Part 6

“How should I know?” answered the Linnet. “She could not well feed herself and hatch the eggs. I don’t wish to think about it, for she is lost to me, and the Downs are lost to me, and all is lost to me that made life worth living. The bitterness of that first moment in the cage I won’t and can’t describe to you. If you were turned out of your cage into the street to keep company with the Sparrows, you might feel a little, a very little, like it. At first it was furious anger that seized me, then utter blank stupefying despair.

“The man flung something over the cage, and I was in darkness. I suppose he went on with his wicked work, for after a while the cage door was opened, and another Linnet was put in, struggling and furious: and this happened several times. Each time the door was opened I made a frantic effort to get out, and the others too, and the little cage was full of loose feathers and struggling birds. One of us did get away, with the loss of his tail, and most gladly would I have given my tail for liberty and one more sight of my mate and the eggs.

“At last the cage was taken up: we all fluttered and scrambled over each other, thinking something better was going to happen now. But nothing happened for a long time, and then nothing but misery. Half dead with jolting, shaking, and swaying, we found ourselves at last in a small close room, where we were taken out and examined one by one, and put into separate small cages, so small that we could hardly turn round in them. The room was full of these cages, and there was a continual noise of hysterical fluttering and sorrowful twittering. None of us cared to talk, and there was nothing but misery to talk about. Seed and water were given us, and we ate and drank a little after a while, but there was no delight in that lukewarm water and that stale seed.

“But I had better stop: I’m sure you want to sing again. And there is nothing more to tell; one by one my fellow-captives were taken away, and I suppose what happened to me happened to them too. Caged we all are, and expected to sing, and to forget the Downs and the gorse and the brook and the fresh air! But we don’t and we can’t,—it is the little life left within us, to hope against hope for the Downs again.”

“Don’t you think it may be all a dream?” said the Canary, kindly; “are you sure there are such things as you talk of? You can’t see the Downs from here, can you? Then how do you know there are such things? It’s all a dream, I tell you: I had such a dream once, of rocky hills and curious trees, and fierce sun, and a vast expanse of blue waves, and all sorts of strange things that I have heard men talk of; but it was only because my grandmother had been telling us of the old island home of our family, that belongs to us by right if we could only get there. I never was there myself, you see, yet I dreamed of it, and you have been dreaming of the Downs, which no doubt belong to your family by right.”

“I can’t see the Downs,” said the Linnet, “but I can feel them still, and I know that my feeling is true.”

After this there was silence for a few minutes. Suddenly the Canary burst into song, as if to drive away the Linnet’s sad thoughts. And so indeed he meant it, and also to ease his own mind, after it had been bottled up so long. Little did he know what was to come of that outburst, as he poured forth rattle and reel, reel and rattle, every feather quivering, the cage vibrating, the air resounding, the street echoing! Children playing in the gutter stopped to look up at the cages, at the triumphant yellow bird in all the glow of effort, and at the ugly brown one that seemed trying to hide away from this hurricane of song. Even the costermonger’s placid donkey in the cart two doors away shook its long ears and rattled its harness. A policeman at the end of the street turned his head slowly round to listen, but recollected himself and turned it slowly back again. The red-faced cobbler, who had been more than once to the drink-shop while the birds were talking, once more seized the hob-nailed boot he was mending, and as the Canary burst afresh, and after a second’s pause, into a still shriller outpouring, he glanced out of the open window up the street, saw the policeman’s back vanishing round the corner, and then took wicked aim and flung the boot with all his force at the unconscious singer.

The song suddenly ceased; there was the crash of wood and wirework tumbling to the ground, and the gutter children scrambled up and made for the fallen cage. The cobbler rushed out of the opposite house, snatched up the boot and vanished. A woman with dishevelled hair came tearing into the street and picked up the cage. It was empty, and the door was open. She glanced up, and with a sigh of relief saw the Canary still safe in his cage.

The cobbler’s arm had swerved ever so little, and the boot had hit the wrong cage. The door had come open as it reached the ground, and the Linnet had escaped. The woman thanked her stars that it was “the ugly bird” that was gone, and so too did the cobbler, now repentant, as he peered from behind the door of his back-kitchen. The Canary sat still and frightened on his perch, and for a full hour neither sang a note nor pecked a seed.

When the cage fell and the door had come unlatched, the Linnet was out of it in a moment, but, dizzy and bruised with the fall, and feeling his wings stiff and feeble, he looked for something to rest on. The first object that met his eyes was the donkey in the coster’s cart,—and indeed there was nothing else in the street that looked the least bit comfortable. Donkeys had been familiar to Lintie on the Downs, and among the thistles they both loved. So he perched on the donkey’s back, his claws convulsively grasping the tough grey hair.

The sharp eyes of a small muddy boy in the gutter instantly caught sight of him, and with a shrill yell he seized an old tin sardine-box with which he had been scraping up the mud for a pie, and aimed it at the bird. But that yell saved Lintie; the donkey shook his ears as it pierced their hairy recesses, and the bird at the same instance relaxed his hold of the hair and flew up above the house-roofs.

The air up there was even worse than down in the street. It was still drizzling, and the fine rain, clogged with the smoke from countless crooked chimney-pots, seemed to thicken and congeal upon every object that it met. It clung to the Linnet’s feathers, it made his eyes smart, and his heart palpitate fiercely; he must rest again somewhere, and then try his wings once more.

Fluttering over those horrible chimney-pots, he spied at last a roof where there was an attempt at a little garden: a box of sallow-looking mignonette, and two or three pots of old scarlet geraniums. Lintie dropped upon the mignonette, which refreshed him even with its sickly sweetness, and for a moment was almost happy. But only for a moment; suddenly, from behind one of the geranium-pots there came a swift soft rush of grey fur, a lightning-stroke of a velvet paw, a struggle in the mignonette, and Lintie emerged with the loss of three white-edged tail-feathers, while a pair of angry yellow eyes followed his scared flight into the grimy air.

The very fright seemed to give his wings a sudden convulsive power. Where they were carrying him he could not tell, and the loss of three of his steering feathers mattered little. Over the crooked chimneys, over dismal streets and foul back-yards he flew, till the air seemed to clear a little as a large open space came in sight. There were tall fine houses round this space, but all the middle part of it was full of trees and shrubs, and even flower-beds. The stems of the trees were dead-black with smoke, and the shrubs looked heavy and sodden; but yet this was the best thing that Lintie had seen for many long and weary days. Even the sounds as well as sights revived him, for surely, heard through the roar of the great street hard by, there came the cooing of Woodpigeons,—the very same soothing sound that used to come up to the Downs from the beech-woods, that hung on their steep sides.

He flew down into one of the thick shrubs, found a way in, and hid himself. He seemed as secure as in his native gorse-bush; and as it was dark in there and he was tired, and evening was not far distant, he put his head under his wing and went to sleep.

He had not slept very long when he was waked up by a sparrow coming into the bush and beginning to chatter loudly. The next minute there came another, then a third, a fourth, half-a-dozen together, all chattering and quarrelling so noisily that for the moment they did not notice the stranger. But more and more came bustling in, and the din and the hubbub were so overwhelming that Lintie felt he must go at all risks. He moved, was detected, and instantly pounced upon.

“Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing in our roosting-bush? What do you want here? No vulgar vagrants here! Take that, and that, and that!”

So they all shouted in chorus, pecking at him the while, and the noise was so unusual that two young men of the law, looking out of a first-floor window in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, took their pipes out of their mouths and listened.

“It’s all over with me at last,” thought Lintie; but he made one brave effort to escape, found his way out of the bush, and flew into the open roadway, pursued by half a hundred sparrows.

“What in the world is up?” said one of the men up in the window. “By George, it’s murder they’re at,” he cried, as he saw a whirling, screaming cloud of sparrows on the ground below him, and their victim resigning himself to inevitable death. In a moment his pipe was on the floor, and he himself was in the street. The sparrows flew away swearing; Lintie crouched on the ground, a heap of dishevelled feathers.

The student took him gently in his hand and carried him into the house.

“They’d all but done for him, the beggars,” he said to his friend. “I fancy he might come round if we only knew what to do with him. I say, I wish you’d see whether M—— has gone home; it’s only just round in New Square,—you know the staircase. He’ll like to see the bird anyhow, and he can doctor it if he thinks it worth while.”

The friend went out, grumbling but compliant, and in five minutes returned with the Ornithologist, keen-faced and serious. He took the bird in his hand.

“It’s only a damaged cock linnet,” he said at once and decisively: “an escaped one, of course, for his crimson has turned a dirty yellow, you see, as it always does in confinement. I think he may live if he’s cared for. If he does, I’ll take him on my cycle into Sussex on Saturday, and I’ll let him go there. Can you find a cage?”

An old cage was found somewhere, and Lintie was a prisoner once more; but he was past caring about that, and simply sat huddled up at the bottom of it with his head under his wing. The Ornithologist called a cab,—a very unusual step for him,—put his great-coat over the cage, and drove off to the West End.

Two days later the Ornithologist was wheeling swiftly southwards, with a little cage fixed to the saddle in front of him. The motion was not unpleasant to Lintie when once they were free of streets and crowds, and out of suburbs, even to the last new house of dreary Croydon. He was in a cage still; but birds, even more than other animals, have a subtle inward sense of sympathy that tells them surely in whose hands they are. Lintie was in the strong hands of one who loves all birds, and whose happiness is bound up in theirs.

When they came to the North Downs between Croydon and Reigate, he stopped and looked about him. The fringe of London still seemed there; he saw villas building, men playing golf, advertisements in the fields. “Better go on,” he said to himself; “this is too near London for a damaged linnet.” And they slipped rapidly down into a verdant vale of wood and pasture.

At last they began to mount again. The Ornithologist had avoided the main route, and was ascending the South Downs at a point little known to Londoners. Near the top the hollow road began to be fringed by the burning yellow of the gorse-bloom; the air grew lighter, and the scent of clean, sweet herbage put new life into man and bird. The Linnet fluttered in his cage with wild uncertain hopes; but that determined Ornithologist went on wheeling his machine up the hill.

In a few minutes they came out of the hollow road on to the bare summit of the Down. It was an April day; the drizzle had given way to bright sunshine and a bracing east wind. Far off to the south they could see the glitter of the sea fretted into a million little dancing waves. Nearer at hand were the long sweeping curves of chalk down, the most beautiful of all British hills, for those who know and love them; with here and there a red-tiled farmhouse lurking in a cool recess, or a little watercourse springing from the point where down and cultivation meet, and marking its onward course by the bushes and withy-beds beside it.

A Wheatear, newly arrived in the glory of slaty-blue plumage, stood bowing at them on a big stone hard by. A Stonechat, on the top twig of a gorse-bush, bade a sturdy defiance to all bird-catchers. The Cuckoo could be faintly heard from the vale behind them; still the Ornithologist held his hand.

Suddenly there came dancing overhead, here, there, and everywhere, gone in a moment and back again, half a dozen little twittering fairies; and then one of them, alighting no one knows how or when, sat bolt upright on a gorse-bush, and turned a crimson breast and forehead towards the Ornithologist. His hand was already on the cage-door; in a moment it was open, and Lintie was gone.

I cannot tell you whether those linnets were his own friends and relations; but I think that, thanks to the Ornithologist’s true instinct, he was not far from his old home. And as the summer was all before him, and the hearts of linnets are kind, and Nature in sweet air repairs all damage quickly, I cannot doubt that his sky soon cleared, and that the heavy London thundercloud rolled far away out of his horizon.

DOCTOR AND MRS. JACKSON

Doctor and Mrs. Jackson were, for all we knew, the oldest pair in the parish: their heads were very grey, and they had an old-world look about them, and an air of wisdom and experience in life, that gave them a place of importance in our society and claimed the respect of us all. Yet I cannot remember that any of us noticed them until they became the intimate friends of the old Scholar. Then we all came to know them, and to feel as though we had known them all our lives.

Their heads were grey, and their dress was black, and as they lived in the old grey tower of the church they seemed to have something ancient and ecclesiastical about them; no one inquired into their history or descent; we took it all for granted, as we did the Established Church itself. They were there as the church was there, looking out over meadows and ploughed fields as it had looked out since good souls built it in the reign of Henry III., and over these same fields Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked out with knowing eyes as they sat on their gurgoyles of a sunshiny morning. The water that collected on the tower roof was discharged by large projecting gurgoyles ending in the semblance of two fierce animal heads, one a griffin, and the other a wolf; and on these the Doctor and his wife loved to sit and talk, full in view of the old Scholar’s study room.

The church was not only old, but mouldy and ill cared for. It had escaped the ruthless hand of the restorer, the ivy clung around it, the lights and shadows still made its quaint stone fretwork restful to the eye, but I fear it cannot be denied that it needed the kindly hand of a skilful architect to keep it from decay. Half of a stringcourse below the gurgoyles had fallen and never been replaced: and below that again the effigy of the patron saint looked as if it had been damaged by stone-throwing. The churchyard was overgrown and untidy, and the porch unswept, and the old oaken doors were crazy on their hinges. Inside you saw ancient and beautiful woodwork crumbling away, old tiles cracking under the wear and tear of iron-heeled boots and old dames’ pattens, and cobwebs and spiders descending from the groined roof upon your prayer-book. If you went up the spiral staircase into the ringers’ chamber, you would see names written on the wall, two or three empty bottles, and traces of banquets enjoyed after the clock had struck and the peal ceased,—banquets of which the Doctor and his wife occasionally partook, coming in through that unglazed lancet window when all was still.

The church indeed was mouldy enough, and the air within it was close and sleep-giving: and as the old parson murmured his sermon twice a Sunday from the high old pulpit, his hearers gradually dropped into a tranquil doze or a pleasant day-dream,—all except the old Scholar, who sat just below, holding his hand to his ear, and eagerly looking for one of those subtle allusions, those reminiscences of old reading, or even now and then three words of Latin from Virgil or the “Imitatio,” with which his lifelong friend would strain a point to please him. They had been at school together, and at college together, and now they were spending their last years together, for the old Scholar had come, none of us knew whence, and settled down in the manor-house by the churchyard, hard by the Rectory of his old companion. And so they walked together through the still and shady avenues of life’s evening, wishing for no change, reading much and talking little, lovers of old times and old books, seeking the truth, not indeed in the world around them, but in the choice words of the wise man of old: “Pia et humilis inquisitio veritatis, per sanas patrum sententias studens ambulare.”

And Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked down on them from their gurgoyles, and approved. I suppose that old grey-headed bird did not know that he had been honoured with a doctorate, though he looked wise enough to be doctor of divinity, law and medicine, all in one; it had been conferred upon him by the old Scholar one day as he walked up and down his garden path, glancing now and then at the friendly pair on the tower. And in one way or another we had all come to know of it; and even visitors to the village soon made acquaintance with the Doctor and his wife.

No one, as I said, unless it were his old friend the Vicar, knew whence or why the old Scholar had come to take up his abode among us. We thought he must have had some great sorrow in his life which was still a burden to him: but if it was the old old story, he never told his love. Yet the burden he carried, if there were one, did not make him a less cheerful neighbour to the folk around him. He knew all the old people in the village, if not all the young ones: he would sit chatting in their cottages on a wet day, and on a fine one he would stroll around with some old fellow past his work, and glean old words and sayings, and pick up odds and ends of treasure for the history of the parish which he was going to write some day.

“I am like Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” he would say: “I poke and pry into all the corners of the old place, and when I find anything that catches my eye I carry it home and hide it away. And really I don’t know that my treasures will ever come to light, any more than the Doctor’s up there in the tower.”

Those who were ever admitted to his study, as I sometimes was in my college vacations, knew that there was great store of hidden treasure there; and now and again he would talk to me of the church and its monuments, of the manor and its copyholds, of furlongs and virgates and courts leet and courts baron, and many other things for which I cared little, though I listened to please him, and left him well pleased myself.

But at other times, and chiefly on those dim still days of autumn when a mist is apt to hang over men’s hearts as over field and woodland, he would walk up and down his garden path ‘talking to hisself in furrin tongues’ as our old sexton expressed it, who heard him as he dug a grave in the adjoining churchyard. Once or twice I heard him myself, when I happened to be within range of his gentle voice. Sometimes it was Greek, and then I could not easily follow it. Once I heard “Sed neque Medorum silvæ,” and could just catch sight of him pausing to look round at the grey fields as he slowly added line to line of that immortal song. And there were single lines which he would repeat again and again, cherishing them with tenderness like old jewels, and doubtless seeing many a sparkle in them that I could not, as he turned them over and over. And there were bits of Latin from some author unknown to me then, known to me later as the unknown author of the “De Imitatione”: “Unde coronabitur patientia tua, si nihil adversi occurrerit;” or, “Nimis avide consolationem quæris.”

At one time he took long walks or rides, and coming in after dark to dinner, would spend the evening in “logging” (as he called it) all that he had seen or heard. But when I knew him he was getting old, and the rambles were growing shorter: it was not often that he was seen beyond the village. He would go up to the village shop of afternoons, where a chair was always set for him, and talk to the people as they came in on various errands. But his old friends died off one by one: he followed them to the churchyard, and would stand with bare head there, listening to the Vicar reading the prayers, while Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked down on the scene from the tower as usual. And really it seemed as if they would soon be the only old friends left to him.