CHAPTER IV—MISS MARY
The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to an honest merchant whose regular payment of his rent did not prevent the Paymaster, every time he stepped through the close, from dunting with his cane on the stones with the insolence of a man whose birth and his father’s acres gave him a place high above such as earned their living behind a counter.
“There you are, Sandy!” he would call, “doing no trade as usual; you’ll not have sold a parcel of pins or a bolt of tape to-day, I suppose. Where am I to get my rent, I wonder, next Martinmas?”
The merchant would remonstrate. “I’ve done very well to-day, Captain,” he would say. “I have six bolls of meal and seven yards of wincey going up the glen in the Salachary cart.”
“Pooh, pooh, what’s that to the time of war? I’ll tell you this, Sandy, I’ll have to roup out for my rent yet.” And by he would sail, as red in the face as a bubbly-jock, swelling his neck over his stock more largely than ever, and swinging his rattan by its tassel or whacking with it on his calves, satisfied once more to have put this merchant-body in his own place.
To-day he paid no heed to the merchant, when, having just keeked in at the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. “I’m going to leave you with my sister Mary,” he explained. “You’ll think her a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a well-meaning creature.”
Gilian thought no one could be more droll than this old man himself. Before indifferent to him, he had, in the past hour, grown to be afraid of him as a new mysterious agent who had his future in his hands. And to go up the stairs of this great high house, with its myriad windows looking out upon the busiest part of the street, and others gazing over the garden and the sea, was an experience new and bewildering. The dwelling abounded in lobbies and corridors, in queer corners where the gloom lurked, and in doors that gave glimpses of sombre bedsteads and high-backed austere chairs, of china painted with the most wonderful designs (loot of the old Indian palaces), of swords and sabretaches hung on walls, and tables polished to such degree that they reflected their surroundings.
They went into a parlour with its window open, upon the window-sill a pigeon mourning among pots of wallflowers and southernwood that filled the entering air with sweetness. A room with thin-legged chairs, with cupboards whose lozens gave view to punch-bowls and rummers and silver ladles, a room where the two brothers would convene at night while John was elsewhere, and in a wan candle light sit silent by the hour before cooling spirits, musing on other parlours elsewhere in which spurs had jingled under the board, musing on comrades departed. It was hung around with dark pictures in broad black frames, for the most part pictures of battles, “Fontenoy,” “Stemming the Rout at Steinkirk,” “Blenheim Field,” and—a new one—“Vittoria.” There were pictures of men too, all with soldier collars high upon the nape of the neck, and epaulettes on their shoulders, whiskered, keen-eyed young men—they were the brothers in their prime when girls used to look after them as they went by on their horses. And upon the mantlebrace, flanked by tall silver candlesticks, was an engraving of John, Duke of Argyll, Field-Marshal.
“Look at that man there,” said the Paymaster, pointing to the noble and arrogant head between the candles, “that was a soldier’s soldier. There is not his like in these days. If you should take arms for your king, boy, copy the precept and practice of Duke John. I myself modelled me on his example, and that, mind you, calls for dignity and valour and education and every manly part and——”
“Is that you blethering away in there, John?” cried a high female voice from the spence.