FOR only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept the dwelling, Bell remarked, when he was gone. You might see no outward difference; the furniture might still be as it was, and in the same position as Miss Bell had found it when her mother died, but all the same there was an unseen, doleful wreckage. This unco man Molyneux changed the vital thing, the atmosphere, and the house with the brass knocker was never to be altogether just the same again. It is no discovery of mine that what may seem the smallest trifles play tremendous parts in destiny.
Even the town itself was someway altered for a little by the whim that took the American actor to it. That he should be American, and actor, too, foredoomed the greatness of his influence, since the combination stood for much that was mysterious, half fearful, half sublime in our simple notions of the larger world. To have been the first alone would have endowed him with the charm of wonder and romance for most of us, who at the very sight of the name America, even if it be only on a reaper or a can of beef, have some sense of a mightiness that the roar of London cannot rouse. But to be an actor, too! earning easy bread by mimicry and in enormous theatres before folk that have made money—God knows how!—and prospered. Sinful a little, we allow, for there are doubts if the play-actor, having to paint his face and work late hours in gaslight, finally shall obtain salvation—sinful, and yet—and yet so queer and clever a way of making out a living! It is no wonder if we looked on Mr. Molyneux with that regard which by cities is reserved for shahs of a hundred wives, and royal vagabonds. Besides, consider how the way had been prepared for him by Bud!—a child, but a child who had shown already how wonderful must be the land that had swallowed up clever men like William Dyce and the brother of P. &. A. MacGlashan. Had she not, by a single object-lesson in the Pilgrim widow's warehouse, upset the local ways of commerce, so that now, in all the shops, the people were constantly buying things of which they had no earthly need, and the Pilgrim widow herself was put to the weekly trouble of washing her windows, so wasting time that might have been devoted to the mission? Had she not shown that titled ladies were but human, after all, and would not bite you if you cracked a joke politely with them? Had she not put an end to all the gallivanting of the maid of Colonsay and given her an education that made her fit to court a captain? And, finally, had she not by force of sheer example made dumb and stammering bashfulness in her fellow-pupils at the Sunday-school look stupid, and by her daily walk and conversation roused in them a new spirit of inquiry and independence that pleased their parents not so badly, and only the little twin teachers of the Pigeons' Seminary could mistake for the kind of rebellion that calls for the application of the tawse?
Mr. Molyneux might have no idea of it, but he was a lion for those few days of sequestration in what he thought the wilds. Miss Minto dressed her windows specially for his critical eye, and on the tickets of her autumn sales gave the name of “waist” to what had hitherto been a blouse or a garibaldi. P. &. A. Mac-Glashan made the front of his shop like a wharf with piles of empty packing-cases to indicate a-prosperous foreign and colonial trade. One morning Wanton Wully rang the bell at half-past five instead of six to prove how very wide-awake we were; and the band paraded once with a new tune, “Off to Philadelphia,” to show that when it came to gayety we were not, though small, so very far behind New York.
But Jim Molyneux, going up and down the street with Lennox and the dog for cicerones, peered from under the rim of his hat, and summed all up to himself in the words “Rube town” and “Cobwebopolis.” Bell took warmly to him from the outset; so much was in his favor. For one thing he was spick-and-span though not a jackanapes, with no long hair about him as she had expected, and with an honest eye and a good complexion that simple country ladies readily pass as the guarantee of a being clean within. She forgave the disreputable part in him—the actor—since William had been one and yet had taught his child her prayers, and she was willing to overlook the American, seeing William's wife had suffered from the same misfortune. But oh! the blow she got when she unpacked what he called his grip and found the main thing wanting!
“Where's your Bible, Mr. Molyneux?” she asked, solemnly. “It's not in your portmanteau!”
Again it was in his favor that he reddened, though the excuse he had to make was feeble.
“Dear me!” she said, shaking her head with a sad sort of smile. “And you to be so regularly travelling! If I was your wife I would take you in hand! But perhaps in America there's no need for a lamp to the feet and a light to the path.”
It was after their first supper, for which the patriot Bell had made a haggis, that her brother, for Moly-neux's information, said was thought to be composed of bagpipes boiled. Bud was gone to bed in the attic, and Molyneux was telling how he simply had to come.
“It's my first time in Scotland,” said he; “and when 'The Iron Hand' lost its clutch on old Edina's fancy, and the scenery was arrested, I wasn't so sore about it as I might have been, since it gave me the opportunity of coming up here to see girly-girly. I'll skiddoo from the gang for a day or two, I said to the manager when we found ourselves side-tracked, and he said that was all right, he'd wire me when he'd fixed a settlement, so I skiddid, and worked my way here with the aid of the American language, and a little Scotch—by absorption.”
“We have only one fault with your coming—that it was not sooner,” said Mr. Dyce.