“This dear child needs the advantages of city life,” she declared. “I always found the country exceedingly quiet myself, and-er not altogether—progressive. But I deferred to Sister Virginia’s judgment. Now, however—” her voice trembled a moment, and then went on quite steadily—“the responsibility is mine, and I cannot shirk it. I think Lydia should have city advantages. I shall go there and devote myself to her education, and prepare for her entrance into society at the proper time.”
Argument was of no avail. When I avouched my preference for the country she said quietly that I knew nothing of the city yet, and that every one should try more than one side of life before making a final choice. She was very gentle, but Great-aunt Virginia herself could not have been more inflexible. We went, to the envy of my cousin, Billy Wrenn, and to my own silent and passionate grief.
As I grew older, Aunt Letitia grew younger—younger, that is, in her ideas and in her desires for me. She cared far more than I about my clothes, and took a livelier interest in possible lovers. I understood, beneath this late blossoming of pleasure in what she called gay life, the starved aspirations of her own youth, shut away in the seclusion of her beautiful home during the many years of her widowed mother’s invalidism and morbid grieving for her husband. There were times when her dead-and-gone girlhood rose to life in her eyes, and a soft color tinged her delicate cheeks, as she imagined for me some small social triumph or admired me in some new dress. I divined that she was immensely interested in my men friends, though her shyness in discussing them was even greater than her interest. I wondered often if she had a love-story of her own; but I never knew. My own love-story, when it came, gave her great happiness; and for three years after my marriage she lived with us in great content, and passed out at last in utter peace.
My husband is known in our family circle as the Peon, since he entered into a contract to work for me without wages for life. He brought into our home at our marriage his brother’s orphaned child, David Bird, a little fellow four years of age, who flatly refused to call me auntie and dubbed me Mammy Lil. That was many years ago; and as the time has passed the Peon and I have realized with deepening gratitude our debt to the little child who has given our home its crowning joy. But for David we would have been childless, growing old alone; for we owe Caro to David, too. I have never flattered myself that we could have captured and held the heart of that tricksey birdling if David had not added to our attractions childhood’s lure to a child.
For our years in the city, however, we found David sufficient in himself. He has grown up like the Peon’s own son, sturdy, steady, large of body and of heart. He has stood well in his classes without much effort; but more because it is his disposition to do thoroughly whatever he does at all than because of any great love for books. He is deliberate in manner, and somewhat slow of speech; and his steady gray eyes seem made to look facts in the face. He has always moved in straight lines, mentally and physically, cutting through obstacles which Caro would flutter around in a twinkling; yet somehow he arrived at the goal in time to secure whatever he set out to obtain. He was rather too solemn as a child, and regarded me, apparently, somewhat as the Peon did at times, with an air of amused and affectionate tolerance. I used to hunt through his small personality for the spark of fun I was sure lay hidden there, and as the years passed I caught the glint of it more and more frequently; but it was really Caro who brought it out into the open, and set it, a perpetual signal, in his eyes.
I found it easy to awaken in him my own love of outdoors, and together we made friends with such birds as could be enticed to our shady yard in the city’s outer circle. We were sworn comrades in our enmity to the English sparrows, and the bond of a common foe was one of the many things that drew us into a fellowship unusually close. The Peon used to say that no boy came to genuine manhood without something in the way of an evil to hate and to fight; and for my part I joyfully set up the English sparrows as the embodiment of all wickedness, to be destroyed beak and tail. My own objections to them were the result of long watching; but David’s hatred sprang to life full-fledged the morning we found four of the wretched bullies fighting one small chickadee, which hung head downward from a twig of privet, his eyes shut tight, his claws clenched, and his throat and breast exposed to his enemies’ vicious bills. I think some deep thirst for justice seized the child’s soul at sight of the helpless victim, and ever since he has been mindful of weak things in a way surprising in a boy so ruggedly strong.
He has been wonderfully mindful of me, always. Long before we left the city I had learned to enjoy outdoors from a cot under the trees in the back yard. The pain which was to be by turns my companion, my jailer, and my emancipator had already laid upon me an iron hand. I was up and about when the Peon was at home; but when he came in unexpectedly he learned to look for me under the drooping silver maples in the yard; and my old-time love of birds was an easy explanation of the many-cushioned cot and the long hours I daily spent upon it.
David filled the birds’ drinking fountain for me when he came home to leave his books and get his bat or his football; and I would lie there, watching my visitors, wondering at the variety of birds to be seen in a city yard, and wishing the sparrows’ duels were less on the harmless French order. They never fought because they needed to do it; it was always for something perfectly futile and foolish. They would leave all the food I could scatter to tear one crumb from a neighbor. For it is English sparrow nature never to be satisfied with what they have, to want only what some one else is enjoying, and to get it for themselves if they can. David and I were fully agreed that if anything more hateful was ever created we wished to be spared acquaintance with it.
II
Bird Corners
It is to Uncle Milton that I owe our return to the country, and all the delights of Bird Corners.