The Daft Days

“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?”

“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.”