And before you could count ten they had sprung from their places, opened the door, and lifted her in. With a hoarse agonized screech the Cochin-Chinaman leaped up and flew heavily into the coach. He came through the air like a cannon-ball.
“Really, this is too much!” exclaimed the Bishop. “I cannot be made ridiculous by having this creature sitting in front of me as we go through the streets.”
“He is the only friend I have got left,” sobbed poor Maggie, bursting into tears as the footmen tried to seize the cock’s legs.
The Bishop was far from being an unkind man; indeed, he had a great reputation for charity, both public and private.
“Tut, tut!” he said; “let him come. But he can’t sit there opposite to me. Put him under the seat.”
And so Maggie, thankful to keep him at any price, stuffed him underneath, and pressed her feet against him, to comfort him. The footmen were inexpressibly shocked. Then they all drove off to the palace.
The palace was a truly imposing place, with cupolas and courts, porches and statues; and, being outside the town, it was approached by an avenue a mile long. A wide stream flowed round one side of it, and the great entrance gates were covered with crests and glorious devices. Behind it was an aviary full of bright-coloured birds, who screamed and fought and made such a terrible din that, when the carriage drew up, the Cochin-Chinaman was taken from under the seat trembling. Maggie was shown a hut which she was to inhabit, built in a little remote yard, and an old chicken-coop was brought and filled with straw to make a bed for the cock. The Bishop ordered that food should be given them, and told Maggie she was to begin her duties on the morrow.
She did not like her place at all. The birds in the aviary were nearly all foreign, so she did not know their language; and those she could understand were rude and turbulent, and made the most heartless jokes about the poor Cochin-Chinaman’s yellow trousers. But there was no use in grumbling. The Bishop was determined that she should stay and look after the aviary; he disapproved of vagrants and gipsies, and had settled that she was to be brought up respectably. She could not get away, because she was never allowed to leave the place alone; so she consoled herself by thinking that, as winter was at hand, she would be likely to starve were she still tramping the road; and then she would certainly never see Alfonso again.
And so time went by and she lived at the palace, feeding and tending the foreign birds, and cheered by the company of her faithful comrade, who grew fat on the crumbs from the Bishop’s kitchen and took care not to display his yellow trousers within sight of the aviary.
Soon it grew bitterly cold. The snow fell, and Christmas came and went; and then, at last, the young New Year grew strong, and birds began to sing and trees to bud. The little yard in which the hut stood was surrounded by an ivy-covered wall with a small iron gate in it, and through the latter she could see the ground slope down to the still, wide stream that passed the palace like a crawling silver snake.