“That would be very frightsome,” said Gilian with a shiver. “I have made believe the hum of the bee in the heather at my ear as I lay on it in the summer was the roar of the wild beast a long way off; it was uncanny and I could make myself afraid of it, but when I liked it was the bee again and the heather was no higher than my knee.”
The seaman laughed till the den rang. He poked the fire and the flame thrust out and made the boy and the man and the timbers and bunks dance and shake in the world between light and shadow. “You are the sharpest boy ever I conversed with,” said he.
A run of the merriest, the sweetest, the most unconstrained laughter broke overhead like a bird’s song. They looked up and found the square of blue sky broken at the hatch by a girl’s head. A roguish face in a toss of brown hair, seen thus above them against the sky, seemed to Gilian the face of one of the fairies with which he had peopled the seaman’s isle.
“There you go!” cried Black Duncan, noway astonished. “Did I not tell you never to come on board without halloo?”
“I cried,” said the girl in a most pretty English that sounded all the sweeter beside the seaman’s broken and harsh accent in a language foreign to him. “I cried ‘O Duncan’ twice and you never heard, so I knew you were asleep in your dingy old den.” She swung herself down as she spoke and stood at the foot of the companion with the laugh renewed upon her lips, a gush of happy heart.
“Indeed, Miss Nan, and I was not sleeping at all,” said Black Duncan, standing up and facing her; “if I was sleeping would there be a boy with me here listening to the stories of the times when I was scouring the oceans and not between here and the Clyde in your father’s vessel?”
“Oh! a boy!” cried the girl, taken a little aback. “I did not know there was a boy.”
“And a glen boy, too,” said the seaman, speaking in a language wherein he knew himself more the equal of his master’s daughter. “I told him of Erin O and the music in its streets, and he does not make fun of my telling like you, Miss Nan, because he understands.”
The girl peered into the dark of the cabin at the face of Gilian that seemed unwontedly long and pallid in the half light, with eyes burning in sepulchral pits, repeating the flash of the embers. She was about his own age—at most no more than a month or two younger, but with a glance bold and assured that spoke of an early maturity.
“Oh! a Glen Aray boy,” said she. “I never much care for them. You would be telling him some of the tales there is no word of truth in.”