“The poor wee mite,” she says, and she gives it the tips of her fingers with which to ease its toothless gums.
But sometimes, as woman will, she carries this motherdom to excess. You may aid Nature to a point. Men do it in their pre-eminently practical way, which has science for the dry heart of it. Watch them pruning rose trees. I believe they take a positive pleasure in the knife. I am perfectly sure Bellwattle’s garden would be a forest of briars were it not that Cruikshank keeps locked within a little drawer a knife with a handle of horn, which he takes out in the month of March, when Bellwattle goes to pay a visit to her mother up in town. In fact, the visit is arranged for that purpose.
“I suppose it has to be done,” she says, packing her trunk. “But it seems a silly business to me that you should have to cut the arms and legs off a thing before it can grow properly. They bore roses last year. Why not this?”
But where Nature needs no aid, there is Bellwattle ready with her ever-helping hand. She constitutes herself in the capacity of nurse to all the birds in the garden.
Only this spring a linnet built its nest in the yew tree that grows in our hedge. In an unwise moment Cruikshank informed her of it. She ran off at once and counted the eggs. Five there were. She had seen eggs before, but these were the most beautiful that any bird had ever laid in its life.
From that moment she became so fussy and excitable that Cruikshank was at a loss to know what to do with her.
“She’ll drive the bird away,” said Cruikshank to me.
“She simply said, ‘The bird must know that I don’t mean to do any harm.’”
“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “I don’t suppose there’s an animal in the whole of creation that doesn’t recognise the maternal instinct when it sees it.”
That was all very well while there were only eggs to be reckoned with. But when one morning Bellwattle went to the nest and found five black little heads, like five little Hottentots grown old and grizzled, with shrivelled tufts of grey hair, there was no containing her.
She clapped her hands. She danced up and down and—
“Oh, the dears!” she cried. “Oh, the little dears! I must give them something to eat. What will they eat?”
I looked at Cruikshank. I had come round that morning to count his rosebuds with him—a weakness of his to which he always succumbs. He tells me it is the only way he can justify his use of the knife. I looked at him and he looked at me.