FOR only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us,
but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It
was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked, when he was
gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be
as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her
mother died, but all the same there was an unseen, doleful wreckage.
This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the
house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same
again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest
trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.
Even the town itself was someway altered for a little by the whim that
took the American actor to it. That he should be American, and actor,
too, foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination
stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime in our
simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would
have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us,
who at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a
reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar
of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor, too! earning easy bread by
mimicry and in enormous theatres before folk that have made money--God
knows how!--and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are
doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face and work late hours
in gaslight, finally shall obtain salvation--sinful, and yet--and yet
so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we
looked on Mr. Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for
shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how
the way had been prepared for him by Bud!--a child, but a child who
had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up
clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. &. A. MacGlashan.
Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow's warehouse,
upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the
people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need,
and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing
her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the
mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human, after all,
and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she
not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay and given
her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had
she not by force of sheer example made dumb and stammering bashfulness
in her fellow-pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her
daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry
and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the
little twin teachers of the Pigeons' Seminary could mistake for the kind
of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?
Mr. Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few
days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed
her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her
autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse
or a garibaldi. P. &. A. Mac-Glashan made the front of his shop like a
wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a-prosperous foreign
and colonial trade. One morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past
five instead of six to prove how very wide-awake we were; and the band
paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when
it came to gayety we were not, though small, so very far behind New
York.
But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog
for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up
to himself in the words “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.” Bell took warmly
to him from the outset; so much was in his favor. For one thing he was
spick-and-span though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him
as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that
simple country ladies readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean
within. She forgave the disreputable part in him--the actor--since
William had been one and yet had taught his child her prayers, and she
was willing to overlook the American, seeing William's wife had suffered
from the same misfortune. But oh! the blow she got when she unpacked
what he called his grip and found the main thing wanting!
“Where's your Bible, Mr. Molyneux?” she asked, solemnly. “It's not in
your portmanteau!”
Again it was in his favor that he reddened, though the excuse he had to
make was feeble.
“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head with a sad sort of smile. “And you
to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in
hand! But perhaps in America there's no need for a lamp to the feet and
a light to the path.”
It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a
haggis, that her brother, for Moly-neux's information, said was thought
to be composed of bagpipes boiled. Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and
Molyneux was telling how he simply _had_ to come.
“It's my first time in Scotland,” said he; “and when 'The Iron Hand'
lost its clutch on old Edina's fancy, and the scenery was arrested,
I wasn't so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the
opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. I'll skiddoo from the
gang for a day or two, I said to the manager when we found ourselves
side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he'd wire me when he'd
fixed a settlement, so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of
the American language, and a little Scotch--by absorption.”
“We have only one fault with your coming--that it was not sooner,” said
Mr. Dyce.
“And I'm pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is
to a Scottish training. Chicago's the finest city on earth--in spots;
America's what our Fourth-of-July orators succinctly designate God's
Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn't been any woman better or braver
than Mrs. Molyneux. But we weren't situated to give Bud a show like what
she'd get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn't dwell, as
you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs. Molyneux's a dear, good
girl, but she isn't demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what
Bud's father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came
from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing
her, now that I'm here and see her, I'm glad of it, for my wife and I
are pretty much on the drift most the time in England, as we were in the
United States.”
“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr. Molyneux,” said Mr. Dyce. “It's very
much the same in all countries, I suppose?”
“It's not so bad as stone-breaking nor so much of a cinch as being a
statesman,” said Mr. Molyneux, cheerfully, “but a man's pretty old at
it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I've
still the idea myself that if I'm not likely to be a Booth or Henry
Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back
for a mascot and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide
gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr. Emerson said,
'Hitch your wagon to a star.' I guess if I got a good star bridled, I'd
hitch a private parlor-car and a steam-yacht onto her before she flicked
an ear. Who wants a wagon, anyway?”
“A wagon's fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr. Dyce, twinkling
through his glasses.
“So's a hearse,” said Mr. Molyneux, quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled
in a hearse ever complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his
feelings jarred, but it's a mighty slow conveyance for live folks.
That's the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this cute little
British kingdom; it's pretty and it's what the school-marm on the coach
would call redolent of the dear, dead days beyond recall, and it's
plucky, but it keeps the brakes on most the time and don't give its star
a chance to amble. I guess it's a fine crowded and friendly country to
be bom rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor
in; but take a tenpenny car ride out from Charing Cross and you're in
Lullaby Land and the birds are building nests and carolling in your
whiskers. Life's short; it only gives a man time to wear through one
pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live
every hour of it that I'm not conspicuously dead.”
They were silent in the parlor of the old house that had for generations
sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the
wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green,
curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the
strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to
those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not, sometimes, found in
a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest,
the alarm and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the
shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the
way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises--in an aspect
fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit
of this actor's gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the
sacrilege; even Ailie, sharing in her heart, if less ecstatically, the
fervor for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some
inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo
clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.
“Mr. Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie
White's husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter
nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting
in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument
about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and
profitable call for Johnny's toddy, he would come in chittering as it
were with cold, and his coat collar up on his neck, to say: 'An awfu'
nicht outside! As dark as the inside o' a cow and as cauld as charity!
They're lucky that have fires to sit by.' And he would impress them
so much with the good-fortune of their situation at the time that they
would order in another round and put off their going all the longer,
though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I
feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions
and its lack of hurry, when I hear you--with none of Johnny White's
stratagem--tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what
to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive.
You'll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for
another round. Life's short, as you say, but I don't think it makes it
look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely
daundering--if you happen to know what daunder-ing is, Mr. Molyneux--and
now and then resting on the road-side with a friend and watching the
others pass.”
“At fifty-five,” said Mr. Molyneux, agreeably, “I'll perhaps think so,
too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two.
We've all got to move, at first, Mr. Dyce. That reminds me of a little
talk I had with Bud to-day. That child's growing, Mr. Dyce--grown a heap
of ways. She's hardly a child any longer.”
“Tuts! She's nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving.
“When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet's.”
“Anyhow, she's grown. And it seems to me she's about due for a little
fresh experience. I suppose you'll be thinking of sending her to one
of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her
education?”
“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr.
Dyce, quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination
manner.
“Well she did--but she didn't know it,” said Mr. Molyneux. “I guess
about the very last thing that child'd suggest to anybody would be that
she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but
if there's one weakness about her it is that she can't conceal what she
thinks, and I'd not been twenty minutes in her society before I found
out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that
complaint, and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and
lolling around and dwelling on the past isn't apt to be her foible. Two
or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap-sheaf on
the making of that girl's character, and I know, for there's my wife,
and she had only a year and a half. If she'd had longer I guess she'd
have had more sense than marry me. Bud's got almost every mortal thing
a body wants here, I suppose--love in lumps, a warm, moist soil, and all
the rest of it, but she wants to be hardened off, and for hardening off
a human flower there's nothing better than a three-course college, where
the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”
Miss Bell turned pale--the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a
little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.
“Indeed!” said she; “and I do not see the need for any such thing for
a long while yet. Do you, Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was
enough to show what she thought.
“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,”
continued Mr. Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great
heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it: she cried like
the cherubim and seraphim; said it was snatching all the sunshine out of
her life; and when I said, 'Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?' she
just said 'Scat! and threw a couple of agonized throes. Now Edinburgh's
not so very far away that you'd feel desolated if Bud went to a school
there.”
“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.
“Well, it isn't the Pacific slope if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr.
Molyneux.
“No, but it's the most beautiful city in the wide world for all that,”
cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air and made her
sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had
touched her in the very heart's core of her national pride.
“You're sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to
school?” asked Mr. Dyce.
“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux, slyly.
“No,” said Mr. Dyce, “I know it well enough, but--but I don't believe
it,” and he smiled at his own paradox.
“I have her own words for it.”
“Then she'll go!” said the lawyer, firmly, as if a load was off his
mind, and, oddly, there were no objections from his sisters. “You're not
to imagine, Mr. Molyneux,” he went on, “that we have not thought of this
before. It has for months been never out of our minds, as might be seen
from the fact that we never mentioned it, being loath to take a step
that's going to make considerable difference here. It's not that we
feared we should die of ennui in her absence, for we're all philosophers
and have plenty to engage our minds as well as our activities, and
though you might think us rather rusty here, we get a good deal of fun
with ourselves. She'll go--oh yes, of course she'll go--Ailie went--and
she's no muckle the waur o't, as we say. I spent some time in the south
myself, and the only harm it seems to have done me was to make me think
too much, perhaps, of my native north. Taste's everything, Mr. Molyneux,
and you may retort if you please that I'm like the other Scotsman who
preferred his apples small and hard and sour. I think there's no divine
instruction, is there, Bell, about apples? and judgments regarding
different countries and different places in them is mostly a subjective
thing, like the estimate of beauty apart from its utility--”
“Oh! there you are at your metapheesics, Daa,” cried Miss Bell, “and
it's for me and Ailie to make ready the bairn for Edinburgh. She hasna
got a stitch that's fit to be put on.”
Molyneux stared at her; the tone displayed so little opposition to the
project; and seeing him so much surprised the three of them smiled.
“That's us!” said Mr. Dyce. “We're dour and difficult to decide on
anything involving change, and hide from ourselves as long as we can the
need for it, but once our mind's made up it's wonderful how we hurry.”