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Updated: May 23, 2025
Perhaps when you become acquainted with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light-footed laddies, running about the pastures there gallivanting with the girls.
But Crawford, like the best that have humour, had pity and pathos too. "Slow march!" he cried to his men, and the pipers played "Lochaber No More." "He's punctilious in his forms," said the Paymaster, "but it's thoughtful of him too." "There was never but true duine uasail put on the tartan of Argyll," said the Cornal.
They were turning their backs, as it were, on a sorrow irremediable. Miss Mary and the Cornal stood alone by the dying man. He lay like a log but that his left hand played restlessly on the coverlet, long in the fingers, sinewy at the wrist. Miss Mary took it in hers and put palm to palm, and caressed the back with her other hand with an overflowing of affection that murmured at her throat.
"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!"
"You treat the boy as if he was a vagabond and " " Vagabond or no vagabond," said the Cornal, "he was where he should not be. I'm wanting but the truth from him, and that, it seems, is not very easy to get." "You are not just at all," she protested. Then she went over and whispered something in his ear.
The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might, ran over the morning's sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid before him.
It's all bye for me; I'm an old pensioner rotting to the tomb in a landward burgh packed with relics like myself, and as; God's in heaven, I often wish I was with brother Jamie yonder fallen in my prime with a clod stopping the youth and spirit in my throat." "Tut, tut, now we're in our flights!" said the Paymaster, not very audibly, so that in his transport the Cornal never heard.
To him the Cornal no longer spoke directly; he was thinking aloud the thoughts alike of the General and himself the dreams, the actions, the joys, the bitterness of youth. He sat back in his chair, relaxed, his hand wrinkled and grey, with no lusty blood rushing any more under the skin; upon the arms his fingers beating tattoo for his past.
"You had every chance," said the Paymaster, who nowadays found more courage to retort when his brother's shortness and contempt annoyed him. "More chance, of course I had," said the Cornal. "I'm thinking you had mighty little from yon lady."
"That is being daft," said she. "But it is a very clever tale and you tell it very well. You must tell me more stories. Do you know any more stories? I like soldier stories. My father tells me a great many." "The Cornal tells me a great many too," said Gilian, "but they are all true, and they do not sound true, and I have to make them all up again in my own mind.
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