THERE was joy a few days later in the Dyces' kitchen when Peter the postman, with a snort that showed the bitterness of his feelings, passed through the window a parcel for Kate that on the face of it had come from foreign parts. “I don't ken who it's from, and ye're no' to think I'm askin',” said he; “but the stamps alone for that thing must have cost a bonny penny.”
“Did they, indeed!” said Kate, with a toss of her head. “Ye'll be glad to ken he can well afford it!” and she sniffed at the parcel redolent of perfumes strange and strong.
“Ye needna snap the nose off me,” said the postman; “I only made the remark. What—what does the fellow, do?”
“He's a traveller for railway tunnels,” retorted the maid of Colonsay, and shut the window with a bang, to tear open the parcel in a frenzy of expectation and find a bottle of Genuine Riga Balsam—wonderful cure for sailors' wounds!—another of Florida Water, and a silver locket, with a note from Charles saying the poem she had sent was truly grand, and wishing her many happy returns of the day. Like many of Charles's letters now, its meaning was, in parts, beyond her, until she could learn from Bud the nature of the one to which it was an answer—for Bud was so far enraptured with the wandering sailor that she sometimes sent him letters which the servant never saw. That day the breakfast service smelled of Florida Water, for Kate had drenched herself with the perfume, and Miss Bell was sure she had washed the dishes again with scented soap, as was the habit of the girl when first she came from Colonsay and thought that nothing but Brown Windsor would do justice to Grandma Buntain's tea-set used on Sundays. But Bud could see the signs of Shipping Intelligence, and as soon as she could she hastened to the kitchen, for it was Saturday, and on Saturdays there were no lessons in the Dyce Academy. Oh, how she and Kate fondled the bottles lovingly, and sniffed passionately at their contents, and took turn about of the locket! The maid had but one regret, that she had no immediate use for Riga Balsam; but Bud was more devoted than that—she gently pricked the palm of her hand with a pin and applied the Genuine. “Oh, how he must love me—us, I mean!” she exclaimed, and eagerly devoured his letter.
“What did you say to him in the last?” asked Kate. “He's talking there about a poetry, and happy returns of the day.”
Bud confessed she had made a poem for him from his beloved Kate, and had reckoned on fetching a gift of candy by telling him her birthday was on Monday. “It really I'd just as lief have the balsam,” said she; “it's perfectly lovely; how it nips!”
“It's not my birthday at all,” said Kate. “My birthday's always on the second Sunday in September. I was born about the same time as Lady Anne—either a fortnight before or a fortnight after; I forget mysel' completely which it was, and I dare say so does she.”
“No, but Monday's my birthday, right enough,” said Bud, “and seeing that we're sort of loving him in company, I s'posed it would be all the same.”
“So it is; I'm not complainin',” said the maid. “And now we'll have to send him something back. What would you recommend?”
They considered many gifts appropriate for a sailor—sou'westers, Bible-markers, woollen comforters, and paper-knives, scarf-pins, gloves, and ties. Bud was sure that nothing would delight him like a book about a desert island, but Kate said no, a pipe was just the very ticket—a wooden pipe with silver mountings; the very one to suit was in the window of Mrs. Wright's Italian warehouse.
“What's an Italian warehouse?” asked the child. “You have me there,” said Kate, “unless, maybe, her husband was Italian before he went and died on her. 'Italian Warehouse' is the only thing that's on her sign. She sells a thing for almost any price you like to offer, because the Bible says it's not the thing at all to argy-bargy.”
“Iknow,” said Bud; “it's what we call running a business on—on—on philanthropic principles. I'd love to see a body do it. I'll run out and buy the pipe from Mrs. Wright, Kate.”
She departed on her errand down the town, at the other side of the church; and the hours of the forenoon passed, and dinner-time was almost come, and still there was no sign of her returning. Kate would have lost her patience and gone to seek for her, but found so much to interest her at the window that she quite forgot her messenger. Something out of the ordinary was happening on the other side of the church. Wanton Wully knew what it was, but of course he was not telling, for he was out as public crier, rousing the town with his hand-bell, and shouting “Notice!” with an air that promised some tremendous tidings; but beyond mysterious words like “bed-rock prices,” which he mumbled from a paper in his hand, there was nothing to show this proclamation differed from the common ones regarding herring at the quay or a sale of delft down-by at John Turner's corner. “What are ye crying?” they asked him, but being a man with the belief that he had a voice as clear as a concert singer he would not condescend to tell them. Only when some one looked across his shoulder and read the paper for himself was it found that a sale described as “Revolutionary” was taking place at the Italian warehouse. Half the town at once went to see what the decent body was up to. Kate saw them hurrying down, and when they came back they were laughing. “What's the ploy?” she asked a passer-by.
“A sale at the Pilgrim weedow's,” she was told. “She's put past herSpurgeon's Sermonsand got a book aboot business, and she's learnin' the way to keep an Italian warehouse in Scotch.”
Kate would have been down the town at once to see this marvel for herself, but her pot was on the boil, and here was the mistress coming down the stair crying, “Lennox, Lennox!” The maid's heart sank. She had forgotten Lennox, and how could she explain her absence to a lady so particular? But for the moment she was spared the explanation, for the bark of Footles filled the street and Mr. Dyce came into the lobby laughing.
“You're very joco!” said his sister, helping him off with his coat. “What are you laughing at?”
“The drollest thing imaginable,” said he. “I have just left Captain Consequence in a terrible rage about a letter that a boy has brought to him from Mrs. Wright. He's one of the folk who brag of paying as they go but never make a start. It seems he's as much in debt to her as to most of the other merchants in the place, but wasn't losing any sleep about it, for she's such a softy. This letter has given him a start. He showed it to me, with the notion that it was a libel or a threat that might be actionable, but I assured him I couldn't have written one more to the point myself. It said that unless he paid at once something would be apt to happen that would create him the utmost astonishment.”
“Mercy on us! That's not very like the widow; she must be getting desperate.”
“It was the wording of the thing abused me,” said Mr. Dyce, walking into the parlor still chuckling—“'something will be apt to happen that will create you the utmost astonishment'—it suggests such awful possibilities. And it's going to serve its purpose, too, for the Captain's off to pay her, sure it means a scandal.” Kate took the chance to rush round the kirk in search of her messenger. “This way for the big bargains!” cried some lads coming back from the Italian warehouse, or, “Hey! ye've missed a step”—which shows how funny we can be in the smallest burgh towns—but Kate said nothing only “trash!” to herself in indignation, and tried by holding in her breath to keep from getting red.
The shop of the Pilgrim widow suffered from its signboard, that was “far too big for its job, like the sweep that stuck in my granny's chimney,” as Mr. Dyce said. Once the sign had been P. & A.'s, but P. & A's good lady tired of hearing her husband nicknamed the Italian, and it went back to the painter, who partly paid with it a debt to the Pilgrim widow, who long since rued her acquisition. She felt in her soul it was a worldly vanity—that a signboard less obtrusive on the public eye would more befit herself and her two meek little windows, where fly-papers, fancy goods, sweetmeats, cigarettes, country eggs, and cordial invitations to the Pilgrims' Mission Bethel every Friday (D. V.), eight o'clock, kept one another incongruous and dusty company. A decent, pious widow, but ah! so wanting any saving sense of guile. The Pilgrim Mission was the thing she really lived for, and her shop was the cross she bore. But to-day it was scarcely recognizable: the windows had been swept of their stale contents', and one was filled with piles of rosy apples, the other with nuts that poured in a tempting cataract from a cask upset with an air of reckless prodigality. A large, hand-lettered bill was in each window; one said:
“HALLOWE'EN! ARISE AND SHINE!” and the other:
what was to be done being left to the imagination. All forenoon there had been a steady flow of customers, who came out of the shop with more than nuts or apples, greatly amazed at the change in the Pilgrim widow, who was cracking up her goods like any common sinner. Behind the railed and curtained box, in which she was supposed to keep her books and pray for the whole community, there seemed to be some secret stimulating influence, for when bad payers tried to-day to get a thing on credit, and she was on the point of yielding, she would dart into the box and out again as hard as steel, insisting that at every Revolutionary Sale the terms were cash. She was giving bargains, but at her own price, never at her customers', as it used to be. The Health Saline—extract of the finest fruit, Cooling, Refreshing, Invigorating, Tonic (though indeed it looked like an old friend from Rochelle with a dash of sugar and tartaric)—was down a ha'penny, to less than what it cost, according to another hand-done bill upon the counter. When they asked her how she could afford to sell the stuff below its cost, she seemed ashamed and startled, till she had a moment in behind the curtains, and then she told them it was all because of the large turn-over; she could not afford to sell the saline under cost if she did not sell it in tremendous quantities.
Did they want Ward's Matchless Polishing Paste?—alas! (after a dash behind the curtains) she was completely out of it. Of late it had been in such great demand that she got tired of ordering it every other week wholesale. Yes, she was out of Ward's, but (again the curtained box) what about this wonderful line in calf-foot jelly, highly praised by the—by the connoisseurs? What were connoisseurs? A connoisseur (again on reference behind the curtains) was one of those wealthy men who could swallow anything.
“I'll tell ye what it is,” said the tailor, “I see't at last! She's got a book in there; I've seen't before—The Way to Conduct a Retail Business—and when she runs behind, it's to see what she should say to the customers. That's where she got the notions for her window and the 'Do it Now!'”
But he was wrong—completely wrong, for when Kate came into the shop with “Have you seen Miss Lennox, Mrs. Wright? I sent her here a message hours ago,” Lennox herself came from the curtained box saying, “Hello, Kate; saw you first! What can we do for you to day?”
“My stars! you'll catch it!” said the maid. “They're waiting yonder on you for your dinner.”
“I was just heading for home,” said Bud, making for the door.
“My child! my child! my angel child!” cried the Pilgrim widow, going to kiss her, but Bud drew back.
“Not to-day, please; I'm miles too big for kissing to-day,” said she, and marched solemnly out of the Italian warehouse.
“What in the world were you doing away so long?” asked Kate. “Were you carrying on at anything?”
“I was paying for Charles's pipe,” said the child, returning the money she had got for its purchase. “That's the sweetest lady, Mrs. Wright, but my! ain't she Baby Mine when it settles down to business? When I wanted to buy the pipe, she was so tickled she wanted me to have it for nothing, seeing I was Mr. Dyce's niece. She said Uncle Dan was a man of God, who saved her more than once from bankruptcy, and it was a pretty old pipe anyway, that had been in the window since the time she got changed and dropped brocaded dolmans. You'd think it made her ache to have folk come in her shop and spend money; I guess she was raised for use in a free-soup kitchen. I said I'd take the pipe for nothing if she'd throw in a little game with it. 'What game?' said she—oh, she's a nice lady!—and I said I was just dying to have a try at keeping a really really shop, and would show her Chicago way.And you bet I did, Kate MacNeill!”
She came in with the soup, but no question was put till her uncle asked the blessing, and then, before a spoon was lifted, Auntie Bell said, “Lassie, lassie, where in the world have you been?”
“Keeping shop for Mrs. Wright,” said Bud.
“Tcht! tcht! you're beyond redemption,” cried her aunt. “A child like you keeping shop!”
“A bonny pair of shopkeepers, the widow and you! which of you counted the change?” said Uncle Dan. “Tell us all about it.”
“Well, I had the loveliest time,” said Bud. “It would take till tea-time to tell just 'zactly what a lovely day it was, but I'll hurry up and make it a front scene. What you said, Uncle Dan, about her running a shop on phil—on philanthropic principles made me keen to see her doing it, and I went down a message for Kate, and offered to help. She lowed herself she wasn't the best there was in the land at keeping shop, and didn't seem to make much money at it, but said thank the Lord she had the priceless boon of health. I was the first customer she'd set eyes on all the morning, 'cept a man that wanted change for half a crown and hadn't the half-crown with him, but said he'd pay it when he didn't see her again, and she said she felt sure that trade was going to take a turn. I said I thought it would turn quicker if—if—if she gave it a push herself, and she said she dared say there was something in it, and hoped I was in the fold. I said I was, sure, and at that she cried out 'Hallelujah!' Every other way she was 'a perfectly perfect lady; she made goo-goo eyes at me, and skipped round doing anything I told her. First she cleared all the old truck out of the windows, and filled them up with nuts and apples for Hallowe'en, till they looked the way windows never looked in Scotland in all creation before, I s'pose. 'They'll think it kind of daft,' says she, scared-like, 'they're not like any other windows in the place.' 'Of course not,' I said, 'and that's the very thing to jar the eye of the passer-by.' Jim Molyneux said a shop-window was like a play-bill, it wanted a star line—a feature—a whoop. Then I tried to think of the 'cute things shopkeepers print in Chicago, but couldn't remember any 'cepting 'Pants two dollars a leg, seats free,' but the widow said she didn't sell pants. Then I thought of some natty little cards I'd seen that said 'Arise and Shine!' and 'Do it Now!' so I got her to print these words good and big, and put them in the window. She wanted to know what they meant, but I said I couldn't tell from Adam, but they would make the people wonder, and come in the shop to find out, and then it would be up to her to sell them something and pry the money out of them before they balked. Oh, Auntie, how I go on!” and here Bud stopped almost breathless and a little ashamed.
“Go on! go on!” cried Ailie.
“Well, I got behind a curtain into a little box-office, where the widow kept a cash-book awfully doggy-eared, and a pile of printed sermons, and heaps of tracts about doing to others as you should be done by, and giving to the poor and lending to the Lord. She read bits of them to me, and said she sometimes wondered if Captain Brodie was too poor to pay for eighteen months' tobacco, but she didn't like to press him, seeing he had been in India and fought his country's battles. She said she felt she must write him again for her money, but couldn't think of what to say that would be Christian and polite and gentle, but still make him see she wanted the money pretty bad. I said I would tell her what to say that would suit just fine, and I dictated it—”
“I saw the letter,” said Uncle Dan, twinkling through his glasses. “It was a work of genius—go on! go on!”
“Then folk began to come in for nuts and apples, and asked what 'Arise and Shine' and 'Do it Now' meant. She said they were messages from the angel of the Lord—meaning me, I s'pose—though, goodness knows, I'm not much of an angel, am I, Auntie Bell? Then the folk would fade away, looking a bit rattled, and come back in a while and ask the price of things. She'd say she wasn't sure, but she thought about a shilling, or maybe ninepence, seeing they had a young family, and then they'd want the stuff on credit, and she'd yammer away to them till I got wild. When they were gone I had a good heart-to-heart talk with her, and said phil-philanthropic principles were a great mistake in a small Italian warehouse, and that she ought to give the customers a chance of doing unto others as they would be done by. She made more goo-goo eyes at me, and said I was a caution, sure enough, and perhaps I was right, for she had never looked at it that way before. After that she spunked up wonderful. I got her to send Mr. Wanton through the town with his bell, saying there was everything you wanted at Mrs. Wright's at bed-rock prices; and when people came in after that and wanted to get things for nothing, or next to it, she'd pop into the box where I lay low, and ask me what she was to say next, and then skip out to them as sharp as a tack and show they needn't try to toy with her. She says she made more money to-day by my playing shop Chicago-way than she'd make in a week her own way. Why, I'm talking, and talking, and talking, and my soup's stone cold!”
“So's mine,” said Uncle Dan, with a start.
“And mine!” said Auntie Ailie, with a smile.
“And mine too, I declare!” cried Miss Bell, with a laugh they all joined in, till Footles raised his voice protesting.
YES, that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce. There was a happy night to follow soon, and it is my grief that my pen cannot grasp the spirit of it, so that reading you would laugh with her and whiles be eerie. 'Tis true there was little in the thing itself as in most that at the age of twelve impresses us for all our lives, but it met in some degree the expectations that her father's tales of Scotland had sent home with her. Hitherto all had been natural and wellnigh commonplace that she had experienced, all except the folk so queer and kind and comical in a different way from those in Chicago, the sounds she could hear as she lay in her attic bed—the wind-call, and the honk of geese, and the feeling of an island hopelessly remote from the new bright world that best she knew—remote and lost, a speck on the sea far, far from great America. The last things vaguely troubled her. For she was child enough as yet to shiver at things not touched by daylight nor seemingly made plain by the common-sense of man. She could laugh at the ghosts that curdled the blood of the maid of Colonsay; and yet at times, by an effort of the will, she could feel all Kate's terror at some manifestation no more alarming than the cheep of mice or a death-watch ticking in a corner cupboard. These were but crude and vulgar fears, self-encouraged little actress terrors. It took more than the hint of ghost or the menace of the ticking insect in the wood to wake in her the feeling of worlds unrealized, encompassing, that she could get from casual verses in her auntie Ailie's book of Scottish ballads, or find o'erwhelm her of a sudden on looking from her window into the garden bare and palid below the moon.
This night there should be moon according to the penny almanac, and Wanton Wully lit no lamps, but went home for a good sleep to himself, as his saying went, and left the burgh to such illumination as should come to it by the caprice of the clouds. It lay, the little place, for most of the night in darkness: a mirk so measureless deep, when the shops were shut, that the red-lit skylight windows at the upper end of the town seemed by some miracle to lift themselves and soar into the heavens—square, monstrous, flitting stars to the vision of Bud, as she stood with Auntie Ailie at the door watching for Uncle Dan's return from his office. To bring the soaring windows back to their natural situation, she had to stand a little way inside the lobby and establish their customary place against the darkness by the lintel of the door.
From the other side of the church came a sound of dull, monotonous drumming—no cheerful, rhythmic beat like the drumming of John Taggart, but a mournful thumping, fitful in flaws of the bland night wind.
“What's that, Auntie?” she asked.
“The guizards,” said Miss Ailie, looking down upon her in the lobby light with a smile she could not see. “Did you never hear of the guizards, Bud?”
Bud had never heard of the guizards; that was one thing, surely, her father had forgotten. She had heard of Hallowe'en, she said, when further questioned. Wasn't it the night for ducking into tubs for apples? The Pilgrim widow had told her Hallowe'en was coming, and it was for Hallowe'en she had sold so many nuts and apples; but the widow said she felt ashamed to do it, for Hallowe'en was not approved of by the Mission, being idolatrous and gay. “Is it very gay?” asked Bud, anxiously.
“So I used to think it,” said her aunt.
“Then I s'pose it must be wicked,” said the child, regretfully. “I'd have expected you'd have Hallowe'en right here in the house if it hadn't been very bad. That widow did me a lot of good, showing me what a heap of happy things are full of sin. She knew them all! I s'pose she got them in the tracts. Yes, she did me a lot of good; I—I almost wish I hadn't met that widow.”
“Do you feel wicked when you're gay?” asked Miss Ailie.
“Mercy on us! not a mite!” said Bud. “I feel plumb full of goodness when I'm gay; but that's my youth and innocence. The widow says it is, and I guess what she says goes.”
“Still, do you know, my dear, I'd risk a little gayety now and then,” said Auntie Ailie. “Who knows? The widow, though a worthy lady, is what in Scotland we call an old wife, and it's generally admitted that old wives of either sex have no monopoly of wisdom. If you're wanting pious guidance, Bud, I don't know where you'll get it better than from Auntie Bell; and she fairly dotes on Hallowe'en and the guizards. By-and-by you'll see the guizards, and—and—well, just wait and we'll find what else is to be seen. I do wish your uncle Dan would hurry.”
The street was quite deserted, but did not show its vacancy until the clouds for a moment drifted off the moon that rolled behind the steeple. Then the long, gray stretch of tenements came out unreal and pale on the other side of the street, their eaves and chimneys throwing inky shadows, their red-lit windows growing of a sudden wan. Over them hung the ponderous kirk, the master shadow, and all—the white-harled walls, the orange windows, the glittering cold, and empty street—seemed like the vision of a dream. Then the clouds wrapped up the moon again, and the black was the black of Erebus. But as it fell, the dull drums seemed to come nearer, and from the head of the street, the windy corner where Uncle Dan had his office, small moons came, purple and golden, fantastically carved. They ran from house to house, and grouped in galaxies, or singly fell apart, swinging and giddy orbs. For a moment Bud looked at them bewildered, then gave a happy scream.
“The lanterns! the lanterns! Look at the lanterns, Auntie. Is that Hallowe'en?”
“That's part of it, at least,” said her aunt; “these are the guizards, with their turnip lanterns; they're going round the houses singing; by-and-by we'll hear them.”
“My! I wish to goodness I had a lantern like that. To swing a lantern like that I'd feel like being a lighthouse or the statue of Liberty at New York. I'd rather have a turnip lantern than a raft of dolls.”
“Did, you never have one?”
“No,” said Bud, sorrowfully. “You have no idea what a poor mean place Chicago is—not a thing but common electric light!” And Miss Ailie smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret. “I wish that brother of mine would come quickly.” she said, and at the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern.
“Here, Bud,” said he, “take this quickly, before some silly body sees me with it and thinks it's for myself. I have the name, I know, of being daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce was going round at Hallowe'en with a turnip lantern, they would think he had lost his head in a double sense, and it would be very bad for business.”
“Uncle!” cried the child, in ecstasy, “you're the loveliest, sweetest man in the whole wide world.”
“I dare say,” said he. “I have been much admired when I was younger. But in this case don't blame me. I wash my hands of the responsibility. I got my orders for that thing from your auntie Bell.”
“My! ain't it cute! Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his glasses to look at it himself.
“No,” said he, “though I've made a few of them in my time. All that's needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory's Mixture in the morning.”
“What's the Gregory's Mixture for?”
“In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr. Dyce. “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn't that I know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the Gregory. I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit of it. I'm thinking that his Gregory's nearly due.”
Bud hardly listened, she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate! Kate!” she cried; “let me in to light my lantern.”
Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer.
“Open the door—quick, quick!” cried Bud, again, and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said:
“Yes, open, Kate; I think we're ready.”
The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun.
Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which I'm thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavor of old time and the book of ballads. She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered, black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop—the thing we call a dallan. She had never discovered before what a soul of gayety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realized her dancing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you're fey!”
“Indeed, and I dare say you're right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted. “At my time of life it's daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet's seminary.”
Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home; so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back.
But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That, so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams. Notably was she good at Hallowe'en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute.
They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spae-wife's door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering, vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbor, and that meant a sailor husband.
“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, andthatwas the name of the sailor husband. Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious, wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and gray and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand, with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armor in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running, with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland—Scotland where witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street—it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.
“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I had to say it, though I s'pose it means I've lost him for a husband.”
“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.
SPRING came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child—in that old Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the neuk of the burgh walls. It must have been because the Dyces loved so much their garden, and spent so many hours there, that they were so sanely merry, nor let too often or too long the Scots' forebodings quell their spirits, but got lessons of hope from the circling of the seasons, that give us beauty and decay in an unvarying alternation.
“It is the time,” used Ailie to say of the spring, “when a delicious feeling steals over you of wanting to sit down and watch other people work.”
“I'll need to have the lawn-mower sharpened; it may be needed at any moment by the neighbors,” said her brother Dan.
They watched upspring the green spears of the daffodils, that by-and-by should bear their flags of gold.
And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing, or cleaning the streets, or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought—as he would call it—in the Dyce's garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything, so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy man. But being handy is its own reward, carrying with it the soothing sense of self-sufficiency, so we need not vex ourselves for Wully. As he said himself, he “did the turn” for plain, un-ornamental gardening, though in truth he seemed to think he did it best when sitting on his barrow trams, smoking a thoughtful pipe and watching the glad spring hours go by at a cost of sixpence each to the lawyer who employed him.
Bud often joined him on the trams, and gravely listened to him, thinking that a man who did so many different and interesting things in a day was wise and gifted beyond ordinary. In the old and abler years he had been 'a soldier, and, nursing flowers nowadays, his mind would oft incongruously dwell on scenes remote and terribly different where he had delved in foreign marl for the burial of fallen comrades.
“Tell me Inkerman again, Mr. Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I'll shoo off the birds from the blub-flow-ers.
“I'll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe, and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and chasing birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the mischief with them birds! the garden's fair polluted wi' them! God knows what's the use o' them except for chirping, chirping—Tchoo! off wi' ye at once, or I'll be after ye!—Ay, ay, Inkerman. It was a gey long day, I'm tellin' ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter, slaughter a' the time; me wi' an awfu' hacked heel, and no' a bit o' anything in my stomach. A nesty, saft day, wi' a smirr o' rain. We were as black as—as black as—as—”
“As black as the Earl o' Hell's waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I mind the very words.”
“I only said that the once,” said Wully, shocked at her glibness in the uptake. “And it's not a thing for the like o' you to say at all; it's only the word o' a rowdy sodger.”
“Well, ain't I the limb! I'll not say it again,” promised the child; “you needn't look as solemn's the Last Trump. Go on, go on!”
“As black as a ton o' coal, wi; the creesh o' the cartridges and the poother; it was the Minié gun, ye ken. And the Rooshians would be just ower there between the midden and the cold-frame, and we would be coming doon on them—it micht be ower the sclates o' Rodger's hoose yonder. We were in the Heavy Diveesion, and I kill't my first man that I kent o' aboot where the yellow crocus is. Puir sowl! I had nae ill-will to the man, I'll guarantee ye that; but we were baith unloaded when we met each other, and it had to be him or me.”
He paused and firmed his mouth until the lips were lost among the puckers gathered round them, a curious glint in his eyes.
“Go on!” cried Bud, sucking in her breath with a horrid expectation, “ye gie'd him—ye gie'd him—”
“I gie'd him—I tell't ye what I gie'd him before. Will I need to say't again?”
“Yes,” said Bud, “for that's your top note.”
“I gie'd him—I gie'd him the—thebaggonet!” cried the gardener, with a sudden, frightful, furious flinging of the arms, and then—oh, silly Wully Oliver!—began to weep, or at least to show a tear. For Bud had taught him to think of all that lay beyond that furious thrust of the bayonet—the bright, brave life extinguished, the mother rendered childless, or the children fatherless, in some Russian home.
Bell, the thrifty woman, looking from the scullery window, and seeing time sadly wasted at twelve bawbees the hour, would come out and send the child in to her lessons, but still the orra gardener did not hurry to his task, for he knew the way to keep Miss Dyce in an idle crack, although she would not sit on his barrow trams.
“A wonderfu' wean that!” would be his opening. “A perfect caution! I can see a difference on her every day; she grows like a willow withy, and she's losin' yon awfu' Yankee awcent she had about her when she came at first. She speaks as bonny English noo as you or me, when she puts her mind to't.”
“I'm afraid it would not be very difficult for her to do that, Willy,” said Miss Bell. “She could always speak in any way she wanted, and, indeed, the first time that we heard her she was just yoursel' on a New Year's morning, even to the hiccough. I hope you'll keep a watch on what you say to her; the bairn picks up the things she hears so fast, and she's so innocent, that it's hardly canny to let her listen much to the talk of a man that's been a soldier—not that I blame the soldiers, Willy, bless them all for Scotland, young or old!”
“Not a word out of place from me, Miss Dyce,” would he cry, emphatic. “Only once I slippit oot a hell, and could have bit my tongue oot for it. We heard, ye ken, a lot o' hells oot yonder roond aboot Sevastapool: it wasna Mr. Meikle's Sunday-school. But ye needna fear that Wully Oliver would learn ill language to a lady like the wee one. Whatever I am that's silly when the dram is in, I hope I'm aye the perfect gentleman.”
“Indeed, I never doubted it,” said Miss Bell. “But you know yourself we're anxious that she should be all that's gentle, nice, and clean. When you're done raking this bed—dear me! I'm keeping you from getting at it—it 'll be time for you to go home for dinner. Take a bundle of rhubarb for the mistress.”
“Thanky, thanky, me'm,” said Wanton Wully, “but, to tell the truth, we're kind o' tired o' rhubarb; I'm getting it by the stone from every bit o' grun I'm laborin' in. I wish folk were so rife wi' plooms or strawberries.”
Bell laughed. “It's the herb of kindness,” said she. “There's aye a reason for everything in nature, and rhubarb's meant to keep our generosity in practice.” And there she would be, the foolish woman, keeping him at the crack, the very thing he wanted, till Mr. Dyce himself, maybe, seeing his silver hours mishandled, would come to send his sister in, and see his gardener earned at least a little of his wages.
“A terrible man for the ladies, William!” was all that the lawyer had to say. “There was some talk about doing a little to the garden, but, hoots, man! don't let it spoil your smoke!”
It was then you would see Wanton Wully busy. Where would Bud be then? At her lessons? No, no, you may be sure of it; but in with Kate of Colonsay, giving the maid the bloody tale of Inkerman. It was a far finer and more moving story as it came from Bud than ever it was on the lips of Wanton Wully. From him she only got the fling of the arms that drove the bayonet home, the lips pursed up as if they were gathered by a string, the fire of the moment, and the broad Scots tongue he spoke in. To what he gave she added fancy and the drama.
“As black as a ton o' coal, wi' the creesh o' the cartridges;... either him or me;... I gie'd him,... I gie'd him;... I shut my eyes, and said, 'O God, Thy pardon!' and gie'd him thebaggonet!”
Kate's apron at that would fly up to cover her eyes, for she saw before her all the bloody spectacle. “I'm that glad,” she would say, “that my lad's a sailor. I couldna sleep one iota at night thinkin' of their baggonets if he was a man o' war. And that puts me in mind, my dear, it's more than a week since we sent the chap a letter. Have you time the now to sit and write a scrape to Hamburg on the Elbow—imports iron ore?”
And Bud had time, and sit she would and write a lovely letter to Charles Maclean of Oronsay. She told him that her heart was sore, but she must confess that she had one time plighted her troth to a Russian army officer, who died, alas! on the bloody field. His last words, as his life-blood slowly ebbed away, were:
“Whatwouldbe the last words of a Russian officer who loved you?” asked Bud, biting her pen in her perplexity.
“Toots! anything—'my best respects to Kate,'” said the maid, who had learned by this time that the letters Charles liked the most were the ones where Bud most freely used imagination.
“I don't believe it would,” said Bud. “It'd sound far too calm for a man that's busy dying.” But she put it down all the same, feeling it was only fair that Kate should have some say in the letters written in her name.
That was the day they gave him a hint that a captain was wanted on the yacht of Lady Anne.
And still Kate's education made some progress, as you may see from what she knew of Hamburg, though she was not yet the length of writing her own love-letters. She would sit at times at night for hours quite docile, knitting in the kitchen, listening to the reading of the child. A score of books had been tried on her by Aunt Ailie's counsel (for she was in the secret of this Lower Dyce Academy), but none there was that hit the pupil's fancy half so much as her own old favorite penny novelettes till they came one happy day toThe Pickwick Papers. Kate grew very fond ofThe Pickwick Papers. The fun of them being in a language quite unknown in Colonsay was almost all beyond her. But “that poor Mr. Puckwuck!” she would cry at each untoward accident; “oh, the poor wee man!” and the folk were as real to her as if she had known them all in Colonsay. If Dickens could have known the curious sentiments his wandering hero roused in this Highland servant mind he would have greatly wondered.
While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew as fast in her mind as in her body; each day she seemed to drift farther away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would preserve her—into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie Ailie's magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. So Bell determined there and then to coax her into the gentle arts of domesticity that ever had had a fascination for herself. She went about it, oh, so cunningly! letting Bud play at the making of beds and the dusting of the stair-rails and the parlor beltings—the curly-wurly places, as she called them, full of quirks and holes and corners that the unelect like Kate of Colonsay will always treat perfunctorily in a general wipe that only drives the dirt the farther in. Bud missed not the tiniest corner nor the deepest nook; whatever she did, she did fastidiously, much to the joy of her aunt, who was sure it was a sign she was meant by the Lord for a proper housewife. But the child soon tired of making beds and dusting, as she did of white-seam sewing; and when Bell deplored this falling off, Ailie said: “You cannot expect everybody to have the same gifts as yourself. Now that she has proved she's fit to clean a railing properly, she's not so much to blame if she loses interest in it. The child's a genius, Bell, and to a person of her temperament the thing that's easily done is apt to be contemptuous; the glory's in the triumph over difficulties, in getting on—getting on—getting on,” and Ailie's face grew warm with some internal fire.
At that speech Bell was silent. She thought it just another of Ailie's haiverings; but Mr. Dyce, who heard, suddenly became grave.
“Do you think it's genius or precocity?” he asked.
“They're very much the same thing,” said Ailie. “If I could be the child I was; if I could just remember—” She stopped herself and smiled. “What vanity!” said she; “what conceit! If I could be the child I was, I dare say I would be pretty commonplace, after all, and still have the same old draigled pinnies; but I have a notion that Lennox was never meant to make beds, dust stair-railings, or sit in a parlor listening, demure, to gossip about the village pump and Sacrament Sunday bonnets. To do these things are no discredit to the women who are meant to do them, and who do them well; but we cannot all be patient Marthas. I know, because I've honestly tried my best myself.”
“When you say that, you're laughing at me, I fear,” said Bell, a little blamefully.
“I wasn't thinking of you,” said her sister, vexed. “And if I was, and had been laughing, I would be laughing at the very things I love; it's only the other things that make me solemn. Your way, Bell, was always clear before you—there you were the lucky woman; with genius, as we have it in the child, the way's perplexed and full of dangers.”
“Is she to be let drift her own way?”
“We got her ten years too late to prevent it,” said Miss Ailie, firmly, and looked at her brother Dan for some assistance. He had Footles on his lap, stroking his tousy back, and he listened with twinkling eyes to the argument, humming the air of the day, that happened to be “Robin Tamson's Smiddy, O!”
“You're both right and you're both wrong, as Mr. Cleland used to say if he was taking a dram with folk that had an argument,” said the lawyer; “but I'm not so clever as Colin Cleland, for I can't ring the bell and order in themedia sententia. This I'll say, that to my mind the child is lucky if she's something short of genius. If I had had a son, my prayer would always be that he should be off and on about the ordinary. It's lonely on the mountain-top, and genius generally seems to go with a poor stomach or a bad lung, and pays an awful price for every ecstasy!” “Shakespeare!” suggested Miss Ailie.
“And Robert Burns!” cried Bell. “Except for the lass and the glass and the randan—Poor, misguided laddie! he was like the folk he lived among. And there was Walter Scott, the best and noblest man God ever gave to Scotland; he was never on the mountain-top except it was to bring a lot of people with him there.”
Mr. Dyce cleaned his glasses and chuckled. “H'm,” said he, “I admit there are exceptions. But please pass me my slippers, Bell; I fall back on Colin Cleland—you're both right and you're both wrong.”
Miss Bell was so put about at this that she went at once to the kitchen to start her niece on a course of cookery.