He would keek in at the door on them as he passed to his office, and Ailie would cry, “Avaunt, man! here woman reigns!” “It's a pleasant change,” he would say. “I would sooner have them rain than storm.” “You're as bad as Geordie Jordon,” said Miss Bell, biting thread with that zest that always makes me think her sex at some time must have lived on cotton—“you're as bad as Geordie Jordon: you cannot see a key-hole but your eye begins to water.”
If it had, indeed, been Bud's trousseau, the townfolk could not have displayed more interest. Ladies came each day to see how things progressed and recommend a heavier lining or another row of the insertion. Even Lady Anne came one afternoon to see the trousseau, being interested, as she slyly said, in such things for private reasons of her own, and dubious about the rival claims of ivory or pure white. So she said, but she came, no doubt, to assure Miss Lennox that her captain was a great success.
“I knew he'd be!” said Bud, complacently. “That man's so beautiful and good he's fit for the kingdom of heaven.”
“So are you, you rogue,” said Lady Anne, gathering her in her arms, without a bit of awkwardness, to the great astonishment of 'Lizbeth Ann, who thought that titled folk were not a bit like that—perhaps had not the proper sort of arms for it. “Yes, so are you, you rogue!” said Lady Anne.
“No, I'm not,” said the child. “Leastways only sometimes. Most the time I'm a born limb, but then again I'm nearly always trying to be better, and that's what counts, I guess.”
“And you're going away to leave us,” said Lady Anne, whereon a strange thing happened, for the joyous child, who was to get her heart's desire and such lovely garments, burst into tears and ran from the room to hide herself up-stairs in the attic bower, whose windows looked to a highway that seemed hateful through her tears. Her ladyship went off distressed, but Bell, as one rejoicing, said:
“I always told you, Ailie—William's heart!”
But Bud's tears were transient; she was soon back among the snippets where Ailie briskly plied the sewing-machine and sang the kind of cheerful songs that alone will go to the time of pedalling, and so give proof that the age of mechanism is the merry age if we have the happy ear for music. And Bud, though she tired so soon of hems, could help another way that busy convocation, for she could sit tucked up in Uncle Dan's snoozing chair, and read Pickwick to the women till the maid of Colonsay was in the mood to take the Bardell body by the hair of the head and shake her for her brazenness to the poor wee man. Or the child would dance as taught by the lady of the Vaudeville, or start at Ailie's bidding (Bell a little dubious) to declaim a bit of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth,” till 'Lizbeth Ann saw ghosts and let her nerves get the better of her, and there was nothing for it but a cheery cup of tea all round. Indeed, I must confess, a somewhat common company! I could almost wish for the sake of my story they were more genteel, and dined at half-past seven and talked in low, hushed tones of Bach and Botticelli.
But oh! they were happy days—at least so far as all outward symptoms went; it might, indeed, have been a real trousseau and not the garments for the wedding of a maiden and the world. How often, in the later years, did Winifred Wallace, reading to me her own applause in newspapers, stop to sigh and tell me how she once was really happy—happy to the inward core, feeling the dumb applause of four women in a country chamber when the world was all before her and her heart was young?