Thatthe child should have gone to the dame school at all was due to her Auntie Bell. From the first Miss Ailie had been dubious of the seminary, but Bell was terribly domineering; in fact, was neither to hold nor bind, and the doo-cot it bode to be. A product herself of the old dame school in the spacious days of Barbara Mushet, whose pupils in white-seam sewing and Italian hand were nowadays married to the best, and notable as housewives, she deemed it still the only avenue to the character and skill that keep those queer folk, men, when they’re married, by their own fire-ends. As for Daniel Dyce, he was, I fear, indifferent how Bud came by her schooling, having a sort of philosophy that the gate of gifts is closed on us the day we’re born, and that the important parts of the curriculum, good or bad, are picked up like a Scots or Hielan’ accent, someway in the home.
So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity-cooed at the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan’s. Their home was like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork bracket on the wall behind her chair, andthinking not unkindly of the creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic. And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free, that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.
“You’ll find her somewhat odd,” she explained as she nibbled the seed-cake, with a silly little d’oyley of Miss Jean’s contrivance on her knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional,—quite unlike other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to manage her.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose it’s the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”
“Oh, it’s nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the d’oyley from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with a wicked little shake. “If she didn’t speak much you would never guess from her appearance that she knew any more than—than most of us. Her mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius—at least it never came from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbours cross to the other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years ago, and when William—when my brother died, Lennox was staying with professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”
“The dear!” said Miss Jean, enraptured.
“Quite a sweet romance!” cooed Miss Amelia, languishing.
“You may be sure we will do all we can for her,” continued Miss Jean, pecking with unconscious fingers at the crumbs on her visitor’s lap, till Ailie could scarcely keep from smiling.
“She will soon feel quite at home among us in our little school,” said Miss Amelia. “No doubt she’ll be shy at first—”
“Quite the contrary!” Ailie assured them, with a little mischievous inward glee, to think how likely Bud was to astonish them by other qualities than shyness. “It seems that in America children are brought up on wholly different lines from children here; you’ll find a curious fearless independence in her.”
The twins held up their hands in amazement, “tcht-tcht-tchting” simultaneously. “Whata pity!” said Miss Jean, as if it were a physical affliction.
“But no doubt by carefulness and training it can be eradicated,” said Miss Amelia, determined to encourage hope.
At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little parlour, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.
“I don’t think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said with some of her brother’s manner at the bar. “Individuality is not painful to the possessor like toothache, so it’s a pity to eradicate it or kill the nerve.”
The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in their agitation were not observant.
“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and putthem in a stocking of Amelia’s, before they started to their crochet-work again.
It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement, and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger’s heart. Once the child turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell!—Miss Bell! she flew to the kitchen and stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.
Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the Duffs—sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys enough as yet to be in the Grammar School. Miss Jean came out and rang a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers and held out her hand.
“Good morning; I’m Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening, with a glance at the delinquents, as she dubiously took the proffered hand.
“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants air some, don’t it? What’s the name of the sweet little boy in the Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”
She was standing between the twins, facing thescholars; she surveyed all with the look of his Majesty’s Inspector.
“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench. “By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”
Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the Lord’s Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet “chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep’s head singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the street; from fields behind came in a ploughman’s whistle as he drove his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green, green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses, hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker’s boys. God only knew the other variations. ’Twas the duty of the twins to bring them all in mind alike to the one plain level.
It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean, to test her,asked her simply Man’s Chief End, she answered boldly—
“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.”
“Very good!verygood indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.
“Man is a harp,” she said as solemnly as he had said it—“a har-r-rp with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we’re timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with things.”
If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the schoolroom it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.
“What’s that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in America?”
“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again. She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.
Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.
“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.
“Oban, and Glasgow, and ’Tornoway,” replied Bud with a touch of Highland accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put about at such a preference.
“You mustn’t move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia, taking her back. “It’s not allowed.”
“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud frankly, “and I wanted to speak to Percy.”
“My dear child, his name’s not Percy, and there’s no speaking in school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.
“No speaking! Why, you’re speaking all the time,” said the child. “It ain’t—isn’t fair. Can’t I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that nice girl over there?”
The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the demoralising influence of the young invader.
Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.
There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand, never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be merely women, like her mother, and Mrs Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.
“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the black-board where they had taken refuge again. “I declare I’ll take a fit if this goes on! Did you ever hear of such a creature?”
Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the schemeof treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of great severity.
“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at school before, you don’t know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you are not behaving nicely—not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox. Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say anything unless they’re asked. They are respectful to their teachers, and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and—”
“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn’t contradicting,” explained Bud very soberly, “and when respect is called for, I’m there with the goods. You said honor was spelt with a ‘u,’ and I guess you just made a mistake, same as I might make myself, for there ain’t no ‘u’ in honor, at least in America.”
“I—I—I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia, gasping.
“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.
“What do you mean by ‘Oh, Laura’?” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”
“You can search me,” replied Bud composedly. “Jim often said ‘Oh, Laura!’ when he got a start.”
“It’s not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It’s not at all ladylike. It’s just a sort of profane language, and profane language is an ‘abomination unto the Lord.’”
“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If it’s slang I’ll stop it,—at least I’ll try to stop it. I’m bound to be a well-off English undefied, you know; poppa—father fixed that.”
The school was demoralised without a doubt, for now the twins were standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused—more interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend how far sheand her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to the little foreigner’s attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take up poetry and reading.”
Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of poetry and reading, but, alas! her delight was short-lived, for the reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie Ailie’s Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why. What completed Bud’s rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when she had read that—
“One ugly trick has often spoiledThe sweetest and the best;Matilda, though a pleasant child,One ugly trick possessed”—
she laughed outright.
“I can’t help it, Miss Duff,” she said when the twins showed their distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it’s got the jaggy edges, but it doesn’t make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It wants biff.”
“What’s ‘zip’ and ‘biff’?” asked Miss Amelia.
“It’s—it’s a kind of tickle in your mind,” said Bud. “I’m so tired,” she continued, rising in her seat, “I guess I’ll head for home now.” And before the twins had recovered from their dumfounderment she was in the porch putting on her cloak and hood.
“Just let her go,” said Miss Jean to her sister. “If she stays any longer I shall certainly have a swoon; I feel quite weak.”
And so Bud marched out quite cheerfully, and reached home an hour before she was due. Kate met her at the door. “My stars! are youhome already?” she exclaimed, with a look at the town clock. “You must be smart at your schooling when they let you out of the cemetery so soon.”
“It ain’t a cemetery at all,” said Bud, standing unconcernedly in the lobby; “it’s just a kindergarten.”
Aunt Ailie bore down on her to overwhelm her in caresses. “What are you home for already, Bud?” she asked. “It’s not time yet, is it?”
“No,” said Bud, “but I just couldn’t stay any longer. I’d as lief not go back there. The ladies don’t love me. They’re Sunday sort of ladies, and give me pins and needles. They smile and smile, same’s it was done with a glove-stretcher, and don’t love me. They said I was using profound language, and—and they don’t love me. Not the way mother and Mrs Molyneux and you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan and Kate and Footles does. They made goo-goo-eyes at me when I said the least thing. They had all those poor kiddies up on the floor doing their little bits, and they made me read kindergarten poetry—that was the limit! So I just upped and walked.”
The two aunts and Kate stood round her for a moment baffled.
“What’s to be done now?” said Aunt Ailie.
“Tuts!” said Aunt Bell, “give the wean a drink of milk and some bread and butter.”
And so ended Bud’s only term in a dame school.
Itwas a saying of Daniel Dyce’s that all the world is under one’s own waistcoat. We have a way of spaeing fortunes in the North, when young, in which we count the waistcoat buttons from top to bottom, and say—
Tinker,
Tailor,
Soldier,
Sailor,
Rich man,
Poor man,
Prodigal, or
Thief?
Whichever name falls upon the last button tells what is your destiny, and after the county corps has been round our way recruiting, I see our schoolboys with all their waistcoat buttons, but three at the top, amissing. Dan Dyce had a different formula: he said “Luckiness, Leisure, Ill or Well, Good World, Bad World, Heaven or Hell?”
“Not Heaven, Dan!” said Bell. “The other place I’ll admit, for whiles I’m in a furious temper over some trifle;” to which he would answer, “Woman! the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
So, I think sometimes, all that’s worth while in the world is in this little burgh, except a string quartette and a place called Florence I have long been ettling to see if ever I have the money. In this small town is every week as much of tragedy and comedy and farce as would make a complete novel full of laughterand tears, that would sell in a jiffy. I have started, myself, a score of them—all the essential inspiration got from plain folk passing my window, or from hearing a sentence dropped among women gossiping round a well. Many a winter night I come in with a fine catch of tales picked up in the by-going, as we say, and light the candles in a hurry, and make a gallant dash at “Captain Consequence. Chapter I.” or “A Wild Inheritance. Part I. The Astounding Mary.” Only the lavishness of the material hampers me: when I’m at “Captain Consequence” (which would be a splendid sombre story of an ill life, if I ever got beyond Chapter I. and the old scamp’s fondness for his mother), my wife runs in with something warm to drink, and tells me Jonathan Campbell’s goat has broken into the minister’s garden, and then I’m off the key for villainy; there’s a shilling book in Jonathan’s goat herself.
But this time I’m determined to stick by the fortunes of the Dyce family, now that I have got myself inside their door. I hope we are friends of that household, dearer to me than the dwellings of kings (not that I have cognisance of many). I hope that no matter how often or how early we rap at the brass knocker, or how timidly, Kate will come, and in one breath say, “What is’t? Come in!” We may hear, when we’re in, people passing in the street, and the wild geese call,—wild geese, wild geese! this time I will not follow where you tempt to where are only silence and dream,—the autumn and the summer days may cry us out to garden and wood, but if I can manage it I will lock the door on the inside, and shut us snugly in with Daniel Dyce and his household, and it will be well with us then. Yes, yes, it will be well with us then.
The wild-goose cry, heard in the nights, beyond her comprehension, was all that Bud Dyce found foreign in that home. All else was natural and familiar and friendly, for all else she knew was love. But she feared at first the “honk, honk” of the lone wildthings that burdened her with wonder and awe. Lying in her attic bower at night, they seemed to her like sore mistaken wanderers, wind-driven, lost; and so they are, I know. Hans Andersen and Grimm for her had given to their kind a forlorn and fearsome meaning. But Kate MacNeill had helped, to some degree, these childish apprehensions.
The Highland maid had brought from Colonsay a flesh that crept in darkness, a brain with a fantastic maggot in it; she declared to goodness, and to Bud sometimes, that she had no life of it with ghosts in her small back room. But Bud was not to let on to her aunties. Forbye it was only for Kate they came, the ghosts; did Bud not hear them last night? Geese! No, not geese, Kate knew different, and if the thing lasted much longer she would stay no more in this town; she would stay nowhere, she would just go back to Colonsay. Not that Colonsay was better; there were often ghosts in Colonsay—in the winter-time, and then it behoved you to run like the mischief, or have a fine strong lad with you for your convoy. If there were no ghosts in America it was because it cost too much to go there on the steamers. Harken to yon—“Honk, honk!”—did ever you hear the like of it? Who with their wits about them in weather like that would like to be a ghost? And loud above the wind that rocked the burgh in the cradle of the hills, loud above the beating rain, the creak of doors and rap of shutters in that old house, Bud and Kate together in the kitchen heard again the “honk, honk!” of the geese. Then it was for the child that she missed the mighty certainty of Chicago, that Scotland somehow to her mind seemed an old unhappy place, in the night of which went passing Duncan, murdered in his sleep, and David Rizzio with the daggers in his breast, and Helen of Kirkconnel Lee. The nights but rarely brought any fear for her in spite of poor Kate’s ghosts, since the warmth and light and love of the household filled every corner of lobby and stair, and went to bed withher. When she had said her prayer the geese might cry, the timbers of the old house crack, Bud was lapped in the love of God and man, and tranquil. But the mornings dauntened her often when she wakened to the sound of the six o’clock bell. She would feel, when it ceased, as if all virtue were out of last night’s love and prayer. Then all Scotland and its curious scraps of history as she had picked it up weighed on her spirit for a time; the house was dead and empty; not ghost nor goose made her eerie, but mankind’s old inexplicable alarms. How deep and from what distant shores comes childhood’s wild surmise! There was nothing to harm her, she knew, but the strangeness of the dawn and a craving for life made her at these times the awakener of the other dwellers in the house of Dyce.
She would get out of bed and go next door to the room of Ailie, and creep in bed beside her to kiss her for a little from her dreams. To the aunt these morning visitations were precious: she would take the bairn to her bosom and fall asleep with sighs of content, the immaculate mother. Bud herself could not sleep then for watching the revelation of her lovely auntie in the dawn—the cloud on the pillow that turned to masses of hazel hair, the cheeks and lips that seemed to redden like flowers as the day dawned, the nook of her bosom, the pulse of her brow.
Other mornings Wanton Wully’s bell would send her in to Bell, who would give her the warm hollow of her own place in the blankets, while she herself got up to dress briskly for the day’s affairs. “Just you lie down there, pet, and sleepy-baw,” she would say, tying her coats with trim tight knots. “You will not grow up a fine, tall, strong girl like your Auntie Ailie if you do not take your sleep when you can get it. The morning is only for done old wives like me that have things to do and don’t grudge doing them.”
She would chatter away to Bud as she dressed, a garrulous auntie this, two things always for hertext—the pride of Scotland, and the virtue of duty done. A body, she would say, was sometimes liable to weary of the same things to be done each day, the same tasks even-on, fires and food and cleansing, though the mind might dwell on great deeds desirable to be accomplished, but pleasure never came till the thing was done that was the first to hand, even if it was only darning a stocking. What was Bud going to be when she grew up? Bud guessed she wasn’t going to be anything but just a lady. Ah, yes, but even ladies had to do something wise-like; there was Ailie—to go no farther—who could have managed a business though her darning was but lumpy. Even for a lady there was nothing nobler than the making of her own bed; besides the doctors said it was remarkably efficacious for the figure.
Bud, snug in her auntie’s blankets, only her nose and her bright bead eyes showing in the light of the twirly wooden candlestick, guessed Mrs Molyneux was the quickest woman to get through work ever she saw: why she just waved it to one side and went out to shop or lunch with Jim.
A look of pity for Mrs Molyneux, the misguided, would come to Bell’s face, but for those folk in America she never had a word of criticism in the presence of the child. All she could say was America was different. America was not Scotland. And Scotland was not England, though in many places they called Scotch things English.
Jim used to say, speaking of father, that a Scotsman was a kind of superior Englishman.
Bell wished to goodness she could see the man,—he must have been a clever one!
Other mornings again would the child softly open her uncle’s door and he would get a terrible fright, crying “Robbers! but you’ll get nothing. I have my watch in my boots, and my money in my mouth.”
She would creep beside him, and in these early hours began her education. She was learning Ailie’s calm and curiosity and ambition; she was learningBell’s ideas of duty and the ancient glory of her adopted land; from her uncle she was learning many things, of which the least that seemed useful at the time was the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. “Pater Noster qui es in coelis”—that and a few hundreds of Trayner’s Latin maxims was nearly all of the classic tongue that survived with the lawyer from student days. It was just as good and effective a prayer in English, he admitted, but somehow, whiles, the language was so old it brought you into closer grips with the original. Some mornings she would hum to him coon songs heard in her former home; and if he was in trim he himself would sing some psalm to the tune of Coleshill, French, Bangor, or Torwood. His favourite was Torwood; it mourned so—mourned so! Or at other times a song like “Mary Morison.”
“What are you bumming away at up there the pair of you?” Bell would cry, coming to the stair-foot. “If you sing before breakfast, you’ll greet before night!”
“Don’t she like singing in the morning?” Bud asked, nestling beside him, and he laughed.
“It’s an old freit—an old superstition,” said he, “that it’s unlucky to begin the day too blithely. It must have been a doctor that started it, but you would wonder at the number of good and douce Scots folk, plain bodies like ourselves, that have the notion in their mind from infancy, and never venture a cheep or chirrup before the day’s well aired.”
“My stars! ain’t she Scotch, Auntie Bell?” said Bud. “So was father. He would sing any time; he would sing if it broke a tooth; but he was pretty Scotch other ways. Once he wore a pair of kilts to a Cale—to a Caledonian Club.”
“I don’t keep a kilt myself,” said her uncle. “The thing’s not strictly necessary unless you’re English and have a Hielan’ shooting.”
“Auntie Bell is the genuine Scotch stuff, I guess!”
“There’s no concealing the fact that she is,” her uncle admitted. “She’s so Scotch that I am afraid she’s apt to think of God as a countryman of her own.”
And there were the hours that Ailie gave with delight to Bud’s more orthodox tuition. The back room that was called Dan’s study, because he sometimes took a nap there after dinner, became a schoolroom. There was a Mercator’s map of the world on the wall and another of Europe, that of themselves gave the place the right academy aspect. With imagination, a map, and the Golden Treasury, you might have as good as a college education, according to Ailie. They went long voyages together on Mercator; saw marvellous places; shivered at the poles or languished in torrid plains, sometimes before Kate could ring the bell for breakfast. There seemed no spot in the world that this clever auntie had not some knowledge of. How eagerly they crossed continents, how ingeniously they planned routes! For the lengths of rivers, the heights of mountains, the values of exports, and all the trivial passing facts that mar the great game of geography for many childish minds, they had small consideration; what they gathered in their travels were sounds, colours, scenes, weather, and the look of races. What adventures they had! as when, pursued by elephants and tigers, they sped in a flash from Bengal to the Isle of Venice, and saw the green slime of the sea on her steeping palaces. Yes, the world is all for the folk of imagination. “Love maps and you will never be too old or too poor to travel,” was Ailie’s motto. She found a hero or a heroine for every spot upon Mercator, and nourished so the child in noble admirations.
You might think it would always be the same pupil and the same teacher, but no, they sometimes changed places. If Ailie taught Bud her own love for the lyrics that are the best work of men in their hours of exaltation, Bud sent Ailie back to her Shakespeare, and sweet were the days they spent in Arden or Prospero’s Isle.
It was well with them then; it was well with the woman and the child, and they were happy.
Butthe Dyces never really knew how great and serious was the charge bequeathed to them in their brother William’s daughter till they saw it all one night in March in the light of a dozen penny candles.
Lennox had come from a world that’s lit by electricity, and for weeks she was sustained in wonder and amusement by the paraffin lamps of Daniel Dyce’s dwelling. They were, she was sure, the oldest kind of light in all the world, Aladdin-lights that gleamed of old on caverns of gems, till Kate on this particular evening came into the kitchen with the week-end groceries. It was a stormy season—the year of the big winds; moanings were at the windows, sobbings in the chimney-heads, and the street was swept by spindrift rain. Bell and Ailie and their brother sat in the parlour, silent, playing cards with a dummy hand, and Bud, with Footles in her lap, behind the winter-dykes on which clothes dried before the kitchen fire, crouched on the fender with a Shakespeare, where almost breathlessly she read the great, the glorious Macbeth.
“My stars! what a night!” said Kate. “The way them slates and chimney-cans are flying! It must be the anti-nuptial gales. I thought every minute would be my next. Oh towns! towns! Stop you till I get back to Colonsay, and I’ll not leave it in a hurry, I’ll assure you.”
She threw a parcel on the kitchen-dresser, and turned to the light a round and rosy face that streamed with clean cooling rain, her hair in tangleson her temples and her eyes sparkling with the light of youth and adventure,—for to tell the truth she had been flirting at the door a while, in spite of all the rain, with some admirer.
Bud was the sort of child whose fingers itch in the presence of unopened parcels: in a moment the string was untied from the week-end groceries.
“Candles!” she cried. “Well, that beats the band! I’ve seen ’em in windows. What in the world are you going to do with candles? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve—oh Laura, ain’t we grand!”
“What would we do with them but burn them?” said the maid; “we’ll use them in the washing-house,” and then she sank into a chair. “Mercy on me, I declare I’m dying!” she exclaimed in a different key, and Bud looked round and saw Kate’s face had grown of a sudden very pale.
“Oh dear! what is the matter?” she asked, her eyes large, innocent, and anxious.
“Pains,” moaned the maid. “Pains inside me and all over me, and shiverings down the spine of the back. Oh, it’s a sore thing pain, especially when it’s bad! But don’t—don’t say a word to the mustress; I’m not that old, and maybe I’ll get better.”
“Try pain-killer,” recommended Bud. “And if I was you I’d start just here and say a prayer. Butt right in and I’ll not listen.”
“Pain-killer!—what in all the world’s pain-killer? I never heard of it. And the only prayer I know is ‘My Father which art’ in Gaelic, and there’s nothing in it about pains in the spine of the back. No, no I’ll just have to take a tablespoonful of something or other three times a-day, the way I did when the doctor put me right in Colonsay. Perhaps it’s just a chill—but oh! I’m sorrowful, sorrowful!” and Kate, the colour coming slowly back to her, wept softly to herself, rocking in the kitchen chair. It was sometimes by those odd hysterics that she paid for her elations with the lads.
“I know what’s wrong with you,” said Bud briskly, in the manner of Mrs Molyneux. “It’s just the croodles. Bless you, you poor perishing soul! I take the croodles myself when it’s a night like this, and I’m alone. The croodles ain’t the least wee bit deadly; you can put them away by hustling at your work, or banging an old piano, or reading a story, or playing that you’re somebody else—Well, I declare I think I could cure you right now with these twelve candles, far better than you’d do by shooting drugs into yourself.”
“I never took a single candle in all my life,” said Kate, “far less twelve, and I’ll die first”
“Silly!” exclaimed Bud. “You’d think to hear you speak you were a starving Eskimo. I don’t want you to eat the candles. Wait a minute.” She ran lightly upstairs, and was gone for ten minutes.
Kate’s colour all revived; she forgot her croodles in the spirit of anticipation that the child had roused. “Oh, but she’s the clever one that!” she said to herself, drying the rain and tears from her face and starting to nibble a biscuit. “She knows as much as two ministers, and still she’s not a bit proud. Some day she’ll do something desperate.”
When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs Molyneux’s, had taught her dancing.
“Ain’t this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid’s eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain’t this bully? Don’t you stand there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles for the footlights. Why! I knew there was some use for these old candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something I couldn’t ’zactly think of—made me kind of gay, you know, just as if I was going to the theatre. They’re only candles, butthere’s twelve lights to them all at once, and now you’ll see some fun.”
“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.
“I’m going to be a Gorgeous Entertainment; I’m going to be the Greatest Agg—Aggregation of Historic Talent now touring the Middle West. I’m Mademoiselle Winifred Wallace of Madison Square Theatre, New York, positively appearing here for one night only. I’m the whole company, and the stage manager, and the band, and the boys that throw the bouquets. Biff! I’m checked high: all you’ve got to do is to sit there with your poor croodles and feel them melt away. Let’s light the foot-lights.”
There was a row of old brass bedroom candlesticks on the kitchen-shelf that were seldom used now in the house of Dyce, though their polish was the glory of Miss Bell’s heart. The child kilted up her gown, jumped on a chair, and took them down with the help of Kate. She stuck in each a candle, and ranged them in a semicircle on the floor, then lit the candles and took her place behind them.
“Put out the lamp!” she said to Kate, in the common voice of actors’ tragedy.
“Indeed and I’ll do nothing of the kind,” said the maid. “If your Auntie Bell comes in she’ll—she’ll skin me alive for letting you play such cantrips with her candles. Forbye, you’re going to do something desperate, something that’s not canny, and I must have the lamp behind me or I’ll lose my wits.”
“Woman, put out the light!” repeated Bud, with an imperious pointing finger, and, trembling, Kate turned down the lamp upon the wall and blew down the chimney in the very way Miss Dyce was always warning her against. She gasped at the sudden change the loss of the light made—at the sense of something idolatrous and bewitched in the arc of flames on her kitchen-floor, each blown inward from the draught of a rattling window.
“If it isbuidseachas—if it is witchcraft of any kindyou are on for, I’ll not have it,” said Kate firmly. “I never saw the like of this since the old woman in Pennyland put the curse on the Colonsay factor, and she had only seven candles. Dear, dear Lennox, do not do anything desperate; do not be carrying on, for you are frightening me out of my judgment. I’m—I’m maybe better now, I took a bite at a biscuit; indeed I’m quite better, it was nothing but the cold—and a lad out there that tried to kiss me.”
Bud paid no heed, but plucked up the edges of her skirt in outstretched hands and glided into the last dance she had learned from the vaudeville lady, humming softly to herself an appropriate tune. The candles warmly lit her neck, her ears, her tilted nostrils, her brow was high in shadow. First she rose on tiptoe and made her feet to twitter on the flags, then swayed and swung a little body that seemed to hang in air. The white silk swept around and over her—wings with no noise of flapping feather, or swirled in sea-shell coils, that rose in a ripple from her ankles and swelled in wide circling waves above her head, revealing her in glimpses like some creature born of foam on fairy beaches, and holding the command of tempest winds. Ah, dear me! many and many a time I saw her dance just so in her daft days before the chill of wisdom and reflection came her way; she was a passion disembodied, an aspiration realised, a happy morning thought, a vapour, a perfume of flowers, for her attire had lain in lavender. She was the spirit of Spring, as I have felt it long ago in little woods, or seen it in pictures, or heard it in songs; she was an ecstasy, she was a dream.
The dog gave a growl of astonishment, then lay his length on the hearth-rug, his nose between his paws, his eyes fixed on her. “I’ll not have it,” said the maid piteously. “At least I’ll not stand much of it, for it’s not canny to be carrying-on like that in a Christian dwelling. I never did the like of that in all my life.”
“Everymove a picture,” said the child, and stilldanced on, with the moan of the wind outside for a bass to her low-hummed melody. Her stretching folds flew high, till she seemed miraculous tall, and to the servant’s fancy might have touched the low ceiling; then she sank—and sank—and sank till her forehead touched the floor, and she was a flower fallen, the wind no more to stir its petals, the rain no more to glisten on its leaves. ’Twas as if she shrivelled and died there, and Kate gave one little cry that reached the players of cards in the parlour.
“Hush! what noise was that?” said Ailie, lifting her head.
“It would be Kate clumping across the kitchen-floor in the Gaelic language,” said Mr Dyce, pushing his specs up on his brow.
“Nothing but the wind,” said Bell. “What did you say was trumph?”—for that was the kind of player she was.
“It was not the wind, it was a cry; I’m sure I heard a cry. I hope there’s nothing wrong with the little one,” said Ailie, with a throbbing heart, and she threw her cards on the table and went out. She came back in a moment, her face betraying her excitement, her voice demanding silence.
“Of all the wonders!” said she. “Just step this way, people, to the pantry.”
They rose and followed her. The pantry was all darkness. Through its partly open door that led into the kitchen they saw their child in the crescent of the candles, though she could not see them, as no more could Kate, whose chair was turned the other way. They stood in silence watching the strange performance, each with different feelings, but all with eeriness, silent people of the placid, old, half-rustic world, that lives for ever with realities, and seldom sees the passions counterfeited.
Bud had risen, her dark hair looking unnaturally black above her brow, and, her dancing done, she was facing the dog and the servant, the only audience of whose presence she was aware.
“Toots!” said the maid, relieved that all seemed over, “that’s nothing in the way of dancing; you should see them dancing Gillie-Callum over-bye in Colonsay! There’s a dancer so strong there that he breaks the very boards.”
Bud looked at her, and yet not wholly at her—through her, with burning eyes.
“Hush!” she said, trembling. “Do you not hear something?” and at that moment, high over the town went the “honk, honk” of the wild geese.
“Devil the thing but geeses!” said the maid, whose blood had curdled for a second. The rain swept like a broom along the street, the gutters bubbled, the shutters rapped, far above the dwelling went the sound of the flying geese.
“Oh, hush, woman, hush!” implored the child, her hands over her ears, her figure cowering.
“It’s only the geeses. What a start you gave me!” said the maid again.
“No, no,” said Bud, “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast—’”
“What do you mean?” cried Kate.
“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
The child filled each phrase with a travesty of passion; she had seen the part enacted. It was not, be sure, a great performance. Some words were strangely mutilated; but it was a child, and she had more than a child’s command of passion—she had feeling, she had heart.
“I cannot look at you!” exclaimed Kate. “You are not canny, but oh! you are—you are majestic! There was never the like of it in all the isles.”
Bell, in the darkness of the pantry, wept silently at some sense of sin in this play-acting on a Saturdaynight; her brother held her arm tightly; Ailie felt a vague unrest and discontent with herself, a touch of envy and of shame.
“Please collect the bouquets,” said the child, seating herself on the floor with her knees tucked high in her gown. “Are the croodles all gone?”
“It did me a lot of good yon dancing,” said Kate. “Did you put yon words about Macbeth sleep no more together yourself?”
“Yes,” said Bud, and then repented. “No,” she added hurriedly, “that’s a fib; please, God, give me a true tongue. It was made by Shakespeare—dear old Will!”
“I’m sure I never heard of the man in all my life before; but he must have been a bad one.”
“Why, Kate, you are as fresh as the mountain breeze,” said Bud. “He was Great! He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, a poor boy, and went to London and held horses outside the theatre door, and then wrote plays so grand that only the best can act them. He was—he was not for an age, but all the time.”
She had borrowed the lesson as well as the manner of Auntie Ailie, who smiled in the dark of the pantry at this glib rendering of herself.
“Oh, I should love to play Rosalind,” continued the child. “I should love to play everything. When I am big, and really Winifred Wallace, I will go all over the world and put away people’s croodles same as I did yours, Kate, and they will love me; and I will make them feel real good, and sometimes cry—for that is beautiful too. I will never rest, but go on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me—even in the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or’nary luck but just coon shows, for it’s in these places croodles must be most catching. I’ll go there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my Auntie Ailie, and lovely like my dear Auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet sweet Aunt Ailie.”
“She’s big enough and bonny enough, and clever enough in some things,” said the maid; “but can she sew like her sister!—tell me that!”
“Sew!” exclaimed the child, with a frown. “I hate sewing. I guess Auntie Ailie’s like me, and feels sick when she starts a hem and sees how long it is, and all to be gone over with small stitches.”
“Indeed, indeed I do,” whispered Ailie in the pantry, and she was trembling. She told me later how she felt of her conviction then that for her the years of opportunity were gone, the golden years that had slipped past in the little burgh town without a chance for her to grasp their offerings. She told me of her resolution there and then that this child, at least, should have its freedom to expand.
Bud crept to the end of the crescent of her footlights and blew out the candles slowly one by one. The last she left a-light a little longer, and, crouched upon the floor, she gazed with large and dreaming eyes into its flame as if she read there.
“It is over now,” said Mr Dyce in a whisper to his sisters, and, with his hands on their shoulders led them back into the parlour.
Shewas wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not what, in the Pigeons’ Seminary, could be called a good child, for all her sins were frankly manifest, and she knew no fear nor naughty stratagem; her mind, to all but Kate, was open as the day, and there it was the fault of honest Kate’s stupidity. But often Miss Bell must be moaning at transgressions almost harmless in themselves, yet so terribly unlike a Christian bairn, as when Bud spent an afternoon in a tent with some gipsy children, changed clothes with them the better to act a part, and stormed because she could not have them in to tea with her. Or when she asked Lady Anne, bazaar-collecting in the house of Dyce, if she ever had had a proposal. It was a mercy that Lady Anne that very week had had one, and was only too pleased to tell of it and say she had accepted.
“Thenyou’resafe out of the woods,” said Bud gravely. “There’s our Kate, she hasn’t had a proposal yet, and I guess she’s on the slopey side of thirty. It must be dre’ffle to be as old—as old as a house and have no beau to love you. It must be ’scrutiating.”
Lady Anne let her eyes turn for a moment on the sisters Dyce, and the child observed and reddened.
“Oh! Auntie Bell!” she said quickly. “Auntie Bell had heaps and heaps of beaux all dying to marry her, but she gave them the calm cold eye and said she had to cling to Uncle Dan. It was very noble of her, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed it was!” admitted Lady Anne, very much ashamed of herself.
“And Auntie Ailie is not on the slopey side of thirty,” continued Bud, determined to make all amends. “She’s young enough to love dolls.”
It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behaviour. “You are a perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and nonsense of that kind,—it’s fair ridiculous.”
“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much astonished. “It’s in all the books, there’s hardly anything else, ’cept when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the only one you don’t suspect. Indeed, Auntie, I thought it was the Great Thing!”
“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There’s very little else in all the world, except—except the children,” and she folded her niece in her arms. “It is the Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler, kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”
“But it was very wrong; it was a kind of fib for you to talk about me having lots of lads in my time,” said Auntie Bell. “You do not know whether I had or not.”
Bud looked at her and saw a flush on her face. “I think,” said she, “the beaux must have been very stupid, then. But I guess there must have been one, Auntie Bell, and you have forgotten all about him.” And at that Miss Bell went hurriedly from the room, with a pretence that she heard a pot boil over, and Ailie in a low voice told her niece all about Bell’s beau, deep drowned in the Indian Ocean.
For days after that the child was tender with her elder aunt, and made a splendid poem in blank verse upon the late Captain James Murray, which Bell was never to see, but Ailie treasured. For days was sheangelic good. Her rages never came to fever heat. Her rebellions burned themselves out in her bosom. Nobly she struggled with Long Division and the grammar that she abominated; very meekly she took censure for copy-books blotted and words shamefully misspelled in Uncle Daniel’s study. Some way this love that she had thought a mere amusement, like shopping in Chicago, took a new complexion in her mind—became a dear and solemn thing, like her uncle’s Bible readings, when, on Sunday nights at worship in the parlour, he took his audience through the desert to the Promised Land, and the abandoned street was vocal with domestic psalm from the Provost’s open windows. She could not guess—how could she, the child?—that love has its variety. She thought there was but the one love in all the world,—the same she felt herself for most things,—a gladness and agreement with things as they were. And yet at times in her reading she got glimpses of love’s terror and empire, as in the stories of Othello and of Amy Robsart, and herself began to wish she had a lover. She thought at first of Uncle Dan; but he could not be serious, and she had never heard him sigh,—in him was wanting some remove, some mystery. What she wanted was a lover on a milk-white steed, a prince who was “the flower o’ them a’,” as in Aunt Ailie’s song “Glenlogie”; and she could not imagine Uncle Dan with his spectacles on riding any kind of steed, though she felt it would be nice to have him with her when the real prince was there.
Do you think it unlikely that this child should have such dreams? Ah, then, you are not of her number, or you have forgotten. She never forgot. Many a time she told me in after-years of how in the attic bower, with Footles snug at her feet, she conjured up the lad on the milk-white steed, not so much for himself alone, but that she might act the lady-love. And in those dreams she was tall and slender, sometimes proud, disdainful, wounding the poor wretchwith sharp words and cold glances; or she was meek and languishing, sighing out her heart even in presence of his true-love gifts of candy and P. & A. MacGlashan’s penny tarts. She walked with him in gardens enchanted; they sailed at nights over calm moonlit seas, and she would be playing the lute. She did not know what the lute was like; but it was the instrument of love, and had a dulcet sound, like the alto flutes in the burgh band.
But, of course, no fairy prince came wooing Daniel Dyce’s little niece, though men there were in the place—elderly and bald, with married daughters—who tried to buy her kisses for sixpences and sweets, and at last she felt vicariously the joys of love by conducting the affairs of Kate.
Kate had many wooers,—that is the solace of her class. They liked her because she was genial and plump, with a flattering smile and a soft touch of the Gaelic accent that in the proper key and hour is the thing to break hearts. She twirled them all round her little finger, and Bud was soon to see this and to learn that the maid was still very far from the slopey side of thirty. But Kate, too, had her dreams—of some misty lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a delicious smell of tar—something or other on a yacht. The name she had endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny novelettes.
One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.
“Are you at your lessons too?” said the child. “You naughty Kate! there’s a horrid blot. No lady makes blots.”
“It wasn’t me, it was this devilish pen; besides, I’m not a lady,” said Kate, licking the latest blot with her tongue and grimacing. “What way do you spell weather?”
“W-e-t-h-e-r,” said Bud. “At least, I think that’sthe way! but I’d best run and ask Aunt Ailie,—she’s a speller from Spellerville.”
“Indeed and you’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried the maid, alarmed and reddening. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Lennox, because—I’m writing to Charles.”
“A love-letter! Oh, I’ve got you with the goods on you!” exclaimed Bud, enchanted. “And what are you doing with your hurrah clothes on?”
“I like to put on my Sunday clothes when I’m writing Charles,” said the maid, a little put-about. “Do you think it’s kind of daft?”
“It’s not daft at all, it’s real ’cute of you; it’s what I do myself when I’m writing love-letters, for it makes me feel kind of grander. It’s just the same with poetry; I simply can’t make sure enough poetry unless I have on a nice frock and my hands washed.”
“Youwrite love-letters!” said the maid, astounded.
“Yes, you poor perishing soul!” retorted Bud. “And you needn’t yelp. I’ve written scores of love-letters without stopping to take breath. Stop! stop!” she interrupted herself, and breathed an inward little prayer. “I mean that I write them—well, kind of write them—in my mind.” But this was a qualification beyond Kate’s comprehension.
“Then I wish you would give me a hand with this one,” said she despairingly. “All the nice words are so hard to spell, and this is such a bad pen.”
“They’reallbad pens; they’re all devilish,” said Bud, from long experience. “But I’d love to help you write that letter. Let me see—pooh! it’s dreffle bad, Kate. I can’t read a bit of it, almost.”
“I’m sure and neither can I,” said Kate, distressed.
“Then how in the world do you expect Charles to read it?” asked Bud.
“Oh, he’s—he’s a better scholar than me,” said Kate complacently. “But you might write this one for me.”
Bud washed her hands, took a chair to the kitchen table, threw back her hair from her eyes, and eagerlyentered into the office of love-letter-writer. “What will I say to him?” she asked.
“My dear, dear Charles,” said the maid, who at least knew so much.
“My adorable Charles,” said Bud, as an improvement, and down it went with the consent of the dictator.
“I’m keeping fine, and I’m very busy,” suggested Kate, upon deliberation. “The weather is capital here at present, and it is a good thing, for the farmers are busy with their hay.”
Bud sat back and stared at her in amazement. “Are you sure this is for a Charles?” she asked. “You might as well call him Sissy and talk frocks. Why! you must tell him how you love him.”
“Oh, I don’t like,” said Kate, confused. “It sounds so—so bold and impudent when you put it in the English and write it down. But please yourself; put down what you like, and I’ll be dipping the pen for you.”
Bud was not slow to take the opportunity. For half an hour she sat at the kitchen table and searched her soul for fitting words that would convey Kate’s adoration. Once or twice the maid asked what she was writing, but all she said was “Don’t worry, Kate. I’m right in the throes.” There were blots and there were erasions, but something like this did the epistle look when it was done:—
“My adorable Charles,—I am writeing this letter to let you know how much I truly love you. Oh Charles, dear, you are the Joy of my heart. I am thinking of you so often, often, till my Heart just aches. It is lovely wether here at present. Now I will tell you all about the Games. They took place in a park near here Friday and there was seventeen beautiful dancers. They danced to give you spassums. One of them was a Noble youth. He was a Prince in his own write, under Spells for sevn years. When he danced, lo and behold he was the admiration ofall Beholders. Alas! poor youth. When I say alas I mean that it was so sad being like that full of Spells in the flower of his youth. He looked at me so sad when he was dancing, and I was so glad. It was just like money from home. Dear Charles, I will tell you all about myself. I am full of goodness most the time for God loves good people. But sometimes I am not and I have a temper like two crost sticks when I must pray to be changed. The dancing gentleman truly loves me to distruction. He kissed my hand and hastily mountain his noble steed, galoped furiously away. Ah, the coarse of true love never did run smooth. Perhaps he will fall upon the forein plain. Dearest Charles—adorable—I must now tell you that I am being educated for my proper station in life. There is Geograpy, and penmanship with the right commas, and Long Division and conjunctives which I abomiate. But my teacher, a sweet lady named Miss Alison Dyce, says they are all truly refining. Oh I am weary, weary, he cometh not. That is for you, darling Charles, my own.—Your true heart love,Kate MacNeill.”
“My adorable Charles,—I am writeing this letter to let you know how much I truly love you. Oh Charles, dear, you are the Joy of my heart. I am thinking of you so often, often, till my Heart just aches. It is lovely wether here at present. Now I will tell you all about the Games. They took place in a park near here Friday and there was seventeen beautiful dancers. They danced to give you spassums. One of them was a Noble youth. He was a Prince in his own write, under Spells for sevn years. When he danced, lo and behold he was the admiration ofall Beholders. Alas! poor youth. When I say alas I mean that it was so sad being like that full of Spells in the flower of his youth. He looked at me so sad when he was dancing, and I was so glad. It was just like money from home. Dear Charles, I will tell you all about myself. I am full of goodness most the time for God loves good people. But sometimes I am not and I have a temper like two crost sticks when I must pray to be changed. The dancing gentleman truly loves me to distruction. He kissed my hand and hastily mountain his noble steed, galoped furiously away. Ah, the coarse of true love never did run smooth. Perhaps he will fall upon the forein plain. Dearest Charles—adorable—I must now tell you that I am being educated for my proper station in life. There is Geograpy, and penmanship with the right commas, and Long Division and conjunctives which I abomiate. But my teacher, a sweet lady named Miss Alison Dyce, says they are all truly refining. Oh I am weary, weary, he cometh not. That is for you, darling Charles, my own.—Your true heart love,
Kate MacNeill.”
“Is that all right?” asked Bud anxiously.
“Yes; at least it’ll do fine,” said the maid, with that Highland politeness that is often so bad for business. “There’s not much about himself in it, but och! it’ll do fine. It’s as nice a letter as ever I saw: the lines are all that straight.”
“But there’s blots,” said Bud regretfully. “There oughtn’t to be blots in a real love-letter.”
“Toots! just put a cross beside each of them, and write ‘this is a kiss,’” said Kate, who must have had some previous experience. “You forgot to ask him how’s his health, as it leaves us at present.”
So Bud completed the letter as instructed. “Now for the envelope,” said she.
“I’ll put the address on it myself,” said Kate, confused. “He would be sure somebody else had been reading it if the address was not in my hand ofwrite,”—an odd excuse, whose absurdity escaped the child. So the maid put the letter in the bosom of her Sunday gown against her heart, where meanwhile dwelt the only Charles. It is, I sometimes think, where we should all deposit and retain our love-letters; for the lad and lass, as we must think of them, have no existence any more than poor Kate’s Charles.
Two days passed. Often in those two days would Bud come, asking anxiously if there was any answer yet from Charles. As often the maid of Colonsay reddened, and said with resignation there was not so much as the scrape of a pen. “He’ll be on the sea,” she explained at last, “and not near a post-office. Stop you till he gets near a post-office, and you’ll see the fine letter I’ll get.”
“I didn’t know he was a sailor,” said Bud. “Why, I calculated he was a Highland chieftain or a knight, or something like that. If I had known he was a sailor I’d have made that letter different. I’d have loaded it up to the nozzle with sloppy weather, and said, Oh, how sad I was—that’s you, Kate—to lie awake nights thinking about him out on the heaving billow. Is he a captain?”
“Yes,” said Kate promptly. “A full captain in the summer time. In the winter he just stays at home and helps on his mother’s farm. Not a cheep to your aunties about Charles, darling Lennox,” she added anxiously. “They’re—they’re that particular!”
“I don’t think you’re a true love at all,” said Bud, reflecting on many interviews at the kitchen window and the back-door. “Just think of the way you make goo-goo eyes at the letter-carrier, and the butcher’s man, and the ashpit gentleman. What would Charles say?”
“Toots! I’m only putting by the time with them,” explained the maid. “It’s only a diversion. When I marry I will marry for my own conveniency, and the man for me is Charles.”
“What’s the name of his ship?” asked the child.
“TheGood Intent,” said Kate, who had known a skiff of the name in Colonsay. “A beautiful ship, with two yellow lums, and flags to the masthead.”
“That’s fine and fancy!” said Bud. “There was a gentleman who loved me to destruction, coming over on the ship from New York, and loaded me with candy. He was not the captain, but he had gold braid everywhere, and his name was George Sibley Purser. He promised he would marry me when I made a name for myself, but I ’spect Mister J. S. Purser’ll go away and forget.”
“That’s just the way with them all,” said Kate.
“I don’t care, then,” said Bud. “I’m all right; I’m not kicking.”
Next day the breakfast in the house of Dyce was badly served, for Kate was wild to read a letter that the post had brought, and when she opened it, you may be sure Bud was at her shoulder.
“Dearest Kate[it said],—I love you truly and I am thinking of you most the time. Thank God we was all safed. Now I will tell you all about the Wreck. The sea was mountains high, and we had a cargo of spise and perils from Java on the left-hand side the map as you go to Australia. When the Pirite ship chased us we went down with all hands. But we constrickted a raft and sailed on and on till we had to draw lots who would drink the blood. Just right there a sailor cried ‘A sail, A sail,’ and sure enough it was a sail. And now I will tell you all about Naples. There is a monsterious mountain there, or cone which belches horrid flames and lavar. Once upon a time it belched all over a town by the name of Pompy and it is there till this very day. The bay of naples is the grandest in the world it is called the golden horn. Dearest Katherine, I am often on the mast at night. It is cold and shakey in that place and oh how the wind doth blow, but Iring a bell and say alls well which makes the saloon people truly glad. We had five stow-ways. One of them was a sweet fair-haired child from Liverpool, he was drove from home. But a good and beautious lady, one of the first new england families is going to adopt him and make him her only air. How beautiful and bright he stood as born to rule the storm. I weary for your letters darling Katherine.—Write soon to your true love till death,
“Dearest Kate[it said],—I love you truly and I am thinking of you most the time. Thank God we was all safed. Now I will tell you all about the Wreck. The sea was mountains high, and we had a cargo of spise and perils from Java on the left-hand side the map as you go to Australia. When the Pirite ship chased us we went down with all hands. But we constrickted a raft and sailed on and on till we had to draw lots who would drink the blood. Just right there a sailor cried ‘A sail, A sail,’ and sure enough it was a sail. And now I will tell you all about Naples. There is a monsterious mountain there, or cone which belches horrid flames and lavar. Once upon a time it belched all over a town by the name of Pompy and it is there till this very day. The bay of naples is the grandest in the world it is called the golden horn. Dearest Katherine, I am often on the mast at night. It is cold and shakey in that place and oh how the wind doth blow, but Iring a bell and say alls well which makes the saloon people truly glad. We had five stow-ways. One of them was a sweet fair-haired child from Liverpool, he was drove from home. But a good and beautious lady, one of the first new england families is going to adopt him and make him her only air. How beautiful and bright he stood as born to rule the storm. I weary for your letters darling Katherine.—Write soon to your true love till death,
“Charles.”
Kate struggled through this extraordinary epistle with astonishment. “Who in the world is it from?” she asked Bud.
“Charles, stupid,” said Bud, astonished that there should be any doubt about that point. “Didn’t I—didn’t we write him the other night? It was up to him to write back, wasn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Kate, very conscious of that letter still unposted, “but—but he doesn’t say Charles anything, just Charles. It’s a daft-like thing not to give his name; it might be anybody. There’s my Charles, and there’s Charles Maclean from Oronsay,—what way am I to know which of them it is?”
“It’ll be either or eyether,” said Bud. “Do you know Charles Maclean?”
“Of course I do,” said the maid. “He’s following the sea, and we were well acquaint.”
“Did he propose to you?” asked Bud.
“Well, he did not exactly propose,” admitted Kate, “but we sometimes went a walk together to the churchyard on a Sunday, and you know yourself what that means out in Colonsay. I’ll just keep the letter and think of it. It’s the nicest letter I ever got, and full of information. It’s Charles Maclean, I’ll warrant you, but he did not use to call me Katherine—he just said Kate, and his face would be as red as anything. Fancy him going down with all hands! My heart is sore for him,” and the maid there and then transferred her devotion from themisty lad of her own imagination to Charles Maclean of Oronsay.
“You’ll help me to write him a letter back to-night,” she said.
“Yes, indeed, I’ll love to,” said the child wearily. But by the time the night came on, and Wanton Wully rang his curfew bell, and the rooks came clanging home to the tall trees of the forest, she was beyond all interest in life or love.