YES, that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored
the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce. There was a happy night to
follow soon, and it is my grief that my pen cannot grasp the spirit of
it, so that reading you would laugh with her and whiles be eerie. 'Tis
true there was little in the thing itself as in most that at the age
of twelve impresses us for all our lives, but it met in some degree the
expectations that her father's tales of Scotland had sent home with
her. Hitherto all had been natural and wellnigh commonplace that she
had experienced, all except the folk so queer and kind and comical in
a different way from those in Chicago, the sounds she could hear as
she lay in her attic bed--the wind-call, and the honk of geese, and the
feeling of an island hopelessly remote from the new bright world that
best she knew--remote and lost, a speck on the sea far, far from great
America. The last things vaguely troubled her. For she was child enough
as yet to shiver at things not touched by daylight nor seemingly made
plain by the common-sense of man. She could laugh at the ghosts that
curdled the blood of the maid of Colonsay; and yet at times, by
an effort of the will, she could feel all Kate's terror at some
manifestation no more alarming than the cheep of mice or a death-watch
ticking in a corner cupboard. These were but crude and vulgar fears,
self-encouraged little actress terrors. It took more than the hint of
ghost or the menace of the ticking insect in the wood to wake in her
the feeling of worlds unrealized, encompassing, that she could get from
casual verses in her auntie Ailie's book of Scottish ballads, or find
o'erwhelm her of a sudden on looking from her window into the garden
bare and palid below the moon.
This night there should be moon according to the penny almanac, and
Wanton Wully lit no lamps, but went home for a good sleep to himself, as
his saying went, and left the burgh to such illumination as should come
to it by the caprice of the clouds. It lay, the little place, for most
of the night in darkness: a mirk so measureless deep, when the shops
were shut, that the red-lit skylight windows at the upper end of
the town seemed by some miracle to lift themselves and soar into the
heavens--square, monstrous, flitting stars to the vision of Bud, as she
stood with Auntie Ailie at the door watching for Uncle Dan's return
from his office. To bring the soaring windows back to their natural
situation, she had to stand a little way inside the lobby and establish
their customary place against the darkness by the lintel of the door.
From the other side of the church came a sound of dull, monotonous
drumming--no cheerful, rhythmic beat like the drumming of John Taggart,
but a mournful thumping, fitful in flaws of the bland night wind.
“What's that, Auntie?” she asked.
“The guizards,” said Miss Ailie, looking down upon her in the lobby
light with a smile she could not see. “Did you never hear of the
guizards, Bud?”
Bud had never heard of the guizards; that was one thing, surely, her
father had forgotten. She had heard of Hallowe'en, she said, when
further questioned. Wasn't it the night for ducking into tubs for
apples? The Pilgrim widow had told her Hallowe'en was coming, and it was
for Hallowe'en she had sold so many nuts and apples; but the widow said
she felt ashamed to do it, for Hallowe'en was not approved of by
the Mission, being idolatrous and gay. “Is it very gay?” asked Bud,
anxiously.
“So I used to think it,” said her aunt.
“Then I s'pose it must be wicked,” said the child, regretfully. “I'd
have expected you'd have Hallowe'en right here in the house if it hadn't
been very bad. That widow did me a lot of good, showing me what a heap
of happy things are full of sin. She knew them all! I s'pose she got
them in the tracts. Yes, she did me a lot of good; I--I almost wish I
hadn't met that widow.”
“Do you feel wicked when you're gay?” asked Miss Ailie.
“Mercy on us! not a mite!” said Bud. “I feel plumb full of goodness when
I'm gay; but that's my youth and innocence. The widow says it is, and I
guess what she says goes.”
“Still, do you know, my dear, I'd risk a little gayety now and then,”
said Auntie Ailie. “Who knows? The widow, though a worthy lady, is what
in Scotland we call an old wife, and it's generally admitted that old
wives of either sex have no monopoly of wisdom. If you're wanting pious
guidance, Bud, I don't know where you'll get it better than from Auntie
Bell; and she fairly dotes on Hallowe'en and the guizards. By-and-by
you'll see the guizards, and--and--well, just wait and we'll find what
else is to be seen. I do wish your uncle Dan would hurry.”
The street was quite deserted, but did not show its vacancy until the
clouds for a moment drifted off the moon that rolled behind the steeple.
Then the long, gray stretch of tenements came out unreal and pale on
the other side of the street, their eaves and chimneys throwing inky
shadows, their red-lit windows growing of a sudden wan. Over them hung
the ponderous kirk, the master shadow, and all--the white-harled walls,
the orange windows, the glittering cold, and empty street--seemed like
the vision of a dream. Then the clouds wrapped up the moon again, and
the black was the black of Erebus. But as it fell, the dull drums seemed
to come nearer, and from the head of the street, the windy corner
where Uncle Dan had his office, small moons came, purple and golden,
fantastically carved. They ran from house to house, and grouped in
galaxies, or singly fell apart, swinging and giddy orbs. For a moment
Bud looked at them bewildered, then gave a happy scream.
“The lanterns! the lanterns! Look at the lanterns, Auntie. Is that
Hallowe'en?”
“That's part of it, at least,” said her aunt; “these are the guizards,
with their turnip lanterns; they're going round the houses singing;
by-and-by we'll hear them.”
“My! I wish to goodness I had a lantern like that. To swing a lantern
like that I'd feel like being a lighthouse or the statue of Liberty at
New York. I'd rather have a turnip lantern than a raft of dolls.”
“Did, you never have one?”
“No,” said Bud, sorrowfully. “You have no idea what a poor mean place
Chicago is--not a thing but common electric light!” And Miss Ailie
smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret.
“I wish that brother of mine would come quickly.” she said, and at
the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of
embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern.
“Here, Bud,” said he, “take this quickly, before some silly body sees
me with it and thinks it's for myself. I have the name, I know, of being
daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce
was going round at Hallowe'en with a turnip lantern, they would think
he had lost his head in a double sense, and it would be very bad for
business.”
“Uncle!” cried the child, in ecstasy, “you're the loveliest, sweetest
man in the whole wide world.”
“I dare say,” said he. “I have been much admired when I was younger. But
in this case don't blame me. I wash my hands of the responsibility. I
got my orders for that thing from your auntie Bell.”
“My! ain't it cute! Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely
carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his
glasses to look at it himself.
“No,” said he, “though I've made a few of them in my time. All that's
needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory's Mixture in
the morning.”
“What's the Gregory's Mixture for?”
“In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr.
Dyce. “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn't that I
know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the
Gregory. I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who
was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit
of it. I'm thinking that his Gregory's nearly due.”
Bud hardly listened, she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced
at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate!
Kate!” she cried; “let me in to light my lantern.”
Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of
giggling, but no answer.
“Open the door--quick, quick!” cried Bud, again, and this time Auntie
Bell, inside, said:
“Yes, open, Kate; I think we're ready.”
The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a
spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken
pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been
smuggled in by the back door in the close, were seated round a tub of
water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin
their fun.
Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which
I'm thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the
discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and
silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked;
nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs
that gave the eerie flavor of old time and the book of ballads. She
liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards
entered, black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a
sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop--the thing we call a dallan. She
had never discovered before what a soul of gayety was in Auntie Bell,
demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she
realized her dancing days were over and it was time for her to remember
all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment,
led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and
kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think,
Bell, that you're fey!”
“Indeed, and I dare say you're right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair
exhausted. “At my time of life it's daft; I have not laughed so much
since I was at Barbara Mushet's seminary.”
Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening
memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should
light her lantern and convoy the other children home; so Kate went with
her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at
her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid
turned back.
But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since
she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire,
and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That, so far, was
satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her
love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells
and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams.
Notably was she good at Hallowe'en devices, and Bud must come and see
her, for it would not take a minute.
They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spae-wife's
door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had
not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish
servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the
future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light
from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a
glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering,
vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a
crowded harbor, and that meant a sailor husband.
“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the
end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass,
without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the
Christian name of a man, and _that_ was the name of the sailor husband.
Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the
darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious,
wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever
she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly
illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and gray and ancient
and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand, with windows
shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as
empty of life as the armor in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant,
speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a
moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse
she started running, with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the
light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in
the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her
died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood
alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland--Scotland where
witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the
morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she
knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded
shrilly up the street--it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it,
gulped and came back.
“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I
had to say it, though I s'pose it means I've lost him for a husband.”
“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.