BUT the Dyces never really knew how great and serious was the charge bequeathed to them in their brother William's daughter till they saw it all one night in March in the light of a dozen penny candles.
Lennox had come from a world that's lit by electricity, and for weeks she was sustained in wonder and amusement by the paraffine lamps of Daniel Dyce's dwelling. They were, she was sure, the oldest kind of light in all the world—Aladdin-lights that gleamed of old on caverns of gems—till Kate on this particular evening came into the kitchen with the week-end groceries. It was a stormy season—the year of the big winds; moanings were at the windows, sobbings in the chimney-heads, and the street was swept by spindrift rain. Bell and Ailie and their brother sat in the parlor, silent, playing cards with a dummy hand, and Bud, with Footles in her lap, behind the winter dikes on which clothes dried before the kitchen fire, crouched on the fender with a Shakespeare, where almost breathlessly she read the great, the glorious Macbeth.
“My stars, what a night!” said Kate. “The way them slates and chimney-cans are flying! It must be the antinuptial gales. I thought every minute would by my next. Oh, towns! towns! Stop you till I get back to Colonsay, and I'll not leave it in a hurry, I'll assure you.”
She threw a parcel on the kitchen dresser, and turned to the light a round and rosy face that streamed with clean, cooling rain, her hair in tangles on her temples and her eyes sparkling with the light of youth and adventure—for to tell the truth she had been flirting at the door a while, in spite of all the rain, with some admirer.
Bud was the sort of child whose fingers itch in the presence of unopened parcels—in a moment the string was untied from the week-end groceries.
“Candles!” she cried. “Well, that beats the band! I've seen 'em in windows. What in the world are you going to do with candles? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve—oh, Laura, ain't we grand!”
“What would we do with them but burn them?” said the maid; “we'll use them in the washing-house,” and then she sank into a chair. “Mercy on me, I declare I'm dying!” she exclaimed, in a different key, and Bud looked round and saw Kate's face had grown of a sudden very pale.
“Oh, dear! what is the matter?” she asked, her eyes large, innocent, and anxious.
“Pains,” moaned the maid. “Pains inside me and all over me, and shiverings down the spine of the back. Oh, it's a sore thing pain, especially when it's bad! But don't—don't say a word to the mustress; I'm not that old, and maybe I'll get better.”
“Try pain-killer,” recommended Bud. “And if I was you I'd start just here and say a prayer. Butt right in and I'll not listen.”
“Pain-killer!—what in all the world's pain-killer? I never heard of it. And the only prayer I know is 'My Father which art' in Gaelic, and there's nothing in it about pains in the spine of the back. No, no! I'll just have to take a table-spoonful of something or other three times a day, the way I did when the doctor put me right in Colonsay. Perhaps it's just a chill, but oh! I'm sorrowful, sorrowful!” and Kate, the color coming slowly back to her, wept softly to herself, rocking in the kitchen chair. It was sometimes by those odd hysterics that she paid for her elations with the lads.
“I know what's wrong with you,” said Bud, briskly, in the manner of Mrs. Molyneux. “It's just the croodles. Bless you, you poor, perishing soul! I take the croodles myself when it's a night like this and I'm alone. The croodles ain't the least wee bit deadly; you can put them away by hustling at your work, or banging an old piano, or reading a story, or playing that you're somebody else—Well, I declare, I think I could cure you right now with these twelve candles, far better than you'd do by shooting drugs into yourself.”
“I never took a single candle in all my life,” said Kate, “far less twelve, and I'll die first.”
“Silly!” exclaimed Bud. “You'd think to hear you speak you were a starving Esquimau. I don't want you to eat the candles. Wait a minute.” She ran lightly up-stairs and was gone for ten minutes.
Kate's color all revived; she forgot her croodles in the spirit of anticipation that the child had roused. “Oh, but she's the clever one that!” she said to herself, drying the rain and tears from her face and starting to nibble a biscuit. “She knows as much as two ministers, and still she's not a bit proud. Some day she'll do something desperate.”
When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs. Molyneux's, had taught her dancing.
“Ain't this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid's eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain't this bully? Don't you stand there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles for the foot-lights. Why, I knew there was some use for these old candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something I couldn't 'zactly think of—made me kind of gay, you know, just as if I was going to the theatre. They're only candles, but there's twelve lights to them all at once, and now you'll see some fun.”
“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.
“I'm going to be a Gorgeous Entertainment; I'm going to be the Greatest Agg-Aggregation of Historic Talent now touring the Middle West. I'm Mademoiselle Winifred Wallace, of Madison Square Theatre, New York, positively appearing here for one night only. I'm the whole company, and the stage manager, and the band, and the boys that throw the bouquets. Biff! I'm checked high; all you've got to do is to sit there with your poor croodles and feel them melt away. Let's light the foot-lights.”
There was a row of old brass bedroom candlesticks on the kitchen shelf that were seldom used now in the house of Dyce, though their polish was the glory of Miss Bell's heart. The child kilted up her gown, jumped on a chair, and took them down with the help of Kate. She stuck in each a candle, and ranged them in a semicircle on the floor, then lit the candles and took her place behind them.
“Put out the lamp!” she said to Kate, in the common voice of actors' tragedy.
“Indeed and I'll do nothing of the kind,” said the maid. “If your auntie Bell comes in she'll—she'll skin me alive for letting you play such cantrips with her candles. Forbye, you're going to do something desperate, something that's not canny, and I must have the lamp behind me or I'll lose my wits.”
“Woman, put out the light!” repeated Bud, with an imperious, pointing finger, and, trembling, Kate turned down the lamp upon the wall and blew down the chimney in the very way Miss Dyce was always warning her against. She gasped at the sudden change the loss of the light made—at the sense of something idolatrous and bewitched in the arc of flames on her kitchen floor, each blown inward from the draught of a rattling window.
“If it isbuidseachas—if it is witchcraft of any kind you are on for, I'll not have it,” said Kate, firmly. “I never saw the like of this since the old woman in Pennyland put the curse on the Colonsay factor, and she had only seven candles. Dear,dearLennox, do not do anything desperate; do not be carrying on, for you are frightening me out of my judgment. I'm—I'm maybe better now; I took a bite at a biscuit; indeed, I'm quite better; it was nothing but the cold—and a lad out there that tried to kiss me.”
Bud paid no heed, but plucked up the edges of her skirt in out-stretched hands and glided into the last dance she had learned from the vaudeville lady, humming softly to herself an appropriate tune. The candles warmly lit her neck, her ears, her tilted nostrils; her brow was high in shadow. First she rose on tiptoe and made her feet to twitter on the flags, then swayed and swung a little body that seemed to hang in air. The white silk swept around and over her—wings with no noise of flapping feather, or swirled in sea-shell coils, that rose in a ripple from her ankles and swelled in wide, circling waves above her head, revealing her in glimpses like some creature born of foam on fairy beaches and holding the command of tempest winds. Ah, dear me! many and many a time I saw her dance just so in her daft days before the chill of wisdom and reflection came her way; she was a passion disembodied, an aspiration realized, a happy morning thought, a vapor, a perfume of flowers, for her attire had lain in lavender. She was the spirit of spring, as I have felt it long ago in little woods, or seen it in pictures, or heard it in songs; she was an ecstasy, she was a dream.
The dog gave a growl of astonishment, then lay his length on the hearth-rug, his nose between his paws, his eyes fixed on her. “I'll not have it,” said the maid, piteously. “At least I'll not stand much of it, for it's not canny to be carrying on like that in a Christian dwelling. I never did the like of that in all my life.”
“Everymove a picture,” said the child, and still danced on, with the moan of the wind outside for a bass to her low-hummed melody. Her stretching folds flew high, till she seemed miraculous tall, and to the servant's fancy might have touched the low ceiling; then she sank—and sank—and sank till her forehead touched the floor, and she was a flower fallen, the wind no more to stir its petals, the rain no more to glisten on its leaves. 'Twas as if she shrivelled and died there, and Kate gave one little cry that reached the players of cards in the parlor.
“Hush! what noise was that?” said Ailie, lifting her head.
“It would be Kate clumping across the kitchen floor in the Gaelic language,” said Mr. Dyce, pushing his specs up on his brow.
“Nothing but the wind,” said Bell. “What did you say was trump?”—for that was the kind of player she was.
“It was not the wind, it was a cry; I'm sure I heard a cry. I hope there's nothing wrong with the little one,” said Ailie, with a throbbing heart, and she threw her cards on the table and went out. She came back in a moment, her face betraying her excitement, her voice demanding silence.
“Of all the wonders!” said she. “Just step this way, people, to the pantry.”
They rose and followed her. The pantry was all darkness. Through its partly open door that led into the kitchen they saw their child in the crescent of the candles, though she could not see them, as no more could Kate, whose chair was turned the other way. They stood in silence watching the strange performance, each with different feelings, but all with eeriness, silent people of the placid, old, half-rustic world that lives forever with realities and seldom sees the passions counterfeited.
Bud had risen, her dark hair looking unnaturally black above her brow, and, her dancing done, she was facing the dog and the servant, the only audience of whose presence she was aware.
“Toots!” said the maid, relieved that all seemed over, “that's nothing in the way of dancing; you should see them dancing Gillie-Callum over-bye in Colonsay! There's a dancer so strong there that he breaks the very boards.”
Bud looked at her, and yet not wholly at her—through her—with burning eyes.
“Hush!” she said, trembling. “Do you not hear something?” and at that moment, high over the town went the “honk, honk” of the wild geese.
“Devil the thing but geeses!” said the maid, whose blood had curdled for a second. The rain swept like a broom along the street, the gutters bubbled, the shutters rapped, far above the dwelling went the sound of the flying geese.
“Oh, hush, woman, hush!” implored the child, her hands over her ears, her figure cowering.
“It's only the geeses. What a start you gave me!” said the maid again.
“No, no,” said Bud.
“'Methought, I heard a voice cry,“Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep;Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,... sore labor's bath,Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,Chief nourisher in life's feast—' ”
“What do you mean?” cried Kate.
“Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
The child filled each phrase with a travesty of passion; she had seen the part enacted. It was not, to be sure, a great performance. Some words were strangely mutilated; but it was a child, and she had more than a child's command of passion—she had feeling, she had heart.
“I cannot look at you!” exclaimed Kate. “You are not canny, but oh! you are—you are majestic! There was never the like of it in all the isles.”
Bell, in the darkness of the pantry, wept silently at some sense of sin in this play-acting on a Saturday night; her brother held her arm tightly. Ailie felt a vague unrest and discontent with herself, a touch of envy and of shame.
“Please collect the bouquets,” said the child, seating herself on the floor with her knees tucked high in her gown. “Are the croodles all gone?”
“It did me a lot of good, yon dancing,” said Kate. “Did you put yon words about Macbeth sleep no more together yourself?”
“Yes,” said Bud, and then repented. “No,” she added, hurriedly, “that's a fib; please, God, give me a true tongue. It was made by Shakespeare—dear old Will!”
“I'm sure I never heard of the man in all my life before; but he must have been a bad one.”
“Why, Kate, you are as fresh as the mountain breeze,” said Bud. “He was Great! He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, a poor boy, and went to London and held horses outside the theatre door, and then wrote plays so grand that only the best can act them. He was—he was not for an age, but all the time.”
She had borrowed the lesson as well as the manner of Auntie Ailie, who smiled in the dark of the pantry at this glib rendering of herself.
“Oh, I should love to play Rosalind,” continued the child. “I should love to playeverything. When I am big, and really Winifred Wallace, I will go all over the world and put away people's croodles same as I did yours, Kate, and they will love me; and I will make them feel real good, and sometimes cry—for that is beautiful, too. I will never rest, but go on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me—even in the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or'nary luck but just coon shows, for it's in these places croodles must be most catching. I'll go there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my auntie Ailie, and lovely like my dear auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet, sweet aunt Ailie.”
“She's big enough and bonny enough, and clever enough in some things,” said the maid; “but can she sew like her sister?—tell me that!”
“Sew!” exclaimed the child, with a frown. “Ihatesewing. I guess Auntie Ailie's like me, and feels sick when she starts a hem and sees how long it is, and all to be gone over with small stitches.”
“Indeed, indeed I do,” whispered Ailie in the pantry, and she was trembling. She told me later how she felt—of her conviction then that for her the years of opportunity were gone, the golden years that had slipped past in the little burgh town without a chance for her to grasp their offerings. She told me of her resolution there and then that this child, at least, should have its freedom to expand.
Bud crept to the end of the crescent of her footlights and blew out the candles slowly one by one. The last she left a-light a little longer, and, crouched upon the floor, she gazed with large, dreaming eyes into its flame as if she read there.
“It is over now,” said Mr. Dyce, in a whisper, to his sisters, and with his hands on their shoulders led them back into the parlor.
SHE was wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not what, in the Pigeons' Seminary, could be called a good child, for all her sins were frankly manifest, and she knew no fear nor naughty stratagem; her mind, to all but Kate, was open as the day, and there it was the fault of honest Kate's stupidity. But often Miss Bell must be moaning at transgressions almost harmless in themselves, yet so terribly unlike a Christian bairn, as when Bud spent an afternoon in a tent with somegypsychildren, changed clothes with them the better to act a part, and stormed because she could not have them in to tea with her. Or when she asked Lady Anne, bazaar-collecting in the house of Dyce, if she ever had had a proposal. It was a mercy that Lady Anne that very week had had one, and was only too pleased to tell of it and say she had accepted.
“Thenyou'resafe out of the woods,” said Bud, gravely. “There's our Kate, she hasn't had a proposal yet, and I guess she's on the slopey side of thirty. It must be dreff'le to be as old—as old as a house and have no beau to love you. It must be 'scrudating.”
Lady Anne let her eyes turn for a moment on the sisters Dyce, and the child observed and reddened.
“Oh, Auntie Bell!” she said, quickly. “Auntie Bell had heaps and heaps of beaux all dying to marry her, but she gave them the calm, cold eye and said she had to cling to Uncle Dan. It was very noble of her, wasn't it?”
“Indeed it was!” admitted Lady Anne, very much ashamed of herself.
“And Auntie Ailie is not on the slopey side of thirty,” continued Bud, determined to make all amends. “She's young enough to love dolls.”
It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behavior. “You are a perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and nonsense of that kind—it's fair ridiculous.”
“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much astonished. “It's in all the books, there's hardly anything else, 'cept when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the only one you don't suspect. Indeed, auntie, I thought it was the Great Thing!”
“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There's very little else in all the world, except—except the children,” and she folded her niece in her arms. “Itisthe Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler, kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”
“But it was very wrong; it was a kind of fib for you to talk about me having lots of lads in my time,” said Auntie Bell. “You do not know whether I had or not.”
Bud looked at her and saw a flush on her face. “I think,” said she, “the beaux must have been very stupid, then. But I guess there must have been one, Auntie Bell, and you have forgotten all about him.” And at that Miss Bell went hurriedly from the room with a pretence that she heard a pot boil over, and Ailie in a low voice told her niece all about Bell's beau, deep drowned in the Indian Ocean.
For days after that the child was tender with her elder aunt, and made a splendid poem in blank verse upon the late Captain James Murray, which Bell was never to see, but Ailie treasured. For days was she angelic good. Her rages never came to fever heat. Her rebellions burned themselves out in her bosom. Nobly she struggled with long division and the grammar that she abominated; very meekly she took censure for copy-books blotted and words shamefully misspelled in Uncle Daniel's study. Some way this love that she had thought a mere amusement, like shopping in Chicago, took a new complexion in her mind—became a dear and solemn thing, like her uncle's Bible readings, when, on Sunday nights at worship in the parlor, he took his audience through the desert to the Promised Land, and the abandoned street was vocal with domestic psalm from the provost's open window. She could not guess—how could she, the child?—that love has its variety. She thought there was but the one love in all the world—the same she felt herself for most things—a gladness and agreement with things as they were. And yet at times in her reading she got glimpses of love's terror and empire, as in the stories of Othello and of Amy Robsart, and herself began to wish she had a lover. She thought at first of Uncle Dan; but he could not be serious, and she had never heard him sigh—in him was wanting some remove, some mystery. What she wanted was a lover on a milk-white steed, a prince who was “the flower o' them a',” as in Aunt Ailie's song “Glenlogie”; and she could not imagine Uncle Dan with his spectacles on riding any kind of steed, though she felt it would be nice to have him with her when the real prince was there.
Do you think it unlikely that this child should have such dreams? Ah, then, you are not of her number, or you have forgotten. She never forgot. Many a time she told me in after years of how in the attic bower, with Footles snug at her feet, she conjured up the lad on the milk-white steed, not so much for himself alone, but that she might act the lady-love. And in those dreams she was tall and slender, sometimes proud, disdainful, wounding the poor wretch with sharp words and cold glances; or she was meek and languishing, sighing out her heart even in presence of his true-love gifts of candy and P. & A. MacGlashan's penny tarts. She walked with him in gardens enchanted; they sailed at nights over calm, moonlit seas, and she would be playing the lute. She did not know what the lute was like; but it was the instrument of love, and had a dulcet sound, like the alto flutes in the burgh band.
But, of course, no fairy prince came wooing Daniel Dyce's little niece, though men there were in the place—elderly and bald, with married daughters—who tried to buy her kisses for sixpences and sweets, and at last she felt vicariously the joys of love by conducting the affairs of Kate.
Kate had many wooers—that is the solace of her class. They liked her that she was genial and plump, with a flattering smile and a soft touch of the Gaelic accent that in the proper key and hour is the thing to break hearts. She twirled them all round her little finger, and Bud was soon to see this and to learn that the maid was still very far from the slopey side of thirty. But Kate, too, had her dreams—of some misty lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a delicious smell of tar—something or other on a yacht. The name she had endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny novelettes.
One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.
“Are you at your lessons, too?” said the child. “You naughty Kate! there's a horrid blot. No lady makes blots.”
“It wasn't me, it was this devilish pen; besides, I'm not a lady,” said Kate, licking the latest blot with her tongue and grimacing. “What way do you spell weather?”
“W-e-t-h-e-r,” said Bud. “At least, I think that's the way; but I'd best run and ask Aunt Ailie—she's a speller from Spellerville.”
“Indeed and you'll do nothing of the kind,” cried the maid, alarmed and reddening. “You'll do nothing of the kind, Lennox, because—I'm writing to Charles.”
“A love-letter! Oh, I've got you with the goods on you!” exclaimed Bud, enchanted. “And what are you doing with your hurrah clothes on?”
“I like to put on my Sunday clothes when I'm writing Charles,” said the maid, a little put-about. “Do you think it's kind of daft?”
“It's not daft at all, it's real cute of you; it's what I do myself when I'm writing love-letters, for it makes me feel kind of grander. It's just the same with poetry; I simply can't make really poetry unless I have on a nice frock and my hands washed.”
“Youwrite love-letters!” said the maid, astounded.
“Yes, you poor, perishing soul!” retorted Bud. “And you needn't yelp. I've written scores of love-letters without stopping to take breath. Stop! stop!” she interrupted herself, and breathed an inward little prayer. “I mean that I write them—well, kind of write them—in my mind.” But this was a qualification beyond Kate's comprehension.
“Then I wish you would give me a hand with this one,” said she, despairingly. “All the nice words are so hard to spell, and this is such a bad pen.”
“They'reallbad pens; they're all devilish,” said Bud, from long experience. “But I'd love to help you write that letter. Let me see—pooh! it's dreff'le bad, Kate. I can't read a bit of it, almost.”
“I'm sure and neither can I,” said Kate, distressed.
“Then how in the world do you expect Charles to read it?” asked Bud.
“Oh, he's—he's a better scholar than me,” said Kate, complacently. “But you might write this one for me.”
Bud washed her hands, took a chair to the kitchen table, threw back her hair from her eyes, and eagerly entered into the office of love-letter-writer, “What will I say to him?” she asked.
“My dear, dear Charles,” said the maid, who at least knew so much.
“My adorable Charles,” said Bud, as an improvement, and down it went with the consent of the dictator.
“I'm keeping fine, and I'm very busy,” suggested Kate, upon deliberation. “The weather is capital here at present, and it is a good thing, for the farmers are busy with their hay.”
Bud sat back and stared at her in amazement. “Are you sure this is for a Charles?” she asked. “You might as well call him Sissy and talk frocks. Why, you must tell him how you love him.”
“Oh, I don't like,” said Kate, confused. “It sounds so—so bold and impudent when you put it in the English and write it down. But please yourself; put down what you like and I'll be dipping the pen for you.”
Bud was not slow to take the opportunity. For half an hour she sat at the kitchen table and searched her soul for fitting words that would convey Kate's adoration. Once or twice the maid asked what she was writing, but all she said was: “Don't worry, Kate. I'm right in the throes.” There were blots and there were erasions, but something like this did the epistle look when it was done:
“My adorable Charles,—I am writing this letter to let you know how much I truly love you. Oh Charles, dear, you are the Joy of my heart. I am thinking of you so often, often, till my Heart just aches. It is lovely wether here at present. Now I will tell you all about the Games. They took place in a park near here Friday and there was seventeen beautiful dances. They danced to give you spassums. One of them was a Noble youth. He was a Prince in his own write, under Spells for sevn years. When he danced, lo and behold he was the admiration of all Beholders. Alas? poor youth. When I say alas I mean that it was so sad being like that full of Spells in the flower of his youth. He looked at me so sad when he was dancing, and I was so glad. It was just like money from home. Dear Charles, I will tell you all about myself. I am full of goodness most the time for God loves good people. But sometimes I am not and I have a temper like two crost sticks when I must pray to be changed. The dancing gentleman truly loves me to destruction. He kissed my hand and hastily mountain his noble steed, galoped furiously away. Ah, the coarse of true love never did run smooth. Perhaps he will fall upon the forein plain. Dearest Charles—adorable—I must now tell you that I am being educated for my proper station in life. There is Geograpy, and penmanship with the right commas, and Long Division and conjunctives which I abominate. But my teacher, a sweet lady named Miss Alison Dyce, says they are all truly refining. Oh I am weary, weary, he cometh not. That is for you, darling Charles, my own.—Your true heart love, Kate MacNeill.”
“Is that all right?” asked Bud, anxiously.
“Yes; at least it 'll do fine,” said the maid, with that Highland politeness that is often so bad for business. “There's not much about himself in it, but och! it 'll do fine. It's as nice a letter as ever I saw: the lines are all that straight.”
“But there's blots,” said Bud, regretfully. “There oughtn't to be blots in a real love-letter.”
“Toots! just put a cross beside each of them, and write 'this is a kiss,”' said Kate, who must have had some previous experience. “You forgot to ask him how's his health, as it leaves us at present.”
So Bud completed the letter as instructed. “Now for the envelope,” said she.
“I'll put the address on it myself,” said Kate, confused. “He would be sure somebody else had been reading it if the address was not in my hand of write”—an odd excuse, whose absurdity escaped the child. So the maid put the letter in the bosom of her Sunday gown against her heart, where meanwhile dwelt the only Charles. It is, I sometimes think, where we should all deposit and retain our love-letters; for the lad and lass, as we must think of them, have no existence any more than poor Kate's Charles.
Two days passed. Often in those two days would Bud come, asking anxiously if there was any answer yet from Charles. As often the maid of Colonsay reddened, and said with resignation there was not so much as the scrape of a pen. “He'll be on the sea,” she explained at last, “and not near a post-office. Stop you till he gets near a post-office, and you'll see the fine letter I'll get.”
“I didn't know he was a sailor,” said Bud. “Why, I calculated he was a Highland chieftain or a knight, or something like that. If I had known he was a sailor I'd have made that letter different. I'd have loaded it up to the nozzle with sloppy weather, and said, Oh, how sad I was—that's you, Kate—to lie awake nights thinking about him out on the heaving billow. Is he a captain?”
“Yes,” said Kate, promptly. “A full captain in the summer-time. In the winter he just stays at home and helps on his mother's farm. Not a cheep to your aunties about Charles, darling Lennox,” she added, anxiously. “They're—they're that particular!”
“I don't think you're a true love at all,” said Bud, reflecting on many interviews at the kitchen window and the back door. “Just think of the way you make goo-goo eyes at the letter-carrier and the butcher's man and the ash-pit gentleman. What would Charles say?”
“Toots! I'm only putting by the time with them,” explained the maid. “It's only a diversion. When I marry I will marry for my own conveniency, and the man for me is Charles.”
“What's the name of his ship?” asked the child. “TheGood Intent,” said Kate, who had known a skiff of the name in Colonsay. “A beautiful ship, with two yellow chimneys, and flags to the masthead.”
“That's fine and fancy!” said Bud. “There was a gentleman who loved me to destruction, coming over on the ship from New York, and loaded me with candy. He was not the captain, but he had gold braid everywhere, and his name was George Sibley Purser. He promised he would marry me when I made a name for myself, but I 'spect Mister J. S. Purser 'll go away and forget.”
“That's just the way with them all,” said Kate.
“I don't care, then,” said Bud. “I'm all right; I'm not kicking.”
Next day the breakfast in the house of Dyce was badly served, for Kate was wild to read a letter that the post had brought, and when she opened it, you may be sure Bud was at her shoulder. It said:
“Dearest Kate,—I love you truly and I am thinking of you most the time. Thank God we was all safed. Now I will tell you all about the Wreck. The sea was mountains high, and we had a cargo of spise and perils from Java on the left-hand side the map as you go to Australia. When the Pirite ship chased us we went down with all hands. But we constrickted a raft and sailed on and on till we had to draw lots who would drink the blood. Just right there a sailor cried 'A sail, A sail, and sure enough it was a sail. And now I will tell you all about Naples. There is a monsterious mountain there, or cone which belches horrid flames and lavar. Once upon' a time it belched all over a town by the name of Pompy and it is there till this very day. The bay of naples is the grandest in the world it is called the golden horn. Dearest Katherine, I am often on the mast at night. It is cold and shakey in that place and oh how the wind doth blow, but I ring a bell and say alls well which makes the saloon people truly glad. We had five stow-ways. One of them was a sweet fairhaired child from Liverpool, he was drove from home. But a good and beautious lady, one of the first new england families is going to adopt him and make him her only air. How beautiful and bright he stood as born to rule the storm. I weary for your letters darling Katherine.—Write soon to your true love till death, Charles.”
Kate struggled through this extraordinary epistle with astonishment. “Who in the world is it from?” she asked Bud.
“Charles, stupid,” said Bud, astonished that there should be any doubt about that point. “Didn't I—didn't we write him the other night? It was up to him to write back, wasn't it?”
“Of course,” said Kate, very conscious of that letter still unposted, “but—but he doesn't say Charles anything, just Charles. It's a daft like thing not to give his name; it might be anybody. There's my Charles, and there's Charles Maclean from Oronsay—what way am I to know which of them it is?”
“It'll be either or eyether,” said Bud. “Do you know Charles Maclean?”
“Of course I do,” said the maid. “He's following the sea, and we were well acquaint.”
“Did he propose to you?” asked Bud.
“Well, he did not exactly propose,” admitted Kate, “but we sometimes went a walk together to the churchyard on a Sunday, and you know yourself what that means out in Colonsay. I'll just keep the letter and think of it. It's the nicest letter I ever got, and full of information. It's Charles Maclean, I'll warrant you, but he did not use to call me Katherine—he just said Kate and his face would be as red as anything. Fancy him going down with all hands! My heart is sore for him,” and the maid there and then transferred her devotion from the misty lad of her own imagination to Charles Maclean of Oronsay.
“You'll help me to write him a letter back to-night,” she said.
“Yes, indeed, I'll love to,” said the child, wearily. But by the time the night came on, and Wanton Wully rang his curfew bell, and the rooks came clanging home to the tall trees of the forest, she was beyond all interest in life or love.
ANTON WULLY only briefly rang the morning bell, and gingerly, with tight-shut lips and deep nose breathings, as if its loud alarm could so be mitigated. Once before he had done it just as delicately—when the Earl was dying, and the bell-ringer, uncertain of his skill to toll, when the time came, with the right half-minute pauses, grieved the town and horrified the castle by a rehearsal in the middle of a winter night. But no soul of mercy is in brazen bells that hang aloof from man in lofty steeples, and this one, swung ever so gently, sullenly boomed—boomed—boomed.
“Oh, to the devil wi' ye!” said Wanton Wully, sweating with vexation. “Of all the senseless bells! A big, boss bluiter! I canna compel nor coax ye!” and he gave the rope one vicious tug that brought it, broken, round his ears, then went from the church into the sunny, silent, morning street, where life and the day suspended.
In faith, a senseless bell, a merciless bell, waking folk to toil and grief. Dr. Brash and Ailie, heavy-eyed, beside the bed in the attic bower, shivered at the sound of it, and looked with fear and yearning at the sleeping child.
Bud moved her head from side to side a little on the pillow, with a murmur from her parched lips, and there was a flicker of the eyelids—that was all. Between her and the everlasting swound, where giddily swings the world and all its living things, there seemed no more than a sheet of tissue-paper: it was as if a breath of the tender morning air would quench the wavering flame that once was joy and Lennox Dyce. The heart of Auntie Ailie rose clamoring in her bosom; her eyes stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clinched her teeth that she might still be worthy of the doctor's confidence.
He saw it, and put out his hand and pressed her shoulder, a fat, old-fashioned man, well up in years, with whiskers under his chin like a cravat, yet beautiful as a prince to Ailie, for on him all her hopes were cast. “They call me agnostic—atheist even, whiles, I hear,” he said, in the midst of their vigil; “and, indeed, I'm sometimes beat to get my mind beyond the mechanism, but—h'm!—a fine child, a noble child; she was made for something—h'm! That mind and talent—h'm!—that spirit—h'm!—the base of it was surely never yon gray stuff in the convolutions.” And another time the minister had come in (the folk in the street were furious to see him do it!), and timidly suggested prayer. “Prayer!” said Dr. Brash, “before this child, and her quite conscious! Man, what in God's own name are we doing here, this—h'm!—dear, good lady and I, but fever ourselves with sleepless, silent prayer? Do you think a proper prayer must be official? There's not a drop of stuff in a druggist's bottle but what's a solution of hope and faith and—h'm!—prayer. Confound it, sir!”
He put out his hand and pressed her on the shoulder, and never said a word. Oh, the doctors! the doctors! Hale men and hearty, we can see their shortcomings and can smile at them, but when the night-light burns among the phials!
It was the eighth day after Kate, with a face of clay and her sleeves rolled up, and the dough still on her elbows as she had come from the baking-board, burst upon the doctor in his surgery with the cry, “Dr. Brash, Dr. Brash! ye're to haste ye and come at once to the wee one!” He had gone as nearly on the wings of the wind as a fat man may in carpet slippers, and found a distracted family round the fevered child.
“Tut, tut, lassie,” said he, chucking her lightly under the chin. “What new prank is this, to be pretending illness? Or if it's not a let-on, I'll be bound it's MacGlashan's almond tablet.”
“It's these cursed crab-apples in the garden; I'm sure it's the crab-apples, doctor,” said Miss Bell, looking ten years older than her usual.
“H'm! I think not,” said Dr. Brash, more gravely, with his finger on the pulse.
“It's bound to be,” said Bell, piteous at having to give up her only hope. “Didn't you eat some yesterday, pet, after I told you that you were not for your life to touch them?”
“No,” said Bud, with hot and heavy breathing. “Then why didn't ye, why didn't ye; and then it might have been the apples?” said poor Miss Bell. “You shouldn't have minded me; I'm aye so domineering.”
“No, you're not,” said Bud, wanly smiling.
“Indeed I am; the thing's acknowledged and you needn't deny it,” said her auntie. “I'm desperate domineering to you.”
“Well, I'm—I'm not kicking,” said Bud. It was the last cheerful expression she gave utterance to for many days.
Wanton Wully was not long the only one that morning in the sunny street. Women came out unusually early, as it seemed, to beat their basses; but the first thing that they did was to look at the front of Daniel Dyce's house with a kind of terror lest none of the blinds should be up and Mr. Dyce's old kid glove should be off the knocker. “Have you heard what way she is keeping to-day?” they asked the bellman.
“Not a cheep!” said he. “I saw Kate sweepin' out her door-step, but I couldna ask her. That's the curse of my occupation; I wish to goodness they had another man for the grave-diggin'.”
“You and your graves!” said the women. “Who was mentioning them?”
He stood on the siver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce's house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that's what she was—a perfect caution! She called me Mr. Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”
“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.
“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tell't me once it was a kind o' weakness that they keep on gantrys doon in Maggie White's. But she does not understand—the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o' gout. Me! I never had the gout—I never had the money for it, more's the pity.”
He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh's cleansing department. Later—till the middle of the day—he was the harbor-master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped, too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces' house. “It's the parlor fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel' though I never had it; it's a good sign o' him the night before.”
Peter the post came clamping by-and-by along the street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces'. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back door and lightly tapped.
“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.
“She's got the turn!—she's got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”
“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.
“It's no' temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi' the weather-glass the doctor's aye so cross wi' that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But, anyway, she's better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not she'll starve hersel'.”
“That's rare! By George, that's tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons' balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.
Wanton Wully sat on a barrow-tram waiting the postman's exit. “What way is she?” said he, and Peter's errant eye cocked to all parts of the compass. What he wanted was to keep this titbit to himself, to have the satisfaction of passing it along with his letters. To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good-fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What way is she?” he asked again, seeing the postman's hesitation.
“If ye'll promise to stick to the head o' the toun and let me alone in the ither end, I'll tell ye,” said Peter, and it was so agreed.
But they had not long all the glory of the good tidings to themselves. Dr. Brash came out of Dyce's house for the first time in two days, very sunken in the eyes and sorely needing shaving, and it could be noticed by the dullest that he had his jaunty walk and a flower in the lapel of his badly crushed coat. Ailie put it there with trembling fingers; she could have kissed the man besides, if there had not been the chance that he might think her only another silly woman. Later Footles hurled himself in fury from the doorway, his master close behind him. At the sight of Mr. Dyce the street was happy; it was the first time they had seen him for a week. In burgh towns that are small enough we have this compensation, that if we have to grieve in common over many things, a good man's personal joy exalts us all.
“She's better, Mr. Dyce, I'm hearing,” said P. & A. MacGlashan, wiping his hands on his apron to prepare for a fervent clasp from one who he ought to have known was not of the fervent-clasping kind.
“Thank God! Thank God!” said Mr. Dyce. “You would know she was pretty far through?”
“Well—we kind of jaloused. But we kent there was no danger—the thing would be ridiculous!” said P. & A. MacGlashan, and went into his shop in a hurry, much uplifted, too, and picked out a big bunch of black grapes and sent his boy with them, with his compliments, to Miss Lennox Dyce, care of Daniel Dyce, Esquire, Writer.
Miss Minto so adored the man she could not show herself to him in an hour like that; for she knew that she must weep, and a face begrutten ill became her, so in she came from the door of her Emporium and watched him pass the window. She saw in him what she had never seen before—for in his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say—she saw, with the sharp eyes of a woman who looks at the man she would like to manage, that his hat was dusty and his boots not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week from the Dyces' dwelling it realized for her the state of things there.
“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he's quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence ha'penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they called “Miss Minto's back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace, a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss Minto's youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen—if queens are attired in gorgeous, hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss Minto's life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But she thought how happy Mr. Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.
As she knocked lightly at the front door, the old kid glove came loose in her hand—an omen! One glance up and down the street to see that no one noticed her, and then she slipped it in her pocket, with a guilty countenance. She was not young, at least she was not in her 'teens, but young enough to do a thing like that for luck and her liking of Daniel Dyce. Yet her courage failed her, and when Kate came to the door the first thing she handed to her was the glove.
“It fell off,” she said. “I hope it means that it's no longer needed. And this is a little thing for Miss Lennox, Kate; you will give her it with my compliments. I hear there's an improvement?”
“You wouldnabelieveit!” said Kate. “Thank God she'll soon be carrying on as bad as ever!”
Mr. Dyce would not have cared a rap that morning if he had come upon his clerks at Catch-the-Ten, or even playing leap-frog on their desks. He was humming a psalm you may guess at as he looked at the documents heaped on his table—his calf-bound books and the dark, japanned deed-boxes round his room.
“Everything just the same, and business still going on!” he said to his clerk. “Dear me! dear me! what a desperate world! Do you know, I had the notion that everything was stopped. No, when I think of it, I oftener fancied all this was a dream.”
“Not Menzies vs. Kilblane, at any rate,” said the clerk, with his hand on a bulky Process, for he was a cheery soul and knew the mind of Daniel Dyce.
“I dare say not,” said the lawyer. “That plea will last a while, I'm thinking. And all about a five-pound fence! Let you and me, Alexander, thank our stars there are no sick bairns in the house of either Menzies or Kilblane, for then they would understand how much their silly fence mattered, and pity be on our Table-of-Fees!” He tossed over the papers with an impatient hand. “Trash!” said he. “What frightful trash! I can't be bothered with them—not to-day. They're no more to me than a docken leaf. And last week they were almost everything. You'll have heard the child has got the turn?”
“I should think I did!” said Alexander. “And no one better pleased to hear it!”
“Thank you, Alick. How's the family?”
“Fine,” said the clerk.
“Let me think, now—seven, isn't it? A big responsibility.”
“Not so bad as long's we have the health,” said Alexander.
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Dyce. “All one wants in this world is the health—and a little more money. I was just thinking—” He stopped himself, hummed a bar of melody, and twinkled through his spectacles. “You'll have read Dickens?” said he.
“I was familiar with his works when I was young,” said Alexander, like a man confessing that in youth he played at bools. “They were not bad.”
“Just so! Well, do you know there was an idea came to my mind just now that's too clearly the consequence of reading Dickens for a week back, so I'll hold my hand and keep my project for another early occasion when it won't be Dickens that's dictating.”
He went early back that day, to relieve Ailie at her nursing, as he pretended to himself, but really for his own delight in looking at the life in eyes where yesterday was a cloud. A new, fresh, wholesome air seemed to fill the house. Bud lay on high pillows, with Miss Minto's Grace propped against her knees, and the garret was full of the odor of flowers that had come in a glorious bunch from the banker's garden. Bell had grown miraculously young again, and from between Ailie's eyebrows had disappeared the two black lines that had come there when Dr. Brash had dropped in her ear the dreadful word pneumonia. But Dr. Brash had beaten it! Oh, if she only knew the way to knit a winter waistcoat for him!
The child put out her hand to her uncle, and he kissed her on the palm, frightful even yet of putting a lip to her cheek, lest he should experience again the terror of the hot breath from that consuming inward fire.
“Well,” said he, briskly, “how's our health, your ladyship? Losh bless me! What a fine, big, sonsy baby you have gotten here; poor Alibel's nose will be out of joint, I'm thinking.”
“Hasn't got any,” said Bud, still weakly, in her new, thin, and unpractised voice, as she turned with a look that showed no lessening affection for the old doll, badly battered in the visage and wanting in the limbs, which lay beside her on the pillow.
“Blythmeat and breadberry,” said Daniel Dyce. “In the house of Daniel Dyce! Bell and Ailie, here's an example for you!”