“Miss Lennox!” said the bride distressed; “what ails you? I’ve come up to say good-bye: it wasn’t a right good-bye at all with yon folk looking. Oh, Lennox, Lennox! ghaol mo chridhe! my heart is sore to be leaving you, for the two of us were so merry! Now I have a man, and a good man too; it was you that gave me him, but I have lost my loving friend.” She threw herself on the bed, regardless of her finery, and the Celtic fount of her swelled over in sobs and tears.
CHAPTER XXXII.
It took two maids to fill Kate’s place in the Dyces’ household—one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued; and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell called their breaking-in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone: she must sit in the parlour strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain’s Broadwood, taming her heart of fire. It was as a voice from heaven’s lift there came one day a letter from London in which Mrs Molyneux invited her and one of her aunts for an Easter holiday.
“Indeed and I’ll be glad to be quit for a week or two of both of you,” said Bell to her niece and Ailie. “Spring-cleaning, with a couple of stupid huzzies in the kitchen,—not but what they’re nice and willing lassies,—is like to be the sooner ended if we’re left to it ourselves.”
A radiant visage and lips in firm control betrayed how Lennox felt. She had never been in London—its cry went pealing through her heart. Ailie said nothing, but marvelled how blithely and blindly her sister always set foot on the facile descent that led to her inevitable doom of deprivation and regret.
“The Grand Tour!” said Uncle Dan; “it’s the fitting termination to your daft days, Lennox. Up by at the Castle there’s a chariot with imperials that conveyed the Earl on his, the hammercloth most lamentably faded: I often wonder if his lordship takes a sly seat in it at times when no one’s looking, and climbs the Alps or clatters through Italian towns again when Jones the coachman is away at his tea. It’s a thing I might do myself if I had made the Tour and still had the shandrydan.”
“Won’t you really need me?” Aunt Ailie asked her sister, and half hoped, half feared spring-cleaning should postpone the holiday; but Bell maintained it should be now or never, more particularly as Lennox’s dress was new.
Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding round country trees; the throngs of people, the odours of fruit-shops, the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery grey, and the multitudinous monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the silence of mighty parks,—Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.
Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her, and shook a living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did she seem to have a place for any stranger: now he had found she could be bullied,—that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls, and the play was as often as not “The Father’s Curse”; but once a day he walked past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement, planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble, and duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a pea-green house with nine French-bean rows and some clumps of bulbs behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of success—teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that’s what ails the boys, and makes ’em sleepier than Hank M’Cabe’s old tom-cat. Good boys, dear boys, they’ve always got the long-lost-brother grip, but they’re mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling in the middle of the day. When they’ve got cobwebs in their little brilliantined belfries, I’m full of the songs of spring and merry old England’s on the lee. See? I don’t even need to grab; all I’ve got to do is to look deserving, and the stuff comes crowding in: it always does to a man who looks like ready-money, and don’t lunch on cocktails and cloves.”
“Jim, boyette,” his wife would say, “I guess you’d better put ice or something on your bump of self-esteem;” but she proudly wore the jewels that were the rewards of his confidence and industry.