“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.