On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster making for the house of the Sergeant More. “I cannot understood,” would the Paymaster say, “what makes you take your drams in so common a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company! MacNicol and Major Hall—and—and—myself and some of the best in the burgh; yet you must be frequenting a low tavern with only merchants and mice and fisherman to say ‘Good health’ to.”
Master Brooks had always his answer very pat.
“I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books,” he would say drily. “And told with a greater ingenuity—not to mention veracity—than pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between ourselves, I’m not for war at all, but for the far finer and more wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!” (and here would he grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an old acquaintance,) “Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us, so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the back room of Kate’s there where the merchants discourse upon their bales and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their way of it.”
“It’s aye the old story with you,” the Paymaster would say tolerantly. “You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy’s head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer.”
“The boy’s made, Captain Campbell,” said the schoolmaster one day at this. “He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I’ve had many a curious student yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere but as the tinkler learns—by the roadside and in the wood.”
“I know he’s a droll one,” said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a thoughtful brow, “but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it in with your tawse.”
The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse-ness of youth made its presence necessary in his desk.
“Captain Campbell,” said he, “it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a lusus naturo, that is all; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as an idiot when it is not, and then no tawse or ferule will avail.”
And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him the restraints were galling shackles. When the classes would be humming in the drowsy afternoon and the sharp high voice of old Brooks rose above the murmur as he taught some little class in the upper corner, the boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a new edge on their instruments. Oh! the outer world was ever the world of charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat in that constrained and humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing, himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so peremptorily called.
If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty, mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple for hue, with eyebrows arching high in a perpetual surprise at so hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but one at a time. Marget Maclean’s little shop was the dullest in the street, but it was the anteroom of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer through her glasses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the book she thought most suited for her customer.