CHAPTER XXVI—AGAIN IN THE GARDEN
Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay’s corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over the bridge whence she must sometime come. Years after he would stop again upon the blue slab and recall with a pensive pleasure those old hours of expectation.
For days he loitered in vain, the wonder of the Inns and its frequenters. Nan never appeared. To her father a letter had come; the Duke had come up on the back of it; there had been long discourse and a dram of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his Grace’s cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower on Nan as he passed into the house behind her father, and come out anon smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her father would have her constant in his sight, though it was only, as it seemed, to pleasure an averted eye.
By-and-by Gilian turned his lucky flint one morning in a fortunate inspiration, and had no sooner done so than he remembered a very plausible excuse for going to a farm at the very head of Glen Shira. He started forth with the certainty, somehow, that he should meet the lady at last.
He had transacted his business and was on his way to the foot of the glen when he came upon her at Boshang Gate. Her back was to him; she was looking out to sea, leaning upon the bars as if she were a weary prisoner.
She turned at the sound of his footstep, a stranger utterly to his eyes and imagination, but not to his instinct, her hair bound, her apparel mature and decorous, her demeanour womanly. And he had been looking all the while for a little girl grown tall, with no external difference but that!
She took an impulsive step towards him as he hesitated with his hand dubious between his side and his bonnet, a pleasant, even an eager smile upon her face.
“You are quite sure you are you?” she said, holding out her hand before he had time to say a word. “For I was standing there thinking of you, a little white-faced fellow in a kilt, and here comes your elderly wraith at my back like one of Black Duncan’s ghosts!”
“I would be the more certain it was myself,” he answered, “if you had not been so different from what I expected.”
“Oh! then you had not forgotten me altogether?” she said, waiting her answer, a mere beginner in coquetry emboldened to practice by the slightly rustic awkwardness of the lad.