“Valiant!” cried the Paymaster with a sneer. “He made an ass of himself at the Waterfoot, and his stupidity would have let three or four people drown if Young Islay, a callant better than himself had not put out a boat and rescued them. The town’s ringing with it.”
The scar on the Cornal’s face turned almost black. “Is that true that my brother says?” said he.
Gilian searched in a reeling head for some answer he could not find; his parched lips could not have uttered it, even if he had found it, so he nodded.
“Put me to my bed, somebody,” said the General, breaking in suddenly on the shock of the moment, and staggering to one side a little as he spoke. “Put me to my bed, somebody. I am getting too old to understand!”
CHAPTER XIX—LIGHTS OUT!
AS he spoke he staggered to the side, and would have fallen but for his sister’s readiness. About that tall rush of a brother she quickly placed an arm and kept him on his feet with infinite exertion, the while uttering endearments long out of fashion for her or him, but come suddenly, at this crisis, from the grave of the past—the past where she and Dugald had played as children, with free frank hearts loving each other truly.
“Put me to my bed,” said he again thickly, and his eyes blurred with the utmost weariness. “Put me to my bed. O God! what is on me now? Put me to my bed.”
“Dugald! Dugald! Dugald!” she cried. “My darling brother, here is Mary with you; it is just a turn.” But as she said the flattering thing her face was hopeless. The odour of the southernwood on the window-sill changed at once to laurel, rain-drenched, dark, and waving over tombs for the boy spellbound on the floor. All his shameful perturbation vanished, a trifling thing before the great Perturber’s presence.
The brothers went quickly beside their sister, and took him to his bedroom, furnished sparsely always by his own wish that denied indulgence in anything much beyond a soldier’s campaign quarters.