Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure. Munro Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on. They were there not so much mourners as the guests of Captain Campbell, nigh on a dozen of half-pay officers who had escaped the shambles of Europe, with the merchants of the place, and some of the farmers of the glen, the banker, the Sheriff, the Fiscal and the writers of whom the town has ever had more than a fair share. Dr. Colin had blessed the viands and gone away; he was a new kind of minister and a surprising one, who had odd views about the drinking customs of the people, and when his coat skirts had disappeared round the corner of the church there was a feeling of relief, and old Baldy Bain, “Copenhagen” as they called him, who was precentor in the Gaelic end of the church, was emboldened to fill his glass up to more generous height than he had ever cared to do in the presence of the clergyman. The food and drink were spread on two long tables; the men stood round or sat upon the forms their children occupied in school hours. The room was clamant with the voices of the company. Gathered in groups, they discussed everything under heaven except the object of their meeting—the French, the sowing, the condition of the hogs, the Duke’s approaching departure for London, the storm, the fishing. They wore their preposterous tall hats on the backs of their heads with the crape bows over the ears, they lifted up the skirts of their swallow-tail coats and hung them on their arms with their hands in their breeches pockets. And about them was the odour of musty, mildewed broadcloth, taken out of damp presses only on such occasions.

      Mr. Spencer, standing very straight and tall and thin, so that his trousers at the foot strained tightly at the straps under his insteps, looked over the assembly, and with a stranger’s eye could not but be struck by its oddity. He was seeing—lucky man to have the chance!—the last of the old Highland burgh life and the raw beginnings of the new; he was seeing the real doaine-uasail, gentry of ancient family, colloguing with the common merchants whose day was coming in; he was seeing the embers of the war in a grey ash, officers, merchants, bonnet lairds, and tenants now safe and snug and secure in their places because the old warriors had fought Boney. The schoolroom was perfumed with the smoke of peat, for it was the landward pupils’ week of the fuelling, and they were accustomed to bring each his own peat under his arm every morning. The smoke swirled and eddied out into the room and hung about the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of Europe over the fireplace. Looking at this map and sipping now and then a glass of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself “Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” He wore a queue tied with a broad black ribbon that reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man himself was little more than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is still upon his peninsula.

      “You are at your studies?” said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for the son of a plain Portioner of Glen Shira who was to be seen any day coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather emptily in front of his kilt.

      Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper.

      “I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer,” said he, “I know it by heart—all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I’m but looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria, Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black dots no more ken-speckle than the township of Camus up the glen. Wars, wars, bloody wars! have we indeed got to the last of them?”

      “Indeed I hope so, sir,” said the innkeeper, “for my wife has become very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the rejoicings, and if every war set a woman’s mind running to extravagance in clothing, the fewer we have the better.”

      “If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas! it’s my fate to have lost mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General?”

      He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies * because it was the fashion of the country, but never ate nor drank at them.

      * Dregy: The Scots equivalent of the old English Dirge- ale, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon in the office for the dead, “Dirige, Domine meus,”

      “You were speaking, General Turner?” said Campbell.

      Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its motto “Tu ne cede malis,” and smiled blandly, as he always did when it was brought to his recollection that he had won more than soldiers’ battles when the odds against him were three to one.

      “I was just telling Mr. Spencer that Waterloo looks like being the last of the battles, General, and that one bit of Brooks’ map here is just as well known to some of us as the paths and woods and waters of Glen Shira.”

      “I’m not very well acquaint with Glen Shira myself,” was all the General said, looking at the map for a moment with eyes that plainly had no interest in the thing before them, and then he turned to a nudge of the Paymaster’s arm.

      Turner smiled again knowingly to Mr. Spencer. “I put my brogues in it that time,” said he in a discreet tone. “I forgot that the old gentleman and his brothers were far better acquaint with Glen Shira in my wife’s maiden days than I was myself. But that’s an old story, Mr. Spencer, that you are too recent an incomer to know the shades and meanings of.”

      “I daresay, sir, I daresay,” said Mr. Spencer gravely. “You are a most interesting and sensitive people, and I find myself often making the most unhappy blunders.”

      “Interesting is not the word, I think, Mr. Spencer,” said General Turner coldly; “we refuse to be interesting to any simple Sassenach.” Then he saw the confusion in the innkeeper’s face and laughed. “Upon my word,” he said, “here I’m as touchy as a bard upon a mere phrase. This is very good drink, Mr. Spencer; your purveyance, I suppose?”

      “I had the privilege, sir,” said the innkeeper. “Captain Campbell gave the order——”

      “Captain Campbell!” said the General, putting down his glass and drinking no more. “I was not aware that he was at the costs of this dregy. Still, no matter, you’ll find the Campbells a good family to have dealings with of any commercial kind, pernick-etty and proud a bit, like all the rest of us, with their bark worse than their bite.”

      “I find them quite the gentlemen,” said the innkeeper.

      Turner laughed again.

      “Man!” said he, “take care you do not put your compliment just exactly that way to them; you might as well tell Dr. Colin he was a surprisingly good Christian.”

      Old Brooks, out of sheer custom, sat on the high stool at his desk and hummed his declensions to himself, or the sing-song Arma virumque cano that was almost all his Latin pupils remembered of his classics when they had left school. The noise of the assembly a little distressed him; at times he would fancy it was his scholars who were clamouring before him, and he checked on his lips a high peremptory challenge for silence, flushing to think how nearly he had made himself ridiculous. From his stool he could see over the frosted glass of the lower window sash into the playground where it lay bathed in a yellow light, and bare-legged children played at shinty, with loud shouts and violent rushes after a little wooden ball. The town’s cows were wandering in for the night from the common muir, with their milkmaids behind them in vast wide petticoats of two breadths, and their blue or lilac short-gowns tucked well up at their arms. Behind, the windows revealed the avenue, the road overhung СКАЧАТЬ