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

      “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 with the fresh leaves of the beeches, the sunlight filtering through in lighter splashes on the shade. Within, the drink was running to its dregs, and piles of oatcake farls lay yet untouched. One by one the company departed. The glen folks solemnly shook hands with the Paymaster, as donor of the feast, and subdued their faces to a sad regret for this “melancholy occasion, Captain Campbell”; then went over to the taverns in the tenements and kept up their drinking and their singing till late in the evening; the merchants and writers had gone earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer, superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The afternoon was sinking into the calm it ever has in this place, drowsing, mellowing; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners, gathered at the head of the schoolroom near the door, seemed silent as his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and kept it up with his head while he surveyed the interior. Grammars and copy-books, pens in long tin boxes, the terrible black tawse he never used but reluctantly, and the confiscated playthings of the children who had been guilty of encroaching upon the hours of study with the trifles of leisure, were heaped within. They were for the most part the common toys of the country-side, and among them was a whistle made of young ash, after the fashion practised by children, who tap upon the bark to release it from its wood, slip off the bark entire upon its sap, and cut the vent or blow-hole. Old Brooks took it in his hand and a smile went over his visage.

      “General Turner,” he cried up the room, “here’s an oddity I would like to show you,” and he balanced the pipe upon his long fingers, and the smile played about his lips as he looked at it.

      Turner came up, and “A whistle,” said he. “What’s the story?”

      “Do you know who owns it?” asked Brooks.

      “Sandy, I suppose,” said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his only son. “At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and this may very well be the rogue’s contrivance.” He took the pipe in hand and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. “Man,” said he, “that makes me young again! I wish I was still at the age when that would pipe me to romance.”

      The schoolmaster smiled still. “It is not Master Sandy’s,” said he. “Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer.”

      “Ah! the witch!” cried the General, his face showing affection and annoyance. “That’s the most hoyden jade I’m sure you ever gave the ferule to.”

      “I never did that,” said the schoolmaster.

      “Well, at least she’s the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling wretch ever kept a sergeant’s section of lovers at her skirts. I wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the meadow.”

      Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the moor-fowl pipes in spring. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “It is all, my General, we get from life and knowledge—a very thin and apparently meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General, is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn my fees and Queen Anne’s Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that’s the music that may be inopportune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an ashen stick made by the performer during the morning’s sacred exercise.”

      The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old Brooks was doing, and among them was the