by Paul Gallico
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. Th
en 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.”
Mary Ruadh looked back at him tentatively, unsure, but with this much of her attention he began: “She was so long”—holding his hands to illustrate—“so wide, and so high and her fur was the color of mixed ginger and honey biscuits in alternating stripes, but on her chest she had a pure white blaze in the shape of a triangle, something like this—” and he made one with his fingers.
Mary Ruadh shook her head decisively. “It was round—like this!”
The dominie nodded. “Now that I reflect and you remind me, it was round, and she had three white feet—”
“Four.”
“And a white spot at the very tip of her tail—”
“Yes, but a little one—”
“Very well, then,” Peddie continued. “Her head was most beautifully formed, and her ears were rather delicate and pointed and large for her head, but they stood up straight and made her look most alert and knowing.”
The child was watching him closely now, taking in every word, checking every point. Her expression had softened. Color had come back to her pale cheeks and her eyes were alive again.
“Now her nose. How well I seem to remember her nose; it was the color of the terra-cotta tile on the roof of the vestry and there was one little speck of black on it.”
“Two,” corrected Mary Ruadh, and held up two fingers with a triumphant and dimpled smile.
“Hm, yes, two,” admitted Mr. Peddie. “I seem to see the other now just a little to the south of the first one, but hardly to be noticed unless one looked most carefully. And now we come to her eyes. Do you remember her eyes, Mary Ruadh?”
She nodded excitedly but waited for him to go on with the description. He said, “Surely they were the most beautiful thing about Thomasina. They were like emeralds in a setting of gold. And her tongue was the most delectable pink, just the color of my polyantha roses when they first begin to bud in the spring. I remember once seeing her sitting opposite you at your tea table at a tea party, with a white napkin about her neck and with just the tip of her tongue showing. I said to myself, ‘Hullo! Thomasina has been eating my polyantha and one of the petals is still showing.’ ”
Mary Ruadh laughed so that Mrs. McKenzie, at a sound that had been too long absent from that house, stuck her head through the kitchen door to see. “But it wasn’t. It was her tongue all the time,” the little girl cried.
Peddie nodded. “Didn’t I feel the fool when I found it out. And I do remember what perfect manners she had, how she sat up like a real lady at the table, not a-lapping of her cambric tea until she was bidden, and when you offered her a biscuit she bumped it three times with her nose before accepting it.”
“She liked caraway cakes the best,” Mary Ruadh commented, and then asked, “Why did she bump them?”
“Well,” the minister replied reflectively, “you may have your choice. Either she was smelling of them first as a kind of precautionary measure, not a very polite thing to do at a company tea, or she was being most polite, and each bump meant, ‘For me? —Oh, but you are TOO kind!— Ah well, then, if you really insist . . .’ ”
“She was being polite,” Mary Ruadh decided, with a firm and knowing shake of her head.
“And I remember also how beautifully she moved, how lithe and graceful her long body was and how relaxed when you wore her around your neck sometimes, almost as though she were asleep.”
“Thomasina slept with me in my bed at night,” Mary Ruadh said. The glow had spread to her eyes now—
“And do you remember her little private call to you, what it sounded like? I heard it once when I passed your house and you were both without and she wished for your attention.”
Mary Ruadh thought deeply, a fist pressed under her small rounded chin, and then gave more than a passable imitation of the seldom heard love call of the late Thomasina: “Prrrrrrrrrow.”
“Yes,” Mr. Peddie agreed, “it was ‘Prrrrrrrrrow!’ exactly. And so you see, Mary Ruadh, Thomasina is not really dead at all. We have reassembled her, you and I, and here she is before us both again as large as life.”
The child fell silent again as she stared at him, her young brow furrowed beneath the lock of ginger hair that fell over it, not quite comprehending.
“She lives on,” the minister explained, “in your memory and mine. Don’t you see that as long as you and I are here to think of her and remember her as she was in all her beauty, she cannot ever die? You have but to close your eyes to see her. No one can ever take this memory from you, and sometimes when you are in bed asleep at night, she will come to you in your dreams, only ten times more beautiful and loving than she was before. Come, close your eyes and tell me; do you not see her now as we have described her?”
Mary Ruadh screwed up her eyes and her face with the effort. She said, “Yes.” Nevertheless when she opened them she looked into those of Mr. Peddie with a clear and direct gaze and said quite simply, “But I want her.”
The minister nodded and said, “Of course, and now that you have learned how, you have but to call her to your mind and she will come. When you are older, Mary Ruadh, you will know love of a different kind, and bereavement and grief and all that is a part of the difficult journey through life. And you will remember perhaps a little bit of what I have been trying to tell you today—that there is no wound of sorrow and mourning so great that loving memory cannot help to heal it. Do you think you understand this, Mary Ruadh?”
This time the child did not reply but only regarded him solemnly. Mr. Peddie then ventured to the crux of the matter. He said, “Thomasina lives in your father’s mind as in yours and mine. If you were to put your arms about his neck and give him an old-fashioned whisper that you loved him, you and he could remember Thomasina together just as you and I have done and that would make the memory picture even brighter, for he would perhaps remember things we have left out—”
The child gave this suggestion a moment’s grave consideration and then shook her head slowly and firmly in the negative. “I can’t,” she declared, “Daddy’s dead!”
Taken aback, it was now Mr. Peddie’s turn to stare at this strange child, for in spite of his knowledge and experience, he was shocked at the sudden and unexpected turn the conversation had taken. “But, Mary Ruadh! How can you say such a thing. Your father is not dead . . .”
“Yes, he is,” the little girl insisted gravely and unemotionally, and then added succinctly, “I killed him.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Peddie softly—for he was beginning to see which way the wind was blowing—“That was not very kind. How did you kill your daddy?”
Mary Ruadh reflected the precise details, savoring them again with a pleased and slightly malevolent expression on her face and gave them to the nonplused minister, who was beginning to suspect that in spite of being a father and a minister of the gospel, his understanding of child psychology left something to be desired.
“I put him on a long white table,” she narrated, “and poured something out of a bottle onto a rag and held it over his nose. Daddy wriggled awfully at first, but I sat on him and held the rag there until he didn’t wriggle anymore, but was dead. Then I put him out on the dust heap, but later I put him in a basket lined with silk and put on my mournings and we all went and buried him and Jamie Braid played the lament, but I was glad he was dead and did not cry at all.”
The Reverend Peddie tried once more. “Then who is this man who comes home in the evening and sits across the table from you with his heart breaking because you will not greet him, or speak to him, or kiss him good night?” he asked.
Mary Ruadh reflected on this question seriously for a moment before she replied, “I don’t know,” and then added with unequivocal finality, “I don’t like him.”
Angus Peddie, who in his youth had been a considerable sports enthusiast and
player of games, knew when he was beaten and also how to accept defeat with grace. He sighed and arose from the stairs, retrieving his hat and umbrella. Then going to her, he said, “Perhaps we will talk about this further some other time, Mary Ruadh,” and gently kissed the pale cheek, nor did she try to avoid his doing so, and he took his leave.
But he noted and remembered that the paleness had returned to the face and the lackluster quality of the deep blue eyes and that when he had last looked back upon her she had looked not like a child but a little bowed old lady, and he made up his mind to suggest to Andrew MacDhui to have a word with Dr. Strathsay the next time he saw him, to suggest that he drop by, perhaps, and have a look at the child just in case there was something organic troubling her as well. Mr. Peddie was a well-read man and knew something of the severity of the traumas that could result from imagined as well as genuine catastrophies. A young lady of seven who on one and the same day had had her symbolic mother chloroformed practically before her eyes and thereafter had revenged herself by the mental murdering of her father, might understandably require the services of the family physician, if only to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The veterinary, however, was not in his office when the minister stopped by to tell him the results of his attempt and confess his failure, having gone out to a back-country call, and thus other matters intervened and in the end old Dr. Strathsay was not summoned until it was too late.
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Andrew MacDhui soon was left in no doubt that gossip about him and the affair of his daughter’s cat was all about Inveranoch and hurting his business with the locals. Now a hush would fall upon a knot of gabblers in front of the post office when he entered or left, or at the chemist’s; he was conscious of drawing looks askance and could hear the whispers when his back was turned.