I looked in Mr. Quayle’s face; but I asked him no question. The mud we trod seemed colder, the houses we passed more frowning than before; but I asked no question. I could not form one in my mind; only suddenly and somehow I felt frightened, as if in dreams before a great solitude¹. Then in a moment I was sobbing³ fast and thickly.

 

Ah, what is the use to skate round the memory! Let it clutch me for a moment, and be faced and dismissed. My father, my dear, ardent⁴, noble father was dead—struck down in an instant—shaken out of life by the poignant⁵ utterances⁶ of his own spirit. While the flower of his fervour was blossoming and bearing fruit, the roots thereof were dead already—smitten in their place in his heart. That, its work done, had ceased beating. Sometimes afterwards in my desolation I recalled the church clock, with its poised⁷ motionless hands, and thought what a melancholy⁸ omen² it had been.

 

Mr. Quayle was kindness itself to me in my utter terror and loneliness. He took upon himself, provisionally, the whole conduct of my affairs. One morning he came in, and drew me to him.

 

“Dicky—Dicky-bird, me jewl!” he said. “I’ve found the fine cuckoo that’s to come and father the poor little orphaned⁹ nestling.”

 

I must observe that he had his own theories about this same “harbinger of spring,” which, according to him, was the “bird that looked after another bird’s young.” I remembered the occasion on which he had so defined it, and the laughter which had greeted him; and his alternative, “Well, then, ’tis the bird that doesn’t lay its own eggs, and that’s all one!” But the first definition, it appeared, was the one he kept faith in.

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