Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and bolted up their doors, then retreated to their homes behind. More dark than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation.
And yet the town was not all asleep but for the Sheriff’s party and Miss Mary and the Paymaster’s boy, for there came from the Abercrombie, though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of carousal. It was not, this time, the old half-pay officers but a lower plane of the burgh’s manhood, the salvage and the wreckage of the wars, privatemen and sergeants, by a period of strife and travel made in some degree unfit for the tame ways of peace in a stagnant burgh. They told the old tales of the bivouac; they sang its naughty or swaggering songs. By a plain deal door and some glasses of spirit they removed themselves from the dull town drowsing in the night, and in the light of the Sergeant More’s cruisie moved again in the sacked towns of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos and San Sebastian, gorged anew, perhaps, with blood and lust.
Miss Mary and Gilian passed the door of the Sergeant More hurriedly, she deaf to its carousal, he remembering all at once and finding wake anew his first feelings when he stood in the same room before the half-pay officers at their midday drams. He had become a little tired of this quest all to gratify an old maid’s curiosity, he wished he could be home again and in his attic room with his candle and his story book, or his abundant and lively thoughts. But there was one other task before Miss Mary. She could not forbear so little as a glance at the exterior of the Sheriff’s dwelling where the enemies of her home (as so she now must fancy them) were trying to be happy without the company of the Campbells of Keils. When they were in front of it every window shone across the grass-plot, some of them open so that the sound of gaiety came clearly to the woman and the boy. Miss Mary stood woebegone, suffused in tears.
“And there are my dear brothers at home yonder, their lee-lone, silent, sitting in a parlour! Oh! it is shameful, it is shameful! And all for a hasty word about a lass!”
Gilian before this curious sorrow was dumb. Silently he tried to lead the little lady away from the place, but she would not go, and would not be comforted. Then there came from the open windows the beginning of a song. At the first note Gilian thrilled in every nerve.
“Fancy that now!” said Miss Mary, checking her tears. “No more than a wean and here she must be singing at supper parties as brave as the mother before her. It’s a scandal! And it shows the bitterness of the quarrel to have her here, for she was never here at supper before.”
“But is she not fine?” said Gilian, with a passion in his utterance.
Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a sweetness almost magic.
“Is she not fine?” he said again, clutching with eager hands at the rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that alluring melody.
“Oh, the dear! the dear!” sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the strain. “When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful woman here on any quarrel for her!”