He stood on the siver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce's house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that's what she was—a perfect caution! She called me Mr. Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”
“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.
“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tell't me once it was a kind o' weakness that they keep on gantrys doon in Maggie White's. But she does not understand—the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o' gout. Me! I never had the gout—I never had the money for it, more's the pity.”
He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh's cleansing department. Later—till the middle of the day—he was the harbor-master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped, too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces' house. “It's the parlor fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel' though I never had it; it's a good sign o' him the night before.”
Peter the post came clamping by-and-by along the street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces'. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back door and lightly tapped.
“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.
“She's got the turn!—she's got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”
“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.
“It's no' temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi' the weather-glass the doctor's aye so cross wi' that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But, anyway, she's better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not she'll starve hersel'.”
“That's rare! By George, that's tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons' balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.