The Return Of The Soul Page 2

which, as usual, was sitting before thefire.

  Animals have intuitions as keen as those of a woman, keener than thoseof a man. They inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from along line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men.They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whetherto expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purredcomplacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up herwhite, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm,light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gatherherself together and to make herself small. She shrank from me. Therewas--as I fancied--a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in her blueeyes. She always sat very close to my grandmother now, as if she soughtprotection, and she watched me as if she were watching for an intentionwhich she apprehended to grow in my mind.

  And the intention came.

  For, as the days went on, and my grandmother still lived, I began togrow desperate. My holiday time was over now, but my parents wrotetelling me to stay where I was, and not to think of returning to school.My grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them in which she saidthat she could not part from me, and added that my parents would neverhave cause to regret interrupting my education for a time. "He will bepaid in full for every moment he loses," she wrote, referring to me.

  It seemed a strange taste in her to care so much for a boy, but she hadnever loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked handsome faces. Thebrutality in my nature was not written upon my features. I had smiling,frank brown eyes, a lithe young figure, a gay boy's voice. My movementswere quick, and I have always been told that my gestures were neverawkward, my demeanour was never unfinished, as is the case so often withlads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and the old woman, who hadmarried two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling thatshe had the power to retain me by her side at an age when most boysavoid old people as if they were the pestilence.

  And then I pretended to love her, and obeyed all her insufferablytiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same.My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays,was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote tome furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching me for myselfishness and lack of affection.

  Each time I received one I looked at the cat, and the cat shrank nearerto my grandmother's chair.

  It never purred now, and nothing would induce it to leave the room whereshe sat. One day the servant said to me:

  "I believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can't last very muchlonger, sir. The way that cat looks up at her goes to my heart. Ah! thembeasts understand things as well as we do, I believe."

  I think the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother ina very strange way, gazing up into her face, as if to mark the changingcontours, the increasing lines, the down-droop of the features, thatbespoke the gradual soft approach of death. It listened to the sound ofher voice; and as, each day, the voice grew more vague, more weak andtoneless, an anxiety that made me exult dawned and deepened in its blueeyes. Or so I thought.

  I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age, and loved to weavea web of fancies, mostly horrible, around almost everything that enteredinto my life. It pleased me to believe that the cat understood each newintention that came into my mind, read me silently from its placenear the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror-stricken as theyconcentrated themselves round a definite resolve, which hardened andtoughened day by day.

  It pleased me to believe, do I say? I did really believe, and do believenow, that the cat understood all, and grew haggard with fear as mygrandmother 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 whitecap, with her white face and hands, and the big white cat sittingnear to her, I had thought there was a similarity between them. Thatsimilarity struck me more forcibly, grew upon me, as my time in thehouse grew longer, until the latter seemed almost a reproduction ofthe former, and after each letter from my friend my hate for the twoincreased. But my hate for my grandmother was impotent, and would alwaysbe so. I could never repay her for the _ennui_, the furious, forcedinactivity which made my life a burden, and spurred my bad passionswhile they lulled me in a terrible, enforced repose. I could repay herfavourite, the thing she had always cherished, her feline confidant,who lived in safety under the shadow of her protection. I could wreak myfury on that when the protection was withdrawn, as it must be at last.It seemed to my brutal, imaginative, unfinished boy's mind that themurder of her pet must hurt and wound my grandmother even after she wasdead. I would make her suffer then, when she was impotent to wreak avengeance upon me. I would kill the cat.

  The creature knew my resolve the day I made it, and had even, I shouldsay, 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 herin a subdued and reverent voice, agreeing with all the old banalitiesshe uttered, all the preposterous opinions she propounded, all thecommands she laid upon me, I gazed beyond her at the cat, and thecreature was haggard with apprehension.

  It knew, as I knew, that its day was coming. Sometimes I bent down andtook it up on my lap to please my grandmother, and praised its beautyand its gentleness to her And all the time I felt its warm, furry bodytrembling with horror between my hands. This pleased me, and I pretendedthat I was never happy unless it was on my knees. I kept it there forhours, stroking it so tenderly, smoothing its thick white coat, whichwas always in the most perfect order, talking to it, caressing it.

  And sometimes I took its head between my two hands, turned its face tomine, and stared into its large blue eyes. Then I could read all itsagony, all its torture of apprehension: and in spite of my friend'sletters, 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 sunkdeep in her head. All expression seemed to fade gradually away. Hercheeks were no longer fine ivory white; a dull, sickening, yellow palloroverspread them. She seldom looked at me now, but rested entombed in hergreat armchair, her shrunken limbs seeming to tend downwards, as if shewere inclined to slide to the floor and die there. Her lips were thinand dry, and moved perpetually in a silent chattering, as if her mindwere talking and her voice were already dead. The tide of life wasretreating from her body. I could almost see it visibly ebb away. Thefailing waves made no sound upon the shore. Death is uncanny, like allsilent things.

  Her maid wished her to stay entirely in bed, but she would get up,muttering that she was well; and the doctor said it was useless tohinder her. She had no specific disease. Only the years were takingtheir last toll of her. So she was placed in her chair each day by thefire, and sat there till evening, muttering with those dry lips. Thestiff folds of her silken skirts formed an angle, and there the catcrouched hour after hour, a silent, white, waiting thing.

  And the waves ebbed and ebbed away, and I waited too.

  One afternoon, as I sat by my grandmother, the servant entered witha letter for me just arrived by the post. I took it up. It was fromWilloughby, my school-friend. He said the term was over, that he hadleft school, and his father had decided to send him out to America tostart in business in New York, instead of entering him at Oxford as hehad hoped. He bade me good-bye, and said he supposed we should not meetagain for years; "but," he added, "no doubt you won't care a straw, solong as you get the confounded money you're after. You've taught me oneof the lessons of life, young Ronald--never to believe in friendship."

  As I read the letter I set my teeth. All that was good in my naturecentred round Willoughby. He was a really fine fellow. I honestly andtruly loved him. His news gave me a bitter shock, and turned my heart toiron and to fire. Perhaps I should never see him again; even if I did
,time would have changed him, seared him--my friend, in his wonderfulyouth, with the morning in his eyes, would be no more. I hated myself inthat moment for having stayed; I hated still more her who had kept me.For the moment I was carried out of myself. I crushed the letter up inmy burning hand. I turned fiercely round upon that yellow, enigmatic,dying figure in the great chair. All the fury, locked within my heartfor so long, rose to the surface, and drove self-interest away. I turnedupon my grandmother with blazing eyes and trembling limbs. I opened mymouth to utter a torrent of reproachful words, when--what was it?--whatslight change had stolen into the wrinkled, yellow face? I bent overher. The eyes gazed at me, but so horribly! She sat so low in her chair;she looked so fearful, so very strange. I put my fingers on her eyelids;I drew them down over the eyeballs: they did not open again. I felt herwithered hands: they were ice. Then I knew, and I felt myself smiling. Ileaned over the dead woman. There, on the far