Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

[IV]
A CAGED BIRD

When the high banks of the cut shut off Lammy from Bird’s sight, she followed her uncle into the car, vainly trying to blink back her tears. He, however, did not notice them; but, putting her valise on a seat, told her she had better sit next to the window so that she could amuse herself by looking out, as it would be two hours before they changed cars at New Haven, and then, taking another seat for himself, pulled his hat over his eyes and promptly fell asleep.

At first the poor child was content to sit quite still and rest, trying to realize who and where she was. The changes of the past two weeks had been so sudden that she did not yet fully realize them. Beginning with the day when her father, all full of hope, had been soaked by the rain in walking back from Northboro, where he had gone to buy materials for beginning his work for the wall-paper man, and caught the deadly cold, until now when she was leaving the only friends she had ever known, seemed either a whole lifetime or a dream from which she must awake.

But as the train flew on and the familiar places one by one were lost in the distance, little by little the bare cold truth came to her. Not only was she going to a strange place to live among strangers, but the hope that had comforted her the previous night had been swept away when her uncle had refused to let her bring her paint-box, and she knew by the contemptuous way he spoke that he was even more set against her father’s work than their farming neighbours had been.

“Never mind,” thought the brave, lonely little heart, “I simply must learn somehow, and perhaps my aunt and cousins may be different and help me to persuade Uncle John to let me go on with drawing at the school he sends me to, for I heard him tell Mrs. Lane that I should go to school.” Then Bird began to imagine what the aunt and cousins would be like, and what sort of a house they would live in. She thought the house would be brick or stone like some in Northboro, and she did not expect that there would be a very big garden, perhaps only at the back with a little strip at the sides and in front, but then that would hold enough flowers for her to draw so that she need not forget the way in which Terry had taught her to do it from life, and even if she had no paints and only bits of paper and a pencil, she could work a little out of the way up in her room so as not to annoy her uncle and yet not quite give up. That she was determined she would never do, for Bird had, in addition to a talent that was in every way greater than her father’s, something that came from her mother’s family and that he had wholly lacked,—perseverance, a thing that people are apt to call obstinacy when they do not sympathize with its object.

So busy was she with castle-building that she was quite surprised when the brakeman called: “New Haven! Last stop. Change cars for New York and Boston. Passengers all out!” and her uncle jumped up, flushed and stupid with sleep and bundled her out of the train into the station restaurant “to snatch a bite of dinner” before they went on.

Now Bird, being a perfectly healthy child, even though overwrought and tired, was hungry and gladly climbed up on one of the high stools that flanked the lunch counter, while her uncle gathered a sandwich, two enormous doughnuts, and a quarter of a mince pie on one plate and pushed it toward her saying: “Tea or coffee? You’d better fill up snug, for we won’t be home until well after dinnertime,” then John O’More proceeded to cool his own coffee by pouring it from cup to saucer and back again with much noise and slopping.

“Please, I’d rather have milk,” answered Bird, rescuing the sandwich from under the pie and making a great effort not to stare at her uncle, who had begun by stuffing half a doughnut into his mouth and pouring the larger part of a cup of coffee after it before he swallowed, so that his cheeks bulged, his eyes seemed about to pop from their sockets, and beads of sweat stood on his forehead, while the next moment he was shovelling up great mouthsful of baked beans and ramming them down with cucumber pickles, very much as she had seen Lammy charging his father’s old muzzle-loading shot-gun when going to hunt woodchucks.

Though sometimes the food at home had not been any too plentiful, Bird’s parents had always been particular about her manners at table. She had had their example before her and was naturally dainty in her own ways, so that her uncle’s gorging gave her another shock, and unconsciously she began to pick at her food like a veritable feathered bird.

“The country ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” remarked O’More, when he was able to speak. “I thought country girls was always fat and rosy and ate hearty. Just wait until you get to New York and see my kids stoke in the vittles; it’ll learn you what it means to eat right.”