The fireside sphinx. Agnes Repplier

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СКАЧАТЬ legacy which we have no mind to lose; and all conscientious chroniclers should protest against the grovelling preciseness which would banish it from England's annals. There are records to show that "Richard Whityngdon" was thrice Lord Mayor of London, serving in 1397, 1406, and 1409; that he was born in Gloucestershire, was a mercer by trade, that he married Alice Fitzwarren, and that he lent one thousand pounds—doubtless at goodly interest—to King Henry the Fourth. There is also the evidence of that venerable stone which was found in the garden of a house in Westgate Street, Gloucester, where the grand-nephew of the Lord Mayor is known to have lived in 1460. This stone represents in bas-relief a boy holding in his arms a cat, the ever-famous cat that lifted her young master from penury; and it is ​a pleasant proof that the Whityngdons were not unmindful of the source whence sprang their wealth and distinction.

      What makes the historian so eager to dwell long and lovingly upon every page gilded by Pussy's triumphs is the deepening gloom through which we see her little figure steal frightened and forlorn. For centuries she is hidden from our sight; and, when she emerges out of the unknown, a strange and melancholy change has come over her fortunes. Here and there we find such scanty proof as I have offered of toleration, and even of esteem, on the score of usefulness; but, as she grew in time to be a familiar object in the homes of men, they looked at her askance with cruel and troubled eyes. The god of Egypt, the plaything of Rome, became, by some sad ill chance, a symbol of evil things. Her beauty, her grace, her gentleness availed her nothing. She was the witch's friend, and on many a murky midnight had gazed unblinkingly upon shameful spells. The Prince of the Power of Darkness had taken her for his own, and she dwelt by the hearths of men to lure them to destruction. The cat that served seven masters, each for seven years, carried the soul of the seventh into Hell. Like the were-wolf, she set free the primitive, bestial impulses of humanity. The wife who left her sleeping husband's side to share the obscene revels ​of warlocks and of witches, stole through the lattice window as a sleek black cat. Perchance some passing traveller, seeing her glide by, wounded her with stone or sword; and the next morning she was found maimed and bleeding beneath the counterpane. In ruined churches, pillaged and desecrated by the unsparing wickedness of war, there assembled, on the eve of Saint John, hags and wizards and young girls caught in Satan's toils, all creeping through the darkness under the forms of cats, and all afire with impious relish for sorcery and sin.

      Innumerable legends cluster around the cat during these picturesque centuries of superstition, when men were poor in letters, but rich in vivid imaginings; when they were densely ignorant, but never dull. Even after the Dark Ages had grown light, there was no lifting of the gloom which enveloped Pussy's pathway, there was no visible softening of her lot. The stories told of her impish wickedness have the same general character throughout Europe. We meet them with modest variations in France, in Germany, in Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland and Wales. It was a belated woodcutter of Brittany who saw with horror-stricken eyes thirteen cats dancing in sacrilegious glee around a wayside crucifix. One he killed with his axe, and the other twelve disappeared in a trice. It was a charcoal-burner in the Black ​Forest who, hearing strange noises near his kiln at night, arose from bed and stepped into the clearing. Before him, motionless in the moonlight, sat three cats. He stooped to pick up a stone, and the relic of Saint Gildas he carried in his bosom fell from its snapt string upon the ground. Immediately his arm hung helpless, and he could not touch the stone. Then one of the cats said to its companions: "For the sake of his wife, who is my gossip, sisters, let him go!" and the next morning he was found lying unconscious, but unharmed, across the forest road.

      From Scandinavia, where the fair white cats of Freija were once as honoured as were Odin's ravens and Thor's goats, comes the tale of the haunted mill in which dreadful revelry was heard at night, and which had been twice burned to the ground on Whitsun Eve. The third year, a travelling tailor, pious and brave, offered to keep watch. He chalked a circle on the floor, wrote the Lord's prayer around it, and waited with patience until midnight. Then a troop of cats crept stealthily in, carrying a great pot of pitch which they hung in the fireplace, lighting the logs beneath it. Soon the pitch bubbled and seethed, and the cats, swinging the pot, tried to overturn it. The tailor drove them away; and when one, who seemed to be the leader, sought to pull him gently outside the magic ​circle, he cut off its paw with his knife. Upon this they all fled howling into the night; and the next morning the miller saw with joy his mill standing unharmed, and the great wheel turning merrily in the water. But the miller's wife was ill in bed; and, when the tailor bade her good-by, she gave him her left hand, hiding beneath the bedclothes the right arm's bleeding stump.

      There is also a Scandinavian version of the ever famous story which Sir Walter Scott told to Washington Irving, which "Monk" Lewis told to Shelley, and which, in one form or another, we find embodied in the folk-lore of every land—the story of the traveller who saw within a ruined abbey a procession of cats lowering into its grave a little coffin with a crown upon it. Filled with horror, he hastened from the spot; but when he reached his destination, he could not forbear relating to a friend the wonder he had seen. Scarcely had the tale been told, when his friend's cat, who lay curled up tranquilly by the fire, sprang to its feet, cried out, "Then I am the King of the Cats!" and disappeared in a flash up the chimney.

      In the Norwegian tale, which lacks the subtle suggestiveness of the German, the cat is a young Troll, who, hiding from the jealous wrath of Knurremurre, lived for three years as a peaceful pussy in the house of a Jutland peasant. One day this man, ​toiling to market with his basket of eggs, was met by a Troll from Brönö, who sang out to him lustily:—

      "Hör du, Plat,

      Siig til din Kat

       At Knurremurre er död."

      ("Hark you, Plat,

      Tell your cat

       That Knurremurre is dead.")

      In no way enlightened by this message, the peasant went home and repeated it to his wife; whereupon his cat leaped from the hearth, cried joyously, "Then I am the Master Troll," and overturned the pot of soup in his haste to scramble up the chimney, and be gone.

      In Sternberg's "Legends of Northamptonshire," we have the story of a woodman whose dinner was stolen from him daily by a cat. After many vain attempts, he succeeded in waylaying the creature and cutting off one of its paws, only to find, when he reached home, that his wife had lost her hand. The curious deviltry which provoked witches to plague their husbands, in preference to other men, is one of the interesting points in the annals of sorcery. Those were wild times, when strength ruled the world roughly; and the witch wife—once innocent and weak—had doubtless a long score of insults to avenge before she took to burning her husband's mill, or stealing his daily bread.

      ​As for the poor cat, her fate was sealed; and we can hardly wonder at the deep suspicion with which men regarded an animal so mysterious, and so closely allied to the supernatural. Even when her behaviour was harmless or beneficial, they feared a lurking malice which never lacked the power for evil things. M. Champfleury tells us of a French woman, a native of Billancourt, who was peacefully cooking an omelette, when a black cat strayed into her cottage, and sat upright on the hearth. She took no notice of the creature, but went on with her work. The cat watched the omelette attentively for a moment, and then said: "It is done. Turn it over." Indignant at advice from such a quarter, the woman hastily flung her half-cooked eggs at the beast's head, and the next morning had the satisfaction of seeing a deep red burn on the cheek of an evilly disposed neighbour.

      The trials for witchcraft—always of absorbing interest—offer ample proof of Pussy's wicked associations. Again and again she figures with direful prominence in the records of demonology. A black-hearted Scottish witch confessed in the year 1591 that she had impiously christened a cat; and that she and other witches had carried this animal "sayling in their Riddles or Gives into the middest of the sea, and so left it before the towne of Leith; whereupon there did arise such a tempest at sea, as ​a greater hath not been seen." Nor was this all. It was against King Jamie—pious enemy of СКАЧАТЬ