“Miss Nan!” he cried. “They told me you were returned and——” What was to follow of the sentence he could not just now say.
She blushed to see him; his hand tingled at the contact with hers. She answered in a pleasant tone of Edinburgh gentility, like Lady Charlotte, and they walked a little way together, conversing wondrously upon life and books and poems, whose secrets they shared between them. He was able to hold her fascinated by the sparkle of his talk; he had never before felt so much the master of himself, and his head fairly hummed with high notions. They talked of their childhood——
Here Gilian dropped from the clouds, at first with a sense of some unpleasant memory undefined, then with shivering, ashamed, as his last meeting with the girl flashed before him, and he saw himself again fleeing, an incapable, from the sea-beach at Ealan Dubh.
If she should remember that so vividly as he did! The thought was one to fly from, and he sped down the hill furiously, and plied himself busily for the remainder of the day with an industry Cameron had never seen him show before. Upon him had obviously come a change of some wholesome and compelling kind. He knew it himself, and yet—he told himself—he could not say what it was.
Sunday came, and he went down to church in the morning as usual, but dressed with more scruples than was customary. Far up the glen the bell jangled through the trees of the Duke’s policies, and the road was busy with people bound for the sermon of Dr. Colin. They walked down the glen in groups, elderly women with snow-white piped caps, younger ones with sober hoods, and all with Bibles carried in their napkins and southernwood or tansy between the leaves. The road was dry and sandy; they cast off their shoes, as was their custom, and walked barefoot, carrying them in their hands till they came to the plane-tree at the cross-roads, and put them on again to enter the town with fit decorum. The men followed, unhappy in their unaccustomed suits of broad-cloth or hodden, dark, flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular thoughts as they passed the licensed houses to some harmony with the sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered, smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth breathing peace.
The Paymaster and Miss Mary sat together in Keils pew, Gilian with them, conscious of a new silk cravat. But his mind almost unceasingly was set upon a problem whose solution lay behind him. Keils pew was in front, the Maam pew was at least seven rows behind, in the shadow of the loft, beneath the cushioned and gated preserve of the castle. One must not at any time look round, even for the space of a second, lest it should be thought he was guilty of some poor worldly curiosity as to the occupants of the ducal seat, and to-day especially, Gilian dared not show an unusual interest in the Turner pew. His acute ear had heard its occupants enter after a loud salutation from the elder at the plate to the General, he fancied there was a rustle of garments such as had not been heard there for three years. All other sounds in the church—the shuffle of feet, the chewing of sweets with which the worshippers in these parts always induce wakefulness, the noisy breathing of Rixa as he hunched in his corner beside the pulpit—seemed to stop while a skirt rustled. A glow went over him, and unknowing what he did he put forward his hand to take his Bible off the book-board.
Miss Mary from the corners of her eyes, and without turning her face in the slightest degree from the pulpit where Dr. Colin was soon to appear, saw the action. It was contrary to every form in that congregation; it was a shocking departure from the rule that no one should display sign of life (except in the covert conveyance of a lozenge under the napkin to the mouth, or a clearance of the throat), and she put a foot with pressure upon that of Gilian nearest her. Yet as she did so, no part of her body seen above the boards of the pew betrayed her movement.
Gilian flushed hotly, drew back his hand quickly, without having touched the book, and bent a stern gaze upon the stairs by which Dr. Colin would descend to his battlements.
It was a day of stagnant air, and the church swung with sleepy influences. The very pews and desks, the pillars of the loft and the star-crowned canopy of the pulpit, seemed in their dry and mouldy antiquity to give forth soporific dry accessions to that somnolent atmosphere, and the sun-rays, slanted over the heads of the worshippers, showed full of dust. Outside, through the tall windows, could be seen the beech-trees of the Avenue, and the crows upon them busy at their domestic affairs. Children in the Square cried to each other, a man’s footsteps passed on the causeway, returned, and stopped below the window. Everybody knew it was Black Duncan the seaman, of an older church, and reluctant, yet anxious, to share in some of the Sabbath exercises.
Gilian, with the back of the pew coming up near his neck, wished fervently it had been built lower, for he knew how common and undignified his view from the rear must thus be made. Also he wished he could have had a secret eye that he might look unashamed in the direction of his interest He tingled with feeling when he fancied after a little (indeed, it was no more than fancy) that there was a perceptible odour of young birch. Again he was remitted to his teens, sitting transported in the Jean, soaring heavenward upon a song by a bold child with spate-brown hair. He put forward his hand unconsciously again, and this time he had the Bible on his knee before Miss Mary could check him.