The Daft Days

CHAPTER XXXI

Fortunately Kate’s marriage came to distract them for a while from the thought of Bud’s future. The essential house had been found that was suitable for a captain, yet not too dearly rented, – a piece of luck in a community where dwellings are rarely vacant, and every tenant over eighty years of age has the uneasy consciousness that half a dozen pairs betrothed have already decided upon a different colour of paint for his windows, and have become resigned, with a not unpleasing melancholy, to the thought that in the course of nature his time cannot be long.

The Captain – that once roving eagle-heart subdued by love for the maid of Colonsay – so persistently discouraged any yachting trips which took the Wave for more than a night or two from her moorings, that Lady Anne and her husband, knowing the heart themselves, recommended immediate marriage; and Miss Bell, in consequence, was scouring the countryside for Kate’s successor in the kitchen, but hopeless of coming on one who could cook good kail, have a cheery face, and be a strict communicant. “I can get fine cooks that are wanting in the grace of God, and pious girls who couldn’t be trusted to bake a Christian scone,” she said; “it’s a choice between two evils.”

“Of two evils choose the third, then,” said Dan to his sister, flushed and exhilarated by a search that, for elderly maiden ladies, makes up for an older hunt. “The sport’s agreeing with you.”

It was a great distress to Bud that the wedding should take place in the house and not in church, as seemed most fitting. She felt a private ceremony deprived her of a spectacle, with Miss Amelia Duff playing the wedding march on the harmonium, and the audience filing up the aisle in their Sunday clothes, the carriage of their hats revealing character.

“Why, you’re simply going to make it look like a plain tea!” she protested. “If it was my marriage, Kate, I’d have it as solemn and grand as Harvest Sunday. A body doesn’t get married to a man in brass buttons every other day, and it’s a chance for style.”

“We never have our weddings in the church,” said Kate. “Sometimes the gentry do, but it’s not considered nice; it’s kind of Roman Catholic. Forbye, in a church, where would you get the fun?”

If Bud hadn’t realised that fun was the main thing at Scottish weddings, she got hints of it in Kate’s preparation. Croodles and hysterics took possession of the bride: she was sure she would never get through the ceremony with her life, or she would certainly do something silly that would make the whole world laugh at her and dreadfully vex the Captain. Even her wedding-dress, whose prospect had filled her dreams with gladness, but deepened her depression when it came from the manteau-makers: she wept sad stains on the front width, and the orange-blossom they rehearsed with might have been a wreath of the bitter rue. Bud wanted her to try the dress on, but the bride was aghast at such an unlucky proposition; so she tried it on herself, with sweet results, if one did not look at the gathers in the back. They practised the ceremony the night before, Kate’s sister from Colonsay (who was to be her bridesmaid) playing the part of a tall, brass-buttoned bridegroom.

“Oh, Kate!” cried Bud pitifully, “you stand there like’s you were a soda-water bottle and the cork lost. My goodness! brisk up a bit. If it’s hard on you, just remember it isn’t much of a joke for Charles. Don’t you know the eyes a the public are on you?”

“That’s just it,” said poor Kate. “I wouldn’t be frightened a bit if it wasn’t for that, for I’m so brave. What do you do with your hands?”

“You just keep hold of them. Mercy! don’t let them hang like that, – they’re yours; up till now he’s got nothing to do with them. Now for the tears – where’s your handkerchief? That one’s yards too big, and there isn’t an edge of lace to peek through, but it’ll do this time. It’ll all be right on the night. Now the minister’s speaking, and you’re looking down at the carpet and you’re timid and fluttered and nervous and thinking what an epoch this is in your sinful life, and how you won’t be Kate MacNeill any more but Mrs Charles Maclean, and the Lord knows if you will be happy with him – ”

The bride blubbered and threw her apron over her head as usual: Bud was in despair.

“Well, you are a silly!” she exclaimed. “All you want is a gentle tear or two trickling down the side of your nose, enough to make your eyes blink but not enough to soak your veil or leave streaks. And there you gush like a waterspout, and damp your face so much the bridegroom’ll catch his death of cold when he kisses you! Stop it, Kate MacNeill, – it isn’t anybody’s funeral: why, weddings aren’t so very fatal; lots of folk get over them – leastways in America.”

“I can’t help it!” protested the weeping maid. “I never could be melancholy in moderation, and the way you speak you make me think it’s running a dreadful risk to marry anybody.”

“Well,” said Bud, “you needn’t think of things so harrowing, I suppose. Just squeeze your eyes together and bite your lip, and perhaps it’ll start a tear: if it don’t, it’ll look like as if you were bravely struggling with emotion. And then there’s the proud glad smile as you back out on Charles’s arm – give her your arm, Minnie, – the trial’s over, you know, and you’ve got on a lovely new plain ring, and all the other girls are envious, and Charles Maclean and you are one till death do you part. Oh, Kate, Kate! don’t grin; that’s not a smile, it’s a – it’s a railroad track. Look – ” Bud assumed a smile that spoke of gladness and humility, confidence and a maiden’s fears, – a smile that appealed and charmed.

“I couldn’t smile like that to save my life,” said Kate in a despair. “I wish you had learned me that instead of the height of Popacatthekettle. Do you think he’ll be angry if I don’t do them things properly?”

“Who? Charles! Why, Charles’ll be so mortally scared himself he wouldn’t notice if you made faces at him, or were a different girl altogether. He’ll have a dull dead booming in his ears, and wonder whether it’s wedding-day or apple-custard: all of them I’ve seen married looked like that. It’s not for Charles you should weep and smile; it’s for the front of the house, you know, – it’s for the people looking on.”

“Toots!” said Kate, relieved. “If it’s only for them, I needn’t bother. I thought that maybe it was something truly refined that he would be expecting. It’s not – it’s not the front of a house I’m marrying. Tell me this and tell me no more – is there anything special I should do to please my Charles?”

“I don’t think I’d worry,” said Bud on reflection. “I daresay it’s better not to think of anything dramatic. If I were you I’d just keep calm as grass, and pray the Lord to give me a good contented mind and hurry up the clergyman.”

But yet was the maiden full of a consciousness of imperfection, since she had seen that day the bride’s-cake on view in the baker’s window, – an edifice of art so splendid that she felt she could never be worthy of it. “How do you think I’ll look?” she asked. And Bud assured her she would look magnificently lovely.

“Oh, I wish I did,” she sighed. “But I’m feared I’ll not look so lovely as I think I do.”

“No girl ever did,” said Bud. “That’s impossible; but when Charles comes to and sits up he’ll think you’re It: he’ll think you perfect.”

“Indeed I’m far from that,” said Kate. “I have just my health and napery and a liking for the chap, and I wish I wasn’t near so red.”

Bud was able to instruct her in the right deportment for a bride, but had no experience in the management of husbands: for that Kate had to take some hints from her mistress, who was under the delusion that her brother Dan was the standard of his sex.

“They’re curious creatures,” Bell confided. “You must have patience, ay, and humour them. They’ll trot at your heels like pussy for a cheese-pudding, but they’ll not be driven. If I had a man I would never thwart him. If he was out of temper or unreasonable I would tell him he was looking ill, and that would make him feared and humble. When a man thinks he’s ill, his trust must be in the Lord and in his woman-kind. That’s where we have the upper hand of them! First and last, the thing’s to be agreeable. You’ll find he’ll never put anything in its proper place, and that’s a heartbreak, but it’s not so bad as if he broke the dishes and blackened your eyes, the way they do in the newspapers. There’s one thing that’s the secret of a happy home – to live in the fear of God and within your income, faith! you can’t live very well without it.”

“Oh, mem! it’s a desperate thing a wedding,” said the maid. “I never, in all my life, had so much to think about before.”

There were stricken lads in these days! The more imminent became her utter loss, the more desirable Kate became. But sentiment in country towns is an accommodating thing, and all the old suitors – the whistlers in the close and purveyors of conversation lozenges – found consolation in the fun at the wedding, and danced their griefs away on the flags of the Dyces’ kitchen.

A noble wedding! All the cookery skill of Kate and her mistress was expended on it, and discretion, for the sake of the incredulous, forbids enumeration of the roasted hens. Chanticleers in the town crowed roupily and ruefully for months thereafter. The bridegroom might have stepped over the wall to the wedding chamber, or walked to it in a hundred paces up the lane: he rode instead in a carriage that made a stately and circuitous approach round John Turner’s Corner, and wished the distance had been twenty times as long. “It’s not that I’m feared,” said he, “or that I’ve rued the gyurl, but – but it’s kind of sudden!” – a curious estimate of a courtship that had started in the burial-ground of Colonsay so many years before!

A noble wedding – its revelry kept the town awake till morning. From the open windows the night was filled with dancing tunes, and songs, and laughter; boys cried “Fab, fab!” in the street, and a fairy lady – really a lady all grown up, alas! – stood at a window and showered pence among them.

Long before the wedding-party ended, Bud went up to bed, but she lay for hours awake in the camceil room hearing the revelry of the kitchen. She had said good-bye to the blissful pair whose wedding was the consequence of her own daft pranks as letter-writer: she would miss the maid of Colonsay. The knowledge that ’tis an uncertain world, a place of change and partings, comes to us all sooner or later in one flash of apprehension and of grief: for the first time Bud felt the irrevocable nature of the past, and that her happy world under this roof was, someway, crumbling, and the tears came to her eyes.

A hurried footstep sounded on the stairs, a rap came to her door, and the bride came in, unbid, in the darkness, whispering Lennox’s name.

Her only answer was a sob from the girl in bed.

“Miss Lennox!” said the bride distressed; “what ails you? I’ve come up to say good-bye: it wasn’t a right good-bye at all with yon folk looking. Oh, Lennox, Lennox! ghaol mo chridhe! my heart is sore to be leaving you, for the two of us were so merry! Now I have a man, and a good man too; it was you that gave me him, but I have lost my loving friend.” She threw herself on the bed, regardless of her finery, and the Celtic fount of her swelled over in sobs and tears.

CHAPTER XXXII

It took two maids to fill Kate’s place in the Dyces’ household – one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued; and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell called their breaking-in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone: she must sit in the parlour strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain’s Broadwood, taming her heart of fire. It was as a voice from heaven’s lift there came one day a letter from London in which Mrs Molyneux invited her and one of her aunts for an Easter holiday.

“Indeed and I’ll be glad to be quit for a week or two of both of you,” said Bell to her niece and Ailie. “Spring-cleaning, with a couple of stupid huzzies in the kitchen, – not but what they’re nice and willing lassies, – is like to be the sooner ended if we’re left to it ourselves.”

A radiant visage and lips in firm control betrayed how Lennox felt. She had never been in London – its cry went pealing through her heart. Ailie said nothing, but marvelled how blithely and blindly her sister always set foot on the facile descent that led to her inevitable doom of deprivation and regret.

“The Grand Tour!” said Uncle Dan; “it’s the fitting termination to your daft days, Lennox. Up by at the Castle there’s a chariot with imperials that conveyed the Earl on his, the hammercloth most lamentably faded: I often wonder if his lordship takes a sly seat in it at times when no one’s looking, and climbs the Alps or clatters through Italian towns again when Jones the coachman is away at his tea. It’s a thing I might do myself if I had made the Tour and still had the shandrydan.”

“Won’t you really need me?” Aunt Ailie asked her sister, and half hoped, half feared spring-cleaning should postpone the holiday; but Bell maintained it should be now or never, more particularly as Lennox’s dress was new.

Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding round country trees; the throngs of people, the odours of fruit-shops, the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery grey, and the multitudinous monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the silence of mighty parks, – Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.

Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her, and shook a living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did she seem to have a place for any stranger: now he had found she could be bullied, – that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls, and the play was as often as not “The Father’s Curse”; but once a day he walked past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement, planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble, and duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a pea-green house with nine French-bean rows and some clumps of bulbs behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of success – teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that’s what ails the boys, and makes ’em sleepier than Hank M’Cabe’s old tom-cat. Good boys, dear boys, they’ve always got the long-lost-brother grip, but they’re mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling in the middle of the day. When they’ve got cobwebs in their little brilliantined belfries, I’m full of the songs of spring and merry old England’s on the lee. See? I don’t even need to grab; all I’ve got to do is to look deserving, and the stuff comes crowding in: it always does to a man who looks like ready-money, and don’t lunch on cocktails and cloves.”

“Jim, boyette,” his wife would say, “I guess you’d better put ice or something on your bump of self-esteem;” but she proudly wore the jewels that were the rewards of his confidence and industry.

Bud and Ailie, when they thought of home in these days, thought of it as a picture only, or as a chapter in a book covered in mouldy leather, with f’s for s’s. In their prayers alone were Dan and Bell real personages; and the far-off little town was no longer a woodcut, but an actual place blown through by the scented airs of forest and sea. Bell wrote them of rains and hails and misty weather; Grove Lane gardens breathed of daffodils, and the city gleamed under a constant sun. They came back to the pea-green house each day from rare adventuring, looking, in the words of Molyneux, as if they were fresh come off the farm, and the best seats in half a dozen theatres were at their disposal. “Too much of the playhouse altogether!” Bell wrote once, remonstrating. “Have you heard that man in the City Temple yet?”

In Molyneux’s own theatre there was a break in the long succession of melodrama and musical comedy. He privately rejoiced that, for two ladies of such taste as Ailie and her niece, he could display a piece of the real legitimate – “King John,” – though Camberwell was not very likely to make a week of Shakespeare very profitable to his treasury. Ailie and Bud were to go on Tuesday; and Bud sat up at night to read an acting copy of “King John” till every character took flesh in her imagination, and the little iron balcony behind the pea-green house became the battlemented walls of Angiers, to whose postern came trumpeters of France.

They sat in the drawing-room, astonished at her speeches —

Or —

“Bravo, Bud!” would Molyneux cry, delighted. “Why, if I was an actor-manager, I’d pay you any salary you had the front to name. Ain’t she just great, Millicent? I tell you, Miss Ailie, she puts the blinkers on Maude Adams, and sends Ellen ’way back in the standing-room only. Girly, all you’ve got to learn is how to move. You mustn’t stand two minutes in the same place on the stage, but cross ’most every cue.”

“I don’t know,” said Bud dubiously. “Why should folk have fidgets on a stage? They don’t always have them in real life. I’d want to stand like a mountain —you know, Auntie Ailie, the old hills at home! – and look so – so – so awful, the audience would shriek if I moved, the same as if I was going to fall on them.”

“Is that how you feel?” asked Jim Molyneux, curiously surveying her.

“Yes; that’s how I feel,” said Bud, “when I’ve got the zip of poetry in me. I feel I’m all made up of burning words and eyes.”

“Child, you are very young!” said Mrs Molyneux.

“Yes,” said Bud; “I suppose that’s it. By-and-by I’ll maybe get to be like other people.”

Jim Molyneux struck the table with his open hand. “By George!” he cried, “I wouldn’t hurry being like other people; that’s what every gol-darned idiot in England’s trying, and you’re right on the spot just now as you stand. That’s straight talk, nothing but! I allow I favour a bit of leg movement on the stage – generally it’s about the only life there is on it; but a woman who can play with her head don’t need to wear out much shoe-leather. Girly – ” he stopped a second, then burst out with the question: “How’d you like a little part in this ‘King John’?”

A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed – “Oh! Jim Molyneux, don’t be so cruel.”

“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they’ve got an Arthur in the caste who’s ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had an understudy – and if I – Think you could play a boy’s part? There isn’t much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch the eye of the cognoscenti. You’d let her, wouldn’t you, Miss Ailie? It’d be great fun. She’d learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don’t kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”

Ailie’s heart was leaping. Here was the crisis, – she knew it, – what was she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour – had often wrestled with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only, she could come to no conclusion. Her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead for freedom, – for freedom and the space that herself had years ago surrendered: now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.

“Just this once!” pleaded Mr Molyneux, understanding her scruples: Bud’s face mutely pleaded.

Yes, “just this once!” – it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago – before the mimicry on the first New Year’s morning, before the night of the dozen candles, or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.

“I really don’t mind much, myself,” said Ailie at last; “but I fancy her Aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”

“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox quickly; “but when the thing was over she’d be as pleased as Punch – at least, she’d laugh the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the ball.”

The sound of Will Oliver’s curfew died low in Ailie’s mind, the countenance of Bell grew dim: she heard, instead, the clear young voice of Bud among the scenery and sat with an enraptured audience. “If you are all so anxious for it, then – ” she said, and the deed was done!

She did not rue it when the night of Bud’s performance came, and her niece as the hapless young Bretagne welcomed the Dauphin before the city gates: she gloried in the natural poignancy that marked the painful scene with Hubert come to torture, but she almost rued it when Molyneux, having escorted them in an inexplicable silence home, broke out at last in fervent praise of his discovery as soon as the girl had left them for her bed.

“I’ve kept clutch of myself with considerable difficulty,” he said, “for I didn’t want to spoil girly’s sleep or swell her head, but I want to tell you, Millicent, and you, Miss Ailie, that I’ve Found my Star! Why, say! she’s out of sight! She was the only actor in all that company to-night who didn’t know she was in Camberwell: she was right in the middle of medieval France from start to finish, and when she was picked up dead at the end of the fourth act she was so stone-cold and stiff with thinking it she scared the company. I suspect, Miss Ailie, that you’re going to lose that girl!”

CHAPTER XXXIII

It was a wet night in November. With a chuckle of horse’s hoofs on shining streets, Dan Dyce, with Bell and Ailie, drove from Molyneux’s fine new home to the temple of his former dreams – the proud Imperial. They sat in silence in the darkness of the cab, and in silence drifted into the entrance-hall of the theatre to mingle with the pompous world incongruously – with loud vain-glorious men, who bore to the eye of Bell some spirit of abandonment and mockery, with women lovely by the gift of God, or with dead-white faces, wax-red lips, and stealthy sidelong eyes. One there was who, passing before them, released a great fur cloak from her shoulders with a sudden movement, and, as it slowly slipped down her marble back, threatened an utter nakedness that made Bell gasp and clutch at her sister’s arm.