FOR only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked, when he was gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her mother died, but all the same there was an unseen, doleful wreckage. This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.
Even the town itself was someway altered for a little by the whim that took the American actor to it. That he should be American, and actor, too, foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime in our simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us, who at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor, too! earning easy bread by mimicry and in enormous theatres before folk that have made money—God knows how!—and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face and work late hours in gaslight, finally shall obtain salvation—sinful, and yet—and yet so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we looked on Mr. Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how the way had been prepared for him by Bud!—a child, but a child who had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. &. A. MacGlashan. Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow's warehouse, upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need, and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human, after all, and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay and given her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had she not by force of sheer example made dumb and stammering bashfulness in her fellow-pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the little twin teachers of the Pigeons' Seminary could mistake for the kind of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?
Mr. Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse or a garibaldi. P. &. A. Mac-Glashan made the front of his shop like a wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a-prosperous foreign and colonial trade. One morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past five instead of six to prove how very wide-awake we were; and the band paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when it came to gayety we were not, though small, so very far behind New York.
But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up to himself in the words “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.” Bell took warmly to him from the outset; so much was in his favor. For one thing he was spick-and-span though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that simple country ladies readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean within. She forgave the disreputable part in him—the actor—since William had been one and yet had taught his child her prayers, and she was willing to overlook the American, seeing William's wife had suffered from the same misfortune. But oh! the blow she got when she unpacked what he called his grip and found the main thing wanting!
“Where's your Bible, Mr. Molyneux?” she asked, solemnly. “It's not in your portmanteau!”
Again it was in his favor that he reddened, though the excuse he had to make was feeble.
“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head with a sad sort of smile. “And you to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in hand! But perhaps in America there's no need for a lamp to the feet and a light to the path.”
It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a haggis, that her brother, for Moly-neux's information, said was thought to be composed of bagpipes boiled. Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and Molyneux was telling how he simplyhadto come.
“It's my first time in Scotland,” said he; “and when 'The Iron Hand' lost its clutch on old Edina's fancy, and the scenery was arrested, I wasn't so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. I'll skiddoo from the gang for a day or two, I said to the manager when we found ourselves side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he'd wire me when he'd fixed a settlement, so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of the American language, and a little Scotch—by absorption.”
“We have only one fault with your coming—that it was not sooner,” said Mr. Dyce.
“And I'm pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is to a Scottish training. Chicago's the finest city on earth—in spots; America's what our Fourth-of-July orators succinctly designate God's Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn't been any woman better or braver than Mrs. Molyneux. But we weren't situated to give Bud a show like what she'd get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn't dwell, as you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs. Molyneux's a dear, good girl, but she isn't demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what Bud's father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing her, now that I'm here and see her, I'm glad of it, for my wife and I are pretty much on the drift most the time in England, as we were in the United States.”
“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr. Molyneux,” said Mr. Dyce. “It's very much the same in all countries, I suppose?”
“It's not so bad as stone-breaking nor so much of a cinch as being a statesman,” said Mr. Molyneux, cheerfully, “but a man's pretty old at it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I've still the idea myself that if I'm not likely to be a Booth or Henry Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back for a mascot and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr. Emerson said, 'Hitch your wagon to a star.' I guess if I got a good star bridled, I'd hitch a private parlor-car and a steam-yacht onto her before she flicked an ear. Who wants a wagon, anyway?”
“A wagon's fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr. Dyce, twinkling through his glasses.
“So's a hearse,” said Mr. Molyneux, quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled in a hearse ever complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his feelings jarred, but it's a mighty slow conveyance for live folks. That's the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this cute little British kingdom; it's pretty and it's what the school-marm on the coach would call redolent of the dear, dead days beyond recall, and it's plucky, but it keeps the brakes on most the time and don't give its star a chance to amble. I guess it's a fine crowded and friendly country to be bom rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor in; but take a tenpenny car ride out from Charing Cross and you're in Lullaby Land and the birds are building nests and carolling in your whiskers. Life's short; it only gives a man time to wear through one pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live every hour of it that I'm not conspicuously dead.”
They were silent in the parlor of the old house that had for generations sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green, curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not, sometimes, found in a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest, the alarm and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises—in an aspect fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit of this actor's gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the sacrilege; even Ailie, sharing in her heart, if less ecstatically, the fervor for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.
“Mr. Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie White's husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and profitable call for Johnny's toddy, he would come in chittering as it were with cold, and his coat collar up on his neck, to say: 'An awfu' nicht outside! As dark as the inside o' a cow and as cauld as charity! They're lucky that have fires to sit by.' And he would impress them so much with the good-fortune of their situation at the time that they would order in another round and put off their going all the longer, though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions and its lack of hurry, when I hear you—with none of Johnny White's stratagem—tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive. You'll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for another round. Life's short, as you say, but I don't think it makes it look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely daundering—if you happen to know what daunder-ing is, Mr. Molyneux—and now and then resting on the road-side with a friend and watching the others pass.”
“At fifty-five,” said Mr. Molyneux, agreeably, “I'll perhaps think so, too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two. We've all got to move, at first, Mr. Dyce. That reminds me of a little talk I had with Bud to-day. That child's growing, Mr. Dyce—grown a heap of ways. She's hardly a child any longer.”
“Tuts! She's nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving. “When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet's.”
“Anyhow, she's grown. And it seems to me she's about due for a little fresh experience. I suppose you'll be thinking of sending her to one of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her education?”
“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr. Dyce, quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination manner.
“Well she did—but she didn't know it,” said Mr. Molyneux. “I guess about the very last thing that child'd suggest to anybody would be that she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but if there's one weakness about her it is that she can't conceal what she thinks, and I'd not been twenty minutes in her society before I found out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that complaint, and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and lolling around and dwelling on the past isn't apt to be her foible. Two or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap-sheaf on the making of that girl's character, and I know, for there's my wife, and she had only a year and a half. If she'd had longer I guess she'd have had more sense than marry me. Bud's got almost every mortal thing a body wants here, I suppose—love in lumps, a warm, moist soil, and all the rest of it, but she wants to be hardened off, and for hardening off a human flower there's nothing better than a three-course college, where the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”
Miss Bell turned pale—the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.
“Indeed!” said she; “and I do not see the need for any such thing for a long while yet. Do you, Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was enough to show what she thought.
“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,” continued Mr. Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it: she cried like the cherubim and seraphim; said it was snatching all the sunshine out of her life; and when I said, 'Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?' she just said 'Scat! and threw a couple of agonized throes. Now Edinburgh's not so very far away that you'd feel desolated if Bud went to a school there.”
“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.
“Well, it isn't the Pacific slope if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr. Molyneux.
“No, but it's the most beautiful city in the wide world for all that,” cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air and made her sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had touched her in the very heart's core of her national pride.
“You're sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to school?” asked Mr. Dyce.
“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux, slyly.
“No,” said Mr. Dyce, “I know it well enough, but—but I don't believe it,” and he smiled at his own paradox.
“I have her own words for it.”
“Then she'll go!” said the lawyer, firmly, as if a load was off his mind, and, oddly, there were no objections from his sisters. “You're not to imagine, Mr. Molyneux,” he went on, “that we have not thought of this before. It has for months been never out of our minds, as might be seen from the fact that we never mentioned it, being loath to take a step that's going to make considerable difference here. It's not that we feared we should die of ennui in her absence, for we're all philosophers and have plenty to engage our minds as well as our activities, and though you might think us rather rusty here, we get a good deal of fun with ourselves. She'll go—oh yes, of course she'll go—Ailie went—and she's no muckle the waur o't, as we say. I spent some time in the south myself, and the only harm it seems to have done me was to make me think too much, perhaps, of my native north. Taste's everything, Mr. Molyneux, and you may retort if you please that I'm like the other Scotsman who preferred his apples small and hard and sour. I think there's no divine instruction, is there, Bell, about apples? and judgments regarding different countries and different places in them is mostly a subjective thing, like the estimate of beauty apart from its utility—”
“Oh! there you are at your metapheesics, Daa,” cried Miss Bell, “and it's for me and Ailie to make ready the bairn for Edinburgh. She hasna got a stitch that's fit to be put on.”
Molyneux stared at her; the tone displayed so little opposition to the project; and seeing him so much surprised the three of them smiled.
“That's us!” said Mr. Dyce. “We're dour and difficult to decide on anything involving change, and hide from ourselves as long as we can the need for it, but once our mind's made up it's wonderful how we hurry.”
BELL liked the creature, as I say, not a little because she saw in him whence came some part of Bud's jocosity and most of the daftlike language (though kind of clever, too, she must allow) in which it was expressed. It was a different kind of jocosity from Dan's, whose fun, she used to say, partook of the nature of rowan jelly, being tart and sweet in such a cunning combination that it tickled every palate and held some natural virtue of the mountain tree. The fun of Molyneux had another flavor; it put her in mind of allspice, being foreign, having heat as well as savor. But in each of these droll men was the main thing, as she would aye consider it—no distrust of the Creator's judgment, good intentions, and ability, and a readiness to be laughed at as well as find laughter's cause in others. She liked the man, but still-and-on was almost glad when the telegram came from Edinburgh and he went back to join his company. It was not any lack of hospitality made her feel relief, but the thought that now Bud's going was determined on, there was so much to do in a house where men would only be a bother.
Mr. Molyneux found himself so much at home among them he was loath to go, expressing his contempt for a mode of transit to the railway that took two hours to nineteen miles, but Bell, defensive even of her country's coaches, told him he was haivering—that any greater speed than that was simply tempting Providence. He praised the Lord there was no Providence to be tempted inside Sandy Hook, and that he knew Beef Kings who hurled themselves across the landscape at the rate of a mile a minute. The fact inspired no admiration in Miss Bell; she wondered at the misguided wretches scudding like that regardless of their lives, and them with so much money.
Before he left he called at the Pigeons' Seminary to say good-bye to the little teachers, and sipped tea, a British institution which he told them was as deleterious as the High Ball of his native land. High Ball—what was a High Ball? asked Miss Amelia, scenting a nice new phrase, but he could only vaguely indicate that it was something made of rye and soda. Then she understood—it was a teetotal drink men took in clubs, a kind of barley-water. The tea gratified him less than the confidence of the twins, who told him they had taken what he said about the—about the shameful article so much to heart, that they had given it for a razor-strop to one George Jordon.
“Bully for you!” cried Mr. Molyneux, delighted. “But I'd have liked that tawse some myself, for my wife's mighty keen on curios. She's got a sitting-room full of Navajo things—scalpin'-knives, tomahawks, and other brutal bric-à-brac—and an early British strap would tickle her to death.”
Well, he was gone—the coachman's horn had scarcely ceased to echo beyond the arches when Miss Bell had thrown herself into the task of preparing for Bud's change in life.
What school was she to go to in Edinburgh? Ailie knew; there was none better than the one she had gone to herself.
When did it open? Ailie knew: in a fortnight. What, exactly, would she need? Ailie knew that, too: she had in the escritoire a list of things made up already.
“It seems to me,” said Miss Bell, suspiciously, “you're desperately well informed on all that appertains to this sudden necessity. How long has it been in your mind?”
“For a twelvemonth at least,” answered Ailie, boldly. “How long has it been in your own?”
“H'm!” said Bell. “About as long, but I aye refused to harbor it; and—and now that the thing's decided on, Ailie Dyce, I hope you're not going to stand there arguing away about it all day long when there's so much to do.”
Surely there was never another house so thronged, so bustling, so feverish in anxiety as this one was for another fortnight. The upper and the lower Dyce Academy took holiday; Kate's education stopped with a sudden gasp at a dreadful hill called Popocatapetl, and she said she did not care a button, since Captain Maclean (no longer Charles to any one except himself and Bud in the more confidential moments) said the main things needed in a sailor's wife were health, hope, and temper, and a few good-laying hens. Miss Minto was engaged upon Bud's grandest garments running out and in next door herself with inch-tapes over her shoulders and a mouthful of pins, and banging up against the lawyer in his lobby to her great distress of mind. And Bell had in the seamstress, 'Lizbeth Ann, to help her and Ailie with the rest. Mercator sulked neglected on the wall of Mr. Dyce's study, which was strewn with basting-threads and snippets of selvedge and lining till it looked like a tailor's shop, and Bud and Footles played on the floor of it with that content which neither youth nor dogs can find in chambers trim and orderly. Even Kate was called in to help these hurried operations—they called it the making of Bud's trousseau. In the garden birds were calling, calling; far sweeter in the women's ears were the snip-snip of scissors, the whir of the sewing-machine; needle-arms went back and forth like fiddle-bows in an orchestra, and from webs of cloth and linen came forth garments whose variety intoxicated her who was to wear them. I'm thinking Daniel Dyce lived simply then, with rather makeshift dinners, but I'm certain, knowing him well, he did not care, since his share in the great adventure was to correspond with Edinburgh and pave the way there for the young adventurer's invasion.
He would keek in at the door on them as he passed to his office, and Ailie would cry, “Avaunt, man! here woman reigns!” “It's a pleasant change,” he would say. “I would sooner have them rain than storm.” “You're as bad as Geordie Jordon,” said Miss Bell, biting thread with that zest that always makes me think her sex at some time must have lived on cotton—“you're as bad as Geordie Jordon: you cannot see a key-hole but your eye begins to water.”
If it had, indeed, been Bud's trousseau, the townfolk could not have displayed more interest. Ladies came each day to see how things progressed and recommend a heavier lining or another row of the insertion. Even Lady Anne came one afternoon to see the trousseau, being interested, as she slyly said, in such things for private reasons of her own, and dubious about the rival claims of ivory or pure white. So she said, but she came, no doubt, to assure Miss Lennox that her captain was a great success.
“I knew he'd be!” said Bud, complacently. “That man's so beautiful and good he's fit for the kingdom of heaven.”
“So are you, you rogue,” said Lady Anne, gathering her in her arms, without a bit of awkwardness, to the great astonishment of 'Lizbeth Ann, who thought that titled folk were not a bit like that—perhaps had not the proper sort of arms for it. “Yes, so are you, you rogue!” said Lady Anne.
“No, I'm not,” said the child. “Leastways only sometimes. Most the time I'm a born limb, but then again I'm nearly always trying to be better, and that's what counts, I guess.”
“And you're going away to leave us,” said Lady Anne, whereon a strange thing happened, for the joyous child, who was to get her heart's desire and such lovely garments, burst into tears and ran from the room to hide herself up-stairs in the attic bower, whose windows looked to a highway that seemed hateful through her tears. Her ladyship went off distressed, but Bell, as one rejoicing, said:
“I always told you, Ailie—William's heart!”
But Bud's tears were transient; she was soon back among the snippets where Ailie briskly plied the sewing-machine and sang the kind of cheerful songs that alone will go to the time of pedalling, and so give proof that the age of mechanism is the merry age if we have the happy ear for music. And Bud, though she tired so soon of hems, could help another way that busy convocation, for she could sit tucked up in Uncle Dan's snoozing chair, and readPickwickto the women till the maid of Colonsay was in the mood to take the Bardell body by the hair of the head and shake her for her brazenness to the poor wee man. Or the child would dance as taught by the lady of the Vaudeville, or start at Ailie's bidding (Bell a little dubious) to declaim a bit of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth,” till 'Lizbeth Ann saw ghosts and let her nerves get the better of her, and there was nothing for it but a cheery cup of tea all round. Indeed, I must confess, a somewhat common company! I could almost wish for the sake of my story they were more genteel, and dined at half-past seven and talked in low, hushed tones of Bach and Botticelli.
But oh! they were happy days—at least so far as all outward symptoms went; it might, indeed, have been a real trousseau and not the garments for the wedding of a maiden and the world. How often, in the later years, did Winifred Wallace, reading to me her own applause in newspapers, stop to sigh and tell me how she once was really happy—happy to the inward core, feeling the dumb applause of four women in a country chamber when the world was all before her and her heart was young?
WORKING thus, furiously, at the task of love, which, in all it does for the youth it cherishes, must ever be digging a grave for its own delight, Bell could forget, for periods, that the days of Bud's presence in their midst were numbered. Had she stopped her needle and shears a moment and let her mind contemplate all the emptiness of a fortnight hence, and the months and years thereafter, she would have broken down. Ailie, knowing it, watched her anxiously, and kept the sewing briskly going as if they wrought for a living in a factory, frightened to think of her sister's desperate state when that last button, that the armies talk about, was in its place.
But the days sped; one afternoon there was a final sweeping up of the scraps in the temporary work-room, Bell searched her mind in vain to think of anything further wanted, and, though there was still a week to go, became appalled to find that the only thing of any moment to be done 'twixt now and Friday fortnight was to say good-bye.
No, stay! there was another thing to bring a little respite—the girl's initials must be sewn upon her clothing. A trivial thing to mention, you may think, but the very thought of it gave pleasure to the sisters, till Bud herself, sent to Miss Minto's for a sample of the woven letters, came back with only one—it was a W.
“Has the stupid body not got L's and D's?” asked Bell. “There's no use here for W.” And Bud showed a countenance startled and ashamed.
“Oh, Auntie!” she cried. “I asked for W's. I quite forgot my name was Lennox Dyce, for in all I'm thinking of about the school and Edinburgh, I am Winifred Wallace.”
It was all that was needed to bring about her aunt's prostration. “I'm far from well,” said she, and took to her bed, her first confession of weakness in all the years that Dan or Ailie could remember. What ailed her she could not tell, and they sent, without acquainting her, for Dr. Brash. Hearing he was coming, she protested that she could not see the man; that she was far too ill to be troubled by any doctor; but Dr. Brash was not so easily to be denied.
“H'm!” said he, examining her; “you're system's badly down.”
“I never knew I had one,” said the lady, smiling wanly, with a touch of Dan's rowan-jelly humor. “Women had no system in my young days to go up or down; if they had they were ashamed to mention it. Nowadays it seems as fashionable as what Kate, since she got her education, calls the boil.”
“You have been worrying,” he went on, “a thing that's dreadfully injudicious. H'm! worse than drink I say. Worry's the death of half my patients; they never give my pills a chance. “And there was a twinkle in his eyes which most of Dr. Brash's patients thought was far more efficacious than his pills.
“What would I worry for?” said Miss Bell. “I'm sure I have every blessing: goodness and mercy all my life.”
“Just so! Just so!” said Dr. Brash. “Goodness and—and, h'm!—mercy sometimes take the form of a warning that it's time we kept to bed for a week, and that's what I recommend you.”
“Mercy on me! Am I so far through as that?” she said, alarmed. “It's something serious—I know by the cheerful face that you put on you. Little did I think that I would drop off so soon. And just at the very time when there's so much to do!”
“Pooh!” said Dr. Brash. “When you drop off, Miss Dyce, there'll be an awful dunt, I'm telling you. God bless my soul, what do you think a doctor's for but putting folk on their pins again! A week in bed—and—h'm!—a bottle. Everything's in the bottle, mind you!”
“And there's the hands of the Almighty, too,” said Bell, who constantly deplored the doctor was so poor a kirk attender, and not a bit in that respect like the noble doctors in her sister's latest Scottish novels.
Dr. Brash went out of the room to find the rest of the household sorely put about in the parlor: Lennox an object of woe, and praying hard to herself with as much as she could remember of her uncle Dan's successful supplication for herself when she had the pneumonia. To see the cheerfulness of his countenance when he came in was like the sunburst on a leaden sea. “Miss Bell's as sound as her namesake,” he assured them. “There's been something on her mind”—with a flash of the eye, at once arrested, towards Lennox—“and she has worked herself into a state of nervous collapse. I've given her the best of tonics for her kind—the dread of a week in bed—and I'll wager she'll be up by Saturday. The main thing is to keep her cheerful, and I don't think that should be very difficult.”
Bud there and then made up her mind that her own true love was Dr. Brash, in spite of his nervous sisters and his funny waistcoats. Ailie said if cheerfulness would do the thing she was ready for laughing-gas, and the lawyer vowed he would rake the town for the very latest chronicles of its never-ending fun.
But Bud was long before him on her mission of cheerfulness to the bedroom of Auntie Bell. Did you ever see a douce Scotch lass who never in her life had harbored the idea that her native hamlet was other than the finest dwelling-place in all the world, and would be happy never to put a foot outside it?—that was to be the rôle to-day. A sober little lass, sitting in a wicker-chair whose faintest creak appeared to put her in an agony—sitting incredibly long and still, and speaking Scotch when spoken to, in the most careful undertone, with a particular kind of smile that was her idea of judicious cheerfulness for a sick-room.
“Bairn!” cried her aunt at last, “if you sit much longer like that you'll drive me crazy. What in the world's the matter with you?”
“Nothing, dear Auntie Bell,” said Bud, astonished. “You needn't tell me! What was the doctor saying?”
“He said you were to be kept cheerful,” said Bud, “and I'm doing the best I can—”
“Bless me, lass! do you think it's cheery to be sitting there with a face like an old Geneva watch? I would sooner see you romping.”
But no, Bud could not romp that day, and when her uncle Dan came up he found her reading aloud from Bell's favorite Gospel according to John—her auntie's way of securing the cheerfulness required. He looked at the pair, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders bent, and all the joviality with which he had come carefully charged gave place for a little to a graver sentiment. So had Ailie sat, a child, beside her mother on her death-bed, and, reading John one day, found open some new vista in her mind that made her there and then renounce her dearest visions, and thirl herself forever to the home and him and Bell.
“Well, Dan,” said his sister, when the child was gone, “what have you brought me? Is it the usual pound of grapes?”—for she was of the kind whose most pious exercises never quench their sense of fun, and a gift of grapes in our place is a doleful hint to folks bedridden; I think they might as well bring in the stretching-board.
“A song-book would suit you better,” said the lawyer. “What do you think's the matter with you? Worrying about that wean! Is this your Christian resignation?”
“I amnotworrying, Dan,” she protested. “At least, not very much, and I never was the one to make much noise about my Christianity.”
“You need to be pretty noisy with it nowadays to make folk believe you mean it.”
“What did Dr. Brash say down the stair?” she asked. “Does he—does he think I'm going to die?”
“Lord bless me,” cried her brother, “this is not the way that women die. I never heard of you having a broken heart. You're missing all the usual preliminaries, and you haven't even practised being ill. No, no, Bell; it 'll be many a day, I hope, before you're pushing up the daisies, as that vagabond Wanton Wully puts it.”
Bell sighed. “You're very joco,” said she—“you're aye cheery, whatever happens.”
“So long as it doesn't happen to myself—that's philosophy; at least it's Captain Consequence's. And if I'm cheery to-day it's by the doctor's orders. He says you're to be kept from fretting even if we have to hire the band.”
“Then I doubt I'm far, far through!” said Bell. “I'm booked for a better land.” And at that the lawyer gave a chirruping little laugh, and said:
“Are you sure it's not for Brisbane?”
“What do you mean?” she asked him, marvellously interested for one who talked of dying.
“It's a new one,” he explained. “I had it to-day from her ladyship's captain. He was once on a ship that sailed to Australia, and half-way out a passenger took very ill. 'That one's booked for heaven, anyway,' Maclean said to the purser. 'No,' said the purser, who was busy; 'he's booked for Brisbane.' 'Then he would be a damned sight better in heaven,' said Maclean. 'I have been twice in Brisbane, and I know.'” Bell did her best to restrain a smile, but couldn't. “Oh, Dan!” said she, “you're an awful man! You think there's nothing in this world to daunten anybody.”
“Not if they happen to be Dyces,” said he. “A high heart and a humble head—you remember father's motto? And here you're dauntened because the young one's going only one or two hundred miles away for her own advantage.”
“I'm not a bit dauntened,” said Miss Bell, with spirit. “It's not myself I'm thinking of at all; it's her, poor thing! among strangers night and day; damp sheets, maybe, and not a wiselike thing to eat. You would never forgive yourself if she fell into a decline.”
“Ailie throve pretty well on their dieting,” he pointed out; “and if she's going to fall into a decline, she's pretty long of starting.”
“But you mind they gave her sago pudding,” said Miss Bell; “and if there's one thing Lennox cannot eat it's sago pudding. She says it is so slippy, every spoonful disappears so sudden it gives her an awful start. She says she might as well sup puddocks.” Dan smiled at the picture and forced himself to silent patience.
“And they'll maybe let her sit up to all hours,” Bell proceeded. “You know the way she fastens on a book at bedtime!”
“Well, well!” said he, emphatically. “If you're sure that things are to be so bad as that, we'll not let her go at all,” and he slyly scanned her countenance, to see, as he expected, that she was indignant at the very thought of backing out, now that they had gone so far.
“You needn't start to talk nonsense,” said she; “of course she's going; but oh, Dan! it's not the sheets, nor food, nor anything like that that troubles me; it's the knowledge that she'll never be the same wee lass again.”
“Tuts!” said Daniel Dyce, and cleaned some moisture from his spectacles. “You're putting all the cheerful things I was going to say to you out of my head. I'm off to business. Is there anything I can do for you? No? Then remember, you're not to stir this week outside the blankets; these are the orders of Dr. Brash. I have no doubt Ailie will do very well at the housekeeping,” and he left her with a gleam of mischief in his eye.
The window of the bedroom was a little open; on one of the trees a blackbird sang, and there came in the scent of apple-ringie and a tempting splendor of sun. For twenty minutes the ailing body tried to content herself with the thought of a household managed by Alison Dyce, and then arose to see if Wully Oliver was not idling in the garden. She saw him sitting on his barrow-trams, while Ailie walked among the dahlias and chucked her favorites of them under their chins.
“William Oliver!” cried Miss Bell, indignantly, having thrown a Shetland shawl about her; “is that all the work you can do in a day?”
He looked up at the window, and slowly put his pipe in his pocket.
“Well, m'em,” said he. “I dare say I could do more, but I never was much of a hand for showing off.”
WHEN Miss Bell rose, as she did in a day or two, bantered into a speedy convalescence by Ailie and Dan, it was to mark Bud's future holidays on the calendar, and count the months in such a cunning way that she cheated the year of a whole one by arguing to herself that the child would be gone a fortnight before they really missed her, and as good as home again whenever she started packing to return. And Edinburgh, when one was reasonable and came to think of it, was not so very awful; the Miss Birds were there, in the next street to the school where Bud was bound for, so if anything should happen—a fire, for instance—fires were desperately common just now in the newspapers, and ordinary common-sense suggested a whole clothes-rope for the tying up of the young adventurer's boxes; or if Bud should happen to be really hungry between her usual meals—a common thing with growing bairns—the Birds were the very ones to make her welcome. It was many a year since Bell had been in Edinburgh—she had not been there since mother died; she was determined that if she had the money, and was spared till Martinmas, she should make a jaunt of it and see the shops: it was very doubtful if Miss Minto wasn't often lamentably out of date with many of her fashions.
“Oh, you vain woman!” cried Ailie to her; “will nothing but the very latest satisfy you?”
Bud was to be sure and write once every week, on any day but Saturday, for if her letters came on Sunday they would be tempted to call at the post-office for them, like Captain Consequence, instead of waiting till the Monday morning. And if she had a cold, or any threatening of quinsy, she was to fly for her very life to the horehound mixture, put a stocking round her neck, and go to bed. Above all was she to mind and take her porridge every morning, and to say her prayers.
“I'll take porridge to beat the band,” Bud promised, “even—even if I have to shut my eyes all through.”
“In a cautious moderation,” recommended Uncle Dan. “I think myself oatmeal is far too rich a diet for the blood. I have it from Captain Consequence that there's nothing for breakfast like curried kidney and a chop to follow. But I hope you'll understand that, apart from the carnal appetites, the main thing is to scoop in all the prizes. I'll be dreadfully disappointed if you come back disgraced, with anything less of them than the full of a cart. That, I believe, is the only proof of a Scottish liberal education. In Ailie's story-books it's all the good, industrious, and deserving pupils who get everything. Of course, if you take all the prizes somebody's sure to want—but, tuts! I would never let that consideration vex me—it's their own lookout. If you don't take prizes, either in the school or in the open competition of the world, how are folk to know they should respect you?”
“You must have been a wonderfully successful student in your day,” said Ailie, mischievously. “Where are all your medals?”
Dan laughed. “It's ill to say,” said he, “for the clever lads who won them when I wasn't looking have been so modest ever since that they've clean dropped out of sight. I never won anything myself in all my life that called for competition—except the bottom of the class! When it came to competitions, and I could see the other fellows' faces, I was always far too tired or well disposed to them to give them a disappointment which they seemingly couldn't stand so well as myself. But then I'm not like Bud here. I hadn't a shrewd old uncle egging me on. So you must be keen on the prizes, Bud. Of course, there's wisdom, too, but that comes later—there's no hurry for it. Prizes, prizes—remember the prizes; the more you win, the more, I suppose, I'll admire you.”
“And if I don't win any, Uncle Dan?” said Bud, slyly, knowing very well the nature of his fun.
“Then, I suppose, I'll have to praise the Lord if you keep your health, and just continue loving you,” said the lawyer. “I admit that if you're anyway addicted to the prizes you'll be the first of your name that was so. In that same school in Edinburgh, your auntie Ailie's quarterly reports had always, 'Conduct—Good' and 'Mathematics—Fairly moderate.' We half expected she was coming back an awful diffy; but if she did, she made a secret of it. I forgave her the 'Fairly moderate' myself, seeing she had learned one thing—how to sing. I hope you'll learn to sing, Bud, in French or German or Italian—anything but Scotch. Our old Scotch songs, I'm told, are not what's called artistic.”
“The sweetest in the world!” cried Auntie Bell. “I wonder to hear you haivering.”
“I'm afraid you're not a judge of music,” said the brother. “Scotch songs are very common—everybody knows them. There's no art in them, there's only heart—a trifling kind of quality. If you happen to hear me singing 'Annie Laurie' or 'Afton Water' after you come home, Bud, be sure and check me. I want to be no discredit to you.”
“No, I sha'n't, Uncle Dan,” said the child. “I'll sing 'Mary Morison' and 'Ae Fond Kiss' and 'Jock o'Hazeldean' at you till you're fairly squealing with delight.Iknow. Allow me! Why, you're only haivering.”
“Have mercy on the child, Dan,” said his sister. “Never you mind him, Bud, he's only making fun of you.”
“I know,” said Bud; “but I'm not kicking.”
Kate—ah, poor Kate!—how sorry I should be for her, deserted by her friend and tutor if she had not her own consoling captain. Kate would be weeping silently every time the pipe was on in the scullery and she thought how lonely her kitchen was to be when the child was gone. And she had plans to make that painful exile less heart-rending: she was going to write to her sister out in Colonsay, and tell her to be sure and send fresh country eggs at intervals of every now and then, or maybe oftener in the winter-time, to Lennox, for the genuine country egg was a thing it was hopeless to expect in. Edinburgh, where there wasn't such a thing as sand or grass or heather—only causeway stones. She could assure Lennox that, as for marriage, there was not the slightest risk for years and years, since there wasn't a house in the town to let that would be big enough (and still not dear) to suit a captain. He was quite content to be a plain intended, and hold on. And as for writing, she would take her pen in hand quite often and send the latest news to Lennox, who must please excuse haste and these d-d-desperate pens, and having the post to catch—not that she would dream of catching the poor, wee, shauchly creature; it was just a way of speaking. Would Lennox not be so dreadful homesick, missing all the cheery things, and smothered up in books in yon place—Edinburgh?
“I expect I'll be dre'ffle homesick,” admitted Bud. “I'm sure you will, my lassie,” said the maid. “I was so homesick myself when I came here at first that my feet got almost splay with wanting to turn back to Colonsay. But if I'm not so terribly good-looking, I'm awful brave, and soon got over it. When you are homesick go down to the quay and look at the steamboats or take a turn at our old friend Mr. Puckwuck.” Four days—three days—two days—one day—tomorrow; that last day went so fast it looked as if Wanton Wully had lost the place again and rang the evening bell some hours before it was due. Bud could only sit by, helpless, and marvel at the ingenuity that could be shown in packing what looked enough to stock Miss Minto's shop into a couple of boxes. She aged a twelvemonth between the hand-glass at the bottom and the bath-sheet on the top.
“And in this corner,” said Miss Bell, on her knees, “you'll find your Bible, the horehound mixture, and five-and-twenty threepenny bits for the plate on Sundays—some of them sixpences.”
“Irish ones, apparently,” said Uncle Dan.
“Some of them sixpences, for the Foreign Mission days, and one shilling for the day of the Highlands and Islands.”
“You're well provided for the kirk, at any rate,” said
Uncle Dan. “I'll have to put a little money for this wicked world in the other corner.” And he did.
When the coach next day set out—No, no, I cannot tell you all, for I hate to think of tears and would hurry over partings. It went in tearful weather, rain drizzling on Bud and Auntie Ailie, who accompanied her. They looked back on the hill-top and saw the gray slates glint under a gray sky, and following them on the miry road poor Footles, faithful heart, who did not understand. He paddled through the mud till a blast from the bugle startled him, and he seemed to realize that this was some painful new experience. And then he stood in the track of the disappearing wheels and lifted up his voice, in lamentation.
The night came on, resuming her ancient empire—for she alone, and not the day, did first possess, and finally shall possess unquestioned, this space dusty with transient stars, and the light is Lord of another universe where is no night, nay, nor terror thereof. From the western clouds were the flame and gold withdrawn, and the winds sighed from the mountains as vexed for passing days. The winds sighed from the mountains and the mists came mustering to the glens; the sea crept out on long, bird-haunted, wailing, and piping sands, naught to be seen of it, its presence obvious only in the scent of wrack and the wash on the pebbled beaches. Behind the town the woods lay black and haunted, and through them, and far upward in the valley dripping in the rain, and clamorous with hidden bums and secret wells, went the highway to the world, vacant of aught visible, but never to be wholly vacant, since whoso passes on a highway ever after leaves some wandering spirit there. Did the child, that night, think of the highway that had carried her from home? In the hoarsely crying city did she pause a moment to remember and retrace her way to the little town that now lay faintly glowing in the light of its own internal fires?
Thus Bell wondered, standing at her window looking into the solitary street. Every mile of separating highway rose before her; she walked them in the rain and dark; all the weary longing of the world came down on her that mirk night in September, and, praying that discretion should preserve and understanding keep her wanderer, she arrived at the soul's tranquility and heard without misgiving the wild geese cry.
Her brother took the Books, and the three of them—master, mistress, and maid—were one in the spirit of worship, longing, and hope. Where, then, had gone Daniel Dyce, the lawyer, the gentle ironist, on whose lips so often was kindly mockery, on whose tongue levity or its pretence—