While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew as fast in her mind as in her body; each day she seemed to drift farther away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would preserve her—into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie Ailie's magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. So Bell determined there and then to coax her into the gentle arts of domesticity that ever had had a fascination for herself. She went about it, oh, so cunningly! letting Bud play at the making of beds and the dusting of the stair-rails and the parlor beltings—the curly-wurly places, as she called them, full of quirks and holes and corners that the unelect like Kate of Colonsay will always treat perfunctorily in a general wipe that only drives the dirt the farther in. Bud missed not the tiniest corner nor the deepest nook; whatever she did, she did fastidiously, much to the joy of her aunt, who was sure it was a sign she was meant by the Lord for a proper housewife. But the child soon tired of making beds and dusting, as she did of white-seam sewing; and when Bell deplored this falling off, Ailie said: “You cannot expect everybody to have the same gifts as yourself. Now that she has proved she's fit to clean a railing properly, she's not so much to blame if she loses interest in it. The child's a genius, Bell, and to a person of her temperament the thing that's easily done is apt to be contemptuous; the glory's in the triumph over difficulties, in getting on—getting on—getting on,” and Ailie's face grew warm with some internal fire.
At that speech Bell was silent. She thought it just another of Ailie's haiverings; but Mr. Dyce, who heard, suddenly became grave.
“Do you think it's genius or precocity?” he asked.
“They're very much the same thing,” said Ailie. “If I could be the child I was; if I could just remember—” She stopped herself and smiled. “What vanity!” said she; “what conceit! If I could be the child I was, I dare say I would be pretty commonplace, after all, and still have the same old draigled pinnies; but I have a notion that Lennox was never meant to make beds, dust stair-railings, or sit in a parlor listening, demure, to gossip about the village pump and Sacrament Sunday bonnets. To do these things are no discredit to the women who are meant to do them, and who do them well; but we cannot all be patient Marthas. I know, because I've honestly tried my best myself.”
“When you say that, you're laughing at me, I fear,” said Bell, a little blamefully.
“I wasn't thinking of you,” said her sister, vexed. “And if I was, and had been laughing, I would be laughing at the very things I love; it's only the other things that make me solemn. Your way, Bell, was always clear before you—there you were the lucky woman; with genius, as we have it in the child, the way's perplexed and full of dangers.”
“Is she to be let drift her own way?”
“We got her ten years too late to prevent it,” said Miss Ailie, firmly, and looked at her brother Dan for some assistance. He had Footles on his lap, stroking his tousy back, and he listened with twinkling eyes to the argument, humming the air of the day, that happened to be “Robin Tamson's Smiddy, O!”
“You're both right and you're both wrong, as Mr. Cleland used to say if he was taking a dram with folk that had an argument,” said the lawyer; “but I'm not so clever as Colin Cleland, for I can't ring the bell and order in the media sententia. This I'll say, that to my mind the child is lucky if she's something short of genius. If I had had a son, my prayer would always be that he should be off and on about the ordinary. It's lonely on the mountain-top, and genius generally seems to go with a poor stomach or a bad lung, and pays an awful price for every ecstasy!” “Shakespeare!” suggested Miss Ailie.
“And Robert Burns!” cried Bell. “Except for the lass and the glass and the randan—Poor, misguided laddie! he was like the folk he lived among. And there was Walter Scott, the best and noblest man God ever gave to Scotland; he was never on the mountain-top except it was to bring a lot of people with him there.”