“So’s mine,” said Uncle Dan, with a start.
“And mine!” said Auntie Ailie, with a smile.
“And mine too, I declare!” cried Miss Bell, with a laugh they all joined in, till Footles raised his voice protesting.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Yes, that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce. There was a happy night to follow soon, and it is my grief that my pen cannot grasp the spirit of it, so that reading you would laugh with her and whiles be eerie. ’Tis true, there was little in the thing itself, as in most that at the age of twelve impress us for all our lives, but it met in some degree the expectations that her father’s tales of Scotland had sent home with her. Hitherto all had been natural and wellnigh commonplace that she had experienced, all except the folk so queer and kind and comical in a different way from those in Chicago, the sounds she could hear as she lay in her attic bed—the wind-call, and the honk of geese, and the feeling of an island hopelessly remote from the new bright world that best she knew,—remote and lost, a speck on the sea far, far from great America. The last things vaguely troubled her. For she was child enough as yet to shiver at things not touched by daylight nor seemingly made plain by the common-sense of man. She could laugh at the ghosts that curdled the blood of the maid of Colonsay; and yet at times, by an effort of the will, she could feel all Kate’s terror at some manifestation no more alarming than the cheep of mice or a death-watch ticking in a corner cupboard. These were but crude and vulgar fears, self-encouraged little actress terrors. It took more than the hint of ghost or the menace of the ticking insect in the wood to wake in her the feeling of worlds unrealised, encompassing, that she could get from casual verses in her Auntie Ailie’s book of Scottish ballads, or find o’erwhelm her of a sudden on looking from her window into the garden bare and pallid below the moon.
This night there should be moon according to the penny almanac, and Wanton Wully lit no lamps, but went home for a good sleep to himself, as his saying went, and left the burgh to such illumination as should come to it by the caprice of the clouds. It lay, the little place, for most of the night in darkness: a mirk so measureless deep, when the shops were shut, that the red-lit skylight windows at the upper end of the town seemed by some miracle to lift themselves and soar into the heavens—square, monstrous flitting stars to the vision of Bud, as she stood with Auntie Ailie at the door watching for Uncle Dan’s return from his office. To bring the soaring windows back to their natural situation, she had to stand a little way inside the lobby and establish their customary place against the darkness by the lintel of the door.
From the other side of the church came a sound of dull monotonous drumming—no cheerful rhythmic beat like the drumming of John Taggart, but a mournful thumping, fitful in flaws of the bland night wind.
“What’s that, Auntie?” she asked.
“The guizards,” said Miss Ailie, looking down upon her in the lobby light with a smile she could not see. “Did you never hear of the guizards, Bud?”
Bud had never heard of the guizards; that was one thing, surely, her father had forgotten. She had heard of Hallowe’en, she said, when further questioned. Wasn’t it the night for ducking into tubs for apples? The Pilgrim widow had told her Hallowe’en was coming, and it was for Hallowe’en she had sold so many nuts and apples; but the widow said she felt ashamed to do it, for Hallowe’en was not approved of by the Mission, being idolatrous and gay. “Is it very gay?” asked Bud anxiously.