IT took two maids to fill Kate's place in the Dyces' household--one for
the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere,
as the lawyer argued, and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell
called their breaking in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that
she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone; she must sit in
the parlor strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain's Broadwood, taming
her heart of fire. It was as a voice from Heaven's lift there came one
day a letter from London in which Mrs. Molyneux invited her and one of
her aunts for an Easter holiday.
“Indeed and I'll be glad to be quit for a week or two of both of you,”
said Bell to her niece and Ailie. “Spring cleaning, with a couple of
stupid huzzies in the kitchen--not but what they're nice and willing
lassies--is like to be the sooner ended if we're left to it ourselves.”
A radiant visage and lips in firm control betrayed how Lennox felt. She
had never been in London--its cry went pealing through her heart. Ailie
said nothing, but marvelled how blithely and blindly her sister always
set foot on the facile descent that led to her inevitable doom of
deprivation and regret.
“The Grand Tour!” said Uncle Dan; “it's the fitting termination to your
daft days, Lennox. Up by at the castle there's a chariot with imperials
that conveyed the Earl on his, the hammer-cloth most lamentably faded.
I often wonder if his lordship takes a sly seat in it at times when no
one's looking, and climbs the Alps or clatters through Italian towns
again when Jones the coachman is away at his tea. It's a thing I might
do myself if I had made the Tour and still had the shandrydan.”
“Won't you really need me?” Aunt Ailie asked her sister, and half
hoped, half feared spring cleaning should postpone the holiday, but
Bell maintained it should be now or never, more particularly as Lennox's
dress was new.
Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse
bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic
moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel
windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding
round country trees; the throngs of people, the odors of fruit-shops,
the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery gray, and the multitudinous
monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the
silence of mighty parks--Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.
Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her and shook a
living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too
calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did
she seem to have a place for any stranger; now he had found she could be
bullied, that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor
could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager
of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls and the
play was as often as not “The Father's Curse”; but once a day he walked
past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement,
planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble and
duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement
awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a
pea-green house with nine French bean rows and some clumps of bulbs
behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk
and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of
success--teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that's what ails
the boys, and makes 'em sleepier than Hank M'Cabe's old tomcat. Good
boys, dear boys, they've always got the long-lost-brother grip, but
they're mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling
in the middle of the day. When they've got cobwebs in their little
brilliantined belfries, I'm full of the songs of spring and merry old
England's on the lee. See? I don't even need to grab; all I've got to do
is to look deserving and the stuff comes crowding in; it always does
to a man who looks like ready money and don't lunch on cocktails and
cloves.”
“Jim, boyette,” his wife would say, “I guess you'd better put ice or
something on your bump of self-esteem “--but she proudly wore the jewels
that were the rewards of his confidence and industry.
Bud and Ailie, when they thought of home in these days, thought of it
as a picture only, or as a chapter in a book covered in mouldy
leather, with fs for s's. In their prayers alone were Dan and Bell real
personages; and the far-off little town was no longer a woodcut, but an
actual place blown through by the scented airs of forest and sea. Bell
wrote them of rains and hails and misty weather; Grove Lane gardens
breathed of daffodils, and the city gleamed under a constant sun.
They came back to the pea-green house each day from rare adventuring,
looking, in the words of Molyneux, as if they were fresh come off
the farm, and the best seats in half a dozen theatres were at their
disposal. “Too much of the playhouse altogether!” Bell wrote once,
remonstrating. “Have you heard that man in the City Temple yet?”
In Molyneux's own theatre there was a break in the long succession of
melodrama and musical comedy. He privately rejoiced that, for two ladies
of such taste as Ailie and her niece, he could display a piece of the
real legitimate--“King John”--though Camberwell was not very likely to
make a week of Shakespeare profitable to his treasury. Ailie and Bud
were to go on Tuesday; and Bud sat up at night to read an acting copy of
“King John” till every character took flesh in her imagination, and the
little iron balcony behind the pea-green house became the battlemented
walls of Angiers, to whose postern came trumpeters of France.
They sat in the drawing-room, astonished at her speeches--
“'You men of Angiers, open wide your gates,
And let young Arthur, Duke of Bretagne, in;
Who, by the hand of France, this day hath made
Much work for tears in many an English, mother.'”
or--
'“I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I am Geffrey's wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!'”
“Bravo, Bud!” would Molyneux cry, delighted. “Why, if I was an
actor-manager, I'd pay you any salary you had the front to name. Ain't
she just great, Millicent? I tell you, Miss Ailie, she puts the blinkers
on Maude Adams, and sends Ellen 'way back in the standing room only.
Girly, all you've got to learn is how to move. You mustn't stand two
minutes in the same place on the stage, but cross 'most every cue.”
“I don't know,” said Bud, dubiously. “Why should folk have fidgets on a
stage? They don't always have them in real life. I'd want to stand like
a mountain--_you_ know, Auntie Ailie, the old hills at home!--and look
so--so--so awful, the audience would shriek if I moved, the same as if I
was going to fall on them.”
“Is that how you feel?” asked Jim Molyneux, curiously surveying her.
“Yes, that's how I feel,” said Bud, “when I've got the zip of poetry in
me. I feel I'm all made up of burning words and eyes.”
“Child, you are very young!” said Mrs Molyneux.
“Yes,” said Bud, “I suppose that's it. By-and-by I'll maybe get to be
like other people.”
Jim Molyneux struck the table with his open hand. “By George!” he cried;
“I wouldn't hurry being like other people; that's what every gol-damed
idiot in England's trying, and you're right on the spot just now as you
stand. That's straight talk, nothing but! I allow I favor a bit of leg
movement on the stage--generally it's about the only life there is on
it--but a woman who can play with her head don't need to wear out much
shoe-leather. Girly--” He stopped a second, then burst out with the
question, “How'd you like a little part in this 'King John'?”
A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew
exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “Oh Jim Molyneux, don't be so
cruel!”
“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they've got an Arthur in
the cast who's ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had
an understudy--and if I--Think you could play a boy's part? There isn't
much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of
Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch
the eye of the _cognoscenti._ You'd let her, wouldn't you, Miss Ailie?
It'd be great fun. She'd learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple
of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don't
kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”
Ailie's heart was leaping. Here was the crisis--she knew it--what was
she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour, had often wrestled
with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud
without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered
life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only she
could come to no conclusion; her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled
one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead
for freedom--for freedom and the space that herself had years ago
surrendered--now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the
bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.
“Just this once!” pleaded Mr. Molyneux, understanding her scruples.
Bud's face mutely pleaded.
Yes, “just this once!”--it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers
of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the
beginning was years ago--before the mimicry on the first New Year's
morning, before the night of the dozen candles or the creation of The
Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.
“I really don't mind much myself,” said Ailie at last, “but I fancy her
aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”
“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox, quickly; “but when
the thing was over she'd be as pleased as Punch--at least she'd laugh
the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the
ball.”
The sound of Will Oliver's curfew died low in Ailie's mind, the
countenance of Bell grew dim; she heard, instead, the clear young voice
of Bud among the scenery and sat with an enraptured audience. “If you
are all so anxious for it, then--” she said, and the deed was done!
She did not rue it when the night of Bud's performance came, and her
niece as the hapless young Bretagne welcomed the dauphin before the
city gates; she gloried in the natural poignancy that marked the painful
scene with Hubert come to torture, but she almost rued it when Molyneux,
having escorted them in an inexplicable silence home, broke out at last
in fervent praise of his discovery as soon as the girl had left them for
her bed.
“I've kept clutch of myself with considerable difficulty,” he said, “for
I didn't want to spoil girly's sleep or swell her head, but I want to
tell you, Millicent, and you, Miss Ailie, that _I've Found my Star!_
Why, say, she's out of sight! She was the only actor in all that company
to-night who didn't know she was in Camberwell; she was right in the
middle of mediaeval France from start to finish, and when she was picked
up dead at the end of the fourth act she was so stone-cold and stiff
with thinking it she scared the company. I suspect, Miss Ailie, that
you're going to lose that girl!”