And the same spirit, martial, poetic, make-believe, stayed with Gilian up till the Friday. It was hard indeed to escape it, for was not the town about him in a ferment of anticipation? In our sleeping community we know no longer what of zest the very name of the Army had for the people now asleep in the rank grasses of Kilmalieu. The old war-dogs made more lingering sederunts in the change-houses, the low taverns in the back lands sounded with bragging chorus and debate, and in the room of the Sergeant More the half-pay gentlemen mixed more potently their midday drams. The burgh ceased its industry, and the Duke, coming down the street upon his horse, saw most of the people who should be working for his wages leaning upon the gables indolent or sitting at the open windows with the tumblers at their hands, singing naughty songs.
He leaned over, and with his crop rapped upon the factor’s door. Old Islay came out with a quill behind his ear and a finger to his brow.
“What is wrong in the place to-day?” asked his Grace with a flourish of his crop about him to the lounging rascals and the groups at the tavern doors. “Am I paying good day’s wages for the like of that?”
Islay Campbell bobbed and smirked. “It’s the coming of the army,” said he. “The county corps comes to-morrow and your men are all dukes to-day. They would not do a hand’s turn for an emperor.”
“Humph!” said Duke George. “I wish I could throw off life’s responsibilities so easily. The rogues! the rogues!” he mused, soothing his horse’s neck with a fine and kindly hand. “I suppose it’s in them, this unrest and liability to uproar under the circumstances. My father—well, well, let them be.” His heels turned the horse in a graceful curvet “I’m saying, Islay,” he cried over his shoulder, “have a free cask or two at the Cross in the morning.”
But it was in the Paymaster’s house that the fullest stress, the most nervous restlessness of anticipation were apparent. The Paymaster’s snuff was now in two vest-pockets and even then was insufficient, as he went about the town from morning till night babbling in excited half-sentences of war, and the fields he had never fought in, to men who smiled behind his back. His brothers’ slumbers in the silent parlour had been utterly destroyed till “Me-the-day!” Miss Mary had to cry at last when her maid brought back untasted viands, “I wish the army was never to darken our gates, for two daft men up there have never taken a respectable meal since the billet order came. Dugald will be none the better for this.”
All this excitement sustained the tremulous feeling at the boy’s heart. There must be something after all, he thought, in the soldier’s experience that is precious and lasting when those old men could find in a rumour the spark to set the smouldering fire in a blaze. He wondered to see the heavy eyelids of the General open and the pupils fill as he had never seen them do before, to hear a quite new accent, though sometimes a melancholy, in his voice, and behold a distaste to his familiar chair with its stuffed and lazy arms. The Cornal’s character suffered a change too. He that had been gruff and indifferent took on a pleasing though awkward geniality. He would jest with Miss Mary till she cried “The man’s doited!” though she clearly liked it; to Gilian he began the narration of an unending series of campaign tales.
Listening to those old chronicles, Gilian made himself ever their hero. It was he who took the flag at Fuentes d’Onoro, cutting the Frenchman to the chin; it was he who rode at Busaco and heard the Marshal cry “Well done!”; when the shots were threshing like rain out of a black cloud at Ciudad Rodrigo, and the soldiers were falling to it like ripe grain in thunderplumps, he was in the front with every “whe—e—et” of the bullets at his ear bringing the moment’s alarm to his teeth in a checked sucking-in of air. Back to the school he went, a head full of dreams, to sit dumb before his books, with unwinking eyes fixed upon the battle-lines upon the page—the unbroken ranks of letters, or upon the blistered and bruised plaster of the wall to see horsemen at the charge and flags flying. Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting, commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the master’s desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie.
Old Brooks took him by the ear, not painfully, when he had scrambled down from the crumbled battlements where his troops had left him.
“At the play-acting again, Master Gilian?” said the dominie a little bitterly, a little humorously. “And what might it be this time?”