But I had finished my inspection of mealy linnets and goldfinches, pegging finches and larks; and had taken in at a glance the one bare room, with its whitewashed walls, decorated here with pictures cut from the Illustrated London News and Punch, and there with glass Florence flasks filled with chintz flowers and salt, potichomanie fashion, as performed by our grandmothers; the rusty, broken-barred grate, with its heaped-up ashes; and the general untidiness of the bachelor place, made worse by the plentiful sprinkling of tobacco débris and the many broken craters in which the weed had been consumed. I had seen all I could in a hasty glance, and was now looking out of the open window at another bird in a cage; for at the casement opposite, her little bright eyes glittering through a tangle of long brown hair, was the child of whom Uncle Bill had spoken. Her red lips were apart, and as I looked she shouted in across the court to the lame boot-closer, in a gleeful, childish treble; while he turned his sallow face to me with a smile of gratified pride upon it that told—oh! how plainly—of the true heart, unspoiled by the misery of a London court.
“That’s her,” he said—and his voice seemed to jar discordantly, sounding of the streets, streety; while the proud look upon his face had in it a tinge of the something greater as planted in all hearts by a great Hand—“that’s her. She stands at that window for hours while I’m at work; and I sing to her, as she claps her hands; and, you know, her father leaves her locked up there like that for long enough while he goes out, and I know the little thing would be hungry if—but she ain’t, you know.” (Nods many here.) “I wish he’d let me have her altogether; for he’s a bad sort, is her father, and it worries me as to what’s to become of the little thing. I’m not much account, you see, myself; but, being such a pretty little thing, I should like to see her taken care of, and one daren’t hardly speak to the child when he’s at home, and he won’t hardly let any of the women in the house go near his room at all.
“No, I say—don’t you go near the window, or you’ll frighten her away.”
I kept back in the room so as to look on unseen, and then started forward; for the bright look of pleasure upon the child’s face turned to one of pain, as a rough hand seized her by the shoulder, drew her back, and then the window was dragged in, and fastened so sharply that one of the little panes was jarred out, and fell tinkling far below into the court.
My next glance was at Uncle Bill, who was bending over his work with set teeth, and the sweat standing in drops upon his grimy forehead.
“There, don’t speak to me,” he said, huskily. “I’m a bit put out now; hook it, and see me agen some other time, please.”
I could hear the birds twittering as I went down from landing to landing, meeting no unkindly looks; but, like Uncle Bill, one could not help feeling “a bit put out” concerning the future of the little bird I saw in its cage.