Gilan

“ I am very weary over my hard day in the saddle. But when I seat myself on the highest point of the bridge, and give myself up to reverie, I feel the flood of sentiment and rejoice. The moon is about one-half hour above the mountains of Gilead; a halo seems to gild the heights to the east and to the west. I am just above the Jordan; its rippling waters tell me of Abraham, of Jacob, of Joshua, of Saul, of David, of Elijah, of Elisha, of Naaman, of John the Baptist, and of Jesus of Nazareth. ”

“ And though Gilian was still, for the sake of a worn-out feud with the house of the Paymaster, no visitor to Maam, that saturnine uncle would say nothing. For a little he would look, they uncomfortable, then he would smile most grim, a satyr, as Gilian told himself, more than ever.
He came upon them often. Now it would be at the berries, now among the bulrushes of Dhu Loch. They strayed like children. Often, I say, for Gilian had no sooner hurried through his work in these days than he was off in the afternoon, and, on some pretence, would meet the girl on a tryst of her own making. ”

“ And as they sat thus on the bank of the little lake, Nan sung, forgetting herself in her song as she ever must be doing. The waves stilled to listen; the birds on the heather came closer; the clouds, like wool on the edge of Ben Bhreac, tarried and trembled. And Gilian, as he heard, forgetting all that ancient town below of unable elders and stagnant airs, illusion gone and glory past, its gossip at well and close, its rancours of clan and family, knew the message now of the bird that cried across the swampy meadow-land at Kilmalieu. Love, love, love—and death. ”

“ Only for a single sleepless night was Gilian dashed by this evidence that the world was not made up of Miss Nan and himself alone. Depressions weighed on him as briefly as the keener joys elated, and in a day or two his apprehension of Young Islay had worn to a thin gossamer, and he was as ardent a lover as any one could be with what still was no more than a young lady of the imagination. ”

“ The laurel drugged the air with death’s odour. “In the grasses and the bracken,” said Gilian, singing it to himself as if it were a coronach. Was that indeed the end of it all, of the hope, the lilt, the glory? And then he had a great pity for the dead that in their own time had been on many a march like this. Their tombs are thick in Kilmalieu. It seemed so cruel, so heedless, so taunting thus to march past them with no obeisance or remembrance, that to them, the dead soldiers, all his heart went out, and he hated the quick who marched upon the highway. ”

“ When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was still making-down from the Paymaster’s waistcoats. ”

“ But it has its spiritual accomplishment in the gathering in of precious souls out of a bondage worse than that in Egypt or Assyria, and the bringing of them into the glorious liberties of the children of God and their enjoyments, which are as the beautiful fruitful pastures in the land of Gilead and Lebanon. All the land of promise is theirs, even Gilead, the utmost border of it eastward, and Lebanon, the utmost border northward. But how shall this be? How shall a people so dispersed be got together? How shall those that are set at such a distance from their own country be brought to it again? ”

“ Excuse a soldier’s extravagance. I never meant it either for your ear or for unkindness. And you talk of ages: surely a man so much your senior has a little privilege?”
“Not to judge youth, sir, which he may have forgotten to understand,” said Gilian, yet very red and uneasy, but with a wistful countenance. “If you’ll think of it I’m just at the beginning of life, a little more shy of making the plunge perhaps than Young Islay there might be, or your own son Sandy, who’s a credit to his corps, they say.” ”

“ Though he was there ‘prentice to a hard calling, Gilian’s life was more the gentle’s than the shepherd’s. He might be often on the hill, but it was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling, it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries of the countryside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The men followed, unhappy in their unaccustomed suits of broad-cloth or hodden, dark, flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular thoughts as they passed the licensed houses to some harmony with the sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered, smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth breathing peace.
The Paymaster and Miss Mary sat together in Keils pew, Gilian with them, conscious of a new silk cravat. ”

“ Miss Mary put down her handkerchief impatiently and loaded Gilian at her side with embarrassing attentions.
“What—in—all—the—world—is—his vexation?” mocked the Cornal in the Captain’s high and squeaking voice, reddening at the face and his scar purpling. “That’s a terribly stupid question to put, Jock. What—in—all—the—world—is—his—vexation? If you had the soger’s heart and your brother’s past you would not be asking what an ancient’s sorrow at his own lost strength might mean. Oh, man, man! make a pretence at spirit even if the Almighty denied it to you!” ”

“ All the time, however, Gilian was luckily more or less separate from his company by many miles of fancy, behind the hills among the lochs watching the uprising of Nan, sharing her loneliness, seeing her feet brush the dew from the scented gall. But the Cornal’s allusion brought him to the parlour of his banishment, away from that dear presence. He listened now but said nothing. He feared his very accent would betray his secret.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Cornal again, “whoever is with her will rue it; mind, I’m telling you. It’s like mother like child.” ”

“ So round went Gilian, and there he came upon the pensioners, with Captain John Campbell, late Paymaster of his Majesty’s 46th Foot, at their head.
The pensioners, the officers, ah! when I look up the silent street of the town nowadays and see the old houses empty but for weavers, and merchants, and mechanics, people of useful purposes but little manly interest, and know that all we have of martial glory is a dust under a score of tombstones in the yard, I find it ill to believe that ever wars were bringing trade for youth and valour to our midst. The warriors are gone ”

“ Is there no balm in Gilead—no physician there? Yes, certainly there is; God is able to help and heal them, there is a sufficiency in him to redress all their grievances. Gilead was a place in their own land, not far off. They had among themselves God's law and his prophets, with the help of which they might have been brought to repentance, and their ruin might have been prevented. They had princes and priests, whose business it was to reform the nation and redress their grievances. ”

“ My uniform, Mary, my uniform, it should be aired and ironed, and here at my hand, and I’ll warrant it’s never out of the press yet. It was the boy that heard the drums; it was you that heard the drums, Gilian. Curse me, but I believe you’ll make a soger yet!”
For the next few days, Gilian felt he must indeed be the soldier the Paymaster would make him, for soldiering was in the air. The red-coats gaily filled the street; parade and exercise, evening dance and the continuous sound of pipe and drum left no room for any other interest in life. ”

“ A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like his brothers than I’m like Duke George.”
“You do not deny it!” said Gilian simply.
She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a transfiguration.
“My dear, my dear!” said she, “is there need for me to deny it? What are you yet but a laddie?”
He fingered the down upon his lip.
“But a laddie,” she repeated, determined not to see. “All the world’s before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. ”

“ Thou art Gilead unto me, and the head of Lebanon - Perhaps in allusion, says Dahler, to the oaks of Gilead, and the cedars of Mount Lebanon, of which the palace was constructed. Lebanon was the highest mountain in Israel, and Gilead the richest and most fertile part of the country; and were, therefore, proper emblems of the reigning family. Though thou art the richest and most powerful, I, who raised thee up, can bring thee down and make thee a wilderness. ”

“ Spencer of the Inns, beholding this cobweb-headed youth continually coming through the Arches and hanging expectant about the town-head, often the only figure there in these hot silent days to give life to the empty scene. There is a stone at Old Islay’s corner that yet one may see worn with the feet of Gilian, so often he stood there turning on his heel, lending a gaze to the street where Nan might be, and another behind to the long road over the bridge whence she must sometime come. ”

“ The rain never seemed to penetrate, for the fir-needles underfoot grew more dusty year by year. But when the rain beat as it did now, through the whole of it went a sound of gobbling and drumming, and the wind, striking upon the trunks as if they were the strings of Ossian, harped a great and tremendous tune, wanting start or ending. And by-and-by there came company for Gilian as he sheltered in the wood. Birds of all kinds beat hurriedly through the trees and settled upon the boughs with a shudder of the quill, pleased to be out of the inclement open and cosily mantled in. ”

“ What she felt beyond timidity she betrayed not, but Gilian peopled the house at an instant with all its bygone tenants, seeing the peats ruddy on the stones, the smoke curling up among the shining cabars, hearing ghosts gossiping in muffled Gaelic round the fire.
Yet soon they found even in this relic of old long-gone people the air of domesticity; it was like a shelter even though so poor a one; it was some sort of an end to her quest for a refuge, though the more she looked at its dim interior the more content she was with the outside of it. ”

“ A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel’s ribs, the bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in benign weather moving home upon the sigh of God. ”

“ Verse 11
Iniquity in Gilead - Gilgal and Gilead are equally iniquitous, and equally idolatrous. Gilead, which was beyond Jordan, had already been brought under subjection by Tiglath-Pileser. Gilgal, which was on this side Jordan, shall share the same fate; because it is now as idolatrous as the other.
Their altars are as heaps - They occur everywhere. The whole land is given to idolatry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then in the absence of Brooks at the tavern of Kate Bell, Gilian led the school in a charge of cavalry, shouting, commanding, cheering, weeping for the desertion of his men at deadly embrasures till the schoolboys stood back amazed at his reality, and he was left to come to himself with a shiver, alone on the lid of the master’s desk in the middle of the floor, utterly ashamed before the vexed but sadly tolerant gaze of the dominie. ”

“ But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.
It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of social intercourse in each other’s homes, where the winter nights, that otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or market poorly revealed for the shawls that must cover them. ”

“ He reached the lochs as the night was drawing in. The moor was sounding loud and eerie with the call of large birds. Very cold and uncharitable, a breeze came from Cruach-an-Lochain, and in the evening dusk the country seemed most woefully poor and uninhabitable. So it appeared to Gilian for a moment when at last he came to the head of the brae where he should have his first sight of the light that could make that wild as warm and hospitable and desirable as a king’s court. ”