Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

Bird looked about the room to see what she could find without calling her aunt, whose very presence seemed to irritate Billy. There were two stationary wash-tubs beside the range; one of these being empty, she proceeded to fill it half full of water, making it comfortably warm by aid of the tea-kettle. Next she hunted up a piece of soap and found a towel with much difficulty, for the roller towel on the kitchen door was for general use.

“Come and play duck and go in swimming,” she said to Billy, who had been watching her with interest as she overturned a pail and put it in the corner of the tub for a seat.

The idea struck the child’s fancy so completely that he could hardly wait to slip out of his few clothes and be helped up on a chair and then into the tub, where he sat comfortably pouring the water over himself with a tea-cup, and chuckling in a way that would have warmed his father’s heart.

Meanwhile, Bird gathered the dishes together in the sink, wiping off the plates with bits of bread,—as she had done ever since she could remember and had seen her mother do in the short “better days” when they had a pretty home and her mother had always herself washed the best china in the inside pantry,—and straightened the furniture and hung up various articles that littered the floor so that there was room to move about. By this time Billy was ready for drying, which Bird did so gently that he did not even wince, for she had ministered to her father, seen her father care for her mother, and God had given her the best gift that a girl, be she child or woman, can have,—the gift of loving touch, of doing the right thing almost unconsciously for the weak or helpless.

Billy, clean, refreshed, with his bright hair brushed into a wreath around his forehead, sitting in his little chair on the fire-escape, and being fed with bread and milk by Bird, who talked to him as he ate, was a different being from the crumpled little figure that had only a few moments before looked so pathetic sitting in his high-chair, head on table.

As Bird gave him the last morsel and wiped his mouth, he leaned backward to where she knelt behind him and, clasping his arms around her neck, pulled her head down to him, and, nestling there, whispered, “Billy loves Bird very much, and she must stay close by him forever ’n’ ever, won’t she?”

“See, that must be Tessie’s window down there,” she said, not trusting herself to answer and catching sight of a white rag hanging from the blind of a low building that stood in the rear of a shop that fronted on the next street. It was an old-fashioned, two-story, wooden house, with dormer windows in a roof that had been once shingled. There were a dozen such in Laurelville, and as Bird looked at it she wondered how it came to be there, built in on all sides, and if it didn’t miss the garden that must have once surrounded it.

Then as she looked she saw the outline of a face inside the window. It was so far down and across that she could not distinguish the features, but she waved the towel she held, and Billy shook his hand. Presently something white waved back, and thus a telegraph of love and sympathy crossed the dreary waste of brick and clothes-lines, and put the three in touch, and the Bird, who had been taken from the country wilds and put in a city cage, and the two little cripples were no longer alone, for even at these back windows there was some one to wave to and respond.

Mrs. O’More was in a better mood when, an hour later, having finished the gown, she came back to the kitchen to find the dishes washed and set away, and Billy sitting contentedly in his chair throwing crumbs to try to coax some pigeons that lived in the stable next door from the roof to the fire-escape.