_George Madden Martin_
The spread of the spruce-tree at its base, where its branches rested on
the snow in the bishop’s yard, was thirty feet. The apex, to which the
branches mounted in slanting tiers, was fifty feet above the ground.
The December afternoon was cold--not much above zero. Weather of that
kind was most unusual in a region so far south. The sky was gray. Now
and then a few big snow-flakes came silently down to join the white
brotherhood that had already fallen a foot deep on the level and more
than two feet deep in the drifts.
The shrubs about the yard looked like snow hillocks; the round bushes
were cone-shaped, the branching ones were wreathed. Not a berry or
seed-vessel or grass-spear or weed-tuft was anywhere visible.
In these bleak surroundings, a valiant and energetic gentleman in the
scarlet cassock and biretta of a cardinal--a cardinal with wings and
beak and feathers, you understand--was darting from point to point
of the big evergreen, from apex to branch, from branch to apex, a
gorgeous splash of color against the clear green of the boughs and the
blue-white of the snow.
The spruce, with the flitting cardinal on its boughs, stood at the side
of the bishop’s grounds between his slate-roofed and ivy-clad house and
the brick orphan asylum.
The bishop’s bedroom was on the same side of the house as the spruce,
and just now the bachelor bishop himself was at a window of the square
bay of this chamber, looking out upon his grounds and the big evergreen
in the bleak and wintry setting. He was just becoming acquainted with
the spruce and his side yard.
The robe that he wore at the moment had less of the episcopal dignity
than that of the cardinal in the evergreen; the bishop’s was a
gray-and-black dressing-gown, and it was tied about his body with a
gray-and-black cord and tassels.
His expression, or what could be seen of it,--for this square-featured,
clean-shaven bishop wore a green celluloid shade over his eyes,--was
rueful. It was the first Christmas after his arrival from a distant
state to be head of this Southern diocese. And behold, three weeks
after his coming, here he was--ill with the measles!
He was in his venerable predecessor’s house, and that was why the
stately spruce and the cardinal were new to him.
The dwelling, in its old grounds, with a small, slate-roofed church to
the left of it and the asylum to the right of it, stood on the car-line
a little way out from the chief city of the diocese. The wife of the
late bishop had owned it long before trolley-cars were dreamed of;
had built the church and the asylum, and given them to her husband’s
diocese; had died, and left the dwelling to her husband. When, within a
year, he followed her, he had left the place as an episcopal residence
for his successors.
The old bishop’s pensioned servants remained, integral parts of the
institution. Neither a new broom nor a new bishop must sweep too
clean. Even one who has authority, when he finds himself among the old
associations and traditions and institutions of a sedate community,
must move slowly.
The bishop found the household of which he was bachelor proprietor
somewhat dreary. There was old Mrs. Dyer, the housekeeper, a distant
relative of the old bishop’s, gold-spectacled, tall and spare. There
was old Aunty Sally, the colored cook, silver-spectacled, short and
fat. There was Thomas, the colored coachman and gardener, gray-haired,
and, for the time, confined to his room over the tool-house by
rheumatism. There was old white Tim, the general factotum and
furnace-tender of the asylum, the rectory and the church; he had gone
to town that morning for his Christmas purchases, and so far, at four
o’clock in the afternoon, had not returned. In this venerable company
the new bishop felt a mere infant in arms, an infant with measles!--the
more so, because from the beginning he had refused to have a trained
nurse, and had put himself into the hands of Mrs. Dyer and Aunt Sally.
The house overflowed with flowers and delicacies that his good people,
few of whom he yet knew, had sent him. But to-day as he stood at his
window and gazed out on the winter scene he was feeling lonely and a
little aggrieved. No doubt it was the bleakness of the day and the
nearness of the Christmas season under the present conditions of
captivity, that depressed him.
In a direct line across from him, at no great distance, stood the
asylum; its side windows looked on his own, and both sets of windows
looked upon the spruce-tree. As he had barely established himself in
his present residence when he took the measles, he had had no chance to
become acquainted with the asylum, or its affairs, or its inmates.
Had that little red-feathered fellow out there on the snow-clad
evergreen-tree gone crazy? The bishop came from the city, and knew
neither the spruce nor the cardinal by name. The cardinal was dipping
and rising about the tree, fluttering and darting, now here, now there,
from branch to twig, from twig to branch.
“And always as if he had his red-ringed small eye on the gallery,” said
the bishop, who meant by “gallery,” himself at the window.
Just then the cardinal left the big spruce-tree altogether, and dropped
to the snow-mantled clump of spirea nearer the house. Immediately there
appeared upon the branches of the spruce two flashing, swaggering,
top-knotted blue jays.
The cardinal flew from the spirea; down from the spruce dropped the
jays to the bush that he had left; and almost at once two brown and
speckled sapsuckers perched upon the branches of the evergreen.
The bishop looked on with interest. Almost parrot-like the cardinal
was clinging with the coral-red claws of his coral-red legs to the
sharp edge of the window-sill; his red head and coral beak were held
sidewise, and his beady eyes were upturned sharply. Behind him was a
world that was cold and desolate and threatening. The white flakes were
falling persistently.
Then the bell of the bishop’s telephone rang. The doctor who twice a
day came in to see him and cheer him up had forbidden him to use his
eyes or to do any hard work or to see his secretary, who had not had
the measles; but he could use his ears and his tongue. So he had had
the telephone brought into his room and set upon a table, and he talked
daily with his dean at the cathedral in town, with various members of
his clergy, and with other official persons.
He turned from the window at the ring, and lifted the receiver.
“Bishop Herbert at the telephone. Yes?” said he, and his voice was deep
and genial and sonorous.
“He is telling you that he is hungry, please,” said a voice, small and
anxious.
“Who is hungry? Who is this speaking?”
“The cardinal-bird on your window-sill. This is Gwinie.”
“Why should he be telling me? And who is Gwinie? And how does she know
a cardinal-bird is on my window-sill and hungry?”
“I can see him there. I live across from you at the asylum. He is
hungry because I can’t come over and put crumbs on his bird-tray; and
it’s snowed three days now.”
“Where is his bird-tray? And why can’t you come?”
“It’s there by the spruce-tree. You can see it from your window. It’s a
tray on a stake in the ground. The other bishop kept it full. I can’t
come over and fill it the way I’ve been doing because I’ve got the
measles.”
“Is that so?” said the bishop. “So have I. Is there anybody over there
who can come and fill it? You cannot expect me to ask Mrs. Dyer to
wade out there in a blizzard. And old Aunt Sally would go under in the
drifts.”
“The doctor told us you had measles,” said Gwinie. “You took them
first; then we did. He’s just gone. He said I might come to the
telephone and call up, and tell whoever answered about the cardinal. He
said he didn’t want to have my measles worried in. We’ve all got them.
There isn’t anybody who can come. Tim, he’s never got home from town.
We’ve put crumbs out, but the birds don’t know it, and the snow keeps
covering the crumbs up. We haven’t any tray over here.”
“H’m!” said the bishop. “And how can I put crumbs on the sills of
French windows? They open outward, you know. What? Hold on there,
Gwinie!”
“I have to go. Miss Lowry, she’s called three times. But I’ll think.”
The bishop hung up his receiver, and returned to the window to survey
the situation in the light of what he had just learned. The cardinal
had advanced boldly on the sill, and now hopped back and forth on it,
with his bright eye fixed on the occupant of the room.
The jays and sapsuckers were on the spirea together, and a dozen small,
crested birds with brown backs and slate-colored breasts were flitting
anxiously about the spruce-tree. Across the open space, at an asylum
window, was a little girl, flattening her nose against the pane. She
was wrapped in a heavy blanket, and she wore a shade!
Was it Gwinie? She saw him. The flattened nose drew back, and its owner
waved a hand. It _was_ Gwinie. Suddenly she turned, as if something
had compelled her attention in the room behind her. And then she
disappeared. The bishop felt a pang of loneliness.
Ten minutes passed while he wondered what he could do. He put the
question to the cardinal himself on the sill: How could either of them
ask fat little old Aunt Sally to wade out through the big drifts to
that tray? Then the telephone rang again.
“It’s Gwinie. Miss Lowry says I may speak one minute. It’s about Mr.
Blythe. He takes the orders from the asylum for Santy Claus every
year. We tell him what we want most, and he puts it down, and we get
it. This year the doctor had to take the orders for him because of the
measles. So I asked the doctor to-day, if he saw Mr. Blythe, to get him
to ask Santy to see to the birds till I get over the measles. And Mr.
Blythe just called up to say he will telephone Santy direct, himself,
about tending to them.”
It is to be presumed that when “Santy” received the message, he acted
promptly. No doubt he knew as well as Gwinie did--although the bishop
did not know--that even in the South a starving cardinal compelled to
endure the rigors of a night with the thermometer at zero would be a
little scarlet corpse on the snow by morning. Before the early dusk
quite closed in, the grocer’s delivery boy appeared in the bishop’s
side yard. He took off his cap to the dignitary at the window, tramped
knee-deep out to the bird-tray, and emptied his pockets and the
contents of a paper bag on the tray. Then he lifted his cap again to
the figure at the window, and departed.
The door of the bishop’s room opened, and Mrs. Dyer appeared, followed
by Aunt Sally, who bore the patient’s supper. The women stirred the
open fire, brushed the hearth, drew the curtains, and lighted the lamp.
They pulled the table up near the blaze, laid the white cloth upon it,
and arranged the contents of the tray.
“Creamed oysters, beefsteak, rolls, waffles, coffee, quince preserves?
Good gracious, Mrs. Dyer, do I, a patient, dare to eat all that? Very
well, then, since my friend the cardinal has his supper also, outside.
But you do not know about that. And, one moment, Mrs. Dyer, before you
and Aunt Sally go; who is Mr. Blythe?”
“He goes by heah ev’y mornin’ to the trolley. He’s one o’ those heah
pink-colored young men,” said Aunt Sally.
“He’s a general favorite,” said Mrs. Dyer. “He lives with an aunt up on
the hill.”
“He sells money at one o’ these heah banks. The bishop he bought his’n
f’om him. Got it ev’y Sat’day reg’lar foh to pay us’en off all roun’.”
“He thinks a great deal of Christmas,” said Mrs. Dyer. “I hear he is as
disappointed as the children at the asylum that there will be no tree
this year because of the measles.”
Thanks to Mr. Blythe’s fortunate telephone connection, Santa Claus
continued his useful work. When the bishop got up the next day--none
too early, to be sure--more snow had fallen, but the tray was swept
clean of it and heaped with a fresh meal; and the birds had gathered
round in dozens. Moreover, on the spruce-tree above the tray hung a
placard; it was white, with large black letters, and it was visible to
both sets of windows that looked upon the yard:
To His Grace The Cardinal, And Other Tenants. Please Take Notice. This
Tree is Preëmpted For The Christmas Season.