“Oh,” said Gilian, “I was just wondering if that would be the family the Paymaster is not friendly with.”
The seaman laughed. “That same!” said he. “And are you in the family feud too? If that is so you’ll hear little of Miss Nan’s songs, I’m thinking, and that is the folly of feuds. If I was you I would say nothing about the Jean, and the lass who sang in her.”
CHAPTER VIII—THE SHERIFF’S SUPPER PARTY
But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.
It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of social intercourse in each other’s homes, where the winter nights, that otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly revealed for the shawls that must cover them. The men donned their best figured waistcoats and their newest stocks, and cursed the fashions that took them from their pipes and cards, but solaced themselves mightily with the bottle in the host’s bedroom. From those friendly convocations, jealousies innumerable bred. It was not only that each other’s gowns raised unchristian thoughts in the bosoms of the women, but in a community where each knew her neighbour and many were on equality, there must be selections, and rancour rose. And it was the true Highland rancour, concealing itself under a front of indifference and even politeness, though the latter might be ice-cold in degree but burning fiercely at the core.
A few days after Gilian came to town Miss Mary and her brothers were submitted to a slight there could be no mistaking. It came from the wife of the Sheriff, who was a half-sister of the Turners. The Sheriff’s servant had come up to the shop below the Paymaster’s house early in the forenoon for candles, and Miss Mary chanced to be in the shop when this purchase was made. It could signify nothing but festivity, for even in the Sheriff’s the home-made candle was good enough for all but festive nights.
Miss Mary went upstairs disturbed, curious, annoyed. She had got no invitation to the Sheriff’s, and yet here was the hint of some convivial gathering such as she and her brothers had hitherto always been welcome to.
“What do you think it will be, John?” she asked the Paymaster, telling him what she had seen.
“Tuts,” said he, “they’ll just be out of dips. Or maybe the Sheriff has an extra hard case at avizandum, not to be seen clearly through with a common creesh flame.”