PART II
CHAPTER XX—THE RETURN
When the General died, the household in the high burgh land suffered a change marvellous enough considering how little that old man musing in his parlour had had to do for years with its activities. Cornal Colin would sit of an evening with candles extravagantly burning more numerous than before to make up for the glowing heart extinguished; the long winter nights, black and stifling and immense around the burgh town, and the wind with a perpetual moan among the trees, would find him abandoned to his sorry self, looking into the fire, the week’s paper on his knees unread, and him full of old remembrances and regrets. It had become for him a parlour full of ghosts. He could not, in October blasts, but think of Jamie yonder on the cold foreign field with no stone for his memorial; Dugald, so lately gone, an old man, bent and palsied, would return in the flicker of the candle, remitted to his prime, the very counterpart of the sturdy gallant on the wall. Sometimes he would talk with these wraiths, and Miss Mary standing still in the lobby, her heart tortured by his loneliness, would hear him murmuring in these phantom visitations. She would, perhaps, venture in now and then timidly, and take a seat unbidden on the corner of a chair near him, and embark on some topic of the day. For a little he would listen almost with a brightness, but brief, brief was the mood; very soon would he let his chin fall upon his breast, and with pouted lips relapse into his doleful meditation.
All life, all the interests, the activities of the town seemed to drift by him; folk saw him less and less often on the plain stones of the street; children grew up from pinafores to kilts, from kilts to breeches, never knowing of his presence in that community that at last he saw but of an afternoon in momentary glimpses from the window.
On a week-end, perhaps, the veterans would come up to cheer him if they could; tobacco that he nor any of his had cared for in that form would send its cloud among Miss Mary’s dear naperies, but she never complained: they might have fumed her out of press and pantry if they brought her brother cheer. They talked loudly; they laughed boisterously; they acted a certain zest in life: for a little he would rouse to their entertainment, fiddling heedlessly with an empty glass, but anon he would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the door with one of her mother’s candlesticks, felt as she had the light above her head and showed them down the stair as if she had been the last left at a funeral feast. Her shadow on the wall, dancing before her as she returned, seemed some mockery of the night.
Only Old Brooks could rouse the Cornal to some spirit of liveliness. In a neighbourly compassion the dominie would come in of a Sunday or a Friday evening, leaving for an hour or two the books he was so fond of that he must have a little one in his pocket to feel the touch of when he could not be studying the pages. Seated in the Cornal’s chair, he had a welcome almost blithe. For he was a man of great urbanity, sobered by thought upon the complexities of life, but yet with sparkling courage.
He found the brothers now contemptuous of the boy who showed no sign of adaptability or desire for that gallant career that had been theirs. These, indeed, were the cold days for Gilian in a household indifferent to him save Miss Mary, who grew fonder every day, doting upon him like a lover for a score of reasons, but most of all because he was that rarity the perpetual child, and she must be loving somewhere.
“I have not seen the lad at school for a week now,” Brooks said, compelled at last by long truancies.
“So?” said the Cornal, showing no interest “It is not my affair. John must look after his own recruit, who seems an uncommon tardy one, Mr. Brooks—an uncommon tardy.”