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Just little songs for children." "Verses," he exclaimed; "how wonderful! I knew you were a goddess and a song-bird, but not that you were a poet, too." "Nor am I; they are the most trifling things." "I expect they are delicious, like your singing. Read them to me, beloved," he begged. But Mary would not.
An hour before she had been singing as blithely as a song-bird. Her morning devotions had been sweet. The presence of God had been with her. The day had started out full of sunshine, but alas! now her sky was clouded. It had all happened in a moment.
If I win the scholarship, it'll be because you want me to, Martha; if I come to be a lawyer, it's because it's the wish of the judge's heart; and if I win out in the end, it will be for the love of some one some one who cares more for that than for anything else in the world." She dropped her eyes, while he watched the flight of a song-bird as it wheeled about overhead.
She shuddered within herself when the King or his Mentor the Archbishop addressed her, shrinking from both with the instinctive aversion of a song-bird to a serpent; but Richard of Conisborough spoke as no one else spoke to her so courteously, so gently, so kindly, that no room was left for fear. No one had ever spoken so to this girl since her father died.
Every day he grew larger, plumper, and hungrier; and though he was not a song-bird, his attempts at melody, made with much choking and wheezing and many wry faces, as if the countless flies he had swallowed were sticking in his throat, pleased her more than carols. Within a week after his capture he was so tame that he would sit on her shoulder as she walked about her room and peck at her teeth.
"But we'll take the will for the deed. Forward, march!" After the reverberations, carried from rock to rock with menacing reiteration, had ceased, the stillness was absolute. Even the song-bird remained frightened into silence by those awful echoes. Then the sun rested like a benediction on the land and the white cross of Cortez was distinctly outlined against the blue sky.
After examining his revolver, he slipped it into the side pocket of his coat and walked boldly up to the jail. Then, whistling merrily, for Bat Lewis, the deputy, was a confirmed human song-bird, he knocked sharply on the door with his knuckles. "It's me Bat," he called out, mimicking Lewis' voice, in answer to a question from within. "You're early to-night. What's struck you?"
Then, his thoughts went back to a cabin in the hills and a girl in calico. He heard a voice like the voice of a song-bird saying through tears: "I couldn't live without ye, Samson.... I jest couldn't do hit!" For a moment, he was sick of his life. It seemed that there stood before him, in that place of historic wraiths and memories, a girl, her eyes sad, but loyal and without reproof.
He felt it as a sacred duty to shelter and protect her, seeming to him as she did, an airy, pretty, defenceless song-bird. The Emperor's caricature had the same effect on his feelings as though some one had insulted and scorned, before his eyes, something that ought to be regarded as sacred.
She was his little red-haired girlie, his star, his song-bird, the apple of his eye, his sun, his balm of Gilead, his guardian angel, the key which was to open the door of heaven for him. And the child smiled and stroked him with her soft hands. She loved him so. He gave her everything her mother would not give her. Still, she loved her mother in secret.
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