Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure. Munro Neil
in the thicket, but alas he was trapped! How old they were! How odd they looked in their high collars and those bands wound round their necks! They were not farmers, nor shepherds, nor fishermen, nor even shopkeepers; they were people with some manner of life beyond his guessing. The Paymaster of course he knew; he had seen him often come up to Ladyfield, to talk to the goodwife about the farm and the clipping, to pay her money twice yearly that was called wages, and was so little that it was scarcely worth the name. Six men in a room, all gentle (by their clothes), all with nothing better to do than stare at a boy who could not stare back! How many things they had seen; how many thoughts they must share between them! He wished himself on the other side of Aora river in the stillness of Kincreggan wood, or on the hill among the sheep—anywhere away from the presence of those old men with the keen scrutiny in their eyes, doubtless knowing all about him and seeing his very thoughts. Had they been shepherds, or even the clever gillies that sometimes came to the kitchen of Ladyfield on nights of ceilidh or gossip, he would have felt himself their equal. He would have been comfortable in feeling that however much they might know about the hills, and woods, and wild beasts, it was likely enough better known to himself, who lived among them and loved them. And the thoughts of the gillie, and the shepherd, were rarely beyond his shrewd guess as he looked at them; they had but to say a word or two, and he knew the end of their story from the beginning. But these old gentlemen were as far beyond his understanding as Gillesbeg Aotram, the wanderer who came about the glens and was called daft by the people who did not know, as Gilian did, that he was wiser than themselves.
The Paymaster took his rattan and knocked noisily on the table for the landlord.
The Sergeant More stepped softly on his tiptoes six steps into the kitchen, then six steps noisily back again and put his head in.
“What’s your will, Captain?” said he, polishing a tray with the corner of his brattie.
“Give this boy some dinner, for me,” said the Paymaster. “There is nothing at our place to-day but herrings, and it’s the poorest of meals for melancholy. Miss Mary would make it all the more melancholy with her weeping over the goodwife of Ladyfield.”
Gilian went out with the Sergeant More and made a feeble pretence at eating his second dinner that day.
CHAPTER III—THE FUNERAL
All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west, full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with the broken blossom.
The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions, the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete. It is in a soothing melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods. Sun shines there and rain falls on it till it soaks to the very bones of the old Parson, first to lie there, and in sun or rain there grow the laurel-bushes that have the smell of death, and the gay flowers cluster in a profusion found nowhere else in the parish except it be in the garden of the Duke. The lily nods in the wind, the columbine hangs its bell, there the snowdrop first appears and the hip-rose shows her richest blossoms. On Sundays the children go up and walk among the stones over the graves of their grandfathers and they smell the flowers they would not pluck. Sometimes they will put a cap on the side of a cherub head that tops a stone and the humour of the grinning face will create a moment’s laughter, but it is soon checked and they walk among the graves in a more seemly peace.
They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it. The earth thudded on the lid, the spades patted the mould, the people moved off, and he was standing yet, listening to the bird that shook a song of passionate melody from its little throat as it becked upon a table tombstone. It was a simple song, he had heard it a thousand times before and wondered at the hidden meaning of it, and now it puzzled him anew that it should encroach upon so solemn an hour in thoughtless love or merriment.
The men were on their way home over the New Bridge, treading heavily, and yet light-headed, for they had the Paymaster’s dram at the “lifting” at Ladyfield in them, and the Paymaster himself was narrating to old Rixa, the Sheriff, and Donacha Breck his story, told a hundred times before, of Long Dan MacIntyre, who never came up past the New Bridge, except at the tail of a funeral, for fear the weight should some day bring the massive masonry down. “Ha! ha! is that not good?” demanded the Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. “I told him he would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he would be first.”
The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was Colonel.
“I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt,” said Mr. William Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make his way among the people here, “It is quite the style, quite the style, sir.”
“Do you think so, now?” asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment.
“I do, indeed,” said Mr. Spencer, “it is very genteel and just as the gentry like it.”
The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye.
“Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer,” he asked, “with any idea of making distinctions? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years and I am the first man-of-business in the family.”
The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man! he had much to learn of Highland punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee’d gun that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far behind them, alone on the top of the bridge.
“Is there no one with the boy?” he asked. “And where is he to stay now that his grandmother is dead?”
The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to himself.
“Am not I the golan?” said he. “I forgot about the fellow, and I told the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I’m putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It must be seen to, it must be seen to.”
Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed. “Oh,” said he, “Jean Clerk’s a relative; he’ll be going to bide there.”
They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass button would burst with a crack like a gun; Rixa puffing and stretching himself; Major Dugald ducking his head and darting his glance about from side to side looking for the enemy; Mr. Spencer, tall, thin, with the new strapped breeches and a London hat, blowing his nose with much noise in a Barcelona silk handkerchief. All the way before them the crowd went straggling down in blacks with as much hurry as the look of the thing would permit, to reach the schoolhouse where the Paymaster had laid out the last service of meat and drink for