The Marquess of Tavistock—A Study in Feminine Psychology 105


the way she peered down at the cock and a sinister expedition in her

movements as she followed him to and fro. I knew that look. Some

years ago I had had a cock Yellow-bellied Parrakeet. He possessed

a mate of whom he was reasonably fond, but not so fond that, when

released in autumn, he was content to stay near her, as a normally

dutiful Broadtail husband will always do. He desired company as little

as he feared the hardships of the English winter, and he would roam

the countryside in solitude, being often not seen for months at a stretch.

But when in late April the trees were covered with bursting buds and

the groves were musical with the songs of mating birds, a call sounded

in the lonely wanderer’s heart bringing him home unerringly year after

year. Was it thoughts of his disconsolate wife and hopes of baby

Parrakeets in a dark log that drew him back ? Not a bit of it! He used

bo return to kill a certain cock Yellow-rump : for that purpose and for

that purpose alone. Why he wanted to kill that particular Yellow-

rump more than any other bird in the collection I have no idea, the

less so that he never took the slightest interest in him during the winter.

But as soon as late April came round, as regular as clockwork, the

over-mastering conviction that the Yellow-rump was a thing unfit

to live would enter the Yellow-belly’s mind, and back he would travel

over field and forest to do him in. On arrival he would spend all day

glaring at the Yellow-rump through the wire roof and following him

wherever he went, until, by placing his intended victim in a cage

as a decoy, we lured him into an aviary and thence returned him to

.spend another summer in domestic dulness with his own mate.


The expression and actions of the murderous Yellow-belly were

now plainly those of the hen Barnard. Her blighted hopes had turned

her heart to gall and bitterness, and she was bent on venting her feelings

on her former companion. Why he should have been blamed, poor

fellow, I cannot imagine. If there was to be unpleasantness at all over

the Mealy incident it might more justly have been shown by him ;

but what angry and heart-broken elderly lady was ever reasonable ?

I suppose when she came back to the cock Barnard, after finding

the Mealy’s aviary empty, everything about him grated on her by

contrast with the charms of the dear departed, and so, like the

Psalmist, he was hated without a cause.



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