CHAPTER XXI—THE SORROWFUL SEASON
It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress, growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town. He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have seemed—if not handsome altogether—at least notable and pleasant to any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it, puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his appearance on the street or on the highway put a new interest in the day.
The Paymaster was standing gossiping at the inn door with Mr. Spencer, Rixa, and General Turner himself—no less, for the ancient rancour at the moment was at rest.
“Here he comes,” said old Mars sourly, as Gilian turned round the Arches into the town. “He’s like Gillesbeg Aotram, always seeking for something he’ll never find.”
“Your failure!” said Turner playfully, but with poor inspiration, as in a moment he realised.
The Paymaster bridled. He had no answer to a truth so manifest to himself. In a lightning-flash he remembered his boast in the schoolroom at the dregy, and hoped Turner had not so good a memory as himself. He could only vent his annoyance on Gilian, who drew up his horse with a studied curvet—for still there was the play-actor in him to some degree.
“Down again?” said he with half a sneer. There is a way of leaning on a stick and talking over the shoulder at an antagonist that can be very trying to the antagonist if he has any sense of shyness.
“Down again,” agreed Gilian uncomfortably, sorry he had had the courtesy to stop. The others moved away, for they knew the relations of the man and his adopted son were not of the pleasantest.
“An odd kind of farm training!” said the old officer. “I wish I could fathom whether you are dolt or deep one.”
Gilian might have come off the horse and argued it, for he had an answer pat enough. He sat still and fingered the reins, looking at the old man with the puffed face, and the constricted bull neck, and self-satisfaction written upon every line of him, and concluding it was not worth while to explain to a nature so shallow. And the man, after all, was his benefactor: scrupulous about every penny he spent on himself, he had paid, at Miss Mary’s solicitations, for the very horse the lad bestrode.
“Do you know what Turner said there?” asked the Paymaster, still with his contemptuous side to the lad. “He called you our failure. God, and it’s true! Neither soldier nor shepherd seems to be in you, a muckle bulrush nodding to the winds of Heaven! See that sturdy fellow at the quay there?”
Gilian looked and saw Young Islay, a smart ensign home on leave from the county corps that even yet was taking so many fine young fellows from that community.
“There’s a lad who’s a credit to all about him, and he had not half your chances; do you know that?”
“He seems to have the knack of turning up for my poor comparison ever since I can mind,” said Gilian, good-humouredly. “And somehow,” he added, “I have a notion that he has but half my brains as well as half my chances.” He looked up to see Turner still at the inn door. “General Turner,” he cried, his face reddening and his heart stormy, “I hear that in your frank estimate I’m the Paymaster’s failure; is it so bad as that? It seems, if I may say it, scarcely fair from one of your years to one of mine.”
“Shut your mouth!” said the Paymaster coarsely, as Turner came forward. “You have no right to repeat what I said and show the man I took his insolence to heart.”
“I said it; I don’t deny,” answered the General, coming forward from the group at the door and putting his hand in a friendly freedom on the horse’s neck and looking up with some regret in Gilian’s face. “One says many things in an impetus. Excuse a soldier’s extravagance. I never meant it either for your ear or for unkindness. And you talk of ages: surely a man so much your senior has a little privilege?”
“Not to judge youth, sir, which he may have forgotten to understand,” said Gilian, yet very red and uneasy, but with a wistful countenance. “If you’ll think of it I’m just at the beginning of life, a little more shy of making the plunge perhaps than Young Islay there might be, or your own son Sandy, who’s a credit to his corps, they say.”
“Quite right, Gilian, and I ask your pardon,” said the General, putting out his hand. “God knows who the failures of this life are; some of them go about very flashy semblances of success. In these parts we judge by the external signs, that are not always safest; for my son Sandy, who looks so thriving and so douce when he comes home, is after all a scamp whose hands are ever in his simple daddy’s pockets.” But this he said laughing, with a father’s reservation.
The Paymaster stared at this encounter, in some ways so much beyond his comprehension. “Humph!” he ejaculated; and Gilian rode on, leaving in the group behind him an uncomfortable feeling that somehow, somewhere, an injustice had been done.
Miss Mary’s face was at the window whenever his horse’s hooves came clattering on the causeway—she knew the very clink of the shoes. “There’s something wrong with the laddie to-day,” she cried to Peggy; “he looks unco dejected;” and her own countenance fell in sympathy with her darling’s mood.
She met him on the stair as if by accident, pretending to be going down to her cellar in the pend. They did not even shake hands; it is a formality neglected in these parts except for long farewells or unexpected meetings. Only she must take his bonnet and cane from him and in each hand take them upstairs as if she were leading thus two little children, her gaze fond upon the back of him.
“Well, auntie!” he said, showing at first no sign of the dejection she had seen from the window. “Here I am again. I met the Captain up at the inn door, and he seems to grudge me the occasional comfort of hearing any other voice than my own. I could scarcely tell him as I can tell you, that the bleating of the lambs gave me a sore heart. The very hills are grieving with them. I’m a fine farmer, am I not? Are you not vexed for me?” His lips could no longer keep his secret, their corners trembled with the excess of his feeling.
She put a thin hand upon his coat lapel, and with the other picked invisible specks of dust from his coat sleeve, her eyes revealing by their moisture a ready harmony with his sentiment.
“Farmer indeed!” said she with a gallant attempt at badinage; “you’re as little for that, I’m afraid, as you’re for the plough or the army.” She led him into her room and set a chair for him as if he had been a prince, only to have an excuse for putting an arm for a moment almost round his waist. She leaned over him as he sat and came as close as she dared in contact with his hair, all the time a glow in her face.
“And what did you come down for?” she asked, expecting an old answer he never varied in.
He looked up and smiled with a touch of mock gallantry wholly new. “To see you, of course,” said he, as though she had been a girl.
She was startled at this first revelation of the gallant in what till now had been her child. She flushed to the coils above her ear. Then she laughed softly and slapped him harmlessly on the back. “Get away with you,” she said, “and do not make fun of a douce old maiden!” She drew back as she spoke and busily set about some household office, fearing, apparently, that her fondness had been made too plain.
“Do you know what the Captain said?” he remarked in a tone less hearty, moving about the room in a searching discontent.
“The old fool!” she answered irrelevantly, anticipating some unpleasantness. “He went out this morning in a tiravee about a button wanting from his waistcoat. It’s long since I learned never to heed him much.”
It was a story invented on the moment; in heavenly archives that sin of love is never indexed Her face had at once assumed a look of anxiety, for she felt that the encounter had caused Gilian’s dejection as he rode down the street.
“What was he saying?” she asked at last, seeing there was no sign of his volunteering more. And she spoke with a very creditable show of indifference, and even hummed a little bar of song as she turned some airing towels on a winter-dyke beside the fire.
“Do you think I’m a failure, auntie?” asked he, facing her. “That was what he called me.”
She was extremely hurt and angry.
“A failure!” she cried. “Did any one ever hear the like? God forgive me for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like his brothers than I’m like Duke George.”
“You do not deny it!” said Gilian simply.
She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a transfiguration.
“My dear, my dear!” said she, “is there need for me to deny it? What are you yet but a laddie?”
He fingered the down upon his lip.
“But a laddie,” she repeated, determined not to see. “All the world’s before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants—do I not know them? Grant me patience with them!”
“It was General Turner’s word,” said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he wondered for a moment to see her flush.
“He might have had a kinder thought,” said she, “with his own affairs, as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I’ll warrant you do not know anything of that, but it’s the clavers of the Crosswell.” She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away from what had vexed her darling. “Old Islay has his schemes, they say, to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a place of greed and plot!”
“That Turner said it, showed he thought it!” said Gilian, not a whit moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings.
“Amn’t I telling you?” said Miss Mary. “It’s just his own sorrows souring him. There’s Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye liked the laddie and he’s young yet), and his daughter back from her schooling in Edinburgh, educated, or polished, or finished off as they call it—I hope she kens what she’s to be after next, for I’m sure her father does not.”
Gilian’s breast filled with some strange new sense of sudden relief. It was as if he had been climbing out of an airless, hopeless valley, and emerged upon a hill-crest, and was struck there by the flat hand of the lusty wind and stiffened into hearty interest in the rolling and variegated world around. In a second, the taunt of the General of Maam was no more to him than a dream. A dozen emotions mastered him, and he tingled from head to foot, for the first time man.
“Oh, and she’s back, is she?” said he with a crafty indifference, as one who expects no answer.
Miss Mary was not deceived. She had moved to the window and was looking down into the street where the children played, but the new tone of his voice, and the pause before it, gave her a sense of desertion, and she grieved. On the ridges of the opposite lands, sea-gulls perched and preened their feathers, pigeons kissed each other as they moved about the feet of the passers-by. A servant lass bent over a window in the dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was glorious with sun.