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 his boots
not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week
from the Dyces' dwelling it realized for her the state of things there.
“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he's
quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff
for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence
ha'penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous
joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they
called “Miss Minto's back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace,
a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss
Minto's youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got
no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and
mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and
velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen--if queens are attired
in gorgeous, hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss
Minto's life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But
she thought how happy Mr. Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed
the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.
As she knocked lightly at the front door, the old kid glove came loose
in her hand--an omen! One glance up and down the street to see that no
one noticed her, and then she slipped it in her pocket, with a guilty
countenance. She was not young, at least she was not in her 'teens, but
young enough to do a thing like that for luck and her liking of Daniel
Dyce. Yet her courage failed her, and when Kate came to the door the
first thing she handed to her was the glove.
“It fell off,” she said. “I hope it means that it's no longer needed.
And this is a little thing for Miss Lennox, Kate; you will give her it
with my compliments. I hear there's an improvement?”
“You wouldna _believe_ it!” said Kate. “Thank God she'll soon be
carrying on as bad as ever!”
Mr. Dyce would not have cared a rap that morning if he had come upon his
clerks at Catch-the-Ten, or even playing leap-frog on their desks.
He was humming a psalm you may guess at as he looked at the documents
heaped on his table--his calf-bound books and the dark, japanned
deed-boxes round his room.
“Everything just the same, and business still going on!” he said to his
clerk. “Dear me! dear me! what a desperate world! Do you know, I had the
notion that everything was stopped. No, when I think of it, I oftener
fancied all this was a dream.”
“Not Menzies vs. Kilblane, at any rate,” said the clerk, with his hand
on a bulky Process, for he was a cheery soul and knew the mind of Daniel
Dyce.
“I dare say not,” said the lawyer. “That plea will last a while, I'm
thinking. And all about a five-pound fence! Let you and me, Alexander,
thank our stars there are no sick bairns in the house of either Menzies
or Kilblane, for then they would understand how much their silly fence
mattered, and pity be on our Table-of-Fees!” He tossed over the papers
with an impatient hand. “Trash!” said he. “What frightful trash! I can't
be bothered with them--not to-day. They're no more to me than a docken
leaf. And last week they were almost everything. You'll have heard the
child has got the turn?”
“I should think I did!” said Alexander. “And no one better pleased to
hear it!”
“Thank you, Alick. How's the family?”
“Fine,” said the clerk.
“Let me think, now--seven, isn't it? A big responsibility.”
“Not so bad as long's we have the health,” said Alexander.
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Dyce. “All one wants in this world is the
health--and a little more money. I was just thinking--” He stopped
himself, hummed a bar of melody, and twinkled through his spectacles.
“You'll have read Dickens?” said he.
“I was familiar with his works when I was young,” said Alexander, like a
man confessing that in youth he played at bools. “They were not bad.”
“Just so! Well, do you know there was an idea came to my mind just now
that's too clearly the consequence of reading Dickens for a week back,
so I'll hold my hand and keep my project for another early occasion when
it won't be Dickens that's dictating.”
He went early back that day, to relieve Ailie at her nursing, as he
pretended to himself, but really for his own delight in looking at the
life in eyes where yesterday was a cloud. A new, fresh, wholesome air
seemed to fill the house. Bud lay on high pillows, with Miss Minto's
Grace propped against her knees, and the garret was full of the odor of
flowers that had come in a glorious bunch from the banker's garden. Bell
had grown miraculously young again, and from between Ailie's eyebrows
had disappeared the two black lines that had come there when Dr. Brash
had dropped in her ear the dreadful word pneumonia. But Dr. Brash had
beaten it! Oh, if she only knew the way to knit a winter waistcoat for
him!
The child put out her hand to her uncle, and he kissed her on the
palm, frightful even yet of putting a lip to her cheek, lest he should
experience again the terror of the hot breath from that consuming inward
fire.
“Well,” said he, briskly, “how's our health, your ladyship? Losh bless
me! What a fine, big, sonsy baby you have gotten here; poor Alibel's
nose will be out of joint, I'm thinking.”
“Hasn't got any,” said Bud, still weakly, in her new, thin, and
unpractised voice, as she turned with a look that showed no lessening
affection for the old doll, badly battered in the visage and wanting in
the limbs, which lay beside her on the pillow.
“Blythmeat and breadberry,” said Daniel Dyce. “In the house of Daniel
Dyce! Bell and Ailie, here's an example for you!”