“How cruel — oh, how cruel!” cried Lettie, shuddering.
I wrapped my cap and Lettie’s scarf over my hands and bent to open the trap. The cat struck with her teeth, tearing the cloth convulsively. When it was free, it sprang away with one bound, and fell panting, watching us.
I wrapped the creature in my jacket, and picked her up, murmuring:
“Poor Mrs Nickie Ben — we always prophesied it of you.”
“What will you do with it?” asked Lettie.
“It is one of the Strelley Mill cats,” said I, “and so I’ll take her home.”
The poor animal moved and murmured and I carried her, but we brought her home. They stared, on seeing me enter the kitchen coatless, carrying a strange bundle, while Lettie followed me.
“I have brought poor Mrs Nickie Ben,” said I, unfolding my burden.
“Oh, what a shame!” cried Emily, putting out her hand to touch the cat, but drawing quickly back, like the peewits. “This is how they all go,” said the mother.
“I wish keepers had to sit two or three days with their bare ankles in a trap,” said Mollie in vindictive tones.
We laid the poor brute on the rug, and gave it warm milk. It drank very little, being too feeble. Mollie, full of anger, fetched Mr Nickie Ben, another fine black cat, to survey his crippled mate. Mr Nickie Ben looked, shrugged his sleek shoulders, and walked away with high steps. There was a general feminine outcry on masculine callousness.
George came in for hot water. He exclaimed in surprise on seeing us, and his eyes became animated.
“Look at Mrs Nickie Ben,” cried Mollie. He dropped on his knees on the rug and lifted the wounded paws.
“Broken,” said he.
“How awful!” said Emily, shuddering violently, and leaving the room.
“Both?” I asked.
“Only one — look!”
“You are hurting her!” cried Lettie.
“It’s no good,” said he.
Mollie and the mother hurried out of the kitchen into the parlour.
“What are you going to do?” asked Lettie.
“Put her out of her misery,” he replied, taking up the poor cat. We followed him into the barn.
“The quickest way,” said he, “is to swing her round and knock her head against the wall.”
“You make me sick,” exclaimed Lettie.
“I’ll drown her then,” he said with a smile. We watched him morbidly, as he took a length of twine and fastened a noose round the animal’s neck, and near it an iron goose; he kept a long piece of cord attached to the goose.
“You’re not coming, are you?” said he. Lettie looked at him; she had grown rather white.
“It’ll make you sick,” he said. She did not answer, but followed him across the yard to the garden. On the bank of the lower millpond he turned again to us and said:
“Now for it! — you are chief mourners.” As neither of us replied, he smiled, and dropped the poor writhing cat into the water, saying, “Good-bye, Mrs Nickie Ben.”
We waited on the bank some time. He eyed us curiously. “Cyril,” said Lettie quietly, “isn’t it cruel? — isn’t it awful?” I had nothing to say.
“Do you mean me?” asked George.
“Not you in particular — everything! If we move the blood rises in our heel-prints.”
He looked at her seriously, with dark eyes.
“I had to drown her out of mercy,” said he, fastening the cord he held to an ash-pole. Then he went to get a spade, and with it, he dug a grave in the old black earth.
“If,” said he, “the poor old cat had made a prettier corpse, you’d have thrown violets on her.”
He had struck the spade into the ground, and hauled pup the iron goose.
“Well,” he said, surveying the hideous object, “haven’t her good looks gone! She was a fine cat.”
“Bury it and have done,” Lettie replied.
He did so asking: “Shall you have bad dreams after it?”
“Dreams do not trouble me,” she answered, turning away.
We went indoors, into the parlour, where Emily sat by a window, biting her finger. The room was long and not very high; there was a great rough beam across the ceiling. On the mantelpiece, and in the fireplace, and over the piano were wild flowers and fresh leaves plentifully scattered; the room was cool with the scent of the woods.
“Has he done it?” asked Emily —“and did you watch him? If I had seen it I should have hated the sight of him, and I’d rather have touched a maggot than him.”
“I shouldn’t be particularly pleased if he touched me,” said Lettie.
“There is something so loathsome about callousness and brutality,” said Emily. “He fills me with disgust.”
“Does he?” said Lettie, smiling coldly. She went across to the old piano. “He’s only healthy. He’s never been sick, not anyway, yet.” She sat down and played at random, letting the numbed notes fall like dead leaves from the haughty, ancient piano.
Emily and I talked oh by the widow, about books and people. She was intensely serious, and generally succeeded in reducing me to the same state.
After a while, when the milking and feeding were finished, George came in. Lettie was still playing the piano. He asked her why she didn’t play something with a tune in it, and this caused her to turn round in her chair to give him a withering answer. His appearance, however, scattered her words like startled birds. He had come straight from washing in the scullery, to the parlour, and he stood behind Lettie’s chair, unconcernedly wiping the moisture from his arms. His sleeves were rolled up to the shoulder, and his shirt was opened wide at the breast. Lettie was somewhat taken aback by the sight of him standing with legs apart, dressed in dirty leggings and boots, and breeches torn at the knee, naked at the breast and arms.
“Why don’t you play something with a tune in it?” he repeated, rubbing the towel over his shoulders beneath the shirt.
“A tune!” she echoed, watching the swelling of his arms as he moved them, and the rise and fall of his breasts, wonderfully solid and white. Then having curiously examined the sudden meeting of the sun-hot skin with the white flesh in his throat, her eyes met his, and she turned again to the piano, while the colour grew in her ears, mercifully sheltered by a profusion of bright curls.
“What shall I play?” she asked, fingering the keys somewhat confusedly.
He dragged out a book of songs from a little heap of music, and set it before her.
“Which do you want to sing?” she asked, thrilling a little as she felt his arms so near her.
“Anything you like.”
“A love song?” she said.
“If you like — yes, a love song —” he laughed with clumsy insinuation that made the girl writhe.
She did not answer, but began to play Sullivan’s “Tit Willow”. He had a passable bass voice, not of any great depth, and he sang with gusto. Then she gave him “Drink to me only with thine eyes”. At the end she turned and asked him if he liked the words. He replied that he thought them rather daft. But he looked at her with glowing brown eyes, as if in hesitating