“Child, you are very young!” said Mrs Molyneux.
“Yes,” said Bud; “I suppose that’s it. By-and-by I’ll maybe get to be like other people.”
Jim Molyneux struck the table with his open hand. “By George!” he cried, “I wouldn’t hurry being like other people; that’s what every gol-darned idiot in England’s trying, and you’re right on the spot just now as you stand. That’s straight talk, nothing but! I allow I favour a bit of leg movement on the stage—generally it’s about the only life there is on it; but a woman who can play with her head don’t need to wear out much shoe-leather. Girly—” he stopped a second, then burst out with the question: “How’d you like a little part in this ‘King John’?”
A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed—“Oh! Jim Molyneux, don’t be so cruel.”
“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they’ve got an Arthur in the caste who’s ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had an understudy—and if I— Think you could play a boy’s part? There isn’t much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch the eye of the cognoscenti. You’d let her, wouldn’t you, Miss Ailie? It’d be great fun. She’d learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don’t kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”
Ailie’s heart was leaping. Here was the crisis,—she knew it,—what was she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour—had often wrestled with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only, she could come to no conclusion. Her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead for freedom,—for freedom and the space that herself had years ago surrendered: now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.
“Just this once!” pleaded Mr Molyneux, understanding her scruples: Bud’s face mutely pleaded.
Yes, “just this once!”—it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago—before the mimicry on the first New Year’s morning, before the night of the dozen candles, or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.
“I really don’t mind much, myself,” said Ailie at last; “but I fancy her Aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”
“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox quickly; “but when the thing was over she’d be as pleased as Punch—at least, she’d laugh the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the ball.”