“Open the door, quick, quick!” cried Bud again; and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said, “Yes, open, Kate, I think we’re ready.”
The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back-door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun.
Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which I’m thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavour of old time and the book of ballads. She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop—the thing we call a dallan. She had never discovered before what a soul of gaiety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realised her daffing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you’re fey!”
“Indeed, and I daresay you’re right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted. “At my time of life it’s daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet’s seminary.”
Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home, so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back.
But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams. Notably was she good at Hallowe’en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute.
They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spaewife’s door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbour, and that meant a sailor husband.
“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, and that was the name of the sailor husband. Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and grey and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armour in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland—Scotland where witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street—it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.
“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I had to say it, though I s’pose it means I’ve lost him for a husband.”
“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.