“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 man, 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 taste for pease-brose.”
“You began gey early yourself,” said Bell. “Mother used to say that she was aye tickling 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.
27
“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 as if they were undertakers.”
“Hoots! nobody could weary in this place at any rate,” said Bell briskly. “Look at the life and gayety that's in it. Talk about London! I can hardly get my sleep at night quite often with the traffic. And such things are always happening in it—births and marriages, engagements and tea-parties, new patterns at Miss Minto's, two coaches in the day, and sometimes somebody doing something silly that will keep you laughing half the week.”
“But it's not quite so lively as Chicago,” said Mr. Dyce. “There has not been a man shot in this neighborhood since the tinker kind of killed his wife (as the fiscal says) with the pistol. You'll have heard of him? When the man was being brought on the scaffold for it, and the minister asked if he had anything to say before he suffered the extreme penalty of the law, 'All I have got to say,' he answered, starting to greet, 'is that this'll be an awful lesson to me.'”
“That's one of your old ones,” said Bell; but even an old one was welcome in Dyce's house on New Year's day, and the three of them laughed at the story as if it had newly come from London in Ailie's precious Punch. The dog fell into a convulsion of merriment, as if inward chuckles tormented him—as queer a dog as ever was, neither Scotch terrier nor Skye, Dandy Dinmont nor Dashshund, but just dog—dark wire-haired behind, short ruddy-haired in front, a stump tail, a face so fringed you could only see its eyes when the wind blew. Mr. Dyce put down his hand and scratched it behind the ear. “Don't laugh, Footles,” he said. “I would not laugh if I were you, Footles—it's just an old one. Many a time you've heard it