The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

The boy regarded her for an instant. Then propping his head on his hand, he fell to listening to the beat of the surf. Gradually his fears ceased, for each silver-lipped wave seemed to be speaking not alone to him, but to the dead woman.

"Rest, rest," they seemed to say, "rest, rest."

CHAPTER III
THE SUN

Old David Beckett, though he never spoke on the subject, was haunted by memories of a childhood passed amid scenes of refinement and wealth. He had a hazy impression that his father had been a gentleman of local distinction in a Canadian town. However, with his father's death had come a change in the fortunes of the family. Its members had drifted apart, and David himself, at the time scarcely more than a child, had gone to Philadelphia. Year after year he had worked in the car shops until the lead in the paint had affected his health. This break-down had occurred after his wife's death, in his fiftieth year. Reduced in strength he had come to the Point where one of the owners of the shops, in recognition of his long and faithful service, had given him a little house and a bit of land. This change David had welcomed, but it had engendered in his son Thomas a brooding discontent which had increased with the years.

Brought up in Philadelphia until his tenth year, Thomas Beckett had received a rudimentary training in the public schools, and this training, after coming to the Point, he had managed to eke out with haphazard reading. But the cheerless surroundings had fostered in him a tendency to indulge fits of melancholy. Without visible cause, he would become taciturn. When he was twenty-one his father urged him to marry and settle down, but domestic life had small attraction for Thomas, and it was a surprise to the old man when he finally acted on the suggestion. At the time of his marriage the young lobsterman was thirty years old, tall and broad shouldered, with bold intelligent eyes gazing out from beneath heavy brows, and a moustached lip that, as he spoke, lifted slightly, showing the tips of the white teeth. One raw day he had sailed away from the Point with a cargo of lobsters, and a fortnight later had returned with the meek and fragile Lavina.

During the short period of her wedded life the young wife had contributed to the house of the father and son an air of comfort. Geraniums had bloomed at the windows and the curtains of the front room had been kept white; all the beds had been covered with bright patch-work quilts and the dishes had been washed as soon as used and arranged in gleaming rows in the cupboard. But from the hour of Thomas's desertion, Lavina had relaxed her care of the house. Now, after her death, the change in it was complete. The curtains were dingy, the plants dead, fish-heads from the dog's dish littered the kitchen floor and flies buzzed about the rich messes Nora Gage was constantly preparing for her own consumption. The deterioration in the home suggested a picture by Hogarth.

David Beckett was bewildered. He would have preferred absolute solitude to the presence of Nora Gage, but the fat woman had established herself with the intention of remaining and he was too old and too ineffectual to know how to get rid of her. Often, from a distance, he would stare at the house with a look of indecision, then, with an oath, he would start on a rapid trot for the kitchen. But once in the presence of the woman, his courage forsook him. With one glance from her little crevice eyes, Nora dominated him.

However, she had one virtue. Though she ignored the appeal of hanging buttons and refused to patch his clothes, she fed him. For that matter, it was her custom to feed every living thing that came under her notice, the dog, the chickens, even flies. For the flies she had been known to scatter sugar grains, leaning heavily on a substantial elbow to watch the progress of the tiny meal. To old David's food she gave especial attention. His teeth suggested isolated stumps in a clearing; therefore she prepared soft foods for him, porridges and soups, and, while he ate, she was wont to watch him. Her jaws would move in sympathy and in profound contemplation she would even lick her lips.

On Sundays Nora rolled out of bed at an early hour, and, with her prayer book clasped in her pudgy fingers and her too plump bust visibly undulating, she proceeded by slow stages to Old Harbour, where she attended both early mass and vespers in the ancient Catholic church. This church was none too well thought of by the majority of the townspeople, who in the latter years had turned Protestant. Though placed solemnly in the very centre of the town, the edifice was entirely nautical in character, and many were the sympathetic quiverings of its bell when there was a storm off Pemoquod. It seemed to be sounding a requiem for its invisible congregation of sailormen of every port and clime. Perhaps it was the sight of an occasional sea-faring stranger with a bold look in his eyes that attracted Nora. Or perhaps it was the nearness of a certain little eating-house in a side street, owned by a friend, Katherine Fry.