The Daft Days. Munro Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ sat back in her chair, with her teacup in her hand, and laughed, and Kate laughed quietly – though it beat her to see where the fun was; and the dog laughed likewise – at least it wagged its tail and twisted its body and made such extraordinary sounds in its throat that you could say it was laughing.

      “Tuts! you are the droll woman, Bell,” said Mr Dyce, blinking at her. “You have the daftest ideas of some things. For a woman who spent so long a time in Miss Mushet’s seminary and reads so much at the newspapers, I wonder at you.”

      “Of course his father was Scotch, that’s one mercy,” added Bell, not a bit annoyed at the reception of her pious opinions.

      “That is always something to be going on with,” said Mr Dyce mockingly. “I hope he’ll make the most of that great start in life and fortune. It’s as good as money in his pocket.”

      Bell put up a tiny hand and pushed a stray curl (for she had a rebel chevelure) behind her ear, and smiled in spite of her anxiety about the coming nephew. “You may laugh if you like, Dan,” she said emphatically, perking with her head across the table at him; “but I’m proud, I’m PROUD, I’m PROUD I’m Scotch.” (“Not apologising for it myself,” said her brother softly.) “And you know what these Americans are! Useless bodies, who make their men brush their own boots, and have to pay wages that’s a sin to housemaids, and eat pie even-on.”

      “Dear me! is that true, or did you see it in a newspaper?” said her brother. “I begin to be alarmed myself at the possibilities of this small gentleman now on his way to the north, in the complete confidence of Mr Molyneux, who must think him very clever. It’s a land of infant prodigies he comes from; even at the age of ten he may have more of the stars and stripes in him than we can eradicate by a diet of porridge and a curriculum of Shorter Catechism and Jane Porter’s ‘Scottish Chiefs.’ Faith, I was fond of Jane myself when I read her first: she was nice and bloody. A big soft hat with a bash in it, perhaps; a rhetorical delivery at the nose, ‘I guess and calculate’ every now and then; a habit of chewing tobacco” (“We’ll need a cuspidor,” said Ailie sotto voce); “and a revolver in his wee hip-pocket. Oh, the darling! I can see him quite plainly.”

      “Mercy on us!” cried the maid Kate, and fled the room all in a tremor at the idea of the revolver.

      “You may say what you like, but I cannot get over his being an American,” said Bell solemnly. “The dollar’s everything in America, and they’re so independent!”

      “Terrible! terrible!” said her brother ironically, breaking into another egg fiercely with his knife, as if he were decapitating the President of the United States.

      Ailie laughed again. “Dear, dear Bell!” she said, “it sounds quite Scotch. A devotion to the dollar is a good sound basis for a Scotch character. Remember there are about a hundred bawbees in a dollar: just think of the dollar in bawbees, and you’ll not be surprised that the Americans prize it so much.”

      “Renegade!” said Bell, shaking a spoon at her.

      “Provincial!” retorted Ailie, shaking a fork at Bell.

      “‘Star of Peace, to wanderers weary,

      Bright the beams that shine on me,’

      – children, be quiet,” half-sung, half-said their brother. “Bell, you are a blether; Ailie, you are a cosmopolitan, a thing accursed. That’s what Edinburgh and Brussels and your too brisk head have done for you. Just bring yourself to our poor parochial point of view, and tell me, both of you, what you propose to do with this young gentleman from Chicago when you get him.”

      “Change his stockings and give him a good tea,” said Bell promptly, as if she had been planning it for weeks. “He’ll be starving of hunger and damp with snow.”

      “There’s something more than dry hose and high tea to the making of a man,” said her brother. “You can’t keep that up for a dozen years.”

      “Oh, you mean education!” said Bell resignedly. “That’s not in my department at all.”

      Ailie expressed her views with calm, soft deliberation, as if she, too, had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, which was partly the case. “I suppose,” she said, “he’ll go to the Grammar School, and get a good grounding on the classic side, and then to the University. I will just love to help him so long as he’s at the Grammar School. That’s what I should have been, Dan, if you had let me – a teacher. I hope he’s a bright boy, for I simply cannot stand what Bell calls – calls – ”

      “Diffies,” suggested Bell.

      “Diffies; yes, I can not stand diffies. Being half a Dyce I can hardly think he will be a diffy. If he’s the least like his father, he may be a little wild at first, but at least he’ll be good company, which makes up for a lot, and good-hearted, quick in perception, fearless, and – ”

      “And awful funny,” suggested Bell, beaming with old, fond, glad recollections of the brother dead beside his actor wife in far Chicago.

      “Fearless, and good fun,” continued Ailie. “Oh, dear Will! what a merry soul he was. Well, the child cannot be a fool if he’s like his father. American independence, though he has it in – in – in clods, won’t do him any harm at all. I love Americans – do you hear that, Bell Dyce? – because they beat that stupid old King George, and have been brave in the forest and wise on the prairie, and feared no face of king, and laughed at dynasties. I love them because they gave me Emerson, and Whitman, and Thoreau, and because one of them married my brother William, and was the mother of his child.”

      Dan Dyce nodded; he never quizzed his sister Ailie when it was her heart that spoke and her eyes were sparkling.

      “The first thing you should learn him,” said Miss Dyce, “is ‘God save the Queen.’ It’s a splendid song altogether; I’m glad I’m of a kingdom every time I hear it at a meeting, for it’s all that’s left of the olden notions the Dyces died young or lost their money for. You’ll learn him that, Ailie, or I’ll be very vexed with you. I’ll put flesh on his bones with my cooking if you put the gentleman in him.”

      It was Bell’s idea that a gentleman talked a very fine English accent like Ailie, and carried himself stately like Ailie, and had wise and witty talk for rich or poor like Ailie.

      “I’m not so sure about the university,” she went on. “Such stirks come out of it sometimes; look at poor Maclean, the minister! They tell me he could speak Hebrew if he got anybody to speak it back slow to him, but just imagine the way he puts on his clothes! And his wife manages him not so bad in broad Scotch. I think we could do nothing better than make the boy a lawyer; it’s a trade looked up to, and there’s money in it, though I never could see the need of law myself if folk would only be agreeable. He could go into Dan’s office whenever he is old enough.”

      “A lawyer!” cried her brother. “You have first of all to see that he’s not an ass.”

      “And what odds would that make to a lawyer?” said Bell quickly, snapping her eyes at the brother she honestly thought the wisest man in Scotland.

      “Bell,” said he, “as I said before, you’re a haivering body – nothing else, though I’ll grant you bake no’ a bad scone. And as for you, Ailie, you’re beginning, like most women, at the wrong end. The first thing to do with your nephew is to teach him to be happy, for it’s a habit that has to be acquired early, like the liking for pease-brose.”

      “You began gey early yourself,” said СКАЧАТЬ