CHAPTER XIV--THE CORNAL'S LOVE STORY

Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot, her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by the lamp above the merchant's door. When she saw her brother coming with Gilian she ran forward on the footway, caught the boy by the hand and drew him in.

"I am very angry, oh, I am terribly angry with you!" she cried. "Do not speak a word to me." She pushed him into a chair and spread thick b.u.t.ter on a scone and thrust it in his hand. "To frighten us like this! The Captain is all over the town for you, and the General has sent men to drag for you about the quay."

Peggy the maid smiled over her mistress's shoulder at the youth. He ate his scone with great complacency, heartened by this token that something of Miss Mary's vexation was a.s.sumed. Not perhaps her vexation--for were her eyes not red as with weeping?--but her anger, if she had really been angry.

"You are a perfect heartbreak," she went on

"The Cornal heard you had run off after the sogers, and------"

"Would that vex you?" asked Gilian.

"It would not vex Colin; he would give his only infant, if he had one, to the army; but I was thinking of you left behind in the march about the loch-head, and lost and starving somewhere about the wood of Dunderave."

"I would not starve in Dunderave so long as the nut and bramble were there," said Gilian, rejoicing in her kindly perturbation. "And I could not be lost anywhere--"

"--Except in the Duke's flower garden, wasting the time with--with--a woman's daughter," said the Cornal, putting his head in at the kitchen door. He frowned upon his sister for her too prompt kindness to the rover, and she hid behind her a cup of new-skimmed cream. "Come upstairs and have a talk with Dugald and me," he went on to the boy.

"Will it not do in the morning?" asked Miss Mary, all shaking, dreading her darling's punishment.

"No," said the Cornal, "Now or never. Oh! you need have no fears that I would put him to the triangle."

"Then I may go too?" said Miss Mary.

The Cornal put the boy in front of him and pushed him towards the stair-foot. "You stay where you are," he said to his sister. "This will be a man's sederunt."

They went up the stair together and entered the parlour, to find the General half-sleeping in his lug-chair. He started at the apparition of the entering youth.

"You are not drowned after all," said he, "and there's my money gone that I spent for a gross of stenlock hooks to grapple you."

"Sit down there," said the Cornal, pointing to the chair in which Gilian had first stood court-martial. The bottle was brought forth from the cupboard; the gla.s.ses were ranged again by the General. In the grate a sea-coal fire burned brightly, its glance striking golden now and then upon the polished woodwork of the room and all its dusky corners, more golden, more warm, more generous, than the wan disheartened rays of the candles that shook a smoky flame above the board. Gilian waited his punishment with more wonderment than fear. What could be said to him for a misadventure? He had done no harm except to cause an hour or two of apprehension, and if he had been with one whose company was forbidden it had never been forbidden to him.

"It's a fine carry-on this," said the Cornal, breaking the silence. "Ay, it's a fine carry-on." He stretched the upper part of his body over the low table with his arms spread out, and looked into the boy's eyes with a glance more judicial than severe. "Here are we doing our best to make a man of you, more in a brag against gentry that need not be named in this house than for human kindness, though that is not wanting I a.s.sure you, and what must you be at but colloguing and, perhaps, plotting with the daughter of the gentry in question? I will not exactly say plotting," he hastened to amend, remembering apparently that before him were but the rudiments of a man. "I will not say plotting, but at least you were in a way to make us a laugh to the whole community. Do you know anything of the girl that you were with?"

"I met her in the school before she got her governess."

"Oh, ay! they must be making the leddy of her; that was the spoiling of her mother before her. As if old Brooks could not be learning any woman enough schooling to carry on a career in a kitchen. And have you seen her elsewhere?"

"I heard her once singing on her father's vessel," said Gilian.

"She was singing!" cried the Cornal, standing to his feet and thumping the table till the gla.s.ses rang. "Has she that art of the devil too? Her mother had it; ay! her mother had it, and it would go to your head like strong drink. Would it not, Dugald? You know the dame I mean."

"It was very taking, her song," said the General simply, playing with the empty gla.s.s, his eyes upon the table.

"And what now did she sing? Would it be----"

"It was 'The Rover' and 'The Man with the Coat of Green,'" said Gilian in an eager recollection.

"Man! did I not ken it?" cried the Cornal. "Oh! I kent it fine. 'The Rover' was her mother's trump card. I never gave a curse for a tune, but she had a way of lilting that one that was wonderful."

"She had, that," said the General, and he sighed.

The room, it seemed to Gilian, was a vault, a cavern of melancholy, with only the flicker of the coal to light it up in patches. These old men sighing were its ghosts or hermits, and he himself a worldling fallen invisible among their spoken thoughts. To him the Cornal no longer spoke directly; he was thinking aloud the thoughts alike of the General and himself--the dreams, the actions, the joys, the bitterness of youth.

He sat back in his chair, relaxed, his hand wrinkled and grey, with no l.u.s.ty blood rushing any more under the skin; upon the arms his fingers beating tattoo for his past.

"You'll be wondering that between the Turners and us is little love lost, though no doubt Miss Mary with her clinking tongue has given you a glisk of the reason. He'll be wondering, Dugald, he'll be wondering, I'll warrant. And, man, there's nothing by-ordinar wonderful in it, for are we not but human men? There was a woman in Little Elrig who took Dugald's fancy (if you will let me say it, Dugald), and he was willing to draw in with her and give her a name as reverend as any in the shire, for who are older than the Campbells of Keils? It's an old story, and in a way it was only yesterday: sometimes I think it must be only a dream.

But, dream or waking, I can see plainly my brother Dugald there, home on leave, make visitation to Glen Shira. I have seen him ambling up there happy on his horse (it was Black Geordie, Dugald,--well I mind him), and coming down again at night with a glow upon his countenance. Miss Mary, she would be daffing with him on his return, with a 'How's her leddyship to-day, Dugald?' and he would be in a pleasant vexation at this guessing of what he thought his secret. It was no secret: was ever such a thing secret in the shire of Argyll? We all knew it. She was Mary's friend and companion; she would come to our house here on a Sat.u.r.day; I see her plainly on that chair at the window."

The General turned with a gasp, following his brother's glance. "I wish to G.o.d you would not be so terribly precise," was what he said. And then he fingered at his gla.s.s anew.

"Many a time she sat there with our sister, the smell of the wallflower on the sill about her, and many a time she sang 'The Rover' in this room. In this very room, Dugald: isn't every word I'm saying true?

Of course it is. G.o.d! as if a dream could be so fine! Well, well! my brother, who sits there all bye with such affairs, went away on another war. She was vexed. The woods of Shira Glen were empty for her after that, I have no doubt, now that their rambles were concluded; she was lonely on the Dhuloch-side, where many a time he convoyed her home in the summer gloaming. He came back a tired man, a man hashed about with wounds and voyaging, cold nights, wet marches, bitter cruel fare, not the same at all in make or fashion, or in gaiety, that went away. The girl--the girl was cold. I hate to say it, Dugald, but what is the harm in a story so old? She came about Miss Mary in this house as before, no way blate, but it was 'Hands off!' for the man who had so liked her."

He paused and stretched to fill his gla.s.s, but as he seized the bottle the hand shook so that he laid the vessel down in shame. The boy stood entranced, following the story intimately, guessing every coming sentence, filling up its bald outline with the pictures of his brain; riding with the General, almost in his prime and almost handsome, and hearing the woman sing in the window chair; feeling the soldier's return to a reception so cruel. The General said nothing, but sat musing, his eyes, wide and distant, on the board. And out in the street there was the traffic of the town, the high calls of lads in their boisterous evening play, the laugh of a girl. From the kitchen came the rattle of Peggy's operations, and in a low murmur Miss Mary's voice as she hummed to herself, her symptom of anxiety, as she was sieving the evening milk in the pantry.

The Cornal gulped the merest thimbleful of spirits and resumed in a different key.

"Then, then," said he, "then I became the family's fool. Oh, ay!"--and he laughed with a crackle at the throat and no merriment--"I was the family fool; there was aye a succession of them in our house, one after another, dancing to this woman's piping. For a while n.o.body saw it; Dugald never saw it, for he was sitting moping, wearying for some work anywhere away from this infernal clime of rain and sleep and old sorrows; Mary never noticed it--at least not for a little; she could not easily fancy her companion the character she was. But I would be meeting the girl here and there about the country, in the glen, in the town, as well as here in this very parlour where I had to sit and look indifferent, though--though my heart stounded, and I never met her but I felt a traitor to my brother. You will believe that, Dugald?" said he, recognition for a moment flashing to his eye.

And the General nodded, stretching himself weary on the chair.

"Oh, ay! even then I wished myself younger, for she was not long beyond her teens, and walking beside her I would be feeling musty and old, though I was not really old, as my picture there above the chimneypiece will show. I was not old, in heart--it pattered like a bairn's steps to every glimpse and sentence of her. I lost six months at this game, my corps calling me, but I could not drag myself away. Once I spoke of going, and she sang 'The Rover'--by G.o.d! it scaled me to her footsteps.

I stayed for very pity of myself, seeing myself a rover indeed if I went, more distressed than ever gave the key to any song. The woods, the woods in spring; the country full of birds; Dhuloch lap-lapping on the sh.o.r.e; the summer with hay filling the field, and the sky blue from hill to hill, the nights of heather and star--oh, yes, she led me a pretty dance, I'm thinking, and sometimes I will be wondering if it was worth the paying for."

The Paymaster's house was grown very still. Gilian ceased to make the pictures in his mind.

"I met her ghost up there on the road this very night, and I had a hand below her chin," said the Cornal with a gulp.

"You did not dare, you did not dare!" cried his brother, an apple-red upon his check, and half rising in his chair.

"Surely, surely--in a ghost," said the Cornal. "I would never have mentioned it had it been herself. Sit down, Dugald. It was her daughter.

I never saw her so close before, and the look of her almost gave me a stroke. It was what I felt when I first saw her mother with a younger man than you or I. Just like that I met them in the gloaming, with Turner very jaunty at her side, rapping his leg with his riding-cane, half a head higher than myself, a generation less in years. It was a cursed bitter pill, Dugald! Then I understood what you had meant and what Mary meant by her warnings. But I was cool--oh yes! I think I was cool. I only made to laugh and pa.s.s on, and she stopped me with her own hand. 'I kept it from you as long as I could,' she said: 'it was cruel, it was the blackest of sins, but this is the man for me.'"

"That was the man for her," echoed the General, his sentence stifled in a sigh.

"'This is the man for me.' Turner stood beside her, looking with an admiration, but to do him justice, ill at case, and with some--with some--with some pity for me. Oh! that stunned me! 'Is it so indeed?' I said in a little when I came to myself, feeling for the first time old.

'And must it be farewell with me as with my brother Dugald?'"

"You should not have said that at all," said the General. "I would not have said it."

"I daresay not; I daresay not," said the Cornal slowly, pondering on it.

"But, mind you, I was in a curious position, finding myself the second fool of a family that had got fair warning. She birked up and took her gallant's arm. Said I then, 'We'll maybe get you yet; I have a younger brother still.' It was a stupid touch of bravado. 'Jock!' said she, laughing, all her sorrow for her misdoing gone; 'Jock! Not the three of you together; give me youth and action.' Then she went away with her new fancy, and I was left alone. I was left alone. I was left alone."

His voice, that had risen to a shout as he gave the woman's words, declined to a crackle, a choked harsh utterance that almost failed to cross the table.

Up got the General. "Never mind, never mind, Colin," said he as it were to a vexed child. "We took our scuds gamely, and there was no more to do. G.o.d knows we have had plenty since--made wanderers for the King, ill fed for the King, wounded and blooded for the King. What does it matter for one that was a girl and is now no more but a clod in Kilmalieu? I'm forgetting it all fast I would never be minding it at all but for you and Miss Mary there, and that picture of the man I was once, on the wall. I mind more of Badajos and San Sebastian--that was the roaring, the b.l.o.o.d.y, the splendid time!--than of the girl that played us on her string--three brothers at a single cast--a witch's fishing. What nonsense is this to be bringing up at our time of life? In the hearing of a wean too."