“Kate, you randy!” she cried, bursting into the kitchen—
“‘I sent a letter to my love and by the way I dropped it,
I dropped it, I dropped it; I dree—I dree—I dropped it’—
“I’ve fixed it up for Charles; he’s to be the captain.” The servant danced on the floor in a speechless transport, and Bud danced too.
CHAPTER XXI.
Too slow, far too slow, passed the lengthening days. Kate was bedded by nine to make them shorter by an hour or two, but what she took from the foot of the day she tacked to the head of it, as Paddy in the story eked his blanket, and she was up in the mornings long before Wanton Wully rang the six-hours’ bell. The elder Dyces—saving Ailie, who knew all about it, hearing it from Bud in passionate whispers as they lay together in one bed in the brightening morns of May—might think summer’s coming was what made the household glad, Kate sing like the laverock, and Lennox so happy and so good, but it was the thought of Charles. “Dear me! you’ve surely taken a desperate fancy for Prince Charlie songs,” would Miss Bell remark to Bud and the maid of Colonsay. “Is there not another ditty in the ballant?” and they would glance at each other guiltily but never let on.
“Come o’er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie, brave Charlie,
Come o’er the stream, Charlie, and I’ll be Maclean.”
—Bud composed that one in a jiffy sitting one day at the kitchen window, and of all the noble Jacobite measures Kate liked it best, “it was so clever, and so desperate like the thing!” Such a daft disease is love! To the woman whose recollection of the mariner was got from olden Sabbath walks ’tween churches in the windy isle, among the mossy tombs, and to Bud, who had never seen him, but had made for herself a portrait blent of the youth so gay and gallant Kate described, and of George Sibley Purser, and of dark ear-ringed men of the sea that in “The Tempest” cry “Heigh, my hearts! cheerily, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts! yare, yare,” the prospect of his presence was a giddy joy.
And after all the rascal came without warning, to be for a day and a night within sound of Kate’s minstrelsy without her knowing it, for he lodged, an ardent but uncertain man, on the other side of the garden-wall, little thinking himself the cause and object of these musical mornings. Bud found him out—that clever one! who was surely come from America to set all the Old World right,—she found him at the launching of the Wave.
Lady Anne’s yacht dozed like a hedgehog under leaves through the winter months below the beeches on what we call the hard—on the bank of the river under Jocka’s house, where the water’s brackish, and the launching of her was always of the nature of a festival, for the Earl’s men were there, John Taggart’s band, with “A life on the Ocean Wave” between each passage of the jar of old Tom Watson’s home-made ale—not tipsy lads but jovial, and even the children of the schools, for it happened on a Saturday.
Bud and Footles went with each other and the rest of the bairns, unknown to their people, for in adventures such as these the child delighted, and was wisely never interdicted.