Wanton Wullyonly briefly rang the morning bell, and gingerly, with tight-shut lips and deep nose breathings, as if its loud alarm could so be mitigated. Once before he had done it just as delicately—when the Earl was dying, and the bell-ringer, uncertain of his skill to toll, when the time came, with the right half-minute pauses, grieved the town and horrified the Castle by a rehearsal in the middle of a winter night. But no soul of mercy is in brazen bells that hang aloof from man in lofty steeples, and this one, swung ever so gently, sullenly boomed—boomed—boomed.
“Oh, to the devil wi’ ye!” said Wanton Wully, sweating with vexation. “Of all the senseless bells! A big, boss bluiter! I canna compel nor coax ye!” and he gave the rope one vicious tug that brought it, broken, round his ears; then went from the church into the sunny, silent, morning street, where life and the day suspended.
In faith! a senseless bell, a merciless bell, waking folk to toil and grief. Dr Brash and Ailie heavy-eyed, beside the bed in the attic bower, shivered at the sound of it, and looked with fear and yearning at the sleeping child.
Bud moved her head from side to side a little on the pillow, with a murmur from her parched lips, and there was a flicker of the eyelids—that was all. Between her and the everlasting swound, where giddily swings the world and all its living things, there seemed no more than a sheet of tissue-paper:it was as if a breath of the tender morning air would quench the wavering flame that once was joy and Lennox Dyce. The heart of Auntie Ailie rose clamouring in her bosom; her eyes stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clenched her teeth that she might still be worthy of the doctor’s confidence.
He saw it, and put out his hand and pressed her shoulder, a fat old-fashioned man, well up in years, with whiskers under his chin like a cravat, yet beautiful as a prince to Ailie, for on him all her hopes were cast. “They call me agnostic—atheist even, whiles, I hear,” he had said in the midst of their vigil; “and, indeed, I’m sometimes beat to get my mind beyond the mechanism, but—h’m!—a fine child, a noble child; she was made for something—h’m! That mind and talent—h’m!—that spirit—h’m!—the base of it was surely never yon grey stuff in the convolutions.” And another time the minister had come in (the folk in the street were furious to see him do it!), and timidly suggested prayer. “Prayer!” said Dr Brash, “before this child, and her quite conscious! Man, what in God’s own name are we doing here, this—h’m!—dear good lady and I, but fever ourselves with sleepless, silent prayer? Do you think a proper prayer must be official? There’s not a drop of stuff in a druggist’s bottle but what’s a solution of hope and faith and—h’m!—prayer. Con-found it, sir!”
He put out his hand and pressed her on the shoulder, and never said a word. Oh, the doctors! the doctors! Hale men and hearty, we can see their shortcomings and can smile at them, but when the night-light burns among the phials!
It was the eighth day after Kate, with a face of clay, and her sleeves rolled up, and the dough still on her elbows as she had come from the baking-board, burst upon the doctor in his surgery with the cry, “Dr Brash, Dr Brash! ye’re to haste ye and come at once to the wee one!” He had gone as nearly on the wings of the wind as a fat man may incarpet-slippers, and found a distracted family round the fevered child.
“Tut, tut, lassie,” said he, chucking her lightly under the chin. “What new prank is this, to be pretending illness? Or if it’s not a let-on, I’ll be bound it’s MacGlashan’s almond tablet.”
“It’s these cursèd crab-apples in the garden; I’m sure it’s the crab-apples, doctor,” said Miss Bell, looking ten years older than her usual.
“H’m! I think not,” said Dr Brash more gravely, with his finger on the pulse.
“It’s bound to be,” said Bell, piteous at having to give up her only hope. “Didn’t you eat some yesterday, pet, after I told you that you were not for your life to touch them?”
“No,” said Bud, with hot and heavy breathing.
“Then why didn’t ye, why didn’t ye; and then it might have been the apples?” said poor Miss Bell. “You shouldn’t have minded me; I’m aye so domineering.”
“No, you’re not,” said Bud, and wanly smiling.
“Indeed I am; the thing’s acknowledged, and you needn’t deny it,” said her auntie. “I’m desperate domineering to you.”
“Well, I’m—I’m not kicking,” said Bud. It was the last cheerful expression she gave utterance to for many days.
Wanton Wully was not long the only one that morning in the sunny street. Women came out, unusually early, as it seemed, to beat their basses; but the first thing that they did was to look at the front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a kind of terror lest none of the blinds should be up, and Mr Dyce’s old kid glove should be off the knocker. “Have you heard what way she is keeping to-day?” they asked the bell-man.
“Not a cheep!” said he. “I saw Kate sweepin’ out her door-step, but I couldna ask her. That’s the curse of my occupation; I wish to goodness they had another man for the grave-diggin’.”
“You and your graves!” said the women. “Who was mentioning them?”
He stood on the syver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that’s what she was—a perfect caution! She called me Mr Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”
“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.
“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tellt me once it was a kind o’ weakness that they keep on gantrys down in Maggie White’s. But she does not understand—the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o’ gout. Me! I never had the gout,—I never had the money for it, more’s the pity.”
He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh’s Cleansing Department. Later—till the middle of the day—he was the Harbour-Master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces’ house. “It’s the parlour fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel’, though I never had it; it’s a good sign o’ him the night before.”
Peter the post came clamping by-and-by alongthe street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces’. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back-door and lightly tapped.
“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.
“She’s got the turn!—she’s got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”
“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.
“It’s no’ temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi’ the weather-glass the doctor’s aye so cross wi’ that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But anyway she’s better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not, she’ll starve hersel’”
“That’s rare! By George, that’s tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons’ balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.
Wanton Wully sat on a barrow-tram waiting the postman’s exit. “What way is she?” said he, and Peter’s errant eye cocked to all airts of the compass. What he wanted was to keep this tit-bit to himself, to have the satisfaction of passing it along with his letters. To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What wayis she?” he asked again, seeing the postman’s hesitation.
“If ye’ll promise to stick to the head o’ the toun and let me alone in the ither end, I’ll tell ye,” said Peter, and it was so agreed.
But they had not long all the glory of the good tidings to themselves. Dr Brash came out of Dyce’s house for the first time in two days, very sunken in the eyes and sorely needing shaving, and it could be noticed by the dullest that he had his jaunty walk and a flower in the lapel of his badly-crushed coat. Ailie put it there with trembling fingers; she could have kissed the man besides, if there had not been the chance that he might think her only another silly woman. Later Footles hurled himself in fury from the doorway, his master close behind him. At the sight of Mr Dyce the street was happy; it was the first time they had seen him for a week. In burgh towns that are small enough we have this compensation, that if we have to grieve in common over many things, a good man’s personal joy exalts us all.
“She’s better, Mr Dyce, I’m hearing,” said P. & A. MacGlashan, wiping his hands on his apron, to prepare for a fervent clasp from one who, he ought to have known, was not of the fervent-clasping kind.
“Thank God! Thank God!” said Mr Dyce. “You would know she was pretty far through?”
“Well—we kind of jaloused. But we kent there was no danger—the thing would be ridiculous!” said P. & A. MacGlashan, and went into his shop in a hurry, much uplifted too, and picked out a big bunch of black grapes and sent his boy with them, with his compliments, to Miss Lennox Dyce, care of Daniel Dyce, Esquire, Writer.
Miss Minto so adored the man she could not show herself to him in an hour like that; for she knew that she must weep, and a face begrutten ill became her, so in she came from the door of her Emporium and watched him pass the window. She saw in himwhat she had never seen before—for in his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say: she saw, with the sharp eyes of a woman who looks at the man she would like to manage, that his hat was dusty and his boots not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week from the Dyces’ dwelling it realised for her the state of things there.
“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he’s quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence ha’penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they called “Miss Minto’s back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace, a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss Minto’s youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen—if queens are attired in gorgeous hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss Minto’s life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But she thought how happy Mr Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.
As she knocked lightly at the front door, the old kid glove came loose in her hand—an omen! One glance up and down the street to see that no one noticed her, and then she slipped it in her pocket, with a guilty countenance. She was not young, at least she was not in her ’teens, but young enough to do a thing like that for luck and her liking of Daniel Dyce. Yet her courage failed her, and when Kate came to the door the first thing she handed to her was the glove.
“It fell off,” she said. “I hope it means that it’s no longer needed. And this is a little thing for Miss Lennox, Kate; you will give her it with my compliments. I hear there’s an improvement?”
“You wouldnabelieveit!” said Kate. “Thank God, she’ll soon be carrying-on as bad as ever!”
Mr Dyce would not have cared a rap that morning if he had come upon his clerks at Catch-the-Ten, or even playing leapfrog on their desks. He was humming a psalm you may guess at as he looked at the documents heaped on his table—his calf-bound books and the dark japanned deed-boxes round his room.
“Everything just the same, and business still going on!” he said to his clerk. “Dear me! dear me! what a desperate world! Do you know, I had the notion that everything was stopped. No, when I think of it I oftener fancied all this was a dream.”
“Not Menziesv.Kilblane at any rate,” said the clerk, with his hand on a bulky Process, for he was a cheery soul and knew the mind of Daniel Dyce.
“I daresay not,” said the lawyer. “That plea will last a while, I’m thinking. And all about a five-pound fence! Let you and me, Alexander, thank our stars there are no sick bairns in the house of either Menzies or Kilblane, for then they would understand how much their silly fence mattered, and pity be on our canty wee Table-of-Fees!” He tossed over the papers with an impatient hand. “Trash!” said he. “What frightful trash! I can’t be bothered with them—not to-day. They’re no more to me than a docken leaf. And last week they were almost everything. You’ll have heard the child has got the turn?”
“I should think I did!” said Alexander. “And no one better pleased to hear it!”
“Thank you, Alick. How’s the family?”
“Fine,” said the clerk.
“Let me think, now—seven, isn’t it? A big responsibility.”
“Not so bad as long’s we have the health,” said Alexander.
“Yes, yes,” said Mr Dyce. “All one wants in this world is the health—and a little more money. I was just thinking—” He stopped himself, hummed a bar of melody, and twinkled through his spectacles. “You’ll have read Dickens?” said he.
“I was familiar with his works when I was young,” said Alexander, like a man confessing that in youth he played at bools. “They were not bad.”
“Just so! Well, do you know there was an idea came to my mind just now that’s too clearly the consequence of reading Dickens for a week back, so I’ll hold my hand and keep my project for another early occasion when it won’t be Dickens that’s dictating.”
He went early back that day, to relieve Ailie at her nursing, as he pretended to himself, but really for his own delight in looking at the life in eyes where yesterday was a cloud. A new, fresh, wholesome air seemed to fill the house. Bud lay on high pillows, with Miss Minto’s Grace propped against her knees, and the garret was full of the odour of flowers that had come in a glorious bunch from the banker’s garden. Bell had grown miraculously young again, and from between Ailie’s eyebrows had disappeared the two black lines that had come there when Dr Brash had dropped in her ear the dreadful word pneumonia. But Dr Brash had beaten it! Oh, if she only knew the way to knit a winter waistcoat for him!
The child put out her hand to her uncle, and he kissed her on the palm, frightful even yet of putting a lip to her cheek, lest he should experience again the terror of the hot breath from that consuming inward fire.
“Well,” said he briskly, “how’s our health, yourladyship? Losh bless me! what a fine, big, sonsy baby you have gotten here; poor Alibel’s nose will be out of joint, I’m thinking.”
“Hasn’t got any,” said Bud, still weakly, in her new, thin, and unpractised voice, as she turned with a look that showed no lessening affection for the old doll, badly battered in the visage and wanting in the limbs, which lay beside her on the pillow.
“Blythmeat and breadberry,” said Daniel Dyce. “In the house of Daniel Dyce! Bell and Ailie, here’s an example for you!”
Followingon stormy weeks had come an Indian summer, when the world was blessed with Ailie’s idea of Arden weather, that keeps one wood for ever green and glad with company, knows only the rumour of distant ice and rain, and makes men, reading thereof by winter fires, smell fir and feel the breeze on their naked necks and hunger for the old abandoned bed among the brackens. “It is better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak,” was the motto of Daniel Dyce, and though the larks were absent, he would have the little one in the garden long hours of the day. She beiked there like a kitten in the sunlight till her wan cheek bloomed. The robin sang among the apples—pensive a bit for the ear of age, that knows the difference between the voice of spring and autumn—sweet enough for youth that happily does not have an ear for its gallant melancholy; the starlings blew like a dust about the sky; over the garden wall—the only one in the town that wanted broken bottles—far-off hills raised up their heads to keek at the little lassie, who saw from this that the world was big and glorious as ever.
“My! ain’t this fine and clean?” said Bud. “Feels as if Aunt Bell had been up this morning bright and early with a duster.” She was enraptured with the blaze of the nasturtiums, that Bell would aye declare should be the flower of Scotland, for “Indian cress here, or Indian cress there,” as she would say, “they’re more like Scots than any flower I ken. The poorer the soil thebetter they thrive, and they come to gold where all your fancy flowers would rot for the want of nutriment. Nutriment! give them that in plenty and you’ll see a bonny display of green and no’ much blossom. The thing’s a parable—the worst you can do with a Scotsman, if you want the best from him, ’s to feed him ower rich. Look at Captain Consequence; never the same since he was aboard—mulligatawny even-on in India; a score of servant-men, and never a hand’s-turn for himself,—all the blossom from that kind of Indian cress is on his nose.”
“Lands sake! Iamglad I’m not dead,” said Bud, with all her body tingling as she heard the bees buzz in the nasturtium bells and watched the droll dog Footles snap at the butterflies.
“It’s not a bad world, one way and the other,” said Miss Bell, knitting at her side; “it would have been a hantle worse if we had had the making o’t. But here we have no continuing city, and yonder—if the Lord had willed—you would have gone sweeping through the gates of the new Jerusalem.”
“Sweeping!” said the child. “I can’t sweep for keeps; Kate won’t give me a chance to learn. But anyhow I guess this is a good enough world for a miserable sinner like me.”
Mr Dyce, who had carried her, chair and all, into the garden, though she could have walked there, chuckled at this confession.
“Dan,” said Bell, “think shame of yourself! You make the child light-minded.”
“The last thing I would look for in women is consistency,” said he, “and I daresay that’s the way I like them. What is it Ailie quotes from Emerson? ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’—that kind of goblin never scared a woman in the dark yet. But surely you’ll let me laugh when I think of you chiding her gladness in life to-day, when I mind of you last week so desperate throng among the poultices.”
“I’m for none of your lawyer arguments,” saidBell, trying in vain to gag herself with a knitting-pin from one of the Shetland shawls she had been turning out for years with the hope that some day she could keep one for herself. “It might have been that ‘she pleased God and was beloved of Him, so that, living among sinners’—among sinners, Dan,—‘she was translated. Yea, speedily was she taken away, lest that wickedness should alter her understanding, or deceit beguile her soul.’”
“I declare if I haven’t forgot my peppermints!” said her brother, quizzing her, and clapping his outside pockets. “A consoling text! I have no doubt at all you could prelect upon it most acceptably, but confess that you are just as glad as me that there’s the like of Dr Brash.”
“I like the Doc,” the child broke in, with most of this dispute beyond her; “he’s a real cuddley man. Every time he rapped at my chest I wanted to cry ‘Come in.’ Say, isn’t he slick with a poultice!”
“He was slick enough to save your life, my dear,” said Uncle Dan soberly. “I’m almost jealous of him now, for Bud’s more his than mine.”
“Did he make me better?” asked the child.
“Under God. I’m thinking we would have been in a bonny habble wanting him.”
“I don’t know what a bonny habble is from Adam,” said Bud, “but I bet the Doc wasn’teverything: there was that prayer, you know.”
“Eh?” exclaimed her uncle sharply.
“Oh, I heard you, Uncle Dan,” said Bud, with a sly look up at him. “I wasn’t sleeping really that night, and I was awful liable to have tickled you on the bald bit of your head. I never saw it before. I could have done it easily if it wasn’t that I was so tired; and my breath was so sticky that I had to keep on yanking it, just; and you were so solemn and used such dre’ffle big words. I didn’t tickle you, but I thought I’d help you pray, and so I kept my eyes shut and said a bit myself. Say, I want to tell you something,”—she stammered,with a shaking lip. “I felt real mean when you talked about a sinless child; of course you didn’t know, but it was—it wasn’t true. I know why I was taken ill: it was a punishment for telling fibs to Kate. I was mighty frightened that I’d die before I had a chance to tell you.”
“Fibs!” said Mr Dyce seriously. “That’s bad. And I’m loth to think it of you, for it’s the only sin that does not run in the family, and the one I most abominate.”
Bell stopped her knitting, quite distressed, and the child lost her new-come bloom. “I didn’t mean it for fibs,” she said, “and it wasn’t anything I said, but a thing I did when I was being Winifred Wallace. Kate wanted me to write a letter—”
“Who to?” demanded Auntie Bell.
“It was to—it was to—oh, I daren’t tell you,” said Bud, distressed. “It wouldn’t be fair, and maybe she’ll tell you herself, if you ask her. Anyhow I wrote the letter for her, and seeing she wasn’t getting any answer to it, and was just looney for one, and I was mighty keen myself, I turned Winny on, and wrote one. I went out and posted it that dre’ffle wet night you had the party, and I never let on to Kate, so she took it for a really really letter from the person we sent the other one to. I got soaked going to the post-office, and that’s where I guess God began to playHishand. Jim said the Almighty held a royal flush every blessed time; but that’s card talk, I don’t know what it means, ’cept that Jim said it when the ‘Span of Life’ manager skipped with the boodle—lit out with the cash, I mean, and the company had to walk home from Kalamazoo on the railroad ties.”
“Mercy on us! I never heard a word of it,” cried Miss Bell. “This’ll be a warning! People that have bairns to manage shouldn’t be giving parties; it was the only night since ever you came here that we never put you to your bed. Did Kate not change your clothes when you came in wet?”
“She didn’t know I was out, for that would have spoiled everything, ’cause she’d have asked me what I was doing out, and I’d have had to tell her, for I can’t fib that kind of fib. When I came in all soaking, I took a teeny-weeny loan of Uncle’s tartan rug, and played to Kate I was Helen Macgregor, and Kate went into spasms, and didn’t notice anything till my clothes were dry. Was it very very naughty of me?”
“It was indeed! It was worse than naughty, it was silly,” said her Uncle Dan, remembering all the prank had cost them.
“Oh, Lennox! my poor sinful bairn!” said her aunt, most melancholy.
“I didn’t mean the least harm,” protested the child, trembling on the verge of tears. “I did it all to make Kate feel kind of gay, for I hate to see a body mope,—and I wanted a little fun myself,” she added hastily, determined to confess all.
“I’ll Kate her, the wretch!” cried Auntie Bell quite furious, gathering up her knitting.
“Why, Auntie Bell, it wasn’t her fault, it was—”
But before she could say more, Miss Bell was flying to the house for an explanation, Footles barking at her heels astonished, for it was the first time he had seen her trot with a ball of wool trailing behind her. The maid had the kitchen window open to the last inch, and looked out on a street deserted but for a ring of bairns that played before the baker’s door. Their voices, clear and sweet, and laden with no sense of care or apprehension, filled the afternoon with melody—
“Water, water wall-flowers,Growing up so high,We are all maidens,And we must all die.”
To the maid of Colonsay in an autumn mood, the rhyme conveyed some pensive sentiment that was pleasant though it almost made her cry: the airslipped to her heart, the words in some way found the Gaelic chord that shakes in sympathy with minor keys, for beautiful is all the world, our day of it so brief! Even Miss Bell was calmed by the children’s song as it came from the sunny street into the low-ceiled shady kitchen. She had played that game herself, sung these words long ago, never thinking of their meaning: how pitiful it was that words and a tune should so endure, unchanging, and all else alter!
“Kate, Kate, you foolish lass!” she cried, and the maid drew in with the old astonishment and remorse, as if it was her first delinquency.
“I—I was looking for the post,” said she.
“Not for the first time, it seems,” said her mistress. “I’m sorry to hear it was some business of yours that sent Miss Lennox to the post-office on a wet night that was the whole cause of our tribulation. At least you might have seen the wean was dried when she came back.”
“I’m sure and I don’t know what you’re talking about, me’m,” said the maid, astounded.
“You got a letter the day the bairn took ill; what was it about?”
The girl burst into tears and covered her head with her apron. “Oh, Miss Dyce, Miss Dyce!” she cried, “you’re that particular, and I’m ashamed to tell you. It was only just diversion.”
“Indeed, and you must tell me,” said her mistress, now determined. “There’s some mystery here that must be cleared, as I’m a living woman. Show me that letter this instant!”
“I can’t, Miss Dyce, I can’t, I’m quite affronted. You don’t ken who it’s from.”
“I ken better than yourself; it’s from nobody but Lennox,” said Miss Bell.
“My stars!” cried the maid, astonished. “Do you tell me that? Amn’t I the stupid one? I thought it was from Charles. Oh, me’m! what will Charles Maclean of Oronsay think of me? He’ll think I wasdemented,” and turning to her servant’s chest she threw it open and produced the second sham epistle.
Miss Bell went in with it to Ailie in the parlour, and they read it together. Ailie laughed till the tears came at the story it revealed. “It’s more creditable to her imagination than to my teaching in grammar and spelling,” was her only criticism. “The—the little rogue!”
“And is that the way you look at it?” asked Bell, disgusted. “A pack of lies from end to end. She should be punished for it; at least she should be warned that it was very wicked.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Miss Ailie. “I think she has been punished enough already, if punishment was in it. Just fancy if the Lord could make so much ado about a little thing like that! It’s not a pack of lies at all, Bell; it’s literature, it’s romance.”
“Well, romancing!” said Miss Bell. “What’s romancing, if you leave out Walter Scott? I am glad she has a conviction of the sin of it herself. If she had slipped away from us on Wednesday this letter would have been upon her soul. It’s vexing her now.”
“If that is so, it’s time her mind was relieved,” said Ailie, and rising, sped to the garden with the letter in her hand. Her heart bled to see the apprehension on Bud’s face, and beside her, Dan, stroking her hair and altogether bewildered.
“Bud,” cried Ailie, kissing her, “do you think you could invent a lover for me who would write me letters half so interesting as this? It’s a lover like that I have all the time been waiting for: the ordinary kind, by all my reading, must be very dull in their correspondence, and the lives they lead deplorably humdrum—
“‘Oh, Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling;Oh, Charlie is my darling, the young marineer.’
After this I’ll encourage only sailors: Bud, dear, get me a nice clean sailor. But I stipulate that he mustbe more discriminating with his capitals, and know that the verb must agree with its nominative, and not be quite so much confused in his geography.”
“You’re not angry with me, Aunt?” said Bud, in a tone of great relief, with the bloom coming back. “Was it very, very wicked?”
“Pooh!” said Ailie. “If that’s wicked, where’s our Mr Shakespeare? Oh, child! child! you are my own heart’s treasure. I thought a girl called Alison I used to know long ago was long since dead and done with, and here she’s to the fore yet, daft as ever, and her name is Lennox Dyce.”
“No, it wasn’t Lennox wrote that letter,” said Bud; “it was Winifred Wallace, and oh, my! she’s a pretty tough proposition. You’re quite,quitesure it wasn’t fibbing.”
“No more than Cinderella’s fibbing,” said her aunt, and flourished the letter in the face of Dan, who she saw was going to enter some dissent. “Behold, Dan Dyce, the artist b-r-r-rain! Calls sailor sweethearts from the vasty deep, and they come obedient to her bidding. Spise and perils, Dan, and the golden horn a trifle out of its latitude, and the darling boy that’salwaysbeing drove from home. One thing you overlooked in the boy, Bud—the hectic flush. I’m sure Kate would have liked a touch of the hectic flush in him.”
But Bud was still contrite, thinking of the servant. “She was so set upon a letter from her Charles,” she explained, “and now she’ll have to know that I was joshing her. Perhaps I shouldn’t say joshing, Auntie Ailie,—I s’pose it’s slang.”
“It is,” said her aunt, “and most unladylike; let us call it pulling her le—let us call it—oh, the English language! I’ll explain it all to Kate, and that will be the end of it.”
“Kate ’d be dre’ffle rattled to talk about love to a grown-up lady,” said Bud, on thinking. “I’d best go in and explain it all myself.”
“Very well,” said Auntie Ailie; so Bud went into the house and through the lobby to the kitchen.
“I’ve come to beg your pardon, Kate,” said she hurriedly. “I’m sorry I—I—pulled your leg about that letter you thought was from Charles.”
“Toots! Ye needn’t bother about my leg or the letter either,” said Kate, most cheerfully, with another letter open in her hand, and Mr Dyce’s evening mail piled on the table before her; “letters are like herring now, they’re comin’ in in shoals. I might have kent yon one never came from Oronsay, for it hadn’t the smell of peats. I have a real one now that’s new come in from Charles, and it’s just a beauty! He got his leg broken on the boats a month ago, and Dr Macphee’s attending him. Oh, I’m that glad to think that Charles’s leg is in the hands of a kent face!”
“Why! that’s funny,” said Bud. “And we were just going to write—oh, you mean the other Charles?”
“I mean Charles Maclean,” said Kate, with some confusion. “I—I—was only lettin’-on about the other Charles; he was only a diversion.”
“But you sent him a letter?” cried Bud.
“Not me!” said Kate composedly. “I kept it, and I sent it on to Charles out in Oronsay when you were poorly; it did fine! He says he’s glad to hear about my education, and doesn’t think much of gentlemen that dances, but that he’s always glad to get the scrape of a pen from me, because—because—well, just because he loves me still the same, yours respectfully, Charles Maclean. And oh, my stars, look at what a lot of crosses!”
Bud scrutinised them with amazement. “Well,he’sa pansy!” said she.
Suddenlyall the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill. She took to wearing all her best on week-days; abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established trade in pay-night sweeties, that used to shower on her in threepenny packets at the start of every autumn when the days grew short. No longer blate young lads scraped with their feet uneasily in the sawdust of P. & A MacGlashan’s, swithering between the genteel attractions of Turkish Delight and the eloquence of conversation lozenges, that saved a lot of thinking, and made the blatest equal with the boldest when it came to tender badinage below the lamp at the back-door close with Dyce’s maid. Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain with sentiments doubly sweet and ready-made at threepence the quarter-pound. So fast the sweeties passed, like the thrust and riposte of rapiers, that their final purpose was forgotten; they were sweeties no longer to be eaten, but scented billets-doux, laconic of course, but otherwise just as satisfactory as those that high-born maidens get only one at a time and at long intervals when their papas are out at business.
“Are you engaged?”
“Just keep spierin’.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“You are a gay deceiver.”
“My heart is yours.”
“How are your poor feet?”
By the hour could Kate sustain such sparkling flirtations, or at least till a “Kiss me, dearest” turned up from the bottom of the poke, and then she slapped his face for him. It is the only answer out in Colonsay unless he’s your intended.
But it stopped all at once. P. & A. was beat to understand what way his pay-night drawings fell, until he saw that all the lads were taking the other side of the street. “That’sheroff, anyway!” said he to Mrs P. & A., with a gloomy visage. “I wonder who’s the lucky man? It’s maybe Peter,—she’ll no’ get mony losengers from him.”
And it was not only the decline in votive offerings that showed the vital change; she was not at the Masons’ ball, which shows how wrong was the thought of P. & A., for Peter was there with another lady. Very cheery, too; exceedingly cheery, ah, desperately gay, but quite beyond the comprehension of his partner, Jenny Shand, who was unable to fathom why a spirit so merry in the hall should turn to groans and bitterness when, feeling a faintish turn, she got him in behind the draft-screen on the landing of the stair to sit the “Flowers o’ Edinburgh.” He was fidging fain to tell her plainly what he thought of all her sex, but strove like a perfect gentleman against the inclination, and only said “Ha! ha! do you say so, noo?” and “Weemen!” with a voice that made them all out nothing more nor less than vipers. Poor Jenny Shand! bonny Jenny Shand! what a shame she should be bothered with so ill-faured a fellow! When she was picking bits of nothing off his coat lapel, as if he was her married man, and then coming to herself with a pretty start and begging pardon for her liberty, the diffy paid no heed; his mind was down the town, and he was seeing himself yesterday morning at the first delivery getting the window of Dyce’s kitchen banged in his face when he started to talk about soap, meaning to work the topic round to hands and gloves. He had got the length of dirtyhands, and asked the size of hers, when bang! the window went, and the Hielan’ one in among her pots and pans.
It was not any wonder, for other lads as deliberate and gawky as himself had bothered her all the week with the same demand. Hands! hands! you would think, said she, they were all at the door wi’ a bunch of finger-rings bound to marry her right or wrong, even if they had to put them on her nose. Of course she knew finely what they were after—she knew that each blate wooer wanted a partner for the ball, and could only clench the compact with a pair of gloves; but just at present she was not in trim for balls, and landsmen had no interest for her since her heart was on the brine. Some of them boldly guessed at seven-and-a-halfs without inquiry, and were dumfoundered that she would not look at them; and one had acquired a pair of roomy white cotton ones with elastic round the top—a kind of glove that plays a solemn part at burials, having come upon Miss Minto when her stock of festive kids was done. They waylaid Kate coming with her basket from the mangle—no, thanky, she was needing no assistance; or she would find them scratching at the window after dark; or hear them whistling, whistling, whistling—oh, so softly!—in the close. There are women rich and nobly born who think that they are fortunate, and yet, poor dears! they never heard the whistling in the close. Kate’s case was terrible! By day, in her walks abroad in her new merino, not standing so much as a wink, or paying any heed to a “Hey, Kate, what’s your hurry?” she would blast them with a flashing eye. By night, hearing their signals, she showed them what she thought of them by putting to the shutters. “Dir-r-rt!” was what she called them, with her nose held high and every “r” a rattle on the lug for them—this to Bud, who could not understand the new distaste Kate had to the other sex. “Just dirt below my feet! I think myself far far above them.”
One evening Mr Dyce came in from his office and quizzed her in the lobby. “Kate,” said he, “I’m not complaining, but I wish you would have mercy on my back-door. There’s not a night I have come home of late but if I look up the close I find a lad or two trying to bite his way into you through the door. Can you no’ go out, like a good lass, and talk at them in the Gaelic—it would serve them right! If you don’t, steps will have to be taken with a strong hand, as you say yourself. What are they wanting? Bless my soul! can this—can this be love?”
She ran to the sanctuary of the kitchen, plumped in a chair, and was swept away in a storm of laughter and tears that frightened Bud, who waited there a return of her aunts from the Women’s Guild. “Why, Kate, what’s the matter?” she asked.
“Your un—your un—un—uncle’s blaming me for harbouring all them chaps about the door, and says it’s l-l—love: oh dear! I’m black affronted.”
“You needn’t go into hysterics about a little thing like that,” said Bud; “Uncle Dan’s tickled to death to see so many beaux you have, wanting you to that ball; he said last night he had to walk between so many of them waiting for you there in front, it was like shassaying up the middle in the Haymakers.”
“It’s not hysterics, nor hersterics either,” said the maid; “and oh, I wish I was out of here and back in the isle of Colonsay!”
Yes, Colonsay became a great place then. America, where the prospects for domestics used to be so fascinating, had lost its glamour since Bud had told her the servants there were as discontented as in Scotland, and now her native isle beat Paradise. She would talk by the hour, at a washing, of its charms, of which the greatest seemed to be the absence of public lamps and the way you heard the wind! Colonsay seemed to be a place where folk were always happy, meeting in each other’s houses,dancing, singing, courting, marrying, getting money every now and then from sons or wealthy cousins in Australia. Bud wondered if they never did any work in Colonsay. Yes, yes, indeed! Kate could assure her, they worked quite often out in Colonsay—in the winter time.
But one thing greatly troubled her—she must write back at once to the only Charles, who so marvellously had come to her through Bud’s unconscious offices, and she knew she could never sustain the standard of hand-write, spelling, and information Bud had established in her first epistle. Her position was lamentable. It was all very well to be the haughty madam on the street, and show herself a wise-like modest gyurl, but what was that without the education? C. Maclean was a man of education—he got it on the yats among the gentry, he had travelled all the world!
Kate’s new airs, that caused such speculation in the town, were—now let me tell you—all the result of a dash at education. She wanted to be able to write a letter as good as Bud in a week or two, and had engaged the child to tutor her.
Bud never found a more delicious game in all her life, and it hurried her convalescence, for to play it properly she must be Aunt Ailie, and Aunt Ailie was always so strong and well.
“Education,” said Bud, who had a marvellous memory, and was now, you will notice, Ailie Dyce, sitting on a high chair, with the maid on a stool before her,—“education is not what a lot of sillies think it is; it isn’t knowing everything. Lots try for it that way, and if they don’t die young, just when they’re going to win the bursary, they grow up horrid bores, that nobody asks to picnics. You can’t know everything, not if you sit up cramming till the cows come home; and if you want to see a brainy person jump, ask him how his mother raised her dough. Miss Katherine MacNeill, never—NEVER—NEVER be ashamed of not knowing a thing, butalways be ashamed of not wanting to know. That’s Part One. Don’t you think you should have an exercise-book, child, and take it down?”
“Toots! what’s my head for?” said the servant
“Uncle Dan says education is knowing what you don’t know, and knowing where to find it out without the other people knowing; but he says in most places you can get the name of having it fine and good by talking loud and pushing all your goods in front of you in a big enough barrow. And Auntie Bell—she says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the rest of it is what she skipped at Barbara Mushet’s Seminary. But I tell you, child (said the echo of Ailie Dyce), that education’s just another name for love.”
“My stars! I never knew that before,” cried the servant; “I’m awful glad about Charles!”
“It isn’t that kind of love,” Bud hurriedly explained, “though it’s good enough, for that’s too easy. You’re only on the trail for education when you love things so you’ve simplygotto learn as much as is good for your health about them. Everything’s sweet—oh, so sweet—all the different countries, and the different people, when you understand, and the woods, and the things in them, and all the animals,—’cepting maybe puddocks, though it’s likely God made them too when He was kind of careless,—and the stars, and the things men did, and women,—’specially those that’s dead, poor dears!—and all the books, ’cepting the stupid ones Aunt Ailie simplycan’tstand, though she never lets on to the ladies who like that kind.”
“My Lord! must you love them all?” asked the maid, astonished.
“Yes, you must, my Lord,” said Bud. “You’ll never know the least thing well in this world unless you love it. It’s sometimes mighty hard, I allow. I hated the multiplication table, but now I love it—at least, I kind of love it up to seven times nine, and then it’s almost horrid, but not so horrid as itwas before I knew that I would never have got to this place from Chicago unless a lot of men had learned the table up as far as twelve times twelve.”
“I’m not particular about the multiplication table,” said the maid, “but I want to be truly refined, the same as you said in yon letter to Charles. I know he’ll be expecting it.”
“H-m-m-m-m!” said Bud thoughtfully, “I s’pose I’ll have to ask Auntie Ailie about that, for I declare to goodness I don’t know where you get it, for it’s not in any of the books I’ve seen. She says it’s the One Thing in a lady, and it grows inside you someway, like—like—like your lungs, I guess. It’s no use trying to stick it on outside with lessons on the piano or the mandoline, and parlour talk about poetry, and speaking mim as if you had a clothes-pin in your mouth, and couldn’t say the least wee thing funny without it was a bit you’d see in ‘Life and Work.’ Refinement, some folk think, is not laughing right out.”
“My stars!” said Kate.
“And Auntie Bell says a lot think it’s not knowing any Scotch language and pretending you never took a tousy tea.”
“I think,” said Kate, “we’ll never mind refining; it’s an awful bother.”
“But every lady must be refined,” said Bud. “Ailie prosists in that.”
“I don’t care,” said the maid; “I’m not particular about being very much of a lady,—I’ll maybe never have the jewellery for it,—but I would like to be a sort of lady on the Sundays, when Charles is at home. I’m not hurryin’ you, my dear, but—but when do we start the writin’?” and she yawned in a way that said little for the interest of Professor Bud’s opening lecture.
Whereupon Bud explained that in a systematic course of education reading came first, and the best reading was Shakespeare, who was truly ennoblingto the human mind. She brought in Auntie Ailie’s Shakespeare, and sat upon the fender, and plunged Kate at once into some queer society at Elsinore. But, bless you! nothing came of it: Kate fell asleep, and woke to find the fire cold and the child entranced with Hamlet.
“Oh dear! it’s a slow job getting your education,” she said pitifully, “and all this time there’s my dear Charles waiting for a letter!”
“Icannabe bothered with that Shakespeare,” Kate cried hopelessly, after many days of him; “the man’s a mournin’ thing! Could he not give us something cheery, with ‘Come, all ye boys!’ in it, the same as the trawlers sing in Colonsay? There was far more fun last week in the penny Horner.”
So Bud dipped in the bottomless well of knowledge again and scooped up Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ and splashed her favourite lyrics at the servant’s feet. Kate could not stand the ‘Golden Treasury’ either; the songs were nearly all so lamentable they would make a body greet. Bud assured her on the best authority that the sweetest songs were those that told of saddest thought, but Kate said that might be right enough for gentry who had no real troubles of their own, but they weren’t the thing at all for working folk. What working folk required were songs with tunes to them, and choruses that you could tramp time to with your feet. History, too, was as little to her taste; it was all incredible,—the country could never have kept up so many kings and queens. But she liked geography, for the map enabled her to keep an eye on Charles as he went from port to port, where letters in her name, but still the work of Lennox, would be waiting for him.
The scheme of education was maintained so long because the town had come upon its melancholy days and Bud began to feel depression, so that playing teacher was her only joy. The strangershad gone south with the swallows; the steamer no longer called each day to make the pavement noisy in the afternoon with the skliff of city feet, so different from the customary tread of tackety boots; the coachman’s horn, departing, no longer sounded down the valley like a brassy challenge from the wide, wide world. Peace came to the burgh like a swoon, and all its days were pensive. Folk went about their tasks reluctant, the very smoke of the chimneys loitered lazily round the ridges where the starlings chattered, and a haze was almost ever over the hills. When it rose, sometimes, Bud, from her attic window, could see the road that wound through the distant glen. The road!—the road!—ah, that began to have a meaning and a kind of cry, and wishfully she looked at it and thought upon its other end, where the life she had left and read about was loudly humming and marvellous things were being done. Charles Maclean of Oronsay, second mate, whom she loved unto destruction, now that he was writing regularly, fairly daft himself to get such charming curious letters as he thought from Kate, had been adjusted by the doctor, and was once again on the heaving main. It would be Cardiff or Fleetwood, Hamburg, Santander, or Bilbao, whose very name is like a story, and his tarry pen, infected by the child’s example, induced to emulation, always bravely sought to give some picture of the varied world through which he wandered. Of noisy ports did he communicate, crowded with ships, of streets and lofty warehouses, and places where men sang, and sometimes of the playhouse, where the villain was a bad one and the women were so braw.
“What is braw?” asked Bud.
“It’s fine clothes,” said Kate; “but what’s fine clothes if you are not pure in heart and have a figure?” and she surveyed with satisfaction her own plump arms.
But the child guessed at a wider meaning for the word as Charles used it, and thought upon thebeauteous clever women of the plays that she had seen herself in far Chicago, and since her vicarious lover would have thought them braw and plainly interesting, she longed to emulate them, at least to see them again. And, oh! to see the places that he wrote of, and hear the thundering wheels and jangling bells! And there was also Auntie Ailie’s constant stimulus to thoughts and aspirations that could meet no satisfaction in this little town. Bell dwelt continually within the narrow walls of her immediate duty, content, like many, thank the Lord! doing her daily turns as best she could, dreaming of nothing nobler. Dan had ranged wider in his time, and knew the world a great deal better, and had seen so much of it was illusion, its prizes “Will-o’-the-wisp,” that now his wild geese were come home. He could see the world in the looking-glass in which he shaved, and there was much to be amused at. But Ailie’s geese were still flying far across the firmament, knowing no place of rest. The child had bewitched her! it was often the distant view for her now, the region unattainable; and though apparently she had long ago surrendered to her circumstances, she now would sometimes silently irk at her prisoning here, in sleep-town, where we let things slide until to-morrow, while the wild birds of her inclination flew around the habitable wakeful world. Unwittingly—no, not unwittingly always—she charged the child with curiosity unsatisfiable, and secret discontent at little things and narrow, with longings for spacious arenas and ecstatic crowded hours. To be clever, to be brave and daring, to venture and make a glorious name!—how her face would glow and all her flesh would quiver picturing lives she would have liked to live if only she had had the chance! How many women are like that! silent by the hearth, seemingly placid and content as they darn and mend and wait on the whim and call of dullards.
Bell might be content and busy with small affairs, but she had a quick, shrewd eye, and saw the child’sunrest. It brought her real distress, for so had the roving spirit started in her brother William. Sometimes she softly scolded Lennox, and even had contemplated turning her into some other room from the attic that had the only window in the house from which the highroad could be seen, but Ailie told her that would be to make the road more interesting for the child. “And I don’t know,” she added, “that it should worry us if she does indulge herself in dreams about the great big world and its possibilities. I suppose she’ll have to take the road some day.”
“Take the road!” cried Bell, almost weeping. “Are you daft, Ailie Dyce? What need she take the road for? There’s plenty to do here, and I’m sure she’ll never be better off anywhere else. A lot of nonsense! I hope you are not putting notions in her head; we had plenty of trouble with her father.”
“It would break my heart to lose her, I assure you,” said Aunt Ailie softly; “but—” and she ended with a sigh.
“I’m sure you’re content enough yourself?” said Bell; “and you’re not by any means a diffy.”
“Indeed I am content,” admitted Ailie; “at least—at least I’m not complaining. But there is a discontent that’s almost holy, a roving mood that’s the salvation of the race. There were, you mind, the Pilgrim Fathers—”
“I wish to the Lord they had bided at home!” cried Bell. “There’s never been happy homes in this Christian land since they started emigration.” And at that Miss Ailie smiled and Dan began to chuckle.
“Does it not occur to you, Bell,” said he, “that but for the Pilgrim Fathers there would never have been Bud?”
“I declare neither there would!” she said, smiling. “Perhaps it was as well they went, poor things! And, of course, there must be many an honest decent body in America.”
“Quite a number!” said Ailie. “You would notexpect this burgh to hold them all, or even Scotland: America’s glad to get the overflow.”
“Ah, you’re trying to make me laugh, the pair of you, and forget my argument,” said Bell; “but I’ll not be carried away this time. I’m feared for the bairn, and that’s telling you. Oh, Ailie, mind what her mother was—poor girl! poor dear girl! playacting for her living, roving from place to place, with nothing you could call a home; laughing and greeting and posturing before lights for the diversion of the world—”
“We might do worse than give the world diversion,” said Ailie soberly.
“Yes, yes; but with a painted face and all a vain profession—that is different, is it not? I love a jovial heart like Dan’s, but to make the body just a kind of fiddle! It’s only in the body we can be ourselves—it is our only home; think of furnishing it with shams, and lighting every room that should be private, and leaving up the blinds that the world may look in at a penny a-head! How often have I thought of William, weeping for a living, as he had to do sometimes, no doubt, and wondered what was left for him to do to ease his grief when Mary died. Oh, curb the child, Ailie! curb the dear wee lassie,—it’s you it all depends on; she worships you; the making of her ’s in your hands. Keep her humble. Keep her from thinking of worldly glories. Teach her to number her days, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom. Her mind’s too often out of here and wandering elsewhere: it was so with William,—it was once the same with you.”