The Daft Days

“Still, do you know, my dear, I’d risk a little gaiety now and then,” said Auntie Ailie. “Who knows? The widow, though a worthy lady, is what in Scotland we call an auld wife, and it’s generally admitted that auld wives of either sex have no monopoly of wisdom. If you’re wanting pious guidance, Bud, I don’t know where you’ll get it better than from Auntie Bell; and she fairly dotes on Hallowe’en and the guizards. By-and-by you’ll see the guizards, and – and – well, just wait and we’ll find what else is to be seen. I do wish your Uncle Dan would hurry.”

The street was quite deserted, but did not show its vacancy until the clouds for a moment drifted off the moon that rolled behind the steeple. Then the long grey stretch of tenements came out unreal and pale on the other side of the street, their eaves and chimneys throwing inky shadows, their red-lit windows growing of a sudden wan. Over them hung the ponderous kirk, the master shadow, and all – the white-harled walls, the orange windows, the glittering cold and empty street – seemed like the vision of a dream. Then the clouds wrapped up the moon again, and the black was the black of Erebus. But as it fell, the dull drums seemed to come nearer, and from the head of the street, the windy corner where Uncle Dan had his office, small moons came, purple and golden, fantastically carved. They ran from house to house, and grouped in galaxies, or singly fell apart, swinging and giddy orbs. For a moment Bud looked at them bewildered, then gave a happy scream.

“The lanterns! the lanterns! look at the lanterns, Auntie. Is that Hallowe’en?”

“That’s part of it, at least,” said her Aunt. “These are the guizards with their turnip lanterns; they’re going round the houses singing; by-and-by we’ll hear them.”

“My! I wish to goodness I had a lantern like that. To swing a lantern like that ’d feel like being a lighthouse or the statue of Liberty at New York. I’d rather have a turnip lantern than a raft of dolls.”

“Did you never have one?”

“No,” said Bud sorrowfully. “You have no idea what a poor mean place Chicago is – not a thing but common electric light!” and Miss Ailie smiled gleefully to herself again like one possessed of a lovely secret. “I wish that brother of mine would come quickly,” she said, and at the moment he came out of the darkness to them with a comical look of embarrassment in his face and in his hand an unlighted turnip lantern!

“Here, Bud,” said he, “take this, quickly, before some silly body sees me with it and thinks it’s for myself. I have the name, I know, of being daft enough already, and if it gets about the country that Daniel Dyce was going round at Hallowe’en with a turnip lantern, they would think he had lost his head in a double sense and it would be very bad for business.”

“Uncle!” cried the child in ecstasy, “you’re the loveliest, sweetest man in the whole wide world.”

“I daresay,” said he. “I have been much admired when I was younger. But in this case don’t blame me. I wash my hands of the responsibility. I got my orders for that thing from your Auntie Bell.”

“My! ain’t it cute? Did you make it?” asked Bud, surveying the rudely carved exterior with delight, and her uncle, laughing, put on his glasses to look at it himself.

“No,” said he, “though I’ve made a few of them in my time. All that’s needed is a knife or a mussel-shell, and a dose of Gregory’s Mixture in the morning.”

“What’s the Gregory’s Mixture for?”

“In making a turnip lantern you eat the whole inside of it,” said Mr Dyce. “Perhaps I might have made this one myself if it wasn’t that I know I would hate to see the inside wasted, and still I have mind of the Gregory. I bought the lantern from a boy at the head of the street who was looking very gash and ill, and seemed suspiciously glad to get quit of it. I’m thinking that his Gregory’s nearly due.”

Bud hardly listened – she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate! Kate!” she cried, “let me in to light my lantern.”

Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer.

“Open the door, quick, quick!” cried Bud again; and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said, “Yes, open, Kate, I think we’re ready.”

The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back-door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun.

Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which I’m thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavour of old time and the book of ballads. She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop – the thing we call a dallan. She had never discovered before what a soul of gaiety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realised her daffing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you’re fey!”

“Indeed, and I daresay you’re right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted. “At my time of life it’s daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet’s seminary.”

Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home, so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back.

But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams. Notably was she good at Hallowe’en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute.

They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spaewife’s door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbour, and that meant a sailor husband.

“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, and that was the name of the sailor husband. Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and grey and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armour in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland – Scotland where witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street – it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.

“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I had to say it, though I s’pose it means I’ve lost him for a husband.”

“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.

CHAPTER XIX

Spring came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child – in that old Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the neuk of the burgh walls. It must have been because the Dyces loved so much their garden, and spent so many hours there, that they were so sanely merry, nor let too often or too long the Scots forebodings quell their spirits, but got lessons of hope from the circling of the seasons, that give us beauty and decay in an unvarying alternation.

“It is the time,” used Ailie to say of the spring, “when a delicious feeling steals over you of wanting to sit down and watch other people work.”

“I’ll need to have the lawn-mower sharpened; it may be needed at any moment by the neighbours,” said her brother Dan.

They watched upspring the green spears of the daffodils, that by-and-by should bear their flags of gold.

And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing or cleaning the streets, or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought – as he would call it – in the Dyce’s garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything, so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy man. But being handy is its own reward, carrying with it the soothing sense of self-sufficiency, so we need not vex ourselves for Wully. As he said himself, he “did the turn” for plain unornamental gardening, though in truth he seemed to think he did it best when sitting on his barrow trams, smoking a thoughtful pipe, and watching the glad spring hours go by at a cost of sixpence each to the lawyer who employed him.

Bud often joined him on the trams, and gravely listened to him, thinking that a man who did so many different and interesting things in a day was wise and gifted beyond ordinary. In the old and abler years he had been a soldier, and, nursing flowers nowadays, his mind would oft incongruously dwell on scenes remote and terribly different, where he had delved in foreign marl for the burial of fallen comrades.

“Tell me Inkermann again, Mr Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I’ll shoo off the birds from the blub-flowers.”

“I’ll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe, and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and chasing the birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the mischief with them birds! the garden’s fair polluted wi’ them! God knows what’s the use o’ them except for chirping, chirping – Choo! off wi’ ye at once or I’ll be after ye! – Ay, ay, Inkermann. It was a gey long day, I’m tellin’ ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter, slaughter a’ the time: me wi’ an awfu’ hacked heel, and no’ a bit o’ anything in my stomach. A nesty saft day, wi’ a smirr o’ rain. We were as black as – as black as – as – ”

“As black as the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I mind the very words.”

“I only said that the once, when I lost the place,” said Wully, shocked at her glibness in the uptake. “And it’s not a thing for the like o’ you to say at all; it’s only the word o’ a rowdy sodger.”

“Well, ain’t I the limb! I’ll not say it again,” promised the child; “you needn’t look as solemn’s the Last Trump; go on, go on!”

“As black as a ton o’ coal, wi’ the creesh o’ the cartridges and the poother; it was the Minie gun, ye ken. And the Rooshians would be just ower there between the midden and the cold frame, and we would be coming down on them – it micht be ower the sclates o’ Rodger’s hoose yonder. We were in the Heavy Diveesion, and I kill’t my first man that I kent o’ about where the yellow crocus is. Puir sowl! I had nae ill-will to the man, I’ll guarantee ye that but we were baith unloaded when we met each other, and it had to be him or me.”

He paused and firmed his mouth until the lips were lost among the puckers gathered round them, a curious glint in his eyes.

“Go on!” cried Bud, sucking in her breath with a horrid expectation; “ye gie’d him – ye gie’d him – ”

“I gie’d him – I tell’t ye what I gie’d him before. Will I need to say’t again?”

“Yes,” said Bud, “for that’s your top note.”

“I gie’d him – I gie’d him the – the BAGGONET!” cried the gardener, with a sudden, frightful, furious flinging of the arms, and then – oh, silly Wully Oliver! – began to weep, or at least to show a tear. For Bud had taught him to think of all that lay beyond that furious thrust of the bayonet – the bright brave life extinguished, the mother rendered childless, or the children fatherless, in some Russian home.

Bell, the thrifty woman, looking from the scullery window, and seeing time sadly wasted at twelve bawbees the hour, would drop the shawl she was making, and come out and send the child in to her lessons, but still the orra gardener did not hurry to his task, for he knew the way to keep Miss Dyce in an idle crack although she would not sit on his barrow trams.

“A wonderfu’ wean that!” would be his opening. “A perfect caution! I can see a difference on her every day; she grows like a willow withy, and she’s losin’ yon awfu’ Yankee awcent she had about her when she came at first. She can speak as bonny English noo as you or me when she puts her mind to’t.”

“I’m afraid it would not be very difficult for her to do that, Willy,” said Miss Bell. “She could always speak in any way she wanted, and indeed the first time that we heard her she was just yoursel’ on a New Year’s morning, even to the hiccough. I hope you’ll keep a watch on what you say to her; the bairn picks up the things she hears so fast, and she’s so innocent, that it’s hardly canny to let her listen much to the talk of a man that’s been a soldier – not that I blame the soldiers, Willy, bless them all for Scotland, young or old!”

“Not a word out of place from me, Miss Dyce,” would he cry, emphatic. “Only once I lost the place and slippit out a hell, and could have bit my tongue out for it. We heard, ye ken, a lot o’ hells out yonder roond aboot Sevastapol: it wasna Mr Meikle’s Sunday-school. But ye needna fear that Wully Oliver would learn ill language to a lady like the wee one. Whatever I am that’s silly when the dram is in, I hope I’m aye the perfect gentleman.”

“Indeed I never doubted it,” said Miss Bell. “But you know yourself we’re anxious that she should be all that’s gentle, nice, and clean. When you’re done raking this bed – dear me! I’m keeping you from getting at it – it’ll be time for you to go home for dinner. Take a bundle of rhubarb for the mistress.”

“Thanky, thanky, me’m,” said Wanton Wully, “but to tell the truth we’re kind o’ tired o’ rhubarb; I’m getting it by the stone from every bit o’ grun’ I’m labourin’ in. I wish folk were so rife wi’ plooms or strawberries.”

Bell smiled. “It’s the herb of kindness,” said she. “There’s aye a reason for everything in nature, and rhubarb’s meant to keep our generosity in practice.”

And there she would be – the foolish woman! keeping him at the crack, the very thing he wanted, till Mr Dyce himself, maybe, seeing his silver hours mishandled, would come to send his sister in, and see that his gardener earned at least a little of his wages.

“A terrible man for the ladies, William! You must have had a taking way with you when you were in the Army,” was all that the lawyer had to say. “There was some talk about doing a little to the garden, but, hoots man! don’t let it spoil your smoke!”

It was then you would see Wanton Wully busy.

Where would Bud be then? At her lessons? no, no, you may be sure of it, but in with Kate of Colonsay giving the maid the bloody tale of Inkermann. It was a far finer and more moving story as it came from Bud than ever it was on the lips of Wanton Wully. From him she only got the fling of the arms that drove the bayonet home, the lips pursed up, as if they were gathered by a string, the fire of the moment, and the broad Scots tongue he spoke in. To what he gave she added fancy and the drama.

“ – as black as a ton o’ coal wi’ the creesh o’ the cartridges.. either him or me.. I gie’d him.. I gie’d him.. I shut my eyes, and said, ‘O God, Thy pardon!’ and gie’d him the BAGGONET!”

Kate’s apron at that would fly up to cover her eyes, for she saw before her all the bloody spectacle. “I’m that glad,” she would say, “that my lad’s a sailor. I couldna sleep one iota at night thinkin’ of their baggonets if he was a man-o’-war. And that puts me in mind, my dear, it’s more than a week since we sent the chap a letter. Have you time the now to sit and write a scrape to Hamburg on the Elbow – imports iron ore?”

And Bud had time, and sit she would and write a lovely letter to Charles Maclean of Oronsay. She told him that her heart was sore, but she must confess that she had one time plighted her troth to a Russian army officer, who died, alas! on the bloody field. His last words, as his life-blood slowly ebbed away, were —

“What would be the last words of a Russian officer who loved you?” asked Bud, biting her pen in her perplexity.

“Toots! anything – ‘my best respects to Kate,’” said the maid, who had learned by this time that the letters Charles liked the most were the ones where Bud most freely used imagination.

“I don’t believe it would,” said Bud. “It ’d sound far too calm for a man that’s busy dying;” but she put it down all the same, feeling it was only fair that Kate should have some say in the letters written in her name.

That was the day they gave him a hint that a captain was wanted on the yacht of Lady Anne.

And still Kate’s education made some progress, as you may see from what she knew of Hamburg, though she was not yet the length of writing her own love-letters. She would sit at times at night for hours quite docile, knitting in the kitchen, listening to the reading of the child. A score of books had been tried on her by Aunt Ailie’s counsel (for she was in the secret of this Lower Dyce Academy), but none there was that hit the pupil’s fancy half so much as her own old favourite penny novelettes till they came one happy day to ‘The Pickwick Papers.’ Kate grew very fond of ‘The Pickwick Papers.’ The fun of them being in a language quite unknown in Colonsay, was almost all beyond her. But “that poor Mr Puckwuck!” she would cry at each untoward accident; “oh, the poor wee man!” and the folk were as real to her as if she had known them all in Colonsay. If Dickens could have known the curious sentiments his wandering hero roused in this Highland servant mind, he would have greatly wondered.

While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew as fast in her mind as in her body: each day she seemed to drift farther away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would preserve her – into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie Ailie’s magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. So Bell determined there and then to coax her into the gentle arts of domesticity that ever had had a fascination for herself. She went about it, oh, so cunningly! letting Bud play at the making of beds and the dusting of the stair-rails and the parlour beltings – the curly-wurly places, as she called them, full of quirks and holes and corners that the unelect like Kate of Colonsay will always treat perfunctorily in a general wipe that only drives the dirt the farther in. Bud missed not the tiniest corner nor the deepest nook: whatever she did, she did fastidiously, much to the joy of her aunt, who was sure it was a sign she was meant by the Lord for a proper housewife. But the child soon tired of making beds and dusting, as she did of white-seam sewing; and when Bell deplored this falling off, Ailie said: “You cannot expect everybody to have the same gifts as yourself. Now that she has proved she’s fit to clean a railing properly, she’s not so much to blame if she loses interest in it. The child’s a genius, Bell, and to a person of her temperament the thing that’s easily done is apt to be contemptuous: the glory’s in the triumph over difficulties, in getting on – getting on – getting on,” and Ailie’s face grew warm with some internal fire.

At that speech Bell was silent. She thought it just another of Ailie’s haiverings; but Mr Dyce, who heard, suddenly became grave.

“Do you think it’s genius or precocity?” he asked.

“They’re very much the same thing,” said Ailie.

“If I could be the child I was; if I could just remember – ” She stopped herself and smiled.

“What vanity!” said she; “what conceit! If I could be the child I was, I dare say I would be pretty commonplace after all, and still have the same old draigled pinnies; but I have a notion that Lennox was never meant to make beds, dust stair-railings, or sit in a parlour listening, demure, to gossip about the village pump and Sacrament Sunday bonnets. To do these things is no discredit to the women who are meant to do them, and who do them well; but we cannot all be patient Marthas. I know, because I’ve honestly tried my best myself.”

“When you say that, you’re laughing at me, I fear,” said Bell, a little blamefully.

“I wasn’t thinking of you,” said her sister, vexed. “And if I was, and had been laughing, I would be laughing at the very things I love; it’s only the other things that make me solemn. Your way, Bell, was always clear before you, – there you were the lucky woman; with genius, as we have it in the child, the way’s perplexed and full of dangers.”

“Is she to be let drift her own way?”

“We got her ten years too late to prevent it,” said Miss Ailie firmly, and looked at her brother Dan for some assistance. He had Footles on his lap, stroking his tousy back, and he listened with twinkling eyes to the argument, humming the air of the day, that happened to be “Robin Tamson’s Smiddy, O!”

“You’re both right and you’re both wrong, as Mr Cleland used to say if he was taking a dram with folk that had an argument,” said the lawyer. “But I’m not so clever as Colin Cleland, for I can’t ring the bell and order in the media sententia. This I’ll say, that, to my mind, the child is lucky if she’s something short of genius. If I had had a son, my prayer would always be that he should be off and on about the ordinary. It’s lonely on the mountain-top, and genius generally seems to go with a poor stomach or a bad lung, and pays an awful price for every ecstasy!”

“Shakespeare!” suggested Miss Ailie.

“And Robert Burns!” cried Bell. “Except for the lass and the glass and the ran-dan – Poor misguided laddie! he was like the folk he lived among. And there was Walter Scott, the best and noblest man God ever gave to Scotland, he was never on the mountain-top except it was to bring a lot of people with him there.”

Mr Dyce cleaned his glasses and chuckled. “H’m,” said he, “I admit there are exceptions. But please pass me my slippers, Bell: I fall back on Colin Cleland, – you’re both right and you’re both wrong.”

Miss Bell was so put about at this that she went at once to the kitchen to start her niece on a course of cookery.

CHAPTER XX

“Katerin!” she said, coming into the kitchen with a handful of paper cuttings, and, hearing her, the maid’s face blenched.