CHAPTER XXIX.
It is another mercy, too, that in our age we learn to make the best of what aforetime might be ill to thole, as Bell made fine new garments out of old ones faded by turning them outside in and adding frills and flounces. Bud’s absence early ceased to be deplorable, since it wakened cheerful expectations not to be experienced had she stayed at home; gave rise to countless fond contrivances for her happiness in exile; and two or three times a-year to periods of bliss, when her vacations gave the house of Dyce the very flower of ecstasy. Her weekly letters of themselves were almost compensation for her absence. On the days of their arrival, Peter the post would come blithely whistling with his M.C. step to the lawyer’s kitchen window before he went to the castle itself, defying all routine and the laws of the Postmaster-General, for he knew Miss Dyce would be waiting feverishly, having likely dreamt the night before of happy things that—dreams going by contraries, as we all of us know in Scotland—might portend the most dreadful tidings.
Bud’s envelope was always on the top of his budget. For the sake of it alone (it sometimes seemed to Peter and those who got it) had the mail come splashing through the night,—the lawyer’s big blue envelopes, as it were, had got but a friendly lift through the courtesy of clerks in Edinburgh, and the men on the railway train, and the lad who drove the gig from Maryfield. What were big blue envelopes of the business world compared with the modest little square of grey with Lennox Dyce’s writing on it?
“Here’s the usual! Pretty thick to-day!” would Peter say, with a smack of satisfaction on the window-sash. Ah, those happy Saturdays! Everybody knew about them. “And how’s hersel’?” the bell-ringer would ask in the by-going, not altogether because his kindly interest led to an eye less strict on his lazy moods in the garden. One Fair day, when Maggie White’s was irresistible, it rang so merrily with drovers, and he lost the place again, he stopped the lawyer on the street to ask him what Miss Lennox thought of all this argument about the Churches, seeing she was in the thick of it in Edinburgh.
“Never you mind the argument, Will,” said Daniel Dyce,—“you do your duty by the Auld Kirk bell; and as for the Free folk’s quarrelling, amang them be’t!”
“But can you tell me, Mr D-D-Dyce,” said Wanton Wully, with as much assurance as if he was prepared to pay by the Table of Fees, “what’s the difference between the U.F.’s and the Frees? I’ve looked at it from every point, and I canna see it.”
“Come and ask me some day when you’re sober,” said the lawyer, and Wanton Wully snorted.
“If I was sober,” said he, “I wouldna want to ken—I wouldna give a curse.”
Yet each time Bud came home she seemed, to the mind of her Auntie Bell, a little farther off from them—a great deal older, a great deal less dependent, making for womanhood in a manner that sometimes was astounding, as when sober issues touched her, set her thinking, made her talk in fiery ardours. Aunt Ailie gloried in that rapid growth; Aunt Bell lamented, and spoke of brains o’ertaxed and fevered, and studies that were dangerous. She made up her mind a score of times to go herself to Edinburgh and give a warning to the teachers; but the weeks passed, and the months, and by-and-by the years, till almost three were gone, and the Edinburgh part of Lennox’s education was drawing to a close, and the warning visit was still to pay.