Part 11

After this there was silence for a few minutes. Suddenly the Canary burst into song, as if to drive away the Linnet’s sad thoughts. And so indeed he meant it, and also to ease his own mind, after it had been bottled up so long. Little did he know what was to come of that outburst, as he poured forth rattle and reel, reel and rattle, every feather quivering, the cage vibrating, the air resounding, the street echoing! Children playing in the gutter stopped to look up at the cages, at the triumphant yellow bird in all the glow of effort, and at the ugly brown one that seemed trying to hide away from this hurricane of song. Even the costermonger’s placid donkey in the cart two doors away shook its long ears and rattled its harness. A policeman at the end of the street turned his head slowly round to listen, but recollected himself and turned it slowly back again. The red-faced cobbler, who had been more than once to the drink-shop while the birds were talking, once more seized the hob-nailed boot he was mending, and as the Canary burst afresh, and after a second’s pause, into a still shriller outpouring, he glanced out of the open window up the street, saw the policeman’s back vanishing round the corner, and then took wicked aim and flung the boot with all his force at the unconscious singer.

The song suddenly ceased; there was the crash of wood and wirework tumbling to the ground, and the gutter children scrambled up and made for the fallen cage. The cobbler rushed out of the opposite house, snatched up the boot and vanished. A woman with dishevelled hair came tearing into the street and picked up the cage. It was empty, and the door was open. She glanced up, and with a sigh of relief saw the Canary still safe in his cage.

The cobbler’s arm had swerved ever so little, and the boot had hit the wrong cage. The door had come open as it reached the ground, and the Linnet had escaped. The woman thanked her stars that it was “the ugly bird” that was gone, and so too did the cobbler, now repentant, as he peered from behind the door of his back-kitchen. The Canary sat still and frightened on his perch, and for a full hour neither sang a note nor pecked a seed.

When the cage fell and the door had come unlatched, the Linnet was out of it in a moment, but, dizzy and bruised with the fall, and feeling his wings stiff and feeble, he looked for something to rest on. The first object that met his eyes was the donkey in the coster’s cart,—and indeed there was nothing else in the street that looked the least bit comfortable. Donkeys had been familiar to Lintie on the Downs, and among the thistles they both loved. So he perched on the donkey’s back, his claws convulsively grasping the tough grey hair.

The sharp eyes of a small muddy boy in the gutter instantly caught sight of him, and with a shrill yell he seized an old tin sardine-box with which he had been scraping up the mud for a pie, and aimed it at the bird. But that yell saved Lintie; the donkey shook his ears as it pierced their hairy recesses, and the bird at the same instance relaxed his hold of the hair and flew up above the house-roofs.

The air up there was even worse than down in the street. It was still drizzling, and the fine rain, clogged with the smoke from countless crooked chimney-pots, seemed to thicken and congeal upon every object that it met. It clung to the Linnet’s feathers, it made his eyes smart, and his heart palpitate fiercely; he must rest again somewhere, and then try his wings once more.

Fluttering over those horrible chimney-pots, he spied at last a roof where there was an attempt at a little garden: a box of sallow-looking mignonette, and two or three pots of old scarlet geraniums. Lintie dropped upon the mignonette, which refreshed him even with its sickly sweetness, and for a moment was almost happy. But only for a moment; suddenly, from behind one of the geranium-pots there came a swift soft rush of grey fur, a lightning-stroke of a velvet paw, a struggle in the mignonette, and Lintie emerged with the loss of three white-edged tail-feathers, while a pair of angry yellow eyes followed his scared flight into the grimy air.

The very fright seemed to give his wings a sudden convulsive power. Where they were carrying him he could not tell, and the loss of three of his steering feathers mattered little. Over the crooked chimneys, over dismal streets and foul back-yards he flew, till the air seemed to clear a little as a large open space came in sight. There were tall fine houses round this space, but all the middle part of it was full of trees and shrubs, and even flower-beds. The stems of the trees were dead-black with smoke, and the shrubs looked heavy and sodden; but yet this was the best thing that Lintie had seen for many long and weary days. Even the sounds as well as sights revived him, for surely, heard through the roar of the great street hard by, there came the cooing of Woodpigeons,—the very same soothing sound that used to come up to the Downs from the beech-woods, that hung on their steep sides.

He flew down into one of the thick shrubs, found a way in, and hid himself. He seemed as secure as in his native gorse-bush; and as it was dark in there and he was tired, and evening was not far distant, he put his head under his wing and went to sleep.

He had not slept very long when he was waked up by a sparrow coming into the bush and beginning to chatter loudly. The next minute there came another, then a third, a fourth, half-a-dozen together, all chattering and quarrelling so noisily that for the moment they did not notice the stranger. But more and more came bustling in, and the din and the hubbub were so overwhelming that Lintie felt he must go at all risks. He moved, was detected, and instantly pounced upon.

“Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing in our roosting-bush? What do you want here? No vulgar vagrants here! Take that, and that, and that!”

So they all shouted in chorus, pecking at him the while, and the noise was so unusual that two young men of the law, looking out of a first-floor window in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, took their pipes out of their mouths and listened.

“It’s all over with me at last,” thought Lintie; but he made one brave effort to escape, found his way out of the bush, and flew into the open roadway, pursued by half a hundred sparrows.

“What in the world is up?” said one of the men up in the window. “By George, it’s murder they’re at,” he cried, as he saw a whirling, screaming cloud of sparrows on the ground below him, and their victim resigning himself to inevitable death. In a moment his pipe was on the floor, and he himself was in the street. The sparrows flew away swearing; Lintie crouched on the ground, a heap of dishevelled feathers.

The student took him gently in his hand and carried him into the house.

“They’d all but done for him, the beggars,” he said to his friend. “I fancy he might come round if we only knew what to do with him. I say, I wish you’d see whether M—— has gone home; it’s only just round in New Square,—you know the staircase. He’ll like to see the bird anyhow, and he can doctor it if he thinks it worth while.”

The friend went out, grumbling but compliant, and in five minutes returned with the Ornithologist, keen-faced and serious. He took the bird in his hand.

“It’s only a damaged cock linnet,” he said at once and decisively: “an escaped one, of course, for his crimson has turned a dirty yellow, you see, as it always does in confinement. I think he may live if he’s cared for. If he does, I’ll take him on my cycle into Sussex on Saturday, and I’ll let him go there. Can you find a cage?”

An old cage was found somewhere, and Lintie was a prisoner once more; but he was past caring about that, and simply sat huddled up at the bottom of it with his head under his wing. The Ornithologist called a cab,—a very unusual step for him,—put his great-coat over the cage, and drove off to the West End.

Two days later the Ornithologist was wheeling swiftly southwards, with a little cage fixed to the saddle in front of him. The motion was not unpleasant to Lintie when once they were free of streets and crowds, and out of suburbs, even to the last new house of dreary Croydon. He was in a cage still; but birds, even more than other animals, have a subtle inward sense of sympathy that tells them surely in whose hands they are. Lintie was in the strong hands of one who loves all birds, and whose happiness is bound up in theirs.

When they came to the North Downs between Croydon and Reigate, he stopped and looked about him. The fringe of London still seemed there; he saw villas building, men playing golf, advertisements in the fields. “Better go on,” he said to himself; “this is too near London for a damaged linnet.” And they slipped rapidly down into a verdant vale of wood and pasture.

At last they began to mount again. The Ornithologist had avoided the main route, and was ascending the South Downs at a point little known to Londoners. Near the top the hollow road began to be fringed by the burning yellow of the gorse-bloom; the air grew lighter, and the scent of clean, sweet herbage put new life into man and bird. The Linnet fluttered in his cage with wild uncertain hopes; but that determined Ornithologist went on wheeling his machine up the hill.

In a few minutes they came out of the hollow road on to the bare summit of the Down. It was an April day; the drizzle had given way to bright sunshine and a bracing east wind. Far off to the south they could see the glitter of the sea fretted into a million little dancing waves. Nearer at hand were the long sweeping curves of chalk down, the most beautiful of all British hills, for those who know and love them; with here and there a red-tiled farmhouse lurking in a cool recess, or a little watercourse springing from the point where down and cultivation meet, and marking its onward course by the bushes and withy-beds beside it.

A Wheatear, newly arrived in the glory of slaty-blue plumage, stood bowing at them on a big stone hard by. A Stonechat, on the top twig of a gorse-bush, bade a sturdy defiance to all bird-catchers. The Cuckoo could be faintly heard from the vale behind them; still the Ornithologist held his hand.

Suddenly there came dancing overhead, here, there, and everywhere, gone in a moment and back again, half a dozen little twittering fairies; and then one of them, alighting no one knows how or when, sat bolt upright on a gorse-bush, and turned a crimson breast and forehead towards the Ornithologist. His hand was already on the cage-door; in a moment it was open, and Lintie was gone.

I cannot tell you whether those linnets were his own friends and relations; but I think that, thanks to the Ornithologist’s true instinct, he was not far from his old home. And as the summer was all before him, and the hearts of linnets are kind, and Nature in sweet air repairs all damage quickly, I cannot doubt that his sky soon cleared, and that the heavy London thundercloud rolled far away out of his horizon.

DOCTOR AND MRS. JACKSON

Doctor and Mrs. Jackson were, for all we knew, the oldest pair in the parish: their heads were very grey, and they had an old-world look about them, and an air of wisdom and experience in life, that gave them a place of importance in our society and claimed the respect of us all. Yet I cannot remember that any of us noticed them until they became the intimate friends of the old Scholar. Then we all came to know them, and to feel as though we had known them all our lives.