“Except the man’s name,” repeated Miss Mary. “She did not know it was Young Islay.” She turned as she spoke, and busied herself with a duster where there was no need for it. And when she showed him her face again, there were tears there, not for her own old trials, but for his.
“You must go back there,” she said firmly, though her lips were trembling, “and you will tell Miss Nan that whatever Old Islay would do, his son would never put that affront on her. At the worst, the money was no more than a tocher with the lad; it was their start in Drimlee and Maam that are now together for the sake of an old vanity of the factors.... You must tell all that,” she went on, paying no heed to the perplexity in his face. “It would be unfair to do less, my dear; it will be wiser to do all. Then you will do the other thing—if need be—what you should have done first and foremost; youll find out if the girl is in earnest about yourself or only indulging a cantrip like her mother’s daughter. Ask her—ask her—oh! what need I be telling you? If you have not the words in your heart I need not be putting them in your mouth. Run away with you now!” and she pushed him to the door like a child that had been caressed and counselled.
He was for going eagerly without a word more, but she cried him back. For a moment she clung to his arm as if she was reluctant to part with him.
“Oh!” she cried, laughing, and yet with tears in her voice, “a bonny-like man to be asking her without having anything to offer.”
He would have interrupted her, but she would not let him.
“Go your ways,” she told him, “and bring her back with you if you can. Miss Mary has something in a stocking foot, and no long need for it.”
CHAPTER XXXIII—THE PROMISE
When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was still making-down from the Paymaster’s waistcoats. It was for that he used at last to show a new suit on the town by gentle degrees, the first Sunday the waistcoat, the next Sunday the waistcoat and trousers, and finally the complete splendour. Now he felt kenspeckle, not in any suit of material clothes but in a droll sense of nakedness. He had told his love and adventure in a place where walls heard and windows peered, and a rumour out of the ordinary went on the wind into every close and soared straight to the highest tenement—even to the garret rooms. He felt that the women at the wells, very busy, as they pretended, over their boynes and stoups, would whisper about him as he passed, without looking up from their occupation.
Down the street towards the church there was scarcely any one to be seen except the children out for the mid-day airing from Brooks’s school, and old Brooks himself going over to Kate Bell’s for his midday waters with a daundering step as if he had no special object, and might as readily be found making for the quay or the coffee-house. The children were noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-al and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting, yet with a sorrow in the cadence.