The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

The hours not occupied in divine worship, Nora was accustomed to spend with Katherine in a room curtained off from the public gaze. There, the one buttressed with unwholesome fat, the eyes playing in her countenance the part of little, gleaming, deep-driven nails, the other, lank as a skeleton, in a shawl the fringe of which suggested her own cookery, the friends were wont to regale themselves, Nora with rich cakes and pastry, Katherine with the quarters and dimes her customer unwillingly relinquished to her. Quarrels were frequent, for each had a spiteful understanding of the other's vice; but greed united them.

"I tell ye," old David would remark when of a Sunday he had undisputed possession of his lonely grey old house and with Zarah Patch could enjoy to the full the pleasures of a pipe before the kitchen ingle—a pleasure denied him during the week—"I tell ye, Zary, I thank the Lord Nora has religious inclinations! As for me," he would add, hanging his head with a sudden change of mood, "I'm old and filled with wickedness; the wickedness of the world has got to the very marrow of my bones. I ain't fit to bring up no child, Zary."

However, he did bring up the infant literally by hand. Puny, touching, defenceless, the tiny creature, surrounded from the moment of its birth with these oddly unfavourable conditions, asserted at once its independence. It screamed and squirmed every time Nora Gage took it up, so that the care of it devolved entirely upon the grandfather. But far from complaining, he was secretly flattered by this preference. "She feels the tie of blood," he would explain, "but don't you mind, Nora, she'll outgrow these little ways." The woman, however, laughed straight in his face. She was not particularly anxious that the baby should outgrow them.

The infant early became a tyrant. She was not a very pretty child. From beneath a high rounded forehead peered forth two eyes dark and restless. They had the furtive look seen in the eyes of some animals, save that the pupils had a way of expanding suddenly with inquiry. Even before she could speak, her crowing had a strong note of interrogation. "Eee?" she would pipe, raising imperceptible eyebrows, and the old man, as well as he could for chuckling, would answer in the same cryptic language. She had, moreover, a very amusing and energetic way of creeping.

When the times for her feeding arrived, she was always close beside the door; and there old David found her when, big silver watch in hand, he came hastening up from the dory. He carried the odour of the lobsters, and before he could do anything else he must wash his hands. Then the bottle must be scalded and rinsed and the milk warmed. All the wrinkles of his face drew together, such was the care with which he performed these operations; and eager-eyed, occasionally fretting if he were late or particularly slow, the infant watched him from her place on the floor. Presently he lifted her; then what a picture of peace!

With both hands she clutched the bottle and a soft gurgling, similar to the purring of a cat, filled the room. She laughed, and the look of rapturous content which filled her face was reflected in the countenance of the grandfather. They looked oddly, touchingly alike. Occasionally it was necessary for him to draw the bottle away in order that she might take breath, and at such times she either pursued it with her rosy, clinging mouth, or, being partially satisfied, turned to thrust her fingers between his lips or to pull his beard. Weary as he was from the labour that had occupied him since four in the morning, nothing could have prevailed upon him to relinquish these ministrations to his granddaughter.

When she was nine months old, he had her christened in the Catholic church before a figure of St. Anthony, which seemed to his anxious mind to be of a friendly mien. But it was with no idea of turning her over to the church. Her religion when she grew up should be a thing of her own choosing. Meanwhile he hearkened to the persuasions of Nora Gage, and the child was baptized Rachel Beckett in honour of his dead wife. After that event, however, the housekeeper lapsed into her former state of indifference; and, neglected on the one hand, and foolishly indulged on the other, the child's life flowed on until her fifth year. When she was five years old a change dawned for her. In the care of the boy from the lighthouse she went to the district school, where she was enrolled as a pupil.

Lizzie Goodenough never abbreviated her son's name. She called him boldly André Garins. But when he gave this name at school, the older boys put tongue in cheek. He was an exceedingly handsome lad, with a woodsy grace. Moreover, his ears were slightly pointed like a fawn's; nor did the likeness end there, for his eyes under the thick mat of hair had a wild and impenetrable look and his soft arched lips seemed formed for other speech than that of human beings. When addressed, he would either twist his fingers in a kind of wordless agony, or take fleetly to his heels. He was considered an "innocent" by the folk of the Point.

He led Rachel to the school, her tiny cold hand resting noncommittally in his, and left her stranded before the teacher's desk. But that brisk person frightened the child and she became as restless as a little trapped animal. She refused to learn her letters, she refused to learn to count; André Garins, stealthily on the watch, was ashamed of her. But one day she heard the teacher explaining a point in geography by means of a map on the wall and her eyes suddenly dilated. All at once those monotonous recitations, to which she was wont to shut her ears, those garbled descriptions of mountains, oceans, and climates, assumed a startling significance. In that map grimed by smoke and the breath of generations of children, in that square of painted canvas, with its spots of blue for the water, its spots of yellow and pink for the land, its black veins for rivers, and its fuzzy lines, like caterpillars, for the mountains, she beheld what was an actual vision of the actual world. And this brilliancy of the imagination, this power to touch with life and colour any fact that penetrated her brain at all, proved to be a special gift. But she was too young to understand the liberation that comes through books.

The schoolroom seemed to her the one point of stagnation in an active world. She longed to the point of tears for the sight of trees of which she was temporarily deprived, and for the smell of the outdoor air. The teacher finally in despair left her alone. With something disconcerting in her extraordinarily intelligent eyes, she gazed about her at the other pupils as if she dimly recognised herself as belonging to a distinct and lonely species. Perhaps some subtle power of reasoning underneath the dark hair which grew in a point on her forehead, revealed to her that their needs were not her needs. As instinctively as a plant, she selected from the atmosphere surrounding her what she most required for growth; and idleness offered opportunity for observations, shrewd, penetrating, constant.