But when morning came
there floated up to him, through the noise and bustle of the Cathedral
world, a faint heart-aching message from the prisoner in the wicker cage
far below. And every day, at high noon, when the fat pigeons were
stupefied into silence after their midday meal and the sparrows were
washing themselves in the street-puddles, the song of the little bird
came up to the parapets--a song of hunger and longing and hopelessness, a
cry that could never be answered. The pigeons remarked, between
mealtimes, that the figure leaned forward more than ever out of the
perpendicular.
One day no song came up from the little wicker cage. It was the coldest
day of the winter, and the pigeons and sparrows on the Cathedral roof
looked anxiously on all sides for the scraps of food which they were
dependent on in hard weather.
"Have the lodge-folk thrown out anything on to the dust-heap?" inquired
one pigeon of another which was peering over the edge of the north
parapet.
"Only a little dead bird," was the answer.
There was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof and a
noise as of falling masonry. The belfry jackdaw said the frost was
affecting the fabric, and as he had experienced many frosts it must have
been so.
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