It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behavior. “You are a perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and nonsense of that kind—it's fair ridiculous.”
“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much astonished. “It's in all the books, there's hardly anything else, 'cept when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the only one you don't suspect. Indeed, auntie, I thought it was the Great Thing!”
“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There's very little else in all the world, except—except the children,” and she folded her niece in her arms. “It is the Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler, kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”
“But it was very wrong; it was a kind of fib for you to talk about me having lots of lads in my time,” said Auntie Bell. “You do not know whether I had or not.”
Bud looked at her and saw a flush on her face. “I think,” said she, “the beaux must have been very stupid, then. But I guess there must have been one, Auntie Bell, and you have forgotten all about him.” And at that Miss Bell went hurriedly from the room with a pretence that she heard a pot boil over, and Ailie in a low voice told her niece all about Bell's beau, deep drowned in the Indian Ocean.
For days after that the child was tender with her elder aunt, and made a splendid poem in blank verse upon the late Captain James Murray, which Bell was never to see, but Ailie treasured. For days was she angelic good. Her rages never came to fever heat. Her rebellions burned themselves out in her bosom. Nobly she struggled with long division and the grammar that she abominated; very meekly she took censure for copy-books blotted and words shamefully misspelled in Uncle Daniel's study. Some way this love that she had thought a mere amusement, like shopping in Chicago, took a new complexion in her mind—became a dear and solemn thing, like her uncle's Bible readings, when, on Sunday nights at worship in the parlor, he took his audience through the desert to the Promised Land, and the abandoned street was vocal with domestic psalm from the provost's open window. She could not guess—how could she, the child?—that love has its variety. She thought there was but the one love in all the world—the same she felt herself for most things—a gladness and agreement with things as they were. And yet at times in her reading she got glimpses of love's terror and empire, as in the stories of Othello and of Amy Robsart, and herself began to wish she had a lover. She thought at first of Uncle Dan; but he could not be serious, and she had never heard him sigh—in him was wanting some remove, some mystery. What she wanted was a lover on a milk-white steed, a prince who was “the flower o' them a',” as in Aunt Ailie's song “Glenlogie”; and she could not imagine Uncle Dan with his spectacles on riding any kind of steed, though she felt it would be nice to have him with her when the real prince was there.
Do you think it unlikely that this child should have such dreams? Ah, then, you are not of her number, or you have forgotten. She never forgot. Many a time she told me in after years of how in the attic bower, with Footles snug at her feet, she conjured up the lad on the milk-white steed, not so much for himself alone, but that she might act the lady-love. And in those dreams she was tall and slender, sometimes proud, disdainful, wounding the poor wretch with sharp words and cold glances; or she was meek and languishing, sighing out her heart even in presence of his true-love gifts of candy and P. & A. MacGlashan's penny tarts. She walked with him in gardens enchanted; they sailed at nights over calm, moonlit seas, and she would be playing the lute. She did not know what the lute was like; but it was the instrument of love, and had a dulcet sound, like the alto flutes in the burgh band.
But, of course, no fairy prince came wooing Daniel Dyce's little niece, though men there were in the place—elderly and bald, with married daughters—who tried to buy her kisses for sixpences and sweets, and at last she felt vicariously the joys of love by conducting the affairs of Kate.
Kate had many wooers—that is the solace of her class. They liked her that she was genial and plump, with a flattering smile and a soft touch of the Gaelic accent that in the proper key and hour is the thing to break hearts. She twirled them all round her little finger, and Bud was soon to see this and to learn that the maid was still very far from the slopey side of thirty. But Kate, too, had her dreams—of some misty lad of the mind, with short, curled hair, clothes brass-buttoned, and a delicious smell of tar—something or other on a yacht. The name she had endowed him with was Charles. She made him up from passing visions of seamen on the quays, and of notions gleaned from her reading of penny novelettes.
One week-night Bud came on her in the kitchen dressed in her Sunday clothes and struggling with a spluttering pen.