“What is it, dear?” she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder, speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always to her lips.
“I do not know,” said he, ashamed. “I was just thinking of your brother who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword.”
She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. “I think,” said she, “I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman’s heart.”
“I saw the battle,” said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known before.
“And I saw you dropping the sword when you tugged it from the scabbard, and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite clean.”
“Indeed I did I,” said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so plainly set before her. “You are uncanny--no, no, you are not uncanny, you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel when her dead brother’s sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the brothers of other sisters was on its blade. That’s my only grievance with those soldier brothers of mine. I said I did not think much of the soldiers; oh! boy, I love them all. I sometimes grieve that God made me a woman that I might not be putting on the red coat too, and following the drum. And still and on, I would have no son of mine a soldier. Three fozy, foggy brothers--what did the armies do for them? They never sharpened their wits, but they sit and dover and dream, dream, even-on, never knowing all that’s in their sister Mary’s mind. And here you are, a boy, yet you get to my thoughts in a flash. Oh! I think I am going to be very fond of you.”
Gilian was amazed that at last some one understood him. No one ever did at Ladyfield; his dreams, his fancies, his spectacles of the inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and the splash of waters, and the mists streaming along the ravines. He told her--or rather he made her understand, for his language was simple--how at sudden outer influences his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin’s court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter tale. How the joy of the swallow was his in its first darting flights among the eaves of the old barn, and how when it sped at the summer’s end he went with it across shires and towns, along the surface of winding rivers, even over the seas to the land of everlasting sun. How the sound of the wave on the rock moved him and set him with the ships and galleys, the great venturers whipping and creaking and tossing in the night-time under the stars. How the dark appalled or soothed as the humour was, and the right of a first flower upon a tree would sometimes make him weep at the notion of the brevity of its period.