He went early back that day, to relieve Ailie at her nursing, as he pretended to himself, but really for his own delight in looking at the life in eyes where yesterday was a cloud. A new, fresh, wholesome air seemed to fill the house. Bud lay on high pillows, with Miss Minto’s Grace propped against her knees, and the garret was full of the odour of flowers that had come in a glorious bunch from the banker’s garden. Bell had grown miraculously young again, and from between Ailie’s eyebrows had disappeared the two black lines that had come there when Dr Brash had dropped in her ear the dreadful word pneumonia. But Dr Brash had beaten it! Oh, if she only knew the way to knit a winter waistcoat for him!
The child put out her hand to her uncle, and he kissed her on the palm, frightful even yet of putting a lip to her cheek, lest he should experience again the terror of the hot breath from that consuming inward fire.
“Well,” said he briskly, “how’s our health, your ladyship? Losh bless me! what a fine, big, sonsy baby you have gotten here; poor Alibel’s nose will be out of joint, I’m thinking.”
“Hasn’t got any,” said Bud, still weakly, in her new, thin, and unpractised voice, as she turned with a look that showed no lessening affection for the old doll, badly battered in the visage and wanting in the limbs, which lay beside her on the pillow.
“Blythmeat and breadberry,” said Daniel Dyce. “In the house of Daniel Dyce! Bell and Ailie, here’s an example for you!”
CHAPTER XIV.
Following on stormy weeks had come an Indian summer, when the world was blessed with Ailie’s idea of Arden weather, that keeps one wood for ever green and glad with company, knows only the rumour of distant ice and rain, and makes men, reading thereof by winter fires, smell fir and feel the breeze on their naked necks and hunger for the old abandoned bed among the brackens. “It is better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak,” was the motto of Daniel Dyce, and though the larks were absent, he would have the little one in the garden long hours of the day. She beiked there like a kitten in the sunlight till her wan cheek bloomed. The robin sang among the apples—pensive a bit for the ear of age, that knows the difference between the voice of spring and autumn—sweet enough for youth that happily does not have an ear for its gallant melancholy; the starlings blew like a dust about the sky; over the garden wall—the only one in the town that wanted broken bottles—far-off hills raised up their heads to keek at the little lassie, who saw from this that the world was big and glorious as ever.
“My! ain’t this fine and clean?” said Bud. “Feels as if Aunt Bell had been up this morning bright and early with a duster.” She was enraptured with the blaze of the nasturtiums, that Bell would aye declare should be the flower of Scotland, for “Indian cress here, or Indian cress there,” as she would say, “they’re more like Scots than any flower I ken. The poorer the soil the better they thrive, and they come to gold where all your fancy flowers would rot for the want of nutriment. Nutriment! give them that in plenty and you’ll see a bonny display of green and no’ much blossom. The thing’s a parable—the worst you can do with a Scotsman, if you want the best from him, ’s to feed him ower rich. Look at Captain Consequence; never the same since he was aboard—mulligatawny even-on in India; a score of servant-men, and never a hand’s-turn for himself,—all the blossom from that kind of Indian cress is on his nose.”
“Lands sake! I am glad I’m not dead,” said Bud, with all her body tingling as she heard the bees buzz in the nasturtium bells and watched the droll dog Footles snap at the butterflies.
“It’s not a bad world, one way and the other,” said Miss Bell, knitting at her side; “it would have been a hantle worse if we had had the making o’t. But here we have no continuing city, and yonder—if the Lord had willed—you would have gone sweeping through the gates of the new Jerusalem.”