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Bud: A Novel

by Neil Munro · English · Gutenberg #43731 · 503,591 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bud: A Novel

Author: Neil Munro


        
Release date: September 15, 2013 [eBook #43731]
                Most recently updated: March 8, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43731

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUD: A NOVEL ***




Produced by David Widger






BUD

A Novel

BY NEIL MUNRO

1906

BUD




CHAPTER I

THE town's bell rang through the dark of the winter morning with queer
little jolts and pauses, as if Wanton Wully Oliver, the ringer, had been
jovial the night before. A blithe New-Year's-time bell; a droll, daft,
scatter-brained bell; it gave no horrid alarms, no solemn reminders that
commonly toll from steeples and make good-fellows melancholy to think
upon things undone, the brevity of days and years, the parting of good
company, but a cheery ditty--“boom, boom, ding-a-dong boom, boom ding,
hie, ding-dong,” infecting whoever heard it with a kind of foolish
gayety. The burgh town turned on its pillows, drew up its feet from the
bed-bottles, last night hot, now turned to chilly stone, rubbed its
eyes, and knew by that bell it was the daftest of the daft days come. It
cast a merry spell on the community; it tickled them even in their cosey
beds. “Wanton Wully's on the randan!” said the folk, and rose quickly,
and ran to pull aside screens and blinds to look out in the dark on
window-ledges cushioned deep in snow. The children hugged themselves
under the blankets, and told one another in whispers it was not a
porridge morning, no, nor Sunday, but a breakfast of shortbread, ham,
and eggs; and behold! a beautiful, loud drum, careless as 'twere a
reveille of hot, wild youths, began to beat in a distant lane. Behind
the house of Dyce, the lawyer, a cock that must have been young and
hearty crew like to burst; and at the stables of the post-office the man
who housed his horses after bringing the morning mail through night and
storm from a distant railway station sang a song:

     “'A damsel possessed of great beauty
     Stood near by her own father's gate:
     The gallant hussars were on duty;
     To view them this maiden did wait.
     Their horses were capering and prancing,
     Their accoutrements shone like a star;
     From the plains they were quickly advancing--
     She espied her own gallant hussard”

“Mercy on us, six o'clock!” cried Miss Dyce, with a startled jump from
her dreams to the floor of her bedroom. “Six o'clock on the New Year's
morning, and I'll warrant that randy Kate is sound asleep yet,” she
said, and quickly clad herself and went to the head of the stair
and cried, “Kate! Kate! are ye up yet, Kate? Are ye hearing me, Kate
MacNeill?”

From the cavern dark of the lower story there came back no answer.

She stood with a curious, twirly wooden candlestick in her hand in
the midst of a house that was dead dumb and desperate dark and smelled
deliciously of things to eat. Even herself, who had been at the making
of most of them the day before, and had, by God's grace, still much of
a child's appetite, could not but sniff with a childish satisfaction at
this air of a celestial grocery--of plum-puddings and currant-buns,
apples and oranges, cordials and spices, toffee and the angelic treacly
sweet we call Black Man--her face lit rosily by the candle low, a woman
small and soft and sappy, with the most wanton reddish hair, and a
briskness of body that showed no sign as yet of her accomplished years.
What they were I will never tell you; but this I'll say, that even if
they had been eighty she was the kind to cheerily dance a quadrille.
The daft bell, so plainly in the jovial mood of Wanton Wully Oliver,
infected her: she smiled to herself in a way she had when remembering
droll things or just for simple jollity, and whoever saw Bell Dyce smile
to herself had never the least doubt after that she was a darling. Over
the tenements of the town the song of the bell went rollicking, and in
its hiccoughing pauses went wonderfully another sound far, far removed
in spirit and suggestion--the clang of wild geese calling: the “honk,
honk” of the ganders and the challenge of their ladies come down adrift
in the snow from the bitter north.

But there was no answer from the maid in the kitchen. She had rolled
less deliberately than was usual from her blankets to the summons of
the six-o'clock bell, and already, with the kitchen window open,
her bounteous form surged over the two sashes that were always so
conveniently low and handy for a gossip with any friendly passer-by
on the pavement. She drank the air of the clean, chill morning dark, a
heady thing like old Tom Watson's autumn ale, full of the sentiment of
the daft days. She tilted an ear to catch the tune of the mail-boy's
song that now was echoing mellow from the cobwebbed gloom of the stable
stalls, and, making a snowball from the drift of the window-ledge,
she threw it, woman wise, aimlessly into the street with a pretence at
combat. The chill of the snow stung sweet in the hot palm of her, for
she was young and strong.

“Kate, you wretch!” cried a voice behind her. She drew in her head, to
find her mistress in the kitchen with the candlestick in her hand.

“Oh, m'em,” cried the maid, no way abashed, banging up the window and
hurriedly crushing her more ample parts under the final hooks and eyes
of her morning wrapper--“oh, m'em, what a start you gave me! I'm all in
a p-p-palpitation. I was just takin' one mouthful of air and thinkin' to
myself yonder in the Gaelic that it was time for me to be comin' in and
risin' right.”

“A happy New Year to you, Kate MacNeill,” said the mistress, taking her
hand.

“Just that, just that! and the same to you yourself, Miss Dyce. I'm
feeling fine; I'm that glad with everything,” said the maid, in some
confusion at this unusual relation with her mistress. She shook the
proffered hand rapidly from side to side as if it were an egg-switch.

“And see and get the fires on quick now, like a good lass. It would
never do to be starting the New Year late--it would be unlucky. I was
crying to you yonder from the stair-head, and wondering if you were ill,
that you did not answer me so quickly as you do for ordinar'.”

“Ill, Miss Dyce!” cried the maid, astounded. “Do you think I'm daft to
be ill on a New Year's Day?”

“After yon--after yon shortbread you ate yesterday I would not have
wondered much if you were,” said Miss Dyce, shaking her head solemnly.
“I'm not complaining, but, dear me! it was an awful lump; and
I thought it would be a bonny-like thing, too, if our first-foot had to
be the doctor.”

“Doctor! I declare to goodness I never had need of a doctor to me since
Dr. Macphee in Colonsay put me in order with oil and things after I had
the measles,” exclaimed the maid, as if mankind were like wag-at-the-wa'
clocks, and could be guaranteed to go right for years if you blew
through them with a pair of bellows or touched their works with an oily
feather.

“Never mind about the measles just now, Kate,” said Miss Dyce, with a
meaning look at the black-out fire.

“Neither I was mindin' them, m'em--I don't care a spittle for them; it's
so long ago I would not know them if I saw them; I was just--”

“But get your fire on. You know we have a lot to do to-day to get
everything nice and ready for my nephew who comes from America with the
four-o'clock coach.”

“America!” cried the maid, dropping a saucepan lid on the floor in her
astonishment. “My stars! Did I not think it was from Chickagoo?”

“And Chicago is in America, Kate,” said her mistress. “Is it? is it?
Mercy on me, how was Kate to know? I only got part of my education--up
to the place where you carry one and add ten. America! Dear me, just
fancy! The very place that I'm so keen to go to. If I had the money, and
was in America--”

It was a familiar theme; Kate had not got fully started on it when
her mistress fled from the kitchen and set briskly about her morning
affairs.

And gradually the household of Dyce, the lawyer, awoke wholly to a day
of unaccustomed stillness and sound, for the deep snow piled in the
street and hushed the traffic of wheel and hoof and shoe, but otherwise
the morning was cheerful with New-Year's-Day noise. For the bell-ringing
of Wanton Wully was scarcely done, died down in a kind of brazen
chuckle, and the “honk, honk” of the wild geese sped seaward over
gardens and back lanes--strange, wild music of the north, far-fetched
and undomestic--when the fife band shrilly tootled through the town to
the tune of “Hey, Johnny Cope, are Ye Waukin' Yet?” Ah, they were the
proud, proud men, their heads dizzy with glory and last night's wine,
their tread on air. John Taggart drummed--a mighty drummer, drunk or
sober, who so loved his instrument he sometimes went to bed with it
still fastened to his neck, and banged to-day like Banagher, who banged
furiously, never minding the tune much, but happy if so be that he made
noise enough. And the fifers were not long gone down the town, all with
the wrong step but Johnny Vicar, as his mother thought, when the snow
was trampled under the feet of playing children, and women ran out of
their houses, and crossed the street, some of them, I declare, to kiss
each other, for 'tis a fashion lately come, and most genteel, grown
wonderfully common in Scotland. Right down the middle of the town, with
two small flags in his hat and holly in the lapel of his coat, went
old Divine, the hawker, with a great barrow of pure gold, crying:
“Fine Venetian oranges! wha'll buy sweet Venetian oranges? Nane o' your
foreign trash. Oranges! Oranges!--rale New Year oranges, three a penny;
bloods, a bawbee each!” The shops opened just for an hour for fear
anybody might want anything, and many there were, you may be sure,
who did, for they had eaten and drunken everything provided the night
before--which we call hogmanay--and now there were currant-loaves and
sweety biscuits to buy; shortcake, sugar, and lemons, ginger cordial
for the boys and girls and United Presbyterians, boiled ham for country
cousins who might come unexpected, and P. & A. MacGlashan's threepenny
mutton-pies (twopence if you brought the ashet back), ordinarily only to
be had on fair-days and on Saturdays, and far renowned for value.

Miss Minto's Millinery and Manteau Emporium was discovered at daylight
to have magically outlined its doors and windows during the night
with garlands and festoons of spruce and holly, whereon the white rose
bloomed in snow; and Miss Minto herself, in a splendid crimson cloak
down to the heels and cheeks like cherries, was standing with mittens
and her five finger-rings on, in the middle door, saying in beautiful,
gentle English, “A happy New Year” to every one who passed--even to
George Jordon, the common cowherd, who was always a little funny in
his intellects, and, because his trousers were bell-mouthed and hid his
feet, could never remember whether he was going to his work or coming
from it, unless he consulted; the school-master. “The same to you,
m'em, excuse my hands,” said poor George, just touching the tips of her
fingers. Then, because he had been stopped and slewed a little from his
course, he just went back the way he had come.

Too late got up the red-faced sun, too late to laugh at Wanton Wully's
jovial bell, too late for Taggart's mighty drumming, but a jolly winter
sun--'twas all that was wanted among the chimneys to make the day
complete.

First of all to rise in Dyce's house, after the mistress and the maid,
was the master, Daniel Dyce himself.

And now I will tell you all about Daniel Dyce: it is that behind his
back he was known as Cheery Dan.

“Your bath is ready, Dan,” his sister had cried, and he rose and went
with chittering teeth to it, looked at it a moment, and put a hand in
the water. It was as cold as ice, because that water, drinking which men
never age, comes from high mountain bens.

“That for ye to-day!” said he to the bath, snapping his fingers. “I'll
see ye far enough first!” And contented himself with a slighter wash
than usual, and shaving. As he shaved he hummed all the time, as was his
habit, an ancient air of his boyhood; to-day it was

     “' Star of Peace, to wanderers weary,'”

with not much tone but a great conviction--a tall, lean, clean-shaven
man of over fifty, with a fine, long nose, a ruddy cheek, keen, gray
eyes, and plenty of room in his clothes, the pockets of him so large
and open it was no wonder so many people tried, as it were, to put their
hands into them. And when he was dressed he did a droll thing, for from
one of his pockets he took what hereabouts we call a pea-sling, that to
the rest of the world is a catapult, and having shut one eye, and aimed
with the weapon, and snapped the rubber several times with amazing
gravity, he went up-stairs into an attic and laid it on a table at the
window with a pencilled note, in which he wrote:

“A New Year's Day Present for a Good Boy, from an Uncle who does not
like Cats.”

He looked round the little room that seemed very bright and cheerful,
for its window gazed over the garden to the east and to the valley where
was seen the King's highway. “Wonderful! wonderful!” he said to himself.
“They have made an extraordinary job of it. Very nice, indeed, but just
a shade ladylike. A stirring boy would prefer fewer fallals.” There
was little, indeed, to suggest the occupation of a stirring boy in that
attic, with its draped dressing-table in lilac print, its looking-glass
flounced in muslin and pink lover's-knots, its bower-like bed canopied
and curtained with green lawn, its shy scent of potpourri and lavender.
A framed text in crimson wools, the work of Bell Dyce when she was
in Miss Mushet's seminary, hung over the mantel-piece enjoining all
beholders to

     “Watch and Pray”

Mr. Dyce put both hands into his trousers-pockets, bent a little, and
heaved in a sort of chirruping laughter. “Man's whole duty, according to
Bell Dyce,” he said, “'Watch and Pray'; but they do not need to have the
lesson before them continually yonder in Chicago, I'll warrant. Yon's
the place for watching, by all accounts, however it may be about the
prayer. 'Watch and Pray'--h'm! It should be Watch or Pray--it clearly
cannot be both at once with the world the way it is; you might as well
expect a man to eat pease-meal and whistle strathspeys at the same
time.”

He was humming “Star of Peace”--for the tune he started the morning
with usually lasted him all day--and standing in the middle of the
floor contemplating with amusement the lady-like adornment of the room
prepared for his Chicago nephew, when a light step fell on the attic
stairs, and a woman's voice cried: “Dan! Dan Dyce! Coo-ee!”

He did not answer.

She cried again after coming up a step or two more, but still he did not
answer. He slid behind one of the bed-curtains.




CHAPTER II

ALISON DYCE came lightly up the rest of the stair, whistling blithely,
in spite of her sister Bell's old notion that whistling women and
crowing hens are never canny. She swept into the room. People in the
town--which has a forest of wood and deer behind it--used to say she had
the tread and carriage of a young wild roe, and I can well assure you
she was the girl to walk with on a winter day! She had in her hand
a book of poems called _The Golden Treasury_ and a spray of the herb
called Honesty, that thrives in poor men's gardens. Having laid them
down on the table without noticing her brother's extraordinary Present
for a Good Boy, she turned about and fondled things. She smoothed the
bedclothes as if they covered a child, she patted the chair-backs with
an air of benediction, she took cushions to her breast like one that
cuddled them, and when she touched the mantelpiece ornaments they could
not help it but must start to chime. It was always a joy to see
Alison Dyce redding-up, as we say, though in housewifery, like sewing,
knitting, and cooking, she was only a poor second to her sister Bell.
She tried, from duty, to like these occupations, but oh, dear! the task
was beyond her: whatever she had learned from her schooling in Edinburgh
and Brussels, it was not the darning of hose and the covering of
rhubarb-tarts.

Her gift, said Bell, was management.

Tripping round the little attic, she came back by-and-by to the table
at the window to take one last wee glimpse inside _The Golden Treasury_,
that was her own delight and her notion of happy half-hours for the
ideal boy, and her eye fell for the first time on the pea-sling and the
note beside it.

She read, and laughed, and upon my word, if laughter like Ailie Dyce's
could be bought in perforated rolls, there would be no demand for Chopin
and Schumann on the pianolas. It was a laugh that even her brother could
not resist: a paroxysm of coughing burst from behind the curtains, and
he came out beside her chuckling.

“I reckoned without my hoast,” said he, gasping.

“I was sure you were up-stairs,” said Alison. “You silly man! Upon my
word! Where's your dignity, Mr. Dyce?”

Dan Dyce stood for a second a little bit abashed, rubbing his chin and
blinking his eyes as if their fun was a thing to be kept from brimming
over. “I'm a great wag!” said he. “If it's dignity you're after, just
look at my velvet coat!” and so saying he caught the ends of his coat
skirts with his fingers, held them out at arm's-length, and turned round
as he might do at a fit-on in his tailor's, laughing till his hoast came
on again. “Dignity, quo' she, just look at my velvet coat!”

“Dan! Dan! will you never be wise?” said Ailie Dyce, a humorsome
demoiselle herself, if you believe me.

“Not if I keep my health,” said he. “You have made a bonny-like show of
the old garret, between the two of you. It's as smart as a lass at her
first ball.”

“I think it's very nice; at least it might be worse,” interrupted
Alison, defensively, glancing round with satisfaction and an eye to the
hang of the frame round “Watch and Pray.” Bell's wool-work never agreed
with her notions, but, as she knew that her tarts never agreed with
Bell, she kept, on that point, aye discreetly dumb.

“Poor little Chicago!” said her brother. “I'm vexed for the wee fellow.
Print chintz, or chint prints, or whatever it is; sampler texts, and
scent, and poetry books--what in the world is the boy to break?”

“Oh, you have seen to that department, Dan!” said Ailie, taking the
pea-sling again in her hand. “'A New Year's Day Present for a Good Boy
from an Uncle who does not like Cats.' I declare that is a delightful
way of making the child feel quite at home at once.”

“Tuts! 'Tis just a diversion. I know it 'll cheer him wonderfully to
find at the start that if there's no young folk in the house there's
some of the eternal Prank. I suppose there are cats in Chicago. He
cannot expect us to provide him with pigs, which are the usual domestic
pets there, I believe. You let my pea-sling alone, Ailie; you'll find it
will please him more than all the poetry and pink bows. I was once a boy
myself, and I know.”

“You were never anything else,” said Alison--“and never will be anything
else. It is a pity to let the child see at the very start what an
irresponsible person his uncle is; and, besides, it's cruel to throw
stones at cats.”

“Not at all, not at all!” said her brother, briskly, with his head
quizzically to the side a little, in a way he had when debating in the
court. “I have been throwing stones for twenty years at those cats of
Rodger's that live in our garden, and I never hit one yet. They're all
about six inches too short for genuine sport. If cats were dachshund
dogs, and I wasn't so fond of dogs, I would be deadly. But my ado with
cats is just one of the manly old British sports, like trout-fishing and
curling. You take your fun out in anticipation, and the only difference
is you never need to carry a flask. Still, I'm not without hope that my
nephew from Chicago may have a better aim than I have.”

“You are an old--an old goose, Dan Dyce, and a happy New Year to you!”
 said his sister, putting her arms suddenly round his neck and kissing
him.

“Tuts! the coming of that child's ta'en your head,” said the brother,
reddening, for sisters never kiss their own brothers in our part--it's
so sentimental, it's so like the penny stories. “A good New Year to
you, Ailie,” and “Tuts!” he said again, looking quite upset, till Ailie
laughed and put her arm through his and drew him down-stairs to the
breakfast to which she had come to summon him.

The Chicago child's bedroom, left to itself, chilly a bit like Highland
weather, but honest and clean, looked more like a bower than ever: the
morning sun, peeping over garden trees and the chimneys of the lanes,
gazed particularly on the table where the pea-sling and the poetry book
lay together.

And now the town was thronged like a fair-day, with such stirring things
happening every moment in the street that the servant, Kate, had a
constant head out at the window, “putting by the time,” as she explained
to the passing inquirer, “till the mustress would be ready for the
breakfast.” That was Kate--she had come from an island where they make
the most of everything that may be news, even if it's only brandy-sauce
to pudding at the minister's; and Miss Dyce could not start cutting a
new bodice or sewing a button on her brother's trousers but the maid
billowed out upon the window-sash to tell the tidings to the first of
her sex that passed.

Over the trodden snow she saw the people from the country crowd in their
Sunday clothes, looking pretty early in the day for gayety, all with
scent on their handkerchiefs (which is the odor of festive days for
a hundred miles round burgh towns); and town people, less splendid
in attire, as folk that know the difference between a holiday and a
Sabbath, and leave their religious hard hats at home on a New Year's
Day; children, too, replete with bun already, and all succulent with the
juice of Divine's oranges. She heard the bell begin to peal again, for
Wully Oliver--fie on Wully Oliver!--had been met by some boys who told
him the six-o'clock bell was not yet rung, and sent him back to perform
an office he had done with hours before. He went to his bell dubiously,
something in the dizzy abyss he called his mind that half convinced him
he had rung it already.

“Let me pause and consider,” he said once or twice when being urged
to the rope, scratching the hair behind his ears with both hands,
his gesture of reflection. “Was there no' a bairn--an auld-fashioned
bairn--helped to ca' the bell already, and wanted to gie me money for
the chance? It runs in my mind there was a bairn, and that she had us
aye boil-boiling away at eggs, but maybe I'm wrong, for I'll admit I had
a dram or two and lost the place. I don't believe in dram-dram-dramming,
but I aye say if you take a dram, take it in the morning and you get
the good of it all day. It's a tip I learned in the Crimea.” But at
last they convinced him the bairn was just imagination, and Wanton Wully
Oliver spat on his hands and grasped the rope, and so it happened that
the morning bell on the New Year's Day on which my story opens was twice
rung.

The Dyce handmaid heard it pealing as she hung over the window-sash
with her cap awry on her head. She heard from every quarter--from lanes,
closes, tavern-rooms, high attics, and back yards--fifes playing; it was
as if she leaned over a magic grove of great big birds, each singing
its own song--“Come to the Bower,” or “Moneymusk,” or “The Girl I Left
Behind Me,” noble airs wherein the captain of the band looked for a
certain perfection from his musicians before they marched out again at
mid-day. “For,” said he often in rehearsals, “anything will do in the
way of a tune in the dark, my sunny boys, but it must be the tiptop of
skill, and no discordancy, when the eyes of the world are on us. One
turn more at 'Moneymusk,' sunny boys, and then we'll have a skelp at yon
tune of my own composure.”

Besides the sound of the bell and the universal practice of the fifes
there were loud vocalists at the Cross, and such laughter in the street
that Kate was in an ecstasy. Once, uplifted beyond all private decorum,
she kilted her gown and gave a step of a reel in her kitchen solitude.

“Isn't it cheery, the noise!” she exclaimed, delightedly, to the
letter-carrier who came to the window with the morning's letters. “Oh, I
am feeling beautiful! It is--it is--it is just like being inside a pair
of bagpipes.”

He was a man who roared, the postman, being used to bawling up long
common-stairs in the tenements for the people to come down to the foot
themselves for their letters--a man with one roguish eye for the maiden
and another at random. Passing in the letters one by one, he said in
tones that on a quieter day might be heard half up the street,
“Nothing for you, yourself, personally, Kate, but maybe there'll be
one to-morrow. Three big blue anes and seven wee anes for the man
o' business himsel', twa for Miss Ailie (she's the wonderfu'
correspondent!), and ane for Miss Dyce, wi' the smell o' scented
perfume on't--that 'll be frae the Miss Birds o' Edinburgh. And I near
forgot--here's a post-card for Miss Dyce: hearken to this:

“'Child arrived Liverpool yesterday; left this morning for Scotland.
Quite safe to go alone, charge of conductor. Pip, pip! Molyneux.'

“Whatna child is it, Kate?”

“'Pip, pip!' What in the world's 'Pip, pip?' The child is Brother
William's child, to be sure,” said Kate, who always referred to the Dyce
relations as if they were her own. “You have heard of Brother William?”

“Him that was married to the play-actress and never wrote home?” shouted
the letter-carrier. “He went away before my time. Go on; quick, for I'm
in a desperate hurry this mornin'.”

“Well, he died abroad in Chickagoo--God have mercy on him dying so far
away from home, and him without a word of Gaelic in his head!--and a
friend o' his father's bringing the boy home to his aunties.”

“Where in the world's Chickagoo?” bellowed the postman.

“In America, of course--where else would it be but in America?”
 said Kate, contemptuously. “Where is your education not to know that
Chickagoo is in America, where the servant-maids have a pound a week
of wages, and learn the piano, and can get married when they like quite
easy?”

“Bless me! do you say so?” cried the postman, in amazement, and not
without a pang of jealousy.

“Yes, I say so!” said Kate, in the snappish style she often showed to
the letter-carrier. “And the child is coming this very day with the
coach-and-twice from Maryfield railway station--oh, them trains! them
trains! with their accidents; my heart is in my mouth to think of
a child in them. Will you not come round to the back and get the
mistress's New Year dram? She is going to give a New Year dram to every
man that calls on business this day. But I will not let you in, for
it is in my mind that you would not be a lucky first-foot.”

“Much obleeged,” said the postman, “but ye needna be feared. I'm not
allowed to go dramming at my duty. It's offeecial, and I canna help it.
If it was not offeecial, there's few letter-carriers that wouldna need
to hae iron hoops on their heids to keep their brains from burstin' on
the day efter New Year.”

Kate heard a voice behind her, and pulled her head in hurriedly with a
gasp, and a cry of “Mercy, the start I got!” while the postman fled on
his rounds. Miss Dyce stood behind, in the kitchen, indignant.

“You are a perfect heartbreak, Kate,” said the mistress. “I have rung
for breakfast twice and you never heard me, with your clattering out
there to the letter-carrier. It's a pity you cannot marry the glee
party, as Mr. Dyce calls him, and be done with it.”

“Me marry him!” cried the maid, indignantly. “I think I see myself
marryin' a man like yon, and his eyes not neighbors.”

“That's a trifle in a husband if his heart is good; the letter-carrier's
eyes may--may skew a little, but it's not to be wondered at, considering
the lookout he has to keep on all sides of him to keep out of reach of
every trollop in the town who wants to marry him.”

And leaving Kate speechless at this accusation, the mistress of the
house took the letters from her hands and went to the breakfast-table
with them.

She had read the contents of the post-card before she reached the
parlor; its news dismayed her.

“Just imagine!” she cried. “Here's that bairn on his way from Liverpool
his lee-lone, and not a body with him!''

“What! what!” cried Mr. Dyce, whose eyes had been shut to say the grace.
“Isn't that actor-fellow, Molyneux, coming with him, as he promised?”

Miss Dyce sunk in a chair and burst into tears, crushing the post-card
in her hand.

“What does he say?” demanded her brother.

“He says--he says--oh, dear me!--he says, 'Pip, pip!'” quoth the
weeping sister.




CHAPTER III

“I MISDOUBTED Mr. Molyneux from the very first,” said Ailie, turning as
white as a clout. “From all his post-cards he was plainly too casual.
Stop it, Bell, my dear--have sense; the child's in a Christian land,
and in the care of somebody who is probably more dependable than this
delightful Molyneux.”

Mr. Dyce took out an old, thick, silver verge. “Nine o'clock,” he said,
with a glance at its creamy countenance. “Molyneux's consignment is
making his first acquaintance with Scottish scenery and finding himself,
I hope, amused at the Edinburgh accent. He'll arrive at Maryfield--poor,
wee smout!--at three; if I drive over at twelve, I'll be in time to
meet him. Tuts, Bell, give over; he's a ten-year-old and a Dyce at
that--there's not the slightest fear of him.”

“Ten years old, and in a foreign country--if you can call Scotland a
foreign country,” cried Miss Dyce, still sobbing with anger and grief.
“Oh, the cat-witted scamp, that Molyneux--if I had him here!”

The dining-room door opened and let in a yawning dog of most plebeian
aspect, longest lie-abed of the household, the clamor of the street,
and the sound of sizzling bacon, followed by Kate's majestic form at
a stately glide, because she had on her new stiff lilac print that was
worn for breakfast only on Sundays and holidays. “You would think I was
never coming,” she said, genially, and smiled widely as she put the tray
on the sideboard. This that I show you, I fear, is a beggarly household,
absurdly free from ceremony. Mr. Dyce looked at his sister Ailie and
smiled; Ailie looked at her sister Bell and smiled. Bell took a hair-pin
or two out of their places and seemed to stab herself with them
viciously in the nape of the neck, and smiled not at all nor said
anything, for she was furious with Molyneux, whom she could see in her
mind's eye--an ugly, tippling, frowzy-looking person with badly polished
boots, an impression that would have greatly amused Mrs. Molyneux, who,
not without reason, counted her Jim the handsomest man and the best
dressed in the profession in all Chicago.

“I'm long of coming, like Royal Charlie,” Kate proceeded, as she passed
the ashets on to Miss Dyce; “but, oh me! New Year's Day here is no' like
New Year's Day in the bonny isle of Colonsay.”

Mr. Dyce said grace and abstractedly helped himself alternately from
both ends of a new roll of powdered butter. “Dan, dear, don't take the
butter from both ends--it spoils the look,” said Bell. “Tuts!” said he.
“What's the odds? There'll be no ends at all when we're done with
it. I'm utterly regardless of the symmetrical and the beautiful this
morning. I'm savage to think of that man Molyneux. If I was not a man of
peace I would be wanting to wring Mr. Moly-neux's neck,” and he twisted
his morning roll in halves with ferocious hands.

“Dan!” said Ailie, shocked. “I never heard you say anything so
blood-thirsty in all my life before. I would never have thought it of
you.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “There's many things about me you never suspected.
You women are always under delusions about the men--about the men--well,
dash it! about the men you like. I know myself so well that there is no
sin, short of one or two not so accounted, that I cannot think myself
capable of. I believe I might be forced into robbing a kirk if I had no
money and was as hungry as I was this morning before that post-card
came to ruin a remarkably fine New-Year's-Day appetite, or even into
murdering a man like Molyneux who failed in the simplest duties no man
should neglect.”

“I hope and trust,” said Bell, still nervous, “that he is a wiselike boy
with a proper upbringing, who will not be frightened at travelling and
make no mistakes about the train. If he was a Scotch laddie, with the
fear of God in him, I would not be a bit put about for him, for he would
be sure to be asking, asking, and if he felt frightened he would just
start and eat something, like a Christian. But this poor child has no
advantages--just American!”

Ailie sat back in her chair, with her teacup in her hand, and laughed,
and Kate laughed quietly--though it beat her to see where the fun was;
and the dog laughed likewise--at least it wagged its tail and twisted
its body and made such extraordinary sounds in its throat that you could
say it was laughing.

“Tuts! you are the droll woman, Bell,” said Mr. Dyce, blinking at her.
“You have the daftest ideas of Some things. For a woman who spent
so long a time in Miss Mushet's seminary, and reads so much at the
newspapers, I wonder at you.”

“Of course his father was Scotch, that's one mercy,” added Bell, not a
bit annoyed at the reception of her pious opinions.

“That, is always something to be going on with,” said Mr. Dyce,
mockingly. “I hope he'll make the most of that great start in life and
fortune. It's as good as money in his pocket.”

Bell put up a tiny hand and pushed a stray curl (for she had a rebel
chevelure) behind her ear, and smiled in spite of her anxiety about the
coming nephew. “You may laugh if you like, Dan,” she said, emphatically,
perking with her head across the table at him, “but I'm _proud_, I'm
proud, I'm PROUD I'm Scotch.” (“Not apologizing for it myself,” said
her brother, softly.) “And you know what these Americans are! Useless
bodies, who make their men brush their own boots, and have to pay wages
that's a sin to housemaids, and eat pie even-on.”

“Dear me! is that true, or did you see it in a newspaper?” said her
brother. “I begin to be alarmed myself at the possibilities of this
small gentleman now on his way to the north, in the complete confidence
of Mr. Molyneux, who must think him very clever. It's a land of infant
prodigies he comes from; even at the age of ten he may have more of the
stars and stripes in him than we can eradicate by a diet of porridge and
a curriculum of Shorter Catechism and Jane Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_.
Faith, I was fond of Jane myself when I read her first: she was nice and
bloody. A big soft hat with a bash in it, perhaps; a rhetorical delivery
at the nose, 'I guess and calculate' every now and then; a habit of
chewing tobacco” (“We'll need a cuspidor,” said Ailie, _sotto voce_);
“and a revolver in his wee hip-pocket. Oh, the darling! I can see him
quite plainly.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the maid, Kate, and fled the room all in a tremor
at the idea of the revolver.

“You may say what you like, but I cannot get over his being an
American,” said Bell, solemnly. “The dollar's everything in America, and
they're so independent!”

“Terrible! terrible!” said her brother, ironically, breaking into
another egg fiercely with his knife, as if he were decapitating the
President of the United States.

Ailie laughed again. “Dear, dear Bell!” she said, “it sounds quite
Scotch. A devotion to the dollar is a good sound basis for a Scotch
character. Remember there are about a hundred bawbees in a dollar: just
think of the dollar in bawbees, and you'll not be surprised that the
Americans prize it so much.” “Renegade!” said Bell, shaking a spoon at
her. “Provincial!” retorted Ailie, shaking a fork at Bell,

     '“Star of Peace, to wanderers weary,
     Bright the beams that shine on me.

--children, be quiet,” half-sung, half-said their brother. “Bell, you
are a blether; Ailie, you are a cosmopolitan, a thing accursed. That's
what Edinburgh and Brussels and your too brisk head have done for you.
Just bring yourself to our poor parochial point of view, and tell me,
both of you, what you propose to do with this young gentleman from
Chicago when you get him.”

“Change his stockings and give him a good tea,” said Bell, promptly, as
if she had been planning it for weeks. “He'll be starving of hunger and
damp with snow.”

“There's something more than dry hose and high tea to the making of a
man,” said her brother. “You can't keep that up for a dozen years.”

“Oh, you mean education!” said Bell, resignedly. “That's not in my
department at all.”

Ailie expressed her views with calm, soft deliberation, as if she, too,
had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, which was partly the case.
“I suppose,” she said, “he'll go to the grammar-school, and get a good
grounding on the classic side, and then to the university. I will just
love to help him so long as he's at the grammar-school. That's what
I should have been, Dan, if you had let me--a teacher. I hope he's a
bright boy, for I simply cannot stand what Bell calls--calls--”

“Diffies,” suggested Bell.

“Diffies; yes, I can _not_ stand diffies. Being half a Dyce I can hardly
think he will be a diffy. If he's the least like his father, he may be a
little wild at first, but at least he'll be good company, which makes up
for a lot, and good-hearted, quick in perception, fearless, and--”

“And awful funny,” suggested Bell, beaming with old, fond, glad
recollections of the brother dead beside his actor wife in far Chicago.

“Fearless, and good fun,” continued Ailie. “Oh, dear Will! what a merry
soul he was. Well, the child cannot be a fool if he's like his father.
American independence, though he has it in--in--in clods, won't do him
any harm at all. I love Americans--do you hear that, Bell Dyce?--because
they beat that stupid old King George, and have been brave in the forest
and wise on the prairie, and feared no face of man, and laughed at
dynasties. I love them because they gave me Emerson, and Whitman, and
Thoreau, and because one of them married my brother William, and was the
mother of his child.”

Dan Dyce nodded; he never quizzed his sister Ailie when it was her heart
that spoke and her eyes were sparkling.

“The first thing you should learn him,” said Miss Dyce, “is 'God Save
the Queen.' It's a splendid song altogether; I'm glad I'm of a kingdom
every time I hear it at a meeting, for it's all that's left of the olden
notions the Dyces died young or lost their money for. You'll learn him
that, Ailie, or I'll be very vexed with you. I'll put flesh on his bones
with my cooking if you put the gentleman in him.”

It was Bell's idea that a gentleman talked a very fine English accent
like Ailie, and carried himself stately like Ailie, and had wise and
witty talk for rich or poor like Ailie.

“I'm not so sure about the university,” she went on. “Such stirks come
out of it sometimes; look at poor Maclean, the minister! They tell me he
could speak Hebrew if he got anybody to speak it back slow to him, but
just imagine the way he puts on his clothes! And his wife manages him
not so bad in broad Scotch. I think we could do nothing better than make
the boy a lawyer; it's a trade looked up to, and there's money in it,
though I never could see the need of law myself if folk would only be
agreeable. He could go into Dan's office whenever he is old enough.”

“A lawyer!” cried her brother. “You have first of all to see that he's
not an ass.”

“And what odds would that make to a lawyer?” said Bell, quickly,
snapping her eyes at the brother she honestly thought the wisest man in
Scotland.

“Bell,” said he, “as I said before, you're a haivering body--nothing
else, though I'll grant you bake no' a bad scone. And as for you, Ailie,
you're beginning, like most women, at the wrong end. The first thing to
do with your nephew is to teach him to be happy, for it's a habit that
has to be acquired early, like the taste for pease-brose.”

“You began gey early yourself,” said Bell. “Mother used to say that
she was aye tickling your feet till you laughed when you were a baby. I
sometimes think that she did not stop it soon enough.”

“If I had to educate myself again, and had not a living to make, I would
leave out a good many things the old dominie thought needful. What was
yon awful thing again?--mensuration. To sleep well and eat anything,
fear the face of nobody in bashfulness, to like dancing, and be able to
sing a good bass or tenor--that's no bad beginning in the art of life.
There's a fellow Brodie yonder in the kirk choir, who seems to me
happier than a king when he's getting in a fine boom-boom of bass to the
tune Devizes; he puts me all out at my devotions on a Lord's day with
envy of his accomplishment.”

“What! envy too!” said Alison. “Murder, theft, and envy--what a
brother!”

“Yes, envy too, the commonest and ugliest of our sins,” said Mr. Dyce.
“I never met man or woman who lacked it, though many never know they
have it. I hope the great thing is to be ashamed to feel it, for that's
all that I can boast of myself. When I was a boy at the school there was
another boy, a great friend of my own, was chosen to compete for a prize
I was thought incapable of taking, so that I was not on the list. I
envied him to hatred--almost; and saying my bits of prayers at night I
prayed that he might win. I felt ashamed of my envy, and set the better
Daniel Dyce to wrestle with the Daniel Dyce who was not quite so big. It
was a sair fight, I can assure you. I found the words of my prayer and
my wishes considerably at variance--”

“Like me and 'Thy will be done' when we got the word of brother
William,” said Bell.

27

“But my friend--dash him!--got the prize. I suppose God took a kind
of vizzy down that night and saw the better Dan Dyce was doing his
desperate best against the other devil's--Dan, who mumbled the prayer on
the chance He would never notice. There was no other way of accounting
for it, for that confounded boy got the prize, and he was not half so
clever as myself, and that was Alick Maitland. Say nothing about envy,
Ailie; I fear we all have some of it until we are perhaps well up in
years, and understand that between the things we envy and the luck we
have there is not much to choose. If I got all I wanted, myself, the
world would have to be much enlarged. It does not matter a docken leaf.
Well, as I was saying when my learned friend interrupted me, I would
have this young fellow healthy and happy and interested in everything.
There are men I see who would mope and weary in the middle of a country
fair--God help them! I want to stick pins in them sometimes and
make them jump. They take as little interest in life as if they were
undertakers.”

“Hoots! nobody could weary in this place at any rate,” said Bell
briskly. “Look at the life and gayety that's in it. Talk about London! I
can hardly get my sleep at night quite often with the traffic. And such
things are always happening in it--births and marriages, engagements and
tea-parties, new patterns at Miss Minto's, two coaches in the day, and
sometimes somebody doing something silly that will keep you laughing
half the week.”

“But it's not quite so lively as Chicago,” said Mr. Dyce. “There has not
been a man shot in this neighborhood since the tinker kind of killed
his wife (as the fiscal says) with the pistol. You'll have heard of him?
When the man was being brought on the scaffold for it, and the minister
asked if he had anything to say before he suffered the extreme penalty
of the law, 'All I have got to say,' he answered, starting to greet, 'is
that this'll be an awful lesson to me.'”

“That's one of your old ones,” said Bell; but even an old one was
welcome in Dyce's house on New Year's day, and the three of them laughed
at the story as if it had newly come from London in Ailie's precious
_Punch_. The dog fell into a convulsion of merriment, as if inward
chuckles tormented him--as queer a dog as ever was, neither Scotch
terrier nor Skye, Dandy Dinmont nor Dashshund, but just dog--dark
wire-haired behind, short ruddy-haired in front, a stump tail, a face so
fringed you could only see its eyes when the wind blew. Mr. Dyce put
down his hand and scratched it behind the ear. “Don't laugh, Footles,”
 he said. “I would not laugh if I were you, Footles--it's just an old
one. Many a time you've heard it before, sly rogue. One would think you
wanted to borrow money.” If you could hear Dan Dyce speak to his dog,
you would know at once he was a bachelor: only bachelors and bairnless
men know dogs.

“I hope and trust he'll have decent clothes to wear, and none of their
American rubbish,” broke in Bell, back to her nephew again. “It's
all nonsense about the bashed hat; but you can never tell what way an
American play-actor will dress a bairn: there's sure to be something
daft-like about him--a starry waistcoat or a pair of spats--and we must
make him respectable like other boys in the place.”

“I would say Norfolk suits, the same as the banker's boys,” suggested
Ailie. “I think the banker's boys always look so smart and neat.”

“Anything with plenty of pockets in it,” said Mr. Dyce. “At the age
of ten a boy would prefer his clothes to be all pockets. By George! an
entire suit of pockets, with a new penny in every pocket for luck, would
be a great treat,” and he chuckled at the idea, making a mental note of
it for a future occasion.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Bell, emphatically, for here she was in her
own department. “The boy is going to be a Scotch boy. I'll have the kilt
on him, or nothing.”

“The kilt!” said Mr. Dyce.

“The kilt!” cried Ailie.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

It was a loud knocking at the front door. They stopped the talk to
listen, and they heard the maid go along the lobby from the kitchen.
When she opened the door, there came in the cheerful discord of
the street, the sound of a pounding drum, the fifes still busy,
the orange-hawker's cry, but over all they heard her put her usual
interrogation to visitors, no matter what their state or elegance.

“Well, what is't?” she asked, and though they could not see her, they
knew she would have the door just a trifle open, with her shoulder
against it, as if she was there to repel some chieftain of a wild
invading clan. Then they heard her cry, “Mercy on me!” and her footsteps
hurrying to the parlor door. She threw it open, and stood with some one
behind her.

“What do you think? Here's brother William's wean!” she exclaimed, in a
gasp.

“My God! Where is he?” cried Bell, the first to find her tongue. “He's
no hurt, is he?”

“It's no' a him at all--it's a her!” shrieked Kate, throwing up her
arms in consternation, and stepping aside she gave admission to a little
girl.




CHAPTER IV

THE orphan child of William and Mary Dyce, dead, the pair of them, in
the far-off city of Chicago, stepped, quite serenely, into an astounded
company. There were three Dyces in a row in front of her, and the droll
dog Footles at her feet, and behind her, Kate, the servant, wringing her
apron as if it had newly come from the washing-boyne, her bosom heaving.
Ten eyes (if you could count the dog's, hidden by his tousy fringe)
stared at the child a moment, and any ordinary child would have been
much put out; but this was no common child, or else she felt at once the
fond kind air of home. I will give you her picture in a sentence or
two. She was black-haired, dark and quick in the eye, not quite pale
but olive in complexion, with a chin she held well up, and a countenance
neither shy nor bold, but self-possessed. Fur on her neck and hood (Jim
Molyneux's last gift), and a muff that held her arms up to the elbows,
gave her an aspect of picture-book cosiness that put the maid in mind at
once of the butcher's Christmas calendar.

It was the dog that first got over the astonishment: he made a dive at
her with little friendly growls, and rolled on his back at her feet, to
paddle with his four paws in the air, which was his way of showing he
was in the key for fun.

With a cry of glee she threw the muff on the floor and plumped beside
him, put her arms about his body and buried her face in his fringe. His
tail went waving, joyous, like a banner. “Doggie, doggie, you love me,”
 said she, in an accent that was anything but American. “Let us pause and
consider--you will not leave this house till I boil you an egg.”

“God bless me, what child's this?” cried Bell, coming to herself with a
start, and, pouncing on her, she lifted her to her feet. Ailie sank
on her hands and knees and stared in the visitor's face. “The kilt,
indeed!” said Mr. Dyce to himself. “This must be a warlock wean, for if
it has not got the voice and sentiment of Wanton Wully Oliver I'm losing
my wits.”

“Tell me this, quick, are you Lennox Dyce?” said Bell, all trembling,
devouring the little one with her eyes.

“Well, I just guess I am,” replied the child, calmly, with the dog
licking her chin. “Say, are you Auntie Bell?” and this time there was no
doubt about the American accent. Up went her mouth to them to be kissed,
composedly: they lost no time, but fell upon her, Ailie half in tears
because at once she saw below the childish hood so much of brother
William.

“Lennox, dear, you should not speak like that; who in all the world
taught you to speak like that?” said Bell, unwrapping her.

“Why, I thought that was all right here,” said the stranger. “That's the
way the bell-man speaks.”

“Bless me! Do you know the bell-man?” cried Miss Dyce.

“I rang his old bell for him this morning--didn't you hear me?” was the
surprising answer. “He's a nice man; he liked me. I'd like him too if he
wasn't so tired. He was too tired to speak sense; all he would say was,
'I've lost the place, let us pause and consider,' and 'Try another egg.'
I said I would give him a quarter if he'd let me ring his bell, and he
said he'd let me do it for nothing, and my breakfast besides. 'You'll
not leave this house till I boil an egg for you'--that's what he said,
and the poor man was so tired! And his legs were dreff'le poorly.” Again
her voice was the voice of Wully Oliver; the sentiment, as the Dyces
knew, was the slogan of his convivial hospitality.

“The kilt, indeed!” said Mr. Dyce, feeling extraordinarily foolish, and,
walking past them, he went up-stairs and hurriedly put the pea-sling in
his pocket.

When he came down, young America was indifferently pecking at her second
breakfast with Footles on her knee, an aunt on either side of her, and
the maid Kate with a tray in her hand for excuse, open-mouthed, half in
at the door.

“Well, as I was saying, Jim--that's my dear Mr. Molyneux, you know--got
busy with a lot of the boys once he landed off that old ship, and so he
said, 'Bud, this is the--the--justly cel'brated Great Britain; I know
by the boys; they're so lively when they're by themselves. I was
'prehensive we might have missed it in the dark, but it's all right.'
And next day he bought me this muff and things and put me on the
cars--say, what funny cars you have!--and said 'Good-bye, Bud; just go
right up to Maryfield, and change there. If you're lost anywhere on the
island just holler out good and loud, and I'll hear!' He pretended he
wasn't caring, but he was pretty blinky 'bout the eyes, and I saw he
wasn't anyway gay, so I never let on the way I felt myself.”

She suggested the tone and manner of the absent Molyneux in a fashion
to put him in the flesh before them. Kate almost laughed out loud at the
oddity of it; Ailie and her brother were astounded at the cleverness of
the mimicry; Bell clinched her hands, and said for the second time that
day, “Oh! that Molyneux, if I had him!”

“He's a nice man, Jim. I can't tell you how I love him--and he gave
me heaps of candy at the depot,” proceeded the unabashed new-comer.
“'Change at Edinburgh,' he said; 'you'll maybe have time to run into the
Castle and see the Duke; give him my love, but not my address. When you
get to Maryfield hop out slick and ask for your uncle Dyce.' And then he
said, did Jim, 'I hope he ain't a loaded Dyce, seein' he's Scotch, and
it's the festive season.'”

“The adorable Jim!” said Ailie. “We might have known.”

“I got on all right,” proceeded the child, “but I didn't see the Duke of
Edinburgh; there wasn't time, and uncle wasn't at Maryfield, but a man
put me on his mail carriage and drove me right here. He said I was a
caution. My! it was cold. Say, is it always weather like this here?”

“Sometimes it's like this, and sometimes it's just ordinary Scotch
weather,” said Mr. Dyce, twinkling at her through his spectacles.

“I was dre'ffle sleepy in the mail, and the driver wrapped me up, and
when I came into this town in the dark he said, 'Walk right down there
and rap at the first door you see with a brass man's hand for a knocker;
that's Mr. Dyce's house.' I came down, and there wasn't any brass man,
but I saw the knocker. I couldn't reach up to it, so when I saw a man
going into the church with a lantern in his hand. I went up to him and
pulled his coat. I knew he'd be all right going into a church. He told
me he was going to ring the bell, and I said I'd give him a quarter--oh,
I said that before. When the bell was finished he took me to his house
for luck--that was what he said--and he and his wife got right up and
boiled eggs. They said I was a caution, too, and they went on boiling
eggs, and I couldn't eat more than two and a white though I tried _and_
tried. I think I slept a good while in their house; I was so fatigued,
and they were all right, they loved me, I could see that. And I liked
them some myself, though they must be mighty poor, for they haven't
any children. Then the bellman took me to this house, and rapped at
the door, and went away pretty quick for him before anybody came to
it, because he said he was plain-soled--what's plain-soled anyhow?--and
wasn't a lucky first-foot on a New Year's morning.''

“It beats all, that's what it does!” cried Bell. “My poor wee
whitterick! Were ye no' frightened on the sea?”

“Whitterick, whitterick,” repeated the child to herself, and Ailie,
noticing, was glad that this was certainly not a diffy. Diffies never
interest themselves in new words; diffies never go inside themselves
with a new fact as a dog goes under a table with a bone.

“Were you not frightened when you were on the sea?” repeated Bell.

“No,” said the child, promptly. “Jim was there all right, you see, and
he knew all about it. He said, 'Trust in Providence, and if it's _very_
stormy, trust in Providence _and_ the Scotch captain.'”

“I declare! the creature must have some kind of sense in him, too,” said
Bell, a little mollified by this compliment to Scots sea-captains. And
all the Dyces fed their eyes upon this wonderful wean that had fallen
among them. 'Twas happy in that hour with them, as if in a miracle they
had been remitted to their own young years; their dwelling was at long
last furnished! She had got into the good graces of Footles as if she
had known him all her life.

“Say, uncle, this is a funny dog,” was her next remark. “Did God make
him?”

“Well--yes, I suppose God did,” said Mr. Dyce, taken a bit aback.

“Well, isn't He the damedst! This dog beats Mrs. Molyneux's Dodo, and
Dodo was a looloo. What sort of a dog is he? Scotch terrier?”

“Mostly not,” said her uncle, chuckling. “It's really an improvement on
the Scotch terrier. There's later patents in him, you might say. He's a
sort of mosaic; indeed, when I think of it you might describe him as a
pure mosaic dog.”

“A Mosaic dog!” exclaimed Lennox. “Then he must have come from
scriptural parts. Perhaps I'll get playing with him Sundays. Not playing
loud out, you know, but just being happy. I love being happy, don't
you?”

“It's my only weakness,” said Mr. Dyce, emphatically, blinking through
his glasses. “The other business men in the town don't approve of me for
it; they call it frivolity. But it comes so easily to me I never charge
it in the bills, though a sense of humor should certainly be worth 12s.
6d. a smile in the Table of Fees. It would save many a costly plea.”

“Didn't you play on Sunday in Chicago?” asked Ailie.

“Not out loud. Poppa said he was bound to have me Scotch in one thing
at least, even if it took a strap. That was after mother died. He'd just
read to me Sundays, and we went to church till we had pins and needles.
We had the Reverend Ebenezer Paul Frazer, M.A., Presbyterian Church on
the Front. He just preached _and_ preached till we had pins and needles
all over.”

“My poor Lennox!” exclaimed Ailie, with feeling.

“Oh, I'm all right!” said young America, blithely. “I'm not kicking.”

Dan Dyce, with his head to the side, took off his spectacles and rubbed
them clean with his handkerchief; put them on again, looked at his niece
through them, and then at Ailie, with some motion struggling in his
countenance. Ailie for a moment suppressed some inward convulsion, and
turned her gaze embarrassed from him to Bell, and Bell catching the eyes
of both of them could contain her joy no longer. They laughed till the
tears came, and none more heartily than brother William's child. She had
so sweet a laugh that there and then the Dyces thought it the loveliest
sound they had ever heard in their house. Her aunts would have devoured
her with caresses. Her uncle stood over her and beamed, rubbing his
hands, expectant every moment of another manifestation of the oddest
kind of child mind he had ever encountered. And Kate swept out and in
between the parlor and the kitchen on trivial excuses, generally with
something to eat for the child, who had eaten so much in the house of
Wanton Wully Oliver that she was indifferent to the rarest delicacies of
Bell's celestial grocery.

“You're just--just a wee witch!” said Bell, fondling the child's hair.
“Do you know, that man Molyneux--”

“Jim,” suggested Lennox.

“I would Jim him if I had him! That man Molyneux in all his scrimping
little letters never said whether you were a boy or a girl, and we
thought a Lennox was bound to be a boy, and all this time we have been
expecting a boy.”

“I declare!” said the little one, with the most amusing drawl, a memory
of Molyneux. “Why, I always was a girl, far back as I can remember.
Nobody never gave me the chance to be a boy. I s'pose I hadn't the
clothes for the part, and they just pushed me along anyhow in frocks.
Would you'd rather I was a boy?”

“Not a bit! We have one in the house already, and he's a fair
heart-break,” said her aunt, with a look towards Mr. Dyce. “We had just
made up our mind to dress you in the kilt when your rap came to the
door. At least, I had made up my mind, the others are so stubborn. And
bless me! lassie, where's your luggage? You surely did not come all the
way from Chicago with no more than what you have on your back?”

“You'll be tickled to death to see my trunks!” said Lennox. “I've heaps
and heaps of clothes and six dolls. They're all coming with the coach.
They wanted me to wait for the coach too, but the mail man who called me
a caution said he was bound to have a passenger for luck on New Year's
Day, and I was in a hurry to get home anyway.”

“Home!” When she said that, the two aunts swept on her like a billow and
bore her, dog and all, up-stairs to her room. She was almost blind for
want of sleep.

They hovered over her quick-fingered, airy as bees, stripping her for
bed. She knelt a moment and in one breath said:

“God - bless - father - and - mother - and - Jim - and - Mrs. - Molyneux
- and - my - aunts - in - Scotland - and Uncle - Dan - and - everybody -
good - night.”

And was asleep in the sunlight of the room as soon as her head fell on
the pillow.

“She prayed for her father and mother,” whispered Bell, with Footles
in her arms, as they stood beside the bed. “It's not--it's not quite
Presbyterian to pray for the dead; it's very American, indeed you might
call it papist.”

Ailie's face reddened, but she said nothing.

“And do you know this?” said Bell, shamefacedly, “I do it myself; upon
my word, I do it myself. I'm often praying for father and mother and
William.”

“So am I,” confessed Alison, plainly relieved. “I'm afraid I'm a poor
Presbyterian, for I never knew there was anything wrong in doing so.”

Below, in the parlor, Mr. Dyce stood looking into the white garden, a
contented man, humming:

     “Star of Peace, to wanderers weary.”




CHAPTER V

SHE was a lucky lassie, this of ours, to have come home to her father's
Scotland on that New Year's Day, for there is no denying that it is not
always gay in Scotland, contrary land, that, whether we be deep down in
the waist of the world and afar from her, or lying on her breast,
chains us to her with links of iron and gold--stern tasks and happy days
remembered, ancient stories, austerity and freedom, cold weather on
moor and glen, warm hearths and burning hearts. She might have seen this
burgh first in its solemnity, on one of the winter days when it shivers
and weeps among its old memorials, and the wild geese cry more constant
over the house-tops, and the sodden gardens, lanes, wynds, and wells,
the clanging spirits of old citizens dead and gone, haunting the place
of their follies and their good times, their ridiculous ideals, their
mistaken ambitions, their broken plans. Ah, wild geese! wild geese! old
ghosts that cry to-night above my dwelling, I feel--I feel and know!
She might have come, the child, to days of fast, and sombre dark drugget
garments, dissonant harsh competing kettle bells, or spoiled harvests,
poor fishings, hungry hours. It was good for her, and it is the making
of my story, that she came not then, but with the pure white cheerful
snow, to ring the burgh bell in her childish escapade, and usher in with
merriment the New Year, and begin her new life happily in the Old World.

She woke at noon among the scented curtains, in linen sea-breeze
bleached, under the camceil roof that all children love, for it makes
a garret like the ancestral cave and in rainy weather they can hear the
pattering feet of foes above them. She heard the sound of John Taggart's
drum, and the fifing of “Happy we've been a' thegether,” and turning,
found upon her pillow a sleeping doll that woke whenever she raised it
up, and stared at her in wonderment.

“Oh!--Oh!--Oh! you roly-poly blonde!” cried the child in ecstasy,
hugging it to her bosom and covering it with kisses. “I'm as glad as
anything. Do you see the lovely little room? I'll tell you right here
what your name is: it's Alison; no, it's Bell; no, it's Alibel for your
two just lovely, lovely aunties.”

Up she rose, sleep banished, with a sense of cheerfulness and
expectation, nimbly dressed herself, and slid down the banisters to
tumble plump at the feet of her Auntie Bell in the lobby.

“Mercy on us! You'll break your neck; are you hurt?” cried Aunt Bell.
“I'm not kicking,” said the child, and the dog waved furiously a
gladsome tail. A log fire blazed and crackled and hissed in the parlor,
and Mr. Dyce tapped time with his fingers on a chair-back to an internal
hymn.

“My! ain't I the naughty girl to be snoozling away like a gopher in a
hole all day? Your clock's stopped, Uncle Dan.”

Mr. Dyce looked very guilty, and coughed, rubbing his chin. “You're a
noticing creature,” said he. “I declare it _has_ stopped. Well, well!”
 and his sister Bell plainly enjoyed some amusing secret.

“Your uncle is always a little daft, my dear,” she said.

“I would rather be daft than dismal,” he retorted, cleaning his glasses.

“It's a singular thing that the clocks in our lobby and parlor always
stop on the New Year's Day, Lennox.”

“Bud; please, say Bud,” pleaded the little one. “Nobody ever calls me
Lennox 'cept when I'm doing something wrong and almost going to get a
whipping.”

“Very well, Bud, then. This clock gets something wrong with it every New
Year's Day, for your uncle, that man there, wants the folk who call
never to know the time so that they'll bide the longer.”

“Tuts!” said Uncle Dan, who had thought this was his own particular
recipe for joviality, and that they had never discovered it.

“You have come to a hospitable town, Bud,” said Ailie. “There are
convivial old gentlemen on the other side of the street who have got up
a petition to the magistrates to shut up the inn and the public-house in
the afternoon. They say it is in the interests of temperance, but it's
really to compel their convivial friends to visit themselves.”

“I signed it myself,” confessed Mr. Dyce, “and I'm only half convivial.
I'm not bragging; I might have been more convivial if it didn't so
easily give me an aching head. What's more cheerful than a crowd in the
house and the clash going? A fine fire, a good light, and turn about
at a story! The happiest time I ever had in my life was when I broke my
leg; so many folk called, it was like a month of New Year's Days. I was
born with a craving for company. Mother used to have a superstition that
if a knife or spoon dropped on the floor from the table it betokened a
visitor, and I used to drop them by the dozen. But, dear me! here's a
wean with a doll, and where in the world did she get it?”

Bud, with the doll under one arm and the dog tucked under the other,
laughed up in his face with shy perception.

“Oh, you funny man!” she exclaimed. “I guess you know all right who
put Alibel on my pillow. Why! I could have told you were a doll man:
I noticed you turning over the pennies in your pants' pocket, same as
poppa used when he saw any nice clean little girl like me, and he was
the dolliest man in all Chicago. Why, there was treasury days when he
just rained dolls.”

“That was William, sure enough,” said Mr. Dyce. “There's no need for
showing us _your_ strawberry mark. It was certainly William. If it had
only been dolls!”

“Her name's Alibel, for her two aunties,” said the child.

“Tuts!” said Mr. Dyce. “If I had thought you meant to honor them that
way I would have made her twins. But you see I did not know; it was a
delicate transaction as it was. I could not tell very well whether a
doll or a--a--or a fountain-pen would be the most appropriate present
for a ten-year-old niece from Chicago, and I risked the doll. I hope it
fits.”

“Like a halo! It's just sweet!” said the ecstatic maiden, and rescued
one of its limbs from the gorge of Footles.

It got about the town that to Dyces' house had come a wonderful American
child who talked language like a minister: the news was partly the news
of the mail-driver and Wully Oliver, but mostly the news of Kate, who,
from the moment Lennox had been taken from her presence and put to bed,
had dwelt upon the window-sashes, letting no one pass that side of the
street without her confidence.

“You never heard the like! No' the size of a shilling worth of
ha'pennies, and she came all the way by her lee-lone in the coach from
Chickagoo--that's in America. There's to be throng times in this house
now, I'm tellin' you, with brother William's wean.”

As the forenoon advanced Kate's intelligence grew more surprising: to
the new-comer were ascribed a score of characteristics such as had never
been seen in the town before. For one thing (would Kate assure them),
she could imitate Wully Oliver till you almost saw whiskers on her and
could smell the dram. She was thought to be a boy to start with, but
that was only their ignorance in Chickagoo, for the girl was really a
lassie, and had kists of lassie's clothes coming with the coach.

The Dyces' foreigner was such a grand sensation that it marred the
splendor of the afternoon band parade, though John Taggart was unusually
glorious, walking on the very backs of his heels, his nose in the
heavens, and his drumsticks soaring and circling over his head in a way
to make the spectators giddy. Instead of following the band till its
_répertoire_ was suddenly done at five minutes to twelve at the door of
Maggie White, the wine and spirit merchant, there were many that hung
about the street in the hope of seeing the American. They thought they
would know her at once by the color of her skin, which some said would
be yellow, and others maintained would be brown. A few less patient and
more privileged boldly visited the house of Dyce to make their New-Year
compliments and see the wonder for themselves.

The American had her eye on them.

She had her eye on the Sheriffs lady, who was so determinedly affable,
so pleased with everything the family of Dyce might say, do, or possess,
and only five times ventured to indicate there were others, by a mention
of “the dear Lady Anne--so nice, so simple, so unaffected, so amiable.”

On Miss Minto of the crimson cloak, who kept her deaf ear to the sisters
and her good one to their brother, and laughed heartily at all his
little jokes even before they were half made, or looked at him with
large, soft, melting eyes and her lips apart, which her glass had told
her was an aspect ravishing. The sisters smiled at each other when she
had gone and looked comically at Dan, but he, poor man, saw nothing, but
just that Mary Minto was a good deal fatter than she used to be.

On the doctor's two sisters, late come from a farm in the country,
marvellously at ease so long as the conversation abode in gossip about
the neighbors, but in a silent terror when it rose from persons to
ideas, as it once had done when Lady Anne had asked them what they
thought of didactic poetry, and one of them said it was a thing she was
very fond of, and then fell in a swound.

On the banker man, the teller, who was in hopeless love with Ailie, as
was plain from the way he devoted himself to Bell.

On Mr. Dyce's old retired partner, Mr. Cleland, who smelt of cloves and
did not care for tea.

On P. & A. MacGlashan, who had come in specially to see if the stranger
knew his brother Albert, who, he said, was “in a Somewhereville in
Manitoba.”

On the Provost and his lady, who were very old, and petted each other
when they thought themselves unobserved.

On the soft, kind, simple, content and happy ladies lately married.

On the others who would like to be.

Yes, Bud had her eye on them all. They never guessed how much they
entertained her as they genteelly sipped their tea, or wine, or ginger
cordial,--the women of them--or coughed a little too artificially over
the New-Year glass--the men.

“Wee Pawkie, that's what she is--just Wee Pawkie!” said the Provost when
he got out, and so far it summed up everything.

The ladies could not tear away home fast enough to see if they had not a
remnant of cloth that could be made into such a lovely dress as that of
Dyce's niece for one of their own children. “Mark my words!” they said;
“that child will be ruined between them. She's her father's image, and
he went and married a poor play-actress, and stayed a dozen years away
from Scotland, and never wrote home a line.”

So many people came to the house, plainly for no reason but to see the
new-comer, that Ailie at last made up her mind to satisfy all by
taking her out for a walk. The strange thing was that in the street the
populace displayed indifference or blindness. Bud might have seen no
more sign of interest in her than the hurried glance of a passer-by;
no step slowed to show that the most was being made of the opportunity.
There had been some women at their windows when she came out of the
house sturdily walking by Aunt Ailie's side, with her hands in her muff,
and her keen black eyes peeping from under the fur of her hood; but
these women drew in their heads immediately. Ailie, who knew her native
town, was conscious that from behind the curtains the scrutiny was keen.
She smiled to herself as she walked demurely down the street.

“Do you feel anything, Bud?” she asked.

Bud naturally failed to comprehend.

“You ought to feel something at your back; I'm ticklish all down the
back because of a hundred eyes.”

“I know,” said the astounding child. “They think we don't notice, but
I guess God sees them,” and yet she had apparently never glanced at the
windows herself, nor looked round to discover passers-by staring over
their shoulders at her aunt and her.

For a moment Ailie felt afraid. She dearly loved a quick perception, but
it was a gift, she felt, a niece might have too young.

“How in the world did you know that, Bud?” she asked.

“I just guessed they'd be doing it,” said Bud, “'cause it's what I would
do if I saw a little girl from Scotland walking down the lake front in
Chicago. Is it dreff'le rude, Aunt Ailie?”

“So they say, so they say,” said her aunt, looking straight forward,
with her shoulders back and her eyes level, flushing at the temples.
“But I'm afraid we can't help it. It's undignified--to be seen doing it.
I can see you're a real Dyce, Bud. The other people who are not Dyces
lose a great deal of fun. They must be very much bored with each other.
Do you know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends--you
and I and Aunt Bell and Uncle Dan.”

“And the Mosaic dog,” added Bud with warmth. “I love that old dog so
much that I could--I could eat him. He's the becomingest dog! Why,
here he is!” And it was indeed Footles who hurled himself at them, a
rapturous mass of unkempt hair and convulsive barkings, having escaped
from the imprisonment of Kate's kitchen by climbing over her shoulders
and out across the window-sash.




CHAPTER VI

“I HEARD all about you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan from pop--from
father,” said Bud, as they walked back to the house. She had learned
already from example how sweeter sounded “father” than the term she had
used in America. “He was mighty apt to sit up nights talking about you
all. But I don't quite place Kate: he never mentioned Kate.”

“Oh, she's a new addition,” explained Ailie. “Kate is the maid, you
know: she came to us long after your father left home, but she's been
with us five years now, and that's long enough to make her one of the
family.”

“My! Five years! She ain't--she isn't much of a quitter, is she? I guess
you must have tacked her down,” said Bud. “You don't get helps in
Chicago to linger round the dear old spot like that; they get all hot
running from base to base, same as if it was a game of ball. But she's a
pretty--pretty broad girl, isn't she? She couldn't run very fast;
that'll be the way she stays.”

Ailie smiled. “Ah! So that's Chicago, too, is it? You must have been
in the parlor a good many times at five-o'clock tea to have grasped
the situation at your age. I suppose your Chicago ladies lower the
temperature of their tea weeping into it the woes they have about their
domestics? It's another Anglo-Saxon link.”

“Mrs. Jim said sensible girls that would stay long enough to cool down
after the last dash were getting that scarce you had to go out after
them with a gun. You didn't really, you know; that was just Mrs. Jim's
way of putting it.”

“I understand,” said Alison, unable to hide her amusement. “You seem to
have picked up that way of putting it yourself.”

“Am I speaking slang?” asked the child, glancing up quickly and
reddening. “Father pro--prosisted I wasn't to speak slang nor chew gum;
he said it was things no real lady would do in the old country, and that
I was to be a well-off English undefied. You must be dreff'le shocked,
Auntie Ailie?”

“Oh no,” said Ailie cheerfully; “I never was shocked in all my life,
though they say I'm a shocker myself. I'm only surprised a little at the
possibilities of the English language. I've hardly heard you use a word
of slang yet, and still you scarcely speak a sentence in which there's
not some novelty. It's like Kate's first attempt at sheep's-head broth:
we were familiar with all the ingredients except the horns, and we knew
them elsewhere.”

“_That's_ all right, then,” said Bud, relieved. “But Mrs. Jim had funny
ways of putting things, and I s'pose I picked them up. I can't help
it--I pick up so fast. Why, I had scarlatina twice! and I picked up her
way of zaggerating: often I zaggerate dreff'le, and say I wrote all the
works of Shakespeare, when I really didn't, you know. Mrs. Jim didn't
mean that she had to go out hunting for helps with a gun; all she meant
was that they were getting harder and harder to get, and mighty hard to
keep when you got them.”

“I know,” said Alison. “It's an old British story, you'll hear it often
from our visitors, if you're spared. But we're lucky with our Kate; we
seem to give her complete satisfaction, or, at all events, she puts up
with us. When she feels she can't put up with us any longer, she hurls
herself on the morning newspaper to look at the advertisements for
ladies'-maids and housekeepers with £50 a year, and makes up her mind
to apply at once, but can never find a pen that suits her before we make
her laugh. The servant in the house of Dyce who laughs is lost. You'll
like Kate, Bud. We like her; and I notice that if you like anybody they
generally like you back.”

“I'm so glad,” said Bud, with enthusiasm. “If there's one thing under
the canopy I am, I'm a liker.” They had reached the door of the house
without seeing the slightest sign that the burgh was interested in them,
but they were no sooner in than a hundred tongues were discussing the
appearance of the little American. Ailie took off Bud's cloak and hood,
and pushed her into the kitchen, with a whisper to her that she was to
make Kate's acquaintance, and be sure and praise her scones, then left
her and flew upstairs, with a pleasant sense of personal good-luck. It
was so sweet to know that brother William's child was anything but a
diffy.

Bud stood for a moment in the kitchen, bashful, for it must not be
supposed she lacked a childish shyness. Kate, toasting bread at the
fire, turned round and felt a little blate herself, but smiled at her,
such a fine expansive smile, it was bound to put the child at ease.
“Come away in, my dear, and take a bite,” said the maid. It is so they
greet you--simple folk!--in the isle of Colonsay.

The night was coming on, once more with snowy feathers. Wanton Wully lit
the town. He went from lamp to lamp with a ladder, children in his train
chanting:

     “'Leerie, leerie, light the lamps.
     Long legs and crooked shanks!'”

and he expostulating with: “I know you fine, the whole of you; at least
I know the boys. Stop you till I see your mothers!” Miss Minto's shop
was open, and shamefaced lads went dubiously in to buy ladies' white
gloves, for with gloves they tryst their partners here at New Year
balls, and to-night was Samson's fiddle giggling at the inn. The long
tenement lands, as flat and high as cliffs, and built for all eternity,
at first dark gray in the dusk, began to glow in every window, and down
the stairs and from the closes flowed exceeding cheerful sounds.
Green fires of wood and coal sent up a cloud above these dwellings,
tea-kettles jigged and sang. A thousand things were happening in the
street, but for once the maid of Colonsay restrained her interest in the
window. “Tell me this, what did you say your name was?” she asked.

“I'm Miss Lennox Brenton Dyce,” said Bud, primly, “but the miss don't
amount to much till I'm old enough to get my hair up.”

“You must be tired coming so far. All the way from that Chickagoo!”

“Chicago,” suggested Bud, politely.

“Just that! Chickagoo or Chicago, it depends on the way you spell it,”
 said Kate, readily. “I was brought up to call it Chickagoo. What a
length to come on New Year's Day! Were you not frightened?
Try one of them brown biscuits. And how are all the people keeping in
America?”

She asked the question with such tender solicitude that Bud saw no humor
in it, and answered gravely:

“Pretty spry, thank you. Have you been there?”

“Me!” cried Kate, with her bosom heaving at the very thought. Then her
Highland vanity came to her rescue. “No,” she said, “I have not been
exactly what you might call altogether there, but I had a cousin that
started for Australia and got the length of Paisley. It 'll be a big
place, America? Put butter on it.”.

“The United States of America are bounded on the east by the Atlantic
Ocean, on the west by the Pacific, on the south by Mexico and the Gulf,
and on the north by an imaginary line called Canada. The State of
New York alone is as large as England,” said Bud, glibly, repeating a
familiar lesson.

“What a size!” cried Kate. “Take another of them brown biscuits.
Scotland's not slack neither for size; there's Glasgow and Oban, and
Colonsay and Stornoway. There'll not be hills in America?”

“There's no hills, just mountains,” said Bud. “The chief mountain ranges
are the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. They're about the biggest
mountains in the world.”

“Talking about big things, look at the big pennyworth of milk we get
here,” said Kate, producing a can--it was almost the last ditch of her
national pride.

The child looked gravely into the can, and then glanced shrewdly at the
maid.

“It isn't a pennyworth,” said she, sharply, “it's twopence worth.”

“My stars! how did you know that?” said Kate, much taken aback.

“'Cause you're bragging. Think I don't know when anybody's bragging?”
 said Bud. “And when a body brags about a place or anything, they
zaggerate, and just about double things.”

“You're not canny,” said Kate, thrusting the milk-can back hastily on
the kitchen dresser. “Don't spare the butter on your biscuit. They tell
me there's plenty of money in America. I would not wonder, eh?”

“Why, everybody's got money to throw at the birds there,” said Bud, with
some of the accent as well as the favorite phrase of Jim Molyneux.

“They have little to do; forbye, it's cruelty. Mind you, there's plenty
of money here, too; your uncle has a desperate lot of it. He was wanting
to go away to America and bring you home whenever he heard--whenever
he heard--Will you not try another of them biscuits? It will do you no
harm.”

“I know,” said Bud, gravely--“whenever he heard about my father being
dead.”

“I think we're sometimes very stupid, us from Colonsay,” said the maid,
regretfully. “I should have kept my mouth shut about your father. Take
_two_ biscuits, my dear; or maybe you would rather have short-cake.
Yes, he was for going there and then--even if it cost a pound, I dare
say--but changed his mind when he heard yon man Molyneux was bringing
you.” Footles, snug in the child's lap, shared the biscuits and barked
for more.

     “'I love little Footles,
     His coat is so warm,
     And if I don't tease him
     He'll do me no harm,'”

said Bud, burying her head in his mane.

“Good Lord! did you make that yourself, or just keep mind of it?” asked
the astounded Kate.

“I made it just right here,” said Bud, coolly. “Didn't you know I could
make poetry? Why, you poor, perishing soul, I'm just a regular wee--wee
whitterick at poetry! It goes sloshing round in my head, and it's simply
pie for me to make it. Here's another:

     “'Lives of great men oft remind us
     We can make our lives sublime,
     And, departing, leave behind us
     Footprints on the sands of time.'

I just dash them off. I guess I'll have to get up bright and early
to-morrow and touch that one up some. Mostly you can't make them good
the first try, and then you're bound to go all over them from the
beginning and put the good in here and there. That's art, Jim says. He
knew an artist who'd finish a picture with everything quite plain about
it, and then say, 'Now for the art!' and fuzz it all over with a hard
brush.”

“My stars, what things you know!” exclaimed the maid. “You're
clever--tremendous clever! What's your age?”

“I was bom mighty well near eleven years ago,” said Bud, as if she were
a centenarian.

Now it is not wise to tell a child like Lennox Dyce that she is clever,
though a maid from Colonsay could scarcely be expected to know that.
Till Bud had landed on the British shore she had no reason to think
herself anything out of the ordinary. Jim Molyneux and his wife, with no
children of their own, and no knowledge of children except the elderly
kind that play in theatres, had treated her like a person little younger
than themselves, and saw no marvel in her quickness, that is common
enough with Young America. But Bud, from Maryfield to her uncle's door,
had been a “caution” to the plainly admiring mail-driver; a kind of
fairy princess to Wanton Wully Oliver and his wife; the surprise of
her aunts had been only half concealed, and here was the maid in an
undisguised enchantment! The vanity of the ten-year-old was stimulated;
for the first time in her life she felt decidedly superior.

“It was very brave of me to come all this way in a ship at ten years
old,” she proceeded.

“I once came to Oban along with a steamer my-self,” said Kate, “but och,
that's nothing, for I knew a lot of the drovers. Just fancy you coming
from America! Were you not lonely?”

“I was dre'ffle lonely,” said Bud, who, in fact, had never known a
moment's dulness across the whole Atlantic. “There was I leaving my
native land, perhaps never to set eyes on its shores evermore, and
coming to a far country I didn't know the least thing about. I was
leaving all my dear young friends, and the beautiful Mrs. Molyneux, and
her faithful dog Dodo, and--” Here she squeezed a tear from her eyes,
and stopped to think of circumstances even more touching.

“My poor wee hen!” cried Kate, distressed. “Don't you greet, and I'll
buy you something.”

“And I didn't know what sort of uncle and aunties they might be
here--whether they'd be cruel and wicked or not, or whether they'd keep
me or not. Little girls most always have cruel uncles and aunties--you
can see that in the books.”

“You were awful stupid about that bit of it,” said the maid,
emphatically. “I'm sure anybody could have told you about Mr. Dyce and
his sisters.”

“And then it was so stormy,” proceeded Bud, quickly, in search of more
moving considerations. “I made a poem about that, too--I just dashed it
off; the first verse goes:

     “'The breaking waves dashed high
     On a stern and rock-bound coast--'

but I forget the rest, 'cept that

     “'--they come to wither there
     Away from their childhood's land.'
     The waves were mountains high,
     And whirled over the deck, and--”

“My goodness, you would get all wet!” said Kate, putting her hand on
Bud's shoulder to feel if she were dry yet. Honest tears were in her own
eyes at the thought of such distressing affairs.

“The ship at last struck on a rock,” proceeded Bud, “so the captain
lashed me--”

“I would lash him, the villain!” cried the indignant maid.

“I don't mean that; he tied me--that's lash in books--to the mast, and
then--and then--well, then we waited calmly for the end,” said Bud, at
the last of her resources for ocean tragedy.

Kate's tears were streaming down her cheeks at this conjured vision
of youth in dire distress. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! my poor wee hen!” she
sobbed. “I'm so sorry for you.”

“Bud! coo-ie! coo-ie!” came the voice of Aunt Ailie along the lobby, but
Bud was so entranced with the effect of her imaginings that she paid no
heed, and Kate's head was wrapped in her apron.

“Don't cry, Kate; I wouldn't cry if I was you,” said the child at last,
soothingly. “Maybe it's not true.”

“I'll greet if I like,” insisted the maid. “Fancy you in that awful
shipwreck! It's enough to scare anybody from going anywhere. Oh, dear!
oh, dear!” and she wept more copiously than ever.

“Don't cry,” said Bud again. “It's silly to drizzle like that. Why,
great Queen of Sheba! I was only joshing you: it was as calm on that
ship as a milk sociable.”

Kate drew down the apron from her face and stared at her. Her meaning
was only half plain, but it was a relief to know that things had not
been quite so bad as she first depicted them. “A body's the better of a
bit greet, whiles,” she said, philosophically, drying her eyes.

“That's what I say,” agreed Bud. “That's why I told you all that. Do you
know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends.” She said
this with the very tone and manner of Alison, whose words they were to
herself, and turned round hastily and embarrassed at a laugh behind her
to find her aunt had heard herself thus early imitated.




CHAPTER VII

IF Molyneux, the actor, was to blame for sending this child of ten on
her journey into Scotland without convoy, how much worse was his offence
that he sent no hint of her character to the house of Dyce? She was like
the carpet-bag George Jordon found at the inn door one day without a
name on it, and, saying, “There's nothing like thrift in a family,” took
home immediately, to lament over for a week because he had not the key
to open it. There should have been a key to Lennox Brenton Dyce, but
Molyneux, a man of post-cards and curt and cryptic epistles generally,
never thought of that, so that it took some days for the folk she came
among to pick the lock. There was fun in the process, it cannot be
denied, but that was because the Dyces were the Dyces; had they been
many another folk she might have been a mystery for years, and in the
long-run spoiled completely. Her mother had been a thousand women in
her time--heroines good and evil, fairies, princesses, paupers, maidens,
mothers, shy and bold, plain or beautiful, young or old, as the play of
the week demanded--a play-actress, in a word. And now she was dead
and buried, the bright, white lights on her no more, the music and the
cheering done. But not all dead and buried, for some of her was in her
child.

Bud was born a mimic. I tell you this at once, because so many
inconsistencies will be found in her I should otherwise look foolish to
present her portrait for a piece of veritable life. Not a mimic of voice
and manner only, but a mimic of people's minds, so that for long--until
the climax came that was to change her when she found herself--she was
the echo and reflection of the last person she spoke with. She borrowed
minds and gestures as later she borrowed Grandma Buntain's pelerine and
bonnet. She could be all men and all women except the plainly dull or
wicked--but only on each occasion for a little while; by-and-by she was
herself again.

And so it was that for a day or two she played with the phrase and
accent of Wanton Wully Oliver, or startled her aunts with an unconscious
rendering of Kate's Highland accent, her “My stars!” and “Mercy me's!”
 and “My wee hens!”

The daft days (as we call New Year time) passed--the days of careless
merriment, that were but the start of Bud's daft days, that last with
all of us for years if we are lucky. The town was settling down; the
schools were opening on Han'sel Monday, and Bud was going--not to the
grammar-school after all, but to the Pigeons' Seminary. Have patience,
and by-and-by I will tell about the Pigeons.

Bell had been appalled to find the child, at the age of ten, apparently
incredibly neglected in her education.

“Of course you would be at some sort of school yonder in America?” she
had said at an early opportunity, not hoping for much, but ready to
learn of some hedge-row academy in spite of all the papers said of Yales
and Harvards and the like.

“No, I never was at school; I was just going when father died,” said
Bud, sitting on a sofa wrapped in a cloak of Ailie's, feeling extremely
tall and beautiful and old.

“What! Do you sit there and tell me they did not send you to school?”
 cried her aunt, so stunned that the child delighted in her power to
startle and amaze. “That's America for you! Ten years old and not the
length of your alphabets!--it's what one might expect from a heathen
land of niggers, and lynchers, and presidents. I was the best sewer and
speller in Miss Mushet's long before I was ten. My lassie, let me tell
you you have come to a country where you'll get your education! We would
make you take it at its best if we had to live on meal. Look at your
auntie Ailie--French and German, and a hand like copperplate; it's a
treat to see her at the old scrutoire, no way put-about, composing.
Just goes at it like lightning! I do declare if your uncle Dan was
done, Ailie could carry on the business, all except the aliments and
sequestrations. It beats all! Ten years old and not to know the ABC!”

“Oh, but I do,” said Bud, quickly. “I learned the alphabet off the
play-bills--the big G's first, because there's so many Greats and Grand?
and Gorgeouses in them. And then Mrs. Molyneux used to let me try to
read Jim's press notices. She read them first every morning sitting up
in bed at breakfast, and said, 'My! wasn't he a great man?' and then
she'd cry a little, 'cause he never got justice from the managers, for
they were all mean and jealous of him. Then she'd spray herself with the
peau d'espagne and eat a cracker. And the best papers there was in the
land said the part of the butler in the second act was well filled by
Mr. Jim Molyneux; or among others in a fine cast were J. Molyneux, Ralph
Devereux, and O. G. Tarpoll.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, my poor wee whitterick; but
it's all haivers,” said Miss Bell. “Can you spell?”

“If the words are not too big, or silly ones where it's 'ei' or 'ie' and
you have to guess,” said Bud.

“Spell cat.”

Bud stared at her incredulously.

“Spell cat,” repeated her aunt.

“K-a-t-t,” said Bud (oh, naughty Bud!).

“Mercy!” cried Bell, with horrified hands in the air. “Off you pack
to-morrow to the seminary. I wouldn't wonder if you did not know a
single word of the Shorter Catechism. Perhaps they have not such a thing
in that awful heathen land you came from?”

Bud could honestly say she had never heard of the Shorter Catechism.

“My poor, neglected bairn,” said her aunt, piteously, “you're sitting
there in the dark with no conviction of sin, and nothing bothering you,
and you might be dead to-morrow! Mind this, that 'Man's chief end is to
glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.' Say that.”

'“Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,'”
 repeated Bud, obediently, rolling her r's and looking solemn like her
aunt.

“Did you ever hear of Robert Bruce, him that watched the spiders?”

Here, too, the naughty Bud protested ignorance.

“He was the savior of his country,” said Bell. “Mind that!”

“Why, auntie, I thought it was George Washington,” said Bud, surprised.
“I guess if you're looking for a little wee stupid, it's me.”

“We're talking about Scotland,” said Miss Bell, severely. “He saved
Scotland. It was well worth while! Can you do your sums?”

“I can _not_,” said Bud, emphatically. “I hate them.” Miss Bell said not
a word more; she was too distressed at such confessed benightedness;
but she went out of the parlor to search for Ailie. Bud forgot she
was beautiful and tall and old in Ailie's cloak; she was repeating to
herself “Man's chief end” with rolling r's, and firmly fixing in her
memory the fact that Robert Bruce, not George Washington, was the savior
of his country and watched spiders.

Ailie was out, and so her sister found no ear for her bewailings over
the child's neglected education till Mr. Dyce came in humming the tune
of the day--“Sweet Afton”--to change his hat for one more becoming to
a sitting of the sheriff's court. He was searching for his good one
in what he was used to call “the piety press,” for there was hung his
Sunday clothes, when Bell distressfully informed him that the child
could not so much as spell cat.

“Nonsense! I don't believe it,” said he. “That would be very unlike our
William.”

“It's true--I tried her myself!” said Bell. “She was never at a school;
isn't it just deplorable?”

“H'm!” said Mr. Dyce, “it depends on the way you look at it, Bell.”

“She does not know a word of her catechism, nor the name of Robert
Bruce, and says she hates counting.”

“Hates counting!” repeated Mr. Dyce, wonderfully cheering up; “that's
hopeful; it reminds me of myself. Forbye its gey like Brother William.
His way of counting was 'one pound, ten shillings in my pocket, two
pounds that I'm owing some one, and ten shillings I get to-morrow--
that's five pounds I have; what will I buy you now?' The worst of
arithmetic is that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Two and two's
four and you're done with it; there's no scope for either fun or fancy
as there might be if the two and two went courting in the dark and
swapped their partners by an accident.”

“I wish you would go in and speak to her,” said Bell, distressed still,
“and tell her what a lot she has to learn.”

“What, me!” cried Uncle Dan; “excuse my grammar,” and he laughed. “It's
an imprudent kind of mission for a man with all his knowledge in little
patches. I have a lot to learn, myself, Bell; it takes me all my time to
keep the folk I meet from finding out the fact.”

But he went in humming, Bell behind him, and found the child still
practising “Man's chief end,” so engrossed in the exercise she never
heard him enter. He crept behind her, and put his hands over her eyes.

“Guess who,” said he, in a shrill falsetto.

“It's Robert Bruce,” said Bud, without moving.

“No--cold--cold!--guess again,” said her uncle, growling like Giant
Blunderbore.

“I'll mention no names,” said she, “but it's mighty like Uncle Dan.”

He stood in front of her and put on a serious face. “What's this I am
hearing, Miss Lennox,” said he, “about a little girl who doesn't know a
lot of things nice little girls ought to know?”

“'Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever,'”
 repeated Bud, reflectively. “I've got that all right, but what does it
mean?”

“What does it mean?” said Mr. Dyce, a bit taken aback. “You tell her,
Bell; what does it mean? I must not be late for the court.”

“You're far cleverer than I am,” said Bell. “Tell her yourself.”

“It means,” said Daniel Dyce, the lawyer, seating himself on the sofa
beside his niece, “that man in himself is a gey poor soul, no' worth
a pin, though he's apt to think the world was made for his personal
satisfaction. At the best he's but an instrument--a harp of a thousand
strings God bends to hear in His leisure. He made that harp--the heart
and mind of man--when He was in a happy hour. Strings hale and strings
broken, strings slack or tight, there are all kinds of them; the best we
can do's to be taut and trembling for the gladness of God who loves fine
music, and set the stars themselves to singing from the very day He
put them birling in the void. To glorify's to wonder and adore, and who
keeps the wondering, humble heart, the adoring eye, is to God pleasing
exceedingly. Sing, lassie, sing, sing, sing, inside ye, even if ye are
as timmer as a cask. God knows I have not much of a voice myself, but
I'm full of nobler airs than ever crossed my rusty thrapple. To be
grateful always, and glad things are no worse, is a good song to start
the morning.”

“Ah, but sin, Dan, sin!” said Bell, sighing, for she always feared her
own light-heartedness. “We may be too joco.”

“Say ye so?” he cried, turning to his sister with a flame upon his
visage. “By the heavens above us, no! Sin might have been eternal; each
abominable thought might have kept in our minds, constant day and
night from the moment that it bred there; the theft we did might keep
everlastingly our hand in our neighbor's kist as in a trap; the knife
we thrust with might have kept us thrusting forever and forever. But
no--God's good! sleep comes, and the clean morning, and the morning is
Christ, and every moment of time is a new opportunity to amend. It is
not sin that is eternal, it is righteousness and peace. Joco! We cannot
be too joco, having our inheritance.”

He stopped suddenly, warned by a glance of his sister's, and turned to
look in his niece's face to find bewilderment there. The mood that was
not often published by Dan Dyce left him in a flash, and he laughed and
put his arms round her.

“I hope you're a lot wiser for my sermon, Bud,” said he. “I can see you
have pins and needles worse than under the Reverend Mr. Frazer on the
Front. What's the American for haivers--for foolish speeches?”

“Hot air,” said Bud, promptly.

“Good!” said Dan Dyce, rubbing his hands together. “What I'm saying may
seem just hot air to you, but it's meant. You do not know the Shorter
Catechism; never mind; there's a lot of it I'm afraid I do not know
myself; but the whole of it is in that first answer to 'Man's chief
end.' Reading and writing, and all the rest of it, are of less
importance, but I'll not deny they're gey and handy. You're no Dyce if
you don't master them easily enough.”

He kissed her and got gayly up and turned to go. “Now,” said he,
“for the law, seeing we're done with the gospels. I'm a conveyancing
lawyer--though you'll not know what that means--so mind me in your
prayers.”

Bell went out into the lobby after him, leaving Bud in a curious frame
of mind, for “Man's chief end,” and Bruce's spider, and the word “joco,”
 all tumbled about in her, demanding mastery.

“Little help I got from you, Dan!” said Bell to her brother. “You never
even tried her with a multiplication table.”

“What's seven times nine?” he asked her, with his fingers on the handle
of the outer door, his eyes mockingly mischievous.

She flushed and laughed, and pushed him on the shoulder. “Go away with
you!” said she. “Fine you ken I could never mind seven times!”

“No Dyce ever could,” said he--“excepting Ailie. Get her to put the
little creature through her tests. If she's not able to spell cat at ten
she'll be an astounding woman by the time she's twenty.”

The end of it was that Aunt Ailie, whenever she came in, upon Bell's
report went over the street to Rodger's shop and made a purchase. As
she hurried back with it, bareheaded, in a cool drizzle of rain that
jewelled her wonderful hair, she felt like a child herself again. The
banker-man saw her from his lodging as she flew across the street with
sparkling eyes and eager lips, the roses on her cheeks, and was sure,
foolish man! that she had been for a new novel or maybe a cosmetic,
since in Rodger's shop they sell books and balms and ointments. She made
the quiet street magnificent for a second--a poor wee second, and then,
for him, the sun went down. The tap of the knocker on the door she
closed behind her struck him on the heart. You may guess, good women, if
you like, that at the end of the book the banker-man is to marry Ailie,
but you'll be wrong; she was not thinking of the man at all at all--she
had more to do, she was hurrying to open the gate of gold to her little
niece.

“I've brought you something wonderful,” said she to the child--“better
than dolls, better than my cloak, better than everything; guess what it
is.”

Bud wrinkled her brows. “Ah, dear!” she sighed, “we may be too joco! And
I'm to sing, sing, sing, even if I'm as--timmer as a cask, and Robert
Bruce is the savior of his country.” She marched across the room,
trailing Ailie's cloak with her, in an absurd caricature of Bell's brisk
manner. Yet not so much the actress engrossed in her performance, but
what she tried to get a glimpse of what her aunt concealed.

“You need not try to see it,” said Ailie, smiling, with the secret in
her breast. “You must honestly guess.”

“Better'n dolls and candies; oh, my!” said Bud. “I hope it's not the
Shorter Catechism,” she concluded, looking so grave that her aunt
laughed.

“It's not the Catechism,” said Ailie; “try again. Oh, but you'll never
guess! It's a key.”

“A key?'' repeated Bud, plainly cast down.

“A gold key,” said her aunt.

“What for?” asked Bud.

Ailie sat herself down on the floor and drew the child upon her knees.
She had a way of doing that which made her look like a lass in her
teens; indeed, it was most pleasing if the banker-man could just have
seen it! “A gold key,” she repeated, lovingly, in Bud's ear. “A key to
a garden--the loveliest garden, with flowers that last the whole year
round. You can pluck and pluck at them and they're never a single one
the less. Better than sweet-pease! But that's not all, there's a big
garden-party to be at it--”

“My! I guess I'll put on my best glad rags,” said Bud. “_And_ the hat
with pink.” Then a fear came to her face. “Why, Aunt Ailie, you can't
have a garden-party this time of the year,” and she looked at the
window down whose panes the rain was now streaming.

“This garden-party goes on all the time,” said Ailie. “Who cares about
the weather? Only very old people; not you and I. I'll introduce you to
a lot of nice people--Di Vernon, and--you don't happen to know a lady
called Di Vernon, do you, Bud?”

“I wouldn't know her if she was handed to me on a plate with parsley
trimmings,” said Bud, promptly.

“--Di Vernon, then, and Effie Deans, and Little Nell, and the
Marchioness; and Richard Swivefler, and Tom Pinch, and the Cranford
folks, and Juliet Capulet--”

“She must belong to one of the first families,” said Bud. “I have a kind
of idea that I have heard of her.”

“And Mr. Falstaff--such a naughty man, but nice, too! And Rosalind.”

“Rosalind!” cried Bud. “You mean Rosalind in 'As You Like It?”'

Ailie stared at her with astonishment. “You amazing child!” said she,
“who told you about 'As You Like It'?”

“Nobody told me; I just read about her when Jim was learning the part of
Charles the Wrestler he played on six 'secutive nights in the Waldorf.”

“Read it!” exclaimed her aunt. “You mean he or Mrs. Molyneux read it to
you.”

“No, I read it myself,” said Bud.

     “'Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,
     Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
     Than that of painted pomp?
     Are not these woods
     More free from peril than the envious court.”

She threw Aunt Ailie's cloak over one shoulder, put forth a ridiculously
little leg with an air of the playhouse, and made the gestures of Jim
Molyneux.

“I thought you couldn't read,” said Ailie. “You little fraud! You made
Aunt Bell think you couldn't spell cat.”

“Oh, Queen of Sheba! did she think I was in earnest?” cried Bud. “I was
just pretending. I'm apt to be pretending pretty often; why, Kate thinks
I make Works. I can read anything; I've read books that big it gave you
cramp. I s'pose you were only making believe about that garden, and you
haven't any key at all, but I don't mind; I'm not kicking.”

Ailie put her hand to her bosom and revealed the Twopenny she had
bought to be the key to the wonderful garden of letters--the slim
little gray-paper-covered primer in which she had learned her own first
lessons. She held it up between her finger and thumb that Bud might read
its title on the cover. Bud understood immediately and laughed, but not
quite at her ease for once.

“I'm dre'ffle sorry, Aunt Ailie,” she said. “It was wicked to pretend
just like that, and put you to a lot of trouble. Father wouldn't have
liked that.”

“Oh, I'm not kicking,” said Ailie, borrowing her phrase to put her at
her ease again. “I'm too glad you're not so far behind as Aunt Bell
imagined. So you like books? Capital! And Shakespeare no less! What do
you like best, now?'”

“Poetry,” said Bud. “Particularly the bits I don't understand, but just
about almost. I can't bear to stop and dally with too easy poetry; once
I know it all plain and there's no more to it, I--I--I love to amble on.
I--why! I make poetry myself.”

“Really?” said Ailie, with twinkling eyes.

“Sort of poetry,” said Bud. “Not so good as 'As You Like It'--not
'nearly' so good, of course! I have loads of really, really poetry
inside me, but it sticks at the bends and then I get bits that fit, made
by somebody else, and wish I had been spry and said them first. Other
times I'm the real Winifred Wallace.”

“Winifred Wallace?” said Aunt Ailie, inquiringly.

“Winifred Wallace,” repeated Bud, composedly. “I'm her. It's my--it's my
poetry name. 'Bud Dyce' wouldn't be any use for the magazines; it's not
dinky enough.”

“Bless me, child, you don't tell me you write poetry for the magazines?”
 said her astonished aunt.

“No,” said Bud, “but I'll be pretty liable to when I'm old enough to
wear specs. That's if I don't go on the stage.”

“On the stage!” exclaimed Ailie, full of wild alarm.

“Yes,” said the child. “Mrs. Molyneux said I was a born actress.”

“I wonder, I wonder,” said Aunt Ailie, staring into vacancy.




CHAPTER VIII

DANIEL DYCE had an office up the street at the windy corner facing the
Cross, with two clerks in it and a boy who docketed letters and ran
errands. Once upon a time there was a partner--Cleland & Dyce the firm
had been--but Cleland was a shy and melancholy man whose only hours of
confidence and gayety came to him after injudicious drams. 'Twas patent
to all how his habits seized him, but nobody mentioned it except in a
whisper, sometimes as a kind of little accident, for in everything else
he was the perfect gentleman, and here we never like to see the honest
gentry down. All men liked Colin Cleland, and many would share his
jovial hours who took their law business elsewhere than to Cleland
& Dyce. That is the way of the world, too; most men keep their
jovial-money in a different pocket from where they keep their cash.
The time came when it behooved Mr. Cleland to retire. Men who knew the
circumstances said Dan Dyce paid rather dear for that retirement, and
indeed it might be so in the stricter way of commerce, but the lawyer
was a Christian who did not hang up his conscience in the “piety press”
 with his Sunday clothes. He gave his partner a good deal more than he
asked.

“I hope you'll come in sometimes and see me whiles at night and join in
a glass of toddy,” said Mr. Cleland.

“I'll certainly come and see you,” said Dan Dyce. And then he put
his arm affectionately through that of his old partner, and added, “I
would--I would ca' canny wi' the toddy, Colin,” coating the pill in
sweet and kindly Scots. Thank God, we have two tongues in our place, and
can speak the bitter truth in terms that show humility and love, and not
the sense of righteousness, dictate.

“Eh! What for?” said Mr. Cleland, his vanity at once in arms.

Dan Dyce looked in his alarmed and wavering eyes a moment, and thought,
“What's the use? He knows himself, they always do!”

“For fear--for fear of fat,” he said, with a little laugh, tapping with
his finger on his quondam partner's widening waistcoat. “There are signs
of a prominent profile, Colin. If you go on as you're doing it will be a
dreadful expense for watch-guards.”

Colin Cleland at once became the easy-osey man again, and smiled. “Fat,
man! it's not fat,” said he, clapping himself on the waistcoat, “it's
information. Do you know, Dan, for a second, there, I thought you
meant to be unkind, and it would be devilish unlike you to be unkind.
I thought you meant something else. The breath of vulgar suspicion has
mentioned drink.”

“It's a pity that!” said Mr. Dyce, “for a whole cask of cloves will not
disguise the breath of suspicion.” It was five years now since Colin
Cleland retired among his toddy rummers, and if this were a fancy
story I would be telling you how he fell, and fell, and fell, but the
truth--it's almost lamentable--is that the old rogue throve on leisure
and ambrosial nights with men who were now quite ready to give the firm
of Daniel Dyce their business, seeing they had Colin Cleland all to
themselves and under observation. Trust estates and factorages from
all quarters of the county came now to the office at the windy corner.
A Christian lawyer with a sense of fun, unspotted by the world, and
yet with a name for winning causes, was what the shire had long been
wanting. And Daniel Dyce grew rich. “I'm making money so fast,” he said
one day to his sisters (it was before Bud came), “that I wonder often
what poor souls are suffering for it.”

Said Bell, “It's a burden that's easy put up with. We'll be able now to
get a new pair of curtains for the back bedroom.”

“A pair of curtains!” said her brother, with a smile to Ailie. “Ay, a
score of pairs if they're needed, even if the vogue was Valenciennes.
Your notion of wealth, Bell, is Old Malabar's--'Twopence more, and up
goes the donkey!' Woman, I'm fair rolling in wealth.” He said it with
a kind of exultation that brought to her face a look of fear and
disapproval. “Don't, Dan, don't,” she cried--“don't brag of the world's
dross; it's not like you. 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be
innocent,' says the Proverbs. You must be needing medicine. We should
have humble hearts. How many that were high have had a fall!”

“Are you frightened God will hear me and me His bounty?” said the
brother, in a whisper. “I'm not bragging; I'm just telling you.”

“I hope you're not hoarding it,” proceeded Miss Bell. “It's not
wiselike--”

“Nor Dyce-like either,” said Miss Ailie.

“There's many a poor body in the town this winter that's needful.”

“I dare say,” said Daniel Dyce, coldly. “'The poor we have always with
us.' The thing, they tell me, is decreed by Providence.”

“But Providence is not aye looking,” said Bell. “If that's what you're
frightened for, I'll be your almoner.”

“It's their own blame, you may be sure, if they're poor. Improvidence
and--and drink. I'll warrant they have their glass of ale every
Saturday. What's ale? Is there any moral elevation in it? Its nutritive
quality, I believe, is less than the tenth part of a penny loaf.”

“Oh, but the poor creatures!” sighed Miss Bell. “Possibly,” said Dan
Dyce, “but every man must look after himself; and as you say, many a
man well off has come down in the world. We should take no risks. I
had Black the baker at me yesterday for £20 in loan to tide over some
trouble with his flour merchant and pay an account to Miss Minto.”

“A decent man, with a wife and seven children,” said Miss Bell.

“Decent or not, he'll not be coming back borrowing from me in a hurry. I
set him off with a flea in his lug.”

“We're not needing curtains,” said Miss Bell, hurriedly; “the pair we
have are fine.”

Dan finished his breakfast that day with a smile, flicked the crumbs off
his waistcoat, gave one uneasy glance at Ailie, and went off to business
humming “There is a Happy Land.”

“Oh, dear me, I'm afraid he's growing a perfect miser,” moaned Bell,
when she heard the door close behind him. “He did not use to be like
that when he was younger and poorer. Money's like the toothache, a
commanding thing.”

Ailie smiled. “If you went about as much as I do, Bell,” she said, “you
would not be misled by Dan's pretences. And as for Black, the baker, I
saw his wife in Miss Minto's yesterday buying boots for her children and
a bonnet for herself. She called me Miss Ailie, an honor I never got
from her in all my life before.”

“Do you think--do you think he gave Black the money?” said Bell, in a
pleasant excitation.

“Of course he did. It's Dan's way to give it to some folk with a
pretence of reluctance, for if he did not growl they would never be off
his face! He's telling us about the lecture that accompanied it as a
solace to our femininity. Women, you know, are very bad lenders, and
dislike the practice in their husbands and brothers.”

“None of the women I know,” protested Bell. “They're just as free-handed
as the men if they had it. I hope,” she added, anxiously, “that Dan got
good security. Would it be a dear bonnet, now, that she was getting?”

Ailie laughed--a ridiculous sort of sister this; she only laughed.

Six times each lawful day Daniel Dyce went up and down the street
between his house and the office at the windy corner opposite the Cross,
the business day being divided by an interval of four hours to suit the
mails. The town folk liked to see him passing; he gave the street an
air of occupation and gayety, as if a trip had just come in with a brass
band banging at the latest air. Going or coming he was apt to be
humming a tune to himself as he went along with his hands in his outside
pockets, and it was an unusual day when he did not stop to look in at a
shop window or two on the way, though they never changed a feature once
a month. To the shops he honored thus it was almost as good as a big
turnover. Before him his dog went whirling and barking, a long alarm for
the clerks to stop their game of Catch-the-Ten and dip their pens. There
were few that passed him without some words of recognition.

He was coming down from the office on the afternoon of the Hansel
Monday that started Bud in the Pigeons' Seminary when he met the nurse,
old Betty Baxter, with a basket. She put it down at her feet, and bobbed
a courtesy, a thing that nowadays you rarely see in Scotland.

“Tuts! woman,” he said to her, lifting the basket and putting it in
her hand. “Why need you bother with the like of that? You and your
courtesies! They're out of date, Miss Baxter, out of date, like the
decent men that deserved them long ago, before my time.”

“No, they're not out of date, Mr. Dyce,” said she, “I'll aye be minding
you about my mother; you'll be paid back some day.”

“Tuts!” said he again, impatient. “You're an awful blether: how's your
patient, Duncan Gill?”

“As dour as the devil, sir,” said the nurse. “Still hanging on.”

“Poor man! poor man!” said Mr. Dyce. “He'll just have to put his trust
in God.”

“Oh, he's no' so far through as all that,” said Betty Baxter. “He can
still sit up and take his drop of porridge. They're telling me you have
got a wonderful niece, Mr. Dyce, all the way from America. What a mercy
for her! But I have not set eyes on her yet. I'm so busy that I could
not stand in the close like the others, watching: what is she like?”

“Just like Jean Macrae,” said Mr. Dyce, preparing to move on.

“And what was Jean Macrae like?”

“Oh, just like other folk,” said Mr. Dyce, and passed on chuckling, to
run almost into the arms of Captain Consequence.

“Have you heard the latest?” said Captain Consequence, putting his
kid-gloved hand on the shoulder of the lawyer, who felt it like a lump
of ice, for he did not greatly like the man, the smell of whose cigars,
he said, before he knew they came from the Pilgrim widows, proved that
he rose from the ranks.

“No, Captain Brodie,” he said, coldly. “Who's the rogue or the fool
this time?” but the captain was too stupid to perceive it. He stared
perplexedly.

“I hear,” said he, “the doctor's in a difficulty.”

“Is he--is he?” said Mr. Dyce. “That's a chance for his friends to stand
by him.”

“Let him take it!” said Captain Consequence, puffing. “Did he not say to
me once yonder, 'God knows how you're living.'”

“It must be God alone, for all the rest of us are wondering,” said Mr.
Dyce, and left the man to put it in his pipe and smoke it.

Along the street came the two Miss Duffs, who kept the dame school, and
he saw a hesitation in their manner when they realized a meeting was
inevitable. If they had been folk that owed him anything he would not
have wondered, from their manner, to see them tuck up their skirts and
scurry down the lane. Twins they were--a tiny couple, scarcely young,
dressed always in a douce long-lasting brown, something in their walk
and color that made them look like pigeon hens, and long ago conferred
on them that name in Daniel Dyce's dwelling. They met him in front of
his own door, and seemed inclined to pass in a trepidation.

He took off his hat to them and stood, full of curiosity about Lennox.

“What a lovely winter day!” said Miss Jean, with an air of supplication,
as if her very life depended on his agreement.

“Isn't it _perfectly_ exquisite!” said Miss Amelia, who usually picked
up the bald details of her sister's conversation and passed them on
embroidered with a bit of style.

“It's not bad,” said Mr. Dyce, blinking at them, wondering what ailed
the dears to-day. They were looking uneasily around them for some way
of escape; he could almost hear the thump of their hearts, he noted the
stress of their breathing. Miss Jean's eyes fastened on the tree-tops
over the banker's garden-wall; he felt that in a moment she would spread
out her wings and fly. “You have opened the school again,” he said,
simply.

“We started again to-day,” cooed Miss Jean.

“Yes, we resumed to-day,” said Miss Amelia. “The common round, the daily
task. And, oh! Mr. Dyce--”

She stopped suddenly at the pressure of her sister's elbow on her own,
and lowered her eyes, that had for a second shown an appalling area of
white. It was plain they were going to fly. Mr. Dyce felt inclined to
cry “Pease, pease!” and keep them a little longer.

“You have my niece with you to-day?” he remarked. “What do you think of
her?”

A look of terror exchanged between them escaped his observation.

“She's--she's a wonderful child,” said Miss Jean, nervously twisting the
strings of a hand-bag.

“A singularly interesting and--and unexpected creature,” said Miss
Amelia.

“Fairly bright, eh?” said Mr. Dyce.

“Oh, bright!” repeated Miss Jean. “Bright is not the word for it--is it,
Amelia?”

“I would rather say brilliant,” said Amelia, coughing, and plucking
a handkerchief out of her pocket to inhale its perfume and avert a
threatening swound. “I hope--we both hope, Mr. Dyce, she will be spared
to grow up a credit to you. One never knows?”

“That's it,” agreed Mr. Dyce, cheerfully. “Some girls grow up and become
credits to their parents and guardians, others become reciters and spoil
many a jolly party with 'The Women of Mumbles Head' or 'Coffee was not
strong.'”

“I hope not,” said Miss Jean, hardly understanding: the painful
possibility seemed to be too much for Miss Amelia; she said nothing, but
fixed her eyes on the distant tree-tops and gave a little flap of the
wings of her Inverness cape.

“Pease, pease!” murmured Mr. Dyce, unconsciously, anxious to hold them
longer and talk about his niece.

“I beg pardon!” exclaimed Miss Jean, and the lawyer got very red.

“I hope at least you'll like Bud,” he said. “She's odd, but--but--but--”
 he paused for a word.

“--sincere,” suggested Miss Jean.

“Yes, I would say sincere--or perhaps outspoken would be better,” said
Miss Amelia.

“So clever too,” added Miss Jean. “Pretematurally!” cooed Miss Amelia.

“Such a delightful accent,” said Miss Jean.

“Like linked sweetness long drawn out,” quoted Miss Amelia.

“But--” hesitated Miss Jean.

“Still--” more hesitatingly said her sister, and then there was a long
pause.

“Oh, to the mischief!” said Mr. Dyce to himself, then took off his hat
again, said, “Good-afternoon,” and turned to his door.

He was met by Ailie in the lobby; she had seen him from a window
speaking to the Duffs. “What were they saying to you?” she asked, with
more curiosity in her manner than was customary.

“Nothing at all,” said Mr. Dyce. “They just stood and cooed. I'm not
sure that a doo-cot is the best place to bring up an eagle in. How did
Bud get on with them at school to-day?”

“So far as I can make out, she did not get on at all; she seems to have
demoralized the school, and driven the Misses Duff into hysterics, and
she left of her own accord and came home an hour before closing-time.
And--and she's not going back!”

Mr. Dyce stood a moment in amazement, then rubbed his hands gleefully.
“I'm glad to hear it,” said he. “The poor birdies between them could
not summon up courage to tell me what was wrong. I'm sorry for them; if
she's not going back, we'll send them down a present.”




CHAPTER IX

THAT the child should have gone to the dame school at all was due to her
Auntie Bell. From the first Miss Ailie had been dubious of the seminary,
but Bell was terribly domineering; in fact, was neither to hold nor
bind, and the doo-cot it bode to be. A product herself of the old
dame school in the spacious days of Barbara Mushet, whose pupils in
white-seam sewing and Italian hand were nowadays married to the best,
and notable as housewives, she deemed it still the only avenue to
the character and skill that keep those queer folk, men, when they're
married, by their own fire-ends. As for Daniel Dyce, he was, I fear,
indifferent how Bud came by her schooling, having a sort of philosophy
that the gate of gifts is closed on us the day we're bom, and that the
important parts of the curriculum, good or bad, are picked up like a
Scots or Hielan' accent, someway in the home.

So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the
morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity cooed at
the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated
silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of
a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan's. Their home was
like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved
wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled
spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork
bracket on the wall behind her chair, and thinking not unkindly of the
creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were
so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not
very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic.
And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of
a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their
primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free,
that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw
farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her
soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.

“You'll find her somewhat odd,” she explained, as she nibbled the
seed-cake, with a silly little doily of Miss Jean's contrivance on her
knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down
as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a
remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional--quite unlike
other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to
manage her.”

“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose
it's the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”

“Oh, it's nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the doily
from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with
a wicked little shake. “If she didn't speak much you would never guess
from her appearance that she knew any more than--than most of us. Her
mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius--at least it never came
from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still
not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbors cross to the
other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years
ago, and when William--when my brother died, Lennox was staying with
professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough
to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”

“The dear!” said Miss Jean, enraptured.

“Quite a sweet romance!” cooed Miss Amelia, languishing.

“You may be sure we will do all we can for her,” continued Miss Jean,
pecking with unconscious fingers at the crumbs on her visitor's lap,
till Ailie could scarcely keep from smiling.

“She will soon feel quite at home among us in our little school,” said
Miss Amelia. “No doubt she'll be shy at first--”

“Quite the contrary!” Ailie assured them, with a little mischievous
inward glee, to think how likely Bud was to astonish them by other
qualities than shyness. “It seems that in America children are brought
up on wholly different lines from children here; you'll find a curious
fearless independence in her.”

The twins held up their hands in amazement, “tcht-tcht-tchting”
 simultaneously. “_What_ a pity!” said Miss Jean, as if it were a
physical affliction.

“But no doubt by carefulness and training it can be eradicated,” said
Miss Amelia, determined to encourage hope.

At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that
sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little
parlor, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.

“I don't think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said,
with some of her brother's manner at the bar. “Individuality is not
painful to the possessor like toothache, so it's a pity to eradicate it
or kill the nerve.”

The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and
blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in
their agitation were not observant.

“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she
was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their
aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and put them in a
stocking of Amelia's, before they started to their crochet work again.

It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the
school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland
across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the
street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement,
and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her
companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of
their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge
than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger's heart. Once the child
turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took
it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell!--Miss Bell!--she flew to the kitchen and
stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.

Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the
Duffs--sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys
enough as yet to be in the grammar-school. Miss Jean came out and rang
a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all
strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the
children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers
and held out her hand.

“Good-morning; I'm Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over
their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and
clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.

“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening with a glance at the delinquents,
as she dubiously took the proffered hand.

“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants
air some, don't it? What's the name of the sweet little boy in the
Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”

She was standing between the twins, facing the scholars; she surveyed
all with the look of his Majesty's Inspector.

“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You
will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench.
“By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”

Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the
Lord's Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to
say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words
she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that
supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work
of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the
little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet
“chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep's head
singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the
street; from fields behind came in a ploughman's whistle as he drove
his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green,
green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and
mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses,
hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff
know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of
mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was
much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled
and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker's boys. God
only knew the other variations. 'Twas the duty of the twins to bring
them all in mind alike to the one plain level.

It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter
Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in
hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification
and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and
lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean,
to test her, asked her simply “Man's chief end,” she answered, boldly:

“Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”

“Very good! _very_ good, indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was
passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular
reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.

“Man is a harp,” she said, as solemnly as he had said it--“a har-r-rp
with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we're
timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with
things.”

If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the school-room
it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the
breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a
witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.

“What's that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in
America?”

“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”

“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again.
She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they
communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.

Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested
her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out
triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of
Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.

“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.

“Oban, and Glasgow, and Toraoway,” replied Bud, with a touch of Highland
accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and
removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put
about at such a preference.

“You mustn't move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia,
taking her back. “It's not allowed.”

“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud, frankly, “and I wanted to
speak to Percy.”

“My dear child, his name's not Percy, and there's no speaking in
school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.

“No speaking! Why, you're speaking all the time,” said the child. “It
ain't--isn't fair. Can't I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that
nice girl over there?”

The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times
more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden
unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden
models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that
the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the
demoralizing influence of the young invader.

Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.

There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her
thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand,
never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be
merely women, like her mother, and Mrs. Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only
a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their
funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands
in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not
rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.

“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the blackboard where they had
taken refuge again. “I declare I'll take a fit if this goes on! Did you
ever hear of such a creature?”

Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered
at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the
scheme of treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of
great severity.

“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at
school before, you don't know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you
are not behaving nicely--not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox.
Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say
anything unless they're asked. They are respectful to their teachers,
and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and--”

“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn't contradicting,” explained Bud, very
soberly, “and when respect is called for, I'm there with the goods. You
said honor was spelled with a 'u,' and I guess you just made a mistake,
same as I might make myself, for there ain't no 'u' in honor, at least
in America.”

“I--I--I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia,
gasping.

“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes
so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.

“What do you mean by 'Oh, Laura?'” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”

“You can search me,” replied Bud, composedly. “Jim often said 'Oh,
Laura!' when he got a start.”

“It's not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It's not at all
ladylike. It's just a sort of profane language, and profane language is
an 'abomination unto the Lord.'”

“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If
it's slang I'll stop it--at least I'll try to stop it. I'm bound to be a
well-off English undefied, you know; poppa--father fixed that.”

The school was demoralized without a doubt, for now the twins were
standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite
of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused--more
interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever
happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend
how far she and her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to
the little foreigner's attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take
up poetry and reading.” Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of
poetry and reading, but alas! her delight was short-lived, for the
reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie
Ailie's Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat
called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long
whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that
exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why.
What completed Bud's rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome
Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging
straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when
she had read that:

     “One ugly trick has often spoiled
     The sweetest and the best;
     Matilda, though a pleasant child,
     One ugly trick possessed”--

she laughed outright.

“I can't help it, Miss Duff,” she said, when the twins showed their
distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it's got the jaggy
edges, but it doesn't make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It
wants biff.”

“What's 'zip' and 'biff'?” asked Miss Amelia.

“It's--it's a kind of tickle in your mind,” said Bud. “I'm so tired,”
 she continued, rising in her seat, “I guess I'll head for home now.” And
before the twins had recovered from their dumfounderment she was in the
porch putting on her cloak and hood.

“Just let her go,” said Miss Jean to her sister. “If she stays any
longer I shall certainly have a swoon; I feel quite weak.”

And so Bud marched out quite cheerfully, and reached home an hour before
she was due.

Kate met her at the door. “My stars! are you home already?” she
exclaimed, with a look at the town clock. “You must be smart at your
schooling when they let you out of the cemetery so soon.”

“It ain't a cemetery at all,” said Bud, standing unconcernedly in the
lobby; “it's just a kindergarten.”

Aunt Ailie bore down on her to overwhelm her in caresses. “What are you
home for already, Bud?” she asked. “It's not time yet, is it?”

“No,” said Bud, “but I just couldn't stay any longer. I'd as lief not go
back there. The ladies don't love me. They're Sunday sort of ladies, and
give me pins and needles. They smile and smile, same's it was done with
a glove-stretcher, and don't love me. They said I was using profound
language, and--and they don't love me. Not the way mother and Mrs.
Molyneux and you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan and Kate and Footles
does. They made goo-goo eyes at me when I said the least thing. They had
all those poor kiddies up on the floor doing their little bits, and they
made me read kindergarten poetry--that was the limit! So I just upped
and walked.”

The two aunts and Kate stood round her for a moment baffled.

“What's to be done now?” said Aunt Ailie.

“Tuts!” said Aunt Bell, “give the wean a drink of milk and some bread
and butter.”

And so ended Bud's only term in a dame school.




CHAPTER X

IT was a saying of Daniel Dyce's that all the world is under one's own
waistcoat. We have a way of spaeing fortunes in the North, when young,
in which we count the waistcoat buttons from top to bottom, and say:

     “Tinker,
     Tailor,
     Soldier,
     Sailor,
     Rich man,
     Poor man,
     Prodigal,
     Or Thief?”

Whichever name falls upon the last button tells what is your destiny,
and after the county corps has been round our way recruiting, I see
our school-boys with all their waistcoat buttons but three at the
top amissing. Dan Dyce had a different formula: he said, “Luckiness,
Leisure, Ill or Well, Good World, Bad World, Heaven or Hell?”

“Not Heaven, Dan!” said Bell. “The other place I'll admit, for whiles
I'm in a furious temper over some trifle;” to which he would answer,
“Woman! the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

So, I think sometimes, all that's worth while in the world is in this
little burgh, except a string-quartette and a place called Florence I
have long been wishing to see if ever I have the money. In this small
town is every week as much of tragedy and comedy and farce as would make
a complete novel full of laughter and tears, that would sell in a jiffy.
I have started, myself, a score of them--all the essential inspiration
got from plain folk passing my window, or from hearing a sentence
dropped among women gossiping round a well. Many a winter night I come
in with a fine catch of tales picked up in the by-going, as we say,
and light the candles in a hurry, and make a gallant dash at “Captain
Consequence. Chapter I.” or “A Wild Inheritance. Part I. The Astounding
Mary.” Only the lavishness of the material hampers me: when I'm at
“Captain Consequence” (which would be a splendid sombre story of an ill
life, if I ever got beyond Chapter I. and the old scamp's fondness for
his mother), my wife runs in with something warm to drink, and tells me
Jonathan Campbell's goat has broken into the minister's garden, and then
I'm off the key for villany; there's a shilling book in Jonathan's goat
herself.

But this time I'm determined to stick by the fortunes of the Dyce
family, now that I have got myself inside their door. I hope we are
friends of that household, dearer to me than the dwellings of kings (not
that I have cognizance of many). I hope that no matter how often or how
early we rap at the brass knocker, or how timidly, Kate will come, and
in one breath say, “What is't? Come in!” We may hear, when we're in,
people passing in the street, and the wild geese call--wild geese, wild
geese! this time I will not follow where you tempt to where are only
silence and dream--the autumn and the summer days may cry us out to
garden and wood, but if I can manage it I will lock the door on the
inside, and shut us snugly in with Daniel Dyce and his household, and it
will be well with us then. Yes, yes, it will be well with us then.

The wild-goose cry, heard in the nights, beyond her comprehension, was
all that Bud Dyce found foreign in that home. All else was natural and
familiar and friendly, for all else she knew was love. But she feared
at first the “honk, honk” of the lone wild things that burdened her with
wonder and awe. Lying in her attic bower at night, they seemed to her
like sore mistaken wanderers, wind-driven, lost; and so they are, I
know. Hans Andersen and Grimm for her had given to their kind a forlorn
and fearsome meaning. But Kate MacNeill had helped, to some degree,
these childish apprehensions.

The Highland maid had brought from Colonsay a flesh that crept in
darkness, a brain with a fantastic maggot in it; she declared to
goodness, and to Bud sometimes, that she had no life of it with ghosts
in her small back room. But Bud was not to let on to her aunties. Forbye
it was only for Kate they came, the ghosts; did Bud not hear them last
night? Geese! No, not geese, Kate knew different, and if the thing
lasted much longer she would stay no more in this town; she would stay
nowhere, she would just go back to Colonsay. Not that Colonsay was
better; there were often ghosts in Colonsay--in the winter-time, and
then it behooved you to run like the mischief, or have a fine strong
lad with you for your convoy. If there were no ghosts in America it
was because it cost too much to go there on the steamers. Harken to
yon--“Honk, honk!”--did ever you hear the like of it? Who with their
wits about them in weather like that would like to be a ghost? And loud
above the wind that rocked the burgh in the cradle of the hills, loud
above the beating rain, the creak of doors and rap of shutters in that
old house, Bud and Kate together in the kitchen heard again the “honk,
honk!” of the geese. Then it was for the child that she missed the
mighty certainty of Chicago, that Scotland somehow to her mind seemed an
old unhappy place, in the night of which went passing Duncan, murdered
in his sleep, and David Rizzio with the daggers in his breast, and Helen
of Kirk-connel Lee. The nights but rarely brought any fear for her in
spite of poor Kate's ghosts, since the warmth and light and love of the
household filled every corner of lobby and stair, and went to bed with
her. When she had said her prayer the geese might cry, the timbers of
the old house crack, Bud was lapped in the love of God and man, and
tranquil. But the mornings dauntened her often when she wakened to the
sound of the six-o'clock bell. She would feel, when it ceased, as if all
virtue were out of last night's love and prayer. Then all Scotland and
its curious scraps of history as she had picked it up weighed on her
spirit for a time; the house was dead and empty; not ghost nor goose
made her eerie, but mankind's old inexplicable alarms. How deep and from
what distant shores comes childhood's wild surmise! There was nothing
to harm her, she knew, but the strangeness of the dawn and a craving for
life made her at these times the awakener of the other dwellers in the
house of Dyce.

She would get out of bed and go next door to the room of Ailie, and
creep in bed beside her to kiss her for a little from her dreams. To the
aunt these morning visitations were precious: she would take the bairn
to her bosom and fall asleep with sighs of content, the immaculate
mother. Bud herself could not sleep then for watching the revelation of
her lovely auntie in the dawn--the cloud on the pillow, that turned to
masses of hazel hair, the cheeks and lips that seemed to redden like
flowers as the day dawned, the nook of her bosom, the pulse of her brow.

Other mornings Wanton Wully's bell would send her in to Bell, who would
give her the warm hollow of her own place in the blankets, while she
herself got up to dress briskly for the day's affairs. “Just you lie
down there, pet, and sleepy-baw,” she would say, tying her coats with
trim tight knots. “You will not grow up a fine, tall, strong girl like
your Auntie Ailie if you do not take your sleep when you can get it. The
morning is only for done old wives like me that have things to do and
don't grudge doing them.”

She would chatter away to Bud as she dressed, a garrulous auntie this,
two things always for her text--the pride of Scotland, and the virtue of
duty done. A body, she would say, was sometimes liable to weary of the
same things to be done each day, the same tasks even-on, fires and food
and cleansing, though the mind might dwell on great deeds desirable to
be accomplished, but pleasure never came till the thing was done that
was the first to hand, even if it was only darning a stocking. What was
Bud going to be when she grew up? Bud guessed she wasn't going to be
anything but just a lady. Ah, yes, but even ladies had to do something
wise-like; there was Ailie--to go no farther--who could have managed
a business though her darning was but lumpy. Even for a lady there was
nothing nobler than the making of her own bed; besides the doctors said
it was remarkably efficacious for the figure.

Bud, snug in her auntie's blankets, only her nose and her bright bead
eyes showing in the light of the twirly wooden candlestick, guessed Mrs.
Molyneux was the quickest woman to get through work ever she saw: why!
she just waved it to one side and went out to shop or lunch with Jim.

A look of pity for Mrs. Molyneux, the misguided, would come to Bell's
face, but for those folk in America she never had a word of criticism in
the presence of the child. All she could say was America was different.
America was not Scotland. And Scotland was not England, though in many
places they called Scotch things English.

Jim used to say, speaking of father, that a Scotsman was a kind of
superior Englishman.

Bell wished to goodness she could see the man--he must have been a
clever one!

Other mornings again would the child softly open her uncle's door and he
would get a terrible fright, crying “Robbers! but you'll get nothing. I
have my watch in my boots, and my money in my mouth.”

She would creep beside him, and in these early hours began her
education. She was learning Ailie's calm and curiosity and ambition, she
was learning Bell's ideas of duty and the ancient glory of her adopted
land; from her uncle she was learning many things, of which the least
that seemed useful at the time was the Lord's Prayer in Latin. _Pater
noster qui es in coelis_--that and a few hundred of Trayner's Latin
maxims was nearly all of the classic tongue that survived with the
lawyer from student days. It was just as good and effective a prayer in
English, he admitted, but somehow, whiles, the language was so old it
brought you into closer grips with the original. Some mornings she would
hum to him coon songs heard in her former home; and if he was in trim he
himself would sing some psalm to the tune of Coleshill, French, Bangor,
or Tor-wood. His favorite was Torwood; it mourned so--mourned so! Or at
other times a song like “Mary Morison.”

“What are you bumming away at up there the pair of you?” Bell would cry,
coming to the stair-foot. “If you sing before breakfast, you'll greet
before night!”

“Don't she like singing in the morning?” Bud asked, nestling beside him,
and he laughed.

“It's an old freit--an old superstition,” said he, “that it's unlucky to
begin the day too blithely. It must have been a doctor that started it,
but you would wonder at the number of good and douce Scots folk, plain
bodies like ourselves, that have the notion in their mind from infancy,
and never venture a cheep or chirrup before the day's well aired.”

“My stars, ain't she Scotch, Auntie Bell!” said Bud. “So was father.
He would sing any time; he would sing if it broke a tooth; but he was
pretty Scotch other ways. Once he wore a pair of kilts to a Cale--to a
Caledonian club.”

“I don't keep a kilt myself,” said her uncle. “The thing's not strictly
necessary unless you're English and have a Hielan' shooting.”

“Auntie Bell is the genuine Scotch stuff, I guess!”

“There's no concealing the fact that she is,” her uncle admitted. “She's
so Scotch that I am afraid she's apt to think of God as a countryman of
her own.” And there were the hours that Ailie gave with delight to Bud's
more orthodox tuition. The back room that was called Dan's study,
because he sometimes took a nap there after dinner, became a schoolroom.
There was a Mercator's map of the world on the wall, and another of
Europe, that of themselves gave the place the right academy aspect. With
imagination, a map, and _The Golden Treasury_ you might have as good as
a college education, according to Ailie. They went long voyages together
on Mercator; saw marvellous places; shivered at the poles or languished
4 in torrid plains, sometimes before Kate could ring the bell for
breakfast. There seemed no spot in the world that this clever auntie had
not some knowledge of. How eagerly they crossed continents, how
ingeniously they planned routes! For the lengths of rivers, the heights
of mountains, the values of exports, and all the trivial passing facts
that mar the great game of geography for many childish minds, they had
small consideration; what they gathered in their travels were sounds,
colors, scenes, weather, and the look of races. What adventures they
had! as when, pursued by elephants and tigers, they sped in a flash from
Bengal to the Isle of Venice, and saw the green slime of the sea on her
steeping palaces. Yes, the world is all for the folk of imagination.
'Love maps and you will never be too old or too poor to travel,' was
Ailie's motto. She found a hero or a heroine for every spot upon
Mercator, and nourished so the child in noble admirations.

You might think it would always be the same pupil and the same teacher,
but no, they sometimes changed places. If Ailie taught Bud her own
love for the lyrics that are the best work of men in their hours of
exaltation, Bud sent Ailie back to her Shakespeare, and sweet were the
days they spent in Arden or Prospero's Isle.

It was well with them then; it was well with the woman and the child,
and they were happy.




CHAPTER XI

BUT the Dyces never really knew how great and serious was the charge
bequeathed to them in their brother William's daughter till they saw it
all one night in March in the light of a dozen penny candles.

Lennox had come from a world that's lit by electricity, and for weeks
she was sustained in wonder and amusement by the paraffine lamps of
Daniel Dyce's dwelling. They were, she was sure, the oldest kind of
light in all the world--Aladdin-lights that gleamed of old on caverns
of gems--till Kate on this particular evening came into the kitchen
with the week-end groceries. It was a stormy season--the year of the big
winds; moanings were at the windows, sobbings in the chimney-heads, and
the street was swept by spindrift rain. Bell and Ailie and their brother
sat in the parlor, silent, playing cards with a dummy hand, and Bud,
with Footles in her lap, behind the winter dikes on which clothes dried
before the kitchen fire, crouched on the fender with a Shakespeare,
where almost breathlessly she read the great, the glorious Macbeth.

“My stars, what a night!” said Kate. “The way them slates and
chimney-cans are flying! It must be the antinuptial gales. I thought
every minute would by my next. Oh, towns! towns! Stop you till I get
back to Colonsay, and I'll not leave it in a hurry, I'll assure you.”

She threw a parcel on the kitchen dresser, and turned to the light a
round and rosy face that streamed with clean, cooling rain, her hair in
tangles on her temples and her eyes sparkling with the light of youth
and adventure--for to tell the truth she had been flirting at the door a
while, in spite of all the rain, with some admirer.

Bud was the sort of child whose fingers itch in the presence of unopened
parcels--in a moment the string was untied from the week-end groceries.

“Candles!” she cried. “Well, that beats the band! I've seen 'em in
windows. What in the world are you going to do with candles? One, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve--oh,
Laura, ain't we grand!”

“What would we do with them but burn them?” said the maid; “we'll use
them in the washing-house,” and then she sank into a chair. “Mercy on
me, I declare I'm dying!” she exclaimed, in a different key, and Bud
looked round and saw Kate's face had grown of a sudden very pale.

“Oh, dear! what is the matter?” she asked, her eyes large, innocent, and
anxious.

“Pains,” moaned the maid. “Pains inside me and all over me, and
shiverings down the spine of the back. Oh, it's a sore thing pain,
especially when it's bad! But don't--don't say a word to the mustress;
I'm not that old, and maybe I'll get better.”

“Try pain-killer,” recommended Bud. “And if I was you I'd start just
here and say a prayer. Butt right in and I'll not listen.”

“Pain-killer!--what in all the world's pain-killer? I never heard of
it. And the only prayer I know is 'My Father which art' in Gaelic, and
there's nothing in it about pains in the spine of the back. No, no! I'll
just have to take a table-spoonful of something or other three times
a day, the way I did when the doctor put me right in Colonsay. Perhaps
it's just a chill, but oh! I'm sorrowful, sorrowful!” and Kate, the
color coming slowly back to her, wept softly to herself, rocking in the
kitchen chair. It was sometimes by those odd hysterics that she paid for
her elations with the lads.

“I know what's wrong with you,” said Bud, briskly, in the manner of Mrs.
Molyneux. “It's just the croodles. Bless you, you poor, perishing soul!
I take the croodles myself when it's a night like this and I'm alone.
The croodles ain't the least wee bit deadly; you can put them away by
hustling at your work, or banging an old piano, or reading a story, or
playing that you're somebody else--Well, I declare, I think I could cure
you right now with these twelve candles, far better than you'd do by
shooting drugs into yourself.”

“I never took a single candle in all my life,” said Kate, “far less
twelve, and I'll die first.”

“Silly!” exclaimed Bud. “You'd think to hear you speak you were a
starving Esquimau. I don't want you to eat the candles. Wait a minute.”
 She ran lightly up-stairs and was gone for ten minutes.

Kate's color all revived; she forgot her croodles in the spirit of
anticipation that the child had roused. “Oh, but she's the clever one
that!” she said to herself, drying the rain and tears from her face and
starting to nibble a biscuit. “She knows as much as two ministers, and
still she's not a bit proud. Some day she'll do something desperate.”

When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had
clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious
dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs.
Molyneux's, had taught her dancing.

“Ain't this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a
glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid's
eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain't this bully? Don't you stand
there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles
for the foot-lights. Why, I knew there was some use for these old
candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something
I couldn't 'zactly think of--made me kind of gay, you know, just as if
I was going to the theatre. They're only candles, but there's twelve
lights to them all at once, and now you'll see some fun.”

“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.

“I'm going to be a Gorgeous Entertainment; I'm going to be the Greatest
Agg-Aggregation of Historic Talent now touring the Middle West. I'm
Mademoiselle Winifred Wallace, of Madison Square Theatre, New York,
positively appearing here for one night only. I'm the whole company, and
the stage manager, and the band, and the boys that throw the bouquets.
Biff! I'm checked high; all you've got to do is to sit there with your
poor croodles and feel them melt away. Let's light the foot-lights.”

There was a row of old brass bedroom candlesticks on the kitchen shelf
that were seldom used now in the house of Dyce, though their polish was
the glory of Miss Bell's heart. The child kilted up her gown, jumped on
a chair, and took them down with the help of Kate. She stuck in each
a candle, and ranged them in a semicircle on the floor, then lit the
candles and took her place behind them.

“Put out the lamp!” she said to Kate, in the common voice of actors'
tragedy.

“Indeed and I'll do nothing of the kind,” said the maid. “If your auntie
Bell comes in she'll--she'll skin me alive for letting you play
such cantrips with her candles. Forbye, you're going to do something
desperate, something that's not canny, and I must have the lamp behind
me or I'll lose my wits.”

“Woman, put out the light!” repeated Bud, with an imperious, pointing
finger, and, trembling, Kate turned down the lamp upon the wall and
blew down the chimney in the very way Miss Dyce was always warning her
against. She gasped at the sudden change the loss of the light made--at
the sense of something idolatrous and bewitched in the arc of flames
on her kitchen floor, each blown inward from the draught of a rattling
window.

“If it is _buidseachas_--if it is witchcraft of any kind you are on
for, I'll not have it,” said Kate, firmly. “I never saw the like of this
since the old woman in Pennyland put the curse on the Colonsay factor,
and she had only seven candles. Dear, _dear_ Lennox, do not do anything
desperate; do not be carrying on, for you are frightening me out of my
judgment. I'm--I'm maybe better now; I took a bite at a biscuit; indeed,
I'm quite better; it was nothing but the cold--and a lad out there that
tried to kiss me.”

Bud paid no heed, but plucked up the edges of her skirt in out-stretched
hands and glided into the last dance she had learned from the vaudeville
lady, humming softly to herself an appropriate tune. The candles warmly
lit her neck, her ears, her tilted nostrils; her brow was high in
shadow. First she rose on tiptoe and made her feet to twitter on the
flags, then swayed and swung a little body that seemed to hang in
air. The white silk swept around and over her--wings with no noise of
flapping feather, or swirled in sea-shell coils, that rose in a ripple
from her ankles and swelled in wide, circling waves above her head,
revealing her in glimpses like some creature born of foam on fairy
beaches and holding the command of tempest winds. Ah, dear me! many and
many a time I saw her dance just so in her daft days before the chill
of wisdom and reflection came her way; she was a passion disembodied,
an aspiration realized, a happy morning thought, a vapor, a perfume
of flowers, for her attire had lain in lavender. She was the spirit
of spring, as I have felt it long ago in little woods, or seen it in
pictures, or heard it in songs; she was an ecstasy, she was a dream.

The dog gave a growl of astonishment, then lay his length on the
hearth-rug, his nose between his paws, his eyes fixed on her. “I'll not
have it,” said the maid, piteously. “At least I'll not stand much of it,
for it's not canny to be carrying on like that in a Christian dwelling.
I never did the like of that in all my life.”

“_Every_ move a picture,” said the child, and still danced on, with
the moan of the wind outside for a bass to her low-hummed melody. Her
stretching folds flew high, till she seemed miraculous tall, and to the
servant's fancy might have touched the low ceiling; then she sank--and
sank--and sank till her forehead touched the floor, and she was a flower
fallen, the wind no more to stir its petals, the rain no more to glisten
on its leaves. 'Twas as if she shrivelled and died there, and Kate gave
one little cry that reached the players of cards in the parlor.

“Hush! what noise was that?” said Ailie, lifting her head.

“It would be Kate clumping across the kitchen floor in the Gaelic
language,” said Mr. Dyce, pushing his specs up on his brow.

“Nothing but the wind,” said Bell. “What did you say was trump?”--for
that was the kind of player she was.

“It was not the wind, it was a cry; I'm sure I heard a cry. I hope
there's nothing wrong with the little one,” said Ailie, with a throbbing
heart, and she threw her cards on the table and went out. She came back
in a moment, her face betraying her excitement, her voice demanding
silence.

“Of all the wonders!” said she. “Just step this way, people, to the
pantry.”

They rose and followed her. The pantry was all darkness. Through its
partly open door that led into the kitchen they saw their child in the
crescent of the candles, though she could not see them, as no more
could Kate, whose chair was turned the other way. They stood in silence
watching the strange performance, each with different feelings, but all
with eeriness, silent people of the placid, old, half-rustic world that
lives forever with realities and seldom sees the passions counterfeited.

Bud had risen, her dark hair looking unnaturally black above her brow,
and, her dancing done, she was facing the dog and the servant, the only
audience of whose presence she was aware.

“Toots!” said the maid, relieved that all seemed over, “that's nothing
in the way of dancing; you should see them dancing Gillie-Callum
over-bye in Colonsay! There's a dancer so strong there that he breaks
the very boards.”

Bud looked at her, and yet not wholly at her--through her--with burning
eyes.

“Hush!” she said, trembling. “Do you not hear something?” and at that
moment, high over the town went the “honk, honk” of the wild geese.

“Devil the thing but geeses!” said the maid, whose blood had curdled
for a second. The rain swept like a broom along the street, the gutters
bubbled, the shutters rapped, far above the dwelling went the sound of
the flying geese.

“Oh, hush, woman, hush!” implored the child, her hands over her ears,
her figure cowering.

“It's only the geeses. What a start you gave me!” said the maid again.

“No, no,” said Bud.

  “'Methought, I heard a voice cry,
  “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep;
  Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
  ... sore labor's bath,
  Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
  Chief nourisher in life's feast--' ”

“What do you mean?” cried Kate.

“Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: Glamis hath murder'd
sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no
more.”

The child filled each phrase with a travesty of passion; she had seen
the part enacted. It was not, to be sure, a great performance. Some
words were strangely mutilated; but it was a child, and she had more
than a child's command of passion--she had feeling, she had heart.

“I cannot look at you!” exclaimed Kate. “You are not canny, but oh! you
are--you are majestic! There was never the like of it in all the isles.”

Bell, in the darkness of the pantry, wept silently at some sense of
sin in this play-acting on a Saturday night; her brother held her arm
tightly. Ailie felt a vague unrest and discontent with herself, a touch
of envy and of shame.

“Please collect the bouquets,” said the child, seating herself on the
floor with her knees tucked high in her gown. “Are the croodles all
gone?”

“It did me a lot of good, yon dancing,” said Kate. “Did you put yon
words about Macbeth sleep no more together yourself?”

“Yes,” said Bud, and then repented. “No,” she added, hurriedly,
“that's a fib; please, God, give me a true tongue. It was made by
Shakespeare--dear old Will!”

“I'm sure I never heard of the man in all my life before; but he must
have been a bad one.”

“Why, Kate, you are as fresh as the mountain breeze,” said Bud. “He was
Great! He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, a poor boy, and went to London
and held horses outside the theatre door, and then wrote plays so grand
that only the best can act them. He was--he was not for an age, but all
the time.”

She had borrowed the lesson as well as the manner of Auntie Ailie, who
smiled in the dark of the pantry at this glib rendering of herself.

“Oh, I should love to play Rosalind,” continued the child. “I should
love to play _everything_. When I am big, and really Winifred Wallace, I
will go all over the world and put away people's croodles same as I did
yours, Kate, and they will love me; and I will make them feel real good,
and sometimes cry--for that is beautiful, too. I will never rest, but go
on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me--even in
the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or'nary luck but just coon
shows, for it's in these places croodles must be most catching. I'll go
there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind
was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my auntie Ailie,
and lovely like my dear auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet, sweet
aunt Ailie.”

“She's big enough and bonny enough, and clever enough in some things,”
 said the maid; “but can she sew like her sister?--tell me that!”

“Sew!” exclaimed the child, with a frown. “I _hate_ sewing. I guess
Auntie Ailie's like me, and feels sick when she starts a hem and sees
how long it is, and all to be gone over with small stitches.”

“Indeed, indeed I do,” whispered Ailie in the pantry, and she was
trembling. She told me later how she felt--of her conviction then that
for her the years of opportunity were gone, the golden years that had
slipped past in the little burgh town without a chance for her to grasp
their offerings. She told me of her resolution there and then that this
child, at least, should have its freedom to expand.

Bud crept to the end of the crescent of her footlights and blew out the
candles slowly one by one. The last she left a-light a little longer,
and, crouched upon the floor, she gazed with large, dreaming eyes into
its flame as if she read there.

“It is over now,” said Mr. Dyce, in a whisper, to his sisters, and with
his hands on their shoulders led them back into the parlor.




CHAPTER XII

SHE was wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not
what, in the Pigeons' Seminary, could be called a good child, for
all her sins were frankly manifest, and she knew no fear nor naughty
stratagem; her mind, to all but Kate, was open as the day, and there it
was the fault of honest Kate's stupidity. But often Miss Bell must be
moaning at transgressions almost harmless in themselves, yet so terribly
unlike a Christian bairn, as when Bud spent an afternoon in a tent with
some _gypsy_ children, changed clothes with them the better to act a
part, and stormed because she could not have them in to tea with her. Or
when she asked Lady Anne, bazaar-collecting in the house of Dyce, if she
ever had had a proposal. It was a mercy that Lady Anne that very week
had had one, and was only too pleased to tell of it and say she had
accepted.

“Then _you're_ safe out of the woods,” said Bud, gravely. “There's our
Kate, she hasn't had a proposal yet, and I guess she's on the slopey
side of thirty. It must be dreff'le to be as old--as old as a house and
have no beau to love you. It must be 'scrudating.”

Lady Anne let her eyes turn for a moment on the sisters Dyce, and the
child observed and reddened.

“Oh, Auntie Bell!” she said, quickly. “Auntie Bell had heaps and heaps
of beaux all dying to marry her, but she gave them the calm, cold eye
and said she had to cling to Uncle Dan. It was very noble of her, wasn't
it?”

“Indeed it was!” admitted Lady Anne, very much ashamed of herself.

“And Auntie Ailie is not on the slopey side of thirty,” continued Bud,
determined to make all amends. “She's young enough to love dolls.”

It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behavior. “You are a
perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn
like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and
nonsense of that kind--it's fair ridiculous.”

“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much
astonished. “It's in all the books, there's hardly anything else, 'cept
when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the
only one you don't suspect. Indeed, auntie, I thought it was the Great
Thing!”

“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There's very little else in all
the world, except--except the children,” and she folded her niece in her
arms. “It _is_ the Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever
she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler,
kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”

“But it was very wrong; it was a kind of fib for you to talk about me
having lots of lads in my time,” said Auntie Bell. “You do not know
whether I had or not.”

Bud looked at her and saw a flush on her face. “I think,” said she, “the
beaux must have been very stupid, then. But I guess there must have been
one, Auntie Bell, and you have forgotten all about him.” And at that Miss
Bell went hurriedly from the room with a pretence that she heard a pot
boil over, and Ailie in a low voice told her niece all about Bell's
beau, deep drowned in the Indian Ocean.

For days after that the child was tender with her elder aunt, and made
a splendid poem in blank verse upon the late Captain James Murray, which
Bell was never to see, but Ailie treasured. For days was she angelic
good. Her rages never came to fever heat. Her rebellions burned
themselves out in her bosom. Nobly she struggled with long division
and the grammar that she abominated; very meekly she took censure for
copy-books blotted and words shamefully misspelled in Uncle Daniel's
study. Some way this love that she had thought a mere amusement, like
shopping in Chicago, took a new complexion in her mind--became a dear
and solemn thing, like her uncle's Bible readings, when, on Sunday
nights at worship in the parlor, he took his audience through the desert
to the Promised Land, and the abandoned street was vocal with domestic
psalm from the provost's open window. She could not guess--how could
she, the child?--that love has its variety. She thought there was
but the one love in all the world--the same she felt herself for most
things--a gladness and agreement with things as they were. And yet at
times in her reading she got glimpses of love's terror and empire, as in
the stories of Othello and of Amy Robsart, and herself began to wish
she had a lover. She thought at first of Uncle Dan; but he could not
be serious, and she had never heard him sigh--in him was wanting some
remove, some mystery. What she wanted was a lover on a milk-white
steed, a prince who was “the flower o' them a',” as in Aunt Ailie's song
“Glenlogie”; and she could not imagine Uncle Dan with his spectacles on
riding any kind of steed, though she felt it would be nice to have him
with her when the real prince was there.

Do you think it unlikely that this child should have such dreams?
Ah, then, you are not of her number, or you have forgotten. She never
forgot. Many a time she told me in after years of how in the attic
bower, with Footles snug at her feet, she conjured up the lad on the
milk-white steed, not so much for himself alone, but that she might act
the lady-love. And in those dreams she was tall and slender, sometimes
proud, disdainful, wounding the poor wretch with sharp words and cold
glances; or she was meek and languishing, sighing out her heart even in
presence of his true-love gifts of candy and P. & A. MacGlashan's penny
tarts. She walked with him in gardens enchanted; they sailed at nights
over calm, moonlit seas, and she would be playing the lute. She did not
know what the lute was like; but it was the instrument of love, and had
a dulcet sound, like the alto flutes in the burgh band.

But, of course, no fairy prince came wooing Daniel Dyce's little niece,
though men there were in the place--elderly and bald, with married
daughters--who tried to buy her kisses for sixpences and sweets, and at
last she felt vicariously the joys of love by conducting the affairs of
Kate.

Kate had many wooers--that is the solace of her class. They liked her
that she was genial and plump, with a flattering smile and a soft touch
of the Gaelic accent that in the proper key and hour is the thing to
break hearts. She twirled them all round her little finger, and Bud was
soon to see this and to learn that the maid was still very far from the
slopey side of thirty. But Kate, too, had her dreams--of some misty
lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a
delicious smell of tar--something or other on a yacht. The name she had
endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of
seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny
novelettes.

One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday
clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.

“Are you at your lessons, too?” said the child. “You naughty Kate!
there's a horrid blot. No lady makes blots.”

“It wasn't me, it was this devilish pen; besides, I'm not a lady,” said
Kate, licking the latest blot with her tongue and grimacing. “What way
do you spell weather?”

“W-e-t-h-e-r,” said Bud. “At least, I think that's the way; but I'd best
run and ask Aunt Ailie--she's a speller from Spellerville.”

“Indeed and you'll do nothing of the kind,” cried the maid, alarmed and
reddening. “You'll do nothing of the kind, Lennox, because--I'm writing
to Charles.”

“A love-letter! Oh, I've got you with the goods on you!” exclaimed Bud,
enchanted. “And what are you doing with your hurrah clothes on?”

“I like to put on my Sunday clothes when I'm writing Charles,” said the
maid, a little put-about. “Do you think it's kind of daft?”

“It's not daft at all, it's real cute of you; it's what I do myself when
I'm writing love-letters, for it makes me feel kind of grander. It's
just the same with poetry; I simply can't make really poetry unless I
have on a nice frock and my hands washed.”

“_You_ write love-letters!” said the maid, astounded.

“Yes, you poor, perishing soul!” retorted Bud. “And you needn't yelp.
I've written scores of love-letters without stopping to take breath.
Stop! stop!” she interrupted herself, and breathed an inward little
prayer. “I mean that I write them--well, kind of write them--in my
mind.” But this was a qualification beyond Kate's comprehension.

“Then I wish you would give me a hand with this one,” said she,
despairingly. “All the nice words are so hard to spell, and this is such
a bad pen.”

“They're _all_ bad pens; they're all devilish,” said Bud, from long
experience. “But I'd love to help you write that letter. Let me
see--pooh! it's dreff'le bad, Kate. I can't read a bit of it, almost.”

“I'm sure and neither can I,” said Kate, distressed.

“Then how in the world do you expect Charles to read it?” asked Bud.

“Oh, he's--he's a better scholar than me,” said Kate, complacently. “But
you might write this one for me.”

Bud washed her hands, took a chair to the kitchen table, threw back
her hair from her eyes, and eagerly entered into the office of
love-letter-writer, “What will I say to him?” she asked.

“My dear, dear Charles,” said the maid, who at least knew so much.

“My adorable Charles,” said Bud, as an improvement, and down it went
with the consent of the dictator.

“I'm keeping fine, and I'm very busy,” suggested Kate, upon
deliberation. “The weather is capital here at present, and it is a good
thing, for the farmers are busy with their hay.”

Bud sat back and stared at her in amazement. “Are you sure this is for a
Charles?” she asked. “You might as well call him Sissy and talk frocks.
Why, you must tell him how you love him.”

“Oh, I don't like,” said Kate, confused. “It sounds so--so bold and
impudent when you put it in the English and write it down. But please
yourself; put down what you like and I'll be dipping the pen for you.”

Bud was not slow to take the opportunity. For half an hour she sat at
the kitchen table and searched her soul for fitting words that would
convey Kate's adoration. Once or twice the maid asked what she was
writing, but all she said was: “Don't worry, Kate. I'm right in the
throes.” There were blots and there were erasions, but something like
this did the epistle look when it was done:

“My adorable Charles,--I am writing this letter to let you know how
much I truly love you. Oh Charles, dear, you are the Joy of my heart.
I am thinking of you so often, often, till my Heart just aches. It is
lovely wether here at present. Now I will tell you all about the Games.
They took place in a park near here Friday and there was seventeen
beautiful dances. They danced to give you spassums. One of them was a
Noble youth. He was a Prince in his own write, under Spells for sevn
years. When he danced, lo and behold he was the admiration of all
Beholders. Alas? poor youth. When I say alas I mean that it was so sad
being like that full of Spells in the flower of his youth. He looked at
me so sad when he was dancing, and I was so glad. It was just like money
from home. Dear Charles, I will tell you all about myself. I am full of
goodness most the time for God loves good people. But sometimes I am
not and I have a temper like two crost sticks when I must pray to be
changed. The dancing gentleman truly loves me to destruction. He kissed
my hand and hastily mountain his noble steed, galoped furiously away.
Ah, the coarse of true love never did run smooth. Perhaps he will fall
upon the forein plain. Dearest Charles--adorable--I must now tell
you that I am being educated for my proper station in life. There is
Geograpy, and penmanship with the right commas, and Long Division and
conjunctives which I abominate. But my teacher, a sweet lady named Miss
Alison Dyce, says they are all truly refining. Oh I am weary, weary, he
cometh not. That is for you, darling Charles, my own.--Your true heart
love, Kate MacNeill.”

“Is that all right?” asked Bud, anxiously.

“Yes; at least it 'll do fine,” said the maid, with that Highland
politeness that is often so bad for business. “There's not much about
himself in it, but och! it 'll do fine. It's as nice a letter as ever I
saw: the lines are all that straight.”

“But there's blots,” said Bud, regretfully. “There oughtn't to be blots
in a real love-letter.”

“Toots! just put a cross beside each of them, and write 'this is a
kiss,”' said Kate, who must have had some previous experience. “You
forgot to ask him how's his health, as it leaves us at present.”

So Bud completed the letter as instructed. “Now for the envelope,” said
she.

“I'll put the address on it myself,” said Kate, confused. “He would be
sure somebody else had been reading it if the address was not in my hand
of write”--an odd excuse, whose absurdity escaped the child. So the maid
put the letter in the bosom of her Sunday gown against her heart, where
meanwhile dwelt the only Charles. It is, I sometimes think, where we
should all deposit and retain our love-letters; for the lad and lass,
as we must think of them, have no existence any more than poor Kate's
Charles.

119

Two days passed. Often in those two days would Bud come, asking
anxiously if there was any answer yet from Charles. As often the maid
of Colonsay reddened, and said with resignation there was not so much as
the scrape of a pen. “He'll be on the sea,” she explained at last, “and
not near a post-office. Stop you till he gets near a post-office, and
you'll see the fine letter I'll get.”

“I didn't know he was a sailor,” said Bud. “Why, I calculated he was a
Highland chieftain or a knight, or something like that. If I had known
he was a sailor I'd have made that letter different. I'd have loaded
it up to the nozzle with sloppy weather, and said, Oh, how sad I
was--that's you, Kate--to lie awake nights thinking about him out on the
heaving billow. Is he a captain?”

“Yes,” said Kate, promptly. “A full captain in the summer-time. In the
winter he just stays at home and helps on his mother's farm. Not a cheep
to your aunties about Charles, darling Lennox,” she added, anxiously.
“They're--they're that particular!”

“I don't think you're a true love at all,” said Bud, reflecting on many
interviews at the kitchen window and the back door. “Just think of the
way you make goo-goo eyes at the letter-carrier and the butcher's man
and the ash-pit gentleman. What would Charles say?”

“Toots! I'm only putting by the time with them,” explained the
maid. “It's only a diversion. When I marry I will marry for my own
conveniency, and the man for me is Charles.”

“What's the name of his ship?” asked the child. “The _Good Intent_,”
 said Kate, who had known a skiff of the name in Colonsay. “A beautiful
ship, with two yellow chimneys, and flags to the masthead.”

“That's fine and fancy!” said Bud. “There was a gentleman who loved me
to destruction, coming over on the ship from New York, and loaded me
with candy. He was not the captain, but he had gold braid everywhere,
and his name was George Sibley Purser. He promised he would marry me
when I made a name for myself, but I 'spect Mister J. S. Purser 'll go
away and forget.”

“That's just the way with them all,” said Kate.

“I don't care, then,” said Bud. “I'm all right; I'm not kicking.”

Next day the breakfast in the house of Dyce was badly served, for Kate
was wild to read a letter that the post had brought, and when she opened
it, you may be sure Bud was at her shoulder. It said:

“Dearest Kate,--I love you truly and I am thinking of you most the time.
Thank God we was all safed. Now I will tell you all about the Wreck. The
sea was mountains high, and we had a cargo of spise and perils from Java
on the left-hand side the map as you go to Australia. When the Pirite
ship chased us we went down with all hands. But we constrickted a raft
and sailed on and on till we had to draw lots who would drink the blood.
Just right there a sailor cried 'A sail, A sail, and sure enough it was
a sail. And now I will tell you all about Naples. There is a monsterious
mountain there, or cone which belches horrid flames and lavar. Once
upon' a time it belched all over a town by the name of Pompy and it is
there till this very day. The bay of naples is the grandest in the world
it is called the golden horn. Dearest Katherine, I am often on the mast
at night. It is cold and shakey in that place and oh how the wind doth
blow, but I ring a bell and say alls well which makes the saloon people
truly glad. We had five stow-ways. One of them was a sweet fairhaired
child from Liverpool, he was drove from home. But a good and beautious
lady, one of the first new england families is going to adopt him and
make him her only air. How beautiful and bright he stood as born to rule
the storm. I weary for your letters darling Katherine.--Write soon to
your true love till death, Charles.”

Kate struggled through this extraordinary epistle with astonishment.
“Who in the world is it from?” she asked Bud.

“Charles, stupid,” said Bud, astonished that there should be any doubt
about that point. “Didn't I--didn't we write him the other night? It was
up to him to write back, wasn't it?”

“Of course,” said Kate, very conscious of that letter still unposted,
“but--but he doesn't say Charles anything, just Charles. It's a daft
like thing not to give his name; it might be anybody. There's my
Charles, and there's Charles Maclean from Oronsay--what way am I to know
which of them it is?”

“It'll be either or eyether,” said Bud. “Do you know Charles Maclean?”

“Of course I do,” said the maid. “He's following the sea, and we were
well acquaint.”

“Did he propose to you?” asked Bud.

“Well, he did not exactly propose,” admitted Kate, “but we sometimes
went a walk together to the churchyard on a Sunday, and you know
yourself what that means out in Colonsay. I'll just keep the letter and
think of it. It's the nicest letter I ever got, and full of information.
It's Charles Maclean, I'll warrant you, but he did not use to call me
Katherine--he just said Kate and his face would be as red as anything.
Fancy him going down with all hands! My heart is sore for him,” and the
maid there and then transferred her devotion from the misty lad of her
own imagination to Charles Maclean of Oronsay.

“You'll help me to write him a letter back to-night,” she said.

“Yes, indeed, I'll love to,” said the child, wearily. But by the time
the night came on, and Wanton Wully rang his curfew bell, and the rooks
came clanging home to the tall trees of the forest, she was beyond all
interest in life or love.




CHAPTER XIII

ANTON WULLY only 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 clamoring in her bosom; her eyes
stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clinched 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
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 gray 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. Confound 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 in carpet
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 cursed 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, 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 bellman.

“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 siver-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 tell't me once it was a kind o' weakness that they keep on gantrys
doon 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 harbor-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
parlor 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 along the 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 parts of the
compass. What he wanted was to keep this titbit 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 way is 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 him what 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 hi

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