The Daft Days

“No, I shan’t, Uncle Dan,” said the child. “I’ll sing ‘Mary Morison,’ and ‘Ae Fond Kiss,’ and ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’ at you till you’re fairly squealing with delight. I know. Allow me! why, you’re only haivering.”

“Have mercy on the child, Dan,” said his sister. “Never you mind him, Bud; he’s only making fun of you.”

“I know,” said Bud; “but I’m not kicking.”

Kate – ah! poor Kate – how sorry I should be for her, deserted by her friend and tutor, if she had not her own consoling Captain. Kate would be weeping silently every time the pipe was on in the scullery, and she thought how lonely her kitchen was to be when the child was gone. And she had plans to make that painful exile less heartrending: she was going to write to her sister out in Colonsay and tell her to be sure and send fresh country eggs at intervals of every now and then, or maybe oftener in the winter-time, to Lennox; for the genuine country egg was a thing it was hopeless to expect in Edinburgh, where there wasn’t such a thing as sand, or grass, or heather – only causeway stones. She could assure Lennox that, as for marriage, there was not the slightest risk for years and years, since there wasn’t a house in the town to let that would be big enough (and still not dear) to suit a Captain. He was quite content to be a plain intended, and hold on. And as for writing, she would take her pen in hand quite often and send the latest news to Lennox, who must please excuse haste, and these d-d-desperate pens, and having the post to catch – not that she would dream of catching the poor, wee, shauchly creature: it was just a way of speaking. Would Lennox not be dreadful home-sick, missing all the cheery things, and smothered up in books in yon place – Edinburgh?

“I expect I’ll be dre’ffle home-sick,” admitted Bud.

“I’m sure you will, my lassie,” said the maid. “I was so home-sick myself when I came here at first that my feet got almost splay with wanting to turn back to Colonsay. But if I’m not so terribly good-looking, I’m awful brave, and soon got over it. When you are home-sick go down to the quay and look at the steamboats, or take a turn at our old friend Mr Puckwuck.”

Four days – three days – two days – one day – to-morrow; that last day went so fast, it looked as if Wanton Wully had lost the place again and rang the evening bell some hours before it was due. Bud could only sit by, helpless, and marvel at the ingenuity that could be shown in packing what looked enough to stock Miss Minto’s shop into a couple of boxes. She aged a twelvemonth between the hand-glass at the bottom and the bath-sheet on the top.

“And in this corner,” said Miss Bell, on her knees, “you’ll find your Bible, the hoarhound mixture, and five-and-twenty threepenny-bits for the plate on Sundays. Some of them sixpences.”

“Irish ones, apparently,” said Uncle Dan.

“Some of them sixpences, for the Foreign Mission days, and one shilling for the day of the Highlands and Islands.”

“You’re well provided for the kirk at any rate,” said Uncle Dan. “I’ll have to put a little money for this wicked world in the other corner,” and he did.

When the coach next day set out – No, no, I cannot tell you all, for I hate to think of tears, and would hurry over partings. It went in tearful weather, rain drizzling on Bud and Auntie Ailie, who accompanied her. They looked back on the hill-top, and saw the grey slates glint under a grey sky, and following them on the miry road, poor Footles, faithful heart, who did not understand. He paddled through the mud till a blast from the bugle startled him, and he seemed to realise that this was some painful new experience. And then he stood in the track of the disappearing wheels, and lifted up his voice in lamentation.

The night came on, resuming her ancient empire – for she alone, and not the day, did first possess and finally shall possess unquestioned this space dusty with transient stars, and the light is Lord of another universe where is no night, nay, nor terror thereof. From the western clouds were the flame and gold withdrawn, and the winds sighed from the mountains, as vexed for passing days. The winds sighed from the mountains, and the mists came mustering to the glens; the sea crept out on long, bird-haunted, wailing, and piping sands, nought to be seen of it, its presence obvious only in the scent of wrack and the wash on the pebbled beaches. Behind the town the woods lay black and haunted, and through them, and far upward in the valley, dripping in the rain and clamorous with hidden burns and secret wells, went the highway to the world, vacant of aught visible, but never to be wholly vacant, since whoso passes on a highway ever after leaves some wandering spirit there. Did the child, that night, think of the highway that had carried her from home? In the hoarsely crying city did she pause a moment to remember and retrace her way to the little town that now lay faintly glowing in the light of its own internal fires?

Thus Bell wondered, standing at her window, looking into the solitary street. Every mile of separating highway rose before her, – she walked them in the rain and dark; all the weary longing of the world came down on her that mirk night in September, and praying that discretion should preserve and understanding keep her wanderer, she arrived at the soul’s tranquillity, and heard without misgiving the wild geese cry.

Her brother took the Books, and the three of them – master, mistress, and maid – were one in the spirit of worship, longing, and hope. Where, then, I wonder, had gone Daniel Dyce, the lawyer, the gentle ironist, on whose lips so often was kindly mockery, on whose tongue levity or its pretence —

“Never by passion quite possess’d,

And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway”?

It was Bell’s nightly duty to turn the lamp out in the lobby and bolt the outer door. She went this night reluctant to perform that office, but a thought possessed her of a child from home, somewhere in the darkness among strangers, and she had to call her brother.

“What is it?” said he.

“The door,” she said, ashamed of herself, “I cannot bolt it,”

He looked at her flushed face and her trembling hand, and understood. “It’s only the door of a house,” said he; “that makes no difference,” and ran the bolt into its staple.

CHAPTER XXVIII

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 home-sick 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 morn 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 grey 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 home-made 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 Andrews.”

“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 parlour 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 do it with a back-board and a book on the top of the head; but it was out before my time; we just walked anyway 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 wise-like Scotch sangs, 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 fervour; “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 incomers or poor de-degenerate cadets; and I guess the way she says it, being a de-degenerate cadet Macintosh 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 Macintosh,’ 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 Macintosh 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’raps 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 for ever.”

“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 I 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 daresay 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.”

CHAPTER XXIX

It is another mercy, too, that in our age we learn to make the best of what aforetime might be ill to thole, as Bell made fine new garments out of old ones faded by turning them outside in and adding frills and flounces. Bud’s absence early ceased to be deplorable, since it wakened cheerful expectations not to be experienced had she stayed at home; gave rise to countless fond contrivances for her happiness in exile; and two or three times a-year to periods of bliss, when her vacations gave the house of Dyce the very flower of ecstasy. Her weekly letters of themselves were almost compensation for her absence. On the days of their arrival, Peter the post would come blithely whistling with his M.C. step to the lawyer’s kitchen window before he went to the castle itself, defying all routine and the laws of the Postmaster-General, for he knew Miss Dyce would be waiting feverishly, having likely dreamt the night before of happy things that – dreams going by contraries, as we all of us know in Scotland – might portend the most dreadful tidings.

Bud’s envelope was always on the top of his budget. For the sake of it alone (it sometimes seemed to Peter and those who got it) had the mail come splashing through the night, – the lawyer’s big blue envelopes, as it were, had got but a friendly lift through the courtesy of clerks in Edinburgh, and the men on the railway train, and the lad who drove the gig from Maryfield. What were big blue envelopes of the business world compared with the modest little square of grey with Lennox Dyce’s writing on it?

“Here’s the usual! Pretty thick to-day!” would Peter say, with a smack of satisfaction on the window-sash. Ah, those happy Saturdays! Everybody knew about them. “And how’s hersel’?” the bell-ringer would ask in the by-going, not altogether because his kindly interest led to an eye less strict on his lazy moods in the garden. One Fair day, when Maggie White’s was irresistible, it rang so merrily with drovers, and he lost the place again, he stopped the lawyer on the street to ask him what Miss Lennox thought of all this argument about the Churches, seeing she was in the thick of it in Edinburgh.

“Never you mind the argument, Will,” said Daniel Dyce, – “you do your duty by the Auld Kirk bell; and as for the Free folk’s quarrelling, amang them be’t!”

“But can you tell me, Mr D-D-Dyce,” said Wanton Wully, with as much assurance as if he was prepared to pay by the Table of Fees, “what’s the difference between the U.F.’s and the Frees? I’ve looked at it from every point, and I canna see it.”

“Come and ask me some day when you’re sober,” said the lawyer, and Wanton Wully snorted.

“If I was sober,” said he, “I wouldna want to ken – I wouldna give a curse.”

Yet each time Bud came home she seemed, to the mind of her Auntie Bell, a little farther off from them – a great deal older, a great deal less dependent, making for womanhood in a manner that sometimes was astounding, as when sober issues touched her, set her thinking, made her talk in fiery ardours. Aunt Ailie gloried in that rapid growth; Aunt Bell lamented, and spoke of brains o’ertaxed and fevered, and studies that were dangerous. She made up her mind a score of times to go herself to Edinburgh and give a warning to the teachers; but the weeks passed, and the months, and by-and-by the years, till almost three were gone, and the Edinburgh part of Lennox’s education was drawing to a close, and the warning visit was still to pay.

It was then, one Easter, came The Macintosh.

Bell and Ailie were out that afternoon for their daily walk in the woods or along the shore, when Mr Dyce returned from the Sheriff Court alert and buoyant, feeling much refreshed at the close of an encounter with a lawyer who, he used to say, was better at debating than himself, having more law books in his possession and a louder voice. Letting himself in with his pass-key, he entered the parlour, and was astonished to find a stranger, who rose at his approach and revealed a figure singular though not unpleasing. There was something ludicrous in her manner as she moved a step or two from the chair in which she had been sitting. Small, and silver-grey in the hair, with a cheek that burned – it must be with embarrassment – between a rather sallow neck and sunken temples, and wearing smoked spectacles with rims of tortoise-shell, she would have attracted attention anywhere even if her dress had been less queer. Queer it was, but in what manner Daniel Dyce was not the person to distinguish. To him there was about it nothing definitely peculiar, except that the woman wore a crinoline, a Paisley shawl of silken white, and such a bonnet as he had not seen since Grandma Buntain’s time.

“Be seated, ma’am,” said he; “I did not know I had the honour of a visitor,” and he gave a second, keener glance, that swept the baffling figure from the flounced green poplin to the snow-white lappet of her bonnet. A lady certainly, – that was in the atmosphere, however odd might be her dress. “Where in the world has this one dropped from?” he asked himself, and waited an explanation.

“Oh, Mr Dyce!” said the lady in a high, shrill voice, that plainly told she never came from south of the Border, and with a certain trepidation in her manner; “I’m feared I come at an inconvenient time to ye, and I maybe should hae bided at your office; but they tell’t me ye were out at what they ca’d a Pleading Diet. I’ve come about my mairrage.”