Nan it was, singing a Scots song, a song of sad and familiar mood, a song of old loves, old summers, and into the darkness it came with a sweetness almost magic.

"Is she not fine?" he said again, clutching with eager hands at the rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that alluring melody.

"Oh, the dear! the dear!" sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the strain. "When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful woman here on any quarrel for her!"

The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the sea moaning in the trees behind the town.

"What--what--what are we here for?" said he, beholding for the first time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and sensitive a dame.

She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!

"You may well ask," she said, moving away from that alluring house-front with its inmates so indifferent to the pa.s.sions in the dark without And her sobs were not yet finished. "Because I prize my brothers," said she, "and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead companion's child?" She hurried her pace away from that house whose windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.

"Do you like that girl?" said she.

"I like her--when she sings," said he.

"Oh! it was always that," she went on helplessly "My poor brothers!

They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that brought them together." Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful exclamation: "Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing here with you? She may have her mother's nature as well as her mother's songs."

For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the street, now deserted but for themselves and a man's footsteps sounding on the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming.

It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.

"It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell," he said, in a shrill high dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the guttural Highland burghers.

She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.

"You have left the Sheriff's early to-night," said he. "I was asked, but I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here."

"I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of,"

said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. "The mantua-maker tells me the latest fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edinburgh." She saw in his face the innkeeper's apology for his common sin against the Gaelic vanity. "We were just out for an airing," she added, taking Gilian's hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning.

"I thought, ma'am, you were at the Sheriffs," said Mr. Spencer.

"Oh! there is a party in the Sheriff's, is there?" she said. "That is very nice; they have a hospitable house and many friends. I must hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave them to go out myself."

She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that died in her twenty years before. She said "Good-night," and then she was gone.

Mr. Spencer's footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her cheek.

CHAPTER IX--ACADEMIA

In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest cla.s.s in old Brooks' school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own, but by the luck that attends on such as have G.o.d's gift to begin with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the fascination they had before, even when they had mocked with cries of "Crotal-coat, Crotal-coat," did not very bravely stand a close trial.

He was not dismayed at this; he did as we must all be doing through life and changed one illusion for another. It is a wonderful rich world for dreams, and he had a different one every day, as he sat in the peaty odour of instruction.

Old Brooks would perch high on his three-legged stool conning over some exercise while his scholars in their rows behind the knife-hewn inky desks hummed like bees upon their tasks. The hornbooks of the little ones at the bottom of the room would sometimes fall from their hands in the languor of that stagnant atmosphere, but the boys of the upper forms were ever awake for mischief. To the teaching of the Dominie they would come with pockets full of playthings, sometimes animals from the woods and fields about the town--frogs, moles, hedgehogs, or fledgeling birds.

Brooks rarely suspected the presence of these distractions in his sacred grove, for he was dull of vision and preferred to see his scholars about him in a vague mist rather than wear in their presence the great horn spectacles that were privy to his room in Crombie's Land. The town's clock staring frankly in at the school windows conveyed to him no knowledge of the pa.s.sing enemy, and, as his watch had been for a generation but a bulge upon his vest, he must wait till the hour struck ere he knew it was meridian and time to cross the playground and into Kate Bell's for his gla.s.s of waters. "Silence till I return!" he would say, whipping on his better coat and making for the door that had no sooner shut on him than tumult reigned.

On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster making for the house of the Sergeant More. "I cannot understood,"

would the Paymaster say, "what makes you take your drams in so common a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company! MacNicol and Major Hall--and--and--myself and some of the best in the burgh; yet you must be frequenting a low tavern with only merchants and mice and fisherman to say 'Good health' to."

Master Brooks had always his answer very pat.

"I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books," he would say drily. "And told with a greater ingenuity--not to mention veracity--than pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between ourselves, I'm not for war at all, but for the far finer and more wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!" (and here would he grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an old acquaintance,) "Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us, so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the back room of Kate's there where the merchants discourse upon their bales and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their way of it."

"It's aye the old story with you," the Paymaster would say tolerantly.

"You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy's head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer."

"The boy's made, Captain Campbell," said the schoolmaster one day at this. "He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I've had many a curious student yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere but as the tinkler learns--by the roadside and in the wood."

"I know he's a droll one," said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a thoughtful brow, "but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it in with your tawse."

The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse-ness of youth made its presence necessary in his desk.

"Captain Campbell," said he, "it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a _lusus naturo_, that is all; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as an idiot when it is not, and then no tawse or ferule will avail."

And while the Paymaster and the Dominie were thus discussing Gilian, the school would be in a tumult whereof he was sometimes the leader. To him the restraints were galling shackles. When the cla.s.ses would be humming in the drowsy afternoon and the sharp high voice of old Brooks rose above the murmur as he taught some little cla.s.s in the upper corner, the boy would be gazing with vacant eyes at the whitewashed wall in front of him, or looking out at the beech branches that tapped in faint breezes at the back windows, or listening with an ecstatic ear to the crisp contact of stone and scythe as the mowers in the fields behind put a new edge on their instruments. Oh! the outer world was ever the world of charm for him, winter or summer, as he sat in that constrained and humming school. That sound of scythes a-sharping was more pleasing to his ear than the poetry Mr. Brooks imposed upon his scholars, showing, himself, how to read it with a fierce high limping accent as if it were a thing offensive. When hail or rain rattled on the branches, when snow in great flakes settled down or droves of cattle for distant markets went bellowing through the street, it was with difficulty the boy kept himself to his seat and did not rise and run out where his fancy so peremptorily called.

If he learned from books at all, it was from the wonderful, dusty, mildewed volumes that Marget Maclean had on her shelves behind the post-office. She was one of three sisters and they were all so much alike that Gilian, with many other boys, never learned to know one from the other, so it was ever Marget who was behind the counter, a thin old lady of carefully nurtured gentility, with cheeks like a winter apple for hue, with eyebrows arching high in a perpetual surprise at so hurried and ridiculous a world, and a curled brown wig that was suspected of doing duty for the three sisters who were never seen but one at a time. Marget Maclean's little shop was the dullest in the street, but it was the anteroom of fairydom for Gilian who borrowed books there with the pence cozened from Miss Mary. In the choosing of them he had no voice. He had but to pay his penny and Marget would peer through her gla.s.ses at the short rows of volumes until she came upon the book she thought most suited for her customer.

"You will find that a good one," she would say. "The one you mention is not at all good; it was very fashionable last spring, but it is not asked for now at all." And in proof that the volume she recommended was quite genteel, she would add: "That one was up at the Castle last Sat.u.r.day. Lady Charlotte's maid, you will notice, wet all the pages crying over the places where the lover went to sea another voyage. It is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not remember what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice in a book."

"You have none of Mr. Scott's poetry?" asked Gilian one day, moved thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars.

"Scott, Scott," said Miss Marget. "Now let me think, my dear."

She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bobbed behind her ears as she tilted up her head and glanced along the shelves for what she knew was not there.

"No, my boy," she said. "We have none of Mr. Scott's works at present.

There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but," here she frowned slightly, "I do not think you are old enough for poetry.

It is too romantic, and--it lingers in the memory. I have not read him myself though I hear he is clever--in a way. I would not say that I object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him to my young customers."

So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "Thaddeus of Warsaw," "Moll Flanders," or "Belinda," the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in fancy by many pages. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling below or beating in petulant waves and he floated, as it were, between sea and sky, as free from earth's clogging influence as the gannet that soared above.

He sought the Ramparts because for a boy of his age to read in books, except as a task of the school, was something shameful; and he had been long accustomed to the mid-air trip upon the walls ere some other boys discovered him guilty, flushing and trembling with a story book in his hand. They looked with astonishment at their discovery and were prepared to jeer when his wits came to his rescue. He tore out one or two leaves of the book, twisted them into a rough semblance of a boat and cast them in the water.

"Watch," said he, "you'll see the big ones are sunk sooner than the little ones."

"Do not tear the good book," said one of the boys, Young Islay, shocked, or pretending to be so, at the destruction.

"Oh! it's only a stupid story," said Gilian, tearing again at the treasure, with an agony that could have been no greater had it been his heart. He had to forego many books from Marget Maclean to make up for this one, but at least he had escaped the irony of his companions.

Yet not books were his first lovers and friends and teachers, so much as the creatures of the wild, and the aspects of nature. Often the Dominie missed him from his accustomed place at the foot of the cla.s.s, and there was no explanation to offer when he returned. He had suffered again the wood's fascination. In the upper part of the glen he had been content with little clumps and plantings, the caldine woods of Kincreggan or the hazels whereof the shepherds made their crooks. But the forest lay for miles behind the town, a great land of shade and pillars where the winds roved and tangled. It abounded in wild life, and sounded ever in spring and summer with songs and cries. Into its glades he would wander and stand delirious to the solitude, tingling to the wild. The dim vistas about him had no affrights; he was at home, he was the child of the tranquil, the loving mother, whose lap is the pasture-land and forest.

Autumn fills those woods with the very breath of melancholy, no birds will sing in the mult.i.tudinous cloisters except the birds of the night whose melody is one doleful and mocking note. The bracken burns and withers, lush gra.s.s rots and whitens above the fir-roots, the birds flit from shade to shade with no carolling. And over all will stand the trees sleeping with their heads a-nod.

He would walk among the noisy fallen leaves, posturing the heroes of his reading or his own imagination about him in the landscape--a pleasant recreation. He would set Bruce the king himself sitting at a cave-mouth, a young gentleman with a queue like Turner's, pondering upon freedom, while the spiders wrought for his instruction; deer breaking from covert to dash away, or moving in stately herds across the forest openings, became a foreign cavalry. Sometimes he would take a book to the upper hunting-roads, where rarely any intrusion came except from some gillie or fisher of the lochs far back in the moors, and stretched on dry bracken he would read and dream for hours.