The Return of the Soul | Page 4

purred now, and nothing would induce it to leave the room
where she sat. One day the servant said to me:
"I believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can't last very much
longer, sir. The way that cat looks up at her goes to my heart. Ah! them
beasts understand things as well as we do, I believe."
I think the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother in a
very strange way, gazing up into her face, as if to mark the changing
contours, the increasing lines, the down-droop of the features, that
bespoke the gradual soft approach of death. It listened to the sound of
her voice; and as, each day, the voice grew more vague, more weak and
toneless, an anxiety that made me exult dawned and deepened in its
blue eyes. Or so I thought.
I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age, and loved to weave
a web of fancies, mostly horrible, around almost everything that

entered into my life. It pleased me to believe that the cat understood
each new intention that came into my mind, read me silently from its
place near the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror-stricken as they
concentrated themselves round a definite resolve, which hardened and
toughened day by day.
It pleased me to believe, do I say? I did really believe, and do believe
now, that the cat understood all, and grew haggard with fear as my
grandmother failed visibly. For it knew what the end would mean for it.
That first day of my arrival, when I saw my grandmother in her white
cap, with her white face and hands, and the big white cat sitting near to
her, I had thought there was a similarity between them. That similarity
struck me more forcibly, grew upon me, as my time in the house grew
longer, until the latter seemed almost a reproduction of the former, and
after each letter from my friend my hate for the two increased. But my
hate for my grandmother was impotent, and would always be so. I
could never repay her for the ennui, the furious, forced inactivity which
made my life a burden, and spurred my bad passions while they lulled
me in a terrible, enforced repose. I could repay her favourite, the thing
she had always cherished, her feline confidant, who lived in safety
under the shadow of her protection. I could wreak my fury on that
when the protection was withdrawn, as it must be at last. It seemed to
my brutal, imaginative, unfinished boy's mind that the murder of her
pet must hurt and wound my grandmother even after she was dead. I
would make her suffer then, when she was impotent to wreak a
vengeance upon me. I would kill the cat.
The creature knew my resolve the day I made it, and had even, I should
say, anticipated it.
As I sat day after day beside my grandmother's armchair in the dim
room, with the blinds drawn to shut out the summer sunlight, and
talked to her in a subdued and reverent voice, agreeing with all the old
banalities she uttered, all the preposterous opinions she propounded, all
the commands she laid upon me, I gazed beyond her at the cat, and the
creature was haggard with apprehension.

It knew, as I knew, that its day was coming. Sometimes I bent down
and took it up on my lap to please my grandmother, and praised its
beauty and its gentleness to her And all the time I felt its warm, furry
body trembling with horror between my hands. This pleased me, and I
pretended that I was never happy unless it was on my knees. I kept it
there for hours, stroking it so tenderly, smoothing its thick white coat,
which was always in the most perfect order, talking to it, caressing it.
And sometimes I took its head between my two hands, turned its face
to mine, and stared into its large blue eyes. Then I could read all its
agony, all its torture of apprehension: and in spite of my friend's letters,
and the dulness of my days, I was almost happy.
The summer was deepening, the glow of the roses flushed the garden
ways, the skies were clear above Scawfell, when the end at last drew
near. My grandmother's face was now scarcely recognizable. The eyes
were sunk deep in her head. All expression seemed to fade gradually
away. Her cheeks were no longer fine ivory white; a dull, sickening,
yellow pallor overspread them. She seldom looked at me now, but
rested entombed in her great armchair, her shrunken limbs seeming to
tend downwards, as if she were inclined to slide to the floor and die
there.