The fireside sphinx. Agnes Repplier
bitter persecution of the cat, there are two points to be especially considered. Its sinister reputation—obtained. Heaven knows how—as the accomplice of witches, and the chosen emissary of the Fiend; and the evil character it won for itself—again. Heaven knows how—as an animal equally perfidious and malign. In zoölogical mythology, and in the folk-lore of every land, it figures darkly, and without esteem. A Hindoo fable represents the cat as living with pretended austerity on the banks of the Ganges. The fame of the new Saint's piety, of his long prayers and rigorous fasts, inspires the little birds and mice with such confidence that they gather around him daily, and are daily devoured. From Alexandria we have the story, retold by Æsop and La Fontaine, of the cat bride who leaps from her husband's embraces after a scudding mouse. In an Alsatian legend, a cat comes again and again as a nightmare to torment a young joiner. He wakens once to find her stealing into his room through a hole in the chimney-place; whereupon he stops up the hole, and nails one of her paws to the floor. The next morning reveals to him a beautiful young woman, whom, with the customary fatuity of youth, he promptly marries. But, after a year of wedded life, the hole is by some luckless chance uncovered, and the unfaithful wife disappears, never to be seen again.
Every country adds its quota of dispraise. The story of the nightmare cat appears with variations in the folk-lore of Germany, Austria, and France. Italy tells the fable of the cock who wants to be Pope. His friend, the cat, offers to accompany the foolish bird to Rome, and eats him up comfortably on the first day's journey. In a Bavarian tale, the cat marries the mouse, and sups, without a shadow of remorse, on her small bridegroom. Now and then the picture is brightened by some unexpected touch of fidelity or gratitude, as in the Afanassieff, where a peasant girl gives the witch's cat a piece of ham, and is helped by him generously in return. There is also a grisly Tuscan legend of a servant maid who unwittingly disturbs the procession of ghosts, on the terrible "Night of the Dead." When the phantoms have swept noiselessly past, she finds, to her horror, that she has a human hand in her basket. By the advice of a wise woman, she keeps this hand a year, and on the following Feast of All Souls she ventures once again to stand in the road at midnight, with the open basket at her feet, and a black cat clasped tightly in her arms. "Take back your hand, my masters!" she pleads; and one of the ghosts plucks it from the basket, whispering grimly, "Were it not for the thing you carry, you should walk this night by my side."
The protection afforded by the cat in such an instance was, after all, involuntary, and by no means lessened her disrepute. One does not lightly love a guardian so uncanny. It is probable also that the sailors' wives of Scarborough, who filched their neighbours' black kittens to insure their husbands' safe return from sea, regarded these stolen prizes with more respect than affection. Even in instances where the animal has manifested its own too rare regard, there is often a subtle horror associated with its faithfulness. We remember apprehensively the cat that loved the poisoner, Wainewright, that would not leave his side, and that was the sole witness of his sudden death.
From Lyons comes a dreadful story of crime and retribution. Towards the close of the last century, a woman was found murdered in her home, her throat brutally cut, her oaken chest rifled of its scanty treasures. She had lived alone, with no other companion than a great brindled cat, and this cat was now discovered by the neighbours huddled on a cornice of the cupboard, his glaring eyes fixed full upon his dead mistress. No persuasion nor artifice could move him from his post. For two whole days and nights he crouched there like a panther tense for the spring. On the third morning, a man, suspected of the murder, was brought into the room, when suddenly, and with horrible fury, the creature hurled himself upon the assassin, biting and tearing him savagely. Confession and execution followed; but of the cat's fate we know nothing. Two hundred years earlier, his shrift would have been a short one. Not even his avenging rage could have saved him from sharing the murderer's grave.
Innocence was no protection for an outcast of his fated race. Among the famous French trials of the seventeenth century is one of a woman who had strangled in cold blood several little children left by their mothers to her care. For this hideous crime she was condemned to be hung in an iron cage over a slow fire, in company with fourteen cats that had killed nobody, but that added to the horror of the spectacle by clawing fiercely at the murderess in the throes of their own death agony.
The page of Pussy's martyrdom has been long in turning. It has been no pleasure, Heaven knows, to linger over it; but when we think of the strange and bitter vicissitudes through which she has passed—this creature so small and helpless, so timid and so brave, we come to a better understanding of her complex, subtle, and, to many minds, unlovely character. Self-sufificing by nature, she has learned distrust through centuries of suffering. To see a cat run across a street is to understand that her race has for generation after generation been hunted as cruelly as the hare. She scurries by swiftly and fearfully, as did that poor ancestress of hers whom the Puritan soldiers chased derisively around the nave of Lichfield Cathedral, until Prince Rupert interrupted their pious sport. She knows not now precisely what she dreads—the coast being clear, and no boys nor dogs in sight; she knew not three hundred years ago why she was held responsible for theological errors in which she had no share. Catholicism, Anglicanism, Puritanism—all were alike indifferent to her; yet, as we have seen, she bore the burden of man's devout distaste for his neighbour's creed. Perhaps the last authentic instance of feline persecution for conscience' sake was the case of the "ecclesiastical cat" that George Borrow met and rescued in Wales.
The Vicar of Llangollen, a most unpopular character in a stronghold of sturdy dissent, had returned to England, leaving behind him his black cat; and the antagonism formerly felt for the clergyman had been transferred to the clerical pet. No householder would give it food or shelter; and, if it slunk trembling through the village streets, the children pelted it with stones and clots of mud. "There never was a cat so ill-treated as that poor Church of England animal," says Borrow indignantly; "and altogether on account of the opinions which it was supposed to have imbibed in the house of its late master; for I never could learn that the dissenters of Llangollen were in the habit of persecuting other cats. The cat was a Church of England cat, and that was enough." Finally he was obliged to carry away this unconscious and reluctant martyr, and to seek for it an asylum in another village, where it was charitably received by a young woman, who, being herself an Anglican, was all the more ready to aid an oppressed scion of the Establishment.
It is a touch of comedy with which to ring down the curtain on Pussy's tragic past.
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