CHAPTER XI—THE SOUND OF THE DRUM
And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the town about him in a ferment of anticipation? In our sleeping community we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs.
He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor’s door. Old Islay came out with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow.
“What is wrong in the place to-day?” asked his Grace with a flourish of his crop about him to the lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern doors. “Am I paying good day’s wages for the like of that?”
Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. “It’s the coming of the army,” said he. “The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day. They would not do a hand’s turn for an emperor.”
“Humph!” said Duke George. “I wish I could throw off life’s responsibilities so easily. The rogues! the rogues!” he mused, soothing his horse’s neck with a fine and kindly hand. “I suppose it’s in them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances. My father—well, well, let them be.” His heels turned the horse in a graceful curvet “I’m saying, Islay,” he cried over his shoulder, “have a free cask or two at the Cross in the morning.”
But it was in the Paymaster’s house that the fullest stress, the most nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster’s snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who smiled behind his back. His brothers’ slumbers in the silent parlour had been utterly destroyed till “Me-the-day!” Miss Mary had to cry at last when her maid brought back untasted viands, “I wish the army was never to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the better for this.”
All this excitement sustained the tremulous feeling at the boy’s heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier’s experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal’s character suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till she cried “The man’s doited!” though she clearly liked it; to Gilian he began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales.
Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero. It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d’Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry “Well done!”; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every “whe—e—et” of the bullets at his ear bringing the moment’s alarm to his teeth in a checked sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams, to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the battle-lines upon the page—the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting, commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the master’s desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.
Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.
“At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?” said the dominie a little bitterly, a little humorously. “And what might it be this time?”
“Sogers,” said the boy most red and awkward.
“Ay, ay,” said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. “Soldiers is it? And the playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind. Soldiers! H’m! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you’re going to meet Captain Campbell’s most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts. Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and—my work’s hopeless. Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act to-day you’ll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better and—and—I maybe wished for worse.”
That night Gilian went to bed in his garret while yet the daylight was abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.
He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable. The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.
The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor’s corner there to stand awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited whispering, afraid like the Paymaster’s boy to shatter the charm of that delightful terror. Then of a sudden the town roared and shook to a twofold rattle of the skins and the shrill of fifes as the corps from the north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the darkness to the rattle of the drums? The drums, the drums, the drums! Gilian stood entranced as they passed, looming large and innumerable in the darkness, unchallenged and uncheered by the bewildered citizens. It was the very entrance he could have chosen. For now they were ghosts, legions of the air in borrowed boots of the earth, shades of some army cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal’s bloodiest stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving in to strike it at the vitals.