Gilian was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of the room where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with scrupulous care in the very centre of the table; his brother lifted two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the bottle, fastidious to a hair’s breadth as if he had been laying out columns of troops. It was the formula of the afternoon; sometimes they never put a lip to the glass, but it was always necessary that the bottle should be in the party. For a space that seemed terribly long to the boy they said no word but looked at him. The eyes of the Cornal seemed to pierce him through; the General in a while seemed to forget his presence, turning upon him a flat, vacant eye. Gilian leaned upon his other foot and was on the verge of crying at his situation. The day had been far too crowded with strangers and new experience for his comfort; he felt himself cruelly plucked out of his own sufficient company and jarred by contact with a very complex world.

With a rude loud sound that shook the toddy ladles in the cupboard the Cornal cleared his throat.

“How old are you?” he asked, and this roused the General, who came back from his musings with a convulsive start, and repeated his brother’s question.

“Twelve,” said Gilian, first in Gaelic out of instinct, and hurriedly repeating it in English lest he should offend the gentlemen.

“Twelve,” said the Cornal, thinking hard. “You are not very bulky for your age. Is he now, Dugald?”

“He is not very bulky for his age,” said the General, after a moment’s pause as if he were recalling all the boys he knew of that age, or remitting himself to the days before his teens.

“And now, between ourselves,” said the Cornal, leaning over with a show of intimacy and even friendliness, “have you any notion yourself of being a soger?”

“I never thought anything about it,” Gilian confessed in a low tone. “I can be anything the Captain would like me to be.”

“Did you ever hear the like?” cried the Cornal, looking in amazement at his brother. “He never thought anything about it, but he can be anything he likes. Is not that a good one? Anything he likes!” And he laughed with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the sword-slash struck it open in Corunna.

“Anything he likes!” echoed the General, laughing huskily till he coughed and choked. They both sat smiling grimly with no more sound till it seemed to the boy he must be in a dream, looking at the creations of his brain. The step of a fly could have been heard in the room almost, so sunk was it in silence, but outside, as in another world, a band of children filled the street with the chant of “Pity be”—chant of the trumpeters of the Lords.

Gilian never before heard that song with which the children were used to accompany the fanfare of the scarlet-coated musicians who preceded the Lords Justiciary on their circuit twice a year; but the words came distinctly to him in by the open window where the wallflower nodded, and he joined silently in his mind the dolorous chorus and felt himself the prisoner, deserving of every pity.

“Sit ye down there,” at last said the Cornal, “with my brother the General’s leave.” And he waved to the high-backed haffit chair Miss Mary had so sparely filled an hour ago. Then he withdrew the stopper of the bottle, poured a tiny drop of the spirits into both tumblers, and drank “The King and his Arms,” a sentiment the General joined in with his hand tremulous around the glass.

“Listen to me,” said the Cornal, “and here I speak, I think, for my brother the General, who has too much to be thinking about to be troubling with these little affairs. Listen to me. I fought in Corunna, in Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, and at Waterloo I led the Royals up against the yetts of hell. Did I not, Dugald?”

“You did that,” said Dugald, withdrawing himself again from a muse over the records of victory. And then he bent a lustreless eye upon his own portrait, so sombre and gallant upon the wall, with the gold of the lace and epaulettes a little tarnished.

“I make no brag of it, mind you,” said the Cornal, waving his hand as if he would be excused for mentioning it. “I am but saying it to show that I ken a little of bloody wars, and the art and trade of sogering. There are gifts demanded for the same that seriatim I would enumerate. First there is natural strength and will. All other trades have their limits, when a man may tell himself, ‘That’s the best I can do,’ and shut his book or set down the tool with no disgrace in the relinquishment. But a soger’s is a different ploy; he must stand stark against all encountering, nor cry a parley even with the lance at his throat. Oh, man! man! I had a delight in it in my time for all its trials. I carried claymore (so to name it, ours was a less handsome weapon, you’ll observe), in the ranting, roving humour of a boy; I sailed and marched; it was fine to touch at foreign ports; it was sweet to hear the drums beat revally under the vines; the camp-fire, the—”

“And it would be on the edge of a wood,” broke in the boy in Gaelic; “the logs would roar and hiss. The fires would be in yellow dots along the countryside, and the heather would be like a pillow so soft and springy under the arm. Round about, the soldiers would be standing, looking at the glow, their faces red and flickering, and behind would be the black dark of the wood like the inside of a pot, a wood with ghosts and eerie sounds and——”

He stammered and broke down under the astounded gaze of the Cornal and the General, who stood to their feet facing his tense and thrilled small figure. A wave of shame-heat swept over him at his own boldness.

Outside, the children’s voices were fading in the distance as they turned the corner of the church singing “Pity be.”

they sang; the air softened into a fairy lullaby heard by an ear at eve against the grassy hillock, full of charm, instinct with dream, and the sentiment of it was as much the boy’s within as the performers’ without.

“This is the kind of play-actor John would make a soldier of,” said the Cornal, turning almost piteously to his brother. “It beats all! Where did you learn all that?” he demanded harshly, scowling at the youth and sitting down again.

“He has the picture of it very true, now, has he not?” said the General. “I mind of many camps just like that, with the cork-trees behind and old Sir George ramping and cursing in his tent because the pickets hailed, and the corncrake would be rasping, rasping, a cannon-carriage badly oiled, among the grass.”

Gilian sank into the chair again, his face in shadow.

“Discipline and reverence for your elders and superiors are the first lesson you would need, my boy,” said the Cornal, taking a tiny drop of the spirits again and touching the glass of his brother, who had done likewise. “Discipline and reverence; discipline and reverence. I was once cocky and putting in my tongue like you where something of sense would have made me keep it between my teeth. Once in Spain, an ensign, I found myself in a wine-shop or change-house, drinking as I should never have been doing if I had as muckle sense as a clabbie-doo, with a dragoon major old enough to be my father. He was a pock-pudding Englishman, a great hash of a man with the chest of him slipped down below his belt, and what was he but bragging about the rich people he came of, and the rich soil they flourished on, its apple-orchards and honey-flowers and its grass knee-deep in June. ‘Do you know,’ said I, ‘I would not give a yard’s breadth of the shire of Argyll anywhere north of Knapdale at its rockiest for all your lush straths, and if it comes to antique pedigrees here am I, Clan Diarmid, with my tree going down to Donacha Dhu of Lochow.’ That was insolence, ill-considered, unnecessary, for this major of dragoons, as I tell you, might be my father and I was but a raw ensign.”

“I’ll warrant you were home-sick when you said it,” said the General.

“Was I not?” cried the brother. “‘Twas that urged me on. For one of my company, just a minute before, had been singing Donacha Ban’s song of ‘Ben Dorain,’ and no prospect in the world seemed so alluring to me then as a swath of the land I came from.”

“I know ‘Ben Dorain,’” said Gilian timidly, “and I think I could tell just the way you felt when you heard the man singing it in a foreign place.”

“Come away, then, my twelve-year-old warlock,” said the Cornal, mockingly, yet wondering too.

“This is a real oddity,” said the General, drawing his chair a little nearer the boy.

“I heard a forester sing ‘Ben Dorain’ last Hogmanay at home—I mean in Ladyfield; he was not a good singer, and he forgot bits of the words here and there, but when he was singing it I saw the sun rise on the hill, not a slow grey, but suddenly in a smother of gold, and the hillside moved with deer. Birds whirred from the heather and the cuckoo was in the wood.”

“That was very unlucky about the cuckoo before breakfast,” said the Cornal, and he quoted a Gaelic proverb.

“Oh! if I was in a foreign place and some one sang that song I would be very, very sick for home. I would be full of thoughts about the lochs and the hunting roads, the slope of the braes and stripes of black fir on them; the crying of cattle, the sound of burn and eas and the voices of people I knew would be dragging my heart home. I would be saying, ‘Oh! you strangers, you do not understand. You have not the want at your hearts,’ and there would be one little bit of the place at home as plain to my view as that picture.”

As he spoke, Gilian pointed at “The Battle of Vittoria.” The brothers turned and looked as if it was something quite new and strange to them. Up rose the Cornal and went closer to peer at it.

“Confound it!” said he. “You’re there with your tale of a ballant, and you point at the one picture ever I saw that gave me the day-dreaming. I never see that smudgy old print but I’m crying on the cavalry that made the Frenchmen rout.”

From where he sat the boy could make out the picture in every detail. It was a scene of flying and broken troops, of men on the wings of terror and dragoons riding them down. There was at the very front of the picture, in a corner, among the flying Frenchmen pursued by the horses, the presentment of a Scottish soldier, wounded, lying upon his back with his elbows propped beneath him so that he had his head up, looking at the action, a soldier of a thin long habit of body, a hollow face and high cheekbones.

Gilian forgot the two old men in the room with him when he looked intently on this soldier in the throes; he stood up from the chair, went forward and put a finger as high as he could to point out the particular thing he referred to. “That’s a man,” said he, “and he’s afraid. He does not hear the guns, nor the people crying, but he hears the horses’ feet thudding on the grass, and he thinks they will go over him and crush his bones.”

“Curse me,” cried the Cornal, “but you have the thing to a nicety. That’s the man’s notion, for a guinea, for I have been in his case myself, and the thud of horses was a sound that filled the world. Sit down, sit down!” he went on sharply, as if he had of a sudden found something to reproach himself with in any complacent recognition of this child’s images. “You are not canny; how old are you?”

Gilian was trembling and parched at the lips now, awake to the enormity of his forwardness. “I am twelve,” he repeated.

“It is a cursed lie,” said the Cornal hotly; “you’re a hundred; don’t tell me!”

He was actually a little afraid of those manifestations, so unusual and so remarkable. His excitement could with difficulty be concealed. Very restlessly he moved about in his chair, and turned his look from the General to the boy and back again, but the General sat with his chin in his breast, his mind a vacancy.

“Look at the General there; you’re fairly scunnering him with your notions,” said the Cornal. “I must speak to John about this. A soldier indeed! You’re not fit for it, lad; you have only the makings of a dominie. Sit you there, and we’ll see what John has to say about this when he comes in: it is going on seven, and he’ll be back from the dregy in time for his supper.”

Gilian sat trembling in his chair; the brothers leaned back in theirs and breathed heavily and said no word, and never even stretched a hand to the bottle of spirits. A solemn quiet again took possession of the house, but for a door that slammed in the lower flat, shaking the dwelling; the lulled sound of women’s conversation at the oven-grate was utterly stilled. The pigeons came to the sill a moment, mourned and flew away; the carts did not rumble any more in the street; the children’s chorus was altogether lost. A feeling came over the boy that he had been here or somewhere like it before, and he was fascinated, wondering what next would happen. A tall old clock in the lobby, whose pendulum swung so slowly that at first he had never realised its presence, at last took advantage of the silence and swung itself into his notice with a tick-tack. The silence seemed to thicken and press upon his ears; no striving after fancy could bring the boy far enough off from that strange convention, and try as he might to realise himself back in his familiar places by the riverside at Ladyfield, the wings of his imagining failed in their flight and he tumbled again into that austere parlour sitting with two men utterly beyond his comprehension.

There was, at last, one sound that gave a little comfort, and checked the tears that had begun to gather on the edges of his eyes. It came from the direction of the kitchen; it was a creaking of the wooden stairs; it was a faint shuffle of slippers in the lobby; then there was a hush outside the door deeper even than the stillness within. Gilian knew, as if he could see through the brown panelling, that a woman was standing out there listening with her breath caught up and wondering at the quiet within, yet afraid to open a door upon the mystery. The brothers did not observe it; all this was too faint for their old ears, though plainly heard by a child of the fields whose ear against the grass could detect the marching of insects and the tunnelling of worms. But for that he would have screamed—but for the magic air of friendship and sympathy that flowed to him through chink and keyhole from the good heart loud-beating outside; in that kind air of fond companionship (even with a door between) there was comfort. In a little the slippers sped back along the lobby, the stair creaked, in the lower flat a door slammed. Gilian felt himself more deserted and friendless than ever, and a few moments more would have found him break upon the appalling still with sobs of cowardly surrender, but the church bell rang. It was the first time he had heard its evening clamour, that, however far it might search up the glens, never reached Lady-field, so deep among the hills, and he had no more than recovered from the bewildering influence of its unexpected alarm when the foot of the Paymaster sounded heavily on the stair.

“You’re here at last,” said the Cornal, without looking at him.

“I was a thought later than I intended,” said the Paymaster quickly, putting his cane softly into a corner. “I had a little encounter with that fellow Turner and it put by the time.”

“What—Jamie?”

“No; Charlie.”

“Man! I wonder at you, John,” said the Cornal with a contempt in his utterance and a tightening of the corner of his lips. “I wonder at you changing words with him. What was it you were on?”

The Paymaster explained shortly, guardedly, because of Gilian’s presence, and as he spoke the purple of the Cornal’s face turned to livid and the scar became a sickly yellow. He rose and thumped his fist upon the table.

“That was his defiance, was it?” he cried. “We are the old sonless bachelors, are we, and the name’s dead with the last of us? And you argued with him about that! I would have put a hand on his cravat and throttled him.”

The Paymaster was abashed, but “Just consider, Colin,” he pleaded. “I am not so young as I was, and a bonny-like thing it would be to throttle him on the ground he gave.”

“Old Mars!” cried the Cornal, with a sneer. “Man! but MacColl hit your character when he made his song; you were always well supplied by luck with excuses for not fighting.”

To the General the Paymaster turned with piteous appeal. “Dugald,” said he, “I’ll leave it to you if Colin’s acting fairly. Did ever I disgrace the name of Campbell, or Gael, or soger?”

“I never said you did,” cried the Cornal. “All I said was that fate was a scurvy friend to you and seldom put you face to face with your foe on any clear issue. Perhaps I said too much; I’m hot-tempered, I know; never mind my taunt, John. But you’ll allow it’s galling to have a beggarly upstart like Turner throwing our bachelorhood in our teeth. Now if we had sons, or a son, one of us, I’ll warrant we could bring him up with more credit than Turner brings up his long-lugged Sandy, or that randy lass of his.”

“Isn’t that what I told him?” said the Paymaster, scooping a great heap of dust into his nostrils, and feverishly rubbing down the front of his vest with a large handkerchief. “I wish——”

He stopped suddenly; he looked hard at Gilian, whose presence in the shadow of the big chair he had seemingly forgotten; seeing him gaze thus and pause, the Cornal turned too and looked at the youth, and the General shrugged himself into some interest in the same object. Before the gaze of the three brothers, the boy’s skin burned; his eyes dropped.

“This is a queer callant you’ve brought us here,” said the Cornal, nudging his brother and nodding in Gilian’s direction. “I’ve seen some real diverts in my time, but he beats all. And you have a notion to make a soger of him, they tell me. You heard that yourself, didn’t you, General?”

The General made no reply, for he was looking at the portrait of himself when he was thirty-five, and to sit doing nothing in a house would have been torture.

“I only said it in the by-going to Mary,” explained the Paymaster humbly. “The nature for sogering is the gift of God, and the boy may have it or he may not; it is too soon to say.”

“There’s no more of the soger in him than there is of the writer in me!” cried the Cornal; “but there’s something by-ordinar in him all the same. It’s your affair, John, but—” He stopped short and looked again at Gilian and hummed and ha’d a little and fingered his stock. “Man, do you know I would not say but here’s your son for you.”

“That’s what I thought myself,” said the Paymaster, “and that’s what I said. I’ll make him a soger if I can, and I’ll make him hate the name of Turner whether or not.”

And all this time Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of old men’s passion with his child’s fancy. He found this new world into which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little alarming. Soldiering—with the man before him in the picture, sitting propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample on him—seemed the last trade on earth; as for hate, that might be easier and due to his benefactor, but it would depend very much on the Turners.

When the brothers released him from their den, and he went to Miss Mary, standing at the kitchen door, eager for his company, with a flush on her cheek and a bright new ribbon at her neck, he laid those points before her.

“Tuts!” said she, pressing food on him—her motherhood’s only cure for all a child’s complaints—“they’re only haverils. They cannot make a soger of you against your will. As for the Turners—well, they’re no very likeable race, most of them in my mind. A dour, sour, up-setting clan of no parentage. Perhaps that does not much matter, so long as people are honest and well-doing; we are all equals before God except in head and heart, but there’s something too in our old Hielan’ notion that the closest kith of the King are aye most kindly, because the habit is born in them to be freehanded and unafraid. Am not I the oinseach to be sticking up for pedigrees? Perhaps it is because our own is so good. Kiels was ours three hundred years, and my grandfather was good-brother to an earl—a not very good nor honest lord they say—and the Turners were only portioners and tenants as far back as we ken.”

“I liked the look of the one with his hair in a tail,” said Gilian, and he wondered if she was angry at his admiration of the enemy, when he saw her face grow red.

—“Oh! the General!” she exclaimed, but never a word more, good or ill.