“It seems to me,” said Lady Anne, “that youcouldn’t be more enthusiastic about yourprotégéif you loved him yourself.”
“So I do,” said Bud, with the utmost frankness. “But there’s really nothing between us. He’s meant for Kate. She’s got heaps of beaux, but he’s her steady. I gave him up to her for good on Hallowe’en, and she’s so happy.”
Bell had thrown off her cooking-apron and cleaned her hands, and ran up the stairs to see that her hair was trim, for though she loved a Lady for the sake of Scotland’s history, she someway felt in the presence of Lady Anne the awe she had as a child for Barbara Mushet. That Ailie in such company should be, on the other hand, so composed, and sometimes even comical, was a marvel she never could get over. “I never feared the face of earl or man,” she would say, “but I’m scared for a titled lady.”
When she came down to the parlour the visitor was rising to go.
“Oh, Miss Dyce,” said she, “I’m so glad to see you, though my visit this time’s really to Miss Lennox. I wished to consult her about a captain for my little yacht.”
“Miss Lennox!” exclaimed Miss Bell, shaking hands, and with a look of apprehension at her amazing niece.
“Yes,” said Lady Anne; “she has recommended a man who seems in all respects quite suitable, if he happens to know a little about sailing; and I’m going to write to him to come and see me.”
At that, I must confess it, Lennox for once forgot her manners and darted from the parlour to tell Kate the glorious news.
“Kate, you randy!” she cried, bursting into the kitchen—
“‘I sent a letter to my love and by the way I dropped it,I dropped it, I dropped it; I dree—I dree—I dropped it’—
“I’ve fixed it up for Charles; he’s to be the captain.” The servant danced on the floor in a speechless transport, and Bud danced too.
Tooslow, far too slow, passed the lengthening days. Kate was bedded by nine to make them shorter by an hour or two, but what she took from the foot of the day she tacked to the head of it, as Paddy in the story eked his blanket, and she was up in the mornings long before Wanton Wully rang the six-hours’ bell. The elder Dyces—saving Ailie, who knew all about it, hearing it from Bud in passionate whispers as they lay together in one bed in the brightening morns of May—might think summer’s coming was what made the household glad, Kate sing like the laverock, and Lennox so happy and so good, but it was the thought of Charles. “Dear me! you’ve surely taken a desperate fancy for Prince Charlie songs,” would Miss Bell remark to Bud and the maid of Colonsay. “Is there not another ditty in the ballant?” and they would glance at each other guiltily but never let on.
“Come o’er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie, brave Charlie,Come o’er the stream, Charlie, and I’ll be Maclean.”
—Bud composed that one in a jiffy sitting one day at the kitchen window, and of all the noble Jacobite measures Kate liked it best, “it was so clever, and so desperate like the thing!” Such a daft disease is love! To the woman whose recollection of the mariner was got from olden Sabbath walks ’tween churches in the windy isle, among the mossy tombs, and to Bud, who had never seen him, but had made for herself a portrait blent of the youth so gay and gallant Kate described, and of George Sibley Purser,and of dark ear-ringed men of the sea that in “The Tempest” cry “Heigh, my hearts! cheerily, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts! yare, yare,” the prospect of his presence was a giddy joy.
And after all the rascal came without warning, to be for a day and a night within sound of Kate’s minstrelsy without her knowing it, for he lodged, an ardent but uncertain man, on the other side of the garden-wall, little thinking himself the cause and object of these musical mornings. Bud found him out—that clever one! who was surely come from America to set all the Old World right,—she found him at the launching of theWave.
Lady Anne’s yacht dozed like a hedgehog under leaves through the winter months below the beeches on what we call the hard—on the bank of the river under Jocka’s house, where the water’s brackish, and the launching of her was always of the nature of a festival, for the Earl’s men were there, John Taggart’s band, with “A life on the Ocean Wave” between each passage of the jar of old Tom Watson’s home-made ale—not tipsy lads but jovial, and even the children of the schools, for it happened on a Saturday.
Bud and Footles went with each other and the rest of the bairns, unknown to their people, for in adventures such as these the child delighted, and was wisely never interdicted.
The man who directed the launch was a stranger in a foreign-looking soft slouch hat—Charles plain to identify in every feature, in the big brown searching eyes that only Gaelic could do justice to, and his walk so steeve and steady, his lovely beard, his tread on the hard as if he owned the land, his voice on the deck as if he were the master of the sea. She stood apart and watched him, fascinated, and could not leave even when the work was done and the band was home-returning, charming the road round the bay with “Peggy Baxter’s Quickstep.” He saw her lingering, smiled on her, and beckoned on her to cross the gangway that led to the yacht from the little jetty.
“Well, wee lady,” said he, with one big hand on her head and another on the dog, “is this the first of my crew at a quay-head jump? Sign on at once and I’ll make a sailor of you.”
“Oh, please,” said she, looking up in his face, too anxious to enter into his humour, “are you our Kate’s Charles?”
“Kate!” said he, reflecting, with a hand in his beard, through which his white teeth shone. “There’s such a wheen of Kates here and there, and all of them fine, fine gyurls! Still-and-on, if yours is like most of her name that I’m acquaint with, I’m the very man for her; and my name, indeed, is what you might be calling Charles. In fact,”—in a burst of confidence, seating himself on a water-breaker,—“my Christian name is Charles—Charlie, for short among the gentry. You are not speaking, by any chance, of one called Kate MacNeill?” he added, showing some red in the tan of his countenance.
“Of course I am,” said Bud reproachfully. “Oh, men! men! As if there could be any other! I hope to goodness you love her same as you said you did, and haven’t been—been carrying-on with any other Kates for a diversion. I’m Lennox Dyce. Your Kate stays with me and Uncle Dan, and Auntie Bell, and Auntie Ailie, and this sweet little dog by the name of Footles. She’s so jolly! My! won’t she be tickled to know you’ve come? And—and how’s the world, Captain Charles?”
“The world?” he said, aback, looking at her curiously as she seated herself beside him on a hatch.
“Yes, the world, you know—the places you were in,” with a wave of the hand that seemed to mean the universe.
“‘Edinburgh, Leith,Portobello, Musselburgh, and Dalkeith?’
—No, that’s Kate’s favourite geography lesson, ’cause she can sing it. I mean Rotterdam, and Santander,and Bilbao—all the lovely places on the map where a letter takes four days and a twopence-ha’penny stamp, and’s mighty apt to smell of rope.”
“Oh, them!” said he, with the warmth of recollection, “they’re not so bad—in fact, they’re just A1. It’s the like of there you see life and spend the money.”
“Have you been in Italy?” asked Bud. “I’d love to see that old Italy—for the sake of Romeo and Juliet, you know, and my dear, dear Portia.”
“Iknow,” said Charles. “Allow me! Perfect beauties, all fine, fine gyurls; but I don’t think very much of dagoes. I have slept in their sailors’ homes, and never hear Italy mentioned but I feel I want to scratch myself.”
“Dagoes!” cried Bud; “that’s what Jim called them. Have you been in America?”
“Have I been in America? I should think I have,” said he emphatically, “The Lakes. It’s yonder you get value—two dollars a-day and everywhere respected like a perfect gentleman. Men’s not mice out yonder in America.”
“Then you maybe have been in Chicago?” cried Bud, her face filled with a happy expectation as she pressed the dog in her arms till its fringe mixed with her own wild curls.
“Chicago?” said the Captain. “Allow me! Many a time. You’ll maybe not believe it, but it was there I bought this hat.”
“Oh!” cried Bud, with the tears in her eyes and speechless for a moment, “I—I—could just hug that hat. Won’t you please let me—let me pat it?’
“Pat away,” said Captain Charles, laughing, and took it off with the sweep of a cavalier that was in itself a compliment. “You know yon place—Chicago?” he asked, as she patted his headgear fondly and returned it to him. For a little her mind was far away from the deck of Lady Anne’s yacht, her eyes on the ripple of the tide, her nostrils full, and her little bosom heaving.
“You were there?” he asked again.
“Chicago’s where I lived,” she said. “That was mother’s place,” and into his ear she poured a sudden flood of reminiscence—of her father and mother, and the travelling days and lodging-houses, and Mr and Mrs Molyneux, and the graves in the far-off cemetery. The very thought of them all made her again American in accent and in phrase. He listened, understanding, feeling the vexation of that far-sundering by the sea as only a sailor can, and clapped her on the shoulder, and looking at him she saw that in his eyes which made her love him more than ever.
“Oh my!” she said bravely, “here I’m talking away to you about myself, and I’m no more account than a rabbit under these present circumstances, Captain Charles, and all the time you’re just pining to know all about your Kate.”
The Captain tugged his beard and reddened again. “A fine, fine gyurl!” said he. “I hope—I hope she’s pretty well.”
“She’s fine,” said Bud, nodding her head gravely. “You bet Kate can walk now without taking hold. Why, there’s never anything wrong with her ’cepting now and then the croodles, and they’re not anything lingering.”
“There was a kind of a rumour that she was at times a trifle delicate,” said Charles. “In fact, it was herself who told me, in her letters.”
Bud blushed. This was one of the few details of her correspondence on which she and Kate had differed. It had been her idea that an invalidish hint at intervals produced a nice and tender solicitude in the roving sailor, and she had, at times, credited the maid with some of Mrs Molyneux’s old complaints, a little modified and more romantic, though Kate herself maintained that illness in a woman under eighty was looked upon as anything but natural or interesting in Colonsay.
“It was nothing but—but love,” she said now, confronted with the consequence of her imaginativecunning. “You know what love is, Captain Charles? A powerfully weakening thing, though I don’t think it would hurt anybody if they wouldn’t take it so much to heart.”
“I’m glad to hear it’s only—only what you mention,” said Charles, much relieved. “I thought it might be something inward, and that maybe she was working too hard at her education.”
“Oh, she’s not taking her education so bad as all that,” Bud assured him. “She isn’t wasting to a shadow sitting up nights with a wet towel on her head soaking in the poets and figuring sums. All she wanted was to be sort of middling smart, but nothing gaudy.”
Captain Charles looked sideway keenly at the child as she sat beside him, half afraid himself of the irony he had experienced among her countrymen, but saw it was not here. Indeed it never was in Lennox Dyce, for all her days she had the sweet engaging self-unconsciousness no training can command; frankness, fearlessness, and respect for all her fellows—the gifts that will never fail to make the proper friends. She talked so composedly that he was compelled to frankness himself on a subject no money could have made him speak about to any one a week ago.
“Between you and me and the mast,” said he, “I’m feared Kate has got far too clever for the like of me, and that’s the way I have not called on her.”
“Then you’d best look pretty spry,” said Bud, pointing a monitory finger at him; “for there’s beaux all over the place that’s wearing their Sunday clothes week-days, and washing their faces night and morning, hankering to tag on to her, and she’ll maybe tire of standing out in the cold for you. I wouldn’t be skeered, Cap’, if I was you; she’s not too clever for or’nary use; she’s nicer than ever she was that time you used to walk with her in Colonsay.” Bud was beginning to be alarmed at the misgivings to which her own imaginings had given rise.
“If you saw her letters,” said Charles gloomily. “Poetry and foreign princes. One of them great at the dancing! He kissed her hand. He would never have ventured a thing like that if she hadn’t given him encouragement.”
“Just diversion,” said Bud consolingly. “She was only—she was only putting by the time; and she often says she’ll only marry for her own conveniency, and the man for her is—well,youknow, Captain Charles.”
“There was a Russian army officer,” proceeded the seaman, still suffering a jealous doubt.
“But he’s dead. He’s deader ’n canned beans. Mr Wanton gied him—gied him theBAGGONET. There wasn’t really anything in it anyway. Kate didn’t care for him the tiniest bit, and I guess it was a great relief.”
“Then she’s learning the piano,” said the Captain; “that’s not like a working gyurl. And she talked in one of her letters about sitting on Uncle Dan’s knee.”
Bud dropped the dog at her feet and burst into laughter: in that instance she had certainly badly jumbled the identities.
“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said the Captain, tugging his beard. “It’s not at all becoming in a decent gyurl; and it’s not like the Kate I knew in Colonsay.”
Bud saw the time had come for a full confession.
“Captain Charles,” she said, when she recovered herself, “it—it wasn’t Kate said that at all; it was another girl called Winifred Wallace. You see, Kate is always so busy doing useful things—suchsoup! and—and a washing every Monday, and taking her education, and the pens were all so dev—so—so stupid, that she simply had to get some one to help her write those letters; and that’s why Winifred Wallace gave a hand and messed things up a bit, I guess. Where the letters talked solemn sense about the weather and the bad fishing and bits aboutOronsay, and where they told you to be sure and change your stockings when you came downstairs from the mast, out the wet, and where they said you were the very, very one she loved, that was Kate; but when there was a lot of dinky talk about princes and Russian army officers and slabs of poetry, that was just Winifred Wallace putting on lugs and showing off. No, it wasn’t all showing off; it was because she kind of loved you herself. You see she didn’t have any beau of her own, Mr Charles; and—and she thought it wouldn’t be depriving Kate of anything to pretend, for Kate said there was no depravity in it.”
“Who’s Winifred Wallace?” asked the surprised sailor.
“I’m all the Winifred Wallace there is,” said Bud penitently. “It’s my poetry name,—it’s my other me. I can do a heap of things when I’m Winifred I can’t do when I’m plain Bud, or else I’d laugh at myself enough to hurt, I’m so mad. Are you angry, Mr Charles?”
“Och! just Charles to you,” said the sailor. “Never heed the honours. I’m not angry a bit. Allow me! In fact, I’m glad to find the prince and the piano and the poetry were all nonsense.”
“I thought that poetry pretty middling myself,” admitted Bud, but in a hesitating way that made him look very guilty.
“The poetry,” said he quickly, “was splendid. There was nothing wrong with it that I could see; but I’m glad it wasn’t Kate’s—for she’s a fine, fine gyurl, and brought up most respectable.”
“Yes,” said Bud; “she’s better ’n any poetry. You must feel gay because you are going to marry her.”
“I’m not so sure of her marrying me. She maybe wouldn’t have me.”
“But she can’t help it!” cried Bud. “She’s bound to, for the witch-lady fixed it on Hallowe’en. Only, I hope you won’t marry her for years and years.Why, Auntie Bell ’d go crazy if you took away our Kate; for good girls ain’t so easy to get nowadays as they used to be when they had three pound ten in the half-year, and nailed their trunks down to the floor of a new place when they got it, for fear they might be bounced. I’d be vexed I helped do anything if you married her for a long while. Besides, you’d be sorry yourself, for her education is not quite done; she’s only up to Compound Multiplication and the Tudor Kings. You’d just be sick sorry.”
“Would I?”
“Course you would! That’s love. Before one marries it’s hunkydory—it’s fairy all the time; but after that it’s the same old face at breakfast, Mr Cleland says, and simply putting up with one another. Oh, love’s a wonderful thing, Charles; it’s the Great Thing, but sometimes I say ‘Give me Uncle Dan!’ Promise you’ll not go marrying Kate right off.”
The sailor roared with laughter. “Lord!” said he, “if I wait too long I’ll be wanting to marry yourself, for you’re a dangerous gyurl.”
“But I’m never going to marry,” said Bud. “I want to go right on loving everybody, and don’t yearn for any particular man tagging on to me.”
“I never heard so much about love in English all my life,” said Charles, “though it’s common enough and quite respectable in Gaelic. Do you—do you love myself?”
“Course I do!” said Bud, cuddling Footles.
“Then,” said he firmly, “the sooner I sign on with Kate the better, for you’re a dangerous gyurl.”
So they went down the road together, planning ways of early foregatherings with Kate, and you may be sure Bud’s way was cunningest.
WhenKate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her apron over her head, and cried and laughed horribly turn about—the victim of hysteria that was half from fear and half from a bliss too deep and unexpected.
“Mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “Now he’ll find out everything, and what a stupid one I am. All my education’s clean gone out of my head; I’m sure I couldn’t spell an article. I canna even mind the ninth commandment, let alone the Reasons Annexed; and as for grammar, whether it’s ‘Give the book to Bud and me’ or ‘Give the book to Bud and I,’ is more than I could tell you if my very life depended on it. Oh, Lennox! now we’re going to catch it! Are you certain sure he said to-morrow?”
Bud gazed at her disdainfully and stamped her foot. “Stop that, Kate MacNeill!” she commanded. “You mustn’t act so silly. He’s as skeered of you as you can be of him. He’d have been here Friday before the morning milk if he didn’t think you’d be the sort to back him into a corner and ask him questions about ancient Greece and Rome. Seems to me love makes some folk idiotic; lands sake! I’m mighty glad it always leaves me calm as a plate of pumpkin pie.”
“Is—is—he looking tremendously genteel and well-put-on?” asked the maid of Colonsay, with anxious lines on her forehead. “Is he—is he as nice as I said he was?”
“He was everything you said—except the Gaelic. I knew he couldn’t be so bad as that sounded that you said about his eyes. I—I never saw a more becoming man. If I had known just how noble he looked, I’d have sent him stacks of poetry,” whereat Kate moaned again, rocked herself in her chair most piteously, and swore she could never have the impudence to see him till she had her new frock from the dressmakers.
“He’ll be thinking I’m refined and quite the lady,” she said, “and I’m just the same plain Kate I was in Colonsay, and him a regular Captain! It was all your fault, with your fancy letters. Oh, Lennox Dyce, I think I hate you, just: lend me your hanky,—mine’s all wet with greeting.”
“If you weren’t so big and temper wasn’t sinful, I’d shake you!” said Bud, producing her handkerchief. “You were just on your last legs for a sailor, and you’d never have put a hand on one if I didn’t write these letters. And now, when the sweetest sailor in the land is brought to your doorstep, you don’t ’preciate your privileges and have a grateful heart, but turn round and yelp at me. I tell you, Kate MacNeill, sailors are mighty scarce and sassy in a little place like this, and none too easy picked up, and ’stead of sitting there, with a smut on your nose and tide-marks on your eyebrows, mourning, you’d best arise and shine, or somebody with their wits about them ’ll snap him up. I’d do it myself if it wouldn’t be not honourable to you.”
“Oh! if I just had another week or two’s geography!” said Kate dolefully.
Bud had to laugh—she could not help herself; and the more she laughed, the more tragic grew the servant’s face.
“Seems to me,” said Bud, “that I’ve got to run this loving business all along the line: you don’t know the least thing about it after g-o, go. Why, Kate, I’m telling you Charles is afraid of you more than you are of him. He thought you’d be that educated you’d wear specs, and stand quite stiff talking poetry all thetime, and I had to tell him every dinky bit in these letters were written by me.”
“Then that’s worse!” cried the servant, more distressed than ever. “For he’ll think I canna write myself, and I can write like fury if you only give me a decent pen, and shut the door, and don’t bother me.”
“No fears!” said Bud; “I made that all right. I said you were too busy housekeeping, and I guess it’s more a housekeeper than a school-ma’rm Charles needs. Anyhow, he’s so much in love with you, he’d marry you if you were only half-way through the Twopenny. He’s plump head over heels, and it’s up to you, as a sensible girl, not to conceal that you like him some yourself.”
“I’ll not know what to say to him,” said Kate, “and he always was so clever: half the time I couldna understand him if it wasn’t for his eyes.”
“Well, he’ll know what to say to you, I guess, if all the signs are right. Charles is not so shy as all that,—love-making is where he lives; and he made goo-goo eyes at myself without an introduction. You’d fancy, to hear you, he was a school inspector, and he’s only just an or’nary lover thinking of the happy days you used to have in Colonsay. If I was you I’d not let on I was anything but what I really was; I’d be natural—yes, that’s what I’d be, for being natural’s the deadliest thing below the canopy to make folk love you. Don’t pretend, but just be the same Kate MacNeill to him you are to me. Just you listen to him, and now and then look at him, and don’t think of a darned thing—I mean, don’t think of a blessed thing but how nice he is, and he’ll be so pleased and so content he’ll not even ask you to spell cat”
“Content!” cried Kate, with conviction. “Not him! Fine I ken him! He’ll want to kiss me, as sure as God’s in heaven,—beg your pardon.”
“I expect that’s not a thing you should say to me,” said Bud, blushing deeply.
“But I begged your pardon,” said the maid.
“I don’t mean that about God in heaven, that’s right—so He is, or where wouldwebe? what Imeant was about the kissing. I’m old enough for love, but I’m not old enough for you to be talking to me about kissing. I guess Auntie Ailie wouldn’t like to have you talk to me about a thing like that, and Auntie Bell, she’d be furious—it’s too advanced.”
“What time am I to see him?” asked Kate.
“In the morning. If you go out to the garden just after breakfast, and whistle, he’ll look over the wall.”
“The morning!” cried the maid aghast. “I couldn’t face him in the morning. Who ever heard of such a thing? Now you have gone away and spoiled everything! I could hardly have all my wits about me even if it was only gloaming.”
Bud sighed despairingly. “Oh, you don’t understand, Kate,” said she. “He wanted it to be the evening, too, but I said you weren’t a miserable pair of owls, and the best time for anything is the morning. Uncle Dan says the first half-hour in the morning is worth three hours at any other time of the day, for when you’ve said your prayers, and had a good bath, and a clean shave, and your boots new on—no slippers nor slithery dressing-gowns, the peace of God, and—and—and the assurance of strength and righteousness descends upon you so that you—you—you can tackle wild-cats. I feel so brash and brave myself in the morning I could skip the hills like a goat. It’s simply got to be the morning, Kate MacNeill. That’s when you look your very best, if you care to take a little trouble, and don’t simply just slouch through, and I’m set on having you see him first time over the garden wall. That’s the only way to fix the thing up romantic, seeing we haven’t any balcony. You’ll go out and stand against the blossom of the cherry-tree, and hold a basket of flowers and parsley, and when he peeks over and sees you looming out in the picture, I tell you he’ll be tickled to death. That’s the way Shakespeare ’d fix it, and he knew.”
“I don’t think much of Shakespeare,” said Kate. “Fancy yon Igoa!”
“Iago, you mean; well, what about him?”
“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”
“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never really was such a mean wicked man as that Iago,—there couldn’t be; but Shakespeare made him just so’s you’d like the nice folk all the more by thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”
That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her—the cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the dark; but having said her Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell asleep.
In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds, that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin, and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager pair: no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up and had dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.
“What’s that?” asked Bud. “You’re not going to put on glad rags, are you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.
“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It’s either that or my print for it, and a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet—meet the Captain in; he’ll be expecting me to be truly refined.”
“I think he’d like the wrapper better,” said Bud gravely. “The blue gown’s very nice—but it’s not Kate, somehow: do you know, I think it’s Auntie Ailie up to the waist, and the banker’s cook in the lacey bits above that, and it don’t make you refined a bit. It’s not what you put on that makes yourefined, it’s things you can’t take off. You have no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron. You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion. I’d want to marry you myself if I was a captain, and saw you dressed like that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I’d—I’d bite my lip and go home and ask advice from mother.”
Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud’s choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.
“I’d have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and any other kind’s as rude as Keating’s Powder.”
“He’ll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing it was himself that sent it.”
“It don’t amount to a hill of beans,” said Bud; “you can wear our locket, and that’ll please him.”
Kate went with a palpitating heart through the scullery, out into the garden, with a basket in her hand, a pleasing and expansive figure. Bud would have liked to watch her, but a sense of delicacy prevented, and she stood at the kitchen window looking resolutely into the street. On his way down the stairs Mr Dyce was humming the Hundredth Psalm; outside the shops were shuttered, and the harmony of the morning hymn came from the baker’s open windows. A few folk passed in their Sunday clothes, at a deliberate pace, to differentiate it from the secular hurry of other days. Soon the church bell would ring for the Sabbath-school, and Bud must be ready. Remembering it, a sense of some impiety took possession of her—worldly trysts in back gardens on the Sabbath were not whatAunt Bell would much approve of. Had they met yet? How did Charles look? What did Kate say?
“Mercy on me!” cried the maid, bursting in through the scullery. “Did you say I was to whistle!”
“Of course,” said Bud, and then looked horrified. “Oh, Kate,” said she in a whisper, “I was so keen on the vain things of this wicked world I quite forgot it was the Lord’s Day; of course you can’t go whistling on Sunday.”
“That’s what I was just thinking to myself,” said the maid, not very heartily. “But I thought I would ask you. It wouldn’t need to be a tune, but—but of course it would be awful wicked—forbye Miss Dyce would be sure to hear me, and she’s that particular.”
“No, you can’t whistle—you daren’t,” said Bud. “It’d be dre’ffle wicked. But how’d it do to throw a stone? Not a rock, you know, but a nice little quiet wee white Sunday pebble? You might like as not be throwing it at Rodger’s cats, and that would be a work of necessity and mercy, for these cruel cats are just death on birds.”
“But there’s not a single cat there,” explained the maid.
“Never mind,” said Bud. “You can heave the pebble over the wall so that it’ll be a warning to them not to come poaching in our garden; there’s sure to be some on the other side just about to get on the wall, and if Charles happens to be there too, can you help that?” and Kate retired again.
There was a pause, and then a sound of laughter. For ten minutes Bud waited in an agony of curiosity, that was at last too much for her, and she ventured to look out at the scullery window—to see Charles chasing his adored one down the walk, between the bleaching-green and the gooseberries. Kate was making for the sanctuary of her kitchen, her face aflame, and all her streamers flying, but was caught before she entered.
“I told you!” said she, as she came in panting. “We hadn’t said twenty words when he wanted to kiss me.”
“Why! was that the reason you ran?” asked Bud, astonished.
“Ye—yes,” said the maid.
“Seems to me it’s not very encouraging to Charles, then.”
“Yes, but—but—I wasn’t running all my might,” said Kate.
Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!
The world is coming for Lennox Dyce, the greedy world, youth’s first and worst beguiler, that promises so much, but at the best has only bubbles to give, which borrow a moment the splendour of the sun, then burst in the hands that grasp them; the world that will have only our bravest and most clever bairns, and takes them all from us one by one. I have seen them go—scores of them, boys and girls, their foreheads high, and the sun on their faces, and never one came back. Now and then returned to the burgh in the course of years a man or woman who bore a well-known name, and could recall old stories, but they were not the same, and even if they were not disillusioned, there was that in their flushed prosperity which ill made up for the bright young spirits quelled.
Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!
Yes, the world is coming, sure enough—on black and yellow wheels, with a guard red-coated who bugles through the glen. It is coming behind black horses, with thundering hooves and foam-flecked harness, between bare hills, by gurgling burns and lime-washed shepherd dwellings, or in the shadow of the woods that simply stand where they are placed by God and wait. It comes in a fur-collared coat—though it is autumn weather—and in a tall silk hat, and looks amused at the harmless country it has come to render discontent.
Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!
Go back, world go back, and leave the little lassamong her dreams, with hearts that love and cherish. Go back, with your false flowers and your gems of paste. Go back, world, that for every ecstasy exacts a pang!
There were three passengers on the coach—the man with the fur collar who sat on the box beside the driver, and the Misses Duff behind. I am sorry now that once I thought to make you smile at the pigeon hens, for to-day I’m in more Christian humour and my heart warms to them, seeing them come safely home from their flight afar from their doo-cot, since they it was who taught me first to make these symbols on the paper, and at their worst they were but a little stupid, like the most of us at times, and always with the best intent. They had been to Edinburgh; they had been gone two weeks—their first adventure in a dozen years. Miss Jean was happy, bringing back with her a new crochet pattern, a book of Views, a tooth gold-filled (she was so proud and spoke of it so often that it is not rude to mention it), and a glow of art she had got from an afternoon tea in a picture-gallery full of works in oil. Amelia’s spoils were a phrase that lasted her for years—it was that Edinburgh was “redolent of Robert Louis,” the boast that she had heard the great MacCaskill preach, and got a lesson in the searing of harmless woods with heated pokers. Such are the rewards of travel: I have come home myself with as little for my time and money.
But between them they had brought back something else—something to whisper about lest the man in front should hear, and two or three times to look at as it lay in an innocent roll beside the purse in Miss Amelia’s reticule. It might have been a serpent in its coils, so timidly they glanced in at it, and snapped the bag shut with a kind of shudder.
“At least it’s not a very large one,” whispered Miss Jean, with the old excuse of the unhappy lass who did the deadly sin.
“No,” said her sister, “it may, indeed, be called quite—quite diminutive. The other he showed us was so horribly large and—and vulgar, the very look of it made me almost faint. But, oh I wish we could have dispensed with the horrid necessity. After twe—after so many years it looks like a confession of weakness. I hope there will be no unpleasant talk about it.”
“But you may be sure there will, Amelia Duff,” said her sister. “They’ll cast up Barbara Mushet to us; she will always be the perfect teacher—”
“The paragon of all the virtues.”
“And it is such a gossiping place.”
“Indeed it is,” said Miss Amelia. “It is always redolent of—of scandal.”
“I wish you had never thought of it,” said Miss Jean, with a sigh and a vicious little shake of the reticule. “I am not blaming you, remember, ’Melia; if we are doing wrong the blame of it is equally between us, except perhaps a little more for me, for Ididthink the big one was better value for the money. And yet it made me grue, it looked so—so dastardly.”
“Jean,” said her sister solemnly, “if you had taken the big one, I would have marched out of the shop affronted. If it made you grue, it made me shudder. Even with the small one, did you notice how the man looked at us? I thought he felt ashamed to be selling such a thing: perhaps he has a family. He said they were not very often asked for. I assure you I felt very small, the way he said it.”
Once more they bent their douce brown hats together over the reticule and looked timidly in on the object of their shames and fears. “Well, there it is, and it can’t be helped,” said Miss Jean at last, despairingly. “Let us hope and trust there will not be too frequent need for it, for, I assure you, I have neither the strength nor inclination.” She snapped the bag shut again, and, glancing up, saw the man with the fur collar looking over his shoulder at them.
“Strikes me, ladies,” he said, “the stage coach, as an easy mark for the highwaymen who used to permeate these parts, must have been a pretty merry proposition; they’d be apt to stub their toes on it if they came sauntering up behind. John here”—with an inclination of his head towards the driver—“tells me he’s on schedule time, and I allow he’s making plenty fuss clicking his palate, but I feel I want to get out and heave rocks at his cattle, so’s they’d get a better gait on ’em.”
Miss Jean was incapable of utterance; she was still too much afraid of a stranger who, though gallantly helping them to the top of the coach at Maryfield, could casually address herself and Miss Amelia as “dears,” thrust cigars on the guard and driver, and call them John and George at the very first encounter.
“We—we think this is fairly fast,” Miss Amelia ventured, surprised at her own temerity.. “It’s nineteen miles in two hours, and if it’s not so fast as a railway train it lets you enjoy the scenery. It is very much admired, our scenery, it’s so—it’s so characteristic.”
“Sure!” said the stranger, “it’s pretty tidy scenery as scenery goes, and scenery’s my forte. But I’d have thought that John here ’d have all this part of Caledonia stern and wild so much by heart he’d want to rush it and get to where the houses are; but most the time his horses go so slow they step on their own feet at every stride.”
“Possibly the coach is a novelty to you,” suggested Miss Amelia, made wondrous brave by two weeks’ wild adventuring in Edinburgh. “I—I take you for an American.”
“So did my wife, and she knew, for she belonged out mother’s place,” said the stranger, laughing. “You’ve guessed right, first time. No, the coach is no novelty to me; I’ve been up against a few in various places. If I’m short of patience and want more go just at present, it’s because I’m full of agood joke on an old friend I’m going to meet at the end of these obsequies.”
“Obsequies?” repeated Miss Amelia, with surprise, and he laughed again.
“At the end of the trip,” he explained. “This particular friend is not expecting me, because I hadn’t a post-card, hate a letter, and don’t seem to have been within shout of a telegraph office since I left Edinburgh this morning.”
“We have just come from Edinburgh ourselves,” Miss Jean chimed in.
“So!” said the stranger, throwing his arm over the back of his seat to enter more comfortably into the conversation. “It’s picturesque. Pretty peaceful, too. But it’s liable to be a little shy of the Thespian muse. I didn’t know more than Cooper’s cow about Edinburgh when I got there last Sunday fortnight, but I’ve gone perusing around a bit since; and say, my! she’s fine and old! I wasn’t half a day in the city when I found out that when it came to the real legit. Queen Mary was the king-pin of the outfit in Edinburgh. Before I came to this country I couldn’t just place Mary; sometimes she was Bloody, and sometimes she was Bonnie, but I suppose I must have mixed her up with some no-account English queen of the same name.”
“Edinburgh,” said Miss Amelia, “is redolent of Mary Queen of Scots—and Robert Louis.”
“It just is!” he said. “There’s a little bedroom she had in the Castle yonder, no bigger than a Chicago bathroom. Why, there’s hardly room for a nightmare in it—a skittish nightmare ’d kick the transom out. There doesn’t seem to be a single dramatic line in the whole play that Mary didn’t have to herself. She was the entire cast, and the spot light was on her for the abduction scene, the child-widow scene, the murder, the battle, and the last tag at Fotheringay. Three husbands and a lot of flirtations that didn’t come to anything; her portrait everywhere, and the newspapers tracking her up like old Sleuth from that day to this! I guess Queen Lizzie put her feet in itwhen she killed Mary,—for Mary’s the star-line in history, and Lizzie’s mainly celebrated for spoiling a good Prince Albert coat on Walter Raleigh.”
He spoke so fast, he used such curious words and idioms which the Misses Duff had never heard before nor read in books, that they were sure again he was a dreadful person. With a sudden thought of warnings to “Beware of Pickpockets” she had seen in Edinburgh, Miss Amelia clutched so hard at the chain of the reticule which held their purse as well as their mystery that it broke, and the bag fell over the side of the coach and, bursting open, scattered its contents on the road unobserved by the guard, whose bugle at the moment was loudly flourishing for the special delectation of a girl at work in a neighbouring corn-field.
“Hold hard, John,” said the American, and before the coach had quite stopped he was down on the highway recovering the little teachers’ property.
The serpent had unwound its coils; it lay revealed in all its hideousness—a teacher’s tawse!
At such a sad exposure its owners could have wept. They had never dreamt a tawse could look so vulgar and forbidding as it looked when thus exposed to the eye of man on the King’s highway.
“Oh, thank yousomuch,” said Miss Jean. “It is so kind of you.”
“Exceedingly kind, courteous beyond measure,—we are more than obliged to you,” cooed Miss Amelia, with a face like a sunset as she rolled the leather up with nervous fingers.
“Got children, ma’am?” asked the American seriously, as the coach proceeded on its way.
Miss Amelia Duff made the best joke of her life without meaning it. “Twenty-seven,” said she, with an air of great gratitude, and the stranger smiled.
“School-ma’rm. Now that’s good, that is; it puts me in mind of home, for I appreciate school-ma’rms so heartily that about as soon as I got out of the school myself I married one. I’ve never donethrowing bouquets at myself about it ever since, but I’m sorry for the mites she could have been giving a good time to as well as their education if it hadn’t been that she’s so much mixed up with me. What made me ask about children was that—that medieval animator. I haven’t seen one for years and years, not since old Deacon Springfield found me astray in his orchard one night and hiking for a short cut home. I thought they’d been abolished by the treaty of Berlin.”
Miss Amelia thrust it hurriedly into the reticule. “We have never used one all our life,” said she, “but now we fear we have to, and, as you see, it’s quite thin—it’s quite a little one.”
“So it is,” said the stranger solemnly. “It’s thin,—it’s translucent, you might say; but I guess the kiddies are pretty little too, and won’t be able to make any allowance for the fact that you could have had a larger size if you wanted. It may be light on the fingers and mighty heavy on the feelings.”
“That’s what you said,” whispered Miss Amelia to her sister.
“As moral suasion, belting don’t cut ice,” went on the American. “It’s generally only a safety-valve for a wrothy grown-up person with a temper and a child that can’t hit back”
“That’s whatyousaid,” whispered Miss Jean to Miss Amelia, and never did two people look more miserably guilty.
“What beats me,” said the stranger, “is that you should have got along without it so far, and think it necessary now.”
“Perhaps—perhaps we won’t use it,” said Miss Jean.
“Except as—as a sort of symbol,” added her sister. “We would never have dreamt of it if children nowadays were not so different from what they used to be.”
“I guess folk’s been saying that quite a while,” said the American. “Children never were like what they used to be. I reckons old Mother Nature spits onher hands and makes a fresh start with each baby, and never turns out two alike. That’s why it’s fun to sit and watch ’em bloom. Pretty delicate blooms, too! Don’t bear much pawing; just give them a bit of shelter when the weather’s cold, a prop to lean against if they’re leggy and the wind’s high, and see that the fertiliser is the proper brand. Whether they’re going to turn out like the picture on the packet or just only weeds depends on the seedsman.”
“Oh, youdon’tunderstand how rebellious they can be!” cried Miss Amelia with feeling. “And they haven’t the old deference to their elders that they used to have,—they’re growing bold and independent.”
“Depends on the elders, I suppose. Over here I think you folks think children come into the world just to please grown-ups and do what they’re told without any thinking. In America it’s looked at the other way about: the children are considerably more important than their elders, and the notion don’t do any harm to either, far as I can see. As for your rebels, ma’am, I’d cherish ’em: rebellion’s like a rash, it’s better out than in.”
Ta-ran-ta-ra! The bugle broke upon their conversation; the coach emerged from the wood and dashed down hill, and, wheeling through the arches, drew up at the inn.
The American helped the ladies to alight, took off his hat, bade them good-day, and turned to speak to his friend the driver, when a hand was placed on his sleeve, and a child with a dog at her feet looked up in his face.
“Jim! Why, Jim Molyneux!” cried Bud.
Foronly a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked when he was gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her mother died, but none the less there was an unseen doleful wreckage. This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.
Even the town itself was some ways altered for a little by the whim that took the American actor to it. That he should be American and actor too foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime, in our simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us, who, at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor too! earning easy bread by mimicry, and in enormous theatres, before light-headed folk that have made money—God knows how!—and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face andwork late hours in gas-light, finally shall obtain salvation; sinful, and yet—and yet—so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we looked on Mr Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how the way had been prepared for him by Bud!—a child, but a child who had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. & A. MacGlashan. Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow’s warehouse, upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need; and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the Mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human after all, and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay, and given her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had she not, by force of sheer example, made dumb and stammering bashfulness in her fellow pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the little twin teachers of the Pigeon Seminary could mistake for the kind of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?
Mr Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse or a garibaldi; P. & A. MacGlashan made the front of his shop like a wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a prosperous foreign and colonial trade; one morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past five instead of six toprove how very wide-awake we were; and the band paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when it came to gaiety we were not, though small, so very far behind New York.
But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up to himself in the words, “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.”
Bell took warmly to him from the outset, so much was in his favour. For one thing he was spick and span, though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that, for simple country ladies, readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean within. She forgave the disreputable part in him—the actor, since William had been one, and yet had taught his child her prayers; and she was willing to overlook the American, seeing William’s wife had suffered from the same misfortune. But, oh the blow she got when she unpacked what he called his grip, and found the main thing wanting!
“Where’s your Bible, Mr Molyneux?” she asked solemnly. “It’s not in your portmanteau?”
Again it was in his favour that he reddened, though the excuse he had to make was feeble.
“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head, with a sad sort of smile, “and you to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in hand! But perhaps in America there’s no need for a lamp to the feet and a light to the path.”
It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a haggis, that her brother, for Molyneux’s information, said was thought to be composed of bagpipes boiled; Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and Molyneux was telling how he simplyhadto come.
“It’s my first time in Scotland,” said he, “and when ‘The Iron Hand’ lost its clutch on old Edina’s fancy, and the scenery was arrested, I wasn’t so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. ‘I’llskiddoo from the gang for a day or two,’ I said to the manager, when we found ourselves side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he’d wire me when he’d fixed a settlement; so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of the American language, and a little Scotch—by absorption.”
“We have only one fault with your coming—that it was not sooner,” said Mr Dyce.
“And I’m pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is to a Scottish training. Chicago’s the finest city on earth—in spots; America’s what our Fourth of July orators succinctly designate God’s Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn’t been any woman better or braver than Mrs Molyneux. But we weren’t situated to give Bud a show like what she’d get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn’t dwell, as you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs Molyneux’s a dear good girl, but she isn’t demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what Bud’s father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing her, now that I’m here and see her, I’m glad of it, for my wife and I are pretty much on the drift most the time in England as we were in the United States.”
“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr Molyneux,” said Mr Dyce. “It’s very much the same in all countries, I suppose?”
“It’s not so bad as stone-breaking, nor so much of a cinch as being a statesman,” said Mr Molyneux cheerfully, “but a man’s pretty old at it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I’ve still the idea myself that if I’m not likely to be a Booth or Henry Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back for a mascot, and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr Emerson said, ‘Hitch your waggon to a star.’ I guess if I got a good star bridled, I’d hitch a private parlour-car and a steam yacht on toher before she flicked an ear. Who wants a waggon, anyway?”
“A waggon’s fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr Dyce, twinkling through his glasses.
“So’s a hearse,” said Mr Molyneux quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled in a hearse complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his feelings jarred, but it’s a mighty slow conveyance for live folks. That’s the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this ’cute little British Kingdom: it’s pretty, and it’s what the school-marm on the coach would call redolent of the dear dead days beyond recall; and it’s plucky,—but it keeps the brakes on most the time, and don’t give its star a chance to amble. I guess it’s a fine, friendly, and crowded country to be born rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor in; but take a tenpenny car-ride out from Charing Cross and you’re in Lullaby Land, and the birds are building nests and carolling in your whiskers. Life’s short; it only gives a man time to wear through one pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live every hour of it that I’m not conspicuously dead.”
They were silent in the parlour of the old house that had for generations sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green, curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not sometimes found in a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest, the alarums and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises—in an aspect fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit of this actor’s gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the sacrilege: even Ailie, sharing in herheart, if less ecstatically, the fervour for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.
“Mr Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie White’s husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and profitable call for Johnny’s toddy, he would come in chittering as it were with cold, and his coat-collar up on his neck, to say, ‘An awfu’ nicht outside! As dark as the inside o’ a cow, and as cauld as charity! They’re lucky that have fires to sit by.’ And he would impress them so much with the good fortune of their situation at the time that they would order in another round and put off their going all the longer, though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions and its lack of hurry, when I hear you—with none of Johnny White’s stratagem—tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive. You’ll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for another round. Life’s short, as you say, but I don’t think it makes it look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely daundering—if you happen to know what daundering is, Mr Molyneux—and now and then resting on the roadside with a friend and watching the others pass.”
“At fifty-five,” said Mr Molyneux agreeably, “I’ll perhaps think so too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two. We’ve all got to move, at first, Mr Dyce. That reminds me of a little talk I had with Bud to-day. That child’s grown, MrDyce,—grown a heap of ways: she’s hardly a child any longer.”
“Tuts! She’s nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving. “When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet’s.”
“Anyhow she’s grown. And it seems to me she’s about due for a little fresh experience. I suppose you’ll be thinking of sending her to one of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her education?”
“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr Dyce quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination manner.
“Well, she did,—but she didn’t know it,” said Mr Molyneux. “I guess about the very last thing that child ’d suggest to anybody would be that she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but, if there’s one weakness about her, it is that she can’t conceal what she thinks, and I’d not been twenty minutes in her society before I found out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that complaint and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and lolling around and dwelling on the past isn’t apt to be her foible. Two or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap sheaf on the making of that girl’s character, and I know, for there’s my wife, and she had only a year and a half. If she’d had longer I guess she’d have had more sense than marry me. Bud’s got almost every mortal thing a body wants here, I suppose,—love in lumps, a warm moist soil, and all the rest of it; but she wants to be hardened-off, and for hardening-off a human flower there’s nothing better than a three-course college, where the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”
Miss Bell turned pale—the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.
“Indeed!” said she, “and I do not see the need for any such thing for a long while yet. Do you,Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was enough to show what she thought.
“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,” continued Mr Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it,—she cried like the cherubim and seraphim. Said it was snatching all the sunshine out of her life, and when I said, ‘Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?’ she just said ‘Scat!’ and threw a couple of agonised throes. Now, Edinburgh’s not so very far away that you’d feel desolated if Bud went to a school there.”
“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.
“Well, it isn’t the Pacific Slope, if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr Molyneux.
“No, but it’s the most beautiful city in the wide world, for all that,” cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air, and made her sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had touched her in the very heart’s core of her national pride.
“You’re sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to school?” asked Mr Dyce.
“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux slyly.
“No,” said Mr Dyce, “I know it well enough, but—but I don’t believe it,” and he smiled at his own paradox.
“I have her own words for it.”
“Then she’ll go!” said the lawyer firmly, as if a load was off his mind; and, oddly, there were no objections from his sisters. “You’re not to imagine, Mr Molyneux,” he went on, “that we have not thought of this before. It has for months been never out of our minds, as might be seen from the fact that we never mentioned it, being loth to take a step that’s going to make considerable difference here. It’s not that we feared we should die of ennui in her absence, for we’re all philosophers and have plenty to engageour minds as well as our activities, and though you might think us rather rusty here we get a good deal of fun with ourselves. She’ll go—oh, yes, of course she’ll go,—Ailie went, and she’s no’ muckle the waur o’t, as we say. I spent some time in the south myself, and the only harm it seems to have done me was to make me think too much perhaps of my native north. Taste’s everything, Mr Molyneux, and you may retort if you please that I’m like the other Scotsman who preferred his apples small and hard and sour. I think there’s no divine instruction, is there, Bell, about apples? and judgments regarding different countries and different places in them is mostly a subjective thing, like the estimate of beauty apart from its utility—”
“Oh! there you are at your metapheesics, Dan,” cried Miss Bell, “and it’s for me and Ailie to make ready the bairn for Edinburgh. She hasna got a stitch that’s fit to be put on.”
Molyneux stared at her—the tone displayed so little opposition to the project; and seeing him so much surprised, the three of them smiled.
“That’s us!” said Mr Dyce. “We’re dour and difficult to decide on anything involving change, and hide from ourselves as long as we can the need for it; but once our mind’s made up, it’s wonderful how we hurry!”