Kate’s apron at that would fly up to cover her eyes, for she saw before her all the bloody spectacle. “I’m that glad,” she would say, “that my lad’s a sailor. I couldna sleep one iota at night thinkin’ of their baggonets if he was a man-o’-war. And that puts me in mind, my dear, it’s more than a week since we sent the chap a letter. Have you time the now to sit and write a scrape to Hamburg on the Elbow—imports iron ore?”
And Bud had time, and sit she would and write a lovely letter to Charles Maclean of Oronsay. She told him that her heart was sore, but she must confess that she had one time plighted her troth to a Russian army officer, who died, alas! on the bloody field. His last words, as his life-blood slowly ebbed away, were—
“What would be the last words of a Russian officer who loved you?” asked Bud, biting her pen in her perplexity.
“Toots! anything—‘my best respects to Kate,’” said the maid, who had learned by this time that the letters Charles liked the most were the ones where Bud most freely used imagination.
“I don’t believe it would,” said Bud. “It ’d sound far too calm for a man that’s busy dying;” but she put it down all the same, feeling it was only fair that Kate should have some say in the letters written in her name.
That was the day they gave him a hint that a captain was wanted on the yacht of Lady Anne.
And still Kate’s education made some progress, as you may see from what she knew of Hamburg, though she was not yet the length of writing her own love-letters. She would sit at times at night for hours quite docile, knitting in the kitchen, listening to the reading of the child. A score of books had been tried on her by Aunt Ailie’s counsel (for she was in the secret of this Lower Dyce Academy), but none there was that hit the pupil’s fancy half so much as her own old favourite penny novelettes till they came one happy day to ‘The Pickwick Papers.’ Kate grew very fond of ‘The Pickwick Papers.’ The fun of them being in a language quite unknown in Colonsay, was almost all beyond her. But “that poor Mr Puckwuck!” she would cry at each untoward accident; “oh, the poor wee man!” and the folk were as real to her as if she had known them all in Colonsay. If Dickens could have known the curious sentiments his wandering hero roused in this Highland servant mind, he would have greatly wondered.
While Bud was tutoring Kate that spring, Miss Bell was thinking to take up the training of Bud herself in wiselike housekeeping. The child grew as fast in her mind as in her body: each day she seemed to drift farther away from the hearth and into the world from which her auntie would preserve her—into the world whose doors books widely opened, Auntie Ailie’s magic key of sympathy, and the genius of herself. So Bell determined there and then to coax her into the gentle arts of domesticity that ever had had a fascination for herself. She went about it, oh, so cunningly! letting Bud play at the making of beds and the dusting of the stair-rails and the parlour beltings—the curly-wurly places, as she called them, full of quirks and holes and corners that the unelect like Kate of Colonsay will always treat perfunctorily in a general wipe that only drives the dirt the farther in. Bud missed not the tiniest corner nor the deepest nook: whatever she did, she did fastidiously, much to the joy of her aunt, who was sure it was a sign she was meant by the Lord for a proper housewife. But the child soon tired of making beds and dusting, as she did of white-seam sewing; and when Bell deplored this falling off, Ailie said: “You cannot expect everybody to have the same gifts as yourself. Now that she has proved she’s fit to clean a railing properly, she’s not so much to blame if she loses interest in it. The child’s a genius, Bell, and to a person of her temperament the thing that’s easily done is apt to be contemptuous: the glory’s in the triumph over difficulties, in getting on—getting on—getting on,” and Ailie’s face grew warm with some internal fire.
At that speech Bell was silent. She thought it just another of Ailie’s haiverings; but Mr Dyce, who heard, suddenly became grave.
“Do you think it’s genius or precocity?” he asked.