CHAPTER VIII—THE SHERIFF’S SUPPER PARTY
But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.
It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of social intercourse in each other’s homes, where the winter nights, that otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly revealed for the shawls that must cover them. The men donned their best figured waistcoats and their newest stocks, and cursed the fashions that took them from their pipes and cards, but solaced themselves mightily with the bottle in the host’s bedroom. From those friendly convocations, jealousies innumerable bred. It was not only that each other’s gowns raised unchristian thoughts in the bosoms of the women, but in a community where each knew her neighbour and many were on equality, there must be selections, and rancour rose. And it was the true Highland rancour, concealing itself under a front of indifference and even politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning fiercely at the core.
A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff’s servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster’s house early in the forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in the Sheriff’s the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive nights.
Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no invitation to the Sheriff’s, and yet here was the hint of some convivial gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome to.
“What do you think it will be, John?” she asked the Paymaster, telling him what she had seen.
“Tuts,” said he, “they’ll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has an extra hard case at avizandum, not to be seen clearly through with a common creesh flame.”
“That’s aye you,” cried Miss Mary, indignant “People might slap you in the face and you would have no interest.”
She hastened to Peggy in the kitchen and Peggy shared her wonder, though she was not permitted to see her annoyance. A plan was devised to find out what this extravagance of candle might portend.
The maid took her water-stoups and went up to the Cross Well, where women were busy at that hour of the day plying for the water of Bealloch-an-uarain, that bubbles up deep in the heart of the hills, and brings the coolness and refreshment of the shady wood into the burgh street in the most intense days of summer warmth. She filled her stoups composedly, set them down and gossiped, upset them as by accident, and waited patiently her turn to fill them anew. Thus by twenty minutes’ skilful loitering she secured from the baxter’s daughter the news that there was a supper at the Sheriff’s that very night, and that very large tarts were at the firing in the baxter’s oven.
“Oh, indeed!” cried Miss Mary, when her emissary brought to her those tidings. “Then it seems the Campbells of Keil are not good enough company for Sheriff Maclachlan’s supper parties! My brother the Cornal, and my brother the Major-General, would have their own idea about that if so small a trifle as Madam’s tart supper and green tea was worth their notice or annoyance.”
She was visibly disturbed, yet put on a certain air of indifference that scarcely deceived even Peggy. The worst of it was there was no one with whom she could share her annoyance, for, if the Paymaster had no sympathy, the other two brothers were unapproachable. Gilian found her in a little rain of tears. She started with shame at his discovery, and set herself to a noisy handling of dinner dishes that by this time he knew well enough were not in her daily office of industry. And she said never a word—she that never heard his foot upon the stair without a smile of pleasure, or saw his face at the door without a mother’s challenge to his appetite.
“What is wrong, aunty?” he said in the Gaelic, using the term it had been agreed would best suit the new relationship.
“Just nothing at all, my dear,” she said without looking round. “What would be wrong?”
“But you are crying,” protested Gilian, alarmed lest he in some way should have been the cause of her distress.
“Am I?” said Miss Mary. “And if I am, it is just for a silly thing only a woman would mind, a slight from people not worth heeding.” And then she told, still shamefacedly, her story.
Gilian was amazed.
“I did not think you cared for suppers and teas,” he said. “The last time you went to the Sheriffs you said you would far sooner be at home, and—”
“Did I?” said she. Then she smiled to find some one who knew it was not the outing she immediately prized. “Indeed, what you say is true, Gilian. I’m an old done dame, and it was wiser for the like of me to be sitting knitting at the fire than going on diverts to their bohea parties and clashing supper tables. But it’s not myself I’m angry for. Oh, no! they might leave me alone for ever and a day and I would care not a pin-head, but it’s Dugald I’m thinking of—a Major-General—one of the only three in the shire, and Colin—a Cornal—and both of Keils. The Sheriff’s lady might leave me out of her routs if she pleasured it, but she has no cause to put my brothers to an insult like this.” She said “my brothers” with a high hard sound of stern and proud possession that was very fine to hear. Even Gilian, as yet only beginning to know the love and pride of this little woman, had, at her accent, a sudden deep revealing of her devoted heart.
“It is the Turners’ doing,” she said, feverishly rubbing a warming pan whose carved lid from Zaandam blinked and gleamed like the shining face of a Dutch skipper over his dram. “I know them; because my brother must be quarrelling with them, their half-sister must be taking up the quarrel and shutting her door in our faces.”
“The Turners! Then I hate them too,” cried Gilian, won to the Paymaster’s side by the sorrow of Miss Mary.
“Oh, you must not say that, my dear,” she cried, appalled. “It is not your affair at all, and the Turners are not to blame because the Sheriff is under the thumb of his madam. The Turners have their good points as well as the rest of us, and—”
“They have a daughter,” said Gilian, almost unconsciously, for there had come flooding into his mind a vision of the sombre vessel’s cabin, shot over by a ray of sunshine, wherein a fairy sang of love and wandering. And then he regretted he had spoke of hate for any of her name, for surely (he thought) there should be no hate in the world for any that had her blood and shared her home.
Surely in her people, knowing her so warm, so lovely, so kind, so gifted, there could be no cruelty and wrong.
“I would not say I hated any one if I were you, my dear,” said Miss Mary; “but I would keep a cool side to the Turners, father, or daughter, or son. Their daughter that you speak of was the cause of this new quarrel. The Captain miscalled her to her father, which was not right, for indeed she’s a bonny lassie, and they tell me she sings—”
“Like the mavis,9’ cried Gilian, still in his Gaelic and in a transport of recollection.
“Where did you hear her?” asked Miss Mary.
Gilian, flushed and uneasy, told her of the performance in the ship. Finding a listener neither inattentive nor without sympathy, he went further still and told of the song’s effect upon him, and that the sweetness of it still abiding made his hatred of her people impossible.
“She’ll do for looks too,” said Miss Mary. “She takes them with her singing from her mother, who was my dear companion before this trouble rose.”
“Oh! she looks like—like—like the gruagach girl in the story,” said Gilian, remembering the tale of the sea-maiden who sat on the shore and dressed her hair with a comb of gold.
“I hope she’s not so uncanny,” said Miss Mary with a laugh, “for the gruagach combed till a sweetheart came (that I should be talking of such daft-like things!), and he was drowned and that was the end of him.”
“Still—still,” said Gilian, “the gruagach was worth the drowning for.”
Miss Mary looked at him with a sigh for a spirit so much to be envied.
“This may be but a chapter in a very old tale,” said she. “It was with a lass the feud came in.” A saying full of mystery to the boy. Then she changed the conversation back to her own affairs. “We’ll take a walk out in the gloaming and see all the Sheriff’s friends,” said she, “and all the Sheriff’s friends in this supper are Turner’s friends and the Paymaster’s enemies.”
The night of the Sheriff’s supper party came with heavy showers and a sky swept by clouds that let through glimpse of moon nor star. The town lay in pitch darkness, all silent except for the plash of the sea upon the shore or its long roll on the Ramparts. A deserted and wind-swept street, its white walls streaming with waters, its outer shutters on the ground fiats barred to darkness, its gutters running over—it was the last night on which any one with finery and a notion for comfort would choose for going abroad to parties. Miss Mary, sitting high at her parlour window with Gilian, looked out through the blurred pane with satisfaction upon all this inclemency.
“Faith,” said she, “I wish them joy of their party whoever they be that share it!” Then all at once her mood changed to one of pity as the solitary street showed a moving light upon its footway. “Oh!” she cried. “There’s Donacha Breck’s lantern and his wife will be with him. And to-day she was at me for my jelly for a cold! I wish—I wish she was not over the door this night; it will be the death of her. To-morrow I must send her over the last of my Ladyfield honey.”
From the window and in the darkness of the night, it was impossible to tell who were for the Sheriffs party, so Miss Mary in the excess of her curiosity must be out after a time and into the dripping darkness, with Gilian by her side for companionship. It was an adventure altogether to his liking. As he walked up and down the street on its darker side he could think upon the things that were happening behind the drawn blinds and bolted shutters. It was as if he was the single tenant of a sleeping star and guessing at the mysteries of a universe. Stories were happening behind the walls, fires were glimmering, suppers were set, each family for the time being was in a world of its own, split off from its neighbours by the darkness.
A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam in water.
Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully.
“It’s gone; I knew it would be gone,” she said in a whisper to Gilian, withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep sounded a little way down the street.
He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank expanse of the moaning sea round the corner of a tall tenement filled him with new and moving emotions.
“There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa’s sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That’s two pair at least for the Sheriff’s party.”
“Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there?” said Gilian.
She shook his arm with startled affright.
“Ask! ask!” she exclaimed. “If you dared let on to any one we even heard there was a party, I would—I would—be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we must hold our heads a bit higher than that.”
She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement.
“Major Hall and his sister are there,” she said, showing darkened windows. “And the Camerons and the Frasers,” she added later, informed by the same signs of absence.
Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and bolted up their doors, then retreated to their homes behind. More dark than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation.
And yet the town was not all asleep but for the Sheriff’s party and Miss Mary and the Paymaster’s boy, for there came from the Abercrombie, though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of carousal. It was not, this time, the old half-pay officers but a lower plane of the burgh’s manhood, the salvage and the wreckage of the wars, privatemen and sergeants, by a period of strife and travel made in some degree unfit for the tame ways of peace in a stagnant burgh. They told the old tales of the bivouac; they sang its naughty or swaggering songs. By a plain deal door and some glasses of spirit they removed themselves from the dull town drowsing in the night, and in the light of the Sergeant More’s cruisie moved again in the sacked towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos and San Sebastian, gorged anew, perhaps, with blood and lust.
Miss Mary and Gilian passed the door of the Sergeant More hurriedly, she deaf to its carousal, he remembering all at once and finding wake anew his first feelings when he stood in the same room before the half-pay officers at their midday drams. He had become a little tired of this quest all to gratify an old maid’s curiosity, he wished he could be home again and in his attic room with his candle and his story book, or his abundant and lively thoughts. But there was one other task before Miss Mary. She could not forbear so little as a glance at the exterior of the Sheriff’s dwelling where the enemies of her home (as so she now must fancy them) were trying to be happy without the company of the Campbells of Keils. When they were in front of it every window shone across the grass-plot, some of them open so that the sound of gaiety came clearly to the woman and the boy. Miss Mary stood woebegone, suffused in tears.
“And there are my dear brothers at home yonder, their lee-lone, silent, sitting in a parlour! Oh! it is shameful, it is shameful! And all for a hasty word about a lass!”
Gilian before this curious sorrow was dumb. Silently he tried to lead the little lady away from the place, but she would not go, and would not be comforted. Then there came from the open windows the beginning of a song. At the first note Gilian thrilled in every nerve.
“Fancy that now!” said Miss Mary, checking her tears. “No more than a wean and here she must be singing at supper parties as brave as the mother before her. It’s a scandal! And it shows the bitterness of the quarrel to have her here, for she was never here at supper before.”
“But is she not fine?” said Gilian, with a passion in his utterance.
Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a sweetness almost magic.
“Is she not fine?” he said again, clutching with eager hands at the rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that alluring melody.
“Oh, the dear! the dear!” sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the strain. “When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful woman here on any quarrel for her!”
The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the sea moaning in the trees behind the town.
“What—what—what are we here for?” said he, beholding for the first time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and sensitive a dame.
She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!
“You may well ask,” she said, moving away from that alluring house-front with its inmates so indifferent to the passions in the dark without And her sobs were not yet finished. “Because I prize my brothers,” said she, “and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead companion’s child?” She hurried her pace away from that house whose windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.
“Do you like that girl?” said she.
“I like her—when she sings,” said he.
“Oh! it was always that,” she went on helplessly “My poor brothers! They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that brought them together.” Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful exclamation: “Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing here with you? She may have her mother’s nature as well as her mother’s songs.”
For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the street, now deserted but for themselves and a man’s footsteps sounding on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming. It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.
“It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell,” he said, in a shrill high dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the guttural Highland burghers.
She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.
“You have left the Sheriff’s early to-night,” said he. “I was asked, but I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here.”
“I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of,” said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. “The mantua-maker tells me the latest fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edinburgh.” She saw in his face the innkeeper’s apology for his common sin against the Gaelic vanity. “We were just out for an airing,” she added, taking Gilian’s hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning.
“I thought, ma’am, you were at the Sheriffs,” said Mr. Spencer.
“Oh! there is a party in the Sheriff’s, is there?” she said. “That is very nice; they have a hospitable house and many friends. I must hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave them to go out myself.”
She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that died in her twenty years before. She said “Good-night,” and then she was gone.
Mr. Spencer’s footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her cheek.