Kitabı oku: «The Daft Days», sayfa 2
CHAPTER III
“I misdoubted Mr Molyneux from the very first,” said Ailie, turning as white as a clout. “From all his post-cards he was plainly too casual. Stop it, Bell, my dear – have sense; the child’s in a Christian land, and in care of somebody who is probably more dependable than this delightful Molyneux.”
Mr Dyce took out an old, thick, silver verge. “Nine o’clock,” he said, with a glance at its creamy countenance. “Molyneux’s consignment is making his first acquaintance with Scottish scenery and finding himself, I hope, amused at the Edinburgh accent. He’ll arrive at Maryfield – poor wee smout! – at three; if I drive over at twelve, I’ll be in time to meet him. Tuts, Bell, give over; he’s a ten-year-old and a Dyce at that, – there’s not the slightest fear of him.”
“Ten years old, and in a foreign country – if you can call Scotland a foreign country,” cried Miss Dyce, still sobbing with anger and grief. “Oh, the cat-witted scamp, that Molyneux, – if I had him here!”
The dining-room door opened and let in a yawning dog of most plebeian aspect, longest lie-abed of the household, the clamour of the street, and the sound of sizzling bacon, followed by Kate’s majestic form at a stately glide, because she had on her new stiff lilac print that was worn for breakfast only on Sundays and holidays. “You would think I was never coming,” she said genially, and smiled widely as she put the tray on the sideboard. This that I show you, I fear, is a beggarly household, absurdly free from ceremony. Mr Dyce looked at his sister Ailie and smiled; Ailie looked at her sister Bell and smiled. Bell took a hairpin or two out of their places and seemed to stab herself with them viciously in the nape of the neck, and smiled not at all nor said anything, for she was furious with Molyneux, whom she could see in her mind’s eye – an ugly, tippling, frowsy-looking person with badly polished boots, an impression that would have greatly amused Mrs Molyneux, who, not without reason, counted her Jim the handsomest man and the best dressed in the profession in all Chicago.
“I’m long of coming, like Royal Charlie,” Kate proceeded, as she passed the ashets on to Miss Dyce; “but, oh me! New Year’s day here is no’ like New Year’s day in the bonny isle of Colonsay.”
Mr Dyce said grace and abstractedly helped himself alternately from both ends of a new roll of powdered butter. “Dan, dear, don’t take the butter from both ends, – it spoils the look,” said Bell.
“Tuts!” said he. “What’s the odds? There’ll be no ends at all when we’re done with it. I’m utterly regardless of the symmetrical and the beautiful this morning. I’m savage to think of that man Molyneux. If I was not a man of peace I would be wanting to wring Mr Molyneux’s neck,” and he twisted his morning roll in halves with ferocious hands.
“Dan!” said Ailie, shocked. “I never heard you say anything so bloodthirsty in all my life before. I would never have thought it of you.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “There’s many things about me you never suspected. You women are always under delusions about the men – about the men – well, dash it! about the men you like. I know myself so well that there is no sin, short of one or two not so accounted, that I cannot think myself capable of. I believe I might be forced into robbing a kirk if I had no money and was as hungry as I was this morning before that post-card came to ruin a remarkably fine New-Year’s-day appetite, or even into murdering a man like Molyneux who failed in the simplest duties no man should neglect.”
“I hope and trust,” said Bell, still nervous, “that he is a wiselike boy with a proper upbringing, who will not be frightened at travelling and make no mistakes about the train. If he was a Scotch laddie, with the fear of God in him, I would not be a bit put about for him, for he would be sure to be asking, asking, and if he felt frightened he would just start and eat something, like a Christian. But this poor child has no advantages. Just American!”
Ailie sat back in her chair, with her teacup in her hand, and laughed, and Kate laughed quietly – though it beat her to see where the fun was; and the dog laughed likewise – at least it wagged its tail and twisted its body and made such extraordinary sounds in its throat that you could say it was laughing.
“Tuts! you are the droll woman, Bell,” said Mr Dyce, blinking at her. “You have the daftest ideas of some things. For a woman who spent so long a time in Miss Mushet’s seminary and reads so much at the newspapers, I wonder at you.”
“Of course his father was Scotch, that’s one mercy,” added Bell, not a bit annoyed at the reception of her pious opinions.
“That is always something to be going on with,” said Mr Dyce mockingly. “I hope he’ll make the most of that great start in life and fortune. It’s as good as money in his pocket.”
Bell put up a tiny hand and pushed a stray curl (for she had a rebel chevelure) behind her ear, and smiled in spite of her anxiety about the coming nephew. “You may laugh if you like, Dan,” she said emphatically, perking with her head across the table at him; “but I’m proud, I’m PROUD, I’m PROUD I’m Scotch.” (“Not apologising for it myself,” said her brother softly.) “And you know what these Americans are! Useless bodies, who make their men brush their own boots, and have to pay wages that’s a sin to housemaids, and eat pie even-on.”
“Dear me! is that true, or did you see it in a newspaper?” said her brother. “I begin to be alarmed myself at the possibilities of this small gentleman now on his way to the north, in the complete confidence of Mr Molyneux, who must think him very clever. It’s a land of infant prodigies he comes from; even at the age of ten he may have more of the stars and stripes in him than we can eradicate by a diet of porridge and a curriculum of Shorter Catechism and Jane Porter’s ‘Scottish Chiefs.’ Faith, I was fond of Jane myself when I read her first: she was nice and bloody. A big soft hat with a bash in it, perhaps; a rhetorical delivery at the nose, ‘I guess and calculate’ every now and then; a habit of chewing tobacco” (“We’ll need a cuspidor,” said Ailie sotto voce); “and a revolver in his wee hip-pocket. Oh, the darling! I can see him quite plainly.”
“Mercy on us!” cried the maid Kate, and fled the room all in a tremor at the idea of the revolver.
“You may say what you like, but I cannot get over his being an American,” said Bell solemnly. “The dollar’s everything in America, and they’re so independent!”
“Terrible! terrible!” said her brother ironically, breaking into another egg fiercely with his knife, as if he were decapitating the President of the United States.
Ailie laughed again. “Dear, dear Bell!” she said, “it sounds quite Scotch. A devotion to the dollar is a good sound basis for a Scotch character. Remember there are about a hundred bawbees in a dollar: just think of the dollar in bawbees, and you’ll not be surprised that the Americans prize it so much.”
“Renegade!” said Bell, shaking a spoon at her.
“Provincial!” retorted Ailie, shaking a fork at Bell.
“‘Star of Peace, to wanderers weary,
Bright the beams that shine on me,’
– children, be quiet,” half-sung, half-said their brother. “Bell, you are a blether; Ailie, you are a cosmopolitan, a thing accursed. That’s what Edinburgh and Brussels and your too brisk head have done for you. Just bring yourself to our poor parochial point of view, and tell me, both of you, what you propose to do with this young gentleman from Chicago when you get him.”
“Change his stockings and give him a good tea,” said Bell promptly, as if she had been planning it for weeks. “He’ll be starving of hunger and damp with snow.”
“There’s something more than dry hose and high tea to the making of a man,” said her brother. “You can’t keep that up for a dozen years.”
“Oh, you mean education!” said Bell resignedly. “That’s not in my department at all.”
Ailie expressed her views with calm, soft deliberation, as if she, too, had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, which was partly the case. “I suppose,” she said, “he’ll go to the Grammar School, and get a good grounding on the classic side, and then to the University. I will just love to help him so long as he’s at the Grammar School. That’s what I should have been, Dan, if you had let me – a teacher. I hope he’s a bright boy, for I simply cannot stand what Bell calls – calls – ”
“Diffies,” suggested Bell.
“Diffies; yes, I can not stand diffies. Being half a Dyce I can hardly think he will be a diffy. If he’s the least like his father, he may be a little wild at first, but at least he’ll be good company, which makes up for a lot, and good-hearted, quick in perception, fearless, and – ”
“And awful funny,” suggested Bell, beaming with old, fond, glad recollections of the brother dead beside his actor wife in far Chicago.
“Fearless, and good fun,” continued Ailie. “Oh, dear Will! what a merry soul he was. Well, the child cannot be a fool if he’s like his father. American independence, though he has it in – in – in clods, won’t do him any harm at all. I love Americans – do you hear that, Bell Dyce? – because they beat that stupid old King George, and have been brave in the forest and wise on the prairie, and feared no face of king, and laughed at dynasties. I love them because they gave me Emerson, and Whitman, and Thoreau, and because one of them married my brother William, and was the mother of his child.”
Dan Dyce nodded; he never quizzed his sister Ailie when it was her heart that spoke and her eyes were sparkling.
“The first thing you should learn him,” said Miss Dyce, “is ‘God save the Queen.’ It’s a splendid song altogether; I’m glad I’m of a kingdom every time I hear it at a meeting, for it’s all that’s left of the olden notions the Dyces died young or lost their money for. You’ll learn him that, Ailie, or I’ll be very vexed with you. I’ll put flesh on his bones with my cooking if you put the gentleman in him.”
It was Bell’s idea that a gentleman talked a very fine English accent like Ailie, and carried himself stately like Ailie, and had wise and witty talk for rich or poor like Ailie.
“I’m not so sure about the university,” she went on. “Such stirks come out of it sometimes; look at poor Maclean, the minister! They tell me he could speak Hebrew if he got anybody to speak it back slow to him, but just imagine the way he puts on his clothes! And his wife manages him not so bad in broad Scotch. I think we could do nothing better than make the boy a lawyer; it’s a trade looked up to, and there’s money in it, though I never could see the need of law myself if folk would only be agreeable. He could go into Dan’s office whenever he is old enough.”
“A lawyer!” cried her brother. “You have first of all to see that he’s not an ass.”
“And what odds would that make to a lawyer?” said Bell quickly, snapping her eyes at the brother she honestly thought the wisest man in Scotland.
“Bell,” said he, “as I said before, you’re a haivering body – nothing else, though I’ll grant you bake no’ a bad scone. And as for you, Ailie, you’re beginning, like most women, at the wrong end. The first thing to do with your nephew is to teach him to be happy, for it’s a habit that has to be acquired early, like the liking for pease-brose.”
“You began gey early yourself,” said Bell. “Mother used to say that she was aye kittling your feet till you laughed when you were a baby. I sometimes think that she did not stop it soon enough.”
“If I had to educate myself again, and had not a living to make, I would leave out a good many things the old dominie thought needful. What was yon awful thing again? – mensuration. To sleep well and eat anything, fear the face of nobody in bashfulness, to like dancing, and be able to sing a good bass or tenor, – that’s no bad beginning in the art of life. There’s a fellow Brodie yonder in the kirk choir who seems to me happier than a king when he’s getting in a fine boom-boom of bass to the tune Devizes; he puts me all out at my devotions on a Lord’s day with envy of his accomplishment.”
“What! envy too!” said Alison. “Murder, theft, and envy – what a brother!”
“Yes, envy too, the commonest and ugliest of our sins,” said Mr Dyce. “I never met man or woman who lacked it, though many never know they have it. I hope the great thing is to be ashamed to feel it, for that’s all that I can boast of myself. When I was a boy at the school there was another boy, a great friend of my own, was chosen to compete for a prize I was thought incapable of taking, so that I was not on the list. I envied him to hatred – almost; and saying my bits of prayers at night I prayed that he might win. I felt ashamed of my envy, and set the better Daniel Dyce to wrestle with the Daniel Dyce who was not quite so big. It was a sair fight, I can assure you. I found the words of my prayer and my wishes considerably at variance – ”
“Like me and ‘Thy will be done’ when we got the word of brother William,” said Bell.
“But my friend – dash him! – got the prize. I suppose God took a kind of vizzy down that night and saw the better Dan Dyce was doing his desperate best against the other devil’s-Dan, who mumbled the prayer on the chance He would never notice. There was no other way of accounting for it, for that confounded boy got the prize, and he was not half so clever as myself, and that was Alick Maitland. Say nothing about envy, Ailie; I fear we all have some of it until we are perhaps well up in years, and understand that between the things we envy and the luck we have there is not much to choose. If I got all I wanted, myself, the world would have to be much enlarged. It does not matter a docken leaf. Well, as I was saying when my learned friend interrupted me, I would have this young fellow healthy and happy and interested in everything. There are men I see who would mope and weary in the middle of a country fair – God help them! I want to stick pins in them sometimes and make them jump. They take as little interest in life as if they were undertakers.”
“Hoots! nobody could weary in this place at any rate,” said Bell briskly. “Look at the life and gaiety that’s in it. Talk about London! I can hardly get my sleep at night quite often with the traffic. And such things are always happening in it – births and marriages, engagements and tea-parties, new patterns at Miss Minto’s, two coaches in the day, and sometimes somebody doing something silly that will keep you laughing half the week.”
“But it’s not quite so lively as Chicago,” said Mr Dyce. “There has not been a man shot in this neighbourhood since the tinker kind of killed his wife (as the fiscal says) with the pistol. You’ll have heard of him? When the man was being brought on the scaffold for it, and the minister asked if he had anything to say before he suffered the extreme penalty of the law, ‘All I have got to say,’ he answered, starting to greet, ‘is that this’ll be an awful lesson to me.’”
“That’s one of your old ones,” said Bell; but even an old one was welcome in Dyce’s house on New Year’s day, and the three of them laughed at the story as if it had newly come from London in Ailie’s precious ‘Punch.’ The dog fell into a convulsion of merriment, as if inward chuckles tormented him – as queer a dog as ever was, neither Scotch terrier nor Skye, Dandy Dinmont nor Dachshund, but just dog, – dark wire-haired behind, short ruddy-haired in front, a stump tail, a face so fringed you could only see its eyes when the wind blew. Mr Dyce put down his hand and scratched it behind the ear. “Don’t laugh, Footles,” he said. “I would not laugh if I were you, Footles, – it’s just an old one. Many a time you’ve heard it before, sly rogue. One would think you wanted to borrow money.” If you could hear Dan Dyce speak to his dog, you would know at once he was a bachelor: only bachelors and bairnless men know dogs.
“I hope and trust he’ll have decent clothes to wear, and none of their American rubbish,” broke in Bell, back to her nephew again. “It’s all nonsense about the bashed hat; but you can never tell what way an American play-actor will dress a bairn: there’s sure to be something daft-like about him – a starry waistcoat or a pair of spats, – and we must make him respectable like other boys in the place.”
“I would say Norfolk suits, the same as the banker’s boys,” suggested Ailie. “I think the banker’s boys always look so smart and neat.”
“Anything with plenty of pockets in it,” said Mr Dyce. “At the age of ten a boy would prefer his clothes to be all pockets. By George! an entire suit of pockets, with a new penny in every pocket for luck, would be a great treat,” – and he chuckled at the idea, making a mental note of it for a future occasion.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Bell emphatically, for here she was in her own department. “The boy is going to be a Scotch boy. I’ll have the kilt on him, or nothing.”
“The kilt!” said Mr Dyce.
“The kilt!” cried Ailie.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
It was a loud knocking at the front door. They stopped the talk to listen, and they heard the maid go along the lobby from the kitchen. When she opened the door, there came in the cheerful discord of the street, the sound of a pounding drum, the fifes still busy, the orange-hawker’s cry, but over all they heard her put her usual interrogation to visitors, no matter what their state or elegance.
“Well, what is’t?” she asked, and though they could not see her, they knew she would have the door just a trifle open, with her shoulder against it, as if she was there to repel some chieftain of a wild invading clan. Then they heard her cry, “Mercy on me!” and her footsteps hurrying to the parlour door. She threw it open, and stood with some one behind her.
“What do you think? Here’s brother William’s wean!” she exclaimed in a gasp.
“My God! Where is he?” cried Bell, the first to find her tongue. “He’s no hurt, is he?”
“It’s no’ a him at all – it’s a her!” shrieked Kate, throwing up her arms in consternation, and stepping aside she gave admission to a little girl.
CHAPTER IV
The orphan child of William and Mary Dyce, dead, the pair of them, in the far-off city of Chicago, stepped quite serenely into an astounded company. There were three Dyces in a row in front of her, and the droll dog Footles at her feet, and behind her, Kate, the servant, wringing her apron as if it had newly come from the washing-boyne, her bosom heaving. Ten eyes (if you could count the dog’s, hidden by his tousy fringe) stared at the child a moment, and any ordinary child would have been much put out; but this was no common child, or else she felt at once the fond kind air of home. I will give you her picture in a sentence or two. She was black-haired, dark and quick in the eye, not quite pale but olive in complexion, with a chin she held well up, and a countenance neither shy nor bold, but self-possessed. Fur on her neck and hood (Jim Molyneux’s last gift), and a muff that held her arms up to the elbows, gave her an aspect of picture-book cosiness that put the maid in mind at once of the butcher’s Christmas calendar.
It was the dog that first got over the astonishment: he made a dive at her with little friendly growls, and rolled on his back at her feet, to paddle with his four paws in the air, which was his way of showing he was in the key for fun.
With a cry of glee she threw the muff on the floor and plumped beside him, put her arms about his body and buried her face in his fringe. His tail went waving, joyous, like a banner. “Doggie, doggie, you love me,” said she in an accent that was anything but American. “Let us pause and consider, – you will not leave this house till I boil you an egg.”
“God bless me, what child’s this?” cried Bell, coming to herself with a start, and, pouncing on her, she lifted her to her feet. Ailie sank on her hands and knees and stared in the visitor’s face. “The kilt, indeed!” said Mr Dyce to himself. “This must be a warlock wean, for if it has not got the voice and sentiment of Wanton Wully Oliver I’m losing my wits.”
“Tell me this, quick, are you Lennox Dyce?” said Bell all trembling, devouring the little one with her eyes.
“Well, I just guess I am,” replied the child calmly, with the dog licking her chin. “Say, are you Auntie Bell?” and this time there was no doubt about the American accent. Up went her mouth to them to be kissed, composedly: they lost no time, but fell upon her, Ailie half in tears because at once she saw below the childish hood so much of brother William.
“Lennox, dear, you should not speak like that; who in all the world taught you to speak like that?” said Bell, unwrapping her.
“Why, I thought that was all right here,” said the stranger. “That’s the way the bell-man speaks.”
“Bless me! Do you know the bell-man?” cried Miss Dyce.
“I rang his old bell for him this morning – didn’t you hear me?” was the surprising answer. “He’s a nice man; he liked me. I’d like him too if he wasn’t so tired. He was too tired to speak sense; all he would say was, ‘I’ve lost the place; let us pause and consider,’ and ‘Try another egg.’ I said I would give him a quarter if he’d let me ring his bell, and he said he’d let me do it for nothing, and my breakfast besides. ‘You’ll not leave this house till I boil an egg for you’ – that’s what he said, and the poor man was so tired and his legs were dreff’le poorly!” Again her voice was the voice of Wully Oliver; the sentiment, as the Dyces knew, was the slogan of his convivial hospitality.
“The kilt, indeed!” said Mr Dyce, feeling extraordinarily foolish, and, walking past them, he went upstairs and hurriedly put the pea-sling in his pocket.
When he came down, Young America was indifferently pecking at her second breakfast with Footles on her knee, an aunt on either side of her, and the maid Kate with a tray in her hand for excuse, open-mouthed, half in at the door.
“Well, as I was saying, Jim – that’s my dear Mr Molyneux, you know – got busy with a lot of the boys once he landed off that old ship, and so he said, ‘Bud, this is the – the – justly cel’brated Great Britain; I know by the boys; they’re so lonely when they’re by themselves; I was ’prehensive we might have missed it in the dark, but it’s all right.’ And next day he bought me this muff and things and put me on the cars – say, what funny cars you have! – and said ‘Good-bye, Bud; just go right up to Maryfield, and change there. If you’re lost anywhere on the island just holler out good and loud, and I’ll hear!’ He pretended he wasn’t caring, but he was pretty blinky ’bout the eyes, and I saw he wasn’t anyway gay, so I never let on the way I felt myself.”
She suggested the tone and manner of the absent Molyneux in a fashion to put him in the flesh before them. Kate almost laughed loud out at the oddity of it; Ailie and her brother were astounded at the cleverness of the mimicry; Bell clenched her hands, and said for the second time that day, “Oh! that Molyneux, if I had him!”
“He’s a nice man, Jim. I can’t tell you how I love him – and he gave me heaps of candy at the depot,” proceeded the unabashed new-comer. “‘Change at Edinburgh,’ he said; ‘you’ll maybe have time to run into the Castle and see the Duke; give him my love, but not my address. When you get to Maryfield hop out slick and ask for your uncle Dyce.’ And then he said, did Jim, ‘I hope he ain’t a loaded Dyce, seein’ he’s Scotch, and it’s the festive season.’”
“The adorable Jim!” said Ailie. “We might have known.”
“I got on all right,” proceeded the child, “but I didn’t see the Duke of Edinburgh; there wasn’t time, and uncle wasn’t at Maryfield, but a man put me on his mail carriage and drove me right here. He said I was a caution. My! it was cold. Say, is it always weather like this here?”
“Sometimes it’s like this, and sometimes it’s just ordinary Scotch weather,” said Mr Dyce, twinkling at her through his spectacles.
“I was dreff’le sleepy in the mail, and the driver wrapped me up, and when I came into this town in the dark he said, ‘Walk right down there and rap at the first door you see with a brass man’s hand for a knocker; that’s Mr Dyce’s house.’ I came down, and there wasn’t any brass man, but I saw the knocker. I couldn’t reach up to it, so when I saw a man going into the church with a lantern in his hand, I went up to him and pulled his coat. I knew he’d be all right going into a church. He told me he was going to ring the bell, and I said I’d give him a quarter – oh, I said that before. When the bell was finished he took me to his house for luck – that was what he said – and he and his wife got right up and boiled eggs. They said I was a caution, too, and they went on boiling eggs, and I couldn’t eat more than two and a white though I tried and tried. I think I slept a good while in their house; I was so fatigued, and they were all right; they loved me, I could see that. And I liked them some myself, though they must be mighty poor, for they haven’t any children. Then the bell-man took me to this house, and rapped at the door, and went away pretty quick for him before anybody came to it, because he said he was plain-soled – what’s plain-soled anyhow? – and wasn’t a lucky first-foot on a New Year’s morning.”
“It beats all, that’s what it does!” cried Bell. “My poor wee whitterick! Were ye no’ frightened on the sea?”
“Whitterick, whitterick,” repeated the child to herself, and Ailie, noticing, was glad that this was certainly not a diffy. Diffies never interest themselves in new words; diffies never go inside themselves with a new fact as a dog goes under a table with a bone.
“Were you not frightened when you were on the sea?” repeated Bell.
“No,” said the child promptly. “Jim was there all right, you see, and he knew all about it. He said, ‘Trust in Providence, and if it’s very stormy, trust in Providence and the Scotch captain.’”
“I declare! the creature must have some kind of sense in him, too,” said Bell, a little mollified by this compliment to Scotch sea-captains. And all the Dyces fed their eyes upon this wonderful wean that had fallen among them. ’Twas happy in that hour with them; as if in a miracle they had been remitted to their own young years; their dwelling was at long last furnished! She had got into the good graces of Footles as if she had known him all her life.
“Say, uncle, this is a funny dog,” was her next remark. “Did God make him?”
“Well – yes, I suppose God did,” said Mr Dyce, taken a bit aback.
“Well, isn’t He the darndest! This dog beats Mrs Molyneux’s Dodo, and Dodo was a looloo. What sort of a dog is he? Scotch terrier?”
“Mostly not,” said her uncle, chuckling. “It’s really an improvement on the Scotch terrier. There’s later patents in him, you might say. He’s a sort of mosaic; indeed, when I think of it you might describe him as a pure mosaic dog.”
“A Mosaic dog!” exclaimed Lennox. “Then he must have come from scriptural parts. Perhaps I’ll get playing with him Sundays. Not playing loud out, you know, but just being happy. I love being happy, don’t you?”
“It’s my only weakness,” said Mr Dyce emphatically, blinking through his glasses. “The other business men in the town don’t approve of me for it; they call it frivolity. But it comes so easily to me I never charge it in the bills, though a sense of humour should certainly be worth 12s. 6d. a smile in the Table of Fees. It would save many a costly plea.”
“Didn’t you play on Sunday in Chicago?” asked Ailie.
“Not out loud. Poppa said he was bound to have me Scotch in one thing at least, even if it took a strap. That was after mother died. He’d just read to me Sundays, and we went to church till we had pins and needles. We had the Reverend Ebenezer Paul Frazer, M.A., Presbyterian Church on the Front. He just preached and preached till we had pins and needles all over.”
“My poor Lennox!” exclaimed Ailie, with feeling.
“Oh, I’m all right!” said young America blithely. “I’m not kicking.”
Dan Dyce, with his head to the side, took off his spectacles and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief; put them on again, looked at his niece through them, and then at Ailie, with some emotion struggling in his countenance. Ailie for a moment suppressed some inward convulsion, and turned her gaze, embarrassed from him to Bell, and Bell catching the eyes of both of them could contain her joy no longer. They laughed till the tears came, and none more heartily than brother William’s child. She had so sweet a laugh that there and then the Dyces thought it the loveliest sound they had ever heard in their house. Her aunts would have devoured her with caresses. Her uncle stood over her and beamed, rubbing his hands, expectant every moment of another manifestation of the oddest kind of child mind he had ever encountered. And Kate swept out and in between the parlour and the kitchen on trivial excuses, generally with something to eat for the child, who had eaten so much in the house of Wanton Wully Oliver that she was indifferent to the rarest delicacies of Bell’s celestial grocery.
“You’re just – just a wee witch!” said Bell, fondling the child’s hair. “Do you know, that man Molyneux – ”
“Jim,” suggested Lennox.
“I would Jim him if I had him! That man Molyneux in all his scrimping little letters never said whether you were a boy or a girl, and we thought a Lennox was bound to be a boy, and all this time we have been expecting a boy.”
“I declare!” said the little one, with the most amusing drawl, a memory of Molyneux. “Why, I always was a girl, far back as I can remember. Nobody never gave me the chance to be a boy. I s’pose I hadn’t the clothes for the part, and they just pushed me along anyhow in frocks. Would you’d rather I was a boy?”
“Not a bit! We have one in the house already, and he’s a fair heart-break,” said her aunt, with a look towards Mr Dyce. “We had just made up our minds to dress you in the kilt when your rap came to the door. At least, I had made up my mind; the others are so thrawn! And bless me! lassie, where’s your luggage? You surely did not come all the way from Chicago with no more than what you have on your back?”
