal. "I'm thinking you had mighty little from yon lady."

"Anyway, here's her daughter to seek," said the Paymaster, feeling himself getting the worst of the encounter; "my own notion is that she's on the road to Edinburgh. They say she had aye a crave for the place; perhaps there was a pair of breeches there behind her. Anyway, she's making an a.s.s of somebody!"

Gilian threw down the letter and stood to his feet with his face white.

"You're a liar!" said he.

No sh.e.l.l in any of their foreign battles more astounded the veterans he was facing with wide nostril and a face like chalk.

"G.o.d bless me, here's a marvel!" cried the Cornal when he found voice.

"You--you--you d.a.m.ned sheep!" blurted the Paymaster. "Do you dare speak to me like that? For tuppence I would give you my rattan across the legs." His face was purple with anger; the stock that ran in many folds about his neck seemed like a garotte. He lifted up his hand as if to strike, but his brother caught his arm.

"Let the lad alone," said he. "If he had a little more of that in his make I would like him better."

Together they stood, the old men, facing Gilian with his hands clenched, for the first time in his life the mutineer, feeling a curious heady satisfaction in the pa.s.sion that braced him like a sword and astounded the men before him.

"It's a lie!" he cried again, somewhat modifying his accusation. "I know where she is, and she's not in Edinburgh nor on her way to it."

"Very well," said the Paymaster, "ye better go and tell Old Islay where she is; he's put about at the loss of a daughter-in-law he paid through the nose for, they're saying."

The blow, the last he had expected, the last he had reason to look for, struck full and hard. He was blind then to the old men sneering at him there; his head seemed charged with coiling vapours; his heart, that had been dancing a second ago on the wave of pa.s.sion, swamped and sank. He had no more to say; he pa.s.sed them and left the room and went along the lobby to the stair-head, where he stood till the vapours had somewhat blown away.

CHAPTER x.x.xII--AN OLD MAID'S SECRET

Miss Mary bustled about her kitchen with a liveliness that might have deceived any one but Gilian, who knew her to be in a tremendous perturbation. She clattered among pans, wrestled with her maid over dishes and dusters, and kept her tongue incessantly going on household details. With a laughable transparency she turned in a little to the lad and said something about the weather. He sat down in a chair and gloomed into the fire, Miss Mary watching his every sigh, but yet seemingly intent upon her duties.

"Donacha Breck's widow was over before we were up to-day, for something for her hoast," she said. "She had tried hyssop and pennyroyal masked in two waters, but I gave her sal prunelle and told her to suck it till the cough stopped. There's a great deal of trouble going about just now: sometimes I think----" She stopped incontinent and proceeded to sweep the floor, for she saw that Gilian was paying no attention to her. At length he looked at her and then with meaning to Peggy bent over her jaw-box.

"Peggy," said Miss Mary, "go over and tell the mantua-maker that she did not put the leavings in the pocket of my jacket, and there must have been a good deal."

Peggy dried her arms, tucked up the corner of her ap.r.o.n, and departed, fully aware of the stratagem, but no way betraying the fact When she was gone, Miss Mary faced him, disturbed and questioning.

"We had a quarrel in there," said he shortly, "I am not going to put up with what they said about any friend of mine."

She had no need to ask who he spoke of. "Is it very much to you?" said she, turning away and busy with her brush that she might be no spectator of his confusion. A great fear sprang up in her; the boy who had grown up a man for her in the s.p.a.ce of a Sunday afternoon was capable of new developments even more rapid and extraordinary.

"It should be very much to anybody," said he, "to anybody with the spark of a gentleman, when the old and the soured and the jealous----"

"I'm thinking you are forgetting, Gilian," said she, facing him now with a flush upon her face.

"What? what?" he asked, perplexed. "You think I should be grateful. I cannot help it; you were the kind one and----"

"I was not thinking of that at all," she rejoined "I was just thinking you had forgotten that I was their sister, and that I must be caring much for them. If my brothers have said anything to vex you, and that has been a too common thing--my sorrow!--in this house, you should be minding their years, my dear. It is the only excuse I can offer, and I am willing to make up for their shortcomings by every kindness." And she smiled upon the lad with the most wonderful light of affection in her eyes.

"Oh," he cried, "am I not sure of that, Auntie? You are too good to me.

What am I to be complaining--the beggarly orphan?"

"Not that, my dear," she cried courageously, "not that! In this house, when my brothers' looks were at their blackest for you, there has always been goodwill and motherliness. But you must not be miscalling them that share our roof, the brothers of Dugald and of Jamie." Her voice broke in a gasp of melancholy; she stretched an arm and dusted from a corner of the kitchen a cobweb that had no existence, her eyesight dim with unbr.i.m.m.i.n.g tears. At any other time than now Gilian would have been smitten by her grief, for was he not ever ready to make the sorrows of others his own? But he was frowning in a black-browed abstraction on the clay scroll of the kitchen floor, heartsick of his dilemma and the bitterness of the speeches he had just heard.

Miss Mary could not be long without observing, even in her own troubles, that he was unusually vexed. She was wise enough to know that a fresh start was the best thing to put them at an understanding.

"What did you come to tell me to-day?" she asked, composing herself upon a chair beside him and taking up some knitting, for hers were the fingers that were never idle.

"Come down to tell you? Come down to tell you?" he repeated, in surprise at her penetration, and in some confusion that he should so sharply be brought to his own business.

"Just so," she said. "Do you think Miss Mary has no eyes, my dear, or that they are too old for common use? There was something troubling you as you came in at the door; I saw it in your face--ay, I heard it in your step on the stair."

He fidgeted and evaded her eyes. "I heard outside that--that Turner's daughter had not been got, and it vexed me a little."

"Turner's daughter!" she said. "It used to be Miss Nan; it was Miss Nan no further gone than Thursday, and for what need we be so formal to-day?

You are not heeding John's havers about your name being mixed up with the affair in a poor Sa.s.sanach inn-keeper's story? Eh, Gilian?" And she eyed him shrewdly, more shrewdly than he was aware of.

Still he put her off. He could not take her into his confidence so soon after that cold plunge into truth in the parlour. He wanted to get out of doors and think it all over calmly. He pretended anger.

"What am I to be talked to like this for? All in this house are on me.

Is it wonderful that I should have my share in the interest the whole of the rest of the parish has in this young lady lost?"

He rose to leave the room. Miss Mary stopped him with the least touch upon the arm, a lingering, gentle touch of the finger-tips, and yet caressing.

"Gilian," she said softly, "do you think you can be deceiving me?

_M'eudail, m'ieudail!_ I know there is a great trouble in your mind, and is it not for me to share?"

"There is something, but I cannot tell you now what it is, though I came here to tell you," he answered, making no step to go.

"Gilian," said she, standing before him, and the light from the window touching her ear so that, beside the darkness of her hair (for she had off her cap), it looked like a pink flower, "Gilian, can you not be telling me? Do you think I cannot guess what ails you, nor fancy something for its cure?"

He saw from the shyness of her face that she had an inkling of at least the object of his interest.

"But I cannot be mentioning it here," he said, feebly enough. "It's a matter a man must cherish to himself alone, and not be airing before others. I felt, in there, to have it in my mind before two men who had worked and fought and adventured all their lives, and come to this at last, was a childish weakness."

She caught hold of his coat lapel, and fingered it, and looked as she spoke, not at the face above her, but at some vision over his shoulder.

"Before them, my dear," she said. "That well might be, though even they have not always been the hard and selfish veterans. What about me, my dear? Can I not be understanding, think you, Gilian?"