“And I’m pretty glad I came, if it was only to see what a credit Bud is to a Scottish training. Chicago’s the finest city on earth—in spots; America’s what our Fourth of July orators succinctly designate God’s Own, and since Joan of Arc there hasn’t been any woman better or braver than Mrs Molyneux. But we weren’t situated to give Bud a show like what she’d get in a settled home. We did our best, but we didn’t dwell, as you might say, on Michigan Avenue, and Mrs Molyneux’s a dear good girl, but she isn’t demonstratively domesticated. We suspected from what Bud’s father was, the healthiest place she could be was where he came from, and though we skipped some sleep, both of us, to think of losing her, now that I’m here and see her, I’m glad of it, for my wife and I are pretty much on the drift most the time in England as we were in the United States.”
“Yours is an exacting calling, Mr Molyneux,” said Mr Dyce. “It’s very much the same in all countries, I suppose?”
“It’s not so bad as stone-breaking, nor so much of a cinch as being a statesman,” said Mr Molyneux cheerfully, “but a man’s pretty old at it before he gives up hope of breaking out into a very large gun. I’ve still the idea myself that if I’m not likely to be a Booth or Henry Irving, I could make a pile at management. With a millionaire at my back for a mascot, and one strong star, I fancy I could cut a pretty wide gash through the English dramatic stage. You know our Mr Emerson said, ‘Hitch your waggon to a star.’ I guess if I got a good star bridled, I’d hitch a private parlour-car and a steam yacht on to her before she flicked an ear. Who wants a waggon, anyway?”
“A waggon’s fairly safe to travel in,” suggested Mr Dyce, twinkling through his glasses.
“So’s a hearse,” said Mr Molyneux quickly. “Nobody that ever travelled in a hearse complained of getting his funny-bone jolted or his feelings jarred, but it’s a mighty slow conveyance for live folks. That’s the only thing that seems to me to be wrong with this ’cute little British Kingdom: it’s pretty, and it’s what the school-marm on the coach would call redolent of the dear dead days beyond recall; and it’s plucky,—but it keeps the brakes on most the time, and don’t give its star a chance to amble. I guess it’s a fine, friendly, and crowded country to be born rich in, and a pretty peaceful and lonesome country to die poor in; but take a tenpenny car-ride out from Charing Cross and you’re in Lullaby Land, and the birds are building nests and carolling in your whiskers. Life’s short; it only gives a man time to wear through one pair of eyes, two sets of teeth, and a reputation, and I want to live every hour of it that I’m not conspicuously dead.”
They were silent in the parlour of the old house that had for generations sheltered very different ideals, and over the town went the call of the wild geese. The room, low-roofed, small-windowed, papered in dull green, curtained against the noises of the street, and furnished with the strong mahogany of Grandma Buntain, dead for sixty years, had ever to those who knew it best a soul of peace that is not sometimes found in a cathedral. They felt in it a sanctuary safe from the fret and tempest, the alarums and disillusions of the life out-bye. In the light of the shaded lamp hung over the table, it showed itself to its inmates in the way our most familiar surroundings will at certain crises—in an aspect fonder than ever it had revealed before. To Bell, resenting the spirit of this actor’s gospel, it seemed as if the room cried out against the sacrilege: even Ailie, sharing in her heart, if less ecstatically, the fervour for life at its busiest this stranger showed, experienced some inharmony. To Dan it was for a moment as if he heard a man sell cuckoo clocks by auction with a tombstone for his rostrum.
“Mr Molyneux,” said he, “you remind me, in what you say, of Maggie White’s husband. Before he died he kept the public-house, and on winter nights when my old friend Colin Cleland and his cronies would be sitting in the back room with a good light, a roaring fire, and an argument about Effectual Calling, so lively that it stopped the effectual and profitable call for Johnny’s toddy, he would come in chittering as it were with cold, and his coat-collar up on his neck, to say, ‘An awfu’ nicht outside! As dark as the inside o’ a cow, and as cauld as charity! They’re lucky that have fires to sit by.’ And he would impress them so much with the good fortune of their situation at the time that they would order in another round and put off their going all the longer, though the night outside, in truth, was no way out of the ordinary. I feel like that about this place I was born in, and its old fashions and its lack of hurry, when I hear you—with none of Johnny White’s stratagem—tell us, not how dark and cold is the world outside, but what to me, at the age of fifty-five, at any rate is just as unattractive. You’ll excuse me if, in a manner of speaking, I ring the bell for another round. Life’s short, as you say, but I don’t think it makes it look any the longer to run through the hours of it instead of leisurely daundering—if you happen to know what daundering is, Mr Molyneux—and now and then resting on the roadside with a friend and watching the others pass.”
“At fifty-five,” said Mr Molyneux agreeably, “I’ll perhaps think so too, but I can only look at it from the point of view of thirty-two. We’ve all got to move, at first, Mr Dyce. That reminds me of a little talk I had with Bud to-day. That child’s grown, Mr Dyce,—grown a heap of ways: she’s hardly a child any longer.”
“Tuts! She’s nothing else!” exclaimed Miss Bell, with some misgiving. “When I was her age I was still at my sampler in Barbara Mushet’s.”
“Anyhow she’s grown. And it seems to me she’s about due for a little fresh experience. I suppose you’ll be thinking of sending her to one of those Edinburgh schools to have the last coat of shellac put on her education?”