So Bud dipped in the bottomless well of knowledge again and scooped up Palgrave's Golden Treasury, and splashed her favorite lyrics at the servant's feet. Kate could not stand The Golden Treasury either; the songs were nearly all so lamentable they would make a body greet. Bud assured her on the best authority that the sweetest songs were those that told of saddest thought, but Kate said that might be right enough for gentry who had no real troubles of their own, but they weren't the thing at all for working folk. What working folk required were songs with tunes to them, and choruses that you could tramp time to with your feet. History, too, was as little to her taste; it was all incredible—the country could never have kept up so many kings and queens. But she liked geography, for the map enabled her to keep an eye on Charles as he went from port to port, where letters in her name, but still the work of Lennox, would be waiting for him.
The scheme of education was maintained so long because the town had come upon its melancholy days and Bud began to feel depression, so that playing teacher was her only joy. The strangers had gone south with the swallows; the steamer no longer called each day to make the pavement noisy in the afternoon with the skliff of city feet, so different from the customary tread of tackety boots; the coachman's horn, departing, no longer sounded down the valley like a brassy challenge from the wide, wide world. Peace came to the burgh like a swoon, and all its days were pensive. Folk went about their tasks reluctant, the very smoke of the chimneys loitered lazily round the ridges where the starlings chattered, and a haze was almost ever over the hills. When it rose, sometimes, Bud, from her attic window, could see the road that wound through the distant glen. The road!—the road!—ah, that began to have a meaning and a kind of cry, and wishfully she looked at it and thought upon its other end, where the life she had left and read about was loudly humming and marvellous things were being done. Charles Maclean of Oronsay, second mate, whom she loved unto destruction, now that he was writing regularly, fairly daft himself to get such charming, curious letters as he thought from Kate, had been adjusted by the doctor, and was once again on the heaving main. It would be Cardiff or Fleetwood, Hamburg, Santander, or Bilbao, whose very name is like a story, and his tarry pen, infected by the child's example, induced to emulation, always bravely sought to give some picture of the varied world through which he wandered. Of noisy ports did he communicate, crowded with ships; of streets and lofty warehouses, and places where men sang, and sometimes of the playhouse, where the villain was a bad one and the women were so braw.
“What is braw?” asked Bud.
“It's fine clothes,” said Kate; “but what's fine clothes if you are not pure in heart and have a figure?” and she surveyed with satisfaction her own plump arms.
But the child guessed at a wider meaning for the word as Charles used it, and thought upon the beauteous, clever women of the plays that she had seen herself in far Chicago, and since her vicarious lover would have thought them braw and plainly interesting, she longed to emulate them, at least to see them again. And oh! to see the places that he wrote of and hear the thundering wheels and jangling bells! And there was also Auntie Ailie's constant stimulus to thoughts and aspirations that could meet no satisfaction in this little town. Bell dwelt continually within the narrow walls of her immediate duty, content, like many, thank the Lord! doing her daily turns as best she could, dreaming of nothing nobler. Dan had ranged wider in his time and knew the world a great deal better, and had seen so much of it was illusion, its prizes “will-o'-the-wisp,” that now his wild geese were come home. He could see the world in the looking-glass in which he shaved, and there was much to be amused at. But Ailie's geese were still flying far across the firmament, knowing no place of rest. The child had bewitched her! it was often the distant view for her now, the region unattainable; and though apparently she had long ago surrendered to her circumstances, she now would sometimes silently irk at her prisoning here, in sleep-town, where we let things slide until to-morrow, while the wild birds of her inclination flew round the habitable, wakeful world. Unwittingly—no, not unwittingly always—she charged the child with curiosity unsatisfiable, and secret discontent at little things and narrow, with longings for spacious arenas and ecstatic crowded hours. To be clever, to be brave and daring, to venture and make a glorious name—how her face would glow and all her flesh would quiver picturing lives she would have liked to live if only she had had the chance! How many women are like that—silent by the hearth, seemingly placid and content as they dam and mend and wait on the whim and call of dullards!
Bell might be content and busy with small affairs, but she had a quick, shrewd eye and saw the child's unrest. It brought her real distress, for so had the roving spirit started in her brother William. Sometimes she softly scolded Lennox, and even had contemplated turning her into some other room from the attic that had the only window in the house from which the high-road could be seen, but Ailie told her that would be to make the road more interesting for the child. “And I don't know,” she added, “that it should worry us if she does indulge herself in dreams about the great big world and its possibilities. I suppose she'll have to take the road some day.”
“Take the road!” cried Bell, almost weeping. “Are you daft, Ailie Dyce? What need she take the road for? There's plenty to do here, and I'm sure she'll never be better off anywhere else. A lot of nonsense! I hope you are not putting notions in her head; we had plenty of trouble with her father.”
“It would break my heart to lose her, I assure you,” said Aunt Ailie, softly; “but—” and she ended with a sigh.
“I'm sure you're content enough yourself?” said Bell; “and you're not by any means a diffy.”
“Indeed I am content,” admitted Ailie; “at least—at least I'm not complaining. But there is a discontent that's almost holy, a roving mood that's the salvation of the race. There were, you mind, the Pilgrim Fathers—”