Bud: A Novel

Six times each lawful day Daniel Dyce went up and down the street between his house and the office at the windy corner opposite the Cross, the business day being divided by an interval of four hours to suit the mails. The town folk liked to see him passing; he gave the street an air of occupation and gayety, as if a trip had just come in with a brass band banging at the latest air. Going or coming he was apt to be humming a tune to himself as he went along with his hands in his outside pockets, and it was an unusual day when he did not stop to look in at a shop window or two on the way, though they never changed a feature once a month. To the shops he honored thus it was almost as good as a big turnover. Before him his dog went whirling and barking, a long alarm for the clerks to stop their game of Catch-the-Ten and dip their pens. There were few that passed him without some words of recognition.

He was coming down from the office on the afternoon of the Hansel Monday that started Bud in the Pigeons’ Seminary when he met the nurse, old Betty Baxter, with a basket. She put it down at her feet, and bobbed a courtesy, a thing that nowadays you rarely see in Scotland.

“Tuts! woman,” he said to her, lifting the basket and putting it in her hand. “Why need you bother with the like of that? You and your courtesies! They’re out of date, Miss Baxter, out of date, like the decent men that deserved them long ago, before my time.”

“No, they’re not out of date, Mr. Dyce,” said she, “I’ll aye be minding you about my mother; you’ll be paid back some day.”

“Tuts!” said he again, impatient. “You’re an awful blether: how’s your patient, Duncan Gill?”

“As dour as the devil, sir,” said the nurse. “Still hanging on.”

“Poor man! poor man!” said Mr. Dyce. “He’ll just have to put his trust in God.”

“Oh, he’s no’ so far through as all that,” said Betty Baxter. “He can still sit up and take his drop of porridge. They’re telling me you have got a wonderful niece, Mr. Dyce, all the way from America. What a mercy for her! But I have not set eyes on her yet. I’m so busy that I could not stand in the close like the others, watching: what is she like?”