him in the flesh before them. Kate almost laughed loud out at the oddity of it; Ailie and her brother were astounded at the cleverness of the mimicry; Bell clenched her hands, and said for the second time that day, “Oh! that Molyneux, if I had him!”
“He’s a nice man, Jim. I can’t tell you how I love him – and he gave me heaps of candy at the depot,” proceeded the unabashed new-comer. “‘Change at Edinburgh,’ he said; ‘you’ll maybe have time to run into the Castle and see the Duke; give him my love, but not my address. When you get to Maryfield hop out slick and ask for your uncle Dyce.’ And then he said, did Jim, ‘I hope he ain’t a loaded Dyce, seein’ he’s Scotch, and it’s the festive season.’”
“The adorable Jim!” said Ailie. “We might have known.”
“I got on all right,” proceeded the child, “but I didn’t see the Duke of Edinburgh; there wasn’t time, and uncle wasn’t at Maryfield, but a man put me on his mail carriage and drove me right here. He said I was a caution. My! it was cold. Say, is it always weather like this here?”
“Sometimes it’s like this, and sometimes it’s just ordinary Scotch weather,” said Mr Dyce, twinkling at her through his spectacles.
“I was dreff’le sleepy in the mail, and the driver wrapped me up, and when I came into this town in the dark he said, ‘Walk right down there and rap at the first door you see with a brass man’s hand for a knocker; that’s Mr Dyce’s house.’ I came down, and there wasn’t any brass man, but I saw the knocker. I couldn’t reach up to it, so when I saw a man going into the church with a lantern in his hand, I went up to him and pulled his coat. I knew he’d be all right going into a church. He told me he was going to ring the bell, and I said I’d give him a quarter – oh, I said that before. When the bell was finished he took me to his house for luck – that was what he said – and he and his wife got right up and boiled eggs. They said I was a caution, too, and they went on boiling eggs, and I couldn’t eat more than two and a white though I tried and tried. I think I slept a good while in their house; I was so fatigued, and they were all right; they loved me, I could see that. And I liked them some myself, though they must be mighty poor, for they haven’t any children. Then the bell-man took me to this house, and rapped at the door, and went away pretty quick for him before anybody came to it, because he said he was plain-soled – what’s plain-soled anyhow? – and wasn’t a lucky first-foot on a New Year’s morning.”
“It beats all, that’s what it does!” cried Bell. “My poor wee whitterick! Were ye no’ frightened on the sea?”
“Whitterick, whitterick,” repeated the child to herself, and Ailie, noticing, was glad that this was certainly not a diffy. Diffies never interest themselves in new words; diffies never go inside themselves with a new fact as a dog goes under a table with a bone.
“Were you not frightened when you were on the sea?” repeated Bell.
“No,” said the child promptly. “Jim was there all right, you see, and he knew all about it. He said, ‘Trust in Providence, and if it’s very stormy, trust in Providence and the Scotch captain.’”
“I declare! the creature must have some kind of sense in him, too,” said Bell, a little mollified by this compliment to Scotch sea-captains. And all the Dyces fed their eyes upon this wonderful wean that had fallen among them. ’Twas happy in that hour with them; as if in a miracle they had been remitted to their own young years; their dwelling was at long last furnished! She had got into the good graces of Footles as if she had known him all her life.
“Say, uncle, this is a funny dog,” was her next remark. “Did God make him?”
“Well – yes, I suppose God did,” said Mr Dyce, taken a bit aback.
“Well, isn’t He the darndest! This dog beats Mrs Molyneux’s Dodo, and Dodo was a looloo. What sort of a dog is he? Scotch terrier?”
“Mostly not,” said her uncle, chuckling. “It’s really an improvement on the Scotch terrier. There’s later patents in him, you might say. He’s a sort of mosaic; indeed, when I think of it you might describe him as a pure mosaic dog.”
“A Mosaic dog!” exclaimed Lennox. “Then he must have come from scriptural parts. Perhaps I’ll get playing with him Sundays. Not playing loud out, you know, but just being happy. I love being happy, don’t you?”
“It’s my only weakness,” said Mr Dyce emphatically, blinking through his glasses. “The other business men in the town don’t approve of me for it; they call it frivolity. But it comes so easily to me I never charge it in the bills, though a sense of humour should certainly be worth 12s. 6d. a smile in the Table of Fees. It would save many a costly plea.”
“Didn’t you play on Sunday in Chicago?” asked Ailie.
“Not out loud. Poppa said he was bound to have me Scotch in one thing at least, even if it took a strap. That was after mother died. He’d just read to me Sundays, and we went to church till we had pins and needles. We had the Reverend Ebenezer Paul Frazer, M.A., Presbyterian Church on the Front. He just preached and preached till we had pins and needles all over.”
“My poor Lennox!” exclaimed Ailie, with feeling.
“Oh, I’m all right!” said young America blithely. “I’m not kicking.”
Dan Dyce, with his head to the side, took off his spectacles and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief; put them on again, looked at his niece through them, and then at Ailie, with some emotion struggling in his countenance. Ailie for a moment suppressed some inward convulsion, and turned her gaze, embarrassed from him to Bell, and Bell catching the eyes of both of them could contain her joy no longer. They laughed till the tears came, and none more heartily than brother William’s child. She had so sweet a laugh that there and then the Dyces thought it the loveliest sound they had ever heard in their house. Her aunts would have devoured her with caresses. Her uncle stood over her and beamed, rubbing his hands, expectant every moment of another manifestation of the oddest kind of child mind he had ever encountered. And Kate swept out and in between the parlour and the kitchen on trivial excuses, generally with something to eat for the child, who had eaten so much in the house of Wanton Wully Oliver that she was indifferent to the rarest delicacies of Bell’s celestial grocery.
“You’re just – just a wee witch!” said Bell, fondling the child’s hair. “Do you know, that man Molyneux – ”
“Jim,” suggested Lennox.
“I would Jim him if I had him! That man Molyneux in all his scrimping little letters never said whether you were a boy or a girl, and we thought a Lennox was bound to be a boy, and all this time we have been expecting a boy.”
“I declare!” said the little one, with the most amusing drawl, a memory of Molyneux. “Why, I always was a girl, far back as I can remember. Nobody never gave me the chance to be a boy. I s’pose I hadn’t the clothes for the part, and they just pushed me along anyhow in frocks. Would you’d rather I was a boy?”
“Not a bit! We have one in the house already, and he’s a fair heart-break,” said her aunt, with a look towards Mr Dyce. “We had just made up our minds to dress you in the kilt when your rap came to the door. At least, I had made up my mind; the others are so thrawn! And bless me! lassie, where’s your luggage? You surely did not come all the way from Chicago with no more than what you have on your back?”
“You’ll be tickled to death to see my trunks!” said Lennox. “I’ve heaps and heaps of clothes and six dolls. They’re all coming with the coach. They wanted me to wait for the coach too, but the mail man who called me a caution said he was bound to have a passenger for luck on New Year’s day, and I was in a hurry to get home anyway.”
“Home!” When she said that, the two aunts swept on her like a billow and bore her, dog and all, upstairs to her room. She was almost blind for want of sleep. They hovered over her quick-fingered, airy as bees, stripping her for bed. She knelt a moment and in one breath said —
“God – bless – father – and – mother – and – Jim – and – Mrs Molyneux