It was on a day in a month of August he went to town to escape the lamentation of the new-weaned lambs, that made the glen sorrowful from Camus to Kincreggan. A sound pleasant in the ears of Cameron the shepherd, who read no grief in it, but the comfortable tale of progress, growth, increasing flocks, but to Gilian almost heartrending. The separation for which the ewes wailed and their little ones wept, seemed a cruelty; that far-extending lamentation of the flocks was part of some universal coronach for things eternally doomed. Never seemed a landscape so miserable as then. The hills, in the morning haze, gathered in upon his heart and seemed to crush it. A poor farmer indeed to be thus affected by short brute sorrows, but so it was with Gilian, and on some flimsy excuse he left Ladyfield in the afternoon and rode to town. He had grown tall and slim in those latter days; his face would have seemed—if not handsome altogether—at least notable and pleasant to any other community than this, which ever preferred to have its men full-cheeked, bronzed, robust. He had an air of gentility oddly out of place with his immediate history; in his walk and manner men never saw anything very taking, but young women of the place would feel it, puzzle themselves often as to what the mystery of him was that made his appearance on the street or on the highway put a new interest in the day.
The Paymaster was standing gossiping at the inn door with Mr. Spencer, Rixa, and General Turner himself—no less, for the ancient rancour at the moment was at rest.
“Here he comes,” said old Mars sourly, as Gilian turned round the Arches into the town. “He’s like Gillesbeg Aotram, always seeking for something he’ll never find.”
“Your failure!” said Turner playfully, but with poor inspiration, as in a moment he realised.
The Paymaster bridled. He had no answer to a truth so manifest to himself. In a lightning-flash he remembered his boast in the schoolroom at the dregy, and hoped Turner had not so good a memory as himself. He could only vent his annoyance on Gilian, who drew up his horse with a studied curvet—for still there was the play-actor in him to some degree.
“Down again?” said he with half a sneer. There is a way of leaning on a stick and talking over the shoulder at an antagonist that can be very trying to the antagonist if he has any sense of shyness.
“Down again,” agreed Gilian uncomfortably, sorry he had had the courtesy to stop. The others moved away, for they knew the relations of the man and his adopted son were not of the pleasantest.
“An odd kind of farm training!” said the old officer. “I wish I could fathom whether you are dolt or deep one.”
Gilian might have come off the horse and argued it, for he had an answer pat enough. He sat still and fingered the reins, looking at the old man with the puffed face, and the constricted bull neck, and self-satisfaction written upon every line of him, and concluding it was not worth while to explain to a nature so shallow. And the man, after all, was his benefactor: scrupulous about every penny he spent on himself, he had paid, at Miss Mary’s solicitations, for the very horse the lad bestrode.
“Do you know what Turner said there?” asked the Paymaster, still with his contemptuous side to the lad. “He called you our failure. God, and it’s true! Neither soldier nor shepherd seems to be in you, a muckle bulrush nodding to the winds of Heaven! See that sturdy fellow at the quay there?”