or cat-a-pelt, as some horrid boys call it, because they think it was invented to pelt poor pussies with.
Shireen, however, had managed hitherto to keep out of their way. She was very often to be seen in the village street, walking along leisurely enough, but as soon as that hideous yell was borne along on the breeze, which told her the boys’ school had just been dismissed, pussy increased her pace and disappeared.
Shireen knew boys. She knew all their tricks and their manners, and she could have told you that boys were boys all the wide world over.
Well, as she is crossing the street to-day, giving a glance up and down every two or three seconds to make certain the coast was clear, the rattle of light wheels was heard.
That was the butcher’s cart.
She listened and looked, one paw in the air.
Yes, there was Danger himself coming round the corner with his red tongue lolling out of his open mouth, for though it was autumn the weather was warm.
Danger sees pussy almost as soon as she sees him.
“There’s that long-tailed white cat again,” he says to himself. “Well, I’ll have her this time right enough. Here goes!”
And straight along the road he comes rushing with the speed of a torpedo.
Shireen doesn’t lose her presence of mind. Not a bit of it. She measures the distance with a glance from Uncle Ben’s railing, and calculates to the tenth part of a second the time it will take her to reach it.
She wants to make that dog believe that he is sure of her, so that she may, in triumph and safety, enjoy his chagrin and disappointment all the more.
On he comes, on and on.
Shireen pretends she doesn’t see him.
He is within two yards of her. Oh! he has caught her! No, he hasn’t! One dart, one dive, and she is safe on the other side of Ben’s friendly railing.
He – Danger – can’t get through.
Only just his nose, and no more.
And what a fool he was to stick that between the rails. Shireen springs round like fire from flint.
“Fuss! Fut!”
That blow was beautifully aimed, and poor Danger goes howling off with a sadly torn nose.
I say poor Danger, because it really was the fault of that wicked butcher-boy. Dogs are only what men make them.
Shireen is not so young as she was once upon a time, but she feels very youthful now. And very happy too. She stops for a few minutes to dry herself in a patch of sunshine, then goes galloping off across Ben’s lawn, making pretences that the withered leaves are mice, and whacking them about in all directions.
Next moment she has jumped into Ben’s hammock.
“Why, old girl,” cries Ben, “you’re as playful as a kitten. Who would think, Shireen, that you were over twenty years of age, and had seen nearly as much of the world as Uncle Ben himself? Well, sit there and sing to me. Now, that is real soothing, and I’m not at all sure I won’t go to sleep. For at my time of life, Shireen, it’s best to take all out of life you can get.”
Ben’s hand and book drop listlessly on his breast, and while the autumn wind goes moaning through the pine trees overhead, keeping up a kind of sibilant bass to Shireen’s song, while his pet cockatoo nods on his perch near by, the ancient mariner dozes – and dreams.
Chapter Two
Old Friends Around the Fire
“The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in its flight;
“But the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.”
No cares had Colonel Clarkson to trouble him. So everyone would have told round the village or in the parish. It was then nearly the autumn of life with the Colonel, but really and truly he seemed to be growing old gracefully. Nor did he allow the little worries of life to interfere in the least with the calm enjoyment of his placid existence.
He had been a busy man in his younger days. But that was years ago. He had fought in the Crimea, he had waved his sword on Persian plains, and on Afghanistan heights, and he had gone through all the horrors of the Indian Mutiny. He had even been side by side with brave Havelock in the rush for the Residency up that long street of death and fire where brave Neill fell. Yet concerning these and his many other adventures he was seldom very communicative, albeit there were times when his friend Uncle Ben succeeded in drawing him out, and then his stories were well worth listening to.
The Colonel was like many brave soldiers, a somewhat shy man, and certainly kept himself personally very much in the background when describing a battle or the storming of a trench against fearful odds. That he had not kept himself in the background on the real field of fight was evident enough from the medals he had won but seldom if ever wore. And one of these was the Victoria Cross.
When the Colonel did suffer himself to be drawn out, as Sailor Ben phrased it, he never told his stories excitedly, but in low calm tones, and in earnest conversational English, that carried conviction of the truthfulness of every item of his narrative to the hearts of his listeners.
And who would these listeners be? I must tell you that, and having done so I shall have introduced you to most of the personalities who figure in this biography.
The listeners then may, indeed they must be, divided into two groups. The first group was composed of human beings, the second of what I am loth indeed to call the lower animals. It is mere conventionality on my part to do so, for the creatures God has permitted us to domesticate, and who are such faithful and trustworthy servants, are oftentimes quite as interesting in a way as many of their masters – men.
On that very autumnal evening on which Shireen paid her visit to Uncle Ben’s bungalow, and made it so hot for the butcher’s dog, our two groups were all together around the fire at the Colonel’s Castle, as the old soldier’s house was generally called, and Castle it once had been in reality.
On this particular evening after Ben had finished his pipe and drank the tea that Pedro had brought him, he had smoothed pussy once more, and said: – “I think now, Shireen, we’ll take a walk to the Castle and see your master. By that time gloaming will be falling, and it will be what my dear friend the Colonel calls the ‘Children’s Hour.’”
“Meow!” said puss, as if she knew all about it, and quite understood every word that Uncle Ben said when he repeated Longfellow’s dreamy lines:
“Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.
“I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.”
People who had met Uncle Ben this evening walking along towards the Colonel’s Castle, were not a bit astonished to see Shireen trotting contentedly beside him, her tail in the air and head erect; nor to see his wonderful cockatoo balancing himself uneasily on his shoulder, and giving vent now and then to a war-whoop that would have scared a Comanche Indian, and certainly frightened the dogs.
Uncle Ben’s cockatoo was as often on his shoulder as anywhere else, and the bird was a frequent visitor at the old Castle, only he insisted on remaining on his master’s shoulder all the time he stayed there, generally taking stock of things around him; sometimes making a remark or