The Daft Days

CHAPTER XXII

When Kate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her apron over her head, and cried and laughed horribly turn about – the victim of hysteria that was half from fear and half from a bliss too deep and unexpected.

“Mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “Now he’ll find out everything, and what a stupid one I am. All my education’s clean gone out of my head; I’m sure I couldn’t spell an article. I canna even mind the ninth commandment, let alone the Reasons Annexed; and as for grammar, whether it’s ‘Give the book to Bud and me’ or ‘Give the book to Bud and I,’ is more than I could tell you if my very life depended on it. Oh, Lennox! now we’re going to catch it! Are you certain sure he said to-morrow?”

Bud gazed at her disdainfully and stamped her foot. “Stop that, Kate MacNeill!” she commanded. “You mustn’t act so silly. He’s as skeered of you as you can be of him. He’d have been here Friday before the morning milk if he didn’t think you’d be the sort to back him into a corner and ask him questions about ancient Greece and Rome. Seems to me love makes some folk idiotic; lands sake! I’m mighty glad it always leaves me calm as a plate of pumpkin pie.”

“Is – is – he looking tremendously genteel and well-put-on?” asked the maid of Colonsay, with anxious lines on her forehead. “Is he – is he as nice as I said he was?”

“He was everything you said – except the Gaelic. I knew he couldn’t be so bad as that sounded that you said about his eyes. I – I never saw a more becoming man. If I had known just how noble he looked, I’d have sent him stacks of poetry,” whereat Kate moaned again, rocked herself in her chair most piteously, and swore she could never have the impudence to see him till she had her new frock from the dressmakers.

“He’ll be thinking I’m refined and quite the lady,” she said, “and I’m just the same plain Kate I was in Colonsay, and him a regular Captain! It was all your fault, with your fancy letters. Oh, Lennox Dyce, I think I hate you, just: lend me your hanky, – mine’s all wet with greeting.”

“If you weren’t so big and temper wasn’t sinful, I’d shake you!” said Bud, producing her handkerchief. “You were just on your last legs for a sailor, and you’d never have put a hand on one if I didn’t write these letters. And now, when the sweetest sailor in the land is brought to your doorstep, you don’t ’preciate your privileges and have a grateful heart, but turn round and yelp at me. I tell you, Kate MacNeill, sailors are mighty scarce and sassy in a little place like this, and none too easy picked up, and ’stead of sitting there, with a smut on your nose and tide-marks on your eyebrows, mourning, you’d best arise and shine, or somebody with their wits about them ’ll snap him up. I’d do it myself if it wouldn’t be not honourable to you.”

“Oh! if I just had another week or two’s geography!” said Kate dolefully.

Bud had to laugh – she could not help herself; and the more she laughed, the more tragic grew the servant’s face.

“Seems to me,” said Bud, “that I’ve got to run this loving business all along the line: you don’t know the least thing about it after g-o, go. Why, Kate, I’m telling you Charles is afraid of you more than you are of him. He thought you’d be that educated you’d wear specs, and stand quite stiff talking poetry all the time, and I had to tell him every dinky bit in these letters were written by me.”

“Then that’s worse!” cried the servant, more distressed than ever. “For he’ll think I canna write myself, and I can write like fury if you only give me a decent pen, and shut the door, and don’t bother me.”

“No fears!” said Bud; “I made that all right. I said you were too busy housekeeping, and I guess it’s more a housekeeper than a school-ma’rm Charles needs. Anyhow, he’s so much in love with you, he’d marry you if you were only half-way through the Twopenny. He’s plump head over heels, and it’s up to you, as a sensible girl, not to conceal that you like him some yourself.”

“I’ll not know what to say to him,” said Kate, “and he always was so clever: half the time I couldna understand him if it wasn’t for his eyes.”

“Well, he’ll know what to say to you, I guess, if all the signs are right. Charles is not so shy as all that, – love-making is where he lives; and he made goo-goo eyes at myself without an introduction. You’d fancy, to hear you, he was a school inspector, and he’s only just an or’nary lover thinking of the happy days you used to have in Colonsay. If I was you I’d not let on I was anything but what I really was; I’d be natural – yes, that’s what I’d be, for being natural’s the deadliest thing below the canopy to make folk love you. Don’t pretend, but just be the same Kate MacNeill to him you are to me. Just you listen to him, and now and then look at him, and don’t think of a darned thing – I mean, don’t think of a blessed thing but how nice he is, and he’ll be so pleased and so content he’ll not even ask you to spell cat”

“Content!” cried Kate, with conviction. “Not him! Fine I ken him! He’ll want to kiss me, as sure as God’s in heaven, – beg your pardon.”

“I expect that’s not a thing you should say to me,” said Bud, blushing deeply.

“But I begged your pardon,” said the maid.

“I don’t mean that about God in heaven, that’s right – so He is, or where would we be? what I meant was about the kissing. I’m old enough for love, but I’m not old enough for you to be talking to me about kissing. I guess Auntie Ailie wouldn’t like to have you talk to me about a thing like that, and Auntie Bell, she’d be furious – it’s too advanced.”

“What time am I to see him?” asked Kate.

“In the morning. If you go out to the garden just after breakfast, and whistle, he’ll look over the wall.”

“The morning!” cried the maid aghast. “I couldn’t face him in the morning. Who ever heard of such a thing? Now you have gone away and spoiled everything! I could hardly have all my wits about me even if it was only gloaming.”

Bud sighed despairingly. “Oh, you don’t understand, Kate,” said she. “He wanted it to be the evening, too, but I said you weren’t a miserable pair of owls, and the best time for anything is the morning. Uncle Dan says the first half-hour in the morning is worth three hours at any other time of the day, for when you’ve said your prayers, and had a good bath, and a clean shave, and your boots new on – no slippers nor slithery dressing-gowns, the peace of God, and – and – and the assurance of strength and righteousness descends upon you so that you – you – you can tackle wild-cats. I feel so brash and brave myself in the morning I could skip the hills like a goat. It’s simply got to be the morning, Kate MacNeill. That’s when you look your very best, if you care to take a little trouble, and don’t simply just slouch through, and I’m set on having you see him first time over the garden wall. That’s the only way to fix the thing up romantic, seeing we haven’t any balcony. You’ll go out and stand against the blossom of the cherry-tree, and hold a basket of flowers and parsley, and when he peeks over and sees you looming out in the picture, I tell you he’ll be tickled to death. That’s the way Shakespeare ’d fix it, and he knew.”

“I don’t think much of Shakespeare,” said Kate. “Fancy yon Igoa!”

“Iago, you mean; well, what about him?”

“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”

“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never really was such a mean wicked man as that Iago, – there couldn’t be; but Shakespeare made him just so’s you’d like the nice folk all the more by thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”

That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her – the cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the dark; but having said her Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell asleep.

In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds, that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin, and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager pair: no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up and had dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.

“What’s that?” asked Bud. “You’re not going to put on glad rags, are you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.

“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It’s either that or my print for it, and a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet – meet the Captain in; he’ll be expecting me to be truly refined.”

“I think he’d like the wrapper better,” said Bud gravely. “The blue gown’s very nice – but it’s not Kate, somehow: do you know, I think it’s Auntie Ailie up to the waist, and the banker’s cook in the lacey bits above that, and it don’t make you refined a bit. It’s not what you put on that makes you refined, it’s things you can’t take off. You have no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron. You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion. I’d want to marry you myself if I was a captain, and saw you dressed like that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I’d – I’d bite my lip and go home and ask advice from mother.”

Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud’s choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.

“I’d have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and any other kind’s as rude as Keating’s Powder.”

“He’ll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing it was himself that sent it.”

“It don’t amount to a hill of beans,” said Bud; “you can wear our locket, and that’ll please him.”

Kate went with a palpitating heart through the scullery, out into the garden, with a basket in her hand, a pleasing and expansive figure. Bud would have liked to watch her, but a sense of delicacy prevented, and she stood at the kitchen window looking resolutely into the street. On his way down the stairs Mr Dyce was humming the Hundredth Psalm; outside the shops were shuttered, and the harmony of the morning hymn came from the baker’s open windows. A few folk passed in their Sunday clothes, at a deliberate pace, to differentiate it from the secular hurry of other days. Soon the church bell would ring for the Sabbath-school, and Bud must be ready. Remembering it, a sense of some impiety took possession of her – worldly trysts in back gardens on the Sabbath were not what Aunt Bell would much approve of. Had they met yet? How did Charles look? What did Kate say?

“Mercy on me!” cried the maid, bursting in through the scullery. “Did you say I was to whistle!”

“Of course,” said Bud, and then looked horrified. “Oh, Kate,” said she in a whisper, “I was so keen on the vain things of this wicked world I quite forgot it was the Lord’s Day; of course you can’t go whistling on Sunday.”

“That’s what I was just thinking to myself,” said the maid, not very heartily. “But I thought I would ask you. It wouldn’t need to be a tune, but – but of course it would be awful wicked – forbye Miss Dyce would be sure to hear me, and she’s that particular.”

“No, you can’t whistle – you daren’t,” said Bud. “It’d be dre’ffle wicked. But how’d it do to throw a stone? Not a rock, you know, but a nice little quiet wee white Sunday pebble? You might like as not be throwing it at Rodger’s cats, and that would be a work of necessity and mercy, for these cruel cats are just death on birds.”

“But there’s not a single cat there,” explained the maid.

“Never mind,” said Bud. “You can heave the pebble over the wall so that it’ll be a warning to them not to come poaching in our garden; there’s sure to be some on the other side just about to get on the wall, and if Charles happens to be there too, can you help that?” and Kate retired again.

There was a pause, and then a sound of laughter. For ten minutes Bud waited in an agony of curiosity, that was at last too much for her, and she ventured to look out at the scullery window – to see Charles chasing his adored one down the walk, between the bleaching-green and the gooseberries. Kate was making for the sanctuary of her kitchen, her face aflame, and all her streamers flying, but was caught before she entered.

“I told you!” said she, as she came in panting. “We hadn’t said twenty words when he wanted to kiss me.”

“Why! was that the reason you ran?” asked Bud, astonished.

“Ye – yes,” said the maid.

“Seems to me it’s not very encouraging to Charles, then.”

“Yes, but – but – I wasn’t running all my might,” said Kate.

CHAPTER XXIII

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

The world is coming for Lennox Dyce, the greedy world, youth’s first and worst beguiler, that promises so much, but at the best has only bubbles to give, which borrow a moment the splendour of the sun, then burst in the hands that grasp them; the world that will have only our bravest and most clever bairns, and takes them all from us one by one. I have seen them go – scores of them, boys and girls, their foreheads high, and the sun on their faces, and never one came back. Now and then returned to the burgh in the course of years a man or woman who bore a well-known name, and could recall old stories, but they were not the same, and even if they were not disillusioned, there was that in their flushed prosperity which ill made up for the bright young spirits quelled.

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

Yes, the world is coming, sure enough – on black and yellow wheels, with a guard red-coated who bugles through the glen. It is coming behind black horses, with thundering hooves and foam-flecked harness, between bare hills, by gurgling burns and lime-washed shepherd dwellings, or in the shadow of the woods that simply stand where they are placed by God and wait. It comes in a fur-collared coat – though it is autumn weather – and in a tall silk hat, and looks amused at the harmless country it has come to render discontent.

Ta-ran-ta-ra! Ta-ran-ta-ra!

Go back, world go back, and leave the little lass among her dreams, with hearts that love and cherish. Go back, with your false flowers and your gems of paste. Go back, world, that for every ecstasy exacts a pang!

There were three passengers on the coach – the man with the fur collar who sat on the box beside the driver, and the Misses Duff behind. I am sorry now that once I thought to make you smile at the pigeon hens, for to-day I’m in more Christian humour and my heart warms to them, seeing them come safely home from their flight afar from their doo-cot, since they it was who taught me first to make these symbols on the paper, and at their worst they were but a little stupid, like the most of us at times, and always with the best intent. They had been to Edinburgh; they had been gone two weeks – their first adventure in a dozen years. Miss Jean was happy, bringing back with her a new crochet pattern, a book of Views, a tooth gold-filled (she was so proud and spoke of it so often that it is not rude to mention it), and a glow of art she had got from an afternoon tea in a picture-gallery full of works in oil. Amelia’s spoils were a phrase that lasted her for years – it was that Edinburgh was “redolent of Robert Louis,” the boast that she had heard the great MacCaskill preach, and got a lesson in the searing of harmless woods with heated pokers. Such are the rewards of travel: I have come home myself with as little for my time and money.

But between them they had brought back something else – something to whisper about lest the man in front should hear, and two or three times to look at as it lay in an innocent roll beside the purse in Miss Amelia’s reticule. It might have been a serpent in its coils, so timidly they glanced in at it, and snapped the bag shut with a kind of shudder.

“At least it’s not a very large one,” whispered Miss Jean, with the old excuse of the unhappy lass who did the deadly sin.

“No,” said her sister, “it may, indeed, be called quite – quite diminutive. The other he showed us was so horribly large and – and vulgar, the very look of it made me almost faint. But, oh I wish we could have dispensed with the horrid necessity. After twe – after so many years it looks like a confession of weakness. I hope there will be no unpleasant talk about it.”

“But you may be sure there will, Amelia Duff,” said her sister. “They’ll cast up Barbara Mushet to us; she will always be the perfect teacher – ”

“The paragon of all the virtues.”

“And it is such a gossiping place.”

“Indeed it is,” said Miss Amelia. “It is always redolent of – of scandal.”

“I wish you had never thought of it,” said Miss Jean, with a sigh and a vicious little shake of the reticule. “I am not blaming you, remember, ’Melia; if we are doing wrong the blame of it is equally between us, except perhaps a little more for me, for I did think the big one was better value for the money. And yet it made me grue, it looked so – so dastardly.”

“Jean,” said her sister solemnly, “if you had taken the big one, I would have marched out of the shop affronted. If it made you grue, it made me shudder. Even with the small one, did you notice how the man looked at us? I thought he felt ashamed to be selling such a thing: perhaps he has a family. He said they were not very often asked for. I assure you I felt very small, the way he said it.”

Once more they bent their douce brown hats together over the reticule and looked timidly in on the object of their shames and fears. “Well, there it is, and it can’t be helped,” said Miss Jean at last, despairingly. “Let us hope and trust there will not be too frequent need for it, for, I assure you, I have neither the strength nor inclination.” She snapped the bag shut again, and, glancing up, saw the man with the fur collar looking over his shoulder at them.

“Strikes me, ladies,” he said, “the stage coach, as an easy mark for the highwaymen who used to permeate these parts, must have been a pretty merry proposition; they’d be apt to stub their toes on it if they came sauntering up behind. John here” – with an inclination of his head towards the driver – “tells me he’s on schedule time, and I allow he’s making plenty fuss clicking his palate, but I feel I want to get out and heave rocks at his cattle, so’s they’d get a better gait on ’em.”

Miss Jean was incapable of utterance; she was still too much afraid of a stranger who, though gallantly helping them to the top of the coach at Maryfield, could casually address herself and Miss Amelia as “dears,” thrust cigars on the guard and driver, and call them John and George at the very first encounter.

“We – we think this is fairly fast,” Miss Amelia ventured, surprised at her own temerity.. “It’s nineteen miles in two hours, and if it’s not so fast as a railway train it lets you enjoy the scenery. It is very much admired, our scenery, it’s so – it’s so characteristic.”

“Sure!” said the stranger, “it’s pretty tidy scenery as scenery goes, and scenery’s my forte. But I’d have thought that John here ’d have all this part of Caledonia stern and wild so much by heart he’d want to rush it and get to where the houses are; but most the time his horses go so slow they step on their own feet at every stride.”

“Possibly the coach is a novelty to you,” suggested Miss Amelia, made wondrous brave by two weeks’ wild adventuring in Edinburgh. “I – I take you for an American.”

“So did my wife, and she knew, for she belonged out mother’s place,” said the stranger, laughing. “You’ve guessed right, first time. No, the coach is no novelty to me; I’ve been up against a few in various places. If I’m short of patience and want more go just at present, it’s because I’m full of a good joke on an old friend I’m going to meet at the end of these obsequies.”