The Daft Days

Bud, snug in her auntie’s blankets, only her nose and her bright bead eyes showing in the light of the twirly wooden candlestick, guessed Mrs Molyneux was the quickest woman to get through work ever she saw: why she just waved it to one side and went out to shop or lunch with Jim.

A look of pity for Mrs Molyneux, the misguided, would come to Bell’s face, but for those folk in America she never had a word of criticism in the presence of the child. All she could say was America was different. America was not Scotland. And Scotland was not England, though in many places they called Scotch things English.

Jim used to say, speaking of father, that a Scotsman was a kind of superior Englishman.

Bell wished to goodness she could see the man, – he must have been a clever one!

Other mornings again would the child softly open her uncle’s door and he would get a terrible fright, crying “Robbers! but you’ll get nothing. I have my watch in my boots, and my money in my mouth.”

She would creep beside him, and in these early hours began her education. She was learning Ailie’s calm and curiosity and ambition; she was learning Bell’s ideas of duty and the ancient glory of her adopted land; from her uncle she was learning many things, of which the least that seemed useful at the time was the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. “Pater Noster qui es in coelis” – that and a few hundreds of Trayner’s Latin maxims was nearly all of the classic tongue that survived with the lawyer from student days. It was just as good and effective a prayer in English, he admitted, but somehow, whiles, the language was so old it brought you into closer grips with the original. Some mornings she would hum to him coon songs heard in her former home; and if he was in trim he himself would sing some psalm to the tune of Coleshill, French, Bangor, or Torwood. His favourite was Torwood; it mourned so – mourned so! Or at other times a song like “Mary Morison.”

“What are you bumming away at up there the pair of you?” Bell would cry, coming to the stair-foot. “If you sing before breakfast, you’ll greet before night!”

“Don’t she like singing in the morning?” Bud asked, nestling beside him, and he laughed.

“It’s an old freit – an old superstition,” said he, “that it’s unlucky to begin the day too blithely. It must have been a doctor that started it, but you would wonder at the number of good and douce Scots folk, plain bodies like ourselves, that have the notion in their mind from infancy, and never venture a cheep or chirrup before the day’s well aired.”

“My stars! ain’t she Scotch, Auntie Bell?” said Bud. “So was father. He would sing any time; he would sing if it broke a tooth; but he was pretty Scotch other ways. Once he wore a pair of kilts to a Cale – to a Caledonian Club.”

“I don’t keep a kilt myself,” said her uncle. “The thing’s not strictly necessary unless you’re English and have a Hielan’ shooting.”

“Auntie Bell is the genuine Scotch stuff, I guess!”

“There’s no concealing the fact that she is,” her uncle admitted. “She’s so Scotch that I am afraid she’s apt to think of God as a countryman of her own.”

And there were the hours that Ailie gave with delight to Bud’s more orthodox tuition. The back room that was called Dan’s study, because he sometimes took a nap there after dinner, became a schoolroom. There was a Mercator’s map of the world on the wall and another of Europe, that of themselves gave the place the right academy aspect. With imagination, a map, and the Golden Treasury, you might have as good as a college education, according to Ailie. They went long voyages together on Mercator; saw marvellous places; shivered at the poles or languished in torrid plains, sometimes before Kate could ring the bell for breakfast. There seemed no spot in the world that this clever auntie had not some knowledge of. How eagerly they crossed continents, how ingeniously they planned routes! For the lengths of rivers, the heights of mountains, the values of exports, and all the trivial passing facts that mar the great game of geography for many childish minds, they had small consideration; what they gathered in their travels were sounds, colours, scenes, weather, and the look of races. What adventures they had! as when, pursued by elephants and tigers, they sped in a flash from Bengal to the Isle of Venice, and saw the green slime of the sea on her steeping palaces. Yes, the world is all for the folk of imagination. “Love maps and you will never be too old or too poor to travel,” was Ailie’s motto. She found a hero or a heroine for every spot upon Mercator, and nourished so the child in noble admirations.

You might think it would always be the same pupil and the same teacher, but no, they sometimes changed places. If Ailie taught Bud her own love for the lyrics that are the best work of men in their hours of exaltation, Bud sent Ailie back to her Shakespeare, and sweet were the days they spent in Arden or Prospero’s Isle.

It was well with them then; it was well with the woman and the child, and they were happy.

CHAPTER XI

But the Dyces never really knew how great and serious was the charge bequeathed to them in their brother William’s daughter till they saw it all one night in March in the light of a dozen penny candles.

Lennox had come from a world that’s lit by electricity, and for weeks she was sustained in wonder and amusement by the paraffin lamps of Daniel Dyce’s dwelling. They were, she was sure, the oldest kind of light in all the world, Aladdin-lights that gleamed of old on caverns of gems, till Kate on this particular evening came into the kitchen with the week-end groceries. It was a stormy season – the year of the big winds; moanings were at the windows, sobbings in the chimney-heads, and the street was swept by spindrift rain. Bell and Ailie and their brother sat in the parlour, silent, playing cards with a dummy hand, and Bud, with Footles in her lap, behind the winter-dykes on which clothes dried before the kitchen fire, crouched on the fender with a Shakespeare, where almost breathlessly she read the great, the glorious Macbeth.

“My stars! what a night!” said Kate. “The way them slates and chimney-cans are flying! It must be the anti-nuptial gales. I thought every minute would be my next. Oh towns! towns! Stop you till I get back to Colonsay, and I’ll not leave it in a hurry, I’ll assure you.”

She threw a parcel on the kitchen-dresser, and turned to the light a round and rosy face that streamed with clean cooling rain, her hair in tangles on her temples and her eyes sparkling with the light of youth and adventure, – for to tell the truth she had been flirting at the door a while, in spite of all the rain, with some admirer.

Bud was the sort of child whose fingers itch in the presence of unopened parcels: in a moment the string was untied from the week-end groceries.

“Candles!” she cried. “Well, that beats the band! I’ve seen ’em in windows. What in the world are you going to do with candles? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve – oh Laura, ain’t we grand!”

“What would we do with them but burn them?” said the maid; “we’ll use them in the washing-house,” and then she sank into a chair. “Mercy on me, I declare I’m dying!” she exclaimed in a different key, and Bud looked round and saw Kate’s face had grown of a sudden very pale.

“Oh dear! what is the matter?” she asked, her eyes large, innocent, and anxious.

“Pains,” moaned the maid. “Pains inside me and all over me, and shiverings down the spine of the back. Oh, it’s a sore thing pain, especially when it’s bad! But don’t – don’t say a word to the mustress; I’m not that old, and maybe I’ll get better.”

“Try pain-killer,” recommended Bud. “And if I was you I’d start just here and say a prayer. Butt right in and I’ll not listen.”

“Pain-killer! – what in all the world’s pain-killer? I never heard of it. And the only prayer I know is ‘My Father which art’ in Gaelic, and there’s nothing in it about pains in the spine of the back. No, no I’ll just have to take a tablespoonful of something or other three times a-day, the way I did when the doctor put me right in Colonsay. Perhaps it’s just a chill – but oh! I’m sorrowful, sorrowful!” and Kate, the colour coming slowly back to her, wept softly to herself, rocking in the kitchen chair. It was sometimes by those odd hysterics that she paid for her elations with the lads.

“I know what’s wrong with you,” said Bud briskly, in the manner of Mrs Molyneux. “It’s just the croodles. Bless you, you poor perishing soul! I take the croodles myself when it’s a night like this, and I’m alone. The croodles ain’t the least wee bit deadly; you can put them away by hustling at your work, or banging an old piano, or reading a story, or playing that you’re somebody else – Well, I declare I think I could cure you right now with these twelve candles, far better than you’d do by shooting drugs into yourself.”

“I never took a single candle in all my life,” said Kate, “far less twelve, and I’ll die first”

“Silly!” exclaimed Bud. “You’d think to hear you speak you were a starving Eskimo. I don’t want you to eat the candles. Wait a minute.” She ran lightly upstairs, and was gone for ten minutes.

Kate’s colour all revived; she forgot her croodles in the spirit of anticipation that the child had roused. “Oh, but she’s the clever one that!” she said to herself, drying the rain and tears from her face and starting to nibble a biscuit. “She knows as much as two ministers, and still she’s not a bit proud. Some day she’ll do something desperate.”

When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs Molyneux’s, had taught her dancing.

“Ain’t this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid’s eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain’t this bully? Don’t you stand there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles for the footlights. Why! I knew there was some use for these old candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something I couldn’t ’zactly think of – made me kind of gay, you know, just as if I was going to the theatre. They’re only candles, but there’s twelve lights to them all at once, and now you’ll see some fun.”

“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.

“I’m going to be a Gorgeous Entertainment; I’m going to be the Greatest Agg – Aggregation of Historic Talent now touring the Middle West. I’m Mademoiselle Winifred Wallace of Madison Square Theatre, New York, positively appearing here for one night only. I’m the whole company, and the stage manager, and the band, and the boys that throw the bouquets. Biff! I’m checked high: all you’ve got to do is to sit there with your poor croodles and feel them melt away. Let’s light the foot-lights.”

There was a row of old brass bedroom candlesticks on the kitchen-shelf that were seldom used now in the house of Dyce, though their polish was the glory of Miss Bell’s heart. The child kilted up her gown, jumped on a chair, and took them down with the help of Kate. She stuck in each a candle, and ranged them in a semicircle on the floor, then lit the candles and took her place behind them.

“Put out the lamp!” she said to Kate, in the common voice of actors’ tragedy.

“Indeed and I’ll do nothing of the kind,” said the maid. “If your Auntie Bell comes in she’ll – she’ll skin me alive for letting you play such cantrips with her candles. Forbye, you’re going to do something desperate, something that’s not canny, and I must have the lamp behind me or I’ll lose my wits.”

“Woman, put out the light!” repeated Bud, with an imperious pointing finger, and, trembling, Kate turned down the lamp upon the wall and blew down the chimney in the very way Miss Dyce was always warning her against. She gasped at the sudden change the loss of the light made – at the sense of something idolatrous and bewitched in the arc of flames on her kitchen-floor, each blown inward from the draught of a rattling window.

“If it is buidseachas– if it is witchcraft of any kind you are on for, I’ll not have it,” said Kate firmly. “I never saw the like of this since the old woman in Pennyland put the curse on the Colonsay factor, and she had only seven candles. Dear, dear Lennox, do not do anything desperate; do not be carrying on, for you are frightening me out of my judgment. I’m – I’m maybe better now, I took a bite at a biscuit; indeed I’m quite better, it was nothing but the cold – and a lad out there that tried to kiss me.”

Bud paid no heed, but plucked up the edges of her skirt in outstretched hands and glided into the last dance she had learned from the vaudeville lady, humming softly to herself an appropriate tune. The candles warmly lit her neck, her ears, her tilted nostrils, her brow was high in shadow. First she rose on tiptoe and made her feet to twitter on the flags, then swayed and swung a little body that seemed to hang in air. The white silk swept around and over her – wings with no noise of flapping feather, or swirled in sea-shell coils, that rose in a ripple from her ankles and swelled in wide circling waves above her head, revealing her in glimpses like some creature born of foam on fairy beaches, and holding the command of tempest winds. Ah, dear me! many and many a time I saw her dance just so in her daft days before the chill of wisdom and reflection came her way; she was a passion disembodied, an aspiration realised, a happy morning thought, a vapour, a perfume of flowers, for her attire had lain in lavender. She was the spirit of Spring, as I have felt it long ago in little woods, or seen it in pictures, or heard it in songs; she was an ecstasy, she was a dream.

The dog gave a growl of astonishment, then lay his length on the hearth-rug, his nose between his paws, his eyes fixed on her. “I’ll not have it,” said the maid piteously. “At least I’ll not stand much of it, for it’s not canny to be carrying-on like that in a Christian dwelling. I never did the like of that in all my life.”

“Every move a picture,” said the child, and still danced on, with the moan of the wind outside for a bass to her low-hummed melody. Her stretching folds flew high, till she seemed miraculous tall, and to the servant’s fancy might have touched the low ceiling; then she sank – and sank – and sank till her forehead touched the floor, and she was a flower fallen, the wind no more to stir its petals, the rain no more to glisten on its leaves. ’Twas as if she shrivelled and died there, and Kate gave one little cry that reached the players of cards in the parlour.

“Hush! what noise was that?” said Ailie, lifting her head.

“It would be Kate clumping across the kitchen-floor in the Gaelic language,” said Mr Dyce, pushing his specs up on his brow.

“Nothing but the wind,” said Bell. “What did you say was trumph?” – for that was the kind of player she was.

“It was not the wind, it was a cry; I’m sure I heard a cry. I hope there’s nothing wrong with the little one,” said Ailie, with a throbbing heart, and she threw her cards on the table and went out. She came back in a moment, her face betraying her excitement, her voice demanding silence.

“Of all the wonders!” said she. “Just step this way, people, to the pantry.”

They rose and followed her. The pantry was all darkness. Through its partly open door that led into the kitchen they saw their child in the crescent of the candles, though she could not see them, as no more could Kate, whose chair was turned the other way. They stood in silence watching the strange performance, each with different feelings, but all with eeriness, silent people of the placid, old, half-rustic world, that lives for ever with realities, and seldom sees the passions counterfeited.

Bud had risen, her dark hair looking unnaturally black above her brow, and, her dancing done, she was facing the dog and the servant, the only audience of whose presence she was aware.

“Toots!” said the maid, relieved that all seemed over, “that’s nothing in the way of dancing; you should see them dancing Gillie-Callum over-bye in Colonsay! There’s a dancer so strong there that he breaks the very boards.”

Bud looked at her, and yet not wholly at her – through her, with burning eyes.

“Hush!” she said, trembling. “Do you not hear something?” and at that moment, high over the town went the “honk, honk” of the wild geese.

“Devil the thing but geeses!” said the maid, whose blood had curdled for a second. The rain swept like a broom along the street, the gutters bubbled, the shutters rapped, far above the dwelling went the sound of the flying geese.

“Oh, hush, woman, hush!” implored the child, her hands over her ears, her figure cowering.

“It’s only the geeses. What a start you gave me!” said the maid again.

“No, no,” said Bud, “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast – ’”

“What do you mean?” cried Kate.

“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”

The child filled each phrase with a travesty of passion; she had seen the part enacted. It was not, be sure, a great performance. Some words were strangely mutilated; but it was a child, and she had more than a child’s command of passion – she had feeling, she had heart.

“I cannot look at you!” exclaimed Kate. “You are not canny, but oh! you are – you are majestic! There was never the like of it in all the isles.”

Bell, in the darkness of the pantry, wept silently at some sense of sin in this play-acting on a Saturday night; her brother held her arm tightly; Ailie felt a vague unrest and discontent with herself, a touch of envy and of shame.

“Please collect the bouquets,” said the child, seating herself on the floor with her knees tucked high in her gown. “Are the croodles all gone?”

“It did me a lot of good yon dancing,” said Kate. “Did you put yon words about Macbeth sleep no more together yourself?”

“Yes,” said Bud, and then repented. “No,” she added hurriedly, “that’s a fib; please, God, give me a true tongue. It was made by Shakespeare – dear old Will!”

“I’m sure I never heard of the man in all my life before; but he must have been a bad one.”

“Why, Kate, you are as fresh as the mountain breeze,” said Bud. “He was Great! He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, a poor boy, and went to London and held horses outside the theatre door, and then wrote plays so grand that only the best can act them. He was – he was not for an age, but all the time.”

She had borrowed the lesson as well as the manner of Auntie Ailie, who smiled in the dark of the pantry at this glib rendering of herself.

“Oh, I should love to play Rosalind,” continued the child. “I should love to play everything. When I am big, and really Winifred Wallace, I will go all over the world and put away people’s croodles same as I did yours, Kate, and they will love me; and I will make them feel real good, and sometimes cry – for that is beautiful too. I will never rest, but go on, and on, and on; and everywhere everybody will know about me – even in the tiny minstrel towns where they have no or’nary luck but just coon shows, for it’s in these places croodles must be most catching. I’ll go there and play for nothing, just to show them what a dear soul Rosalind was. I want to grow fast, fast! I want to be tall like my Auntie Ailie, and lovely like my dear Auntie Ailie, and clever like my sweet sweet Aunt Ailie.”

“She’s big enough and bonny enough, and clever enough in some things,” said the maid; “but can she sew like her sister! – tell me that!”

“Sew!” exclaimed the child, with a frown. “I hate sewing. I guess Auntie Ailie’s like me, and feels sick when she starts a hem and sees how long it is, and all to be gone over with small stitches.”

“Indeed, indeed I do,” whispered Ailie in the pantry, and she was trembling. She told me later how she felt of her conviction then that for her the years of opportunity were gone, the golden years that had slipped past in the little burgh town without a chance for her to grasp their offerings. She told me of her resolution there and then that this child, at least, should have its freedom to expand.

Bud crept to the end of the crescent of her footlights and blew out the candles slowly one by one. The last she left a-light a little longer, and, crouched upon the floor, she gazed with large and dreaming eyes into its flame as if she read there.

“It is over now,” said Mr Dyce in a whisper to his sisters, and, with his hands on their shoulders led them back into the parlour.

CHAPTER XII

She was wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not what, in the Pigeons’ Seminary, could be called a good child, for all her sins were frankly manifest, and she knew no fear nor naughty stratagem; her mind, to all but Kate, was open as the day, and there it was the fault of honest Kate’s stupidity. But often Miss Bell must be moaning at transgressions almost harmless in themselves, yet so terribly unlike a Christian bairn, as when Bud spent an afternoon in a tent with some gipsy children, changed clothes with them the better to act a part, and stormed because she could not have them in to tea with her. Or when she asked Lady Anne, bazaar-collecting in the house of Dyce, if she ever had had a proposal. It was a mercy that Lady Anne that very week had had one, and was only too pleased to tell of it and say she had accepted.

“Then you’re safe out of the woods,” said Bud gravely. “There’s our Kate, she hasn’t had a proposal yet, and I guess she’s on the slopey side of thirty. It must be dre’ffle to be as old – as old as a house and have no beau to love you. It must be ’scrutiating.”

Lady Anne let her eyes turn for a moment on the sisters Dyce, and the child observed and reddened.

“Oh! Auntie Bell!” she said quickly. “Auntie Bell had heaps and heaps of beaux all dying to marry her, but she gave them the calm cold eye and said she had to cling to Uncle Dan. It was very noble of her, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed it was!” admitted Lady Anne, very much ashamed of herself.

“And Auntie Ailie is not on the slopey side of thirty,” continued Bud, determined to make all amends. “She’s young enough to love dolls.”

It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behaviour. “You are a perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and nonsense of that kind, – it’s fair ridiculous.”

“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much astonished. “It’s in all the books, there’s hardly anything else, ’cept when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the only one you don’t suspect. Indeed, Auntie, I thought it was the Great Thing!”

“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There’s very little else in all the world, except – except the children,” and she folded her niece in her arms. “It is the Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler, kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”

“But it was very wrong; it was a kind of fib for you to talk about me having lots of lads in my time,” said Auntie Bell. “You do not know whether I had or not.”

Bud looked at her and saw a flush on her face. “I think,” said she, “the beaux must have been very stupid, then. But I guess there must have been one, Auntie Bell, and you have forgotten all about him.” And at that Miss Bell went hurriedly from the room, with a pretence that she heard a pot boil over, and Ailie in a low voice told her niece all about Bell’s beau, deep drowned in the Indian Ocean.

For days after that the child was tender with her elder aunt, and made a splendid poem in blank verse upon the late Captain James Murray, which Bell was never to see, but Ailie treasured. For days was she angelic good. Her rages never came to fever heat. Her rebellions burned themselves out in her bosom. Nobly she struggled with Long Division and the grammar that she abominated; very meekly she took censure for copy-books blotted and words shamefully misspelled in Uncle Daniel’s study. Some way this love that she had thought a mere amusement, like shopping in Chicago, took a new complexion in her mind – became a dear and solemn thing, like her uncle’s Bible readings, when, on Sunday nights at worship in the parlour, he took his audience through the desert to the Promised Land, and the abandoned street was vocal with domestic psalm from the Provost’s open windows. She could not guess – how could she, the child? – that love has its variety. She thought there was but the one love in all the world, – the same she felt herself for most things, – a gladness and agreement with things as they were. And yet at times in her reading she got glimpses of love’s terror and empire, as in the stories of Othello and of Amy Robsart, and herself began to wish she had a lover. She thought at first of Uncle Dan; but he could not be serious, and she had never heard him sigh, – in him was wanting some remove, some mystery. What she wanted was a lover on a milk-white steed, a prince who was “the flower o’ them a’,” as in Aunt Ailie’s song “Glenlogie”; and she could not imagine Uncle Dan with his spectacles on riding any kind of steed, though she felt it would be nice to have him with her when the real prince was there.