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They buried the goodwife of Ladyfield in her appointed place beside her husband and her only child, Gilian taking a cord at the head of the coffin as it was lowered into the red jaws of the grave prepared for it.
A servant lass bent over a window in the dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was glorious with sun. If the lambs were still wailing when Gilian got back to Ladyfield he never heard them. Was the glen as sad and empty as before? Then he was absent, indeed!
If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for." "Ladyfield!" cried the Paymaster. "There was no notion further from my mind. Farming, for all Duke George's reductions, is the last of trades nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a soger." MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. "If you did I forgot," said he. "It never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well.
And then he hurried down the stair and up round the church corner to the schoolhouse where the company, wearied waiting on his presence, were already partaking of his viands. It was a company to whom the goodwife of Ladyfield, the quiet douce widow, had been more or less a stranger, and its solemnity on this occasion of her burial was not too much insisted on.
"Not a very stout chap, I think, but hale enough, and if you stuck his head in a pail of cream once a day you might put meat on him. He's the oe from Ladyfield; surely you might know him even with his boots on." "Dear, dear," she said; "you're the Gilian I never saw but at a distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield. O little hero, am I not sorry for the goodwife?
"You'll be looking for some one?" said she in Gaelic, knowing him no town boy. He was standing as she spoke to him in a close that had seemed the one he sought, and he turned to tell her where he was going. "Oh yes," said the woman, "I know her well. And you'll be from the glen, and what's your errand in the town to-day? You are from Drimfern? No, Ladyfield!
Miss Mary would make it all the more melancholy with her weeping over the goodwife of Ladyfield." Gilian went out with the Sergeant More and made a feeble pretence at eating his second dinner that day. All the glen came to the funeral, and people of Lochowside on either side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town.
They were not farmers, nor shepherds, nor fishermen, nor even shopkeepers; they were people with some manner of life beyond his guessing. The Paymaster of course he knew; he had seen him often come up to Ladyfield, to talk to the goodwife about the farm and the clipping, to pay her money twice yearly that was called wages, and was so little that it was scarcely worth the name.
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.
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.
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