Читать книгу Bud: A Novel - Munro Neil - Страница 3

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.”

“I hope and trust,” said Bell, still nervous, “that he is a wiselike boy with a proper upbringing, who will not be frightened at travelling and make no mistakes about the train. If he was a Scotch laddie, with the fear of God in him, I would not be a bit put about for him, for he would be sure to be asking, asking, and if he felt frightened he would just start and eat something, like a Christian. But this poor child has no advantages – just American!”

Ailie sat back in her chair, with her teacup in her hand, and laughed, and Kate laughed quietly – though it beat her to see where the fun was; and the dog laughed likewise – at least it wagged its tail and twisted its body and made such extraordinary sounds in its throat that you could say it was laughing.

“Tuts! you are the droll woman, Bell,” said Mr. Dyce, blinking at her. “You have the daftest ideas of Some things. For a woman who spent so long a time in Miss Mushet’s seminary, and reads so much at the newspapers, I wonder at you.”

“Of course his father was Scotch, that’s one mercy,” added Bell, not a bit annoyed at the reception of her pious opinions.

“That, is always something to be going on with,” said Mr. Dyce, mockingly. “I hope he’ll make the most of that great start in life and fortune. It’s as good as money in his pocket.”

Bell put up a tiny hand and pushed a stray curl (for she had a rebel chevelure) behind her ear, and smiled in spite of her anxiety about the coming nephew. “You may laugh if you like, Dan,” she said, emphatically, perking with her head across the table at him, “but I’m proud, I’m proud, I’m PROUD I’m Scotch.” (“Not apologizing for it myself,” said her brother, softly.) “And you know what these Americans are! Useless bodies, who make their men brush their own boots, and have to pay wages that’s a sin to housemaids, and eat pie even-on.”

“Dear me! is that true, or did you see it in a newspaper?” said her brother. “I begin to be alarmed myself at the possibilities of this small gentleman now on his way to the north, in the complete confidence of Mr. Molyneux, who must think him very clever. It’s a land of infant prodigies he comes from; even at the age of ten he may have more of the stars and stripes in him than we can eradicate by a diet of porridge and a curriculum of Shorter Catechism and Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs. Faith, I was fond of Jane myself when I read her first: she was nice and bloody. A big soft hat with a bash in it, perhaps; a rhetorical delivery at the nose, ‘I guess and calculate’ every now and then; a habit of chewing tobacco” (“We’ll need a cuspidor,” said Ailie, sotto voce); “and a revolver in his wee hip-pocket. Oh, the darling! I can see him quite plainly.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the maid, Kate, and fled the room all in a tremor at the idea of the revolver.

“You may say what you like, but I cannot get over his being an American,” said Bell, solemnly. “The dollar’s everything in America, and they’re so independent!”

“Terrible! terrible!” said her brother, ironically, breaking into another egg fiercely with his knife, as if he were decapitating the President of the United States.

Ailie laughed again. “Dear, dear Bell!” she said, “it sounds quite Scotch. A devotion to the dollar is a good sound basis for a Scotch character. Remember there are about a hundred bawbees in a dollar: just think of the dollar in bawbees, and you’ll not be surprised that the Americans prize it so much.” “Renegade!” said Bell, shaking a spoon at her. “Provincial!” retorted Ailie, shaking a fork at Bell,

– children, be quiet,” half-sung, half-said their brother. “Bell, you are a blether; Ailie, you are a cosmopolitan, a thing accursed. That’s what Edinburgh and Brussels and your too brisk head have done for you. Just bring yourself to our poor parochial point of view, and tell me, both of you, what you propose to do with this young gentleman from Chicago when you get him.”

“Change his stockings and give him a good tea,” said Bell, promptly, as if she had been planning it for weeks. “He’ll be starving of hunger and damp with snow.”

“There’s something more than dry hose and high tea to the making of a man,” said her brother. “You can’t keep that up for a dozen years.”

“Oh, you mean education!” said Bell, resignedly. “That’s not in my department at all.”

Ailie expressed her views with calm, soft deliberation, as if she, too, had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, which was partly the case. “I suppose,” she said, “he’ll go to the grammar-school, and get a good grounding on the classic side, and then to the university. I will just love to help him so long as he’s at the grammar-school. That’s what I should have been, Dan, if you had let me – a teacher. I hope he’s a bright boy, for I simply cannot stand what Bell calls – calls – ”

“Diffies,” suggested Bell.

“Diffies; yes, I can not stand diffies. Being half a Dyce I can hardly think he will be a diffy. If he’s the least like his father, he may be a little wild at first, but at least he’ll be good company, which makes up for a lot, and good-hearted, quick in perception, fearless, and – ”

“And awful funny,” suggested Bell, beaming with old, fond, glad recollections of the brother dead beside his actor wife in far Chicago.

“Fearless, and good fun,” continued Ailie. “Oh, dear Will! what a merry soul he was. Well, the child cannot be a fool if he’s like his father. American independence, though he has it in – in – in clods, won’t do him any harm at all. I love Americans – do you hear that, Bell Dyce? – because they beat that stupid old King George, and have been brave in the forest and wise on the prairie, and feared no face of man, and laughed at dynasties. I love them because they gave me Emerson, and Whitman, and Thoreau, and because one of them married my brother William, and was the mother of his child.”

Dan Dyce nodded; he never quizzed his sister Ailie when it was her heart that spoke and her eyes were sparkling.

“The first thing you should learn him,” said Miss Dyce, “is ‘God Save the Queen.’ It’s a splendid song altogether; I’m glad I’m of a kingdom every time I hear it at a meeting, for it’s all that’s left of the olden notions the Dyces died young or lost their money for. You’ll learn him that, Ailie, or I’ll be very vexed with you. I’ll put flesh on his bones with my cooking if you put the gentleman in him.”

It was Bell’s idea that a gentleman talked a very fine English accent like Ailie, and carried himself stately like Ailie, and had wise and witty talk for rich or poor like Ailie.

“I’m not so sure about the university,” she went on. “Such stirks come out of it sometimes; look at poor Maclean, the minister! They tell me he could speak Hebrew if he got anybody to speak it back slow to him, but just imagine the way he puts on his clothes! And his wife manages him not so bad in broad Scotch. I think we could do nothing better than make the boy a lawyer; it’s a trade looked up to, and there’s money in it, though I never could see the need of law myself if folk would only be agreeable. He could go into Dan’s office whenever he is old enough.”

“A lawyer!” cried her brother. “You have first of all to see that he’s not an ass.”

“And what odds would that make to a lawyer?” said Bell, quickly, snapping her eyes at the brother she honestly thought the wisest man in Scotland.

“Bell,” said he, “as I said before, you’re a haivering body – nothing else, though I’ll grant you bake no’ a bad scone. And as for you, Ailie, you’re beginning, like most women, at the wrong end. The first thing to do with your nephew is to teach him to be happy, for it’s a habit that has to be acquired early, like the taste for pease-brose.”

“You began gey early yourself,” said Bell. “Mother used to say that she was aye tickling your feet till you laughed when you were a baby. I sometimes think that she did not stop it soon enough.”

“If I had to educate myself again, and had not a living to make, I would leave out a good many things the old dominie thought needful. What was yon awful thing again? – mensuration. To sleep well and eat anything, fear the face of nobody in bashfulness, to like dancing, and be able to sing a good bass or tenor – that’s no bad beginning in the art of life. There’s a fellow Brodie yonder in the kirk choir, who seems to me happier than a king when he’s getting in a fine boom-boom of bass to the tune Devizes; he puts me all out at my devotions on a Lord’s day with envy of his accomplishment.”

“What! envy too!” said Alison. “Murder, theft, and envy – what a brother!”

“Yes, envy too, the commonest and ugliest of our sins,” said Mr. Dyce. “I never met man or woman who lacked it, though many never know they have it. I hope the great thing is to be ashamed to feel it, for that’s all that I can boast of myself. When I was a boy at the school there was another boy, a great friend of my own, was chosen to compete for a prize I was thought incapable of taking, so that I was not on the list. I envied him to hatred – almost; and saying my bits of prayers at night I prayed that he might win. I felt ashamed of my envy, and set the better Daniel Dyce to wrestle with the Daniel Dyce who was not quite so big. It was a sair fight, I can assure you. I found the words of my prayer and my wishes considerably at variance – ”

“Like me and ‘Thy will be done’ when we got the word of brother William,” said Bell.

27

“But my friend – dash him! – got the prize. I suppose God took a kind of vizzy down that night and saw the better Dan Dyce was doing his desperate best against the other devil’s – Dan, who mumbled the prayer on the chance He would never notice. There was no other way of accounting for it, for that confounded boy got the prize, and he was not half so clever as myself, and that was Alick Maitland. Say nothing about envy, Ailie; I fear we all have some of it until we are perhaps well up in years, and understand that between the things we envy and the luck we have there is not much to choose. If I got all I wanted, myself, the world would have to be much enlarged. It does not matter a docken leaf. Well, as I was saying when my learned friend interrupted me, I would have this young fellow healthy and happy and interested in everything. There are men I see who would mope and weary in the middle of a country fair – God help them! I want to stick pins in them sometimes and make them jump. They take as little interest in life as if they were undertakers.”

“Hoots! nobody could weary in this place at any rate,” said Bell briskly. “Look at the life and gayety that’s in it. Talk about London! I can hardly get my sleep at night quite often with the traffic. And such things are always happening in it – births and marriages, engagements and tea-parties, new patterns at Miss Minto’s, two coaches in the day, and sometimes somebody doing something silly that will keep you laughing half the week.”

“But it’s not quite so lively as Chicago,” said Mr. Dyce. “There has not been a man shot in this neighborhood since the tinker kind of killed his wife (as the fiscal says) with the pistol. You’ll have heard of him? When the man was being brought on the scaffold for it, and the minister asked if he had anything to say before he suffered the extreme penalty of the law, ‘All I have got to say,’ he answered, starting to greet, ‘is that this’ll be an awful lesson to me.’”

“That’s one of your old ones,” said Bell; but even an old one was welcome in Dyce’s house on New Year’s day, and the three of them laughed at the story as if it had newly come from London in Ailie’s precious Punch. The dog fell into a convulsion of merriment, as if inward chuckles tormented him – as queer a dog as ever was, neither Scotch terrier nor Skye, Dandy Dinmont nor Dashshund, but just dog – dark wire-haired behind, short ruddy-haired in front, a stump tail, a face so fringed you could only see its eyes when the wind blew. Mr. Dyce put down his hand and scratched it behind the ear. “Don’t laugh, Footles,” he said. “I would not laugh if I were you, Footles – it’s just an old one. Many a time you’ve heard it before, sly rogue. One would think you wanted to borrow money.” If you could hear Dan Dyce speak to his dog, you would know at once he was a bachelor: only bachelors and bairnless men know dogs.

“I hope and trust he’ll have decent clothes to wear, and none of their American rubbish,” broke in Bell, back to her nephew again. “It’s all nonsense about the bashed hat; but you can never tell what way an American play-actor will dress a bairn: there’s sure to be something daft-like about him – a starry waistcoat or a pair of spats – and we must make him respectable like other boys in the place.”

“I would say Norfolk suits, the same as the banker’s boys,” suggested Ailie. “I think the banker’s boys always look so smart and neat.”

“Anything with plenty of pockets in it,” said Mr. Dyce. “At the age of ten a boy would prefer his clothes to be all pockets. By George! an entire suit of pockets, with a new penny in every pocket for luck, would be a great treat,” and he chuckled at the idea, making a mental note of it for a future occasion.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Bell, emphatically, for here she was in her own department. “The boy is going to be a Scotch boy. I’ll have the kilt on him, or nothing.”

“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 parlor 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.