“Does it not occur to you, Bell,” said he, “that but for the Pilgrim Fathers there would never have been Bud?”
“I declare neither there would!” she said, smiling. “Perhaps it was as well they went, poor things! And, of course, there must be many an honest decent body in America.”
“Quite a number!” said Ailie. “You would not expect this burgh to hold them all, or even Scotland: America’s glad to get the overflow.”
“Ah, you’re trying to make me laugh, the pair of you, and forget my argument,” said Bell; “but I’ll not be carried away this time. I’m feared for the bairn, and that’s telling you. Oh, Ailie, mind what her mother was—poor girl! poor dear girl! playacting for her living, roving from place to place, with nothing you could call a home; laughing and greeting and posturing before lights for the diversion of the world—”
“We might do worse than give the world diversion,” said Ailie soberly.
“Yes, yes; but with a painted face and all a vain profession—that is different, is it not? I love a jovial heart like Dan’s, but to make the body just a kind of fiddle! It’s only in the body we can be ourselves—it is our only home; think of furnishing it with shams, and lighting every room that should be private, and leaving up the blinds that the world may look in at a penny a-head! How often have I thought of William, weeping for a living, as he had to do sometimes, no doubt, and wondered what was left for him to do to ease his grief when Mary died. Oh, curb the child, Ailie! curb the dear wee lassie,—it’s you it all depends on; she worships you; the making of her ’s in your hands. Keep her humble. Keep her from thinking of worldly glories. Teach her to number her days, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom. Her mind’s too often out of here and wandering elsewhere: it was so with William,—it was once the same with you.”
Indeed it was no wonder that Bud’s mind should wander elsewhere, since the life about her had grown so suddenly dull. In these days Wanton Wully often let his morning sleep too long possess him, and hurrying through the deserted dawn with his breeches scarcely on, would ring the bell in a hasty fury half an hour behind the proper time. But a little lateness did not matter in a town that really never woke. Men went to work in what we call a dover—that is, half asleep; shopkeepers came blinking drowsily down and took their shutters off, and went back to breakfast, or, I fear sometimes, to bed, and when the day was aired and decency demanded that they should make some pretence at business, they stood by the hour at their shop doors looking at the sparrows, wagtails, and blue-bonnets pecking in the street, or at the gulls that quarrelled in the syver sand. Nothing doing. Two or three times a-day a cart from the country rumbled down the town, breaking the Sabbath calm; and on one memorable afternoon there came a dark Italian with an organ who must have thought that this at last was Eldorado, so great was his reward from a community sick of looking at each other. But otherwise nothing doing, not a thing! As in the dark of the fabled underland the men who are blind are kings, George Jordon, the silly man, who never had a purpose, and carried about with him an enviable eternal dream, seemed in that listless world the only wide-awake, for he at least kept moving, slouching somewhere, sure there was work for him to do if only he could get at it. Bairns dawdled to the schools, dogs slept in the track where once was summer traffic; Kate, melancholy, billowed from the kitchen window, and into the street quite shamelessly sang sad old Gaelic songs which Mr Dyce would say would have been excellent if only they were put to music, and her voice was like a lullaby.
One day Bud saw great bands of countless birds depart, passing above the highroad, and standing in the withering garden heard as it were without a breath of wind the dry rattle of dead leaves fall. It frightened her. She came quickly in to the tea-table, almost at her tears.
“Oh, it’s dre’ffle,” she said. “It’s Sunday all the time, without good clothes and the gigot of mutton for dinner. I declare I want to yell.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Bell cheerfully, “I was just thinking things were unusually lively for the time of year. There’s something startling every other day. Aggie Williams found her fine new kitchen-range too big for the accommodation, and she has covered it with cretonne and made it into a what-not for her parlour. Then there’s the cantata—I hear the U.P. choir is going to start to practise it whenever Duncan Gill, next door to the hall, is gone: he’s near his end, poor body! they’re waiting on, but he says he could never die a Christian death if he had to listen to them at their operatics through the wall.”