“Sogers,” said the boy most red and awkward.
“Ay, ay,” said Brooks, releasing his ear and turning his face to him with a kind enough hand on his shoulder. “Soldiers is it? And the playground and the play-hour are not enough for a play of that kind. Soldiers! H’m! So the lessons of the gentlemen up-bye are not to be in vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you’re going to meet Captain Campbell’s most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts. Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and—my work’s hopeless. Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become the soldier you play-act to-day you’ll please the Paymaster; I could scarcely wish for better and—and—I maybe wished for worse.”
That night Gilian went to bed in his garret while yet the daylight was abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.
He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable. The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.
The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor’s corner there to stand awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited whispering, afraid like the Paymaster’s boy to shatter the charm of that delightful terror. Then of a sudden the town roared and shook to a twofold rattle of the skins and the shrill of fifes as the corps from the north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the darkness to the rattle of the drums? The drums, the drums, the drums! Gilian stood entranced as they passed, looming large and innumerable in the darkness, unchallenged and uncheered by the bewildered citizens. It was the very entrance he could have chosen. For now they were ghosts, legions of the air in borrowed boots of the earth, shades of some army cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal’s bloodiest stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving in to strike it at the vitals.
CHAPTER XII—ILLUSION
He followed them to the square, still with the drums pounding and the fifes shrilling, and now the town was awake in every window. At a word the Colonel on his horse dispelled the illusion. “Halt!” he cried; the drum and fife ceased, the arms grounded, the soldiers clamoured for their billets. Over the hill of Strone the morning paled, out of the gloom the phantom body came a corps most human, thirsty, hungry, travel-strained.
Gilian ran home and found the household awake but unconscious of the great doings in the town.
“What!” cried the Cornal, when he heard the news. “They came here this morning and this is the first we have of it.” He was in a fever of annoyance. “Dugald, Dugald, are you hearing? The Army’s in the town, it moved in when we were snoring and only the boy heard it. I hope Jiggy Crawford does not make it out a black affront to him that we were not there to welcome him. My uniform, Mary, my uniform, it should be aired and ironed, and here at my hand, and I’ll warrant it’s never out of the press yet. It was the boy that heard the drums; it was you that heard the drums, Gilian. Curse me, but I believe you’ll make a soger yet!”