My Robin | Page 6

to the topmost twig of an apple tree and begin to sing his most brilliant song in his most thrilling tone and with an affected manner. Naturally we were obliged to listen and talk about him. Even old Barton's weather-beaten apple face would wrinkle into smiles.
"He's doin' that to make us look at him," he would say. "That's what he's doin' it for. He can't abide not to be noticed."
But it was not only his vanity which drew him to me. He loved me. The low song trilled in his little pulsating scarlet throat was mine. He sang it only to me--and he would never sing it when any one else was there to hear. When we were quite alone with only roses and bees and sunshine and silence about us, when he swung on some spray quite close to me and I stood and talked to him in whispers--then he would answer me--each time I paused--with the little "far away" sounding trills--the sweetest, most wonderful little sounds in the world. A clever person who knew more of the habits of birds than I did told me a most curious thing.
"That is his little mating song," he said. "You have inspired a hopeless passion in a robin."
Perhaps so. He thought the rose-garden was the world and it seemed to me he never went out of it during the summer months. At whatsoever hour I appeared and called him he came out of bushes but from a different point each time. In late autumn however, one afternoon I SAW him fly to me from over a wall dividing the enclosed garden from the open ones. I thought he looked guilty and fluttered when he alighted near me. I think he did not want me to know.
"You have been making the acquaintance of a young lady robin," I said to him. "Perhaps you are already engaged to her for the next season."
He tried to persuade me that it was not true but I felt he was not entirely frank.
After that it was plain that he had discovered that the rose-garden was not ALL the world. He knew about the other side of the wall. But it did not absorb him altogether. He was seldom absent when I came and he never failed to answer my call. I talked to him often about the young lady robin but though he showed a gentlemanly reticence on the subject I knew quite well he loved me best. He loved my robin sounds, he loved my whispers, his dewy dark eyes looked into mine as if he knew we two understood strange tender things others did not.
I was only a mere tenant of the beautiful place I had had for nine years and that winter the owner sold the estate. In December I was to go to Montreux for a couple of months; in March I was to return to Maytham and close it before leaving it finally. Until I left for Switzerland I saw my robin every day. Before I went away I called him to me and told him where I was going.
He was such a little thing. Two or three months might seem a lifetime to him. He might not remember me so long. I was not a real robin. I was only a human being. I said a great many things to him--wondering if he would even be in the garden when I came back. I went away wondering.
When I returned from the world of winter sports, of mountain snows, of tobogganing and skis I felt as if I had been absent a long time. There had been snow even in Kent and the park and gardens were white. I arrived in the evening. The next morning I threw on my red frieze garden cloak and went down the flagged terrace and the Long Walk through the walled gardens to the beloved place where the rose bushes stood dark and slender and leafless among the whiteness. I went to my own tree and stood under it and called.
"Are you gone," I said in my heart; "are you gone, little Soul? Shall I never see you again?"
After the call I waited--and I had never waited before. The roses were gone and he was not in the rose-world. I called again. The call was sometimes a soft whistle as near a robin sound as I could make it-- sometimes it was a chirp--sometimes it was a quick clear repetition of "Sweet! Sweet! Sweetie"--which I fancied he liked best. I made one after the other--and then--something scarlet flashed across the lawn, across the rose-walk--over the wall and he was there. He had not forgotten, it had not been too long, he alighted on the snowy brown grass at my feet.
Then I knew he was a