Part 27 (1/2)

”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 circ.u.mstances. He was a G.o.d-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 d.y.k.es; 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 was.h.i.+ng the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sion.

”I wis.h.!.+ I wis.h.!.+” 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.