When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs Molyneux’s, had taught her dancing.
“Ain’t this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid’s eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain’t this bully? Don’t you stand there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles for the footlights. Why! I knew there was some use for these old candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something I couldn’t ’zactly think of—made me kind of gay, you know, just as if I was going to the theatre. They’re only candles, but there’s twelve lights to them all at once, and now you’ll see some fun.”
“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.
“I’m going to be a Gorgeous Entertainment; I’m going to be the Greatest Agg—Aggregation of Historic Talent now touring the Middle West. I’m Mademoiselle Winifred Wallace of Madison Square Theatre, New York, positively appearing here for one night only. I’m the whole company, and the stage manager, and the band, and the boys that throw the bouquets. Biff! I’m checked high: all you’ve got to do is to sit there with your poor croodles and feel them melt away. Let’s light the foot-lights.”
There was a row of old brass bedroom candlesticks on the kitchen-shelf that were seldom used now in the house of Dyce, though their polish was the glory of Miss Bell’s heart. The child kilted up her gown, jumped on a chair, and took them down with the help of Kate. She stuck in each a candle, and ranged them in a semicircle on the floor, then lit the candles and took her place behind them.
“Put out the lamp!” she said to Kate, in the common voice of actors’ tragedy.
“Indeed and I’ll do nothing of the kind,” said the maid. “If your Auntie Bell comes in she’ll—she’ll skin me alive for letting you play such cantrips with her candles. Forbye, you’re going to do something desperate, something that’s not canny, and I must have the lamp behind me or I’ll lose my wits.”
“Woman, put out the light!” repeated Bud, with an imperious pointing finger, and, trembling, Kate turned down the lamp upon the wall and blew down the chimney in the very way Miss Dyce was always warning her against. She gasped at the sudden change the loss of the light made—at the sense of something idolatrous and bewitched in the arc of flames on her kitchen-floor, each blown inward from the draught of a rattling window.