She looked down with motionless horror at his fingers feverishly turning over the leaves, and saw that he had the volume upside down. Her pressure on his foot was delayed by astonishment. What could this conduct of his mean? He was disturbed about something; or perhaps he was unwell. And as she saw him still holding the volume upside down on his knee and continuing to look at it with absent eyes she put her mittened hand into the pocket of her silk gown, produced a large peppermint lozenge, and passed it into his hand.
This long unaccustomed courtesy found him awkwardly unprepared, and his fingers not closing quickly enough on the sweet it fell on the floor. It rolled with an alarming noise far to the left, and stirred the congregation like a trumpet. Though little movement showed it, every eye was on the pew from which this disturbance came, and Miss Mary and Gilian knew it. Miss Mary did not flinch; she kept a steadfast eye straight in front of her, but to those behind her the sudden colour of her neck betrayed her culpability. Gilian was wretched, all the more because he heard a rustle of the skirts behind in Turner’s pew, and his imagination saw Miss Nan suppressing her laughter with shaking hair and quite conscious that he had been the object of Miss Mary’s attention. He felt the blood that rushed to his body must betray itself behind. All the gowk in him came uppermost; he did not know what he was doing; he put the Bible awkwardly on the book-board in front of him, and it, too, slid to the floor with a noise even more alarming than that of the rolling sweet.
The Paymaster, clearing his throat harshly, wakened from a dover to the fact that these disturbances were in his own territory, and saw the lad’s confusion. If that had not informed him the mischievous smile of Young Islay in Gilian’s direction would have done so. He half turned his face to Gilian, and with shut lips whispered angrily:
“Thumbs! thumbs!” he said. “God forgive you for a gomeral!” And then he stared very sternly at Rixa, who saw the movement of the swollen neck above the ‘kerchief, knew that the Paymaster was administering a reproof, and was comforted exceedingly by this prelude to the day’s devotions.
Gilian left the book where it lay to conceal from those behind that he had been the delinquent. But he felt, at the same time, he was detected. What a contrast the lady behind must find in his gawkiness compared with the correct and composed deportment of the Capital she had come from! He must be the rustic indeed to her, handling lollipops yet like a child, and tumbling books in a child’s confusion. As if to give more acuteness to his picture of himself he saw a foil in Young Islay so trim and manly in the uniform old custom demanded for the Sunday parade, a shrewd upward tilt of the chin and lowering of the brow, his hand now and then at his cheeks, not so much to feel its pleasing roughness, as to show the fine fingers of which he was so conscious. It demanded all his strength to shake himself into equanimity, and Miss Mary felt rather than saw it.
What ailed him? Something unusual was perturbing him. An influence, an air, a current of uneasiness flowed from him and she shared his anxiety, not knowing what might be its source. His every attitude was a new and unaccustomed one. She concluded he must be unwell, and a commotion set up in her heart, so that Dr. Colin’s opening prayer went sounding past her a thing utterly meaningless like the wind among trees, and love that is like a high march wall separated her and her favourite from the world.
She surrendered even her scruples of kirk etiquette to put out a hand timidly as they stood together at the prayer, and touched Gilian softly on the sleeve with a gush of consolation in the momentary contact.
But he never felt the touch, or he thought it accidental, for he was almost feverishly waiting till that interminable prayer was ended that he might have the last proof of the presence of the girl behind him. The crimson hangings of the canopy shook in the stridor of Dr. Colin’s supplication, the hollows underneath the gallery rumbled a sleepy echo; Rixa breathed ponderously and thought upon his interlocutors, but no other life was apparent; it was a man crying in the wilderness, and outside in the playground of the world the children were yet calling and laughing content, the rooks among the beeches surveyed, carelessly, the rich lush policies of the Duke.
Gilian was waiting on the final proof, that was only in the girl’s own voice. He remembered her of old a daring and entrancing vocalist, in the harmony one thread of gold among the hodden grey of those simple unstudied psalmodists.
The prayer concluded, the congregation, wearied their long stand, relapsed in their hard seats with a sense of satisfaction, the psalm was given out, the precentor stuck up on the desk before him the two tablets bearing the name of the tune, “Martyrs,” and essayed at a beginning. He began too high, stopped and cleared his throat. “We will try it again,” said he, and this time led the voices all in unison. Such a storm was in Gilian’s mind that he could not for a little listen to hear what he expected. He had forgotten his awkwardness, he had forgotten his shame; his erratic and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship’s interior listening to a girl’s song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually there by some message in the notes, some soothing passionate melancholy without relation to the words or to the tune, some inexplicable and mellow vibration he had felt first as he stood, a child, on the road from Kilmalieu, and a bird solitary in the winds, lifting with curious tilt of feathers over the marshy field, had piped dolorously some mystery of animal life man must have lost when he ceased to sleep stark naked to the stars. In his mind he traced the baffling accent, failing often to come upon it, anon finding it fill all his being with an emotion he had never known before.