Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (15 page)

It was a strange and very sacred place, this forest temple, for few if any humans ever seemed to come there and then only when they brought a sick dog or injured wild thing to be healed. The shepherds from the hills, and the crofters from the wild country up glen sometimes came across some little beast of field or forest that had been caught in a trap, or suffered an injury. Then they rang the silver Mercy Bell that hung from a branch of the great covin oak that stood outside my temple, and Lori came forth to learn their needs.

They seemed to be afraid of Lori as indeed they should be of one who was a priestess now devoted to a true goddess. Rarely a shepherd would stay to have a wound upon his dogs leg or foot bound up, but mostly if they had some small wild thing they would leave it at the foot of the rope beneath the bell and vanish before Lori appeared. Lori never answered a knock at her door, or a shout, but only the silvery ringing of the Mercy Bell, which reminded me of the shivery glitter of the sistra of the priestesses, shaken in my honor in that Bubastis, removed from me by nearly four thousand years. Later Wullie, who was a most knowledgeable cat, even if plain and common, told me that Lori had found the bell in the woods far up in the glen and that it had once been used by Rob Roy, the outlaw, to warn him of the coming of the King’s men.

There were three rooms on the ground floor of the stone house I called my temple; the kitchen, then the one with the fireplace, which was my shrine, and the big bare room where the loom was kept. There was a room up the stairs, a kind of loft where Lori slept, but I was not allowed to go up there even though I was a goddess.

Behind the cottage there was a small barn of stone with a slate roof and here it was that Lori had her hospital for hurt things and there were several places on the roof where the tiles were off that McMurdock showed me, where one could climb up and peer down inside and watch Lori as she tended the sick and the wounded. There was a rabbit and several shrews and field mice, some birds that had fallen out of their nests, and a young stoat that had an injured foot. There were many vacant pens and small wire cages, but Mac tells me that often it is quite full.

Oh yes, it is “Mac” and “Wullie” now, and even Dorcas, who is a snob, is quite friendly and lets me wash her kittens sometimes; the dogs have learned to keep their places. I never spoke of Bubastis again, or my godhead, and nothing more was said, even though the jackdaw would sometimes flap his wings when he saw me coming and screech, “Hi there, Goddess, old girl.” The dogs thought it was very funny, but I must say the cats rallied round and didn’t even seem to mind that I lived in Lori’s house.

But I knew who I was and who and what I had been and that someday I would show them my power and what a goddess can do when she is determined. The Power would return and I would spin and weave like Lori and once again twist the threads of human destiny and bind the cloth of life.

My ka felt at peace and satisfied with my new body. There were no mirrors in Lori’s house, but from what I saw of myself looking into the pool made by the burn near to the house, I was beautiful and not unlike in color and markings what I had been when I was the adored of all and man’s hope and guide in my temple by the Nile.

There I had inspired love in my priestesses, who, in private, when there were no priests about or temple officials, used to stroke me and cuddle me and scratch me under my chin and let me listen to their gossip, where you may be sure I learned a great many things I used in my goddess business, and this was the case with Lori too, for she spoiled and hugged me and, when she was at her loom, sang to me, for she soon learned that I loved to be sung to and was used to it. Her voice was high and sweet like the reed flutes of Bubastis and sometimes when I shut my eyes I could fancy myself back there again in my sanctuary, listening to the music of my worshipers come to adore and petition me.

I was not unhappy in my new incarnation as Talitha. Lori was attentive and kind. There was sufficient to eat, but it was forbidden to go out and catch something even if I had wished to do so, for Lori could not bear to see harm come to any living thing and through that alone I should have recognized her as a priestess and one of us.

And so, soon, my life was proceeding peacefully and happily and would have no doubt continued to do so but for the coming of the Man with the Red Beard—

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M
r. MacDhui was marching truculently through Dumreith Street, bareheaded, thrusting through the summer drizzle, having just paid what he considered an utterly useless call upon a spinster who kept her cat in a child’s crib, when a black umbrella sailed up alongside him, and he heard the quick patter of feet attempting to fall into stride and keep pace with him.

“Would you wish me to try to have a word with the child?” Mr. Peddie asked, with no preliminaries or greetings, and then added seemingly inconsequentially, “You know it will be time soon for her to be thinking of attending the Sunday school.”

The second speech served to distract and take the sting out of the first query, and the roar that had been gathering within MacDhui deflated, since he was not sure whether he had been presented with one idea or two.

“I am not at all sure I want her to attend the Sunday school,” he growled, but then considered in softer vein, “I suppose, after all, her mother would have wished it and seen to it if she were here.” And a moment later, “Confound it, man, why do you have to come a-bothering me at this time with such business?”

It had been an unhappy fortnight for Mr. Veterinary MacDhui, living as an outcast in his own house, eating his meals in the chill of his daughter’s stony glare and silence, and listening to the nervous remarks of Mrs. McKenzie trying to fill the breach.

He had not again attempted the blackmail of compelling her to ask him for food. She had called his bluff from the first and that battle was lost. None of his attempts to break her silence had succeeded. She had suffered him to bathe her, but when he demanded that she say her prayers she had sealed her lips tightly, driving him from the room in a rage. His temper was not lessened when later he heard her saying them for Mrs. McKenzie. Nevertheless he had listened to the list presented for God’s blessing. He rather expected the omission of “Daddy,” but when he did not hear his name immediately after “Mummy in heaven” it came nevertheless as a shock. He considered prayer to be mumbo jumbo and supplication unworthy of the dignity of man. Standing there in the hallway between his room and his daughter’s, he was filled with a miserable sense of desolation and a queer fantasy of a change being made in the books of heaven, a notation that he need no longer be considered when blessings were being dispensed.

“Really, what I would speak with her about,” Mr. Peddie confessed, seeing that he had disarmed his friend somewhat, “was her not talking to you. It is an unhappy affair when a father and a daughter so young are separated by a wall of silence in their own home—whatever the cause—”

“Whatever the cause—whatever the cause,” MacDhui repeated savagely, “whatever WHAT cause? There is no cause but her own stubbornness.” He turned a frown and a glare upon the little dominie, but found the black umbrella momentarily interposed. He shouted down through it, “If I have failed, do you suppose you can do any better? She has the stubbornness of—of—of myself, I suppose, come by honestly. You will not succeed.”

“Have you tried the child with another animal?”

“Oh, aye. The other night I brought home a beautiful beast, as beasts go, a Siamese kitten, an animal of breeding and pedigree. When I placed it in her lap she brushed it off onto the floor and ran screaming to Mrs. McKenzie and buried her face in her apron. She screamed until I took the animal out of the house and put it in a cage next door. The neighbors thought, no doubt, I was taking a strap to her. It might be better perhaps if I did—”

“You cannot beat a child into loving you,” Mr. Peddie remarked.

MacDhui nodded gloomily. Was love then such a tenuous thing as to be destroyed by pique or anger or disappointment? At that moment he felt the ache in his arms for his child, and his heart was filled with longing for the wondrous softness and fragrance of the skin at her temples when he pressed his lips there. And yet he knew that when she stared at him, the eyes hard in the young face and the lips tightly pressed together lest any vagrant sound escape, he would be possessed by the black rage of frustration and hatred for this female counterpart of himself. What was the tie that had bound her to that wretched cat?

And it was true, the neighbors were talking. The gossips had spread the tale of the silence in the house at the end of Argyll Lane and that Veterinary MacDhui’s daughter had not spoken to her father since he had needlessly chloroformed and killed her pet cat. It just went to show, the gossips further said, that when people remarked that Mr. MacDhui was altogether too quick with the chloroform rag it was the truth; if, indeed, he would show no mercy to his little girl’s own pet, what use to bring an animal around to him? Besides which, he was a surly, crotchety, and ungracious man who was like to bite your head off if you so much as spoke a word.

MacDhui was well aware that this was bad for business and that there had been a noticeable falling-off in clients in his waiting room as word had got around that since the affair of his daughter’s cat he was no longer paying proper attention to his work. The story even seemed to have spread to some of the outlying farms where, if not loved, he was at least respected. Calls for his services during the past fortnight seemed to have been fewer and farther between.

“I do not know—I do not know—I cannot understand it.” Mr. MacDhui groaned aloud, as though his friend were not there. “I would bring the brute back to life for her if I but could”—and then with a sudden angry shake of his shaggy head—“but, by God, I would chloroform it all over again if she brought it to me in the same state—”

“Some children are lonely,” Mr. Peddie said. “It may have taken away somewhat her loneliness.”

Although the minister had left unsaid the concluding thought, “She is motherless,” nevertheless MacDhui heard the sentence in his inner ear as though it had been spoken. Had he been jealous of the animal and her affection for it? Had this made him less than careful in diagnosing the beast’s ailment and too quick to dispose of it? Well, it was over and done with now. And a child should not be lonely with plenty of playmates. She always seemed to be about with some small fry or other from the neighborhood.

He had not noticed how alone she had been since the episode of the cat, that she had lost interest in her friends and in play and each day had taken to longer periods of silent brooding. Often when Mrs. McKenzie thought she was out with Hughie Stirling or Geordie McNabb she would be off by the loch shore, sitting on the beach looking into the water, unseeing, or shut away by herself in her room, grieving for her dead.

Her friends fell away too, for children are more sensitive and quick to observe changes or odd behavior in companions of their own age than are adults; quick too, to write them off and respect their moods. After several rebuffs, when Mary Ruadh had silently shaken her head and refused to accompany them to the quay, or go berrying, or attend a picnic with Hughie Stirling on the manor grounds, they had ceased to come. Imperceptibly Mary Ruadh had begun her withdrawal from a world that had suddenly manifested itself as harsh, cruel, and unjust.

Mr. MacDhui groaned again and said aloud, “Aye, but what’s to do? I felt certain that after a time she would tire of the game, but, if anything she seems to grow more adamant. It is as though I were not there when she regards me—”

Mr. Peddie, who did not believe in putting things off, said, “I will go and have a word with her now and see if I can get at what lies behind her behavior.”

They walked in silence to the end of Argyll Lane together, where Mr. MacDhui with a final “You’ll get nowhere—I promise you.” went into the cottage housing his hospital and dispensary, while the minister padded up the stone path next door and entered the veterinarian’s home. He found Mary Ruadh sitting on the stairs looking, but he saw at once that her gaze was directed not without, but within. Also he was surprised to see how pale she was and she seemed to have lost weight as well. Certainly she was not the healthy, cheerful child he had seen over a fortnight before, holding her sick cat.

Mr. Peddie put aside his hat and umbrella with gravity of demeanor, eschewing forced cheerfulness, and went and sat down a few steps below her. A father, with a brood of his own, he was familiar with some of the intricacies of a child’s mind, though not all. He opened with the safe gambit of the weather. “Foooosh,” he sighed, “will this mizzle of summer’s rain never end? It keeps a parson’s clothes from drying and makes little girls stay indoors. Wouldn’t you like to come over to our house and blow bubbles with Fiona and my young Andrew?”

He could see upon her the struggle to return and from how far, how very far away she seemed to have to come. When she had at last parted the curtains of her dream and stepped through them she regarded him solemnly and wordlessly and silently shook her head in the negative.

Looking up at her, Mr. Peddie suddenly felt himself indescribably moved at the sight of this small, plain, red-haired Mary Ruadh, a little girl sitting alone upon the stairs in a stone house with no dolls at her side, no companions, and no four-footed friends. And because he was himself an instrument, he was astonished to find himself in the presence of that deep soul-sickness which heretofore he had encountered only in adults and which he was attuned to perceive, as some doctors can enter a sickroom and diagnose the illness by the atmosphere.

“Mary Ruadh,” the round little man said, kindly but seriously, “I know that you are grieving sore for your cat Thomasina—” The child’s stare turned quickly to a hostile glower. Then she looked away from him, but Mr. Peddie continued, “I recall Thomasina almost as though she were here at the foot of the steps. Let us see whether I can remember correctly, and if I do not you shall tell me so.”