Bud: A Novel

“I was sure you were up-stairs,” said Alison. “You silly man! Upon my word! Where’s your dignity, Mr. Dyce?”

Dan Dyce stood for a second a little bit abashed, rubbing his chin and blinking his eyes as if their fun was a thing to be kept from brimming over. “I’m a great wag!” said he. “If it’s dignity you’re after, just look at my velvet coat!” and so saying he caught the ends of his coat skirts with his fingers, held them out at arm’s-length, and turned round as he might do at a fit-on in his tailor’s, laughing till his hoast came on again. “Dignity, quo’ she, just look at my velvet coat!”

“Dan! Dan! will you never be wise?” said Ailie Dyce, a humorsome demoiselle herself, if you believe me.

“Not if I keep my health,” said he. “You have made a bonny-like show of the old garret, between the two of you. It’s as smart as a lass at her first ball.”

“I think it’s very nice; at least it might be worse,” interrupted Alison, defensively, glancing round with satisfaction and an eye to the hang of the frame round “Watch and Pray.” Bell’s wool-work never agreed with her notions, but, as she knew that her tarts never agreed with Bell, she kept, on that point, aye discreetly dumb.

“Poor little Chicago!” said her brother. “I’m vexed for the wee fellow. Print chintz, or chint prints, or whatever it is; sampler texts, and scent, and poetry books – what in the world is the boy to break?”

“Oh, you have seen to that department, Dan!” said Ailie, taking the pea-sling again in her hand. “‘A New Year’s Day Present for a Good Boy from an Uncle who does not like Cats.’ I declare that is a delightful way of making the child feel quite at home at once.”

“Tuts! ‘Tis just a diversion. I know it ‘ll cheer him wonderfully to find at the start that if there’s no young folk in the house there’s some of the eternal Prank. I suppose there are cats in Chicago. He cannot expect us to provide him with pigs, which are the usual domestic pets there, I believe. You let my pea-sling alone, Ailie; you’ll find it will please him more than all the poetry and pink bows. I was once a boy myself, and I know.”

“You were never anything else,” said Alison – “and never will be anything else. It is a pity to let the child see at the very start what an irresponsible person his uncle is; and, besides, it’s cruel to throw stones at cats.”

“Not at all, not at all!” said her brother, briskly, with his head quizzically to the side a little, in a way he had when debating in the court. “I have been throwing stones for twenty years at those cats of Rodger’s that live in our garden, and I never hit one yet. They’re all about six inches too short for genuine sport. If cats were dachshund dogs, and I wasn’t so fond of dogs, I would be deadly. But my ado with cats is just one of the manly old British sports, like trout-fishing and curling. You take your fun out in anticipation, and the only difference is you never need to carry a flask. Still, I’m not without hope that my nephew from Chicago may have a better aim than I have.”

“You are an old – an old goose, Dan Dyce, and a happy New Year to you!” said his sister, putting her arms suddenly round his neck and kissing him.

“Tuts! the coming of that child’s ta’en your head,” said the brother, reddening, for sisters never kiss their own brothers in our part – it’s so sentimental, it’s so like the penny stories. “A good New Year to you, Ailie,” and “Tuts!” he said again, looking quite upset, till Ailie laughed and put her arm through his and drew him down-stairs to the breakfast to which she had come to summon him.

The Chicago child’s bedroom, left to itself, chilly a bit like Highland weather, but honest and clean, looked more like a bower than ever: the morning sun, peeping over garden trees and the chimneys of the lanes, gazed particularly on the table where the pea-sling and the poetry book lay together.

And now the town was thronged like a fair-day, with such stirring things happening every moment in the street that the servant, Kate, had a constant head out at the window, “putting by the time,” as she explained to the passing inquirer, “till the mustress would be ready for the breakfast.” That was Kate – she had come from an island where they make the most of everything that may be news, even if it’s only brandy-sauce to pudding at the minister’s; and Miss Dyce could not start cutting a new bodice or sewing a button on her brother’s trousers but the maid billowed out upon the window-sash to tell the tidings to the first of her sex that passed.

Over the trodden snow she saw the people from the country crowd in their Sunday clothes, looking pretty early in the day for gayety, all with scent on their handkerchiefs (which is the odor of festive days for a hundred miles round burgh towns); and town people, less splendid in attire, as folk that know the difference between a holiday and a Sabbath, and leave their religious hard hats at home on a New Year’s Day; children, too, replete with bun already, and all succulent with the juice of Divine’s oranges. She heard the bell begin to peal again, for Wully Oliver – fie on Wully Oliver! – had been met by some boys who told him the six-o’clock bell was not yet rung, and sent him back to perform an office he had done with hours before. He went to his bell dubiously, something in the dizzy abyss he called his mind that half convinced him he had rung it already.

“Let me pause and consider,” he said once or twice when being urged to the rope, scratching the hair behind his ears with both hands, his gesture of reflection. “Was there no’ a bairn – an auld-fashioned bairn – helped to ca’ the bell already, and wanted to gie me money for the chance? It runs in my mind there was a bairn, and that she had us aye boil-boiling away at eggs, but maybe I’m wrong, for I’ll admit I had a dram or two and lost the place. I don’t believe in dram-dram-dramming, but I aye say if you take a dram, take it in the morning and you get the good of it all day. It’s a tip I learned in the Crimea.” But at last they convinced him the bairn was just imagination, and Wanton Wully Oliver spat on his hands and grasped the rope, and so it happened that the morning bell on the New Year’s Day on which my story opens was twice rung.

The Dyce handmaid heard it pealing as she hung over the window-sash with her cap awry on her head. She heard from every quarter – from lanes, closes, tavern-rooms, high attics, and back yards – fifes playing; it was as if she leaned over a magic grove of great big birds, each singing its own song – “Come to the Bower,” or “Moneymusk,” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” noble airs wherein the captain of the band looked for a certain perfection from his musicians before they marched out again at mid-day. “For,” said he often in rehearsals, “anything will do in the way of a tune in the dark, my sunny boys, but it must be the tiptop of skill, and no discordancy, when the eyes of the world are on us. One turn more at ‘Moneymusk,’ sunny boys, and then we’ll have a skelp at yon tune of my own composure.”

Besides the sound of the bell and the universal practice of the fifes there were loud vocalists at the Cross, and such laughter in the street that Kate was in an ecstasy. Once, uplifted beyond all private decorum, she kilted her gown and gave a step of a reel in her kitchen solitude.

“Isn’t it cheery, the noise!” she exclaimed, delightedly, to the letter-carrier who came to the window with the morning’s letters. “Oh, I am feeling beautiful! It is – it is – it is just like being inside a pair of bagpipes.”

He was a man who roared, the postman, being used to bawling up long common-stairs in the tenements for the people to come down to the foot themselves for their letters – a man with one roguish eye for the maiden and another at random. Passing in the letters one by one, he said in tones that on a quieter day might be heard half up the street, “Nothing for you, yourself, personally, Kate, but maybe there’ll be one to-morrow. Three big blue anes and seven wee anes for the man o’ business himsel’, twa for Miss Ailie (she’s the wonderfu’ correspondent!), and ane for Miss Dyce, wi’ the smell o’ scented perfume on’t – that ‘ll be frae the Miss Birds o’ Edinburgh. And I near forgot – here’s a post-card for Miss Dyce: hearken to this:

“‘Child arrived Liverpool yesterday; left this morning for Scotland. Quite safe to go alone, charge of conductor. Pip, pip! Molyneux.’

“Whatna child is it, Kate?”

“‘Pip, pip!’ What in the world’s ‘Pip, pip?’ The child is Brother William’s child, to be sure,” said Kate, who always referred to the Dyce relations as if they were her own. “You have heard of Brother William?”

“Him that was married to the play-actress and never wrote home?” shouted the letter-carrier. “He went away before my time. Go on; quick, for I’m in a desperate hurry this mornin’.”

“Well, he died abroad in Chickagoo – God have mercy on him dying so far away from home, and him without a word of Gaelic in his head! – and a friend o’ his father’s bringing the boy home to his aunties.”

“Where in the world’s Chickagoo?” bellowed the postman.

“In America, of course – where else would it be but in America?” said Kate, contemptuously. “Where is your education not to know that Chickagoo is in America, where the servant-maids have a pound a week of wages, and learn the piano, and can get married when they like quite easy?”

“Bless me! do you say so?” cried the postman, in amazement, and not without a pang of jealousy.

“Yes, I say so!” said Kate, in the snappish style she often showed to the letter-carrier. “And the child is coming this very day with the coach-and-twice from Maryfield railway station – oh, them trains! them trains! with their accidents; my heart is in my mouth to think of a child in them. Will you not come round to the back and get the mistress’s New Year dram? She is going to give a New Year dram to every man that calls on business this day. But I will not let you in, for it is in my mind that you would not be a lucky first-foot.”

“Much obleeged,” said the postman, “but ye needna be feared. I’m not allowed to go dramming at my duty. It’s offeecial, and I canna help it. If it was not offeecial, there’s few letter-carriers that wouldna need to hae iron hoops on their heids to keep their brains from burstin’ on the day efter New Year.”

Kate heard a voice behind her, and pulled her head in hurriedly with a gasp, and a cry of “Mercy, the start I got!” while the postman fled on his rounds. Miss Dyce stood behind, in the kitchen, indignant.

“You are a perfect heartbreak, Kate,” said the mistress. “I have rung for breakfast twice and you never heard me, with your clattering out there to the letter-carrier. It’s a pity you cannot marry the glee party, as Mr. Dyce calls him, and be done with it.”

“Me marry him!” cried the maid, indignantly. “I think I see myself marryin’ a man like yon, and his eyes not neighbors.”

“That’s a trifle in a husband if his heart is good; the letter-carrier’s eyes may – may skew a little, but it’s not to be wondered at, considering the lookout he has to keep on all sides of him to keep out of reach of every trollop in the town who wants to marry him.”

And leaving Kate speechless at this accusation, the mistress of the house took the letters from her hands and went to the breakfast-table with them.

She had read the contents of the post-card before she reached the parlor; its news dismayed her.

“Just imagine!” she cried. “Here’s that bairn on his way from Liverpool his lee-lone, and not a body with him!’’

“What! what!” cried Mr. Dyce, whose eyes had been shut to say the grace. “Isn’t that actor-fellow, Molyneux, coming with him, as he promised?”

Miss Dyce sunk in a chair and burst into tears, crushing the post-card in her hand.

“What does he say?” demanded her brother.

“He says – he says – oh, dear me! – he says, ‘Pip, pip!’” quoth the weeping sister.

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 the 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 clamor 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 hair-pin 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, frowzy-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. Moly-neux’s neck,” and he twisted his morning roll in halves with ferocious hands.

“Dan!” said Ailie, shocked. “I never heard you say anything so blood-thirsty 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.”