He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart
grew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires. They seemed, like
himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should
he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of
gentle friends and pensioners--the only friends he could claim as
being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often
told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted
anew.
"Poor little dears!" said Jude, aloud. "You SHALL have some dinner--
you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford
to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a
good meal!"
They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude
enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his
own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much
resembled his own.
His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean
and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself
as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow
upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his
surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence
used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed
eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham
himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude's cowering frame, the
clacker swinging in his hand.
"So it's 'Eat my dear birdies,' is it, young man? 'Eat, dear
birdies,' indeed! I'll tickle your breeches, and see if you say,
'Eat, dear birdies,' again in a hurry! And you've been idling at the
schoolmaster's too, instead of coming here, ha'n't ye, hey? That's
how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!"
Whilst saluting Jude's ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham
had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim
frame round him at arm's-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts
with the flat side of Jude's own rattle, till the field echoed with
the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.
"Don't 'ee, sir--please don't 'ee!" cried the whirling child, as
helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked
fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the
plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an
amazing circular race. "I--I sir--only meant that--there was a good
crop in the ground--I saw 'em sow it--and the rooks could have a
little bit for dinner--and you wouldn't miss it, sir--and Mr.
Phillotson said I was to be kind to 'em--oh, oh, oh!"