SPRING came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt
the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child--in that old
Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the neuk of the burgh walls. It
must have been because the Dyces loved so much their garden, and spent
so many hours there, that they were so sanely merry, nor let too often
or too long the Scots' forebodings quell their spirits, but got lessons
of hope from the circling of the seasons, that give us beauty and decay
in an unvarying alternation.
“It is the time,” used Ailie to say of the spring, “when a delicious
feeling steals over you of wanting to sit down and watch other people
work.”
“I'll need to have the lawn-mower sharpened; it may be needed at any
moment by the neighbors,” said her brother Dan.
They watched upspring the green spears of the daffodils, that by-and-by
should bear their flags of gold.
And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing, or cleaning the streets,
or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being
at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are
making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought--as he would
call it--in the Dyce's garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to
be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything,
so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy
man. But being handy is its own reward, carrying with it the soothing
sense of self-sufficiency, so we need not vex ourselves for Wully. As
he said himself, he “did the turn” for plain, un-ornamental gardening,
though in truth he seemed to think he did it best when sitting on his
barrow trams, smoking a thoughtful pipe and watching the glad spring
hours go by at a cost of sixpence each to the lawyer who employed him.
Bud often joined him on the trams, and gravely listened to him, thinking
that a man who did so many different and interesting things in a day was
wise and gifted beyond ordinary. In the old and abler years he had
been 'a soldier, and, nursing flowers nowadays, his mind would oft
incongruously dwell on scenes remote and terribly different where he had
delved in foreign marl for the burial of fallen comrades.
“Tell me Inkerman again, Mr. Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I'll shoo off
the birds from the blub-flow-ers.
“I'll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe,
and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and
chasing birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the
mischief with them birds! the garden's fair polluted wi' them! God knows
what's the use o' them except for chirping, chirping--Tchoo! off wi' ye
at once, or I'll be after ye!--Ay, ay, Inkerman. It was a gey long day,
I'm tellin' ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter,
slaughter a' the time; me wi' an awfu' hacked heel, and no' a bit o'
anything in my stomach. A nesty, saft day, wi' a smirr o' rain. We were
as black as--as black as--as--”
“As black as the Earl o' Hell's waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I
mind the very words.”
“I only said that the once,” said Wully, shocked at her glibness in the
uptake. “And it's not a thing for the like o' you to say at all; it's
only the word o' a rowdy sodger.”
“Well, ain't I the limb! I'll not say it again,” promised the child;
“you needn't look as solemn's the Last Trump. Go on, go on!”
“As black as a ton o' coal, wi; the creesh o' the cartridges and the
poother; it was the Minié gun, ye ken. And the Rooshians would be just
ower there between the midden and the cold-frame, and we would be coming
doon on them--it micht be ower the sclates o' Rodger's hoose yonder. We
were in the Heavy Diveesion, and I kill't my first man that I kent o'
aboot where the yellow crocus is. Puir sowl! I had nae ill-will to the
man, I'll guarantee ye that; but we were baith unloaded when we met each
other, and it had to be him or me.”
He paused and firmed his mouth until the lips were lost among the
puckers gathered round them, a curious glint in his eyes.
“Go on!” cried Bud, sucking in her breath with a horrid expectation, “ye
gie'd him--ye gie'd him--”
“I gie'd him--I tell't ye what I gie'd him before. Will I need to say't
again?”
“Yes,” said Bud, “for that's your top note.”
“I gie'd him--I gie'd him the--the _baggonet!_” cried the gardener, with
a sudden, frightful, furious flinging of the arms, and then--oh, silly
Wully Oliver!--began to weep, or at least to show a tear. For Bud had
taught him to think of all that lay beyond that furious thrust of
the bayonet--the bright, brave life extinguished, the mother rendered
childless, or the children fatherless, in some Russian home.
Bell, the thrifty woman, looking from the scullery window, and seeing
time sadly wasted at twelve bawbees the hour, would come out and send
the child in to her lessons, but still the orra gardener did not hurry
to his task, for he knew the way to keep Miss Dyce in an idle crack,
although she would not sit on his barrow trams.
“A wonderfu' wean that!” would be his opening. “A perfect caution! I can
see a difference on her every day; she grows like a willow withy, and
she's losin' yon awfu' Yankee awcent she had about her when she came at
first. She speaks as bonny English noo as you or me, when she puts her
mind to't.”
“I'm afraid it would not be very difficult for her to do that, Willy,”
said Miss Bell. “She could always speak in any way she wanted, and,
indeed, the first time that we heard her she was just yoursel' on a New
Year's morning, even to the hiccough. I hope you'll keep a watch on what
you say to her; the bairn picks up the things she hears so fast, and
she's so innocent, that it's hardly canny to let her listen much to
the talk of a man that's been a soldier--not that I blame the soldiers,
Willy, bless them all for Scotland, young or old!”
“Not a word out of place from me, Miss Dyce,” would he cry, emphatic.
“Only once I slippit oot a hell, and could have bit my tongue oot for
it. We heard, ye ken, a lot o' hells oot yonder roond aboot Sevastapool:
it wasna Mr. Meikle's Sunday-school. But ye needna fear that Wully
Oliver would learn ill language to a lady like the wee one. Whatever
I am that's silly when the dram is in, I hope I'm aye the perfect
gentleman.”
“Indeed, I never doubted it,” said Miss Bell. “But you know yourself
we're anxious that she should be all that's gentle, nice, and clean.
When you're done raking this bed--dear me! I'm keeping you from getting
at it--it 'll be time for you to go home for dinner. Take a bundle of
rhubarb for the mistress.”
“Thanky, thanky, me'm,” said Wanton Wully, “but, to tell the truth,
we're kind o' tired o' rhubarb; I'm getting it by the stone from every
bit o' grun I'm laborin' in. I wish folk were so rife wi' plooms or
strawberries.”
Bell laughed. “It's the herb of kindness,” said she. “There's aye
a reason for everything in nature, and rhubarb's meant to keep our
generosity in practice.” And there she would be, the foolish woman,
keeping him at the crack, the very thing he wanted, till Mr. Dyce
himself, maybe, seeing his silver hours mishandled, would come to send
his sister in, and see his gardener earned at least a little of his
wages.
“A terrible man for the ladies, William!” was all that the lawyer had
to say. “There was some talk about doing a little to the garden, but,
hoots, man! don't let it spoil your smoke!”
It was then you would see Wanton Wully busy. Where would Bud be then?
At her lessons? No, no, you may be sure of it; but in with Kate of
Colonsay, giving the maid the bloody tale of Inkerman. It was a far
finer and more moving story as it came from Bud than ever it was on the
lips of Wanton Wully. From him she only got the fling of the arms that
drove the bayonet home, the lips pursed up as if they were gathered by a
string, the fire of the moment, and the broad Scots tongue he spoke in.
To what he gave she added fancy and the drama.
“As black as a ton o' coal, wi' the creesh o' the cartridges;... either
him or me;... I gie'd him,... I gie'd him;... I shut my eyes, and said,
'O God, Thy pardon!' and gie'd him the _baggonet!_”
Kate's apron at that would fly up to cover her eyes, for she saw before
her all the bloody spectacle. “I'm that glad,” she would say, “that
my lad's a sailor. I couldna sleep one iota at night thinkin' of their
baggonets if he was a man o' war. And that puts me in mind, my dear,
it's more than a week since we sent the chap a letter. Have you time
the now to sit and write a scrape to Hamburg on the Elbow--imports iron
ore?”
And Bud had time, and sit she would and write a lovely letter to Charles
Maclean of Oronsay. She told him that her heart was sore, but she must
confess that she had one time plighted her troth to a Russian army
officer, who died, alas! on the bloody field. His last words, as his
life-blood slowly ebbed away, were:
“What _would_ be the last words of a Russian officer who loved you?”
asked Bud, biting her pen in her perplexity.
“Toots! anything--'my best respects to Kate,'” said the maid, who had
learned by this time that the letters Charles liked the most were the
ones where Bud most freely used imagination.
“I don't believe it would,” said Bud. “It'd sound far too calm for a
man that's busy dying.” But she put it down all the same, feeling it was
only fair that Kate should have some say in the letters written in her
name.
That was the day they gave him a hint that a captain was wanted on the
yacht of Lady Anne.
And still Kate's education made some progress, as you may see from what
she knew of Hamburg, though she was not yet the length of writing
her own love-letters. She would sit at times at night for hours quite
docile, knitting in the kitchen, listening to the reading of the child.
A score of books had been tried on her by Aunt Ailie's counsel (for she
was in the secret of this Lower Dyce Academy), but none there was
that hit the pupil's fancy half so much as her own old favorite penny
novelettes till they came one happy day to _The Pickwick Papers_. Kate
grew very fond of _The Pickwick Papers_. The fun of them being in a
language quite unknown in Colonsay was almost all beyond her. But “that
poor Mr. Puckwuck!” she would cry at each untoward accident; “oh, the
poor wee man!” and the folk were as real to her as if she had known them
all in Colonsay. If Dickens could have known the curious sentiments
his wandering hero roused in this Highland servant mind he would have
greatly wondered.
While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take
up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew
as fast in her mind as in her body; each day she seemed to drift farther
away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would
preserve her--into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie
Ailie's magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. So Bell
determined there and then to coax her into the gentle arts of
domesticity that ever had had a fascination for herself. She went about
it, oh, so cunningly! letting Bud play at the making of beds and the
dusting of the stair-rails and the parlor beltings--the curly-wurly
places, as she called them, full of quirks and holes and corners that
the unelect like Kate of Colonsay will always treat perfunctorily in a
general wipe that only drives the dirt the farther in. Bud missed
not the tiniest corner nor the deepest nook; whatever she did, she did
fastidiously, much to the joy of her aunt, who was sure it was a sign
she was meant by the Lord for a proper housewife. But the child soon
tired of making beds and dusting, as she did of white-seam sewing; and
when Bell deplored this falling off, Ailie said: “You cannot expect
everybody to have the same gifts as yourself. Now that she has proved
she's fit to clean a railing properly, she's not so much to blame if she
loses interest in it. The child's a genius, Bell, and to a person of her
temperament the thing that's easily done is apt to be contemptuous;
the glory's in the triumph over difficulties, in getting on--getting
on--getting on,” and Ailie's face grew warm with some internal fire.
At that speech Bell was silent. She thought it just another of Ailie's
haiverings; but Mr. Dyce, who heard, suddenly became grave.
“Do you think it's genius or precocity?” he asked.
“They're very much the same thing,” said Ailie. “If I could be the child
I was; if I could just remember--” She stopped herself and smiled. “What
vanity!” said she; “what conceit! If I could be the child I was, I dare
say I would be pretty commonplace, after all, and still have the same
old draigled pinnies; but I have a notion that Lennox was never meant to
make beds, dust stair-railings, or sit in a parlor listening, demure, to
gossip about the village pump and Sacrament Sunday bonnets. To do these
things are no discredit to the women who are meant to do them, and who
do them well; but we cannot all be patient Marthas. I know, because I've
honestly tried my best myself.”
“When you say that, you're laughing at me, I fear,” said Bell, a little
blamefully.
“I wasn't thinking of you,” said her sister, vexed. “And if I was, and
had been laughing, I would be laughing at the very things I love; it's
only the other things that make me solemn. Your way, Bell, was always
clear before you--there you were the lucky woman; with genius, as we
have it in the child, the way's perplexed and full of dangers.”
“Is she to be let drift her own way?”
“We got her ten years too late to prevent it,” said Miss Ailie, firmly,
and looked at her brother Dan for some assistance. He had Footles on his
lap, stroking his tousy back, and he listened with twinkling eyes to
the argument, humming the air of the day, that happened to be “Robin
Tamson's Smiddy, O!”
“You're both right and you're both wrong, as Mr. Cleland used to say if
he was taking a dram with folk that had an argument,” said the lawyer;
“but I'm not so clever as Colin Cleland, for I can't ring the bell and
order in the _media sententia_. This I'll say, that to my mind the child
is lucky if she's something short of genius. If I had had a son, my
prayer would always be that he should be off and on about the ordinary.
It's lonely on the mountain-top, and genius generally seems to go with a
poor stomach or a bad lung, and pays an awful price for every ecstasy!”
“Shakespeare!” suggested Miss Ailie.
“And Robert Burns!” cried Bell. “Except for the lass and the glass and
the randan--Poor, misguided laddie! he was like the folk he lived among.
And there was Walter Scott, the best and noblest man God ever gave to
Scotland; he was never on the mountain-top except it was to bring a lot
of people with him there.”
Mr. Dyce cleaned his glasses and chuckled. “H'm,” said he, “I admit
there are exceptions. But please pass me my slippers, Bell; I fall back
on Colin Cleland--you're both right and you're both wrong.”
Miss Bell was so put about at this that she went at once to the kitchen
to start her niece on a course of cookery.