CHAPTER XXVIII—GILIAN’S OPPORTUNITY
Her father was at the door when she went in. Now for the first time she knew the reason for his change of manner lately, for that bustle about trivial affairs when she was near, that averted eye when she was fond and humorous. She went past him, unable to speak more than an indifferent word, and great was his relief at that, for he had been standing there bracing his courage to consult her on what she must be told of sooner or later. He looked after her as she sped upstairs. “I wonder how she’ll take it?” he said to himself, greatly perplexed. “A father has some unco’ tasks to perform, and here’s a father not very well fitted by nature for the management of a daughter.” He took off his hat and dried a clammy brow that showed how much the duty postponed had been disturbing him. “It’s for the best, but it’s a vulgar business even then. If it was her uncle, now, he would wake her out of her sleep to tell her the news. Poor girl, poor girl! I wish she had her mother.”
He went into the barn, where corn was piling up, the straw filling the gloomy gable-ends with rustling gold. Loud he stormed among some workers there; loud he stormed, for him a thing unusual; and they bent silent to their work and looked at one another knowingly, sensible that he was ashamed of himself. Sitting dry-eyed on the edge of her bed, Nan reflected upon her next step. At a cast of her mind round all the countryside she could think of no woman to turn to in this trouble, and only with a woman could she share it. Her pride first, and then the fear of her father’s anger, left her only certain limits in which to operate. Her pride would not let her even show curiosity in the identity of the man who was to be her doom, nor confess to another that she did not know his name. And the whole parish, if it was acquainted with her sale (as now she deemed it), must be her enemy. Against any other outrage than this she would have gone straight to her father. He that she loved and caressed, on whose knees sometimes even yet she sat, would not be deaf to any ordinary plea or protest of hers. She would need but to nestle in his arms, and loose and tie the antique queue, and perhaps steal a kiss willingly surrendered, and all would be well But this, all her instincts, all her knowledge of her father told her, was no ordinary decision of his. He had gone too far to draw back. The world knew it; he feared to face her because for once to please her he could not cancel what was done. There was no hope, she told herself, in that direction; even if there was she would not have gone there, for the sordid horror of this transaction put a gulf between them. Feverishly she turned over her lowland letters, and there she found but records of easy heart and gaiety; no sacrificing friends were offering themselves in the pages she had mourned over in her moods of evening loneliness. And again she brought her mind back to her own country, and sitting still dry-eyed, with a burning skin, upon her bed, reviewed her relatives and friends, weighing which would be most like to help her.
She almost laughed when she found she had reduced all at last to one eligible—Elasaid, her old Skye nurse, and the mother of Black Duncan, who was in what was called the last of the shealings, by the lochs of Karnes. Many a time her mother had gone to the shealing a young matron for motherly counsel, but Nan herself had never been there, though Elasaid had come to Nan to nurse her when her mother died. In the shealing, she felt sure, there was not only counsel, but concealment if occasion demanded that.
But how was she to get there, lost as it was somewhere miles beyond the corner of the Salachary hill, in the wild red moors between the two big waters?
First she thought of Young Islay—first and with a gladness at the sense of his sufficiency in such an enterprise. His was the right nature for knight-errantry in a case like hers, but then she reflected that he was away from home—her father had casually let that drop in conversation at breakfast yesterday; and even if he had been at home, said cooler thought, she would hesitate to enlist him in so sordid a cause.
Then Gilian occurred—less well adapted, she felt, for the circumstances; but she could speak more freely to him than to any other, and he was out there in the hazel-wood, no doubt, still waiting for her. Gilian would do, Gilian would have to do. If he could have seen how unimpassioned she was in coming to this conclusion he would have been grieved.
She went out at once, leisurely and with her thoughts constrained upon some unimportant matter, so that her face might not betray her tribulation when she met him.
In the low fields her uncle was scanning the hills with his hands arched above his eyes to shield them from the glare of the westering sun, groaning for the senselessness of sheep that must go roaming on altitudes when they are wanted specially in the plains. She evaded his supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first words showed her the way to a speedy explanation.
“Next week,” said he, “we’ll try Strongara; the place is as full of berries as the night is full of stars. Here they’re not so ripe as on the other side.”
“Next week the berries might be as numerous as that at the very door of Maam,” said she, “and I none the better for them.”
“What’s the matter?” he cried, appalled at the omen of her face.
“My father is going abroad at once,” she answered.
“Abroad?” he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked for the crimson of its leafage. He drew it through his hands and the thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too! She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice to think on expectantly in slow-passing forenoons, and no light to shine like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!
“Well,” she said, looking curiously at him. “My father is going abroad, have you heard?”
“I have not,” he answered; and she was relieved, for in that case he had not learned the full ignominy of her story.
“Can you not say so little as ‘good luck’ to us?” she asked in her lightest manner.
“You—you are going with him, then?” said Gilian, and he delighted in the sharp torture of the thorns that bled his hands.
“No,” she answered, “it’s worse than that, for I stay. You have not heard? Then you are the only one in the parish, I am sure, so ignorant of my poor business. They’re—they’re looking for a man for me. Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” She laughed with a bitterness that shocked him. “Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” she went on. “I’m wondering they did not lead me on a halter round the country and take the best offer at a fair I It was throwing away good chances to give me to the first offerer, was it not, Gilian?”
“Who is it?” he asked, every nerve jarring at the story.
“Do you think I would ask?” she said sharply. “It does not matter who it is; and it is the last thing I would like to know, for then I would know who knew my price in the market.”
“Your father would never do it!”
“My father would not do but what he thought he must. He is poor, though I never thought him so poor as this; and I daresay he would like to see me settled before he goes. It is the black settling when I’m cried in the kirk before I’m courted.”
“They can never marry you against your will,” said Gilian in a dull, lifeless way, as if he had no great belief in what he laid forth.
“And that would be true,” she said, “if I had a friend in the whole countryside. I have not one except——”
He flushed and waited, and so did she expectantly, thinking he would make the fervent protest most lads would do under the same circumstances. But in the moment’s pause he could not find the words for his profound feeling.
“Except old Elasaid, the nurse on the Kames moor,” she continued.
“Oh, her!” said he lamely.
“There’s no one else I could think of.”
“Look at me,” he cried; “look at me; am I not your true friend? I will do anything in the world for you.” But he still went on torturing himself with his bramble branch, the most insensible of lovers.
She was annoyed at his want of the commonest courage or tact. “John Hielan’man! John Hielan’-man!” she said inwardly, trying a little coquetry of the downcast eyes to tempt him. For now she was desolate that she almost loved this gawky youth throbbing in sympathy with her tribulation.
“I believe you are my true friend, I believe you arc my true friend, and there is no one else,” she said, blushing now with no coquetry, and if he had not been a fool and his fate against him, he might at a hand’s movement or a word have had her in his arms. The word to say was sounding loud and strong within him; he took her (only, alas! in fancy) to his breast, but what was she the wiser?
“And I can do nothing?” he said pitifully. “Nothing!” said she; “you can do everything.” “Show me how, then,” he said eagerly. She had been gazing away from him with her eyes on Maam, that looked so sombre a home, and was certainly now so cruel a home, and she turned then, almost weeping, her breath rising and falling, audible to his ear, the sweetest of sounds.
“Will you take me away from here?” she asked in entreaty. “I must go away from here.”
“I will take you anywhere you wish,” said he.
He held out his hands in a gesture of sudden offering, and she felt a happiness as one who comes upon a familiar and kind face all unexpectedly in a strange country. Her face betrayed her gladness.
“I will take you, and who would be better pleased?” said Gilian.
She explained her intention briefly. She must leave Maam at the latest to-morrow night without being observed, and he must show her the way to Elasaid’s shealing.
“Ah! give me the right,” he said, “and I will take you to the world’s end.” He put out his hands and nigh encircled her, but shyness sent him back to a calmer distance.
“John Hielan’man!” she repeated to herself, annoyed at this tardiness, but she outwardly showed no knowledge of it.
They planned what only half in fun she called their elopement. He was to come across to Maam in the early morning.