BEL AND BARTHOLOMEW.
"Kroo! kroo! I've cramp in my legs,
Sitting so long atop of my eggs!
Never a minute for rest to snatch;
I wonder when they are going to hatch!
"Cluck! cluck! listen! tseep!
Down in the nest there's a stir and a peep.
Everything comes to its luck some day;
I've got chickens! What will folks say?"
Bel Bree made that rhyme. It came into her head suddenly one
morning, sitting in her little bedroom window that looked right
over the grass yard into the open barn-door, where the hens
stalked in and out; and one, with three chickens, was at that
minute airing herself and her family that had just come out of
their shells into the world, and walked about already as if the
great big world was only there, just as they had of course
expected it to be. The hen was the most astonished. _She_ was just
old enough to begin to be able to be astonished. Her whole mind
expressed itself in that proud cluck, and pert, excited carriage.
She had done a wonderful thing, and she didn't know how she had
done it. Bel "read it like coarse print,"--as her step-mother was
wont to say of her own perspicacities,--and put it into jingle, as
she had a trick of doing with things.
Bel Bree lived in New Hampshire; fifteen miles from a railway; in
the curious region where the old times and the new touch each
other and mix up; where the women use towels, and table-cloths, and
bed-spreads, of their mothers' own hand-weaving, and hem their new
ones with sewing-machines brought by travelling agents to their
doors; where the men mow and rake their fields with modern
inventions, but only get their newspapers once a week; where the
"help" are neighbors' girls, who wear overskirts and high hats, and
sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and
"painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys,
and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork
quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long
winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles
about, over tremendous hills and pitches, with happy-go-lucky wagons
and harnesses that never come to grief; where they have few schools
and intermitted teaching, yet turn out, somehow, young men who work
their way into professions, and girls who take the world by
instinct, and understand a great deal perfectly well that is beyond
their practical reach; where the old Puritan stiffness keeps them
straight, but gets leavened in some marvelous way with the broader
and more generous thought of the time, and wears a geniality that it
is half unconscious of; the region where, if you are lucky enough to
get into it to know it, you find yourself, as Miss Euphrasia said,
encouraged and put in heart again about the world. Things are so
genuine; when they make a step forward, they are really there.
But Bel Bree was not very happy in her home, though she sat at the
window and made rhymes in half merry fashion; though she loved the
hills, and the lights, and the shadows, the sweet-blossoming springs
and the jeweled autumns, the sunsets, and the great rains, that set
all the wild little waterfalls prancing and calling to each other
among the ravines.
Bel had two lives; one that she lived in these things, and one
within the literal and prosaic limit of the farmhouse, where her
father, as farmers must, had married a smart second wife to "look
after matters."
Not that Mrs. Bree ever looked _after_ anything: nothing ever got
ahead of her; she "whewed round;" when she was "whewing," she
neither wanted Bel to hinder nor help; the child was left to
herself; to her idleness and her dreams; then she neglected
something that she might and ought to have done, and then there was
reproach, and hard speech; partly deserved, but running over into
that wherein she should not have been blamed,--the precinct of her
step-mother's own busy and self-arrogated functions. She was taunted
and censured for incapacity in that to which she was not admitted;
"her mother made ten cheeses a week, and flung them in her face,"
she said. On the other hand, Mrs. Bree said "Bel hadn't got a mite
of _snap_ to her." One might say that, perhaps, of an electric
battery, if the wrong poles were opposed. Mrs. Bree had not found
out where the "snap" lay in Bel's character. She never would find
out.
Bel longed, as human creatures who are discontent always do, to get
away. The world was big; there must be better things somewhere.
There was a pathos of weariness, and an inspiration of hope, in her
little rhyme about the hen.
Bel was named for her Aunt Belinda. Miss Belinda Bree came up for a
week, sometimes, in the summer, to the farm. All the rest of the
year she worked hard in the city. She put a good face upon it in
her talk among her old neighbors. She spoke of the grand streets,
the parades, Duke's balls,--for which she made dresses,--and
jubilees, of which she heard afar off,--as if she were part and
parcel of all Boston enterprise and magnificence. It was a great
thing, truly, to live in the Hub. Honestly, she had not got over it
since she came there, a raw country girl, and began her
apprenticeship to its wonders and to her own trade. She could not
turn a water faucet, nor light her gas, nor count the strokes of the
electric fire alarm, without feeling the grandeur of having
Cochituate turned on to wash her hands,--of making her one little
spark of the grand illumination under which the Three Hills shone
every night,--of dwelling within ear-shot and protection of the
quietly imposing system of wires and bells that worked by lightning
against a fierce element of daily danger. She was proud of
policemen; she was thrilled at the sound of steam-engines thundering
along the pavements; she felt as if she had a hand in it. When they
fired guns upon the Common, she could only listen and look out of
windows; the little boys ran and shouted for her in the streets;
that is what the little boys are for. Somebody must do the running
and the shouting to relieve the instincts of older and busier
people, who must pretend as if they didn't care.
All this kept Miss Belinda Bree from utterly wearing out at her dull
work in the great warerooms, or now and then at days' seamstressing
in families. It really keeps a great many people from wearing out.
Miss Bree's work _was_ dull. The days of her early "mantua making"
were over. Twenty years had made things very different in Boston.
The "nice families" had been more quiet then; the quietest of them
now cannot manage things as they did in those days; for the same
reason that you cannot buy old-fashioned "wearing" goods; they are
not in the market. "Sell and wear out; wear out and sell;" that is
the principle of to-day. You must do as the world does; there is no
other path cut through. If you travel, you must keep on night and
day, or wait twenty-four hours and start in the night again.
Nobody--or scarcely anybody--has a dress-maker now, in the old, cosy
way, of the old, cosy sort, staying a week, looking over the
wardrobes of the whole family, advising, cutting, altering,
remaking, getting into ever so much household interest and history
in the daily chat, and listening over daily work: sitting at the
same table; linking herself in with things, spring and fall, as the
leaves do with their goings and comings; or like the equinoxes, that
in March and September shut about us with friendly curtains of rain
for days, in which so much can be done in the big up-stairs room
with a cheerful fire, that is devoted to the rites and mysteries of
scissors and needle. We were always glad, I remember, when our
dress-making week fell in with the equinoctial.
But now, all poor Miss Bree's "best places" had slipped away from
her, and her life had changed. People go to great outfitting stores,
buy their goods, have themselves measured, and leave the whole thing
to result a week afterward in a big box sent home with everything
fitted and machined and finished, with the last inventions and
accumulations of frills, tucks, and reduplications; and at the
bottom of the box a bill tucked and reduplicated in the same modern
proportions.
Miss Bree had now to go out, like any other machine girl, to the
warerooms; except when she took home particular hand-work of button
holes and trimmings, or occasionally engaged herself for two or
three days to some family mother who could not pay the big bills,
and who ran her own machine, cut her own basques and gores, and
hired help for basting and finishing. She had almost done with even
this; most people liked young help; brisker with their needles,
sewing without glasses, nicer and fresher looking to have about.
Poor "Aunt Blin" overheard one man ask his wife in her dressing-room
before dinner, "Why, if she must have a stitching-woman in the
house, she couldn't find a more comfortable one to look at; somebody
a little bright and cheerful to bring to the table, instead of that
old callariper?"
Miss Bree behaved like a saint; it was not the lady's fault; she
resisted the temptation to a sudden headache and declining her
dinner, for fear of hurting the feelings of her employer, who had
always been kind to her; she would not let her suspect or be afraid
that the speech had come to her ears; she smoothed her thin old
hair, took off her glasses, wiped her eyes a little, washed her
hands, and went down when she was called; but after that day she
"left off going out to work for families."
The warehouses did not pay her very well; neither there was she able
to compete with the smart young seamstresses; she only got a dollar
and a quarter a day, and had to lodge and feed herself; yet she kept
on; it was her lot and living; she looked out at her third-story
window upon the roofs and spires, listened to the fire alarms, heard
the chimes of a Sunday, saw carriages roll by and well-dressed
people moving to and fro, felt the thrill of the daily bustle, and
was, after all, a part of this great, beautiful Boston! Strange
though it seem, Miss Belinda Bree was content.
Content enough to tell charming stories of it, up in the country,
to her niece Bel, when she was questioned by her.
Of her room all to herself, so warm in winter, with a red carpet
(given her by the very Mrs. "Callariper" who could not help a
misgiving, after all, that Miss Bree's vocation had been ended with
that wretched word), and a coal stove, and a big, splendid brindled
gray cat--Bartholomew--lying before it; of her snug little
housekeeping, with kindlings in the closet drawer, and milk-jug out
on the stone window-sill; of the music-mistress who had the room
below, and who came up sometimes and sat an hour with her, and took
her cat when she came away, leaving in return, in her own absences,
her great English ivy with Miss Bree. Of the landlady who lived in
the basement, and asked them all down, now and then, to play a game
of cassino or double cribbage, and eat a Welsh rabbit: of things
outside that younger people did,--the girls at the warerooms and
their friends. Of Peck's cheap concerts, and the Public Library
books to read on holidays and Sundays; of ten-cent trips down the
harbor, to see the surf on Nantasket Beach; of the brilliant streets
and shops; of the Public Garden, the flowers and the pond, the boats
and the bridge; of the great bronze Washington reared up on his
horse against the evening sky; of the deep, quiet old avenues of the
Common; of the balloons and the fireworks on the "Fourth of Julies."
I do not think she did it to entice her; I do not think it occurred
to her that she was putting anything into Bel's head; but when Bel
all at once declared that she meant to go to Boston herself and seek
her fortune,--do machine-work or something,--Aunt Blin felt a sudden
thankful delight, and got a glimpse of a possible cheerfulness
coming to herself that she had never dreamed of. If it was pleasant
to tell over these scraps of her small, husbanded enjoyments to Bel,
what would it be to have her there, to share and make and enlarge
them? To bring young girls home sometimes for a chat, or even a cup
of tea; to fetch books from the library, and read them aloud of a
winter evening, while she stitched on by the gas-light with her
glasses on her little homely old nose? The little old nose radiated
the concentrated delight of the whole diminutive, withered face; the
intense gleam of the small, pale blue eyes that bent themselves
together to a short focus above it, and the eagerness of the thin,
shrunken lips that pursed themselves upward with an expression that
was keener than a smile. Bel laughed, and said she was "all puckered
up into one little admiration point!"
After that, it was of no use to be wise and to make objections.
"I'll take you right in with me, and look after you, if you do!"
said Miss Bree. "And two together, we can housekeep real
comfortable!"
It was as if a new wave of youth, from the far-retreated tide, had
swept back upon the beach sands of her life, to spend its sparkle
and its music upon the sad, dry level. Every little pebble of
circumstance took new color under its touch. Something belonging to
her was still young, strong, hopeful. Bel would be a brightness in
the whole old place. The middle-aged music-mistress would like
her,--perhaps even give her some fragmentary instruction in the
clippings of her time. Mrs. Pimminy, the landlady,--old Mr. Sparrow,
the watch-maker, who went up and down stairs to and from his nest
under the eaves,--the milliner in the second-floor-back,--why, she
would make friends with them all, like the sunshine! There would be
singing in the house! The middle-aged music-mistress did not
sing,--only played. And this would be her doing,--her bringing; it
would be the third-floor-front's glory! The pert girls at the
wareroom would not snub the old maid any more, and shove her into
the meanest corner. She had got a piece of girlhood of her own
again. Let them just see Bel Bree--that was all!
Yet she did set before Bel, conscientiously, the difference between
the free country home and the close, bricked up city.
"There isn't any out-doors there, you know--round the houses; _home_
out-doors; you have to be dressed up and go somewhere, when you go
out. The streets are splendid, and there's lots to look at; but
they're only made to _get through_, you know, after all."
They were sitting, while she spoke, on a flat stone out under the
old elm-trees between the "fore-yard" and the barn. Up above was
great blue depth into which you could look through the delicate
stems and flickering leaves of young far tips of branches. One
little white cloud was shining down upon them as it floated in the
sun. Away off swelled billowy tops of hills, one behind another,
making you feel how big the world was. That was what Bel had been
saying.
"You feel so as long as you stay here," replied Miss Blin, "as if
there was room and chance for everything 'over the hills and far
away.' But in the city it all crowds up together; it gets just as
close as it can, and everybody is after the same chances. 'Tain't
_all_ Fourth-of-July; you mustn't think it. Milk's ten cents a
quart, and _jest_ as blue! Don't you 'spose you're better off up
here, after all? Do you think Mrs. Bree could get along without you,
now?"
Bel replied most irrelevantly. She sat watching the fowls
scratching around the barn-door.
"How different a rooster scratches from a hen!" said she. "He just
gives one kick,--out smart,--and picks up what he's after; _she_
makes ever so many little scrabbles, and half the time concludes it
ain't there!--What was it you were saying? About mother? O, _she_
don't want me! The trouble is, Aunt Blin, we two _don't_ want each
other, and never did." She picked up a straw and bent it back and
forth, absently, into little bits, until it broke. Her lips curled
tremulously, and her bright eyes were sad.
Miss Blin knew it perfectly well without being told; but she
wouldn't have pretended that she did, for all the world.
"O, tut!" said she. "You get along well enough. You like one another
full as well as could be expected, only you ain't constituted
similar, that's all. She's great for turning off, and going
ahead, and she ain't got much patience. Such folks never has. You
can't be smart and easy going too. 'Tain't possible. She's
right-up-an'-a-comin', and she expects everybody else to be. But you
_like_ her, Bel; you know you do. You ain't goin' away for that. I
won't have it that you are."
"I like her--yes;" said Bel, slowly. "I know she's smart. I _mean_
to like her. I do it on purpose. But I don't _love_ her, with a
_can't help it_, you see. I feel as if I ought to; I want to have my
heart go out to her; but it keeps coming back again. I could be
happy with you, Aunt Blin, in your up-stairs room, with the blue
milk out in the window-sill. There'd be room, enough for _us_, but
this whole farm isn't comfortable for Ma and me!"
After that, Miss Blin only said that she would speak to Kellup;
meaning her brother, Caleb Bree.
Caleb Bree was just the sort of man that by divine compensation
generally marries, or gets married by a woman that is
"right-up-and-a-comin'." He "had no objections," to this plan of
Bel's, I mean; perhaps his favorite phrase would have expressed his
strongest feeling in the crisis just referred to, also; it was a
normal state of mind with him; he had gone through the world, thus
far, on the principle of _not_ "having objections." He had none now,
"if Ma'am hadn't, and Blin saw best." He let his child go out from
his house down into the great, unknown, struggling, hustling,
devouring city, without much thought or inquiry. It settled _that_
point in his family. "Bel had gone down to Boston to be a
dress-maker, 'long of her Aunt Blindy," was what he had to say to
his neighbors. It sounded natural and satisfactory. House-holds
break up after the children are grown, of course; they all settle to
something; that is all it comes to--the child-life out of which if
they had died and gone away, there would have been wailing and
heart-breaking; the loving and tending and watching through cunning
ways and helpless prettiness and small knowledge-getting: they turn
into men and women, and they go out into the towns, or they get
married, even--and nobody thinks, then, that the little children are
dead! But they are: they are dead, out of the household, and they
never come back to it any more.
Caleb Bree let Bel go, never once thinking that after this she never
_could_ come back the same.
Mrs. Bree had her own two children,--and there might be more--that
would claim all that could be done for them. She would miss Bel's
telling them stories, and washing their faces, and carrying them off
into the barn or the orchard, and leaving the house quiet of a
Sunday or a busy baking-day. It had been "all Bel was good for;"
and it had been more than Mrs. Bree had appreciated at the time. Bel
cried when she kissed them and bade them good-by; but she was gone;
she and her round leather trunk and her little bird in its cage that
she could not leave behind, though Aunt Blin did say that "she
wouldn't altogether answer for it with Bartholomew."
Bel herself,--the other little bird,--who had never tried her
wings, or been shut up in strange places with fierce, prowling
creatures,--she could answer for her, she thought!
It is worth telling,--the advent of Bel and her bird in the
up-stairs room in Leicester Place, and what came of it with
Bartholomew. Miss Blin believed very much in her cat with the
apostolic name, though she had never tried his principles with a
caged bird. She had tutored him to refrain from meat and milk unless
they were set down for him in his especial corner upon the hearth.
He took his airings on the window-ledge where the sun slanted in of
a morning, beside the very brown paper parcel in which was wrapped
the mutton chop for dinner; he never touched the cheese upon the
table, though he knew the word "cheese" as well as if he could spell
it, and would stand up tall on his hind paws to receive his morsel
when he was told, even in a whisper, and without a movement, that he
might come and have some. He preferred his milk condensed in this
way; he got very little of it in the fluid form, and did not think
very highly of it when he did. He knew what was good, Aunt Blin
said.
He understood conversation; especially moral lectures and
admonitions; Miss Bree had talked to him precisely as if he had a
soul, for five years. He knew when she was coming back at one
o'clock to dinner, or at nine in the evening, by the ringing of the
bells. After she had told him so, he would be sitting at the door,
watching for its opening, from the instant of their first sound
until she came up-stairs.
When Aunt Blin thought over all this and told it to Bel, on their
way down in the cars, she almost persuaded her niece and quite
convinced herself, that Bartholomew could be dealt with on
principles of honor and confidence. They would not attempt to keep
the cage out of his reach; that would be almost to keep it out of
their own. She would talk to Bartholomew. She would show him the
bird, and make him understand that they set great store by it, that
it must not be meddled with on any account. "Why, he never _offers_
to touch my tame pigeon that hops in on the table to eat the
crumbs!"
"But a pigeon is pretty big, Aunt Blin," Bel answered, "and may be
Bartholomew suspects that it is old and tough. I _am_ afraid about
my tiny, tender little bird."
Bel was charmed with Aunt Blin's room, when she opened the blinds
and drew up the colored shades, and let the street-light in until
she could find her matches and light the gas. It was just after dark
when they reached Leicester Place. The little lamp-lighter ran down
out of the court with his ladder as they turned in. There were two
bright lanterns whose flames flared in the wind; one just opposite
their windows, and one below at the livery stable. There was a big
livery stable at the bottom of the court, built right across the
end; and there was litter about the doors, and horse odor in the
air. But that is not the very worst kind of city smell that might
be, and putting up with that, the people who lived in Leicester
Court had great counterbalancing advantages. There was only one side
to the place; and though the street way was very narrow, the
opposite walls shut in the grounds of a public building, where there
were trees and grass, and above which there was really a chance at
the sky. Further along, at the corner, loomed the eight stories of
an apartment hotel. All up and down this great structure, and up and
down the little three-storied fronts of the Court as well, the whole
place was gay with illumination, for these last were nearly all
lodging houses, and at night at least, looked brilliant and grand;
certainly to Bel Bree's eyes, seeing three-storied houses and
gas-lights for the first time. Inside, at number eight, the one
little gas jet revealed presently just what Aunt Blin had told
about: the scarlet and black three-ply carpet in a really handsome
pattern of raised leaves; the round table in the middle with a red
cloth, and the square one in the corner with a brown linen one; the
little Parlor Beauty stove, with a boiler atop and an oven in the
side,--an oval braided mat before it, and a mantel shelf above with
some vases and books upon it,--all the books, some dozen in number,
that Aunt Blin had ever owned in the whole course of her life. One
of the blue vases had a piece broken out of its edge, but that was
turned round behind. The closets, one on each side of the
fire-place, answered for pantry, china closet, store-room, wardrobe,
and all. The _refrigerator_ was out on the stone window-sill on the
east side. The room had corner windows, the house standing at the
head of a little paved alley that ran down to Hero Street.
"There!" says Aunt Blin turning up the gas cheerily, and dropping
her shawl upon a chair. "Now I'll go and get Bartholomew, and then
I'll run for some muffins, and you can make a fire. You know where
all the things are, you know!"
That was the way she made Bel welcome; treating her at once as part
and parcel of everything.
Down stairs ran Aunt Blin; she came up more slowly, bringing the
great Bartholomew in her arms, and treading on her petticoats all
the way.
Straight up to the square table she walked, where Bel had set down
her bird-cage, with the newspaper pinned over it. Aunt Blin pulled
the paper off with one hand, holding Bartholomew fast under the
other arm. His big head stuck out before, and his big tail behind;
both eager, restless, wondering, in port and aspect.
"Now, Bartholomew," said Aunt Blin, in her calmest, most confident,
most deliberate tones, "see here! We've brought--home--a little
_bird_, Bartholomew!"
Bartholomew's big head was electric with feline expression; his ears
stood up, his eyes sent out green sparks; hair and whiskers were on
end; he devoured poor little Cheeps already with his gaze; his tail
grew huger, and vibrated in great sweeps.
"O see, Aunt Blin!" cried Bel. "He's just ready to spring. He don't
care a bit for what you say!"
Aunt Blin gave a fresh grip with her elbow against Bartholomew's
sides, and went on with unabated faith,--unhurried calmness.
"We set _everything_ by that little bird, Bartholomew! We wouldn't
have it touched for all the world! Don't--you--never--go--_near_ it!
Do you hear?"
Bartholomew heard. Miss Bree could not see his tail, fairly lashing
now, behind her back, nor the fierce eyes, glowing like green fire.
She stroked his head, and went on preaching.
"The little bird _sings_, Bartholomew! You can hear it, mornings,
while you eat your breakfast. And you shall have CHEESE for
breakfast as long as you're good, and _don't_--_touch_--the _bird_!"
"O, Aunt Blin! He will! He means to! Don't show it to him any more!
Let me hang it way up high, where he _can't_!"
"Don't you be afraid. He understands now, that we're precious of it.
Don't you, Bartholomew? I want him to get used to it."
And Aunt Blin actually set the cat down, and turned round to take up
her shawl again.
Bartholomew was quiet enough for a minute; he must have his
cat-pleasure of crouching and creeping; he must wait till nobody
looked. He knew very well what he was about. But the tail trembled
still; the green eyes were still wild and eager.
"The kindlings are in the left-hand closet, you know," said Aunt
Blin, with a big pin in her mouth, and settling her shoulders into
her shawl. "You'll want to get the fire going as quick as you can."
Poor Bel turned away with a fearful misgiving; not for that very
minute, exactly; she hardly supposed Bartholomew would go straight
from the sermon to sin; but for the resistance of evil enticements
hereafter, under Miss Bree's trustful system,--though he walked off
now like a deacon after a benediction,--she trembled in her poor
little heart, and was sorely afraid she could not ever come to love
Aunt Blin's great gray pet as she supposed she ought.
Aunt Blin had not fairly reached the passage-way, Bel had just
emerged from the closet with her hands full of kindlings, and pushed
the door to behind her with her foot, when--crash! bang!--what _had_
happened?
A Boston earthquake? The room was full of a great noise and
scramble. It seemed ever so long before Bel could comprehend and
turn her face toward the centre of it; a second of time has
infinitesimal divisions, all of which one feels and measures in such
a crisis. Then she and Aunt Blin came together at a sharp angle of
incidence in the middle of the room, the kindlings scattered about
the carpet; and there was the corollary to the exhortation. The
overturned cage,--the dragged-off table-cloth,--the clumsy
Bartholomew, big and gray, bewildered, yet tenacious, clinging to
the wires and sprawling all over them on one side with his fearful
bulk, and the tiny green and golden canary flattened out against the
other side within, absolutely plane and prone with the mere smite of
terror.
"You awful wild beast! I _knew_ you didn't mind!" shrieked Bel,
snatching at the little cage from which Bartholomew dropped
discomfited, and chirping to Cheepsie with a vehemence meant to be
reassuring, but failing of its tender intent through frantic
indignation. It is impossible to scold and chirp at once, however
much one may want to do it.
"You dreadful tiger cat!" she repeated. It almost seemed as
if her love for Aunt Blin let loose more desperately her
denunciations. There is something in human nature which turns
most passionately,--if it does turn,--upon one's very own.
"I can't bear you! I never shall! You're a horrid, monstrous,
abominable, great, gray--wolf! I knew you were!"
Miss Bree fairly gasped.
When she got breath, she said slowly, mournfully, "O Bartholomew! I
_thought_ I could have trusted you! _Was_ you a murderer in your
heart all the time? Go away! I've--no--_con_--fidence _in_ you! No
_co-on_--fidence _in_ you, Bartholomew Bree!"
It is impossible to write or print the words so as to suggest their
grieved abandonment of faith, their depth of loving condemnation.
If Bartholomew had been a human being! But he was not; he was only a
great gray cat. He retreated, shamefaced enough for the moment,
under the table. He knew he was scolded at; he was found out and
disappointed; but there was no heart-shame in him; he would do
exactly the same again. As to being trusted or not, what did he care
about that?
"I don't believe you do," said Aunt Blin, thinking it out to this
same point, as she watched his face of greed, mortified, but
persistent; not a bit changed to any real humility. Why do they say
"_dogged_," except for a noble holding fast? It is a cat which is
selfishly, stolidly obstinate.
"I don't know as I shall really like you any more," said Aunt Blin,
with a terrible mildness. "To think you would have ate that little
bird!"
Aunt Blin's ideal Bartholomew was no more. She might give the
creature cheese, but she could not give him "_con_fidence."
Bel and the bird illustrated something finer, higher, sweeter to her
now. Before, there had only been Bartholomew; he had had to stand
for everything; there was a good deal, to be sure, in that.
But Bel was so astonished at the sudden change,--it was so funny in
its meek manifestation,--that she forgot her wrath, and laughed
outright.
"Why, Auntie!" she cried. "Your beautiful Bartholomew, who
understood, and let alone!"
Aunt Blin shook her head.
"I don't know. I _thought_ so. But--I've no--_con_-fidence in him!
You'd better hang the cage up high. And I'll go out for the
muffins."
Bel heard her saying it over again, as she went down the stairs.
"No, I've no--_con_-fidence in him!"