Part 5

“Bob White is laying siege to Cousin Jane’s favor, Davy, dear,” I said, using the baby name he still loves in our private talks. “She has sold him her good-will for a four-course lunch.”

David laughed a little.

“Worst affliction could happen to him, I should think. What on earth does he want with it?”

“She thinks he’s in love with Caro.”

“Probably is. Most of the fellows are; and Bob’s nobody’s fool.”

He had cuddled his brown head under my hand as he sat on a stool by my bed, and I couldn’t see his face. His voice was so very natural that it suggested an effort to make it so.

“Well, I doubt if he displayed any special wisdom when he tried to win Cousin Jane over—if he tried,” I said. “When you go courting, I don’t think you’ll spend much time on the girl’s guardians.”

“Not much time on anybody, you mean, till I get things settled.”

“And you’d rather I waited with the rest, dear, wouldn’t you?”

He lifted his head and sat facing me, stroking my hand.

“I couldn’t talk about it, little Mammy, even to you. But I wouldn’t mind your knowing about it if you could understand without words. You have always done that when I couldn’t talk.”

His eyes met mine fully, his heart unveiled behind them. That is one of the beautiful things about David’s reserve—the secret door he opens into it for one whom he truly loves.

“I do understand,” I said slowly. “But, remember, dear, a woman loves to be loved. You musn’t have any reserves with her when the time comes. Let her understand your love is great enough to justify the demands it makes upon her. If she hurts you at first, don’t try to shield her by letting her think it’s a light matter. Be as honest with her as you are with yourself. And you’ll win her, dear; I know you will. And you’ll do it all by yourself, with no meddling nor helping from anybody.”

He straightened his broad shoulders.

“I’ll do it that way or not at all, little Mammy. Suppose somebody else—even you—helped me to win her; it would be up to me to hold her, wouldn’t it? And how could I ever be sure of doing it if I hadn’t been enough for her at the start, by myself? If I’m not enough—if I can’t make myself enough—I couldn’t afford to have her at all.”

He rose to his full six feet of height and stretched his clenched hands above his head.

“That stool cramps my legs these days,” he said. “I remember how proud I was when I found I could sit on it squarely and get my toes to the floor. Legs change, don’t they? But the only way I change is to love more the folks I love at all. Goodnight, you sweetest mother a boy ever had.”

He bent down, rubbing his cheek against mine in the dear caress of his baby days, and went out. He never was a boy to kiss one; but he always loved to stroke my hand, and to touch my cheek with his. He always loved, too, for me to receive his caresses passively; it is only when he tucks his close-cropped head under my hand that petting from me is in order.

So he loves Caro. Half of my hope has come true. And here I lie, trembling with fear. Is there any greater mockery than a hope wrecked by a half fulfilment? If Caro—Now isn’t Grumpy a clever imp? I’ve faced him down and out about the pain for nearly three weeks, and shut him up in the skeleton-closet with all the gruesome things I’m determined not to be nagged about; and so he sneaks out on an entirely new tack, and flaunts David and Caro at me instead of my own spinal column, which is his customary trade-mark! But if I don’t want him associating with my own anatomy, which heaven knows is too depraved to be further contaminated, why should he aspire to the children’s company? And if David loves Caro, isn’t that proof I was right in thinking they were made for each other, and that Caro’s love will answer his? _Sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sure!_ Just hear her bird-double out of doors: Grumpy as a prophet isn’t in it with the little red-brown wren!

* * * * *

_February 7th._ Milly came to see me today. Grace has been for more than a month with George’s mother, who has been very ill. I was lying here thinking of her as I watched the jays outside, and of what Caro said when she was at home.

Caro never could stand Cousin Jason, and has called him Cousin Jay ever since the first summer we came to Bird Corners. I took her to spend the day at Grace’s, and she went with Milly and her nurse down to the brook to wade. The brook divides Cousin Jason’s land from theirs; and the children, finding some of his hogs in Grace’s pasture, drove them before them with much laughter and little clods of earth. Cousin Jason, hearing his squealing beasts, came charging down the hill in a fury and jabbed his petty wrath straight to poor little Milly’s heart. She was always a timid creature, like her mother, and, like her mother, unkindness made her physically ill; so she wept miserably, poor baby, while her half-uncle stormed. But Caro flamed into wrath as fierce as his own. She had been feeding the birds that morning, and had jumped from the stool by my cot afterward a dozen times to scatter the jay-birds, who were out in unusual force, and bent on pecking off the head of any other bird who ventured to take a crumb. She sprang in front of Milly now, ruffling like an angry wren.

“Go home, you horrid—jay-bird!” she shrieked; “you peck, an’ peck, an’ peck, _all_ the time! I hate you! Cousin Jay, Cousin Jay!”

He stared at the mite, speechless, with purpling face. Milly gasped with fright, and old Aunt Susan, as she afterwards declared, “done choke herse’f ’mos’ ter death swallerin’ her laff.”

Caro took Milly by the hand.

“Let’s go home an’ play party,” she proposed calmly; “we don’t like pigs and jay-birds.” And back they went.

Cousin Jason was immensely impressed. He told me about it afterwards, himself, and declared that he wished Milly had a little of Caro’s “spunk.”

He even tried, in his not very happy fashion, to be friends with the child, and has always treated her with more consideration than any one else he knows. But Caro will have none of him, and to this day calls him Cousin Jay to his face. He is a man of large bulk, with a face at once sharp and heavy, as unlike Grace in body as he is in soul. And I’m afraid he makes life pretty hard for her.

When her husband died, Grace was left sole mistress of his estate—which included, according to our beautiful state law, the plantation she inherited from her father. But her brother calmly assumed the management of everything. Cousin Jason is really a Mohammedan born out of due place. He cannot conceive of a woman’s having mind or soul of her own, much less rights; and he proposes, in all honesty, to do his next-of-kin duty by the widowed family fool. Grace, I suppose, was too broken by grief to realize what she was doing; but in any event she would probably have given way to him; she spent her girlhood, as she now spends her widowhood, trying to keep her half-brother in a good humor. She yielded to him absolutely, even to giving him power of attorney over all her belongings, and to vacating her own pretty rose-colored bed-room, with its private bath, on the first floor of her home. Cousin Jay never liked to sleep upstairs; it was too far from his work, he said.

He has certainly, the Peon says, made everything pay well; he has Cousin Chad’s own genius for money-making. But he does not believe in spending money, nor, of course, in giving it; nor in being bothered with “idle gossiping women who ought to be at home minding their husbands’ affairs.” (He is never conscious of a woman except as the appendage of some man.) So Grace controls neither her own money nor her own home. All her gracious hospitality, her wise open-handedness to those in need, is a thing of the past. It is difficult for Milly even to have ordinary visitors, except in the afternoons; and if it were not for the child’s other-worldly beauty, before which the judgments applied to most girls are abashed, one would almost call her dresses shabby. But it is not easy to think of her dress, the girl herself so charms one.

She has been telling me a little of her troubles, poor child; they have been hard to manage in her mother’s absence. Chief among them, as I infer, mainly from what she did not say, is the difficulty of being properly courteous to Robert Lincoln, without calling down Cousin Jason’s boorish wrath on the young man’s head, as well as her own.

“You see it isn’t as if he were one of us, Cousin Lil,” she said, her soft cheeks flushed, her eyes large with unshed tears: “he’s a Northerner, you know, a New Englander. He’s interested in the interurban lines they’re building and projecting here in Tennessee, and he really lives in the city—I mean his headquarters are there. And when he comes down here to see us, why, it isn’t real Southern hospitality not to ask him to a single meal. But I daren’t. And once Uncle Jason came right into the parlor and banged the fire-irons around and glared and kept looking at his watch. And it was only half-past nine, Cousin Lil. That was just after Caro went back; and he really hasn’t been here since. I do hate for _Northern_ people to think——” a tear slid down one cheek; but the slight shrinking of her pretty hand showed me she could not bear to be petted just now; she did not want sympathy, but help. She swallowed hard and went on.

“And you know next morning at breakfast I spoke to him—not to criticise, you know, nor anger him, of course. I told him not to be afraid that I would forget his wishes; that I told every one it kept him awake to have anyone stirring after ten o’clock at night, and that Mother and I always closed the house then; and I said it was only half-past nine last night.”

“What did he say?”

“Why, he just stormed, like he always does, you know. He said he wanted to go to bed early. And he got up without eating his breakfast, and slammed the door and went out. I had to run clear to the barn after him and beg and beg, before he would come back.”

“What on earth did you want him back for?” I inquired.

“Why, to eat his breakfast. He hadn’t had his coffee, and he’d have had a headache without it.”

“Milly Wood!” I gasped.

“Mother always coaxes him back,” said Milly, with gentle finality; “at least, she always tries. Sometimes he won’t come, and then she takes it to him herself. You know he has terrible headaches sometimes.”

“But, dear, if you would only face him down just once.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Milly, shrinking. “And Mother would never get over it. You don’t know how she feels about Uncle Jason. She says he’s never had the best of life, because he never has known the love that can give its all. She’s sorry for him, and she wants us to make up to him for what he has missed.”

“Well, you’ll never do it,” I said. “Nobody but Jason Blue can ever make good that loss to him.”

“Sometimes I think Mother ought to require some things of him,” she said; “but she won’t; and I know I’ll never make it harder for her by doing what she doesn’t want. But I wish he didn’t live at home.”

She kissed me, smiling rather forlornly, and went away, while I lay here wondering about Mr. Lincoln, whom I have never seen. But David and Caro liked him, which is sufficient passport to my favor.

* * * * *

_February 12th._ The mocking-birds have a constant fascination for me—the charm of a complex nature which touches life on many sides. One can know a robin by heart in a single season, and predict with one’s eyes shut the doings of any one of the tribe; but a mocking-bird is a different proposition.

His song throbs with the pure joy of living. It is the song of one in the world and of it, and rejoicing so to be; yet there is in it a haunting suggestion of aloofness, of mystery, of something beyond one’s ken. It is as if his joy had deeper foundations than sunshine and plenty; as if he had lived through pain, clear to the other side of it, and learned that it, too, is good.

His powers of mimicry, I think, are greatly exaggerated. He does not really sing other birds’ songs, as his cousin, the catbird, does; he merely experiments with their notes—a stave from a thrasher here, a light-flung oriole measure there, a thrush note, piercing sweet, a bit of the wren’s summer trill. It is as if he would try life on all sides and look at it from every point of view; his ear is keen for the music from every throat. But always, through all this imaginative performance, he clings to the integrity of his own message. One may hear a catbird for an hour, and, unless one sees the blithe gray mime among the leaves, never suspect his real identity. But all a mocking-bird’s borrowed notes are woven into the texture of his own song, which wholly claims him as the melody rises, sweeping him with it bodily up to heaven, and carrying the listener’s heart with him. His is the rapture of open vision, feathered mystic that he is.

Now, a bird like that one would expect to be a recluse, dwelling apart in cloistered green, afar from his fellows and from mankind; but the mocking-bird flatly declines that rôle. He is a bird of affairs, friendly and neighborly withal, a haunter of men’s doorways and house-vines, and a public-spirited citizen who rejoices to succor the oppressed. For he has a fine, full-fledged temper of his own, and any amount of fighting blood. He rarely seeks a quarrel; but if one be thrust upon him, either by aggressions attempted upon his own rights or by the call of another bird in distress, he accepts the combat with alacrity, and carries it joyously to a triumphant conclusion. And three minutes after the enemy is routed his voice floats down from the highest perch in the vicinity as if he were singing at heaven’s gate. He has fought for all he is worth, yet not a feather of his spirit is ruffled.

* * * * *

_February 15th._ When I can catch Grumpy and call him to his face by his right name, he always disappears; but blue devils are so very clever at disguising themselves, and at concentrating one’s attention on their instruments of torture!

This morning, for instance, he hid under the foot of my bed, and kept poking up all sorts of things where I couldn’t help seeing them; the things the Peon and David need me to get well for; the things I long to do; the idleness I so desperately hate—for he can make even an abstraction visible, being a very clever devil indeed. Then he held up the pain, turning it round and round, and counting off the time like a clock—minutes, hours, days, months, years, and never an end in sight. I had to look out of the window in self-defense; and there I saw a kinglet.

Except the winter wren and the humming-bird, the kinglets are the smallest birds we have. But they make up in energy what they lack in size; and this one dashed about as if his very life depended on his getting his breakfast in ten seconds and catching the seven-thirty breeze to Somewhere. Grayish-olive, of course; but was his crown of ruby-red, or of orange, crimson and black? And why should a mite of the tree-tops be so inconsiderate as to carry his trade-mark on the top of his head?

I was almost in despair about him—for when you meet a bird, it is of consuming importance to know whose acquaintance you have the pleasure of making—when he took pity on me of his own sweet will. Perhaps the breeze was a thought late, and he had a moment to spare: but he perched on a twig just outside the window, bowed his tiny head toward me, thrust one claw up between his wing and his body, and scratched the back of his neck for the whole of one second and a half!

Golden-crowned! The cunningest striped pate, red in the middle, with a yellow band on each side, a black band next the yellow, and a white line over his eye. Then he flung up his head as boldly as though it were mountain-high, jerked his wee tail-feathers frantically, and squeaked in the finest and most wiry of voices, the astonishing information that it was only Grumpy under the bed, at his old tricks—a creature for nobody to pay attention to. And as soon as he found himself discovered, my blue devil took himself off.

* * * * *

_February 20th._ If I can’t go outdoors, outdoors can come to me! The windows are all open this morning, and my bed so close under them that I can lie here and stretch my hand into the outside world, where the lilac is rapidly leafing and the elms and maples are all abloom. A moment ago Uncle Milton stepped into view, one hand holding his hat and the other filled with jonquils.

“Is you gittin’ er little better, honey?” he inquired. “Hit’s gittin’ spring-time now, en Milton wants ter see you ridin’ roun’ in dat ar cheer you got. Ef we-all puts er mattress in it, don’ you reckon we kin git you down ter de holler by de gate? Des see what come f’um down dat er way dis mawnin’—dem holler jonquils allus did beat dese yere up on de hill.”

He reached the flowers through the window and laid them upon the bed—the first flowers of the awakening year; for the violets are ageless, belonging neither to the new year nor to the old. I caught up the golden beauty with a gasp of joy.

“Oh, thank you, Uncle Milton! I knew spring was coming true before long! And I’ll be walking down there when they bloom again: don’t think I’m going to live in beds and wheeled-chairs forever.”

His brown old face beamed.

“Dat’s de talk!” he exclaimed gleefully. “Ef dat ain’t de Forest sperrit my name ain’t Milton, sho’! You look like yo’ pa endurin’ er de war. You keep talkin’ dat erway, honey, en feelin’ dat erway, too. Hit’s sperrit en spunk what cyores folks a sight mo’ dan doctors en physicin, I lay my little Missy gwinter be runnin’ roun’ yere yet, makin’ ole Milton hop.” He walked off, chuckling to himself.

Josie brought me a vase, and I set the flowers in it as flowers should be set, lovingly, and one by one. It has been years since I have been down in that hollow, just this side of where the road turns out into the pike; but I can see it as if I were there this minute—the maples blooming overhead, the meadow-larks flashing the white of their tail-feathers as they fly, singing, on the hill beyond; the twigs in the strip of woodland down the road, shining yellow, tan, and red with the rising sap. The blue-grass is under foot, soft and thick, and all through it rise the spears of the jonquil leaves, and the swinging, golden bells. Along the fence runs the broad band of iris, matted close, the pointed leaves already taller than the jonquils. Cardinals and mocking-birds are calling all up the hillside; and down under the willows and sycamores at the water’s edge the myrtle warblers are swarming, and thinking of donning their gay spring suits. Oh, I can see it all, all! A little wind is dancing along the hillside, and the branches touch one another softly, the dry, scraping, winter sound all gone. The wren’s spring song is in full blast, the bluebirds are twittering, and even the jays’ voices are turning sweet. The breath of life is everywhere, and the joy of it. I can feel the wind in my hair, and the grass under my flying feet—_My flying feet_! For a moment I had forgotten. But here are the four close walls, the narrow bed, the endless, wrenching pain. And I could not walk even to my sofa today, though the Peon’s life were my reward.—Eh, well, and what of that? Did I not run in Make-Believe? And shall I shut my eyes to joy and beauty because my locomotive apparatus is laid up for a few repairs? I may be walking clear out to the hall again before the week is out, and be out in my chair on the porch tomorrow. Love and sunshine really are enough, no matter what Grumpy says—even love without the sunshine: and here are both, and flowers besides, and the spring-time everywhere out of doors.

* * * * *

_February 25th._ Grace was here yesterday. She has a way of dropping in when she is most wanted and leaving a trail of sunshine behind her. She is a quiet little body, never hurried or fretted, and she has a genius for discovering, in the most unlikely places, virtues invisible to the naked eye. She sees the wrong and mean things, too—she’s not at all a goody-goody person; but she keeps the wrong and the wrong-doers so entirely distinct and separate that you wonder how you were ever so stupid as to confuse them. She’s really devoted to that cranky old half-brother of hers. She is always commiserating him because he did not have her mother, and his own died when he was born. She’ll explain and expound him till you think he really is noble, only he never had a chance to learn how to do noble things.

It is certainly a pity, however, that his education is in such a backward stage. Robert Lincoln and Milly are becoming much more than friends; and Cousin Jason’s infantile ignorance of other people’s rights is anything but conductive to comfort under the circumstances. But Grace’s one idea, as usual, is that dear brother Jason must not be crossed. He takes it so hard, poor fellow, when things don’t go as he wishes. And if Mr. Lincoln is as seriously fond of Milly as he professes to be, he may as well make up his mind to be satisfied with winning her, if he can succeed in doing it, and not be too exacting with her relatives.

Poor Grace! As if I don’t know the kind of young-ladyhood she believes in Milly’s having, and is simply aching to give her! But evidently Cousin Jason’s will is to be law.

The truth is, as I told Grace, Cousin Jason is just like Cousin Chad—though they’d both foam at the mouth to hear me say it. But they’ve neither of them any sense of proportion. That’s why they have no sense of humor, nor power to get their own personalities in proper perspective with other people and their rights. But why, asks Grace calmly, shouldn’t we be as sorry for a person born with no sense of proportion as for a person born with only one eye? Of course the lack of a sense of humor is harder on the kin than the lack of an eye would be—Grace admitted that handsomely; but in neither case was the afflicted party to blame. And didn’t one really deserve more sympathy when his affliction necessitated his also being a bore?

We fell to giggling as we discussed this knotty point; and I was so far converted to Grace’s charitable views that I had Uncle Milton get a basket of double jonquils for her to take to Cousin Jane. Cousin Jane always did admire my double jonquils, and somehow her own never succeed. I like the single ones much better myself; the others, like my revered relative, are too clumsy and fat. I told Grace to say I sent them to her on the principle of sweets to the sweet. And now I’ll be having another visitation, for my sins!

* * * * *

_February 27th._ Pitch dark when I woke this morning; and pain to make one clench one’s teeth. Grumpy is not hilarious company at such times, but occasionally he helps by overdoing things.

This morning, for instance, he began about the unendingness of things—sickness, and the long night, and all that—till it struck me all at once it really was morning that second, and only looked like night. Besides, the pain is like this, often, when I don’t feel blue a bit: so it isn’t the pain that makes me miserable—it’s my own mood about the pain; and if a seasoned old party like me can’t manage her own moods, what’s the world coming to?