“'Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,Hath not old custom made this life more sweetThan that of painted pomp?Are not these woodsMore free from peril than the envious court.”
She threw Aunt Ailie's cloak over one shoulder, put forth a ridiculously little leg with an air of the playhouse, and made the gestures of Jim Molyneux.
“I thought you couldn't read,” said Ailie. “You little fraud! You made Aunt Bell think you couldn't spell cat.”
“Oh, Queen of Sheba! did she think I was in earnest?” cried Bud. “I was just pretending. I'm apt to be pretending pretty often; why, Kate thinks I make Works. I can read anything; I've read books that big it gave you cramp. I s'pose you were only making believe about that garden, and you haven't any key at all, but I don't mind; I'm not kicking.”
Ailie put her hand to her bosom and revealed the Twopenny she had bought to be the key to the wonderful garden of letters—the slim little gray-paper-covered primer in which she had learned her own first lessons. She held it up between her finger and thumb that Bud might read its title on the cover. Bud understood immediately and laughed, but not quite at her ease for once.
“I'm dre'ffle sorry, Aunt Ailie,” she said. “It was wicked to pretend just like that, and put you to a lot of trouble. Father wouldn't have liked that.”
“Oh, I'm not kicking,” said Ailie, borrowing her phrase to put her at her ease again. “I'm too glad you're not so far behind as Aunt Bell imagined. So you like books? Capital! And Shakespeare no less! What do you like best, now?'”
“Poetry,” said Bud. “Particularly the bits I don't understand, but just about almost. I can't bear to stop and dally with too easy poetry; once I know it all plain and there's no more to it, I—I—I love to amble on. I—why! I make poetry myself.”
“Really?” said Ailie, with twinkling eyes.
“Sort of poetry,” said Bud. “Not so good as 'As You Like It'—not 'nearly' so good, of course! I have loads of really, really poetry inside me, but it sticks at the bends and then I get bits that fit, made by somebody else, and wish I had been spry and said them first. Other times I'm the real Winifred Wallace.”
“Winifred Wallace?” said Aunt Ailie, inquiringly.
“Winifred Wallace,” repeated Bud, composedly. “I'm her. It's my—it's my poetry name. 'Bud Dyce' wouldn't be any use for the magazines; it's not dinky enough.”
“Bless me, child, you don't tell me you write poetry for the magazines?” said her astonished aunt.
“No,” said Bud, “but I'll be pretty liable to when I'm old enough to wear specs. That's if I don't go on the stage.”
“On the stage!” exclaimed Ailie, full of wild alarm.
“Yes,” said the child. “Mrs. Molyneux said I was a born actress.”
“I wonder, I wonder,” said Aunt Ailie, staring into vacancy.
DANIEL DYCE had an office up the street at the windy corner facing the Cross, with two clerks in it and a boy who docketed letters and ran errands. Once upon a time there was a partner—Cleland & Dyce the firm had been—but Cleland was a shy and melancholy man whose only hours of confidence and gayety came to him after injudicious drams. 'Twas patent to all how his habits seized him, but nobody mentioned it except in a whisper, sometimes as a kind of little accident, for in everything else he was the perfect gentleman, and here we never like to see the honest gentry down. All men liked Colin Cleland, and many would share his jovial hours who took their law business elsewhere than to Cleland & Dyce. That is the way of the world, too; most men keep their jovial-money in a different pocket from where they keep their cash. The time came when it behooved Mr. Cleland to retire. Men who knew the circumstances said Dan Dyce paid rather dear for that retirement, and indeed it might be so in the stricter way of commerce, but the lawyer was a Christian who did not hang up his conscience in the “piety press” with his Sunday clothes. He gave his partner a good deal more than he asked.
“I hope you'll come in sometimes and see me whiles at night and join in a glass of toddy,” said Mr. Cleland.
“I'll certainly come and see you,” said Dan Dyce. And then he put his arm affectionately through that of his old partner, and added, “I would—I would ca' canny wi' the toddy, Colin,” coating the pill in sweet and kindly Scots. Thank God, we have two tongues in our place, and can speak the bitter truth in terms that show humility and love, and not the sense of righteousness, dictate.
“Eh! What for?” said Mr. Cleland, his vanity at once in arms.
Dan Dyce looked in his alarmed and wavering eyes a moment, and thought, “What's the use? He knows himself, they always do!”
“For fear—for fear of fat,” he said, with a little laugh, tapping with his finger on his quondam partner's widening waistcoat. “There are signs of a prominent profile, Colin. If you go on as you're doing it will be a dreadful expense for watch-guards.”
Colin Cleland at once became the easy-osey man again, and smiled. “Fat, man! it's not fat,” said he, clapping himself on the waistcoat, “it's information. Do you know, Dan, for a second, there, I thought you meant to be unkind, and it would be devilish unlike you to be unkind. I thought you meant something else. The breath of vulgar suspicion has mentioned drink.”
“It's a pity that!” said Mr. Dyce, “for a whole cask of cloves will not disguise the breath of suspicion.” It was five years now since Colin Cleland retired among his toddy rummers, and if this were a fancy story I would be telling you how he fell, and fell, and fell, but the truth—it's almost lamentable—is that the old rogue throve on leisure and ambrosial nights with men who were now quite ready to give the firm of Daniel Dyce their business, seeing they had Colin Cleland all to themselves and under observation. Trust estates and factorages from all quarters of the county came now to the office at the windy corner. A Christian lawyer with a sense of fun, unspotted by the world, and yet with a name for winning causes, was what the shire had long been wanting. And Daniel Dyce grew rich. “I'm making money so fast,” he said one day to his sisters (it was before Bud came), “that I wonder often what poor souls are suffering for it.”
Said Bell, “It's a burden that's easy put up with. We'll be able now to get a new pair of curtains for the back bedroom.”
“A pair of curtains!” said her brother, with a smile to Ailie. “Ay, a score of pairs if they're needed, even if the vogue was Valenciennes. Your notion of wealth, Bell, is Old Malabar's—'Twopence more, and up goes the donkey!' Woman, I'm fair rolling in wealth.” He said it with a kind of exultation that brought to her face a look of fear and disapproval. “Don't, Dan, don't,” she cried—“don't brag of the world's dross; it's not like you. 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,' says the Proverbs. You must be needing medicine. We should have humble hearts. How many that were high have had a fall!”
“Are you frightened God will hear me and me His bounty?” said the brother, in a whisper. “I'm not bragging; I'm just telling you.”
“I hope you're not hoarding it,” proceeded Miss Bell. “It's not wiselike—”
“Nor Dyce-like either,” said Miss Ailie.
“There's many a poor body in the town this winter that's needful.”
“I dare say,” said Daniel Dyce, coldly. “'The poor we have always with us.' The thing, they tell me, is decreed by Providence.”
“But Providence is not aye looking,” said Bell. “If that's what you're frightened for, I'll be your almoner.”
“It's their own blame, you may be sure, if they're poor. Improvidence and—and drink. I'll warrant they have their glass of ale every Saturday. What's ale? Is there any moral elevation in it? Its nutritive quality, I believe, is less than the tenth part of a penny loaf.”
“Oh, but the poor creatures!” sighed Miss Bell. “Possibly,” said Dan Dyce, “but every man must look after himself; and as you say, many a man well off has come down in the world. We should take no risks. I had Black the baker at me yesterday for £20 in loan to tide over some trouble with his flour merchant and pay an account to Miss Minto.”
“A decent man, with a wife and seven children,” said Miss Bell.
“Decent or not, he'll not be coming back borrowing from me in a hurry. I set him off with a flea in his lug.”
“We're not needing curtains,” said Miss Bell, hurriedly; “the pair we have are fine.”
Dan finished his breakfast that day with a smile, flicked the crumbs off his waistcoat, gave one uneasy glance at Ailie, and went off to business humming “There is a Happy Land.”
“Oh, dear me, I'm afraid he's growing a perfect miser,” moaned Bell, when she heard the door close behind him. “He did not use to be like that when he was younger and poorer. Money's like the toothache, a commanding thing.”
Ailie smiled. “If you went about as much as I do, Bell,” she said, “you would not be misled by Dan's pretences. And as for Black, the baker, I saw his wife in Miss Minto's yesterday buying boots for her children and a bonnet for herself. She called me Miss Ailie, an honor I never got from her in all my life before.”
“Do you think—do you think he gave Black the money?” said Bell, in a pleasant excitation.
“Of course he did. It's Dan's way to give it to some folk with a pretence of reluctance, for if he did not growl they would never be off his face! He's telling us about the lecture that accompanied it as a solace to our femininity. Women, you know, are very bad lenders, and dislike the practice in their husbands and brothers.”
“None of the women I know,” protested Bell. “They're just as free-handed as the men if they had it. I hope,” she added, anxiously, “that Dan got good security. Would it be a dear bonnet, now, that she was getting?”
Ailie laughed—a ridiculous sort of sister this; she only laughed.
Six times each lawful day Daniel Dyce went up and down the street between his house and the office at the windy corner opposite the Cross, the business day being divided by an interval of four hours to suit the mails. The town folk liked to see him passing; he gave the street an air of occupation and gayety, as if a trip had just come in with a brass band banging at the latest air. Going or coming he was apt to be humming a tune to himself as he went along with his hands in his outside pockets, and it was an unusual day when he did not stop to look in at a shop window or two on the way, though they never changed a feature once a month. To the shops he honored thus it was almost as good as a big turnover. Before him his dog went whirling and barking, a long alarm for the clerks to stop their game of Catch-the-Ten and dip their pens. There were few that passed him without some words of recognition.
He was coming down from the office on the afternoon of the Hansel Monday that started Bud in the Pigeons' Seminary when he met the nurse, old Betty Baxter, with a basket. She put it down at her feet, and bobbed a courtesy, a thing that nowadays you rarely see in Scotland.
“Tuts! woman,” he said to her, lifting the basket and putting it in her hand. “Why need you bother with the like of that? You and your courtesies! They're out of date, Miss Baxter, out of date, like the decent men that deserved them long ago, before my time.”
“No, they're not out of date, Mr. Dyce,” said she, “I'll aye be minding you about my mother; you'll be paid back some day.”
“Tuts!” said he again, impatient. “You're an awful blether: how's your patient, Duncan Gill?”
“As dour as the devil, sir,” said the nurse. “Still hanging on.”
“Poor man! poor man!” said Mr. Dyce. “He'll just have to put his trust in God.”
“Oh, he's no' so far through as all that,” said Betty Baxter. “He can still sit up and take his drop of porridge. They're telling me you have got a wonderful niece, Mr. Dyce, all the way from America. What a mercy for her! But I have not set eyes on her yet. I'm so busy that I could not stand in the close like the others, watching: what is she like?”
“Just like Jean Macrae,” said Mr. Dyce, preparing to move on.
“And what was Jean Macrae like?”
“Oh, just like other folk,” said Mr. Dyce, and passed on chuckling, to run almost into the arms of Captain Consequence.
“Have you heard the latest?” said Captain Consequence, putting his kid-gloved hand on the shoulder of the lawyer, who felt it like a lump of ice, for he did not greatly like the man, the smell of whose cigars, he said, before he knew they came from the Pilgrim widows, proved that he rose from the ranks.
“No, Captain Brodie,” he said, coldly. “Who's the rogue or the fool this time?” but the captain was too stupid to perceive it. He stared perplexedly.
“I hear,” said he, “the doctor's in a difficulty.”
“Is he—is he?” said Mr. Dyce. “That's a chance for his friends to stand by him.”
“Let him take it!” said Captain Consequence, puffing. “Did he not say to me once yonder, 'God knows how you're living.'”
“It must be God alone, for all the rest of us are wondering,” said Mr. Dyce, and left the man to put it in his pipe and smoke it.
Along the street came the two Miss Duffs, who kept the dame school, and he saw a hesitation in their manner when they realized a meeting was inevitable. If they had been folk that owed him anything he would not have wondered, from their manner, to see them tuck up their skirts and scurry down the lane. Twins they were—a tiny couple, scarcely young, dressed always in a douce long-lasting brown, something in their walk and color that made them look like pigeon hens, and long ago conferred on them that name in Daniel Dyce's dwelling. They met him in front of his own door, and seemed inclined to pass in a trepidation.
He took off his hat to them and stood, full of curiosity about Lennox.
“What a lovely winter day!” said Miss Jean, with an air of supplication, as if her very life depended on his agreement.
“Isn't itperfectlyexquisite!” said Miss Amelia, who usually picked up the bald details of her sister's conversation and passed them on embroidered with a bit of style.
“It's not bad,” said Mr. Dyce, blinking at them, wondering what ailed the dears to-day. They were looking uneasily around them for some way of escape; he could almost hear the thump of their hearts, he noted the stress of their breathing. Miss Jean's eyes fastened on the tree-tops over the banker's garden-wall; he felt that in a moment she would spread out her wings and fly. “You have opened the school again,” he said, simply.
“We started again to-day,” cooed Miss Jean.
“Yes, we resumed to-day,” said Miss Amelia. “The common round, the daily task. And, oh! Mr. Dyce—”
She stopped suddenly at the pressure of her sister's elbow on her own, and lowered her eyes, that had for a second shown an appalling area of white. It was plain they were going to fly. Mr. Dyce felt inclined to cry “Pease, pease!” and keep them a little longer.
“You have my niece with you to-day?” he remarked. “What do you think of her?”
A look of terror exchanged between them escaped his observation.
“She's—she's a wonderful child,” said Miss Jean, nervously twisting the strings of a hand-bag.
“A singularly interesting and—and unexpected creature,” said Miss Amelia.
“Fairly bright, eh?” said Mr. Dyce.
“Oh, bright!” repeated Miss Jean. “Bright is not the word for it—is it, Amelia?”
“I would rather say brilliant,” said Amelia, coughing, and plucking a handkerchief out of her pocket to inhale its perfume and avert a threatening swound. “I hope—we both hope, Mr. Dyce, she will be spared to grow up a credit to you. One never knows?”
“That's it,” agreed Mr. Dyce, cheerfully. “Some girls grow up and become credits to their parents and guardians, others become reciters and spoil many a jolly party with 'The Women of Mumbles Head' or 'Coffee was not strong.'”
“I hope not,” said Miss Jean, hardly understanding: the painful possibility seemed to be too much for Miss Amelia; she said nothing, but fixed her eyes on the distant tree-tops and gave a little flap of the wings of her Inverness cape.
“Pease, pease!” murmured Mr. Dyce, unconsciously, anxious to hold them longer and talk about his niece.
“I beg pardon!” exclaimed Miss Jean, and the lawyer got very red.
“I hope at least you'll like Bud,” he said. “She's odd, but—but—but—” he paused for a word.
“—sincere,” suggested Miss Jean.
“Yes, I would say sincere—or perhaps outspoken would be better,” said Miss Amelia.
“So clever too,” added Miss Jean. “Pretematurally!” cooed Miss Amelia.
“Such a delightful accent,” said Miss Jean.
“Like linked sweetness long drawn out,” quoted Miss Amelia.
“But—” hesitated Miss Jean.
“Still—” more hesitatingly said her sister, and then there was a long pause.
“Oh, to the mischief!” said Mr. Dyce to himself, then took off his hat again, said, “Good-afternoon,” and turned to his door.
He was met by Ailie in the lobby; she had seen him from a window speaking to the Duffs. “What were they saying to you?” she asked, with more curiosity in her manner than was customary.
“Nothing at all,” said Mr. Dyce. “They just stood and cooed. I'm not sure that a doo-cot is the best place to bring up an eagle in. How did Bud get on with them at school to-day?”
“So far as I can make out, she did not get on at all; she seems to have demoralized the school, and driven the Misses Duff into hysterics, and she left of her own accord and came home an hour before closing-time. And—and she's not going back!”
Mr. Dyce stood a moment in amazement, then rubbed his hands gleefully. “I'm glad to hear it,” said he. “The poor birdies between them could not summon up courage to tell me what was wrong. I'm sorry for them; if she's not going back, we'll send them down a present.”
THAT the child should have gone to the dame school at all was due to her Auntie Bell. From the first Miss Ailie had been dubious of the seminary, but Bell was terribly domineering; in fact, was neither to hold nor bind, and the doo-cot it bode to be. A product herself of the old dame school in the spacious days of Barbara Mushet, whose pupils in white-seam sewing and Italian hand were nowadays married to the best, and notable as housewives, she deemed it still the only avenue to the character and skill that keep those queer folk, men, when they're married, by their own fire-ends. As for Daniel Dyce, he was, I fear, indifferent how Bud came by her schooling, having a sort of philosophy that the gate of gifts is closed on us the day we're bom, and that the important parts of the curriculum, good or bad, are picked up like a Scots or Hielan' accent, someway in the home.
So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity cooed at the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan's. Their home was like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork bracket on the wall behind her chair, and thinking not unkindly of the creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic. And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free, that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.
“You'll find her somewhat odd,” she explained, as she nibbled the seed-cake, with a silly little doily of Miss Jean's contrivance on her knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional—quite unlike other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to manage her.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose it's the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”
“Oh, it's nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the doily from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with a wicked little shake. “If she didn't speak much you would never guess from her appearance that she knew any more than—than most of us. Her mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius—at least it never came from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbors cross to the other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years ago, and when William—when my brother died, Lennox was staying with professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”
“The dear!” said Miss Jean, enraptured.
“Quite a sweet romance!” cooed Miss Amelia, languishing.
“You may be sure we will do all we can for her,” continued Miss Jean, pecking with unconscious fingers at the crumbs on her visitor's lap, till Ailie could scarcely keep from smiling.
“She will soon feel quite at home among us in our little school,” said Miss Amelia. “No doubt she'll be shy at first—”
“Quite the contrary!” Ailie assured them, with a little mischievous inward glee, to think how likely Bud was to astonish them by other qualities than shyness. “It seems that in America children are brought up on wholly different lines from children here; you'll find a curious fearless independence in her.”
The twins held up their hands in amazement, “tcht-tcht-tchting” simultaneously. “Whata pity!” said Miss Jean, as if it were a physical affliction.
“But no doubt by carefulness and training it can be eradicated,” said Miss Amelia, determined to encourage hope.
At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little parlor, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.
“I don't think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said, with some of her brother's manner at the bar. “Individuality is not painful to the possessor like toothache, so it's a pity to eradicate it or kill the nerve.”
The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in their agitation were not observant.
“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and put them in a stocking of Amelia's, before they started to their crochet work again.
It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement, and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger's heart. Once the child turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell!—Miss Bell!—she flew to the kitchen and stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.
Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the Duffs—sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys enough as yet to be in the grammar-school. Miss Jean came out and rang a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers and held out her hand.
“Good-morning; I'm Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening with a glance at the delinquents, as she dubiously took the proffered hand.
“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants air some, don't it? What's the name of the sweet little boy in the Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”
She was standing between the twins, facing the scholars; she surveyed all with the look of his Majesty's Inspector.
“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench. “By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”
Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the Lord's Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet “chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep's head singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the street; from fields behind came in a ploughman's whistle as he drove his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green, green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses, hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker's boys. God only knew the other variations. 'Twas the duty of the twins to bring them all in mind alike to the one plain level.
It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean, to test her, asked her simply “Man's chief end,” she answered, boldly:
“Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
“Very good!verygood, indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.
“Man is a harp,” she said, as solemnly as he had said it—“a har-r-rp with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we're timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with things.”
If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the school-room it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.
“What's that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in America?”
“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again. She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.
Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.
“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.
“Oban, and Glasgow, and Toraoway,” replied Bud, with a touch of Highland accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put about at such a preference.
“You mustn't move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia, taking her back. “It's not allowed.”
“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud, frankly, “and I wanted to speak to Percy.”
“My dear child, his name's not Percy, and there's no speaking in school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.
“No speaking! Why, you're speaking all the time,” said the child. “It ain't—isn't fair. Can't I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that nice girl over there?”
The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the demoralizing influence of the young invader.
Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.
There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand, never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be merely women, like her mother, and Mrs. Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.
“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the blackboard where they had taken refuge again. “I declare I'll take a fit if this goes on! Did you ever hear of such a creature?”
Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the scheme of treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of great severity.
“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at school before, you don't know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you are not behaving nicely—not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox. Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say anything unless they're asked. They are respectful to their teachers, and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and—”
“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn't contradicting,” explained Bud, very soberly, “and when respect is called for, I'm there with the goods. You said honor was spelled with a 'u,' and I guess you just made a mistake, same as I might make myself, for there ain't no 'u' in honor, at least in America.”
“I—I—I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia, gasping.
“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.
“What do you mean by 'Oh, Laura?'” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”
“You can search me,” replied Bud, composedly. “Jim often said 'Oh, Laura!' when he got a start.”
“It's not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It's not at all ladylike. It's just a sort of profane language, and profane language is an 'abomination unto the Lord.'”
“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If it's slang I'll stop it—at least I'll try to stop it. I'm bound to be a well-off English undefied, you know; poppa—father fixed that.”
The school was demoralized without a doubt, for now the twins were standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused—more interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend how far she and her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to the little foreigner's attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take up poetry and reading.” Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of poetry and reading, but alas! her delight was short-lived, for the reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie Ailie's Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why. What completed Bud's rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when she had read that:
“One ugly trick has often spoiledThe sweetest and the best;Matilda, though a pleasant child,One ugly trick possessed”—
she laughed outright.
“I can't help it, Miss Duff,” she said, when the twins showed their distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it's got the jaggy edges, but it doesn't make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It wants biff.”
“What's 'zip' and 'biff'?” asked Miss Amelia.
“It's—it's a kind of tickle in your mind,” said Bud. “I'm so tired,” she continued, rising in her seat, “I guess I'll head for home now.” And before the twins had recovered from their dumfounderment she was in the porch putting on her cloak and hood.
“Just let her go,” said Miss Jean to her sister. “If she stays any longer I shall certainly have a swoon; I feel quite weak.”
And so Bud marched out quite cheerfully, and reached home an hour before she was due.
Kate met her at the door. “My stars! are you home already?” she exclaimed, with a look at the town clock. “You must be smart at your schooling when they let you out of the cemetery so soon.”
“It ain't a cemetery at all,” said Bud, standing unconcernedly in the lobby; “it's just a kindergarten.”
Aunt Ailie bore down on her to overwhelm her in caresses. “What are you home for already, Bud?” she asked. “It's not time yet, is it?”
“No,” said Bud, “but I just couldn't stay any longer. I'd as lief not go back there. The ladies don't love me. They're Sunday sort of ladies, and give me pins and needles. They smile and smile, same's it was done with a glove-stretcher, and don't love me. They said I was using profound language, and—and they don't love me. Not the way mother and Mrs. Molyneux and you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan and Kate and Footles does. They made goo-goo eyes at me when I said the least thing. They had all those poor kiddies up on the floor doing their little bits, and they made me read kindergarten poetry—that was the limit! So I just upped and walked.”
The two aunts and Kate stood round her for a moment baffled.
“What's to be done now?” said Aunt Ailie.
“Tuts!” said Aunt Bell, “give the wean a drink of milk and some bread and butter.”
And so ended Bud's only term in a dame school.
IT was a saying of Daniel Dyce's that all the world is under one's own waistcoat. We have a way of spaeing fortunes in the North, when young, in which we count the waistcoat buttons from top to bottom, and say:
“Tinker,Tailor,Soldier,Sailor,Rich man,Poor man,Prodigal,Or Thief?”
Whichever name falls upon the last button tells what is your destiny, and after the county corps has been round our way recruiting, I see our school-boys with all their waistcoat buttons but three at the top amissing. Dan Dyce had a different formula: he said, “Luckiness, Leisure, Ill or Well, Good World, Bad World, Heaven or Hell?”
“Not Heaven, Dan!” said Bell. “The other place I'll admit, for whiles I'm in a furious temper over some trifle;” to which he would answer, “Woman! the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
So, I think sometimes, all that's worth while in the world is in this little burgh, except a string-quartette and a place called Florence I have long been wishing to see if ever I have the money. In this small town is every week as much of tragedy and comedy and farce as would make a complete novel full of laughter and tears, that would sell in a jiffy. I have started, myself, a score of them—all the essential inspiration got from plain folk passing my window, or from hearing a sentence dropped among women gossiping round a well. Many a winter night I come in with a fine catch of tales picked up in the by-going, as we say, and light the candles in a hurry, and make a gallant dash at “Captain Consequence. Chapter I.” or “A Wild Inheritance. Part I. The Astounding Mary.” Only the lavishness of the material hampers me: when I'm at “Captain Consequence” (which would be a splendid sombre story of an ill life, if I ever got beyond Chapter I. and the old scamp's fondness for his mother), my wife runs in with something warm to drink, and tells me Jonathan Campbell's goat has broken into the minister's garden, and then I'm off the key for villany; there's a shilling book in Jonathan's goat herself.
But this time I'm determined to stick by the fortunes of the Dyce family, now that I have got myself inside their door. I hope we are friends of that household, dearer to me than the dwellings of kings (not that I have cognizance of many). I hope that no matter how often or how early we rap at the brass knocker, or how timidly, Kate will come, and in one breath say, “What is't? Come in!” We may hear, when we're in, people passing in the street, and the wild geese call—wild geese, wild geese! this time I will not follow where you tempt to where are only silence and dream—the autumn and the summer days may cry us out to garden and wood, but if I can manage it I will lock the door on the inside, and shut us snugly in with Daniel Dyce and his household, and it will be well with us then. Yes, yes, it will be well with us then.
The wild-goose cry, heard in the nights, beyond her comprehension, was all that Bud Dyce found foreign in that home. All else was natural and familiar and friendly, for all else she knew was love. But she feared at first the “honk, honk” of the lone wild things that burdened her with wonder and awe. Lying in her attic bower at night, they seemed to her like sore mistaken wanderers, wind-driven, lost; and so they are, I know. Hans Andersen and Grimm for her had given to their kind a forlorn and fearsome meaning. But Kate MacNeill had helped, to some degree, these childish apprehensions.
The Highland maid had brought from Colonsay a flesh that crept in darkness, a brain with a fantastic maggot in it; she declared to goodness, and to Bud sometimes, that she had no life of it with ghosts in her small back room. But Bud was not to let on to her aunties. Forbye it was only for Kate they came, the ghosts; did Bud not hear them last night? Geese! No, not geese, Kate knew different, and if the thing lasted much longer she would stay no more in this town; she would stay nowhere, she would just go back to Colonsay. Not that Colonsay was better; there were often ghosts in Colonsay—in the winter-time, and then it behooved you to run like the mischief, or have a fine strong lad with you for your convoy. If there were no ghosts in America it was because it cost too much to go there on the steamers. Harken to yon—“Honk, honk!”—did ever you hear the like of it? Who with their wits about them in weather like that would like to be a ghost? And loud above the wind that rocked the burgh in the cradle of the hills, loud above the beating rain, the creak of doors and rap of shutters in that old house, Bud and Kate together in the kitchen heard again the “honk, honk!” of the geese. Then it was for the child that she missed the mighty certainty of Chicago, that Scotland somehow to her mind seemed an old unhappy place, in the night of which went passing Duncan, murdered in his sleep, and David Rizzio with the daggers in his breast, and Helen of Kirk-connel Lee. The nights but rarely brought any fear for her in spite of poor Kate's ghosts, since the warmth and light and love of the household filled every corner of lobby and stair, and went to bed with her. When she had said her prayer the geese might cry, the timbers of the old house crack, Bud was lapped in the love of God and man, and tranquil. But the mornings dauntened her often when she wakened to the sound of the six-o'clock bell. She would feel, when it ceased, as if all virtue were out of last night's love and prayer. Then all Scotland and its curious scraps of history as she had picked it up weighed on her spirit for a time; the house was dead and empty; not ghost nor goose made her eerie, but mankind's old inexplicable alarms. How deep and from what distant shores comes childhood's wild surmise! There was nothing to harm her, she knew, but the strangeness of the dawn and a craving for life made her at these times the awakener of the other dwellers in the house of Dyce.
She would get out of bed and go next door to the room of Ailie, and creep in bed beside her to kiss her for a little from her dreams. To the aunt these morning visitations were precious: she would take the bairn to her bosom and fall asleep with sighs of content, the immaculate mother. Bud herself could not sleep then for watching the revelation of her lovely auntie in the dawn—the cloud on the pillow, that turned to masses of hazel hair, the cheeks and lips that seemed to redden like flowers as the day dawned, the nook of her bosom, the pulse of her brow.
Other mornings Wanton Wully's bell would send her in to Bell, who would give her the warm hollow of her own place in the blankets, while she herself got up to dress briskly for the day's affairs. “Just you lie down there, pet, and sleepy-baw,” she would say, tying her coats with trim tight knots. “You will not grow up a fine, tall, strong girl like your Auntie Ailie if you do not take your sleep when you can get it. The morning is only for done old wives like me that have things to do and don't grudge doing them.”
She would chatter away to Bud as she dressed, a garrulous auntie this, two things always for her text—the pride of Scotland, and the virtue of duty done. A body, she would say, was sometimes liable to weary of the same things to be done each day, the same tasks even-on, fires and food and cleansing, though the mind might dwell on great deeds desirable to be accomplished, but pleasure never came till the thing was done that was the first to hand, even if it was only darning a stocking. What was Bud going to be when she grew up? Bud guessed she wasn't going to be anything but just a lady. Ah, yes, but even ladies had to do something wise-like; there was Ailie—to go no farther—who could have managed a business though her darning was but lumpy. Even for a lady there was nothing nobler than the making of her own bed; besides the doctors said it was remarkably efficacious for the figure.
Bud, snug in her auntie's blankets, only her nose and her bright bead eyes showing in the light of the twirly wooden candlestick, guessed Mrs. Molyneux was the quickest woman to get through work ever she saw: why! she just waved it to one side and went out to shop or lunch with Jim.
A look of pity for Mrs. Molyneux, the misguided, would come to Bell's face, but for those folk in America she never had a word of criticism in the presence of the child. All she could say was America was different. America was not Scotland. And Scotland was not England, though in many places they called Scotch things English.
Jim used to say, speaking of father, that a Scotsman was a kind of superior Englishman.
Bell wished to goodness she could see the man—he must have been a clever one!
Other mornings again would the child softly open her uncle's door and he would get a terrible fright, crying “Robbers! but you'll get nothing. I have my watch in my boots, and my money in my mouth.”
She would creep beside him, and in these early hours began her education. She was learning Ailie's calm and curiosity and ambition, she was learning Bell's ideas of duty and the ancient glory of her adopted land; from her uncle she was learning many things, of which the least that seemed useful at the time was the Lord's Prayer in Latin.Pater noster qui es in coelis—that and a few hundred of Trayner's Latin maxims was nearly all of the classic tongue that survived with the lawyer from student days. It was just as good and effective a prayer in English, he admitted, but somehow, whiles, the language was so old it brought you into closer grips with the original. Some mornings she would hum to him coon songs heard in her former home; and if he was in trim he himself would sing some psalm to the tune of Coleshill, French, Bangor, or Tor-wood. His favorite was Torwood; it mourned so—mourned so! Or at other times a song like “Mary Morison.”
“What are you bumming away at up there the pair of you?” Bell would cry, coming to the stair-foot. “If you sing before breakfast, you'll greet before night!”
“Don't she like singing in the morning?” Bud asked, nestling beside him, and he laughed.
“It's an old freit—an old superstition,” said he, “that it's unlucky to begin the day too blithely. It must have been a doctor that started it, but you would wonder at the number of good and douce Scots folk, plain bodies like ourselves, that have the notion in their mind from infancy, and never venture a cheep or chirrup before the day's well aired.”
“My stars, ain't she Scotch, Auntie Bell!” said Bud. “So was father. He would sing any time; he would sing if it broke a tooth; but he was pretty Scotch other ways. Once he wore a pair of kilts to a Cale—to a Caledonian club.”
“I don't keep a kilt myself,” said her uncle. “The thing's not strictly necessary unless you're English and have a Hielan' shooting.”
“Auntie Bell is the genuine Scotch stuff, I guess!”
“There's no concealing the fact that she is,” her uncle admitted. “She's so Scotch that I am afraid she's apt to think of God as a countryman of her own.” And there were the hours that Ailie gave with delight to Bud's more orthodox tuition. The back room that was called Dan's study, because he sometimes took a nap there after dinner, became a schoolroom. There was a Mercator's map of the world on the wall, and another of Europe, that of themselves gave the place the right academy aspect. With imagination, a map, andThe Golden Treasuryyou might have as good as a college education, according to Ailie. They went long voyages together on Mercator; saw marvellous places; shivered at the poles or languished 4 in torrid plains, sometimes before Kate could ring the bell for breakfast. There seemed no spot in the world that this clever auntie had not some knowledge of. How eagerly they crossed continents, how ingeniously they planned routes! For the lengths of rivers, the heights of mountains, the values of exports, and all the trivial passing facts that mar the great game of geography for many childish minds, they had small consideration; what they gathered in their travels were sounds, colors, scenes, weather, and the look of races. What adventures they had! as when, pursued by elephants and tigers, they sped in a flash from Bengal to the Isle of Venice, and saw the green slime of the sea on her steeping palaces. Yes, the world is all for the folk of imagination. 'Love maps and you will never be too old or too poor to travel,' was Ailie's motto. She found a hero or a heroine for every spot upon Mercator, and nourished so the child in noble admirations.
You might think it would always be the same pupil and the same teacher, but no, they sometimes changed places. If Ailie taught Bud her own love for the lyrics that are the best work of men in their hours of exaltation, Bud sent Ailie back to her Shakespeare, and sweet were the days they spent in Arden or Prospero's Isle.
It was well with them then; it was well with the woman and the child, and they were happy.