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The enemy drew off at a command of their captain, and into the edge of the wood that came up on the left near our summit. We lost our interest in them for a time, watching a man running up the little valley from the right, above Kilmalieu. He came on waving his arms wildly and pointing ahead; but though he was plain to our view, he was out of sight of the enemy on the left.
"She did, Colin, she did; I'm not denying." "She'll be bedded long syne, no doubt, father?" My father looked at me and gulped at the throat. "Bedded indeed, poor Colin," said he, "this very day in the clods of Kilmalieu!" And that was my melancholy home-coming to my father's house of Elngmore, in the parish of Glcnaora, in the shire of Argile.
It is in a soothing melancholy one may hear the tide lapping on the rocks below and the wood-bird call in the trees above. They have been doing so in the ears of Kilmalieu for numberless generations, those voices everlasting but unheard by the quiet folk sleeping snug and sound among the clods.
The Marquis and his clansman touched hands, lingered together a little, and the rider passed on his way with the piper's invitation the last sound in his ears. He rode past Kilmalieu of the tombs, with his bonnet off for all the dead that are so numerous there, so patient, waiting for the final trump.
I love my fellows, one and all, not offhand as the Catechism enjoins, but heartily, and I never saw the fellow, carl or king, who, if ordinary honest and cheerful, I could not lie heads and thraws with at a camp-fire. In matters of strict ritual, now, ha urn!" "Out with it, man!" I cried, laughing. "I'm like Parson Kilmalieu upbye. You've heard of him easy-going soul, and God sain him!
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.
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.
The burial ground of Kilmalieu lies at the foot of a tall hill beside the sea, a hill grown thick with ancient wood. The roots come sometimes under the walls and below the old tombstones and set them ajee upon their bases, but wanting those tall and overhanging companions, the yard, I feel, would be ugly and incomplete.
It had humility and courage too; it was imbued with a spirit strong and calm. For the first time my heart warmed to the man who in years after was my friend and mentor Alexander Gordon, Master of the Arts, the man who wedded me and gave my children Christian baptism, and brought solace in the train of those little ones lost for a space to me among the grasses and flowers of Kilmalieu.
"In there among the grass and bracken," thought Gilian, turning a moment to look up the slope that leads to Kilmalieu. 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?
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