Bud. Munro Neil

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      “Mercy on us, six o'clock!” cried Miss Dyce, with a startled jump from her dreams to the floor of her bedroom. “Six o'clock on the New Year's morning, and I'll warrant that randy Kate is sound asleep yet,” she said, and quickly clad herself and went to the head of the stair and cried, “Kate! Kate! are ye up yet, Kate? Are ye hearing me, Kate MacNeill?”

      From the cavern dark of the lower story there came back no answer.

      She stood with a curious, twirly wooden candlestick in her hand in the midst of a house that was dead dumb and desperate dark and smelled deliciously of things to eat. Even herself, who had been at the making of most of them the day before, and had, by God's grace, still much of a child's appetite, could not but sniff with a childish satisfaction at this air of a celestial grocery—of plum-puddings and currant-buns, apples and oranges, cordials and spices, toffee and the angelic treacly sweet we call Black Man—her face lit rosily by the candle low, a woman small and soft and sappy, with the most wanton reddish hair, and a briskness of body that showed no sign as yet of her accomplished years. What they were I will never tell you; but this I'll say, that even if they had been eighty she was the kind to cheerily dance a quadrille. The daft bell, so plainly in the jovial mood of Wanton Wully Oliver, infected her: she smiled to herself in a way she had when remembering droll things or just for simple jollity, and whoever saw Bell Dyce smile to herself had never the least doubt after that she was a darling. Over the tenements of the town the song of the bell went rollicking, and in its hiccoughing pauses went wonderfully another sound far, far removed in spirit and suggestion—the clang of wild geese calling: the “honk, honk” of the ganders and the challenge of their ladies come down adrift in the snow from the bitter north.

      But there was no answer from the maid in the kitchen. She had rolled less deliberately than was usual from her blankets to the summons of the six-o'clock bell, and already, with the kitchen window open, her bounteous form surged over the two sashes that were always so conveniently low and handy for a gossip with any friendly passer-by on the pavement. She drank the air of the clean, chill morning dark, a heady thing like old Tom Watson's autumn ale, full of the sentiment of the daft days. She tilted an ear to catch the tune of the mail-boy's song that now was echoing mellow from the cobwebbed gloom of the stable stalls, and, making a snowball from the drift of the window-ledge, she threw it, woman wise, aimlessly into the street with a pretence at combat. The chill of the snow stung sweet in the hot palm of her, for she was young and strong.

      “Kate, you wretch!” cried a voice behind her. She drew in her head, to find her mistress in the kitchen with the candlestick in her hand.

      “Oh, m'em,” cried the maid, no way abashed, banging up the window and hurriedly crushing her more ample parts under the final hooks and eyes of her morning wrapper—“oh, m'em, what a start you gave me! I'm all in a p-p-palpitation. I was just takin' one mouthful of air and thinkin' to myself yonder in the Gaelic that it was time for me to be comin' in and risin' right.”

      “A happy New Year to you, Kate MacNeill,” said the mistress, taking her hand.

      “Just that, just that! and the same to you yourself, Miss Dyce. I'm feeling fine; I'm that glad with everything,” said the maid, in some confusion at this unusual relation with her mistress. She shook the proffered hand rapidly from side to side as if it were an egg-switch.

      “And see and get the fires on quick now, like a good lass. It would never do to be starting the New Year late—it would be unlucky. I was crying to you yonder from the stair-head, and wondering if you were ill, that you did not answer me so quickly as you do for ordinar'.”

      “Ill, Miss Dyce!” cried the maid, astounded. “Do you think I'm daft to be ill on a New Year's Day?”

      “After yon—after yon shortbread you ate yesterday I would not have wondered much if you were,” said Miss Dyce, shaking her head solemnly. “I'm not complaining, but, dear me! it was an awful lump; and I thought it would be a bonny-like thing, too, if our first-foot had to be the doctor.”

      “Doctor! I declare to goodness I never had need of a doctor to me since Dr. Macphee in Colonsay put me in order with oil and things after I had the measles,” exclaimed the maid, as if mankind were like wag-at-the-wa' clocks, and could be guaranteed to go right for years if you blew through them with a pair of bellows or touched their works with an oily feather.

      “Never mind about the measles just now, Kate,” said Miss Dyce, with a meaning look at the black-out fire.

      “Neither I was mindin' them, m'em—I don't care a spittle for them; it's so long ago I would not know them if I saw them; I was just—”

      “But get your fire on. You know we have a lot to do to-day to get everything nice and ready for my nephew who comes from America with the four-o'clock coach.”

      “America!” cried the maid, dropping a saucepan lid on the floor in her astonishment. “My stars! Did I not think it was from Chickagoo?”

      “And Chicago is in America, Kate,” said her mistress. “Is it? is it? Mercy on me, how was Kate to know? I only got part of my education—up to the place where you carry one and add ten. America! Dear me, just fancy! The very place that I'm so keen to go to. If I had the money, and was in America—”

      It was a familiar theme; Kate had not got fully started on it when her mistress fled from the kitchen and set briskly about her morning affairs.

      And gradually the household of Dyce, the lawyer, awoke wholly to a day of unaccustomed stillness and sound, for the deep snow piled in the street and hushed the traffic of wheel and hoof and shoe, but otherwise the morning was cheerful with New-Year's-Day noise. For the bell-ringing of Wanton Wully was scarcely done, died down in a kind of brazen chuckle, and the “honk, honk” of the wild geese sped seaward over gardens and back lanes—strange, wild music of the north, far-fetched and undomestic—when the fife band shrilly tootled through the town to the tune of “Hey, Johnny Cope, are Ye Waukin' Yet?” Ah, they were the proud, proud men, their heads dizzy with glory and last night's wine, their tread on air. John Taggart drummed—a mighty drummer, drunk or sober, who so loved his instrument he sometimes went to bed with it still fastened to his neck, and banged to-day like Banagher, who banged furiously, never minding the tune much, but happy if so be that he made noise enough. And the fifers were not long gone down the town, all with the wrong step but Johnny Vicar, as his mother thought, when the snow was trampled under the feet of playing children, and women ran out of their houses, and crossed the street, some of them, I declare, to kiss each other, for 'tis a fashion lately come, and most genteel, grown wonderfully common in Scotland. Right down the middle of the town, with two small flags in his hat and holly in the lapel of his coat, went old Divine, the hawker, with a great barrow of pure gold, crying: “Fine Venetian oranges! wha'll buy sweet Venetian oranges? Nane o' your foreign trash. Oranges! Oranges!—rale New Year oranges, three a penny; bloods, a bawbee each!” The shops opened just СКАЧАТЬ