Kitabı oku: «The Daft Days», sayfa 7
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.
Do you think it unlikely that this child should have such dreams? Ah, then, you are not of her number, or you have forgotten. She never forgot. Many a time she told me in after-years of how in the attic bower, with Footles snug at her feet, she conjured up the lad on the milk-white steed, not so much for himself alone, but that she might act the lady-love. And in those dreams she was tall and slender, sometimes proud, disdainful, wounding the poor wretch with sharp words and cold glances; or she was meek and languishing, sighing out her heart even in presence of his true-love gifts of candy and P. & A. MacGlashan’s penny tarts. She walked with him in gardens enchanted; they sailed at nights over calm moonlit seas, and she would be playing the lute. She did not know what the lute was like; but it was the instrument of love, and had a dulcet sound, like the alto flutes in the burgh band.
But, of course, no fairy prince came wooing Daniel Dyce’s little niece, though men there were in the place – elderly and bald, with married daughters – who tried to buy her kisses for sixpences and sweets, and at last she felt vicariously the joys of love by conducting the affairs of Kate.
Kate had many wooers, – that is the solace of her class. They liked her because she was genial and plump, with a flattering smile and a soft touch of the Gaelic accent that in the proper key and hour is the thing to break hearts. She twirled them all round her little finger, and Bud was soon to see this and to learn that the maid was still very far from the slopey side of thirty. But Kate, too, had her dreams – of some misty lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a delicious smell of tar – something or other on a yacht. The name she had endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny novelettes.
One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.
“Are you at your lessons too?” said the child. “You naughty Kate! there’s a horrid blot. No lady makes blots.”
“It wasn’t me, it was this devilish pen; besides, I’m not a lady,” said Kate, licking the latest blot with her tongue and grimacing. “What way do you spell weather?”
“W-e-t-h-e-r,” said Bud. “At least, I think that’s the way! but I’d best run and ask Aunt Ailie, – she’s a speller from Spellerville.”
“Indeed and you’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried the maid, alarmed and reddening. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Lennox, because – I’m writing to Charles.”
“A love-letter! Oh, I’ve got you with the goods on you!” exclaimed Bud, enchanted. “And what are you doing with your hurrah clothes on?”
“I like to put on my Sunday clothes when I’m writing Charles,” said the maid, a little put-about. “Do you think it’s kind of daft?”
“It’s not daft at all, it’s real ’cute of you; it’s what I do myself when I’m writing love-letters, for it makes me feel kind of grander. It’s just the same with poetry; I simply can’t make sure enough poetry unless I have on a nice frock and my hands washed.”
“You write love-letters!” said the maid, astounded.
“Yes, you poor perishing soul!” retorted Bud. “And you needn’t yelp. I’ve written scores of love-letters without stopping to take breath. Stop! stop!” she interrupted herself, and breathed an inward little prayer. “I mean that I write them – well, kind of write them – in my mind.” But this was a qualification beyond Kate’s comprehension.
“Then I wish you would give me a hand with this one,” said she despairingly. “All the nice words are so hard to spell, and this is such a bad pen.”
“They’re all bad pens; they’re all devilish,” said Bud, from long experience. “But I’d love to help you write that letter. Let me see – pooh! it’s dreffle bad, Kate. I can’t read a bit of it, almost.”
“I’m sure and neither can I,” said Kate, distressed.
“Then how in the world do you expect Charles to read it?” asked Bud.
“Oh, he’s – he’s a better scholar than me,” said Kate complacently. “But you might write this one for me.”
Bud washed her hands, took a chair to the kitchen table, threw back her hair from her eyes, and eagerly entered into the office of love-letter-writer. “What will I say to him?” she asked.
“My dear, dear Charles,” said the maid, who at least knew so much.
“My adorable Charles,” said Bud, as an improvement, and down it went with the consent of the dictator.
“I’m keeping fine, and I’m very busy,” suggested Kate, upon deliberation. “The weather is capital here at present, and it is a good thing, for the farmers are busy with their hay.”
Bud sat back and stared at her in amazement. “Are you sure this is for a Charles?” she asked. “You might as well call him Sissy and talk frocks. Why! you must tell him how you love him.”
“Oh, I don’t like,” said Kate, confused. “It sounds so – so bold and impudent when you put it in the English and write it down. But please yourself; put down what you like, and I’ll be dipping the pen for you.”
Bud was not slow to take the opportunity. For half an hour she sat at the kitchen table and searched her soul for fitting words that would convey Kate’s adoration. Once or twice the maid asked what she was writing, but all she said was “Don’t worry, Kate. I’m right in the throes.” There were blots and there were erasions, but something like this did the epistle look when it was done: —
“My adorable Charles, – I am writeing this letter to let you know how much I truly love you. Oh Charles, dear, you are the Joy of my heart. I am thinking of you so often, often, till my Heart just aches. It is lovely wether here at present. Now I will tell you all about the Games. They took place in a park near here Friday and there was seventeen beautiful dancers. They danced to give you spassums. One of them was a Noble youth. He was a Prince in his own write, under Spells for sevn years. When he danced, lo and behold he was the admiration of all Beholders. Alas! poor youth. When I say alas I mean that it was so sad being like that full of Spells in the flower of his youth. He looked at me so sad when he was dancing, and I was so glad. It was just like money from home. Dear Charles, I will tell you all about myself. I am full of goodness most the time for God loves good people. But sometimes I am not and I have a temper like two crost sticks when I must pray to be changed. The dancing gentleman truly loves me to distruction. He kissed my hand and hastily mountain his noble steed, galoped furiously away. Ah, the coarse of true love never did run smooth. Perhaps he will fall upon the forein plain. Dearest Charles – adorable – I must now tell you that I am being educated for my proper station in life. There is Geograpy, and penmanship with the right commas, and Long Division and conjunctives which I abomiate. But my teacher, a sweet lady named Miss Alison Dyce, says they are all truly refining. Oh I am weary, weary, he cometh not. That is for you, darling Charles, my own. – Your true heart love,
Kate MacNeill.”
“Is that all right?” asked Bud anxiously.
“Yes; at least it’ll do fine,” said the maid, with that Highland politeness that is often so bad for business. “There’s not much about himself in it, but och! it’ll do fine. It’s as nice a letter as ever I saw: the lines are all that straight.”
“But there’s blots,” said Bud regretfully. “There oughtn’t to be blots in a real love-letter.”
“Toots! just put a cross beside each of them, and write ‘this is a kiss,’” said Kate, who must have had some previous experience. “You forgot to ask him how’s his health, as it leaves us at present.”
So Bud completed the letter as instructed. “Now for the envelope,” said she.
“I’ll put the address on it myself,” said Kate, confused. “He would be sure somebody else had been reading it if the address was not in my hand of write,” – an odd excuse, whose absurdity escaped the child. So the maid put the letter in the bosom of her Sunday gown against her heart, where meanwhile dwelt the only Charles. It is, I sometimes think, where we should all deposit and retain our love-letters; for the lad and lass, as we must think of them, have no existence any more than poor Kate’s Charles.
Two days passed. Often in those two days would Bud come, asking anxiously if there was any answer yet from Charles. As often the maid of Colonsay reddened, and said with resignation there was not so much as the scrape of a pen. “He’ll be on the sea,” she explained at last, “and not near a post-office. Stop you till he gets near a post-office, and you’ll see the fine letter I’ll get.”
“I didn’t know he was a sailor,” said Bud. “Why, I calculated he was a Highland chieftain or a knight, or something like that. If I had known he was a sailor I’d have made that letter different. I’d have loaded it up to the nozzle with sloppy weather, and said, Oh, how sad I was – that’s you, Kate – to lie awake nights thinking about him out on the heaving billow. Is he a captain?”
“Yes,” said Kate promptly. “A full captain in the summer time. In the winter he just stays at home and helps on his mother’s farm. Not a cheep to your aunties about Charles, darling Lennox,” she added anxiously. “They’re – they’re that particular!”
“I don’t think you’re a true love at all,” said Bud, reflecting on many interviews at the kitchen window and the back-door. “Just think of the way you make goo-goo eyes at the letter-carrier, and the butcher’s man, and the ashpit gentleman. What would Charles say?”
“Toots! I’m only putting by the time with them,” explained the maid. “It’s only a diversion. When I marry I will marry for my own conveniency, and the man for me is Charles.”
“What’s the name of his ship?” asked the child.
“The Good Intent,” said Kate, who had known a skiff of the name in Colonsay. “A beautiful ship, with two yellow lums, and flags to the masthead.”
“That’s fine and fancy!” said Bud. “There was a gentleman who loved me to destruction, coming over on the ship from New York, and loaded me with candy. He was not the captain, but he had gold braid everywhere, and his name was George Sibley Purser. He promised he would marry me when I made a name for myself, but I ’spect Mister J. S. Purser’ll go away and forget.”
“That’s just the way with them all,” said Kate.
“I don’t care, then,” said Bud. “I’m all right; I’m not kicking.”
Next day the breakfast in the house of Dyce was badly served, for Kate was wild to read a letter that the post had brought, and when she opened it, you may be sure Bud was at her shoulder.
“Dearest Kate [it said], – I love you truly and I am thinking of you most the time. Thank God we was all safed. Now I will tell you all about the Wreck. The sea was mountains high, and we had a cargo of spise and perils from Java on the left-hand side the map as you go to Australia. When the Pirite ship chased us we went down with all hands. But we constrickted a raft and sailed on and on till we had to draw lots who would drink the blood. Just right there a sailor cried ‘A sail, A sail,’ and sure enough it was a sail. And now I will tell you all about Naples. There is a monsterious mountain there, or cone which belches horrid flames and lavar. Once upon a time it belched all over a town by the name of Pompy and it is there till this very day. The bay of naples is the grandest in the world it is called the golden horn. Dearest Katherine, I am often on the mast at night. It is cold and shakey in that place and oh how the wind doth blow, but I ring a bell and say alls well which makes the saloon people truly glad. We had five stow-ways. One of them was a sweet fair-haired child from Liverpool, he was drove from home. But a good and beautious lady, one of the first new england families is going to adopt him and make him her only air. How beautiful and bright he stood as born to rule the storm. I weary for your letters darling Katherine. – Write soon to your true love till death,
“Charles.”
Kate struggled through this extraordinary epistle with astonishment. “Who in the world is it from?” she asked Bud.
“Charles, stupid,” said Bud, astonished that there should be any doubt about that point. “Didn’t I – didn’t we write him the other night? It was up to him to write back, wasn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Kate, very conscious of that letter still unposted, “but – but he doesn’t say Charles anything, just Charles. It’s a daft-like thing not to give his name; it might be anybody. There’s my Charles, and there’s Charles Maclean from Oronsay, – what way am I to know which of them it is?”
“It’ll be either or eyether,” said Bud. “Do you know Charles Maclean?”
“Of course I do,” said the maid. “He’s following the sea, and we were well acquaint.”
“Did he propose to you?” asked Bud.
“Well, he did not exactly propose,” admitted Kate, “but we sometimes went a walk together to the churchyard on a Sunday, and you know yourself what that means out in Colonsay. I’ll just keep the letter and think of it. It’s the nicest letter I ever got, and full of information. It’s Charles Maclean, I’ll warrant you, but he did not use to call me Katherine – he just said Kate, and his face would be as red as anything. Fancy him going down with all hands! My heart is sore for him,” and the maid there and then transferred her devotion from the misty lad of her own imagination to Charles Maclean of Oronsay.
“You’ll help me to write him a letter back to-night,” she said.
“Yes, indeed, I’ll love to,” said the child wearily. But by the time the night came on, and Wanton Wully rang his curfew bell, and the rooks came clanging home to the tall trees of the forest, she was beyond all interest in life or love.
CHAPTER XIII
Wanton Wully only briefly rang the morning bell, and gingerly, with tight-shut lips and deep nose breathings, as if its loud alarm could so be mitigated. Once before he had done it just as delicately – when the Earl was dying, and the bell-ringer, uncertain of his skill to toll, when the time came, with the right half-minute pauses, grieved the town and horrified the Castle by a rehearsal in the middle of a winter night. But no soul of mercy is in brazen bells that hang aloof from man in lofty steeples, and this one, swung ever so gently, sullenly boomed – boomed – boomed.
“Oh, to the devil wi’ ye!” said Wanton Wully, sweating with vexation. “Of all the senseless bells! A big, boss bluiter! I canna compel nor coax ye!” and he gave the rope one vicious tug that brought it, broken, round his ears; then went from the church into the sunny, silent, morning street, where life and the day suspended.
In faith! a senseless bell, a merciless bell, waking folk to toil and grief. Dr Brash and Ailie heavy-eyed, beside the bed in the attic bower, shivered at the sound of it, and looked with fear and yearning at the sleeping child.
Bud moved her head from side to side a little on the pillow, with a murmur from her parched lips, and there was a flicker of the eyelids – that was all. Between her and the everlasting swound, where giddily swings the world and all its living things, there seemed no more than a sheet of tissue-paper: it was as if a breath of the tender morning air would quench the wavering flame that once was joy and Lennox Dyce. The heart of Auntie Ailie rose clamouring in her bosom; her eyes stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clenched her teeth that she might still be worthy of the doctor’s confidence.
He saw it, and put out his hand and pressed her shoulder, a fat old-fashioned man, well up in years, with whiskers under his chin like a cravat, yet beautiful as a prince to Ailie, for on him all her hopes were cast. “They call me agnostic – atheist even, whiles, I hear,” he had said in the midst of their vigil; “and, indeed, I’m sometimes beat to get my mind beyond the mechanism, but – h’m! – a fine child, a noble child; she was made for something – h’m! That mind and talent – h’m! – that spirit – h’m! – the base of it was surely never yon grey stuff in the convolutions.” And another time the minister had come in (the folk in the street were furious to see him do it!), and timidly suggested prayer. “Prayer!” said Dr Brash, “before this child, and her quite conscious! Man, what in God’s own name are we doing here, this – h’m! – dear good lady and I, but fever ourselves with sleepless, silent prayer? Do you think a proper prayer must be official? There’s not a drop of stuff in a druggist’s bottle but what’s a solution of hope and faith and – h’m! – prayer. Con-found it, sir!”
He put out his hand and pressed her on the shoulder, and never said a word. Oh, the doctors! the doctors! Hale men and hearty, we can see their shortcomings and can smile at them, but when the night-light burns among the phials!
It was the eighth day after Kate, with a face of clay, and her sleeves rolled up, and the dough still on her elbows as she had come from the baking-board, burst upon the doctor in his surgery with the cry, “Dr Brash, Dr Brash! ye’re to haste ye and come at once to the wee one!” He had gone as nearly on the wings of the wind as a fat man may in carpet-slippers, and found a distracted family round the fevered child.
“Tut, tut, lassie,” said he, chucking her lightly under the chin. “What new prank is this, to be pretending illness? Or if it’s not a let-on, I’ll be bound it’s MacGlashan’s almond tablet.”
“It’s these cursèd crab-apples in the garden; I’m sure it’s the crab-apples, doctor,” said Miss Bell, looking ten years older than her usual.
“H’m! I think not,” said Dr Brash more gravely, with his finger on the pulse.
“It’s bound to be,” said Bell, piteous at having to give up her only hope. “Didn’t you eat some yesterday, pet, after I told you that you were not for your life to touch them?”
“No,” said Bud, with hot and heavy breathing.
“Then why didn’t ye, why didn’t ye; and then it might have been the apples?” said poor Miss Bell. “You shouldn’t have minded me; I’m aye so domineering.”
“No, you’re not,” said Bud, and wanly smiling.
“Indeed I am; the thing’s acknowledged, and you needn’t deny it,” said her auntie. “I’m desperate domineering to you.”
“Well, I’m – I’m not kicking,” said Bud. It was the last cheerful expression she gave utterance to for many days.
Wanton Wully was not long the only one that morning in the sunny street. Women came out, unusually early, as it seemed, to beat their basses; but the first thing that they did was to look at the front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a kind of terror lest none of the blinds should be up, and Mr Dyce’s old kid glove should be off the knocker. “Have you heard what way she is keeping to-day?” they asked the bell-man.
“Not a cheep!” said he. “I saw Kate sweepin’ out her door-step, but I couldna ask her. That’s the curse of my occupation; I wish to goodness they had another man for the grave-diggin’.”
“You and your graves!” said the women. “Who was mentioning them?”
He stood on the syver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that’s what she was – a perfect caution! She called me Mr Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”
“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.
“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tellt me once it was a kind o’ weakness that they keep on gantrys down in Maggie White’s. But she does not understand – the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o’ gout. Me! I never had the gout, – I never had the money for it, more’s the pity.”
He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh’s Cleansing Department. Later – till the middle of the day – he was the Harbour-Master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces’ house. “It’s the parlour fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel’, though I never had it; it’s a good sign o’ him the night before.”
Peter the post came clamping by-and-by along the street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces’. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back-door and lightly tapped.
“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.
“She’s got the turn! – she’s got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”
“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.
“It’s no’ temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi’ the weather-glass the doctor’s aye so cross wi’ that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But anyway she’s better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not, she’ll starve hersel’”
“That’s rare! By George, that’s tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons’ balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.
Wanton Wully sat on a barrow-tram waiting the postman’s exit. “What way is she?” said he, and Peter’s errant eye cocked to all airts of the compass. What he wanted was to keep this tit-bit to himself, to have the satisfaction of passing it along with his letters. To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What way is she?” he asked again, seeing the postman’s hesitation.
“If ye’ll promise to stick to the head o’ the toun and let me alone in the ither end, I’ll tell ye,” said Peter, and it was so agreed.
But they had not long all the glory of the good tidings to themselves. Dr Brash came out of Dyce’s house for the first time in two days, very sunken in the eyes and sorely needing shaving, and it could be noticed by the dullest that he had his jaunty walk and a flower in the lapel of his badly-crushed coat. Ailie put it there with trembling fingers; she could have kissed the man besides, if there had not been the chance that he might think her only another silly woman. Later Footles hurled himself in fury from the doorway, his master close behind him. At the sight of Mr Dyce the street was happy; it was the first time they had seen him for a week. In burgh towns that are small enough we have this compensation, that if we have to grieve in common over many things, a good man’s personal joy exalts us all.
“She’s better, Mr Dyce, I’m hearing,” said P. & A. MacGlashan, wiping his hands on his apron, to prepare for a fervent clasp from one who, he ought to have known, was not of the fervent-clasping kind.
“Thank God! Thank God!” said Mr Dyce. “You would know she was pretty far through?”
“Well – we kind of jaloused. But we kent there was no danger – the thing would be ridiculous!” said P. & A. MacGlashan, and went into his shop in a hurry, much uplifted too, and picked out a big bunch of black grapes and sent his boy with them, with his compliments, to Miss Lennox Dyce, care of Daniel Dyce, Esquire, Writer.
Miss Minto so adored the man she could not show herself to him in an hour like that; for she knew that she must weep, and a face begrutten ill became her, so in she came from the door of her Emporium and watched him pass the window. She saw in him what she had never seen before – for in his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say: she saw, with the sharp eyes of a woman who looks at the man she would like to manage, that his hat was dusty and his boots not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week from the Dyces’ dwelling it realised for her the state of things there.
“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he’s quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence ha’penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they called “Miss Minto’s back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace, a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss Minto’s youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen – if queens are attired in gorgeous hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss Minto’s life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But she thought how happy Mr Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.
