Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. And diligently he sought a meeting. It used to be the wonder of Mr. Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay’s corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over the bridge whence she must sometime come. Years after he would stop again upon the blue slab and recall with a pensive pleasure those old hours of expectation.
For days he loitered in vain, the wonder of the Inns and its frequenters. Nan never appeared. To her father a letter had come; the Duke had come up on the back of it; there had been long discourse and a dram of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his Grace’s cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower on Nan as he passed into the house behind her father, and come out anon smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her father would have her constant in his sight, though it was only, as it seemed, to pleasure an averted eye.
By-and-by Gilian turned his lucky flint one morning in a fortunate inspiration, and had no sooner done so than he remembered a very plausible excuse for going to a farm at the very head of Glen Shira. He started forth with the certainty, somehow, that he should meet the lady at last.
He had transacted his business and was on his way to the foot of the glen when he came upon her at Boshang Gate. Her back was to him; she was looking out to sea, leaning upon the bars as if she were a weary prisoner.
She turned at the sound of his footstep, a stranger utterly to his eyes and imagination, but not to his instinct, her hair bound, her apparel mature and decorous, her demeanour womanly. And he had been looking all the while for a little girl grown tall, with no external difference but that!
She took an impulsive step towards him as he hesitated with his hand dubious between his side and his bonnet, a pleasant, even an eager smile upon her face.
“You are quite sure you are you?” she said, holding out her hand before he had time to say a word. “For I was standing there thinking of you, a little white-faced fellow in a kilt, and here comes your elderly wraith at my back like one of Black Duncan’s ghosts!”
“I would be the more certain it was myself,” he answered, “if you had not been so different from what I expected.”
“Oh! then you had not forgotten me altogether?” she said, waiting her answer, a mere beginner in coquetry emboldened to practice by the slightly rustic awkwardness of the lad.
“Not—not altogether,” said he, unhappily accepting the common locution of the town, that means always more than it says.
A spark of humour flashed to merriment in her eyes and died to a demure ember again before he noticed it. “Here’s John Hielan’man,” she said to herself, and she recalled, not to Gilian’s credit in the comparison, the effrontery of Young Islay.
The situation was a little awkward, for he held her hand too long, taking all the pleasure he could from a sudden conviction that in all the times he had seen Glen Shira it had never seemed fully furnished and habitable till now. This creature, so much the mistress of herself, and dainty and cheerful, made up for all its solitude; she was the one thing (he felt) wanting to make complete the landscape.
Her blush and a feeble effort to disengage her hand brought him to himself.
“I am pleased to see you back,” said he shyly, as he released her. “I had not forgotten—oh no, I had not forgotten you. It would be easy to convince you of that, I think, but in all my recollection of Miss Nan I had more of the girl in the den of the Jean in my mind than the Edinburgh lady.”
“You’ll be meaning that I am old and—and pretty no longer,” said she. “Upon my word, you are honestly outspoken in these parts nowadays.” She pouted, with lines of annoyance upon her brow, which seriously disturbed him, and so obviously that she was compelled to laugh.
Not a word could he find to say to raillery which was quite new to him, and so for the sake of both of them as they stood at the gate Miss Nan had to ply an odd one-sided conversation till he found himself at his ease. By-and-by his shyness forsook him.
The sun was declining; the odours of the traffic of peace blew from the land; one large and ruddy star lit over Strone. The fishers raised their sails, and as their prows beat the sea they chanted the choruses of the wave.
A recollection of all this having happened before seized them together; she looked at him with a smile upon her lips, and he was master of her thought before she had expressed it.
“I know exactly what you are thinking of,” he said.
“It was the odd thing about you that you often did,” she replied. “It’s a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan’man,” she thought.
“You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke’s garden,” he said. “It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I’m as old—as old as the hills.” He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with brass. “As old as the hills,” he went on, eager to display himself, and also to show he appreciated her advantages. “Do you know I begin to find them irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body, like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the glens.”
She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to some women makes a strange appeal.
“One sees much among strangers,” she confessed. “I thought you had been out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked of the army for you?”
“The army,” he said, wincing imperceptibly. “Oh! that was the Paymaster’s old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it was?” He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.
“No, tell me,” she said.
“It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed, shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least, when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that was the very last of the army for me.”
“I don’t understand it,” she said.
“Nor I,” he confessed frankly; “only there’s the fact! All I know is that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before, night and day.”
“I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be the thing in actuality.”
“I remember that too. Dhe! how the whole thing comes back! I wonder—”
“Well!” she pressed.
“I wonder if we walked in the Duke’s garden again, if we could restore the very feelings of that time—the innocence and ignorance of it?”
“I don’t know that I want to do so,” said she, laughing.
“Might we not——” He paused, afraid of his own temerity.
“Try it, you were going to say,” she continued.
“You see I have little of your own gift. I’m willing. I am going to the town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not.”
Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though she was saying “John Hielan’man, John Hielan’man!” to herself most of the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer—little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.
They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the flowers grew thick on the dykes; the tall trees swayed their boughs: still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they were trying to recall.
“It is all just as it was,” said she. “All just as it was; there are the very flowers I plucked,” and she bent and plucked them again.
“We can never pluck our flowers twice,” said he. “The flowers you gathered then are ghosts.”
“Not a bit,” said she. “Here they are re-born,” and she went as before from bush to bush and bank to bank, humming a strain of sailor song.
They went under the trees on which he had fancied his heron’s nest, and they looked at each other, laughing.
“Wasn’t I a young fool?” he asked. “I was full of dream and conceit in those days.”
“And now?” she asked, burying her face in the flowers and eyeing him wonderingly.
“Oh, now,” said he, “I have lost every illusion.” “Or changed them for others, perhaps.” He started at the suggestion. “I suppose you are right, after all,” he said. “I’m still in a measure the child of fancy. This countryside moves me—I could tenant it with a thousand tales; never a wood or thicket in it but is full of song. I love it all, and yet it is my torture. When I was a child the Paymaster once got me on the bridge crying my eyes out over the screech of a curlew—that has been me all through life—I must be wondering at the hidden meanings of things. The wind in the winter trees, the gossip of the rivers, the trail of clouds, waves washing the shore at night—all these things have a tremendous importance to me. And I must laugh to see my neighbours making a to-do about a mercantile bargain. Well, I suppose it is the old Highlands in me, as Miss Mary says.” “I have felt a little of it in a song,” said Nan. “You could scarce do otherwise to sing them as you do,” he answered. “I never heard you yet but you had the magic key for every garden of fancy. One note, one phrase of yours comes up over and over again that seems to me filled with the longings of thousand years.”
He turned on her suddenly a face strenuous, eyes led with passion.
“I wish! I wish!” said he all fervent, “I wish could fathom the woman within.”
“Here she’s on the surface,” said Nan, a little impatiently, arranging her flowers. And then she looked him straight in the eyes. “Ladyfield seems a poor academy,” she said, “if it taught you but to speculate on things unfathomable. I always preferred the doer to the dreamer. The mind of man is a far more interesting thing than the song of the river I’m thinking, or the trailing of mist. And woman——” she laughed and paused.
“Well?” He eyed her robust and wholesome figure.
“Should I expose my sex, John Hielan’man, or should I not?” she reflected with an amused look in her face yet. “Never bother to look below the surface for us,” she said. “We are better pleased, and you will speed the quicker to take us for what we seem. What matters of us is—as it is with men too—plain enough on the surface. Dear, dear! what nonsense to be on! You are far too much of the mist and mountain for me. As if I had not plenty of them up in Maam! Oh! I grow sick of them!” She began to walk faster, forgetting his company in the sudden remembrance of her troubles; and he strode awkwardly at her heels, not very dignified, like a menial overlooked. “They hang about the place like a menace,” said she. “No wonder mother died! If she was like me she must have been heart-broken when father left her to face these solitudes.”
“It is so, it is so,” confessed the lad. “But they would not be wearisome with love. With love in that valley it would smile like an Indian plain.”
“How do you ken?” said she, stopping suddenly at this.
“It would make habitable and even pleasant,” said he, “a dwelling where age and bitterness had their abode.”
“Faith, you’re not so blate as I thought you!” she said, setting aside the last of her affected shy simplicity.
“Blate!” he repeated, “I would not have thought that was my failing. Am I not cracking away to you like an old wife?”
“Just to hide the blateness of you,” she answered. “You may go to great depths with hills and heughs and mists—and possibly with women too when you get the chance, but, my dear Gilian, you’re terribly shallow to any woman with an eye in her head.”
“Did you say ‘Gilian’?” he asked, stopping and looking at her with a high colour.
“Did I?” she repeated, biting her lips. “What liberty!”
“No, no,” he cried——
“I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you object——”
He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him, and she laughed. All her assurance was back to her, she knew the young gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.
“Well, well,” she went on after a silence, “you seem poorly provided with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would be making love to me by this time.”
He stared at her aghast. “But, but——”
“But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson’s, I can assure you.” This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the policies.
They reached the Lady’s Linn, but did not repeat old history to the extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested it in a momentary boldness.
“No, no,” said she. “We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson’s. And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram’s stories here; what was it again?”
He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale’s Daughter. She listened attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put into the narrative.
“It is a kind of gruesome fable,” she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. “The other brother was Death, wasn’t he? When you told it to me last I did not understand.”
They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so bewildered them before: “After all, it is not a bit like what it was,” said she. “I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time.”
“Just so,” he answered, “but you could see over no bushes in those days, and more’s the pity that you can see over them now, in the Duke’s garden as well as in life, for it’s only one more dream spoiled, my dear Nan.”
“Oh! there is not much blateness there! You are coming on, John Hielan’man.” But this was to herself.
“Then to you this is just the same as when we lost our way?”
“The same and not all the same,” he admitted. “I can make it exactly the same if I forgot to look at you, for that means sensations I never knew then. I cannot forget the place has been here night and day, summer and winter, rain and sun, since we last were in it, and time makes no difference; it is the same place. But it is not the same in some other way, some sad way I cannot explain.”
The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees. There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady’s breathing, that to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers. And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other rumour to the ear.
“Listen,” said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that grey grassy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady’s arm.
“Faith, and you are not blate,” said she whimsically, but indifferent to remove herself from a grasp so innocent.
She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature. A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt attention. She withdrew her arm gently.
“Hush, hush!” he said. “Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?”
“I do?” she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly sense of laughter as at a child “Bees and midges, late things like ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies.”
“They are, of course they are,” he protested, laughing. “At least a second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet”—his humour came back—“even yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other path.”
“What, and waste ten minutes more!” she cried “Follow me, follow me!”
And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself, very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity. He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book again to please or to deceive the Philistine.
“I thought we could bring it all back again—that was the object of my rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past.”
They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.
“And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you ever written anything?”
He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he had read in Marget Maclean’s books that were still the favourites of his leisure hours.
“It’ll be in that like other things,” she said with some sense of her own cruelty. “You must be dreaming it when you might be making it.”
“I never had the inspiration——”
“What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!” she pointed out.
“But now, of course—-”
“Just the weather, Gilian,” she hastened to interject. “A bonny night with stars, the scent of flower, a misty garden—I could find some inspiration in them myself for poetry, and I make no pretence at it.”
“There was a little more,” he said meaningly; “but no matter, that may wait,” and he proceeded immediately to the making of a poem as he went, the subject a night of stars and a maiden. They had got into the dark upper end of the town overhung by the avenue trees, the lands were spotted with the lemon lights of the evening candles, choruses came from the New Inns where fishermen from Cowal met to spend a shilling or two in the illusion of joy. Mr. Spencer saw them as he passed and was suffused by a kindly glow of uncommon romance. He saw, as he thought, a pair made for each other because they were of an age and of a size (as if that meant much); what should they be but lovers coming from the gardens of Duke George in such a night and the very heavens twinkling with the courtship of the stars? He looked and sighed. Far off in the south was an old tale of his own; the lady upstairs eternally whining because she must be banished to the wilds away from her roaring native city was not in it. “Lucky lad!” said he to himself. “He is not so shy as we thought him.” They came for a moment under the influence of the swinging lamp above his door, then passed into the dusk. He went into his public room, and “Mary,” he cried to a maid, “a little drop of the French for Sergeant Cameron and me. You will allow me, Sergeant? I feel a little need of an evening brace.” And he drank, for the sake of bygone dusks, with his customer.
Nan and Gilian now walked on the pavement, a discreet distance apart. She stopped at the mantua-makers door. He lingered on the parting, eager to prolong it. The street was deserted; from the Sergeant More’s came the sound of song; some fallen leaves ran crisp along the stones, blown by an air of wind. He had her by the hand, still loath to leave, when suddenly the door of the mantua-maker’s opened and out came a little woman, who, plunging from the splendour of two penny dips into the outer mirk, ran into his arms before she noticed his presence. She drew back with an apology uttered in Gaelic in her hurried perturbation. It was Miss Mary.
“Auntie,” he said, no more.
She glanced at his companion and started as if in fear, shivered, put out a hand and bade her welcome home.
“Dear me! Miss Nan,” said she, “amn’t I proud to see you back? What a tall lady you have grown, and so like—so like——” She stopped embarrassed.
Her hand had gone with an excess of kindness upon the girl’s arm ere she remembered all that lay between them and the heyday of another Nan than this. Of Gilian she seemed to take no notice, which much surprised him with a sense of something wanting.
At last they parted, and he went up with Miss Mary to the Paymaster’s house.
Nan’s uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature’s caprice with sheep and crop, man’s injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons, nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life’s dolours, would be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river. A gaunt, bowed man in the decline of years, with a grey tangle of beard—a fashion deemed untidy where the razor was on every other man’s face—he looked like a satyr of the trees, when he first came to the view of Gilian. He saw those young ones from remote vistas of the trees, or from above them in cliffs as they plucked the boughs. In lanes of greenwood he would peer in questioning and silent, and there he was certain to find them as close as lovers, though, had he known it, there was never word of love. And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable, then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more than ever.
He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a tryst of her own making. She was indifferent—I have no excuse for her, and she’s my poor heroine—about his wasted hours so long as she had her days illumined by some flicker of life and youth. He never knew how often it was from weeping over a letter from Edinburgh, or a song familiar elsewhere, upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam—and Young Islay was for reasons away in the Lowlands—this dreamer of the wild, with the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts. So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers have ever been meeting in the woods of these glens without saying to each other why.
Gilian went little to town in that weather, he was getting credit with Miss Mary, if not with her brothers, for a new interest in his profession. Nor did Nan. Her father did not let her go much without himself, he had his own reasons for keeping her from hearing the gossip of the streets.
A week or two passed. The corn, in the badger’s moon, yellowed and hung; silent days of heat haze, all breathless, came on the country; the stubble fields filled at evening with great flights of birds moving south. A spirit like Nan’s, that must ever be in motion, could not but irk to share such a doleful season; she went more than ever about the house of Maam sighing for lost companions, and a future not to be guessed at. Only she would cheer up when she had her duties done for the afternoon and could run out to the hillside to meet Gilian if he were there.
She was thus running, actually with a song on her lips, one day, when she ran into the arms of her uncle as he came round the corner of the barn.
“Where away?” said he shortly, putting her before him, with his hands upon her shoulders.
She reddened, but answered promptly, for there was nothing clandestine in her meetings on the bare hillside with Gilian.
“The berries again,” she said. “Some of the people from Glen Aray are coming over.”
“Some of the people,” he repeated ironically; “that means one particular gentleman. My lassie, there’s an end coming to that.”
He drew a large-jointed coarse hand through his tangled beard and chuckled to himself.
“Are you aware of that?” he went on. “An end coming to it. Oh! I see things; I’m no fool: I could have told your father long ago, but he’s putting an end to it in his own way, and for his own reasons.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” she said, surprised at the portentous tone. She was not a bit afraid of him, though he was so little in sympathy with her youth, so apparently in antagonism to her.
“What would you say to a man?” he asked cunningly.
“It would depend, uncle,” she said readily and cheerfully, though a sudden apprehension smote her at the heart. “It would depend on what he said to me first.”
The old man grinned callously as the only person in the secret.
“Suppose he said: ‘Come away home, wife, I’ve paid a bonny penny for ye’?”
“Perhaps I would say, if I was in very good humour at the time, ‘You’ve got a bonny wife for your bonny penny.’ More likely I would be throwing something at him, for I have my Uncle Jamie’s temper they say, but I’m nobody’s wife, and for want of the asking I’m not likely to be.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said the uncle oracularly. Then abruptly, “Have you heard that your father’s got an appointment?”
“I—I heard just a hint of it, of course he has not told me all about it yet,” she answered with a readiness that surprised herself when she reflected on it later, for the news now so unexpectedly given her in the momentary irritation of the old man was news indeed, and though she was unwilling to let him see that it was so, a tremendous oppression seized her; now she was to be lonely indeed. Half uttering her thoughts she said, “I’ll sooner go with him than stay here and——”
“Oh, there’s no going yonder,” said the uncle. “Sierra Leone is not a healthy clime for men, let alone for women. That’s where the man comes in. He could hardly leave you alone to stravaige about the hills there with all sorts of people from Glen Aray.”
“The white man’s grave!” said she, appalled.
“Ay!” said he, “but he’s no ordinary white man; he’s of good stock.”
“And—and—he has found a man for me,” she said bitterly. “Could I not be left to find one for myself?”
Her uncle laughed his hoarse rude laugh again, and still combed his tangled beard.
“Not to his fancy,” he answered. “It’s not every one who would suit.” He smiled grimly—a wicked elder man. “It’s not every one would suit,” he repeated—as if he was anxious to let the full significance of what he meant sink to her understanding. And he combed his rough beard with large-jointed knotted fingers, and looked from under his heavy eyebrows.
“Seeing the business is so commercial,” said she, “I’m sure that between the two of you you will make a good bargain. I am not sure but I might be glad to be anywhere out of this if father’s gone and I not with him.” She said it with outer equanimity, and unable to face him a moment longer without betraying her shame and indignation, she left him and went to the corn-field where Black Duncan was working alone.
That dark mariner was to some extent a grieved sharer of her solitude in Maam. The loss of the Jean on Ealan Dubh had sundered him for ever from his life of voyaging. The distant ports in whose dusks wild beasts roared and spices filled the air were far back in another life for him; even the little trips to the Clyde were, in the regrets of memory, experiences most precious. Now he had to wear thick shoes on the hill of Maam or sweat like a common son of the shore in the harvest-fields. At night upon his pillow in the barn loft he would lie and mourn for unreturning days and loud and clamorous experience. Or at morning ere he started the work of the day he would ascend the little tulloch behind the house and look far off at a patch of blue—the inner arm of the ocean.
Nan found him in one of his cranky moods, fretful at circumstances, and at her father who kept him there on the shore, and had no word of another ship to take the place of the Jean. Of late he had been worse than usual, for he had learned that the master was bound for abroad, and though he was a sure pensioner so long as Maam held together, it meant his eternal severance from the sea and ships.
Nan threw herself upon the grass beside him as he twisted hay-bands for the stacks, and said no more than “Good afternoon” for a little.
He gloomed at her, and hissed between his teeth a Skye pibroch. For a time he would have her believe he was paying no attention, but ever and anon he would let slip a glance of inquiry from the corner of his eyes. He was not too intent upon his own grievances to see that she was troubled with hers, but he knew her well enough to know that she must introduce them herself if they were to be introduced at all.
He changed his tune, let a little more affability come into his face, and it was an old air of her childhood on the Jean he had at his lips. As he whistled it he saw a little moisture at her eyes; she was recalling the lost old happiness of the days when she had gone about with that song at her lips. But he knew her better than to show that he perceived it.
“Have you heard that father’s going away, Duncan?” she asked in a little.
“I have been hearing that for five years,” said he shortly. He had not thought her worries would have been his own like this.
“Yes, but this time he goes.”
“So they’re telling me,” said Black Duncan.
He busied himself more closely than ever with his occupation.
“Do you think he should be taking me?” she asked in a little.
He stopped his work immediately, and looked up startled.
“The worst curse!” said he in Gaelic. “He could not be doing that. He goes to the Gold Coast. Do I not know it—the white man’s grave?”
“But this Glen Shira,” said she, pretending merriment, “it’s the white girl’s grave for me, Duncan. Should not I be glad to be getting out of it?” And now her eyes were suffused with tears though her lips were smiling.
“I know, I know,” said he, casting a glance up that lone valley that was so much their common grief. “And could we not be worse? I’m sure Black Duncan, reared in a bothy in Skye, who has been tossed by the sea, and been wet and dry in all airts of the world, would be a very thankless man if he was not pleased to be here safe and comfortable, on a steady bed at night, and not heeding the wind nor the storm no more than if he was a skart.”
“Oh! you’re glad enough to be here, then?” said she.
“Am I?” said he. And he sighed, so comical a sound from that hard mariner that she could not but laugh in spite of the anxieties oppressing her.
“I’m not going with him,” she proceeded.
“I know,” said he. “At least I heard—I heard otherwise, and I wondered when you said it, thinking perhaps you had made him change his mind.”
“You thought I had made him change—what do you mean?” she pressed, feeling herself on the verge of an explanation, but determined not to ask directly.
Black Duncan became cautious.
“You need not be asking me anything: I know nothing about it,” said he shortly. “I am very busy—I——” He hissed at his work more strenuously than ever.
Then Nan knew he was not to be got at that way.
“Oh, well, never mind,” said she; “tell me a story.”
“I have no time just now,” he answered.
Nan’s uncle came round the corner of the dyke, no sound from his footsteps, his hands in his pockets, his brows lowering. He looked at the two of them and surmised the reason of Nan’s discourse with Black Duncan.
“Women—” said he to himself vaguely. “Women—” said he, pausing for a phrase to express many commingled sentiments he had as to their unnecessity, their aggravation, and his suspicion of them. He did not find the right one. He lifted his hand, stroked again the tangled beard, then made a gesture, a large animal gesture—still the satyr—to the sky. He turned and went down to the riverside. Mid-way he paused and stroked his beard again, and looked grimly up at where the maid and the manservant were blue-black against the evening sky. He shrugged his shoulders, “Women,” said he, “they make trouble. I wish—I wish——” He had no word to finish the sentence with, he but sighed and proceeded on his way.
Nan seemed to be lazily watching his figure as she sat in the grass, herself observed by Black Duncan. But she really saw him not.
“Ah well! never mind the story, Duncan,” she said at last; “I know you are tired and not in the mood for sguullachd, and if you like I will sing you my song.”
“You randy!” he said to himself, “you are going to have it out of me, my dear.” And he bent the more industriously to his task.
“Stop! stop!” he cried before she had got halfway through the old song of “The Rover.” “Stop! stop!” said he. He threw the binding bands from him and faced the crimson west, with his back to her.
“Any port but that, my dear! If you are grieving because you think you are going abroad you need not be anything of the kind, my leddy. This is the place for you, about your father’s door and him away where the fevers are—aye and the harbours too with diversions in every one of them.”
“And Uncle Jamie’s going to keep me, is he?” said she. “Lucky me! I was aye so fond of gaiety, you mind.”
“Whoever it is that’s to keep you it might be worse,” said he.
“Then there’s somebody.”
“Somebody,” he repeated; “the cleverest young——”
“Stop! stop!” she cried, rising suddenly to her feet; “do not dare to mention a name; spare me that.”
He looked at her in amazement.
“Do you think I’m a stone, Duncan?”
“You would not be asking me that twice if I was younger myself,” he said redly, looking at her fine figure, the blush like a sunset on her neck, the palpitation of her bosom, the flash and menace of her eyes.
“Well, well, well, go on, tell me more,” she cried when she had recovered herself. “What more is there?”
“You are the one that should know most,” said he.
“I know nothing at all,” she answered bitterly. “It seems that nowadays the lady is the last to be taken into confidence about her own marriage.”
“Are you telling me?” he asked incredulously.
“I’m swearing it down your throat,” she cried. “If I had a friend in this countryside he would be pitying my shame that I must be bargained for like beast at a fair and not have a word in the bargain.”
“My name’s what my name may be,” said he, putting out an arm and addressing the world, “and you are my master’s daughter; I would cut off that hand to save you a minute’s vexation. What did Black Duncan know but that you had the picking of the gentleman yourself—and you might have picked worse, though I tell you I did not care to hear about the money in it.”
“The money,” she exclaimed, turning pale to the lips; “then—then—then there’s money in it?”
“He’s a smart young fellow——”
“No name, no name, or you are no friend of mine! Money, you say?”
“I could have picked no better for you myself.”
“Did you say money?”
“I thought once there might be something.”
“Money, money,” she repeated to herself.
“A tocher should not be all on one side,” said he, “and I know the gentleman would be glad to have you——”
“Perhaps the whole countryside knows more about it than I do; it could scarcely know less. I wondered why they were looking at me in the church on Sunday. Oh! I feel black burning shame—shame—shame!”
She put her hands to her face to hide her tears; she trembled in every part.
“They know; the cries are in at least,” said Duncan.
“The cries! the cries!” she repeated. “Is my fate so near at hand as that?”
“You’ll be a married woman before the General takes the road,” said he.
She took her hands from her face; her eyes froze and snapped, cold as ice, the very redness of her weeping cooling pale in her passion. She had no words to utter; she left him hurriedly, and ran fast into the house.