More Tales of the Birds

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.

Their heads were grey, and their dress was black, and as they lived in the old grey tower of the church they seemed to have something ancient and ecclesiastical about them; no one inquired into their history or descent; we took it all for granted, as we did the Established Church itself. They were there as the church was there, looking out over meadows and ploughed fields as it had looked out since good souls built it in the reign of Henry III., and over these same fields Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked out with knowing eyes as they sat on their gurgoyles of a sunshiny morning. The water that collected on the tower roof was discharged by large projecting gurgoyles ending in the semblance of two fierce animal heads, one a griffin, and the other a wolf; and on these the Doctor and his wife loved to sit and talk, full in view of the old Scholar’s study room.

The church was not only old, but mouldy and ill cared for. It had escaped the ruthless hand of the restorer, the ivy clung around it, the lights and shadows still made its quaint stone fretwork restful to the eye, but I fear it cannot be denied that it needed the kindly hand of a skilful architect to keep it from decay. Half of a stringcourse below the gurgoyles had fallen and never been replaced: and below that again the effigy of the patron saint looked as if it had been damaged by stone-throwing. The churchyard was overgrown and untidy, and the porch unswept, and the old oaken doors were crazy on their hinges. Inside you saw ancient and beautiful woodwork crumbling away, old tiles cracking under the wear and tear of iron-heeled boots and old dames’ pattens, and cobwebs and spiders descending from the groined roof upon your prayer-book. If you went up the spiral staircase into the ringers’ chamber, you would see names written on the wall, two or three empty bottles, and traces of banquets enjoyed after the clock had struck and the peal ceased, – banquets of which the Doctor and his wife occasionally partook, coming in through that unglazed lancet window when all was still.

The church indeed was mouldy enough, and the air within it was close and sleep-giving: and as the old parson murmured his sermon twice a Sunday from the high old pulpit, his hearers gradually dropped into a tranquil doze or a pleasant day-dream, – all except the old Scholar, who sat just below, holding his hand to his ear, and eagerly looking for one of those subtle allusions, those reminiscences of old reading, or even now and then three words of Latin from Virgil or the “Imitatio,” with which his lifelong friend would strain a point to please him. They had been at school together, and at college together, and now they were spending their last years together, for the old Scholar had come, none of us knew whence, and settled down in the manor-house by the churchyard, hard by the Rectory of his old companion. And so they walked together through the still and shady avenues of life’s evening, wishing for no change, reading much and talking little, lovers of old times and old books, seeking the truth, not indeed in the world around them, but in the choice words of the wise man of old: “Pia et humilis inquisitio veritatis, per sanas patrum sententias studens ambulare.”

And Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked down on them from their gurgoyles, and approved. I suppose that old grey-headed bird did not know that he had been honoured with a doctorate, though he looked wise enough to be doctor of divinity, law and medicine, all in one; it had been conferred upon him by the old Scholar one day as he walked up and down his garden path, glancing now and then at the friendly pair on the tower. And in one way or another we had all come to know of it; and even visitors to the village soon made acquaintance with the Doctor and his wife.

No one, as I said, unless it were his old friend the Vicar, knew whence or why the old Scholar had come to take up his abode among us. We thought he must have had some great sorrow in his life which was still a burden to him: but if it was the old old story, he never told his love. Yet the burden he carried, if there were one, did not make him a less cheerful neighbour to the folk around him. He knew all the old people in the village, if not all the young ones: he would sit chatting in their cottages on a wet day, and on a fine one he would stroll around with some old fellow past his work, and glean old words and sayings, and pick up odds and ends of treasure for the history of the parish which he was going to write some day.

“I am like Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” he would say: “I poke and pry into all the corners of the old place, and when I find anything that catches my eye I carry it home and hide it away. And really I don’t know that my treasures will ever come to light, any more than the Doctor’s up there in the tower.”

Those who were ever admitted to his study, as I sometimes was in my college vacations, knew that there was great store of hidden treasure there; and now and again he would talk to me of the church and its monuments, of the manor and its copyholds, of furlongs and virgates and courts leet and courts baron, and many other things for which I cared little, though I listened to please him, and left him well pleased myself.

But at other times, and chiefly on those dim still days of autumn when a mist is apt to hang over men’s hearts as over field and woodland, he would walk up and down his garden path ‘talking to hisself in furrin tongues’ as our old sexton expressed it, who heard him as he dug a grave in the adjoining churchyard. Once or twice I heard him myself, when I happened to be within range of his gentle voice. Sometimes it was Greek, and then I could not easily follow it. Once I heard “Sed neque Medorum silvæ,” and could just catch sight of him pausing to look round at the grey fields as he slowly added line to line of that immortal song. And there were single lines which he would repeat again and again, cherishing them with tenderness like old jewels, and doubtless seeing many a sparkle in them that I could not, as he turned them over and over. And there were bits of Latin from some author unknown to me then, known to me later as the unknown author of the “De Imitatione”: “Unde coronabitur patientia tua, si nihil adversi occurrerit;” or, “Nimis avide consolationem quæris.”

At one time he took long walks or rides, and coming in after dark to dinner, would spend the evening in “logging” (as he called it) all that he had seen or heard. But when I knew him he was getting old, and the rambles were growing shorter: it was not often that he was seen beyond the village. He would go up to the village shop of afternoons, where a chair was always set for him, and talk to the people as they came in on various errands. But his old friends died off one by one: he followed them to the churchyard, and would stand with bare head there, listening to the Vicar reading the prayers, while Dr. and Mrs. Jackson looked down on the scene from the tower as usual. And really it seemed as if they would soon be the only old friends left to him.

For the greater part of the year they were his companions most of the day: they became a part of his life, and we called them his familiar spirits. When he woke in the morning he could see them as he lay in bed, and sometimes they would come to his window if he had put out a breakfast for them overnight. But as a rule they took their own breakfast in the fields with the rooks and starlings and peewits, while he was dressing; and when, after his own breakfast, he took his walk up and down the garden path, they were to be seen perched on their gurgoyles, preening their feathers, chatting, and turning their wise old heads round and round in great ease of body and contentment of mind. In the early spring, after a bath in the large flat earthenware pan, which was daily filled for them by the housekeeper, they would turn their attention to a heap of odds and ends laid out for them in a corner of the garden: bits of string, old shoe-laces, shreds of all sorts, – everything that was wanted for nothing else went into the Doctor’s “library,” as the old Scholar called it, in which he and his wife conducted their researches. Nor could our dear old friend always refrain from adding some special treasure to the heap: he is known to have cut off one button after another from his coat, because they had a gleam upon them that he thought would please, and fragments of his old neckties were found in the tower when the long companionship had at last come to an end. It was only after the nesting season that for a time he missed them, when they took their young family out into the world, and introduced them to the society of which we may hope they have since become ornaments; and this absence the old Scholar took in very good part, being confident that he should see them again in August at latest. Besides, at the end of June I myself came home to the village: and though I could not hope to rival them in his esteem or respect, I might make shift to fill the gap till they returned. When I went to see him he would take my hand with all kindness, and invariably point to the vacant church tower. “I am glad to see you, my lad: Dr. and Mrs. Jackson have gone for a few days into the country with the children, but they will be home again long before you leave us.”

It is sad to me even now to think that such an old friendship, which I am sure was felt in equal strength by both men and birds, should ever have come to an end. It had to be, but it gives me pain to tell the story.

The old Vicar fell into a drowsy decay, and the murmur of his sermons was heard no more in the church. A Curate took the work for him, and the old Scholar came and listened as before; but the sweet old memories of a long friendship were not to be found in those discourses, nor the flashes of light from the world’s great poets and thinkers that had been wont to keep him awake and cheer him. And at last the old shepherd died, and slept among the sheep to whose needs he had been ministering so quietly for half a century. The old Scholar, bent and withered, was there to see the last of his friend, and the Doctor and his wife looked sadly down from the tower. They never saw him again outside his own garden.

A new Vicar came, a kindly, shrewd, and active man, whose sense of the right order of things was sadly wounded as he examined the church from end to end in company with his churchwardens. “You have let the fabric fall into ruin, Mr. Harding,” he said, “into ruin: I can’t use a milder word. We must scrape together what we can, and make it fit for divine worship. Let us come up into the tower and see how things are there.”

The crestfallen churchwardens followed him up the well-worn stairs, but were left far behind, and his active youthful figure disappeared in front of them into the darkness. When they found him at last in the ringers’ chamber, he was kicking at a great heap of refuse accumulated on the floor in a corner.

“What on earth is this, Mr. Harding?” asked the Vicar. “Who makes a kitchen-midden of the church tower?”

“That there belongs to Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” said poor Harding.

“Then Dr. and Mrs. Jackson had better come and fetch it away at once!” cried the Vicar, forgetting in his indignation to ask who they were. “See about it directly, please: it is your duty as churchwarden, and if your duties have so far been neglected, you cannot do better than begin to make up for the past. I do not mean to speak harshly,” he added, seeing Mr. Harding’s grave face grow graver, “but the state of this tower is dreadful, and we must see to it at once.”

Mr. Harding said nothing, but made for the staircase, disappeared from view, and went home very sad at heart. “I doubt the old Doctor and his missus will have to go,” said he. Mrs. Harding let her work drop to the floor and stared at him. “Then the old gentleman’ll have to go too,” she said. And there was consternation among all the old folks that evening.

Next day I happened to be sitting with the old Scholar when the new Vicar called. He was received with all the gentle grace and cordiality which our old friend showed to strangers, and we sat for a few minutes talking of the weather and the village. Then the Vicar came to the point of his mission, and I am bound to say that he performed his operation with tenderness and skill, considering how little he could have guessed what pain he was inflicting.

“You love the old church, I am sure,” he began. “And I daresay you like it better as it is, and would not care to see it restored. I don’t want to spoil it, but I must at least begin by cleaning it thoroughly: and even that alone will cost a good deal. It is inches deep in dust and mess in places, and up in the tower they eat and drink and smoke and write their names, – and what they do it for I don’t know, but they have made it the common rubbish-heap of the parish. By the way, can you tell me anything of a Dr. and Mrs. Jackson, who seem to have goings on up there, – some eccentric old people are they? or – ” At this point he caught sight of my face, which was getting as red as fire.

“Dear me,” he said, turning suddenly upon me, and losing his balance as he saw that something was wrong, “I hope they are not – not – ” and he stopped in some perplexity.

“No, Sir,” said I. “My name is Johnson.” And I broke out into an irresistible peal of laughter, in which even the old Scholar joined me, – but it was the last time I ever saw him laugh.

We cleared up the mystery for the discomfited Vicar; and the old Scholar went quietly to his desk and wrote a cheque with a trembling Hand.

“I will give you fifty pounds,” he said, “to help to put the old church in good repair, and I will trust you not to ‘restore’ it. We have neglected it too long. Dr. and Mrs. Jackson must take their treasures elsewhere: but I trust that they will long remain your parishioners.” And so they parted, each with a pleasing sense of duty done: but the Vicar had high hopes before him, while our dear old Scholar began to nurse sad misgivings. I cheered him up and bade him goodbye, and meant to tell the Vicar all about him. But one thing and another prevented me, and the next day I left the village.

This happened at the end of June, and it was September before I was home again from the Continent. The man who drove me from the station told me that the old Scholar was dying. I went to his gate through the churchyard, and found it neat and well-trimmed: the church was looking brighter and tidier, and the door was open; and the tower seemed to have found a fresh youth, with its stringcourse and effigy repaired, and its abundant crop of ivy lopped away from the lancet windows. But no Doctor or his wife were sitting on the gurgoyles, or taking the air on the battlements. I knocked sadly at the old Scholar’s door, fearing that he had spent his last days in utter friendlessness.

His old housekeeper let me in, and took me at once upstairs. He was lying on his bed, facing an open window that looked towards the tower; there was another to the right with a view of distant cornfields full of autumn sheaves. For once, she told me, that he looked at the cornfields, he looked a dozen times at the tower: “and if the Doctor and his wife would but come back,” she said, “he would surely die happy. They should be here by now, if ’twere like it was in the old times: but they went off without their young ones when the men began to rummage in the tower, and I doubt they’ll never come back again now.”

The old Scholar was only half conscious, but he seemed to know me and kept my hand in his. I made up my mind not to leave him, and sat there till the shadow of the tower grew long enough to reach us, and then till the great harvest moon arose over the distant corn-sheaves. Sometimes he would murmur a few words, and once or twice I caught the favourite old treasures, – “Unde coronabitur patientia tua,” and “Nimis avide consolationem quæris.” And so we passed the night, till the moon sank again, and ‘the high lawns appeared, Under the opening eyelids of the Morn.’

Then I left him for a few minutes, and descending to the garden filled the earthenware pan with fresh water, and scattered food on the dewy grass in the dim hope that the Doctor and his wife might have come back to see the last of their old friend.

And I had no sooner returned and drawn up the blinds of the sick-room than I saw them once more on the gurgoyles. I could hardly believe my eyes: I threw up the window and let the sweet air into the room. The light roused the old Scholar; he opened his eyes, and at that moment the Doctor and his wife flew past the window to their morning bath. I am sure he saw them; a smile of great happiness came over his wasted features, and he lay back and closed his eyes again. I read him the Lord’s Prayer: and after a while I heard him whisper, “Nunc coronabitur – ,” as he sank into sleep.

Each day, until he was laid by his old friend the Vicar, we put out the morning bath and breakfast for his last old friends; then the house was shut up, and finding that they were not expected, the Doctor and his wife departed, and were seen no more by any of us. They had done their kindly work well, and they took our thanks with them.

A LUCKY MAGPIE

“So you’ve kept old Mag safe all this time,” I called out, as I came through the little croft under the apple-trees, and caught sight of the farmer sitting at his door and smoking his evening pipe; and not forgetting my duty as became a midshipman in Her Majesty’s Service, I took off my cap and made three bows to the magpie, whose wicker cage was hanging just over the farmer’s head.

Farmer Reynardson and his magpie and I had always been great friends. Ever since I was a little fellow I had had a great liking for the farmer’s friendly face, and a still greater reverence for his bird, for he never would let me come within sight of it without making my obeisance in due form.

“It’s a lucky magpie,” he always said, “and I don’t know what mightn’t happen if you didn’t treat him with proper respect. Honour where honour is due, my boy!”

So I always made my three bows, which seemed to please both the bird and his master. I say “master” now, but in those days I never thought of him as the magpie’s master, nor of the bird as his property. I considered Mag as a member of the family, about whom there was something rather mysterious. It was only when I grew older that I began to think of asking questions about him, and it was not till the very last evening before I left to join the training-ship that I ventured to ask the history of my revered friend. But the farmer would not tell me then. “When you’re ready to fight for the Queen, then I’ll tell you the story,” he said.

So I had to wait a pretty long time; and whenever I came home from the Britannia and called at Slade Croft, I felt my curiosity increasing. The story must be worth hearing, or I should not have been kept waiting for it so long. And when I was gazetted midshipman, and ran home to my grandfather’s for a week before joining my ship, I slipped off to the farm the very first evening after dinner.

Farmer Reynardson rose, shook hands warmly, and slapped me on the back. Then he turned me round and inspected my jacket and Her Majesty’s buttons carefully.

“Now for the story,” I cried. “It’s all right, you needn’t look at my boots too, you know,” as his eye travelled down my uniform trousers. “Now for the yarn of the lucky magpie.”

“George,” said the farmer gravely, putting his hand on my shoulder, “you shall have it, my lad, this very evening. But I must show you something first.” He walked me through the orchard to a shady corner by the hedge, and showed me a little stone set upright in the ground, on which I read this inscription —

Here lies the body ofa lucky Magpieand anattachedFriend(J. R.)

“It’s a new one, he in the cage,” he said, quite sadly. “Neither I nor the missis could get along without one. Old Mag died quite easy, of nothing but old age, and old he was, to be sure. He’d have died years ago, if he’d been any one else’s bird. He’d have been shot years ago if he’d lived his own natural life. They say it’s cruel keeping birds in cages; but if ever a bird was happy, that one was. And what’s more,” he said, with a touch of pathos in his voice which I have often remembered since then, when I have been telling his story to others, “he had his share in making others happy, and that’s more than can be said for some of us, my boy. However, come along, and I’ll spin you the yarn (as you seafaring folks say); and, indeed, I’ll be glad to tell it to some one, for poor old Mag’s sake. Honour where honour is due.”