FOR all the regrets of increasing age there is one alleviation among
many, that days apart from those we love pass the quicker, even as our
hurrying years. Thus it is that separations are divested of more and
more of their terrors the nearer we are to that final parting which
wipes out all and is but the going to a great reunion. So the first
fortnight, whereof Miss Bell thought to cheat the almanac under the
delusion that Bud's absence would then scarcely be appreciated, was in
truth the period when she missed her most, and the girl was back for her
Christmas holidays before half of her threepenny bits for the plate were
done.
It was worth a year of separation to see her come in at the door, rosy
from the frosty air, with sparkling eyes and the old, sweet, rippling
laugh, not--outside at least--an atom different from the girl who had
gone away; and it made up to Bud herself for many evenings homesick on
an Edinburgh pillow to smell again the old celestial Christmas grocery
and feel the warmth of her welcome.
Myself, I like to be important--not of such consequence to the world as
to have it crick its neck with having to look up at me, but now and then
important only to a few old friends; and Bud, likewise, could always
enjoy the upper seat, if the others of her company were never below
the salt. She basked in the flattery that Kate's deportment gave to her
dignity as a young lady educated at tremendous cost.
It was the daft days of her first coming over again; but this time
she saw all with older eyes--and, besides, the novelty of the little
Scottish town was ended. Wanton Wully's bell, pealing far beyond the
burgh bounds--commanding, like the very voice of God, to every ear of
that community, no matter whether it rang at mom or eve--gave her at
once a crystal notion of the smallness of the place, not only in its
bounds of stone and mortar, but in its interests, as compared with the
city, where a thousand bells, canorous on the Sabbath, failed, it was
said, to reach the ears of more than a fraction of the people. The bell,
and John Taggart's band on hogmanay, and the little shops with windows
falling back already on timid appeals, and the gray, high tenements
pierced by narrow entries, and the douce and decent humdrum folk--she
saw them with a more exacting vision, and Ailie laughed to hear them all
summed up as “quaint.”
“I wondered when you would reach 'quaint,'” said Auntie Ailie; “it was
due some time ago, but this is a house where you never hear the word.
Had you remained at the Pige--at the Misses Duff's Seminary, Miss Amelia
would have had you sewing it on samplers, if samplers any longer were
the fashion.”
“Is it not a nice word, 'quaint'?” asked Bud, who, in four months among
critics less tolerant (and perhaps less wise) than the Dyces, had been
compelled to rid herself of many transatlantic terms and phrases.
“There's nothing wrong with 'quaint,' my dear,” said Miss Ailie; “it
moves in the most exclusive circles; if I noticed it particularly, it
is because it is the indication of a certain state of mind, and tells me
where you stand in your education more clearly than your first quarterly
report. I came home from school with 'quaint' myself; it not only seemed
to save a lot of trouble by being a word which could be applied to
anything not otherwise describable, but I cherished it because its use
conferred on me a kind of inward glow of satisfaction like--like--like
Aunt Bell's homemade ginger cordial. 'Quaint,' Bud, is the shibboleth of
boarding-school culture; when you can use the word in the proper
place, with a sense of superiority to the thing so designated, you are
practically a young lady and the polish is taking on.”
“They all say it in our school,” explained Bud, apologetically; “at
least all except The Macintosh--I couldn't think of her saying it,
somehow.
“Who's The Macintosh?” asked Ailie.
“Why! was there no Macintosh in your time?” exclaimed Bud. “I thought
she went away back to the--to the Roman period. She's the funniest
old lady in the land, and comes twice a week to teach us dancing and
deportment. She's taught them to mostly all the nobility and gentry of
Scotland; she taught Lady Anne and all her brothers when they were in
St. Andrew's.”
“I never heard of her,” said Ailie; “she must be--be--be decidedly
quaint.”
“She's so quaint you'd think she'd be kept in a corner cupboard with a
bag of camphor at the back to scare the moths away. She's a little wee
mite, not any bigger than me--than I--and they say she's seventy years
old; but sometimes she doesn't look a day more than forty-five, if
it weren't for her cap and her two front teeth missing. She's got the
loveliest fluffy, silver hair--pure white, like Mrs. Molyneux's Aunt
Tabitha's Persian cat--cheeks like an apple, hands as young as yours,
and when she walks across a room she glides like this, so you'd think
she was a cutter yacht--”
Bud sailed across the parlor to represent the movement of The Macintosh
with an action that made her aunties laugh, and the dog gave one short
yelp of disapproval.
“That was the way that Grandma Buntain walked--it used to be considered
most genteel,” said Bell. “They trained girls up to it with a back-board
and a book on the top of the head; but it was out before my time; we
just walked any way in Barbara Mushet's seminary, where the main things
were tambouring and the catechism.”
“Miss Macintosh is a real lady,” Bud went on. “She's got genuine old
ancestors. They owned a Highland place called Kaims, and the lawyers
have almost lawyered it a' awa', she says, so now she's simply got to
help make a living teaching dancing and deportment. I declare I don't
know what deportment is no more than the child unborn, unless it's
shutting the door behind you, walking into a room as if your head and
your legs were your own, keeping your shoulders back, and being polite
and kind to everybody, and I thought folks 'd do all that without
attending classes, unless they were looney. Miss Macintosh says they are
the _sine qua non_ and principal branches for a well-bred young lady
in these low days of clingy frocks and socialism; but the principal
she just smiles and gives us another big block of English history. Miss
Macintosh doesn't let on, but I know she simply can't stand English
history, for she tells us, spells between quadrilles, that there hasn't
been any history anywhere since the Union of the Parliaments, except
the Rebellion of 1745. But she doesn't call it a rebellion. She calls
it 'yon affair.' _She's_ Scotch! I tell you, Auntie Bell, you'd love to
meet her! I sit, and sit, and look at her like--like a cat. She
wears spectacles, just a little clouded, only she doesn't call them
spectacles; she says they are preserves, and that her eyes are as good
as anybody's. They're bright enough, I tell you, for over seventy.”
“Indeed, I would like to see the creature!” exclaimed Miss Bell. “She
must be an original! I'm sometimes just a trifle tired of the same old
folk about me here--I know them all so well, and all they're like to do
or say, that there's nothing new or startling to be expected from them.”
“Would you like to see her?” said Bud, quickly; “then--then, some day
I'll tell her, and I'll bet she'll come. She dresses queer--like a lady
in the 'School for Scandal,' and wears long mittens like Miss Minto, and
when our music-master, Herr Laurent, is round she makes goo-goo eyes at
him fit to crack her glasses. 'Oh, Hair-r-r!' she says, sitting with
her mitts in her lap--'oh, Hair-r-r! Can you no' give the young ladies
wiselike Scotch songs instead o' that dreich Concone?' And sometimes
she'll hit him with a fan. He says she plays the piano to our dancing
the same as it was a spinet.”
“I declare it beats all!” said Miss Bell. “Does the decent old body
speak Scotch?”
“Sometimes. When she's making goo-goo eyes at the Herr, or angry, or
finding fault with us but doesn't want to hurt our feelings.”
“I can understand that,” said Miss Bell, with a patriot's fervor;
“there's nothing like the Scotch for any of them. I fall to it myself
when I'm sentimental; and so does your uncle Dan.”
“She says she's the last of the real Macintoshes--that all the rest you
see on Edinburgh signboards are only in-comers or poor de-degenerate
cadets; and I guess the way she says it, being a de-degenerate cadet
Mackintosh must be the meanest thing under the cope and canopy. Heaps of
those old ancestors of hers went out in the days of the clans, fighting
for any royalty that happened along. She's got all their hair in
lockets, and makes out that when they disappeared Scotland got a pretty
hard knock. I said to her once the same as Aunt Ailie says to you, Aunt
Bell, 'English and Scots, I s'pose we're all God's people, and it's
a terribly open little island to be quarrelling in, seeing all the
Continent can hear us quite plain,' but she didn't like it. She said it
was easy seen I didn't understand the dear old Highland mountains, where
her great-great-grandfather, Big John of the Axe, could collect five
hundred fighting-men if he wagged a fiery cross at them. 'I have Big
John's blood in me!' she said, quite white, and her head shaking so much
her preserves nearly fell off her nose. 'I've Big John's blood in me;
and when I think of things, _I hate the very name o' thae aboaminable
English!_' 'Why, you've never seen them, Miss Mackintosh,' I said--for
I knew she'd never had a foot outside Scotland. 'No,' said she, quite
sharp, 'and I don't want to, for they might be nice enough, and then I
wad be bound to like them.'”
“Oh, Bell!” cried Ailie, laughing, “Miss Mackintosh is surely your
doppelganger.”
“I don't know what a doppelganger is,” said Auntie
Bell; “but she's a real sensible body, and fine I would like to see
her.”
“Then I'll have to fix it somehow,” said Bud, with emphasis. “P'r'aps
you'll meet her when you come to Edinburgh--”
“I'm not there yet, my dear.”
“Or she might be round this way by-and-by. She'd revel in this place;
she'd maybe not call it quaint, but she'd find it pretty careless about
being in the--in the modern rush she talks about, and that would make her
happier than a letter from home. I believe The Macintosh--”
“Miss Macintosh, my dear,” said Bell, reprovingly, and the girl reddened.
“I know,” said she. “It's mean to talk of her same as she was a
waterproof, and I often try not to, because I like her immensely; but
it's so common among the girls that I forget. I believe Miss Macintosh
would love this place and could stop in it forever.”
“Couldn't you?” asked Auntie Ailie, slyly.
Bud hesitated. “Well, I--I like it,” said she. “I just love to lie awake
nights and think about it, and I can hear the wind in the trees and the
tide come in, and the bell, and the wild geese; and family worship at
the Provost's on Sunday nights, and I can almost _be_ here, I think so
powerfully about it; but--but--” She stopped short, for she saw a look
of pain in the face of her auntie Bell.
“But what?” said the latter, sharply.
“Oh, I'm a wicked, cruel, ungrateful girl, Auntie Bell; and I ought to
want to love this place so much, nobody could push me out of it. And I
_do_ love it, but feel if I lived here always I'd not grow any more.”
“You're big enough,” said Auntie Bell. “You're as big as myself now.”
“I mean inside. Am I a prig, Aunt Ailie? I'd hate to be a prig! But I'd
hate as bad to tell a lie; and I feel I'd never learn half so much or do
half so much here as I'd do where thousands of folk were moving along
in a procession and I was with them, too. A place like this is like a
kindergarten--it's good enough as far's it goes, but it doesn't teach
the higher branches.”
Bell gazed at her in wonder and pity and blame, shaking her head. All
this was what she had anticipated.
“I know the feeling,” said Aunt Ailie, “for I have shared it myself; and
sometimes still it will come back to me, but in my better hours I think
I'm wiser and can be content. If there is growth in you, you will grow
anywhere. You were born in the noise of Chicago, Bud, and I suppose it's
hard to get it out of the ears. By-and-by I hope you'll find that we are
all of us most truly ourselves, not in the crowd, but when we are alone,
and that not the smallest hamlet in the world need be intellectually
narrow for any one with imagination, some books, and a cheerful
constitution. Do you understand that, Bud?”
Bud thought hard for a moment and then shook her head. “It sounds as if
it ought to be true,” said she, “and I dare say you think just now it
is true; but I simply _can't_ believe it.” And all of them turned at the
sound of a chuckling laugh to find that Mr. Dyce had heard this frank
confession.
“That's the worst of you, Bud,” said he. “You will never let older folk
do your thinking for you.”