“Indeed I’m far from that,” said Kate. “I have just my health and napery and a liking for the chap, and I wish I wasn’t near so red.”
Bud was able to instruct her in the right deportment for a bride, but had no experience in the management of husbands: for that Kate had to take some hints from her mistress, who was under the delusion that her brother Dan was the standard of his sex.
“They’re curious creatures,” Bell confided. “You must have patience, ay, and humour them. They’ll trot at your heels like pussy for a cheese-pudding, but they’ll not be driven. If I had a man I would never thwart him. If he was out of temper or unreasonable I would tell him he was looking ill, and that would make him feared and humble. When a man thinks he’s ill, his trust must be in the Lord and in his woman-kind. That’s where we have the upper hand of them! First and last, the thing’s to be agreeable. You’ll find he’ll never put anything in its proper place, and that’s a heartbreak, but it’s not so bad as if he broke the dishes and blackened your eyes, the way they do in the newspapers. There’s one thing that’s the secret of a happy home—to live in the fear of God and within your income, faith! you can’t live very well without it.”
“Oh, mem! it’s a desperate thing a wedding,” said the maid. “I never, in all my life, had so much to think about before.”
There were stricken lads in these days! The more imminent became her utter loss, the more desirable Kate became. But sentiment in country towns is an accommodating thing, and all the old suitors—the whistlers in the close and purveyors of conversation lozenges—found consolation in the fun at the wedding, and danced their griefs away on the flags of the Dyces’ kitchen.
A noble wedding! All the cookery skill of Kate and her mistress was expended on it, and discretion, for the sake of the incredulous, forbids enumeration of the roasted hens. Chanticleers in the town crowed roupily and ruefully for months thereafter. The bridegroom might have stepped over the wall to the wedding chamber, or walked to it in a hundred paces up the lane: he rode instead in a carriage that made a stately and circuitous approach round John Turner’s Corner, and wished the distance had been twenty times as long. “It’s not that I’m feared,” said he, “or that I’ve rued the gyurl, but—but it’s kind of sudden!”—a curious estimate of a courtship that had started in the burial-ground of Colonsay so many years before!
A noble wedding—its revelry kept the town awake till morning. From the open windows the night was filled with dancing tunes, and songs, and laughter; boys cried “Fab, fab!” in the street, and a fairy lady—really a lady all grown up, alas!—stood at a window and showered pence among them.
Long before the wedding-party ended, Bud went up to bed, but she lay for hours awake in the camceil room hearing the revelry of the kitchen. She had said good-bye to the blissful pair whose wedding was the consequence of her own daft pranks as letter-writer: she would miss the maid of Colonsay. The knowledge that ’tis an uncertain world, a place of change and partings, comes to us all sooner or later in one flash of apprehension and of grief: for the first time Bud felt the irrevocable nature of the past, and that her happy world under this roof was, someway, crumbling, and the tears came to her eyes.
A hurried footstep sounded on the stairs, a rap came to her door, and the bride came in, unbid, in the darkness, whispering Lennox’s name.
Her only answer was a sob from the girl in bed.