Fatherless--motherless--homeless!
A little work-house-boy, with a swarthy face and tidily-cropped black
hair, as short and thick as the fur of a mole, was grubbing, not quite
so cleverly as a mole, in the work-house garden.
He had been set to weed, but the weeding was very irregularly performed,
for his eyes and heart were in the clouds, as he could see them over the
big boundary wall. For there--now dark against the white, now white
against the gray--some Air Tumbler pigeons were turning somersaults on
their homeward way, at such short and regular intervals that they seemed
to be tying knots in their lines of flight.
It was too much! The small gardener shamelessly abandoned his duties,
and, curving his dirty paws on each side of his mouth, threw his whole
soul into shouting words of encouragement to the distant birds.
"That's a good un! On with thee! Over ye go! Oo--ooray!"
It was this last prolonged cheer which drowned the sound of footsteps on
the path behind him, so that if he had been a tumbler pigeon himself he
could not have jumped more nimbly when a man's hand fell upon his
shoulder. Up went his arms to shield his ears from a well-merited
cuffing; but fate was kinder to him than he deserved. It was only an old
man (prematurely aged with drink and consequent poverty), whose faded
eyes seemed to rekindle as he also gazed after the pigeons, and spoke as
one who knows.
"Yon's Daddy Darwin's Tumblers."
This old pauper had only lately come into "the House" (the house that
never was a home!), and the boy clung eagerly to his flannel sleeve, and
plied him thick and fast with questions about the world without the
workhouse-walls, and about the happy owner of those yet happier
creatures who were free not only on the earth, but in the skies.
The poor old pauper was quite as willing to talk as the boy was to
listen. It restored some of that self-respect which we lose under the
consequences of our follies to be able to say that Daddy Darwin and he
had been mates together, and had had pigeon-fancying in common "many a
long year afore" he came into the House.
And so these two made friendship over such matters as will bring man and
boy together to the end of time. And the old pauper waxed eloquent on
the feats of Homing Birds and Tumblers, and on the points of Almonds and
Barbs, Fantails and Pouters; sprinkling his narrative also with high
sounding and heterogeneous titles, such as Dragons and Archangels, Blue
Owls and Black Priests, Jacobines, English Horsemen and Trumpeters. And
through much boasting of the high stakes he had had on this and that
pigeon-match then, and not a few bitter complaints of the harsh
hospitality of the House he "had come to" now, it never seemed to occur
to him to connect the two, or to warn the lad who hung upon his lips
that one cannot eat his cake with the rash appetites of youth, and yet
hope to have it for the support and nourishment of his old age.
The longest story the old man told was of a "bit of a trip" he had made
to Liverpool, to see some Antwerp Carriers flown from thence to Ghent,
and he fixed the date of this by remembering that his twin sons were
born in his absence, and that though their birthday was the very day of
the race, his "missus turned stoopid," as women (he warned the boy) are
apt to do, and refused to have them christened by uncommon names
connected with the fancy. All the same, he bet the lads would have been
nicknamed the Antwerp Carriers, and known as such to the day of their
death, if this had not come so soon and so suddenly, of croup; when (as
it oddly chanced) he was off on another "bit of a holiday" to fly some
pigeons of his own in Lincolnshire.
This tale had not come to an end when a voice of authority called for
"Jack March," who rubbed his mole-like head, and went ruefully off,
muttering that he should "catch it now."
"Sure enough! sure enough!" chuckled the unamiable old pauper.
But again fate was kinder to the lad than his friend. His negligent
weeding passed unnoticed, because he was wanted in a hurry to join the
other children in the school-room. The parson's daughter had come, the
children were about to sing to her, and Jack's voice could not be
dispensed with.
He "cleaned himself" with alacrity, and taking his place in the circle
of boys standing with their hands behind their backs, he lifted up a
voice worthy of a cathedral choir, whilst varying the monotony of sacred
song by secretly snatching at the tail of the terrier as it went
snuffing round the legs of the group. And in this feat he proved as much
superior to the rest of the boys (who also tried it) as he excelled them
in the art of singing.
Later on he learned that the young lady had come to invite them all to
have tea with her on her birthday. Later still he found the old pauper
once more, and questioned him closely about the village and the
Vicarage, and as to which of the parishioners kept pigeons, and where.
And when he went to his straw bed that night, and his black head
throbbed with visions and high hopes, these were not entirely of the
honor of drinking tea with a pretty young lady, and how one should
behave himself in such abashing circumstances. He did not even dream
principally of the possibility of getting hold of that silver-haired,
tawny-pawed dog by the tail under freer conditions than those of this
afternoon, though that was a refreshing thought.
What kept him long awake was thinking of this. From the top of an old
walnut-tree at the top of a field at the back of the Vicarage, you could
see a hill, and on the top of the hill some farm buildings. And it was
here (so the old pauper had told him) that those pretty pigeons lived,
who, though free to play about among the clouds, yet condescended to
make an earthly home--in Daddy Darwin's Dovecot.