A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “Oh Jim Molyneux, don't be so cruel!”
“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they've got an Arthur in the cast who's ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had an understudy—and if I—Think you could play a boy's part? There isn't much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch the eye of the cognoscenti. You'd let her, wouldn't you, Miss Ailie? It'd be great fun. She'd learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don't kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”
Ailie's heart was leaping. Here was the crisis—she knew it—what was she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour, had often wrestled with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only she could come to no conclusion; her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead for freedom—for freedom and the space that herself had years ago surrendered—now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.
“Just this once!” pleaded Mr. Molyneux, understanding her scruples. Bud's face mutely pleaded.
Yes, “just this once!”—it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago—before the mimicry on the first New Year's morning, before the night of the dozen candles or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.
“I really don't mind much myself,” said Ailie at last, “but I fancy her aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”
“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox, quickly; “but when the thing was over she'd be as pleased as Punch—at least she'd laugh the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the ball.”
The sound of Will Oliver's curfew died low in Ailie's mind, the countenance of Bell grew dim; she heard, instead, the clear young voice of Bud among the scenery and sat with an enraptured audience. “If you are all so anxious for it, then—” she said, and the deed was done!
She did not rue it when the night of Bud's performance came, and her niece as the hapless young Bretagne welcomed the dauphin before the city gates; she gloried in the natural poignancy that marked the painful scene with Hubert come to torture, but she almost rued it when Molyneux, having escorted them in an inexplicable silence home, broke out at last in fervent praise of his discovery as soon as the girl had left them for her bed.
“I've kept clutch of myself with considerable difficulty,” he said, “for I didn't want to spoil girly's sleep or swell her head, but I want to tell you, Millicent, and you, Miss Ailie, that I've Found my Star! Why, say, she's out of sight! She was the only actor in all that company to-night who didn't know she was in Camberwell; she was right in the middle of mediaeval France from start to finish, and when she was picked up dead at the end of the fourth act she was so stone-cold and stiff with thinking it she scared the company. I suspect, Miss Ailie, that you're going to lose that girl!”