“Eh? Are you hearing me, Cornal?” he pressed, eager to compel something for the youth whose days were being wasted.
“Speak to Miss Mary,” was all the Cornal would say. “I have nothing to do with him, and John’s heedless now, for he knows his plan for the army is useless.”
The dominie shook his head. “Man!” he cried. “I cannot even tell of his truancy there, for her heart’s wrapped up in the youth. When she speaks to me about him her face is lighted up like a day in spring, and I dare not say cheep to shatter her illusion.”
Gilian, alas! knew how little these old men now cared for him. The Cornal had long since ceased his stories; the Paymaster, coming in from his meridian in the Sergeant More, would pass him on the stair with as little notice as if he were a stranger in the street. Miss Mary was his only link between his dreams, his books, and the common life of the day, and it was she who at last made the move that sent him back to Ladyfield to learn with Cameron the shepherd—still there in the interests of the Paymaster who had whimsically remained tenant—the trade that was not perhaps best suited for him, but at least came somehow most conveniently to his practice. But for the loss of her consoling and continual company there would have been almost joy on his part at this returning to the scene of his childhood. He went back to it on a summer day figuring to himself the content, the carelessness that had been his there before, and thinking, poor fool, they were waiting where he had left them.
Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of Drimfern. A pleasant place for meditation, bleak in winter for the want of trees, but in other seasons in a bloom of colour.
Though he was there ‘prentice to a hard calling, Gilian’s life was more the gentle’s than the shepherd’s. He might be often on the hill, but it was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling, it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries of the countryside. A certain weeping effect of the mists on the ravines, one particular moaning sound of the wind among the rocks, had a strange solace for his ear, chording with some sweet melancholy of his spirit He loved it all, yet at times he would flee from the place as if a terror were at his heels and in a revolt against the narrowness of his life, hungering almost to starvation for some companionship, for some salve to an anxious mind, and, in spite of his shyness, bathe in the society of the town—an idler. The people as he rode past would indicate him with a toss of the head over their shoulders, and say, “The Paymaster’s boy,” and yet the down was showing on his lip. He would go up the street looking from side to side with an expectancy that had no object; he stared almost rudely at faces, seeking for he knew not what.
It was not the winters with their cold, their rain, their wind and darkness, that oppressed him most in his banishment, but the summers. In the winter the mists crowded so close about, and the snow so robbed the land of all variety, that Ladyfield house with its peats burning ceaselessly, its clean paven court, its store of books he had gathered there, was an enviable place for compactness and comfort, and he could feel as if the desirable world was in his immediate neighbourhood. Down in the street he knew the burgh men were speeding the long winter nights with song and mild carousal; the lodges and houses up the way, each with its spirit keg and licence, gave noisiness to the home-returning of tenants for Lochow from the town, and as they went by Ladyfield in the dark they would halloo loudly to the recluse lad within who curled, nor shot, nor shintied, nor drank, nor did any of the things it was youth’s manifest duty to do.
But the summer made his station there in Ladyfield almost intolerable. For the roads, crisp, yellow, straight, demanded his going on them; the sun-dart among distant peaks revealed the width and glamour of the world. “Come away,” said the breezes; passing gipsies all jangling with tins upon their backs awoke dreams poignant and compelling. When the summer was just on the turn at that most pitiful’ of periods, the autumn, he must go more often down to town.