BELL liked the creature, as I say, not a little because she saw in
him whence came some part of Bud's jocosity and most of the daftlike
language (though kind of clever, too, she must allow) in which it was
expressed. It was a different kind of jocosity from Dan's, whose fun,
she used to say, partook of the nature of rowan jelly, being tart and
sweet in such a cunning combination that it tickled every palate and
held some natural virtue of the mountain tree. The fun of Molyneux had
another flavor; it put her in mind of allspice, being foreign, having
heat as well as savor. But in each of these droll men was the main
thing, as she would aye consider it--no distrust of the Creator's
judgment, good intentions, and ability, and a readiness to be laughed
at as well as find laughter's cause in others. She liked the man, but
still-and-on was almost glad when the telegram came from Edinburgh and
he went back to join his company. It was not any lack of hospitality
made her feel relief, but the thought that now Bud's going was
determined on, there was so much to do in a house where men would only
be a bother.
Mr. Molyneux found himself so much at home among them he was loath to
go, expressing his contempt for a mode of transit to the railway that
took two hours to nineteen miles, but Bell, defensive even of her
country's coaches, told him he was haivering--that any greater speed
than that was simply tempting Providence. He praised the Lord there was
no Providence to be tempted inside Sandy Hook, and that he knew Beef
Kings who hurled themselves across the landscape at the rate of a mile
a minute. The fact inspired no admiration in Miss Bell; she wondered at
the misguided wretches scudding like that regardless of their lives, and
them with so much money.
Before he left he called at the Pigeons' Seminary to say good-bye to
the little teachers, and sipped tea, a British institution which he
told them was as deleterious as the High Ball of his native land. High
Ball--what was a High Ball? asked Miss Amelia, scenting a nice new
phrase, but he could only vaguely indicate that it was something made of
rye and soda. Then she understood--it was a teetotal drink men took
in clubs, a kind of barley-water. The tea gratified him less than the
confidence of the twins, who told him they had taken what he said about
the--about the shameful article so much to heart, that they had given it
for a razor-strop to one George Jordon.
“Bully for you!” cried Mr. Molyneux, delighted. “But I'd have liked
that tawse some myself, for my wife's mighty keen on curios. She's got
a sitting-room full of Navajo things--scalpin'-knives, tomahawks, and
other brutal bric-à-brac--and an early British strap would tickle her to
death.”
Well, he was gone--the coachman's horn had scarcely ceased to echo
beyond the arches when Miss Bell had thrown herself into the task of
preparing for Bud's change in life.
What school was she to go to in Edinburgh? Ailie knew; there was none
better than the one she had gone to herself.
When did it open? Ailie knew: in a fortnight. What, exactly, would she
need? Ailie knew that, too: she had in the escritoire a list of things
made up already.
“It seems to me,” said Miss Bell, suspiciously, “you're desperately well
informed on all that appertains to this sudden necessity. How long has
it been in your mind?”
“For a twelvemonth at least,” answered Ailie, boldly. “How long has it
been in your own?”
“H'm!” said Bell. “About as long, but I aye refused to harbor it;
and--and now that the thing's decided on, Ailie Dyce, I hope you're not
going to stand there arguing away about it all day long when there's so
much to do.”
Surely there was never another house so thronged, so bustling, so
feverish in anxiety as this one was for another fortnight. The upper
and the lower Dyce Academy took holiday; Kate's education stopped with a
sudden gasp at a dreadful hill called Popocatapetl, and she said she did
not care a button, since Captain Maclean (no longer Charles to any one
except himself and Bud in the more confidential moments) said the main
things needed in a sailor's wife were health, hope, and temper, and
a few good-laying hens. Miss Minto was engaged upon Bud's grandest
garments running out and in next door herself with inch-tapes over her
shoulders and a mouthful of pins, and banging up against the lawyer in
his lobby to her great distress of mind. And Bell had in the seamstress,
'Lizbeth Ann, to help her and Ailie with the rest. Mercator sulked
neglected on the wall of Mr. Dyce's study, which was strewn with
basting-threads and snippets of selvedge and lining till it looked like
a tailor's shop, and Bud and Footles played on the floor of it with
that content which neither youth nor dogs can find in chambers trim and
orderly. Even Kate was called in to help these hurried operations--they
called it the making of Bud's trousseau. In the garden birds were
calling, calling; far sweeter in the women's ears were the snip-snip
of scissors, the whir of the sewing-machine; needle-arms went back and
forth like fiddle-bows in an orchestra, and from webs of cloth and linen
came forth garments whose variety intoxicated her who was to wear
them. I'm thinking Daniel Dyce lived simply then, with rather makeshift
dinners, but I'm certain, knowing him well, he did not care, since his
share in the great adventure was to correspond with Edinburgh and pave
the way there for the young adventurer's invasion.
He would keek in at the door on them as he passed to his office, and
Ailie would cry, “Avaunt, man! here woman reigns!” “It's a pleasant
change,” he would say. “I would sooner have them rain than storm.”
“You're as bad as Geordie Jordon,” said Miss Bell, biting thread with
that zest that always makes me think her sex at some time must have
lived on cotton--“you're as bad as Geordie Jordon: you cannot see a
key-hole but your eye begins to water.”
If it had, indeed, been Bud's trousseau, the townfolk could not
have displayed more interest. Ladies came each day to see how things
progressed and recommend a heavier lining or another row of the
insertion. Even Lady Anne came one afternoon to see the trousseau, being
interested, as she slyly said, in such things for private reasons of her
own, and dubious about the rival claims of ivory or pure white. So she
said, but she came, no doubt, to assure Miss Lennox that her captain was
a great success.
“I knew he'd be!” said Bud, complacently. “That man's so beautiful and
good he's fit for the kingdom of heaven.”
“So are you, you rogue,” said Lady Anne, gathering her in her arms,
without a bit of awkwardness, to the great astonishment of 'Lizbeth Ann,
who thought that titled folk were not a bit like that--perhaps had not
the proper sort of arms for it. “Yes, so are you, you rogue!” said Lady
Anne.
“No, I'm not,” said the child. “Leastways only sometimes. Most the time
I'm a born limb, but then again I'm nearly always trying to be better,
and that's what counts, I guess.”
“And you're going away to leave us,” said Lady Anne, whereon a strange
thing happened, for the joyous child, who was to get her heart's desire
and such lovely garments, burst into tears and ran from the room to hide
herself up-stairs in the attic bower, whose windows looked to a highway
that seemed hateful through her tears. Her ladyship went off distressed,
but Bell, as one rejoicing, said:
“I always told you, Ailie--William's heart!”
But Bud's tears were transient; she was soon back among the snippets
where Ailie briskly plied the sewing-machine and sang the kind of
cheerful songs that alone will go to the time of pedalling, and so give
proof that the age of mechanism is the merry age if we have the happy
ear for music. And Bud, though she tired so soon of hems, could help
another way that busy convocation, for she could sit tucked up in Uncle
Dan's snoozing chair, and read _Pickwick_ to the women till the maid
of Colonsay was in the mood to take the Bardell body by the hair of the
head and shake her for her brazenness to the poor wee man. Or the child
would dance as taught by the lady of the Vaudeville, or start at
Ailie's bidding (Bell a little dubious) to declaim a bit of “Hamlet”
or “Macbeth,” till 'Lizbeth Ann saw ghosts and let her nerves get the
better of her, and there was nothing for it but a cheery cup of tea all
round. Indeed, I must confess, a somewhat common company! I could almost
wish for the sake of my story they were more genteel, and dined at
half-past seven and talked in low, hushed tones of Bach and Botticelli.
But oh! they were happy days--at least so far as all outward symptoms
went; it might, indeed, have been a real trousseau and not the garments
for the wedding of a maiden and the world. How often, in the later
years, did Winifred Wallace, reading to me her own applause in
newspapers, stop to sigh and tell me how she once was really
happy--happy to the inward core, feeling the dumb applause of four women
in a country chamber when the world was all before her and her heart was
young?