He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh’s Cleansing Department. Later—till the middle of the day—he was the Harbour-Master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces’ house. “It’s the parlour fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel’, though I never had it; it’s a good sign o’ him the night before.”
Peter the post came clamping by-and-by along the street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces’. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back-door and lightly tapped.
“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.
“She’s got the turn!—she’s got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”
“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.
“It’s no’ temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi’ the weather-glass the doctor’s aye so cross wi’ that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But anyway she’s better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not, she’ll starve hersel’”
“That’s rare! By George, that’s tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons’ balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.
Wanton Wully sat on a barrow-tram waiting the postman’s exit. “What way is she?” said he, and Peter’s errant eye cocked to all airts of the compass. What he wanted was to keep this tit-bit to himself, to have the satisfaction of passing it along with his letters. To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What way is she?” he asked again, seeing the postman’s hesitation.
“If ye’ll promise to stick to the head o’ the toun and let me alone in the ither end, I’ll tell ye,” said Peter, and it was so agreed.
But they had not long all the glory of the good tidings to themselves. Dr Brash came out of Dyce’s house for the first time in two days, very sunken in the eyes and sorely needing shaving, and it could be noticed by the dullest that he had his jaunty walk and a flower in the lapel of his badly-crushed coat. Ailie put it there with trembling fingers; she could have kissed the man besides, if there had not been the chance that he might think her only another silly woman. Later Footles hurled himself in fury from the doorway, his master close behind him. At the sight of Mr Dyce the street was happy; it was the first time they had seen him for a week. In burgh towns that are small enough we have this compensation, that if we have to grieve in common over many things, a good man’s personal joy exalts us all.