Neil Munro - The Daft Days

“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.”

“Home!” When she said that, the two aunts swept on her like a billow and bore her, dog and all, upstairs to her room. She was almost blind for want of sleep. They hovered over her quick-fingered, airy as bees, stripping her for bed. She knelt a moment and in one breath said —

“God – bless – father – and – mother – and – Jim – and – Mrs Molyneux – and – my – aunts – in – Scotland – and – Uncle – Dan – and – everybody – good-night”

And was asleep in the sunlight of the room as soon as her head fell on the pillow.

“She prayed for her father and mother,” whispered Bell, with Footles in her arms, as they stood beside the bed. “It’s not – it’s not quite Presbyterian to pray for the dead; it’s very American, indeed you might call it papist.”

Ailie’s face reddened, but she said nothing.

“And do you know this?” said Bell shamefacedly, “I do it myself; upon my word, I do it myself. I’m often praying for father and mother and William.”

“So am I,” confessed Alison, plainly relieved. “I’m afraid I’m a poor Presbyterian, for I never knew there was anything wrong in doing so.”

Below, in the parlour, Mr Dyce stood looking into the white garden, a contented man, humming —

She was a lucky lassie, this of ours, to have come home to her father’s Scotland on that New Year’s day, for there is no denying that it is not always gay in Scotland, contrairy land, that, whether we be deep down in the waist of the world and afar from her, or lying on her breast, chains us to her with links of iron and gold, – stern tasks and happy days remembered, ancient stories, austerity and freedom, cold weather on moor and glen, warm hearths and burning hearts. She might have seen this burgh first in its solemnity, on one of the winter days when it shivers and weeps among its old memorials, and the wild geese cry more constant over the house-tops, and the sodden gardens, lanes, wynds, and wells, the clanging spirits of old citizens dead and gone, haunting the place of their follies and their good times, their ridiculous ideals, their mistaken ambitions, their broken plans. Ah, wild geese! wild geese! old ghosts that cry to-night above my dwelling, I feel – I feel and know! She might have come, the child, to days of fast, and sombre dark drugget garments, dissonant harsh competing kettle bells, or spoiled harvests, poor fishings, hungry hours. It was good for her, and it is the making of my story, that she came not then, but with the pure white cheerful snow, to ring the burgh bell in her childish escapade, and usher in with merriment the New Year, and begin her new life happily in the old world.

She woke at noon among the scented curtains, in linen sea-breeze bleached, under the camceil roof that all children love, for it makes a garret like the ancestral cave, and in rainy weather they can hear the pattering feet of foes above them. She heard the sound of John Taggart’s drum, and the fifing of “Happy we’ve been a’ thegether,” and turning, found upon her pillow a sleeping doll that woke whenever she raised it up, and stared at her in wonderment.

“Oh! – Oh! – Oh! you roly-poley blonde!” cried the child in ecstasy, hugging it to her bosom and covering it with kisses. “I’m as glad as anything. Do you see the lovely little room? I’ll tell you right here what your name is: it’s Alison; no, it’s Bell; no, it’s Alibel for your two just lovely, lovely aunties.”

Up she rose, sleep banished, with a sense of cheerfulness and expectation, nimbly dressed herself, and slid down the banisters to tumble plump at the feet of her Auntie Bell in the lobby.

“Mercy on us! You’ll break your neck; are you hurt?” cried Aunt Bell. “I’m not kicking,” said the child, and the dog waved furiously a gladsome tail. A log fire blazed and crackled and hissed in the parlour, and Mr Dyce tapped time with his fingers on a chair-back to an internal hymn.

“My! ain’t I the naughty girl to be snoozling away like a gopher in a hole all day? Your clock’s stopped, Uncle Dan.”