CHAPTER XXX
YOU surely did not come in these daftlike garments all the way from Edinburgh?” asked her auntie Bell, when the wig had been removed and Bud's youth was otherwise resumed.
“Not at all!” said Bud, sparkling with the success of her deception. “I came almost enough of a finished young lady to do you credit, but when I found there was nobody in the house except Kate, I felt I couldn't get a better chance to introduce you to The Macintosh if I waited for a year. I told you we'd been playing charades last winter at the school, and I got Jim to send me some make-up, the wig, and this real cute old lady's dress. They were all in my box to give you some fun sometime, and Kate helped me hook things, though she was mighty scared to think how angry you might be, Aunt Bell; and when I was ready for you she said she'd be sure to laugh fit to burst, and then you'd see it was only me dressed up; and Footles he barked, so he looked like giving the show away, so I sent them both out in the garden and sat in a stage fright that almost shook my ear-rings off. I tell you I felt mighty poorly sitting there wondering what on earth I was to say; but by-and-by I got to be so much. The Macintosh I felt almost sure enough her to have the rheumatism, and knew I could fix up gags to keep the part going. I didn't expect Uncle Dan would be the first to come in, or I wouldn't have felt so brave about it, he's so sharp and suspicious—that's with being a lawyer, I s'pose, they're a' tarred wi' the a'e stick Miss Macintosh says; and when he talked all that solemn Latin stuff and looked like running up a bill for law advice that would ruin me, I laughed inside enough to ache. Now amn't I just the very wickedest girl, Uncle Dan?”
“A little less Scotch and a more plausible story would have made the character perfect,” said her uncle. “Where did you get them both? Miss Macintosh was surely not the only model?”
“Well, she's not so Scotch as I made out, except when she's very sentimental, but I felt she'd have to be as Scotch as the mountain and the flood to fit these clothes; and she's never talked about marrying anybody herself, but she's making a match just now for a cousin of hers, and tells us all about it. I was partly her, but not enough to be unkind or mean, and partly her cousin, and a little bit of the Waverley Novels—in fact, I was pure mosaic, like our dog. There wasn't enough real quaint about Miss Macintosh for ordinary to make a front scene monologue go, but she's fuller of hints than—than a dictionary, and once I started I felt I 'could play half a dozen Macintoshes all different, so's you'd actually think she was a surging crowd. You see, there's the Jacobite Macintosh, and the 'aboaminable English' Macintosh, and the flirting Macintosh who raps Herr Laurent with her fan, and the fortune-telling Macintosh who reads palms and teacup leaves, and the dancing and deportment Macintosh who knows all the first families in Scotland.” Bud solemnly counted off the various Macintoshes on her finger-tips.
“We'll have every one of them when you come home next winter,” said Miss Ailie. “I'd prefer it to the opera.”
“I can't deny but it's diverting,” said Miss Bell; “still it's dreadfully like play-acting, and hardly the thing for a sober dwelling. Lassie, lassie, away this instant and change yourself!”
If prizes and Italian songs had really been the proof that Bud had taken on the polish, she would have disappointed Uncle Dan, but this art of hers was enough to make full amends, it gave so much diversion. Character roused and held her interest; she had a lightning eye for oddities of speech and gesture. Most of a man's philosophy is in a favorite phrase, his individuality is betrayed in the way he carries his hat along the aisle on Sunday. Bud, each time that she came home from Edinburgh, collected phrases as others do postage-stamps, and knew how every hat in town was carried. Folk void of idiosyncrasy, having the natural self restrained by watchfulness and fear, were the only ones whose company she wearied of; all others she studied with delight, storing of each some simulacrum in her memory. Had she reproduced them in a way to make them look ridiculous she would have roused the Dyces' disapproval, but lacking any sense of superiority she made no impersonation look ignoble—the portraits in her gallery, like Raeburn's, borrowed a becoming curl or two and toned down crimson noses.
But her favorite character was The Macintosh in one of the countless phases that at last were all her own invention, and far removed from the original. Each time she came home, the dancing-mistress they had never really seen became a more familiar personage to the Dyces. “I declare,” cried Bell, “I'm beginning to think of you always as a droll old body.” “And how's the rheumatism?” Dan would ask; it was “The Macintosh said this” or “The Macintosh said that” with Ailie, and even Kate would quote the dancing-mistress with such earnestness that the town became familiar with the name and character without suspecting they were otten merely parts assumed by young Miss Lennox.
Bud carried the joke one night to daring lengths by going as Miss Macintosh with Ailie to a dance, in a gown and pelerine of Grandma Buntain's that had made tremendous conquests eighty years before.