CHAPTER XIX.
Spring came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child—in that old Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the neuk of the burgh walls. It must have been because the Dyces loved so much their garden, and spent so many hours there, that they were so sanely merry, nor let too often or too long the Scots forebodings quell their spirits, but got lessons of hope from the circling of the seasons, that give us beauty and decay in an unvarying alternation.
“It is the time,” used Ailie to say of the spring, “when a delicious feeling steals over you of wanting to sit down and watch other people work.”
“I’ll need to have the lawn-mower sharpened; it may be needed at any moment by the neighbours,” said her brother Dan.
They watched upspring the green spears of the daffodils, that by-and-by should bear their flags of gold.
And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing or cleaning the streets, or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought—as he would call it—in the Dyce’s garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything, so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy man. But being handy is its own reward, carrying with it the soothing sense of self-sufficiency, so we need not vex ourselves for Wully. As he said himself, he “did the turn” for plain unornamental gardening, though in truth he seemed to think he did it best when sitting on his barrow trams, smoking a thoughtful pipe, and watching the glad spring hours go by at a cost of sixpence each to the lawyer who employed him.
Bud often joined him on the trams, and gravely listened to him, thinking that a man who did so many different and interesting things in a day was wise and gifted beyond ordinary. In the old and abler years he had been a soldier, and, nursing flowers nowadays, his mind would oft incongruously dwell on scenes remote and terribly different, where he had delved in foreign marl for the burial of fallen comrades.
“Tell me Inkermann again, Mr Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I’ll shoo off the birds from the blub-flowers.”
“I’ll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe, and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and chasing the birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the mischief with them birds! the garden’s fair polluted wi’ them! God knows what’s the use o’ them except for chirping, chirping— Choo! off wi’ ye at once or I’ll be after ye!— Ay, ay, Inkermann. It was a gey long day, I’m tellin’ ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter, slaughter a’ the time: me wi’ an awfu’ hacked heel, and no’ a bit o’ anything in my stomach. A nesty saft day, wi’ a smirr o’ rain. We were as black as—as black as—as—”
“As black as the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I mind the very words.”