WHEN Kate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow
she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her
apron over her head, and cried and laughed horribly turn about--the
victim of hysteria that was half from fear and half from a bliss too
deep and unexpected.
“Mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “Now he'll find out everything, and what a
stupid one I am. All my education's clean gone out of my head; I'm sure
I couldn't spell an article. I canna even mind the ninth commandment,
let alone the Reasons Annexed, and as for grammar, whether it's 'Give
the book to Bud and me,' or 'Give the book to Bud and I,' is more than
I could tell you if my very life depended on it. Oh, Lennox, now we're
going to catch it! Are you certain sure he said to-morrow?”
Bud gazed at her disdainfully and stamped her foot. “Stop that, Kate
MacNeill!” she commanded. “You mustn't act so silly. He's as skeered of
you as you can be of him. He'd have been here Friday before the morning
milk if he didn't think you'd be the sort to back him into a corner and
ask him questions about ancient Greece and Rome. Seems to me love makes
some folk idiotic; land's sake! I'm mighty glad it always leaves me calm
as a plate of pumpkin-pie.”
“Is--is--he looking tremendously genteel and wellput-on?” asked the maid
of Colonsay, with anxious lines on her forehead. “Is he--is he as nice
as I said he was?”
“He was everything you said--except the Gaelic. I knew he couldn't be so
bad as that sounded that you said about his eyes. I--I never saw a more
becoming man. If I had known just how noble he looked, I'd have sent
him stacks of poetry,” whereat Kate moaned again, rocked herself in her
chair most piteously, and swore she could never have the impudence to
see him till she had her new frock from the dressmaker's.
“He'll be thinking I'm refined and quite the lady,” she said, “and I'm
just the same plain Kate I was in Colonsay, and him a regular captain!
It was all your fault, with your fancy letters. Oh, Lennox Dyce, I think
I hate you, just--lend me your hanky; mine's all wet with greeting.”
“If you weren't so big and temper wasn't sinful, I'd shake you!” said
Bud, producing her handkerchief. “You were just on your last legs for a
sailor, and you'd never have put a hand on one if I didn't write these
letters. And now, when the sweetest sailor in the land is brought to
your door-step, you don't 'preciate your privileges and have a grateful
heart, but turn round and yelp at me. I tell you, Kate MacNeill, sailors
are mighty scarce and sassy in a little place like this, and none too
easy picked up, and 'stead of sitting there, with a smut on your nose
and tidemarks on your eyebrows, mourning, you'd best arise and shine, or
somebody with their wits about them 'll snap him up. I'd do it myself if
it wouldn't be not honorable to you.”
“Oh, if I just had another week or two's geography!” said Kate,
dolefully.
Bud had to laugh--she could not help herself; and the more she laughed,
the more tragic grew the servant's face.
“Seems to me,” said Bud, “that I've got to run this loving business all
along the line; you don't know the least thing about it after g-o, go.
Why, Kate, I'm telling you Charles is afraid of you more than you are of
him. He thought you'd be that educated you'd wear specs, and stand quite
stiff talking poetry all the time, and I had to tell him every dinky bit
in these letters were written by me.”
“Then that's worse!” cried the servant, more distressed than ever. “For
he'll think I canna write myself, and I can write like fury if you only
give me a decent pen and don't bother me.”
“No fears!” said Bud; “I made that all right. I said you were too busy
housekeeping, and I guess it's more a housekeeper than a school-marm
Charles needs. Anyhow, he's so much in love with you, he'd marry you if
you were a deaf-mute; he's plumb head over heels, and it's up to you, as
a sensible girl, not to conceal that you like him some yourself.”
“I'll not know what to say to him,” said Kate, “and he always was so
clever; half the time I couldna understand him if it wasn't for his
eyes.”
“Well, he'll know what to say to you, I guess, if all the signs are
right. Charles is not so shy as all that--love-making is where he lives,
and he made goo-goo eyes at myself without an introduction. You'd fancy,
to hear you, he was a school inspector, and he's only just an or'nary
lover thinking of the happy days you used to have in Colonsay. If I was
you I'd not let on I was anything but what I really was; I'd be natural;
yes, that's what I'd be, for being natural's the deadliest thing below
the canopy to make folk love you. Don't pretend, but just be the same
Kate MacNeill to him you are to me. Just you listen to him, and now and
then look at him, and don't think of a darned thing--I mean don't think
of a blessed thing but how nice he is, and he'll be so pleased and so
content he'll not even ask you to spell cat.”
“Content!” cried Kate, with conviction. “Not him! Fine I ken him! He'll
want to kiss me, as sure as God's in heaven--beg your pardon.”
“I expect that's not a thing you should say to me,” said Bud, blushing
deeply.
“But I begged your pardon,” said the maid.
“I don't mean that about God in heaven, that's right--so He is, or where
would _we_ be?--what I meant was about the kissing. I'm old enough for
love, but I'm not old enough for you to be talking to me about kissing,
I guess Auntie Ailie wouldn't like to have you talk to me about a thing
like that, and Auntie Bell, she'd be furious--it's too advanced.”
“What time am I to see him?” asked Kate.
“In the morning. If you go out to the garden just after breakfast,
and whistle, he'll look over the wall.”
“The morning!” cried the maid, aghast. “I couldn't face him in the
morning. Who ever heard of such a thing? Now you have gone away and
spoiled everything! I could hardly have all my wits about me even if it
was only gloaming.”
Bud sighed despairingly. “Oh, you don't understand, Kate,” said she.
“He wanted it to be the evening, too, but I said you weren't a miserable
pair of owls, and the best time for anything is the morning. Uncle Dan
says the first half-hour in the morning is worth three hours at any
other time of the day, for when you've said your prayers, and had a good
bath, and a clean shave, and your boots new on--no slippers nor slithery
dressing-gowns--the peace of God and--and--and the assurance of strength
and righteousness descends upon you so that you--you--you can tackle
wild-cats. I feel so brash and brave myself in the morning I could
skip the hills like a goat. It's simply _got_ to be the morning, Kate
MacNeill. That's when you look your very best, if you care to take a
little trouble, and don't simply just slouch through, and I'm set on
having you see him first time over the garden wall. That's the only way
to fix the thing up romantic, seeing we haven't any balcony. You'll go
out and stand against the blossom of the cherry-tree, and hold a basket
of flowers and parsley, and when he peeks over and sees you looming
out the picture, I tell you he'll be tickled to death. That's the way
Shakespeare 'd fix it, and he knew.”
“I don't think much of Shakespeare,” said Kate. “Fancy yon Igoa!”
“Iago, you mean. Well, what about him?”
“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”
“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never
really was such a mean, wicked man as that Iago--there couldn't be--but
Shakespeare made him just so's you'd like the nice folk all the more by
thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”
That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her--the
cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the
Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows
of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the
dark, but having said her Lord's Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me
down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and
thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell
asleep.
In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds,
that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin,
and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud
flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this
world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager
pair; no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up, and had
dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.
“What's that?” asked Bud. “You're not going to put on glad rags, are
you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.
“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It's either that or my print for it, and
a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet--meet the Captain
in; he'll be expecting me to be truly refined.”
“I think he'd like the wrapper better,” said Bud, gravely. “The blue
gown's very nice--but it's not Kate, somehow; do you know, I think it's
Auntie Ailie up to about the waist, and the banker's cook in the lacey
bits above that, and it don't make you refined a bit. It's not what you
put on that makes you refined, it's things you can't take off. You have
no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron.
You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion.
I'd want to marry you myself if I was a captain and saw you dressed like
that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I'd--I'd bite my lip and go
home and ask advice from mother.”
Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by
now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed
and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud's
choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous
dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.
“I'd have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just
dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean
water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and
any other kind's as rude as Keating's Powder.”
“He'll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing that it was
himself that sent it.”
“It don't amount to a hill of beans,” said Bud; “you can wear our
locket, and that 'll please him.” Kate went with a palpitating heart
through the scullery, out into the garden, with a basket in her hand, a
pleasing and expansive figure. Bud would have liked to watch her, but a
sense of delicacy prevented, and she stood at the kitchen window looking
resolutely into the street. On his way down the stairs Mr. Dyce was
humming the Hundredth Psalm; outside the shops were shuttered, and the
harmony of the morning hymn came from the baker's open windows. A
few folk passed in their Sunday clothes, at a deliberate pace, to
differentiate it from the secular hurry of other days. Soon the
church bell would ring for the Sabbath-school, and Bud must be ready.
Remembering it, a sense of some impiety took possession of her--worldly
trysts in back gardens on the Sabbath were not what Aunt Bell would much
approve of. Had they met yet? How did Charles look? What did Kate say?
“Mercy on me!” cried the maid, bursting in through the scullery. “Did
you say I was to whistle?”
“Of course,” said Bud, and then looked horrified “Oh, Kate,” said she,
in a whisper, “I was so keen on the vain things of this wicked world I
quite forgot it was the Lord's Day; of course you can't go whistling on
Sunday.”
“That's what I was just thinking to myself,” said the maid, not very
heartily. “But I thought I would ask you. It wouldn't need to be a time,
but--but of course it would be awful wicked--forbye Miss Dyce would be
sure to hear me, and she's that particular.”
“No, you can't whistle; you daren't,” said Bud. “It'd be dre'ffle
wicked. But how'd it do to throw a stone? Not a rock, you know, but
a nice little quiet wee white Sunday pebble? You might like as not be
throwing it at Rodger's cats, and that would be a work of necessity and
mercy, for these cruel cats are just death on birds.”
“But there's not a single cat there,” explained the maid.
“Never mind,” said Bud. “You can heave the pebble over the wall so that
it 'll be a warning to them not to come poaching in our garden; there's
sure to be some on the other side just about to get on the wall; and if
Charles happens to be there, can you help that?” and Kate retired again.
There was a pause, and then a sound of laughter. For ten minutes Bud
waited in an agony of curiosity, that was at last too much for her, and
she ventured to look out at the scullery window--to see Charles chasing
his adored one down the walk, between the bleaching-green and the
gooseberries. Kate was making for the sanctuary of her kitchen, her face
aflame and all her streamers flying, but was caught before she entered.
“I told you!” said she, as she came in panting. “We hadn't said twenty
words when he wanted to kiss me.”
“Why! was that the reason you ran?” asked Bud, astonished.
“Ye--yes,” said the maid.
“Seems to me it's not very encouraging to Charles, then.”
“Yes, but--but I wasn't running all my might,” said Kate.