The Daft Days. Munro Neil

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 Bell. “Mother used to say that she was aye kittling your feet till you laughed when you were a baby. I sometimes think that she did not stop it soon enough.”

      “If I had to educate myself again, and had not a living to make, I would leave out a good many things the old dominie thought needful. What was yon awful thing again? – mensuration. To sleep well and eat anything, fear the face of nobody in bashfulness, to like dancing, and be able to sing a good bass or tenor, – that’s no bad beginning in the art of life. There’s a fellow Brodie yonder in the kirk choir who seems to me happier than a king when he’s getting in a fine boom-boom of bass to the tune Devizes; he puts me all out at my devotions on a Lord’s day with envy of his accomplishment.”

      “What! envy too!” said Alison. “Murder, theft, and envy – what a brother!”

      “Yes, envy too, the commonest and ugliest of our sins,” said Mr Dyce. “I never met man or woman who lacked it, though many never know they have it. I hope the great thing is to be ashamed to feel it, for that’s all that I can boast of myself. When I was a boy at the school there was another boy, a great friend of my own, was chosen to compete for a prize I was thought incapable of taking, so that I was not on the list. I envied him to hatred – almost; and saying my bits of prayers at night I prayed that he might win. I felt ashamed of my envy, and set the better Daniel Dyce to wrestle with the Daniel Dyce who was not quite so big. It was a sair fight, I can assure you. I found the words of my prayer and my wishes considerably at variance – ”

      “Like me and ‘Thy will be done’ when we got the word of brother William,” said Bell.

      “But my friend – dash him! – got the prize. I suppose God took a kind of vizzy down that night and saw the better Dan Dyce was doing his desperate best against the other devil’s-Dan, who mumbled the prayer on the chance He would never notice. There was no other way of accounting for it, for that confounded boy got the prize, and he was not half so clever as myself, and that was Alick Maitland. Say nothing about envy, Ailie; I fear we all have some of it until we are perhaps well up in years, and understand that between the things we envy and the luck we have there is not much to choose. If I got all I wanted, myself, the world would have to be much enlarged. It does not matter a docken leaf. Well, as I was saying when my learned friend interrupted me, I would have this young fellow healthy and happy and interested in everything. There are men I see who would mope and weary in the middle of a country fair – God help them! I want to stick pins in them sometimes and make them jump. They take as little interest in life