“Don't cry,” said Bud again. “It's silly to drizzle like that. Why, great Queen of Sheba! I was only joshing you: it was as calm on that ship as a milk sociable.”
Kate drew down the apron from her face and stared at her. Her meaning was only half plain, but it was a relief to know that things had not been quite so bad as she first depicted them. “A body's the better of a bit greet, whiles,” she said, philosophically, drying her eyes.
“That's what I say,” agreed Bud. “That's why I told you all that. Do you know, child, I think you and I are going to be great friends.” She said this with the very tone and manner of Alison, whose words they were to herself, and turned round hastily and embarrassed at a laugh behind her to find her aunt had heard herself thus early imitated.
CHAPTER VII
IF Molyneux, the actor, was to blame for sending this child of ten on her journey into Scotland without convoy, how much worse was his offence that he sent no hint of her character to the house of Dyce? She was like the carpet-bag George Jordon found at the inn door one day without a name on it, and, saying, “There's nothing like thrift in a family,” took home immediately, to lament over for a week because he had not the key to open it. There should have been a key to Lennox Brenton Dyce, but Molyneux, a man of post-cards and curt and cryptic epistles generally, never thought of that, so that it took some days for the folk she came among to pick the lock. There was fun in the process, it cannot be denied, but that was because the Dyces were the Dyces; had they been many another folk she might have been a mystery for years, and in the long-run spoiled completely. Her mother had been a thousand women in her time—heroines good and evil, fairies, princesses, paupers, maidens, mothers, shy and bold, plain or beautiful, young or old, as the play of the week demanded—a play-actress, in a word. And now she was dead and buried, the bright, white lights on her no more, the music and the cheering done. But not all dead and buried, for some of her was in her child.
Bud was born a mimic. I tell you this at once, because so many inconsistencies will be found in her I should otherwise look foolish to present her portrait for a piece of veritable life. Not a mimic of voice and manner only, but a mimic of people's minds, so that for long—until the climax came that was to change her when she found herself—she was the echo and reflection of the last person she spoke with. She borrowed minds and gestures as later she borrowed Grandma Buntain's pelerine and bonnet. She could be all men and all women except the plainly dull or wicked—but only on each occasion for a little while; by-and-by she was herself again.
And so it was that for a day or two she played with the phrase and accent of Wanton Wully Oliver, or startled her aunts with an unconscious rendering of Kate's Highland accent, her “My stars!” and “Mercy me's!” and “My wee hens!”
The daft days (as we call New Year time) passed—the days of careless merriment, that were but the start of Bud's daft days, that last with all of us for years if we are lucky. The town was settling down; the schools were opening on Han'sel Monday, and Bud was going—not to the grammar-school after all, but to the Pigeons' Seminary. Have patience, and by-and-by I will tell about the Pigeons.