THE BALLADE OF THE FALCON
To the deep window of the library, where I am sitting now wrapped in
shawls and scribbling this, I came that day after our drive to sit and
think, and stare out of the double windows at the dusky garden, and
wait for tea. I had taken an old book from one of the library shelves.
It was "The whole art of Falconry," dedicated to his Majesty, King
Charles the First, by his liege servant--I forget whom.
When I was tired with looking out of the window I turned over the
leaves of the book; they smelt of age. Between the cover and the last
leaf was a manuscript, the ink faded, the paper mildewed. I spelt it
out in the dusk.
It was a ballad written in a curious, old-fashioned hand. It was about
a little falcon which a lady had given to her lover; he killed her in a
fit of passion, and he killed the little falcon, or "the little hawke,"
as the ballad sometimes called it, and then he killed himself. As I
read it grew sadder and sadder, it seemed to moan to me like a living
thing, and my eyes became blind with tears so that I could scarcely
read it in the twilight. It was all about the little falcon, but I knew
that the pity was meant for the cavalier. Perhaps the writer dared not
express it openly, for was not the cavalier an assassin and a suicide?
This is the last verse, as well as I remember--
"With the little falcon prest
To his cold and lifeless breast,
They laid him to his rest.
And the ballade humbly prays
The tribute of your sighs
For the hawke's blinde little eyes,
--And the cavalier who lies
By the four cross ways."
Ah! the dead hand that wrote that long ago betrayed itself in the two
last lines,
"And the cavalier who lies
By the four cross ways."
I laid it down and cried as if my heart would break. I was crying, not
for the cavalier but for "the little hawke."