“You will find that a good one,” she would say. “The one you mention is not at all good; it was very fashionable last spring, but it is not asked for now at all.” And in proof that the volume she recommended was quite genteel, she would add: “That one was up at the Castle last Saturday. Lady Charlotte’s maid, you will notice, wet all the pages crying over the places where the lover went to sea another voyage. It is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not remember what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice in a book.”
“You have none of Mr. Scott’s poetry?” asked Gilian one day, moved thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars.
“Scott, Scott,” said Miss Marget. “Now let me think, my dear.”
She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bobbed behind her ears as she tilted up her head and glanced along the shelves for what she knew was not there.
“No, my boy,” she said. “We have none of Mr. Scott’s works at present. There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but,” here she frowned slightly, “I do not think you are old enough for poetry. It is too romantic, and—it lingers in the memory. I have not read him myself though I hear he is clever—in a way. I would not say that I object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him to my young customers.”
So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” “Moll Flanders,” or “Belinda,” the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in fancy by many pages. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling below or beating in petulant waves and he floated, as it were, between sea and sky, as free from earth’s clogging influence as the gannet that soared above.
He sought the Ramparts because for a boy of his age to read in books, except as a task of the school, was something shameful; and he had been long accustomed to the mid-air trip upon the walls ere some other boys discovered him guilty, flushing and trembling with a story book in his hand. They looked with astonishment at their discovery and were prepared to jeer when his wits came to his rescue. He tore out one or two leaves of the book, twisted them into a rough semblance of a boat and cast them in the water.
“Watch,” said he, “you’ll see the big ones are sunk sooner than the little ones.”
“Do not tear the good book,” said one of the boys, Young Islay, shocked, or pretending to be so, at the destruction.
“Oh! it’s only a stupid story,” said Gilian, tearing again at the treasure, with an agony that could have been no greater had it been his heart. He had to forego many books from Marget Maclean to make up for this one, but at least he had escaped the irony of his companions.