Bud: A Novel
“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 up-stairs 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 lively 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 out loud at the oddity of it; Ailie and her brother were astounded at the cleverness of the mimicry; Bell clinched 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 dre’ffle 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 bellman 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 Scots 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 damedst! 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 humor 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 motion 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 parlor 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 mind 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 stubborn. 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?”
“You’ll be tickled to death to see my trunks!” said Lennox. “I’ve heaps and heaps of clothes and six dolls. They’re all coming with the coach. They wanted me to wait for the coach too, but the mail man who called me a caution said he was bound to have a passenger for luck on New Year’s Day, and I was in a hurry to get home anyway.”
“Home!” When she said that, the two aunts swept on her like a billow and bore her, dog and all, up-stairs to her room. She was almost blind for want of sleep.
They hovered over her quick-fingered, airy as bees, stripping her for bed. She knelt a moment and in one breath said:
“God – bless – father – and – mother – and – Jim – and – Mrs. – Molyneux – and – my – aunts – in – Scotland – and Uncle – Dan – and – everybody – good – night.”
And was asleep in the sunlight of the room as soon as her head fell on the pillow.
“She prayed for her father and mother,” whispered Bell, with Footles in her arms, as they stood beside the bed. “It’s not – it’s not quite Presbyterian to pray for the dead; it’s very American, indeed you might call it papist.”
Ailie’s face reddened, but she said nothing.
“And do you know this?” said Bell, shamefacedly, “I do it myself; upon my word, I do it myself. I’m often praying for father and mother and William.”
“So am I,” confessed Alison, plainly relieved. “I’m afraid I’m a poor Presbyterian, for I never knew there was anything wrong in doing so.”
Below, in the parlor, Mr. Dyce stood looking into the white garden, a contented man, humming:
“Star of Peace, to wanderers weary.”CHAPTER V
SHE was a lucky lassie, this of ours, to have come home to her father’s Scotland on that New Year’s Day, for there is no denying that it is not always gay in Scotland, contrary land, that, whether we be deep down in the waist of the world and afar from her, or lying on her breast, chains us to her with links of iron and gold – stern tasks and happy days remembered, ancient stories, austerity and freedom, cold weather on moor and glen, warm hearths and burning hearts. She might have seen this burgh first in its solemnity, on one of the winter days when it shivers and weeps among its old memorials, and the wild geese cry more constant over the house-tops, and the sodden gardens, lanes, wynds, and wells, the clanging spirits of old citizens dead and gone, haunting the place of their follies and their good times, their ridiculous ideals, their mistaken ambitions, their broken plans. Ah, wild geese! wild geese! old ghosts that cry to-night above my dwelling, I feel – I feel and know! She might have come, the child, to days of fast, and sombre dark drugget garments, dissonant harsh competing kettle bells, or spoiled harvests, poor fishings, hungry hours. It was good for her, and it is the making of my story, that she came not then, but with the pure white cheerful snow, to ring the burgh bell in her childish escapade, and usher in with merriment the New Year, and begin her new life happily in the Old World.
She woke at noon among the scented curtains, in linen sea-breeze bleached, under the camceil roof that all children love, for it makes a garret like the ancestral cave and in rainy weather they can hear the pattering feet of foes above them. She heard the sound of John Taggart’s drum, and the fifing of “Happy we’ve been a’ thegether,” and turning, found upon her pillow a sleeping doll that woke whenever she raised it up, and stared at her in wonderment.
“Oh! – Oh! – Oh! you roly-poly blonde!” cried the child in ecstasy, hugging it to her bosom and covering it with kisses. “I’m as glad as anything. Do you see the lovely little room? I’ll tell you right here what your name is: it’s Alison; no, it’s Bell; no, it’s Alibel for your two just lovely, lovely aunties.”
Up she rose, sleep banished, with a sense of cheerfulness and expectation, nimbly dressed herself, and slid down the banisters to tumble plump at the feet of her Auntie Bell in the lobby.
“Mercy on us! You’ll break your neck; are you hurt?” cried Aunt Bell. “I’m not kicking,” said the child, and the dog waved furiously a gladsome tail. A log fire blazed and crackled and hissed in the parlor, and Mr. Dyce tapped time with his fingers on a chair-back to an internal hymn.
“My! ain’t I the naughty girl to be snoozling away like a gopher in a hole all day? Your clock’s stopped, Uncle Dan.”
Mr. Dyce looked very guilty, and coughed, rubbing his chin. “You’re a noticing creature,” said he. “I declare it has stopped. Well, well!” and his sister Bell plainly enjoyed some amusing secret.
“Your uncle is always a little daft, my dear,” she said.
“I would rather be daft than dismal,” he retorted, cleaning his glasses.
“It’s a singular thing that the clocks in our lobby and parlor always stop on the New Year’s Day, Lennox.”
“Bud; please, say Bud,” pleaded the little one. “Nobody ever calls me Lennox ‘cept when I’m doing something wrong and almost going to get a whipping.”
“Very well, Bud, then. This clock gets something wrong with it every New Year’s Day, for your uncle, that man there, wants the folk who call never to know the time so that they’ll bide the longer.”
“Tuts!” said Uncle Dan, who had thought this was his own particular recipe for joviality, and that they had never discovered it.
“You have come to a hospitable town, Bud,” said Ailie. “There are convivial old gentlemen on the other side of the street who have got up a petition to the magistrates to shut up the inn and the public-house in the afternoon. They say it is in the interests of temperance, but it’s really to compel their convivial friends to visit themselves.”
“I signed it myself,” confessed Mr. Dyce, “and I’m only half convivial. I’m not bragging; I might have been more convivial if it didn’t so easily give me an aching head. What’s more cheerful than a crowd in the house and the clash going? A fine fire, a good light, and turn about at a story! The happiest time I ever had in my life was when I broke my leg; so many folk called, it was like a month of New Year’s Days. I was born with a craving for company. Mother used to have a superstition that if a knife or spoon dropped on the floor from the table it betokened a visitor, and I used to drop them by the dozen. But, dear me! here’s a wean with a doll, and where in the world did she get it?”
Bud, with the doll under one arm and the dog tucked under the other, laughed up in his face with shy perception.
“Oh, you funny man!” she exclaimed. “I guess you know all right who put Alibel on my pillow. Why! I could have told you were a doll man: I noticed you turning over the pennies in your pants’ pocket, same as poppa used when he saw any nice clean little girl like me, and he was the dolliest man in all Chicago. Why, there was treasury days when he just rained dolls.”
“That was William, sure enough,” said Mr. Dyce. “There’s no need for showing us your strawberry mark. It was certainly William. If it had only been dolls!”
“Her name’s Alibel, for her two aunties,” said the child.
“Tuts!” said Mr. Dyce. “If I had thought you meant to honor them that way I would have made her twins. But you see I did not know; it was a delicate transaction as it was. I could not tell very well whether a doll or a – a – or a fountain-pen would be the most appropriate present for a ten-year-old niece from Chicago, and I risked the doll. I hope it fits.”
“Like a halo! It’s just sweet!” said the ecstatic maiden, and rescued one of its limbs from the gorge of Footles.
It got about the town that to Dyces’ house had come a wonderful American child who talked language like a minister: the news was partly the news of the mail-driver and Wully Oliver, but mostly the news of Kate, who, from the moment Lennox had been taken from her presence and put to bed, had dwelt upon the window-sashes, letting no one pass that side of the street without her confidence.
“You never heard the like! No’ the size of a shilling worth of ha’pennies, and she came all the way by her lee-lone in the coach from Chickagoo – that’s in America. There’s to be throng times in this house now, I’m tellin’ you, with brother William’s wean.”
As the forenoon advanced Kate’s intelligence grew more surprising: to the new-comer were ascribed a score of characteristics such as had never been seen in the town before. For one thing (would Kate assure them), she could imitate Wully Oliver till you almost saw whiskers on her and could smell the dram. She was thought to be a boy to start with, but that was only their ignorance in Chickagoo, for the girl was really a lassie, and had kists of lassie’s clothes coming with the coach.
The Dyces’ foreigner was such a grand sensation that it marred the splendor of the afternoon band parade, though John Taggart was unusually glorious, walking on the very backs of his heels, his nose in the heavens, and his drumsticks soaring and circling over his head in a way to make the spectators giddy. Instead of following the band till its répertoire was suddenly done at five minutes to twelve at the door of Maggie White, the wine and spirit merchant, there were many that hung about the street in the hope of seeing the American. They thought they would know her at once by the color of her skin, which some said would be yellow, and others maintained would be brown. A few less patient and more privileged boldly visited the house of Dyce to make their New-Year compliments and see the wonder for themselves.
The American had her eye on them.
She had her eye on the Sheriffs lady, who was so determinedly affable, so pleased with everything the family of Dyce might say, do, or possess, and only five times ventured to indicate there were others, by a mention of “the dear Lady Anne – so nice, so simple, so unaffected, so amiable.”
On Miss Minto of the crimson cloak, who kept her deaf ear to the sisters and her good one to their brother, and laughed heartily at all his little jokes even before they were half made, or looked at him with large, soft, melting eyes and her lips apart, which her glass had told her was an aspect ravishing. The sisters smiled at each other when she had gone and looked comically at Dan, but he, poor man, saw nothing, but just that Mary Minto was a good deal fatter than she used to be.
On the doctor’s two sisters, late come from a farm in the country, marvellously at ease so long as the conversation abode in gossip about the neighbors, but in a silent terror when it rose from persons to ideas, as it once had done when Lady Anne had asked them what they thought of didactic poetry, and one of them said it was a thing she was very fond of, and then fell in a swound.
On the banker man, the teller, who was in hopeless love with Ailie, as was plain from the way he devoted himself to Bell.
On Mr. Dyce’s old retired partner, Mr. Cleland, who smelt of cloves and did not care for tea.
On P. & A. MacGlashan, who had come in specially to see if the stranger knew his brother Albert, who, he said, was “in a Somewhereville in Manitoba.”
On the Provost and his lady, who were very old, and petted each other when they thought themselves unobserved.
On the soft, kind, simple, content and happy ladies lately married.
On the others who would like to be.
Yes, Bud had her eye on them all. They never guessed how much they entertained her as they genteelly sipped their tea, or wine, or ginger cordial, – the women of them – or coughed a little too artificially over the New-Year glass – the men.
“Wee Pawkie, that’s what she is – just Wee Pawkie!” said the Provost when he got out, and so far it summed up everything.
The ladies could not tear away home fast enough to see if they had not a remnant of cloth that could be made into such a lovely dress as that of Dyce’s niece for one of their own children. “Mark my words!” they said; “that child will be ruined between them. She’s her father’s image, and he went and married a poor play-actress, and stayed a dozen years away from Scotland, and never wrote home a line.”
So many people came to the house, plainly for no reason but to see the new-comer, that Ailie at last made up her mind to satisfy all by taking her out for a walk. The strange thing was that in the street the populace displayed indifference or blindness. Bud might have seen no more sign of interest in her than the hurried glance of a passer-by; no step slowed to show that the most was being made of the opportunity. There had been some women at their windows when she came out of the house sturdily walking by Aunt Ailie’s side, with her hands in her muff, and her keen black eyes peeping from under the fur of her hood; but these women drew in their heads immediately. Ailie, who knew her native town, was conscious that from behind the curtains the scrutiny was keen. She smiled to herself as she walked demurely down the street.
“Do you feel anything, Bud?” she asked.
Bud naturally failed to comprehend.
“You ought to feel something at your back; I’m ticklish all down the back because of a hundred eyes.”
“I know,” said the astounding child. “They think we don’t notice, but I guess God sees them,” and yet she had apparently never glanced at the windows herself, nor looked round to discover passers-by staring over their shoulders at her aunt and her.
For a moment Ailie felt afraid. She dearly loved a quick perception, but it was a gift, she felt, a niece might have too young.
“How in the world did you know that, Bud?” she asked.
“I just guessed they’d be doing it,” said Bud, “‘cause it’s what I would do if I saw a little girl from Scotland walking down the lake front in Chicago. Is it dreff’le rude, Aunt Ailie?”
“So they say, so they say,” said her aunt, looking straight forward, with her shoulders back and her eyes level, flushing at the temples. “But I’m afraid we can’t help it. It’s undignified – to be seen doing it. I can see you’re a real Dyce, Bud. The other people who are not Dyces lose a great deal of fun. They must be very much bored with each other. Do you know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends – you and I and Aunt Bell and Uncle Dan.”
“And the Mosaic dog,” added Bud with warmth. “I love that old dog so much that I could – I could eat him. He’s the becomingest dog! Why, here he is!” And it was indeed Footles who hurled himself at them, a rapturous mass of unkempt hair and convulsive barkings, having escaped from the imprisonment of Kate’s kitchen by climbing over her shoulders and out across the window-sash.
CHAPTER VI
I HEARD all about you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan from pop – from father,” said Bud, as they walked back to the house. She had learned already from example how sweeter sounded “father” than the term she had used in America. “He was mighty apt to sit up nights talking about you all. But I don’t quite place Kate: he never mentioned Kate.”
“Oh, she’s a new addition,” explained Ailie. “Kate is the maid, you know: she came to us long after your father left home, but she’s been with us five years now, and that’s long enough to make her one of the family.”
“My! Five years! She ain’t – she isn’t much of a quitter, is she? I guess you must have tacked her down,” said Bud. “You don’t get helps in Chicago to linger round the dear old spot like that; they get all hot running from base to base, same as if it was a game of ball. But she’s a pretty – pretty broad girl, isn’t she? She couldn’t run very fast; that’ll be the way she stays.”