THE orphan child of William and Mary Dyce, dead, the pair of them, in the far-off city of Chicago, stepped, quite serenely, into an astounded company. There were three Dyces in a row in front of her, and the droll dog Footles at her feet, and behind her, Kate, the servant, wringing her apron as if it had newly come from the washing-boyne, her bosom heaving. Ten eyes (if you could count the dog's, hidden by his tousy fringe) stared at the child a moment, and any ordinary child would have been much put out; but this was no common child, or else she felt at once the fond kind air of home. I will give you her picture in a sentence or two. She was black-haired, dark and quick in the eye, not quite pale but olive in complexion, with a chin she held well up, and a countenance neither shy nor bold, but self-possessed. Fur on her neck and hood (Jim Molyneux's last gift), and a muff that held her arms up to the elbows, gave her an aspect of picture-book cosiness that put the maid in mind at once of the butcher's Christmas calendar.
It was the dog that first got over the astonishment: he made a dive at her with little friendly growls, and rolled on his back at her feet, to paddle with his four paws in the air, which was his way of showing he was in the key for fun.
With a cry of glee she threw the muff on the floor and plumped beside him, put her arms about his body and buried her face in his fringe. His tail went waving, joyous, like a banner. “Doggie, doggie, you love me,” said she, in an accent that was anything but American. “Let us pause and consider—you will not leave this house till I boil you an egg.”
“God bless me, what child's this?” cried Bell, coming to herself with a start, and, pouncing on her, she lifted her to her feet. Ailie sank on her hands and knees and stared in the visitor's face. “The kilt, indeed!” said Mr. Dyce to himself. “This must be a warlock wean, for if it has not got the voice and sentiment of Wanton Wully Oliver I'm losing my wits.”
“Tell me this, quick, are you Lennox Dyce?” said Bell, all trembling, devouring the little one with her eyes.
“Well, I just guess I am,” replied the child, calmly, with the dog licking her chin. “Say, are you Auntie Bell?” and this time there was no doubt about the American accent. Up went her mouth to them to be kissed, composedly: they lost no time, but fell upon her, Ailie half in tears because at once she saw below the childish hood so much of brother William.
“Lennox, dear, you should not speak like that; who in all the world taught you to speak like that?” said Bell, unwrapping her.
“Why, I thought that was all right here,” said the stranger. “That's the way the bell-man speaks.”
“Bless me! Do you know the bell-man?” cried Miss Dyce.
“I rang his old bell for him this morning—didn't you hear me?” was the surprising answer. “He's a nice man; he liked me. I'd like him too if he wasn't so tired. He was too tired to speak sense; all he would say was, 'I've lost the place, let us pause and consider,' and 'Try another egg.' I said I would give him a quarter if he'd let me ring his bell, and he said he'd let me do it for nothing, and my breakfast besides. 'You'll not leave this house till I boil an egg for you'—that's what he said, and the poor man was so tired! And his legs were dreff'le poorly.” Again her voice was the voice of Wully Oliver; the sentiment, as the Dyces knew, was the slogan of his convivial hospitality.
“The kilt, indeed!” said Mr. Dyce, feeling extraordinarily foolish, and, walking past them, he went up-stairs and hurriedly put the pea-sling in his pocket.
When he came down, young America was indifferently pecking at her second breakfast with Footles on her knee, an aunt on either side of her, and the maid Kate with a tray in her hand for excuse, open-mouthed, half in at the door.
“Well, as I was saying, Jim—that's my dear Mr. Molyneux, you know—got busy with a lot of the boys once he landed off that old ship, and so he said, 'Bud, this is the—the—justly cel'brated Great Britain; I know by the boys; they're so lively when they're by themselves. I was 'prehensive we might have missed it in the dark, but it's all right.' And next day he bought me this muff and things and put me on the cars—say, what funny cars you have!—and said 'Good-bye, Bud; just go right up to Maryfield, and change there. If you're lost anywhere on the island just holler out good and loud, and I'll hear!' He pretended he wasn't caring, but he was pretty blinky 'bout the eyes, and I saw he wasn't anyway gay, so I never let on the way I felt myself.”
She suggested the tone and manner of the absent Molyneux in a fashion to put him in the flesh before them. Kate almost laughed out loud at the oddity of it; Ailie and her brother were astounded at the cleverness of the mimicry; Bell clinched her hands, and said for the second time that day, “Oh! that Molyneux, if I had him!”
“He's a nice man, Jim. I can't tell you how I love him—and he gave me heaps of candy at the depot,” proceeded the unabashed new-comer. “'Change at Edinburgh,' he said; 'you'll maybe have time to run into the Castle and see the Duke; give him my love, but not my address. When you get to Maryfield hop out slick and ask for your uncle Dyce.' And then he said, did Jim, 'I hope he ain't a loaded Dyce, seein' he's Scotch, and it's the festive season.'”
“The adorable Jim!” said Ailie. “We might have known.”
“I got on all right,” proceeded the child, “but I didn't see the Duke of Edinburgh; there wasn't time, and uncle wasn't at Maryfield, but a man put me on his mail carriage and drove me right here. He said I was a caution. My! it was cold. Say, is it always weather like this here?”
“Sometimes it's like this, and sometimes it's just ordinary Scotch weather,” said Mr. Dyce, twinkling at her through his spectacles.
“I was dre'ffle sleepy in the mail, and the driver wrapped me up, and when I came into this town in the dark he said, 'Walk right down there and rap at the first door you see with a brass man's hand for a knocker; that's Mr. Dyce's house.' I came down, and there wasn't any brass man, but I saw the knocker. I couldn't reach up to it, so when I saw a man going into the church with a lantern in his hand. I went up to him and pulled his coat. I knew he'd be all right going into a church. He told me he was going to ring the bell, and I said I'd give him a quarter—oh, I said that before. When the bell was finished he took me to his house for luck—that was what he said—and he and his wife got right up and boiled eggs. They said I was a caution, too, and they went on boiling eggs, and I couldn't eat more than two and a white though I triedandtried. I think I slept a good while in their house; I was so fatigued, and they were all right, they loved me, I could see that. And I liked them some myself, though they must be mighty poor, for they haven't any children. Then the bellman took me to this house, and rapped at the door, and went away pretty quick for him before anybody came to it, because he said he was plain-soled—what's plain-soled anyhow?—and wasn't a lucky first-foot on a New Year's morning.''
“It beats all, that's what it does!” cried Bell. “My poor wee whitterick! Were ye no' frightened on the sea?”
“Whitterick, whitterick,” repeated the child to herself, and Ailie, noticing, was glad that this was certainly not a diffy. Diffies never interest themselves in new words; diffies never go inside themselves with a new fact as a dog goes under a table with a bone.
“Were you not frightened when you were on the sea?” repeated Bell.
“No,” said the child, promptly. “Jim was there all right, you see, and he knew all about it. He said, 'Trust in Providence, and if it'sverystormy, trust in Providenceandthe Scotch captain.'”
“I declare! the creature must have some kind of sense in him, too,” said Bell, a little mollified by this compliment to Scots sea-captains. And all the Dyces fed their eyes upon this wonderful wean that had fallen among them. 'Twas happy in that hour with them, as if in a miracle they had been remitted to their own young years; their dwelling was at long last furnished! She had got into the good graces of Footles as if she had known him all her life.
“Say, uncle, this is a funny dog,” was her next remark. “Did God make him?”
“Well—yes, I suppose God did,” said Mr. Dyce, taken a bit aback.
“Well, isn't He the damedst! This dog beats Mrs. Molyneux's Dodo, and Dodo was a looloo. What sort of a dog is he? Scotch terrier?”
“Mostly not,” said her uncle, chuckling. “It's really an improvement on the Scotch terrier. There's later patents in him, you might say. He's a sort of mosaic; indeed, when I think of it you might describe him as a pure mosaic dog.”
“A Mosaic dog!” exclaimed Lennox. “Then he must have come from scriptural parts. Perhaps I'll get playing with him Sundays. Not playing loud out, you know, but just being happy. I love being happy, don't you?”
“It's my only weakness,” said Mr. Dyce, emphatically, blinking through his glasses. “The other business men in the town don't approve of me for it; they call it frivolity. But it comes so easily to me I never charge it in the bills, though a sense of humor should certainly be worth 12s. 6d. a smile in the Table of Fees. It would save many a costly plea.”
“Didn't you play on Sunday in Chicago?” asked Ailie.
“Not out loud. Poppa said he was bound to have me Scotch in one thing at least, even if it took a strap. That was after mother died. He'd just read to me Sundays, and we went to church till we had pins and needles. We had the Reverend Ebenezer Paul Frazer, M.A., Presbyterian Church on the Front. He just preachedandpreached till we had pins and needles all over.”
“My poor Lennox!” exclaimed Ailie, with feeling.
“Oh, I'm all right!” said young America, blithely. “I'm not kicking.”
Dan Dyce, with his head to the side, took off his spectacles and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief; put them on again, looked at his niece through them, and then at Ailie, with some motion struggling in his countenance. Ailie for a moment suppressed some inward convulsion, and turned her gaze embarrassed from him to Bell, and Bell catching the eyes of both of them could contain her joy no longer. They laughed till the tears came, and none more heartily than brother William's child. She had so sweet a laugh that there and then the Dyces thought it the loveliest sound they had ever heard in their house. Her aunts would have devoured her with caresses. Her uncle stood over her and beamed, rubbing his hands, expectant every moment of another manifestation of the oddest kind of child mind he had ever encountered. And Kate swept out and in between the parlor and the kitchen on trivial excuses, generally with something to eat for the child, who had eaten so much in the house of Wanton Wully Oliver that she was indifferent to the rarest delicacies of Bell's celestial grocery.
“You're just—just a wee witch!” said Bell, fondling the child's hair. “Do you know, that man Molyneux—”
“Jim,” suggested Lennox.
“I would Jim him if I had him! That man Molyneux in all his scrimping little letters never said whether you were a boy or a girl, and we thought a Lennox was bound to be a boy, and all this time we have been expecting a boy.”
“I declare!” said the little one, with the most amusing drawl, a memory of Molyneux. “Why, I always was a girl, far back as I can remember. Nobody never gave me the chance to be a boy. I s'pose I hadn't the clothes for the part, and they just pushed me along anyhow in frocks. Would you'd rather I was a boy?”
“Not a bit! We have one in the house already, and he's a fair heart-break,” said her aunt, with a look towards Mr. Dyce. “We had just made up our mind to dress you in the kilt when your rap came to the door. At least, I had made up my mind, the others are so stubborn. And bless me! lassie, where's your luggage? You surely did not come all the way from Chicago with no more than what you have on your back?”
“You'll be tickled to death to see my trunks!” said Lennox. “I've heaps and heaps of clothes and six dolls. They're all coming with the coach. They wanted me to wait for the coach too, but the mail man who called me a caution said he was bound to have a passenger for luck on New Year's Day, and I was in a hurry to get home anyway.”
“Home!” When she said that, the two aunts swept on her like a billow and bore her, dog and all, up-stairs to her room. She was almost blind for want of sleep.
They hovered over her quick-fingered, airy as bees, stripping her for bed. She knelt a moment and in one breath said:
“God - bless - father - and - mother - and - Jim - and - Mrs. - Molyneux - and - my - aunts - in - Scotland - and Uncle - Dan - and - everybody - good - night.”
And was asleep in the sunlight of the room as soon as her head fell on the pillow.
“She prayed for her father and mother,” whispered Bell, with Footles in her arms, as they stood beside the bed. “It's not—it's not quite Presbyterian to pray for the dead; it's very American, indeed you might call it papist.”
Ailie's face reddened, but she said nothing.
“And do you know this?” said Bell, shamefacedly, “I do it myself; upon my word, I do it myself. I'm often praying for father and mother and William.”
“So am I,” confessed Alison, plainly relieved. “I'm afraid I'm a poor Presbyterian, for I never knew there was anything wrong in doing so.”
Below, in the parlor, Mr. Dyce stood looking into the white garden, a contented man, humming:
“Star of Peace, to wanderers weary.”
SHE was a lucky lassie, this of ours, to have come home to her father's Scotland on that New Year's Day, for there is no denying that it is not always gay in Scotland, contrary land, that, whether we be deep down in the waist of the world and afar from her, or lying on her breast, chains us to her with links of iron and gold—stern tasks and happy days remembered, ancient stories, austerity and freedom, cold weather on moor and glen, warm hearths and burning hearts. She might have seen this burgh first in its solemnity, on one of the winter days when it shivers and weeps among its old memorials, and the wild geese cry more constant over the house-tops, and the sodden gardens, lanes, wynds, and wells, the clanging spirits of old citizens dead and gone, haunting the place of their follies and their good times, their ridiculous ideals, their mistaken ambitions, their broken plans. Ah, wild geese! wild geese! old ghosts that cry to-night above my dwelling, I feel—I feel and know! She might have come, the child, to days of fast, and sombre dark drugget garments, dissonant harsh competing kettle bells, or spoiled harvests, poor fishings, hungry hours. It was good for her, and it is the making of my story, that she came not then, but with the pure white cheerful snow, to ring the burgh bell in her childish escapade, and usher in with merriment the New Year, and begin her new life happily in the Old World.
She woke at noon among the scented curtains, in linen sea-breeze bleached, under the camceil roof that all children love, for it makes a garret like the ancestral cave and in rainy weather they can hear the pattering feet of foes above them. She heard the sound of John Taggart's drum, and the fifing of “Happy we've been a' thegether,” and turning, found upon her pillow a sleeping doll that woke whenever she raised it up, and stared at her in wonderment.
“Oh!—Oh!—Oh! you roly-poly blonde!” cried the child in ecstasy, hugging it to her bosom and covering it with kisses. “I'm as glad as anything. Do you see the lovely little room? I'll tell you right here what your name is: it's Alison; no, it's Bell; no, it's Alibel for your two just lovely, lovely aunties.”
Up she rose, sleep banished, with a sense of cheerfulness and expectation, nimbly dressed herself, and slid down the banisters to tumble plump at the feet of her Auntie Bell in the lobby.
“Mercy on us! You'll break your neck; are you hurt?” cried Aunt Bell. “I'm not kicking,” said the child, and the dog waved furiously a gladsome tail. A log fire blazed and crackled and hissed in the parlor, and Mr. Dyce tapped time with his fingers on a chair-back to an internal hymn.
“My! ain't I the naughty girl to be snoozling away like a gopher in a hole all day? Your clock's stopped, Uncle Dan.”
Mr. Dyce looked very guilty, and coughed, rubbing his chin. “You're a noticing creature,” said he. “I declare ithasstopped. Well, well!” and his sister Bell plainly enjoyed some amusing secret.
“Your uncle is always a little daft, my dear,” she said.
“I would rather be daft than dismal,” he retorted, cleaning his glasses.
“It's a singular thing that the clocks in our lobby and parlor always stop on the New Year's Day, Lennox.”
“Bud; please, say Bud,” pleaded the little one. “Nobody ever calls me Lennox 'cept when I'm doing something wrong and almost going to get a whipping.”
“Very well, Bud, then. This clock gets something wrong with it every New Year's Day, for your uncle, that man there, wants the folk who call never to know the time so that they'll bide the longer.”
“Tuts!” said Uncle Dan, who had thought this was his own particular recipe for joviality, and that they had never discovered it.
“You have come to a hospitable town, Bud,” said Ailie. “There are convivial old gentlemen on the other side of the street who have got up a petition to the magistrates to shut up the inn and the public-house in the afternoon. They say it is in the interests of temperance, but it's really to compel their convivial friends to visit themselves.”
“I signed it myself,” confessed Mr. Dyce, “and I'm only half convivial. I'm not bragging; I might have been more convivial if it didn't so easily give me an aching head. What's more cheerful than a crowd in the house and the clash going? A fine fire, a good light, and turn about at a story! The happiest time I ever had in my life was when I broke my leg; so many folk called, it was like a month of New Year's Days. I was born with a craving for company. Mother used to have a superstition that if a knife or spoon dropped on the floor from the table it betokened a visitor, and I used to drop them by the dozen. But, dear me! here's a wean with a doll, and where in the world did she get it?”
Bud, with the doll under one arm and the dog tucked under the other, laughed up in his face with shy perception.
“Oh, you funny man!” she exclaimed. “I guess you know all right who put Alibel on my pillow. Why! I could have told you were a doll man: I noticed you turning over the pennies in your pants' pocket, same as poppa used when he saw any nice clean little girl like me, and he was the dolliest man in all Chicago. Why, there was treasury days when he just rained dolls.”
“That was William, sure enough,” said Mr. Dyce. “There's no need for showing usyourstrawberry mark. It was certainly William. If it had only been dolls!”
“Her name's Alibel, for her two aunties,” said the child.
“Tuts!” said Mr. Dyce. “If I had thought you meant to honor them that way I would have made her twins. But you see I did not know; it was a delicate transaction as it was. I could not tell very well whether a doll or a—a—or a fountain-pen would be the most appropriate present for a ten-year-old niece from Chicago, and I risked the doll. I hope it fits.”
“Like a halo! It's just sweet!” said the ecstatic maiden, and rescued one of its limbs from the gorge of Footles.
It got about the town that to Dyces' house had come a wonderful American child who talked language like a minister: the news was partly the news of the mail-driver and Wully Oliver, but mostly the news of Kate, who, from the moment Lennox had been taken from her presence and put to bed, had dwelt upon the window-sashes, letting no one pass that side of the street without her confidence.
“You never heard the like! No' the size of a shilling worth of ha'pennies, and she came all the way by her lee-lone in the coach from Chickagoo—that's in America. There's to be throng times in this house now, I'm tellin' you, with brother William's wean.”
As the forenoon advanced Kate's intelligence grew more surprising: to the new-comer were ascribed a score of characteristics such as had never been seen in the town before. For one thing (would Kate assure them), she could imitate Wully Oliver till you almost saw whiskers on her and could smell the dram. She was thought to be a boy to start with, but that was only their ignorance in Chickagoo, for the girl was really a lassie, and had kists of lassie's clothes coming with the coach.
The Dyces' foreigner was such a grand sensation that it marred the splendor of the afternoon band parade, though John Taggart was unusually glorious, walking on the very backs of his heels, his nose in the heavens, and his drumsticks soaring and circling over his head in a way to make the spectators giddy. Instead of following the band till itsrépertoirewas suddenly done at five minutes to twelve at the door of Maggie White, the wine and spirit merchant, there were many that hung about the street in the hope of seeing the American. They thought they would know her at once by the color of her skin, which some said would be yellow, and others maintained would be brown. A few less patient and more privileged boldly visited the house of Dyce to make their New-Year compliments and see the wonder for themselves.
The American had her eye on them.
She had her eye on the Sheriffs lady, who was so determinedly affable, so pleased with everything the family of Dyce might say, do, or possess, and only five times ventured to indicate there were others, by a mention of “the dear Lady Anne—so nice, so simple, so unaffected, so amiable.”
On Miss Minto of the crimson cloak, who kept her deaf ear to the sisters and her good one to their brother, and laughed heartily at all his little jokes even before they were half made, or looked at him with large, soft, melting eyes and her lips apart, which her glass had told her was an aspect ravishing. The sisters smiled at each other when she had gone and looked comically at Dan, but he, poor man, saw nothing, but just that Mary Minto was a good deal fatter than she used to be.
On the doctor's two sisters, late come from a farm in the country, marvellously at ease so long as the conversation abode in gossip about the neighbors, but in a silent terror when it rose from persons to ideas, as it once had done when Lady Anne had asked them what they thought of didactic poetry, and one of them said it was a thing she was very fond of, and then fell in a swound.
On the banker man, the teller, who was in hopeless love with Ailie, as was plain from the way he devoted himself to Bell.
On Mr. Dyce's old retired partner, Mr. Cleland, who smelt of cloves and did not care for tea.
On P. & A. MacGlashan, who had come in specially to see if the stranger knew his brother Albert, who, he said, was “in a Somewhereville in Manitoba.”
On the Provost and his lady, who were very old, and petted each other when they thought themselves unobserved.
On the soft, kind, simple, content and happy ladies lately married.
On the others who would like to be.
Yes, Bud had her eye on them all. They never guessed how much they entertained her as they genteelly sipped their tea, or wine, or ginger cordial,—the women of them—or coughed a little too artificially over the New-Year glass—the men.
“Wee Pawkie, that's what she is—just Wee Pawkie!” said the Provost when he got out, and so far it summed up everything.
The ladies could not tear away home fast enough to see if they had not a remnant of cloth that could be made into such a lovely dress as that of Dyce's niece for one of their own children. “Mark my words!” they said; “that child will be ruined between them. She's her father's image, and he went and married a poor play-actress, and stayed a dozen years away from Scotland, and never wrote home a line.”
So many people came to the house, plainly for no reason but to see the new-comer, that Ailie at last made up her mind to satisfy all by taking her out for a walk. The strange thing was that in the street the populace displayed indifference or blindness. Bud might have seen no more sign of interest in her than the hurried glance of a passer-by; no step slowed to show that the most was being made of the opportunity. There had been some women at their windows when she came out of the house sturdily walking by Aunt Ailie's side, with her hands in her muff, and her keen black eyes peeping from under the fur of her hood; but these women drew in their heads immediately. Ailie, who knew her native town, was conscious that from behind the curtains the scrutiny was keen. She smiled to herself as she walked demurely down the street.
“Do you feel anything, Bud?” she asked.
Bud naturally failed to comprehend.
“You ought to feel something at your back; I'm ticklish all down the back because of a hundred eyes.”
“I know,” said the astounding child. “They think we don't notice, but I guess God sees them,” and yet she had apparently never glanced at the windows herself, nor looked round to discover passers-by staring over their shoulders at her aunt and her.
For a moment Ailie felt afraid. She dearly loved a quick perception, but it was a gift, she felt, a niece might have too young.
“How in the world did you know that, Bud?” she asked.
“I just guessed they'd be doing it,” said Bud, “'cause it's what I would do if I saw a little girl from Scotland walking down the lake front in Chicago. Is it dreff'le rude, Aunt Ailie?”
“So they say, so they say,” said her aunt, looking straight forward, with her shoulders back and her eyes level, flushing at the temples. “But I'm afraid we can't help it. It's undignified—to be seen doing it. I can see you're a real Dyce, Bud. The other people who are not Dyces lose a great deal of fun. They must be very much bored with each other. Do you know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends—you and I and Aunt Bell and Uncle Dan.”
“And the Mosaic dog,” added Bud with warmth. “I love that old dog so much that I could—I could eat him. He's the becomingest dog! Why, here he is!” And it was indeed Footles who hurled himself at them, a rapturous mass of unkempt hair and convulsive barkings, having escaped from the imprisonment of Kate's kitchen by climbing over her shoulders and out across the window-sash.
IHEARD all about you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan from pop—from father,” said Bud, as they walked back to the house. She had learned already from example how sweeter sounded “father” than the term she had used in America. “He was mighty apt to sit up nights talking about you all. But I don't quite place Kate: he never mentioned Kate.”
“Oh, she's a new addition,” explained Ailie. “Kate is the maid, you know: she came to us long after your father left home, but she's been with us five years now, and that's long enough to make her one of the family.”
“My! Five years! She ain't—she isn't much of a quitter, is she? I guess you must have tacked her down,” said Bud. “You don't get helps in Chicago to linger round the dear old spot like that; they get all hot running from base to base, same as if it was a game of ball. But she's a pretty—pretty broad girl, isn't she? She couldn't run very fast; that'll be the way she stays.”
Ailie smiled. “Ah! So that's Chicago, too, is it? You must have been in the parlor a good many times at five-o'clock tea to have grasped the situation at your age. I suppose your Chicago ladies lower the temperature of their tea weeping into it the woes they have about their domestics? It's another Anglo-Saxon link.”
“Mrs. Jim said sensible girls that would stay long enough to cool down after the last dash were getting that scarce you had to go out after them with a gun. You didn't really, you know; that was just Mrs. Jim's way of putting it.”
“I understand,” said Alison, unable to hide her amusement. “You seem to have picked up that way of putting it yourself.”
“Am I speaking slang?” asked the child, glancing up quickly and reddening. “Father pro—prosisted I wasn't to speak slang nor chew gum; he said it was things no real lady would do in the old country, and that I was to be a well-off English undefied. You must be dreff'le shocked, Auntie Ailie?”
“Oh no,” said Ailie cheerfully; “I never was shocked in all my life, though they say I'm a shocker myself. I'm only surprised a little at the possibilities of the English language. I've hardly heard you use a word of slang yet, and still you scarcely speak a sentence in which there's not some novelty. It's like Kate's first attempt at sheep's-head broth: we were familiar with all the ingredients except the horns, and we knew them elsewhere.”
“That'sall right, then,” said Bud, relieved. “But Mrs. Jim had funny ways of putting things, and I s'pose I picked them up. I can't help it—I pick up so fast. Why, I had scarlatina twice! and I picked up her way of zaggerating: often I zaggerate dreff'le, and say I wrote all the works of Shakespeare, when I really didn't, you know. Mrs. Jim didn't mean that she had to go out hunting for helps with a gun; all she meant was that they were getting harder and harder to get, and mighty hard to keep when you got them.”
“I know,” said Alison. “It's an old British story, you'll hear it often from our visitors, if you're spared. But we're lucky with our Kate; we seem to give her complete satisfaction, or, at all events, she puts up with us. When she feels she can't put up with us any longer, she hurls herself on the morning newspaper to look at the advertisements for ladies'-maids and housekeepers with £50 a year, and makes up her mind to apply at once, but can never find a pen that suits her before we make her laugh. The servant in the house of Dyce who laughs is lost. You'll like Kate, Bud. We like her; and I notice that if you like anybody they generally like you back.”
“I'm so glad,” said Bud, with enthusiasm. “If there's one thing under the canopy I am, I'm a liker.” They had reached the door of the house without seeing the slightest sign that the burgh was interested in them, but they were no sooner in than a hundred tongues were discussing the appearance of the little American. Ailie took off Bud's cloak and hood, and pushed her into the kitchen, with a whisper to her that she was to make Kate's acquaintance, and be sure and praise her scones, then left her and flew upstairs, with a pleasant sense of personal good-luck. It was so sweet to know that brother William's child was anything but a diffy.
Bud stood for a moment in the kitchen, bashful, for it must not be supposed she lacked a childish shyness. Kate, toasting bread at the fire, turned round and felt a little blate herself, but smiled at her, such a fine expansive smile, it was bound to put the child at ease. “Come away in, my dear, and take a bite,” said the maid. It is so they greet you—simple folk!—in the isle of Colonsay.
The night was coming on, once more with snowy feathers. Wanton Wully lit the town. He went from lamp to lamp with a ladder, children in his train chanting:
“'Leerie, leerie, light the lamps.Long legs and crooked shanks!'”
and he expostulating with: “I know you fine, the whole of you; at least I know the boys. Stop you till I see your mothers!” Miss Minto's shop was open, and shamefaced lads went dubiously in to buy ladies' white gloves, for with gloves they tryst their partners here at New Year balls, and to-night was Samson's fiddle giggling at the inn. The long tenement lands, as flat and high as cliffs, and built for all eternity, at first dark gray in the dusk, began to glow in every window, and down the stairs and from the closes flowed exceeding cheerful sounds. Green fires of wood and coal sent up a cloud above these dwellings, tea-kettles jigged and sang. A thousand things were happening in the street, but for once the maid of Colonsay restrained her interest in the window. “Tell me this, what did you say your name was?” she asked.
“I'm Miss Lennox Brenton Dyce,” said Bud, primly, “but the miss don't amount to much till I'm old enough to get my hair up.”
“You must be tired coming so far. All the way from that Chickagoo!”
“Chicago,” suggested Bud, politely.
“Just that! Chickagoo or Chicago, it depends on the way you spell it,” said Kate, readily. “I was brought up to call it Chickagoo. What a length to come on New Year's Day! Were you not frightened? Try one of them brown biscuits. And how are all the people keeping in America?”
She asked the question with such tender solicitude that Bud saw no humor in it, and answered gravely:
“Pretty spry, thank you. Have you been there?”
“Me!” cried Kate, with her bosom heaving at the very thought. Then her Highland vanity came to her rescue. “No,” she said, “I have not been exactly what you might call altogether there, but I had a cousin that started for Australia and got the length of Paisley. It 'll be a big place, America? Put butter on it.”.
“The United States of America are bounded on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by the Pacific, on the south by Mexico and the Gulf, and on the north by an imaginary line called Canada. The State of New York alone is as large as England,” said Bud, glibly, repeating a familiar lesson.
“What a size!” cried Kate. “Take another of them brown biscuits. Scotland's not slack neither for size; there's Glasgow and Oban, and Colonsay and Stornoway. There'll not be hills in America?”
“There's no hills, just mountains,” said Bud. “The chief mountain ranges are the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. They're about the biggest mountains in the world.”
“Talking about big things, look at the big pennyworth of milk we get here,” said Kate, producing a can—it was almost the last ditch of her national pride.
The child looked gravely into the can, and then glanced shrewdly at the maid.
“It isn't a pennyworth,” said she, sharply, “it's twopence worth.”
“My stars! how did you know that?” said Kate, much taken aback.
“'Cause you're bragging. Think I don't know when anybody's bragging?” said Bud. “And when a body brags about a place or anything, they zaggerate, and just about double things.”
“You're not canny,” said Kate, thrusting the milk-can back hastily on the kitchen dresser. “Don't spare the butter on your biscuit. They tell me there's plenty of money in America. I would not wonder, eh?”
“Why, everybody's got money to throw at the birds there,” said Bud, with some of the accent as well as the favorite phrase of Jim Molyneux.
“They have little to do; forbye, it's cruelty. Mind you, there's plenty of money here, too; your uncle has a desperate lot of it. He was wanting to go away to America and bring you home whenever he heard—whenever he heard—Will you not try another of them biscuits? It will do you no harm.”
“I know,” said Bud, gravely—“whenever he heard about my father being dead.”
“I think we're sometimes very stupid, us from Colonsay,” said the maid, regretfully. “I should have kept my mouth shut about your father. Taketwobiscuits, my dear; or maybe you would rather have short-cake. Yes, he was for going there and then—even if it cost a pound, I dare say—but changed his mind when he heard yon man Molyneux was bringing you.” Footles, snug in the child's lap, shared the biscuits and barked for more.
“'I love little Footles,His coat is so warm,And if I don't tease himHe'll do me no harm,'”
said Bud, burying her head in his mane.
“Good Lord! did you make that yourself, or just keep mind of it?” asked the astounded Kate.
“I made it just right here,” said Bud, coolly. “Didn't you know I could make poetry? Why, you poor, perishing soul, I'm just a regular wee—wee whitterick at poetry! It goes sloshing round in my head, and it's simply pie for me to make it. Here's another:
“'Lives of great men oft remind usWe can make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time.'
I just dash them off. I guess I'll have to get up bright and early to-morrow and touch that one up some. Mostly you can't make them good the first try, and then you're bound to go all over them from the beginning and put the good in here and there. That's art, Jim says. He knew an artist who'd finish a picture with everything quite plain about it, and then say, 'Now for the art!' and fuzz it all over with a hard brush.”
“My stars, what things you know!” exclaimed the maid. “You're clever—tremendous clever! What's your age?”
“I was bom mighty well near eleven years ago,” said Bud, as if she were a centenarian.
Now it is not wise to tell a child like Lennox Dyce that she is clever, though a maid from Colonsay could scarcely be expected to know that. Till Bud had landed on the British shore she had no reason to think herself anything out of the ordinary. Jim Molyneux and his wife, with no children of their own, and no knowledge of children except the elderly kind that play in theatres, had treated her like a person little younger than themselves, and saw no marvel in her quickness, that is common enough with Young America. But Bud, from Maryfield to her uncle's door, had been a “caution” to the plainly admiring mail-driver; a kind of fairy princess to Wanton Wully Oliver and his wife; the surprise of her aunts had been only half concealed, and here was the maid in an undisguised enchantment! The vanity of the ten-year-old was stimulated; for the first time in her life she felt decidedly superior.
“It was very brave of me to come all this way in a ship at ten years old,” she proceeded.
“I once came to Oban along with a steamer my-self,” said Kate, “but och, that's nothing, for I knew a lot of the drovers. Just fancy you coming from America! Were you not lonely?”
“I was dre'ffle lonely,” said Bud, who, in fact, had never known a moment's dulness across the whole Atlantic. “There was I leaving my native land, perhaps never to set eyes on its shores evermore, and coming to a far country I didn't know the least thing about. I was leaving all my dear young friends, and the beautiful Mrs. Molyneux, and her faithful dog Dodo, and—” Here she squeezed a tear from her eyes, and stopped to think of circumstances even more touching.
“My poor wee hen!” cried Kate, distressed. “Don't you greet, and I'll buy you something.”
“And I didn't know what sort of uncle and aunties they might be here—whether they'd be cruel and wicked or not, or whether they'd keep me or not. Little girls most always have cruel uncles and aunties—you can see that in the books.”
“You were awful stupid about that bit of it,” said the maid, emphatically. “I'm sure anybody could have told you about Mr. Dyce and his sisters.”
“And then it was so stormy,” proceeded Bud, quickly, in search of more moving considerations. “I made a poem about that, too—I just dashed it off; the first verse goes:
“'The breaking waves dashed highOn a stern and rock-bound coast—'
but I forget the rest, 'cept that
“'—they come to wither thereAway from their childhood's land.'The waves were mountains high,And whirled over the deck, and—”
“My goodness, you would get all wet!” said Kate, putting her hand on Bud's shoulder to feel if she were dry yet. Honest tears were in her own eyes at the thought of such distressing affairs.
“The ship at last struck on a rock,” proceeded Bud, “so the captain lashed me—”
“I would lash him, the villain!” cried the indignant maid.
“I don't mean that; he tied me—that's lash in books—to the mast, and then—and then—well, then we waited calmly for the end,” said Bud, at the last of her resources for ocean tragedy.
Kate's tears were streaming down her cheeks at this conjured vision of youth in dire distress. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! my poor wee hen!” she sobbed. “I'm so sorry for you.”
“Bud! coo-ie! coo-ie!” came the voice of Aunt Ailie along the lobby, but Bud was so entranced with the effect of her imaginings that she paid no heed, and Kate's head was wrapped in her apron.
“Don't cry, Kate; I wouldn't cry if I was you,” said the child at last, soothingly. “Maybe it's not true.”
“I'll greet if I like,” insisted the maid. “Fancy you in that awful shipwreck! It's enough to scare anybody from going anywhere. Oh, dear! oh, dear!” and she wept more copiously than ever.
“Don't cry,” said Bud again. “It's silly to drizzle like that. Why, great Queen of Sheba! I was only joshing you: it was as calm on that ship as a milk sociable.”
Kate drew down the apron from her face and stared at her. Her meaning was only half plain, but it was a relief to know that things had not been quite so bad as she first depicted them. “A body's the better of a bit greet, whiles,” she said, philosophically, drying her eyes.
“That's what I say,” agreed Bud. “That's why I told you all that. Do you know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends.” She said this with the very tone and manner of Alison, whose words they were to herself, and turned round hastily and embarrassed at a laugh behind her to find her aunt had heard herself thus early imitated.
IF Molyneux, the actor, was to blame for sending this child of ten on her journey into Scotland without convoy, how much worse was his offence that he sent no hint of her character to the house of Dyce? She was like the carpet-bag George Jordon found at the inn door one day without a name on it, and, saying, “There's nothing like thrift in a family,” took home immediately, to lament over for a week because he had not the key to open it. There should have been a key to Lennox Brenton Dyce, but Molyneux, a man of post-cards and curt and cryptic epistles generally, never thought of that, so that it took some days for the folk she came among to pick the lock. There was fun in the process, it cannot be denied, but that was because the Dyces were the Dyces; had they been many another folk she might have been a mystery for years, and in the long-run spoiled completely. Her mother had been a thousand women in her time—heroines good and evil, fairies, princesses, paupers, maidens, mothers, shy and bold, plain or beautiful, young or old, as the play of the week demanded—a play-actress, in a word. And now she was dead and buried, the bright, white lights on her no more, the music and the cheering done. But not all dead and buried, for some of her was in her child.
Bud was born a mimic. I tell you this at once, because so many inconsistencies will be found in her I should otherwise look foolish to present her portrait for a piece of veritable life. Not a mimic of voice and manner only, but a mimic of people's minds, so that for long—until the climax came that was to change her when she found herself—she was the echo and reflection of the last person she spoke with. She borrowed minds and gestures as later she borrowed Grandma Buntain's pelerine and bonnet. She could be all men and all women except the plainly dull or wicked—but only on each occasion for a little while; by-and-by she was herself again.
And so it was that for a day or two she played with the phrase and accent of Wanton Wully Oliver, or startled her aunts with an unconscious rendering of Kate's Highland accent, her “My stars!” and “Mercy me's!” and “My wee hens!”
The daft days (as we call New Year time) passed—the days of careless merriment, that were but the start of Bud's daft days, that last with all of us for years if we are lucky. The town was settling down; the schools were opening on Han'sel Monday, and Bud was going—not to the grammar-school after all, but to the Pigeons' Seminary. Have patience, and by-and-by I will tell about the Pigeons.
Bell had been appalled to find the child, at the age of ten, apparently incredibly neglected in her education.
“Of course you would be at some sort of school yonder in America?” she had said at an early opportunity, not hoping for much, but ready to learn of some hedge-row academy in spite of all the papers said of Yales and Harvards and the like.
“No, I never was at school; I was just going when father died,” said Bud, sitting on a sofa wrapped in a cloak of Ailie's, feeling extremely tall and beautiful and old.
“What! Do you sit there and tell me they did not send you to school?” cried her aunt, so stunned that the child delighted in her power to startle and amaze. “That's America for you! Ten years old and not the length of your alphabets!—it's what one might expect from a heathen land of niggers, and lynchers, and presidents. I was the best sewer and speller in Miss Mushet's long before I was ten. My lassie, let me tell you you have come to a country where you'll get your education! We would make you take it at its best if we had to live on meal. Look at your auntie Ailie—French and German, and a hand like copperplate; it's a treat to see her at the old scrutoire, no way put-about, composing. Just goes at it like lightning! I do declare if your uncle Dan was done, Ailie could carry on the business, all except the aliments and sequestrations. It beats all! Ten years old and not to know the ABC!”
“Oh, but I do,” said Bud, quickly. “I learned the alphabet off the play-bills—the big G's first, because there's so many Greats and Grand? and Gorgeouses in them. And then Mrs. Molyneux used to let me try to read Jim's press notices. She read them first every morning sitting up in bed at breakfast, and said, 'My! wasn't he a great man?' and then she'd cry a little, 'cause he never got justice from the managers, for they were all mean and jealous of him. Then she'd spray herself with the peau d'espagne and eat a cracker. And the best papers there was in the land said the part of the butler in the second act was well filled by Mr. Jim Molyneux; or among others in a fine cast were J. Molyneux, Ralph Devereux, and O. G. Tarpoll.”
“I don't know what you're talking about, my poor wee whitterick; but it's all haivers,” said Miss Bell. “Can you spell?”
“If the words are not too big, or silly ones where it's 'ei' or 'ie' and you have to guess,” said Bud.
“Spell cat.”
Bud stared at her incredulously.
“Spell cat,” repeated her aunt.
“K-a-t-t,” said Bud (oh, naughty Bud!).
“Mercy!” cried Bell, with horrified hands in the air. “Off you pack to-morrow to the seminary. I wouldn't wonder if you did not know a single word of the Shorter Catechism. Perhaps they have not such a thing in that awful heathen land you came from?”
Bud could honestly say she had never heard of the Shorter Catechism.
“My poor, neglected bairn,” said her aunt, piteously, “you're sitting there in the dark with no conviction of sin, and nothing bothering you, and you might be dead to-morrow! Mind this, that 'Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.' Say that.”
'"Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,'” repeated Bud, obediently, rolling her r's and looking solemn like her aunt.
“Did you ever hear of Robert Bruce, him that watched the spiders?”
Here, too, the naughty Bud protested ignorance.
“He was the savior of his country,” said Bell. “Mind that!”
“Why, auntie, I thought it was George Washington,” said Bud, surprised. “I guess if you're looking for a little wee stupid, it's me.”
“We're talking about Scotland,” said Miss Bell, severely. “He saved Scotland. It was well worth while! Can you do your sums?”
“I cannot,” said Bud, emphatically. “I hate them.” Miss Bell said not a word more; she was too distressed at such confessed benightedness; but she went out of the parlor to search for Ailie. Bud forgot she was beautiful and tall and old in Ailie's cloak; she was repeating to herself “Man's chief end” with rolling r's, and firmly fixing in her memory the fact that Robert Bruce, not George Washington, was the savior of his country and watched spiders.
Ailie was out, and so her sister found no ear for her bewailings over the child's neglected education till Mr. Dyce came in humming the tune of the day—“Sweet Afton”—to change his hat for one more becoming to a sitting of the sheriff's court. He was searching for his good one in what he was used to call “the piety press,” for there was hung his Sunday clothes, when Bell distressfully informed him that the child could not so much as spell cat.
“Nonsense! I don't believe it,” said he. “That would be very unlike our William.”
“It's true—I tried her myself!” said Bell. “She was never at a school; isn't it just deplorable?”
“H'm!” said Mr. Dyce, “it depends on the way you look at it, Bell.”
“She does not know a word of her catechism, nor the name of Robert Bruce, and says she hates counting.”
“Hates counting!” repeated Mr. Dyce, wonderfully cheering up; “that's hopeful; it reminds me of myself. Forbye its gey like Brother William. His way of counting was 'one pound, ten shillings in my pocket, two pounds that I'm owing some one, and ten shillings I get to-morrow— that's five pounds I have; what will I buy you now?' The worst of arithmetic is that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Two and two's four and you're done with it; there's no scope for either fun or fancy as there might be if the two and two went courting in the dark and swapped their partners by an accident.”
“I wish you would go in and speak to her,” said Bell, distressed still, “and tell her what a lot she has to learn.”
“What, me!” cried Uncle Dan; “excuse my grammar,” and he laughed. “It's an imprudent kind of mission for a man with all his knowledge in little patches. I have a lot to learn, myself, Bell; it takes me all my time to keep the folk I meet from finding out the fact.”
But he went in humming, Bell behind him, and found the child still practising “Man's chief end,” so engrossed in the exercise she never heard him enter. He crept behind her, and put his hands over her eyes.
“Guess who,” said he, in a shrill falsetto.
“It's Robert Bruce,” said Bud, without moving.
“No—cold—cold!—guess again,” said her uncle, growling like Giant Blunderbore.
“I'll mention no names,” said she, “but it's mighty like Uncle Dan.”
He stood in front of her and put on a serious face. “What's this I am hearing, Miss Lennox,” said he, “about a little girl who doesn't know a lot of things nice little girls ought to know?”
“'Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,'” repeated Bud, reflectively. “I've got that all right, but what does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” said Mr. Dyce, a bit taken aback. “You tell her, Bell; what does it mean? I must not be late for the court.”
“You're far cleverer than I am,” said Bell. “Tell her yourself.”
“It means,” said Daniel Dyce, the lawyer, seating himself on the sofa beside his niece, “that man in himself is a gey poor soul, no' worth a pin, though he's apt to think the world was made for his personal satisfaction. At the best he's but an instrument—a harp of a thousand strings God bends to hear in His leisure. He made that harp—the heart and mind of man—when He was in a happy hour. Strings hale and strings broken, strings slack or tight, there are all kinds of them; the best we can do's to be taut and trembling for the gladness of God who loves fine music, and set the stars themselves to singing from the very day He put them birling in the void. To glorify's to wonder and adore, and who keeps the wondering, humble heart, the adoring eye, is to God pleasing exceedingly. Sing, lassie, sing, sing, sing, inside ye, even if ye are as timmer as a cask. God knows I have not much of a voice myself, but I'm full of nobler airs than ever crossed my rusty thrapple. To be grateful always, and glad things are no worse, is a good song to start the morning.”
“Ah, but sin, Dan, sin!” said Bell, sighing, for she always feared her own light-heartedness. “We may be too joco.”
“Say ye so?” he cried, turning to his sister with a flame upon his visage. “By the heavens above us, no! Sin might have been eternal; each abominable thought might have kept in our minds, constant day and night from the moment that it bred there; the theft we did might keep everlastingly our hand in our neighbor's kist as in a trap; the knife we thrust with might have kept us thrusting forever and forever. But no—God's good! sleep comes, and the clean morning, and the morning is Christ, and every moment of time is a new opportunity to amend. It is not sin that is eternal, it is righteousness and peace. Joco! We cannot be too joco, having our inheritance.”
He stopped suddenly, warned by a glance of his sister's, and turned to look in his niece's face to find bewilderment there. The mood that was not often published by Dan Dyce left him in a flash, and he laughed and put his arms round her.
“I hope you're a lot wiser for my sermon, Bud,” said he. “I can see you have pins and needles worse than under the Reverend Mr. Frazer on the Front. What's the American for haivers—for foolish speeches?”
“Hot air,” said Bud, promptly.
“Good!” said Dan Dyce, rubbing his hands together. “What I'm saying may seem just hot air to you, but it's meant. You do not know the Shorter Catechism; never mind; there's a lot of it I'm afraid I do not know myself; but the whole of it is in that first answer to 'Man's chief end.' Reading and writing, and all the rest of it, are of less importance, but I'll not deny they're gey and handy. You're no Dyce if you don't master them easily enough.”
He kissed her and got gayly up and turned to go. “Now,” said he, “for the law, seeing we're done with the gospels. I'm a conveyancing lawyer—though you'll not know what that means—so mind me in your prayers.”
Bell went out into the lobby after him, leaving Bud in a curious frame of mind, for “Man's chief end,” and Bruce's spider, and the word “joco,” all tumbled about in her, demanding mastery.
“Little help I got from you, Dan!” said Bell to her brother. “You never even tried her with a multiplication table.”
“What's seven times nine?” he asked her, with his fingers on the handle of the outer door, his eyes mockingly mischievous.
She flushed and laughed, and pushed him on the shoulder. “Go away with you!” said she. “Fine you ken I could never mind seven times!”
“No Dyce ever could,” said he—“excepting Ailie. Get her to put the little creature through her tests. If she's not able to spell cat at ten she'll be an astounding woman by the time she's twenty.”
The end of it was that Aunt Ailie, whenever she came in, upon Bell's report went over the street to Rodger's shop and made a purchase. As she hurried back with it, bareheaded, in a cool drizzle of rain that jewelled her wonderful hair, she felt like a child herself again. The banker-man saw her from his lodging as she flew across the street with sparkling eyes and eager lips, the roses on her cheeks, and was sure, foolish man! that she had been for a new novel or maybe a cosmetic, since in Rodger's shop they sell books and balms and ointments. She made the quiet street magnificent for a second—a poor wee second, and then, for him, the sun went down. The tap of the knocker on the door she closed behind her struck him on the heart. You may guess, good women, if you like, that at the end of the book the banker-man is to marry Ailie, but you'll be wrong; she was not thinking of the man at all at all—she had more to do, she was hurrying to open the gate of gold to her little niece.
“I've brought you something wonderful,” said she to the child—“better than dolls, better than my cloak, better than everything; guess what it is.”
Bud wrinkled her brows. “Ah, dear!” she sighed, “we may be too joco! And I'm to sing, sing, sing, even if I'm as—timmer as a cask, and Robert Bruce is the savior of his country.” She marched across the room, trailing Ailie's cloak with her, in an absurd caricature of Bell's brisk manner. Yet not so much the actress engrossed in her performance, but what she tried to get a glimpse of what her aunt concealed.
“You need not try to see it,” said Ailie, smiling, with the secret in her breast. “You must honestly guess.”
“Better'n dolls and candies; oh, my!” said Bud. “I hope it's not the Shorter Catechism,” she concluded, looking so grave that her aunt laughed.
“It's not the Catechism,” said Ailie; “try again. Oh, but you'll never guess! It's a key.”
“A key?'' repeated Bud, plainly cast down.
“A gold key,” said her aunt.
“What for?” asked Bud.
Ailie sat herself down on the floor and drew the child upon her knees. She had a way of doing that which made her look like a lass in her teens; indeed, it was most pleasing if the banker-man could just have seen it! “A gold key,” she repeated, lovingly, in Bud's ear. “A key to a garden—the loveliest garden, with flowers that last the whole year round. You can pluck and pluck at them and they're never a single one the less. Better than sweet-pease! But that's not all, there's a big garden-party to be at it—”
“My! I guess I'll put on my best glad rags,” said Bud. “Andthe hat with pink.” Then a fear came to her face. “Why, Aunt Ailie, you can't have a garden-party this time of the year,” and she looked at the window down whose panes the rain was now streaming.
“This garden-party goes on all the time,” said Ailie. “Who cares about the weather? Only very old people; not you and I. I'll introduce you to a lot of nice people—Di Vernon, and—you don't happen to know a lady called Di Vernon, do you, Bud?”
“I wouldn't know her if she was handed to me on a plate with parsley trimmings,” said Bud, promptly.
“—Di Vernon, then, and Effie Deans, and Little Nell, and the Marchioness; and Richard Swivefler, and Tom Pinch, and the Cranford folks, and Juliet Capulet—”
“She must belong to one of the first families,” said Bud. “I have a kind of idea that I have heard of her.”
“And Mr. Falstaff—such a naughty man, but nice, too! And Rosalind.”
“Rosalind!” cried Bud. “You mean Rosalind in 'As You Like It?”'
Ailie stared at her with astonishment. “You amazing child!” said she, “who told you about 'As You Like It'?”
“Nobody told me; I just read about her when Jim was learning the part of Charles the Wrestler he played on six 'secutive nights in the Waldorf.”
“Read it!” exclaimed her aunt. “You mean he or Mrs. Molyneux read it to you.”
“No, I read it myself,” said Bud.