Claudius Nero, on the contrary, thirsted for applause. Affable, debonair, and democratic to the core, the caresses and commendations of a chance visitor or of a housemaid were as valuable to him as were my own. I never looked at him “showing off,” as children say,—jumping from chair to chair, balancing himself on the bedpost, or scrambling rapturously up the forbidden curtains,—without thinking of the young Emperor who contended in the amphitheatre for the worthless plaudits of the crowd. He was impulsive and affectionate,—so, I believe was the Emperor for a time,—and as masterful as if born to the purple. His mother struggled hard to maintain her rightful authority, but it was in vain. He woke her from her sweetest naps; he darted at her tail, and leaped down on her from sofas and tables with the grace of a diminutive panther. Every time she attempted to punish him for these misdemeanors he cried piteously for help, and was promptly and unwisely rescued by some kind-hearted member of the family. After a while Agrippina took to sitting on her tail, in order to keep it out of his reach, and I have seen her many times carefully tucking it out of sight. She had never been a cat of active habits or of showy accomplishments, and the daring agility of the little Nero amazed and bewildered her. “A Spaniard,” observes that pleasant gossip, James Howell, “walks as if he marched, and seldom looks upon the ground, as if he contemned it. I was told of a Spaniard who, having got a fall by a stumble, and broke his nose, rose up, and in a disdainful manner said, ‘This comes of walking on the earth.’”
Now Nero seldom walked on the earth. At least, he never, if he could help it, walked on the floor; but traversed a room in a series of flying leaps from chair to table, from table to lounge, from lounge to desk, with an occasional dash at the mantelpiece, just to show what he could do. It was curious to watch Agrippina during the performance of these acrobatic feats. Pride, pleasure, the anxiety of a mother, and the faint resentment of conscious inferiority struggled for mastership in her little breast. Sometimes, when Nero’s radiant self-satisfaction grew almost insufferable, I have seen her eyelids narrow sullenly, and have wondered whether the Roman Empress ever looked in that way at her brilliant and beautiful son, when maternal love was withering slowly under the shadow of coming evil. Sometimes, when Nero had been prancing and paddling about with absurd and irresistible glee, attracting and compelling the attention of everybody in the room, Agrippina would jump up on my lap, and look in my face with an expression I thought I understood. She had never before valued my affection in all her little petted, pampered life. She had been sufficient for herself, and had merely tolerated me as a devoted and useful companion. But now that another had usurped so many of her privileges, I fancied there were moments when it pleased her to know that one subject, at least, was not to be beguiled from allegiance; that to one friend, at least, she always was and always would be the dearest cat in the world.
I am glad to remember that love triumphed over jealousy, and that Agrippina’s devotion to Nero increased with every day of his short life. The altruism of a cat seldom reaches beyond her kittens; but she is capable of heroic unselfishness where they are concerned. I knew of a London beast, a homeless, forlorn vagrant, who constituted herself an out-door pensioner at the house of a friendly man of letters. This cat had a kitten, whose youthful vivacity won the hearts of a neighboring family. They adopted it willingly, but refused to harbor the mother, who still came for her daily dole to her only benefactor. Whenever a bit of fish or some other especial dainty was given her, this poor mendicant scaled the wall, and watched her chance to share it with her kitten, her little wealthy, greedy son, who gobbled it up as remorselessly as if he were not living on the fat of the land.
Agrippina would have been swift to follow such an example of devotion. At dinner time she always yielded the precedence to Nero, and it became one of our daily tasks to compel the little lad to respect his mother’s privileges. He scorned his saucer of milk, and from tenderest infancy aspired to adult food, making predatory incursions upon Agrippina’s plate, and obliging us finally to feed them in separate apartments. I have seen him, when a very young kitten, rear himself upon his baby legs, and with his soft and wicked little paw strike his mother in the face until she dropped the piece of meat she had been eating, when he tranquilly devoured it. It was to prevent the recurrence of such scandalous scenes that two dining-rooms became a necessity in the family. Yet he was so loving and so lovable, poor little Claudius Nero! Why do I dwell on his faults, remembering, as I do, his winning sweetness and affability? Day after day, in the narrow city garden, the two cats played together, happy in each other’s society, and never a yard apart. Night after night they retired at the same time, and slept upon the same cushion, curled up inextricably into one soft, furry ball. Many times I have knelt by their chair to bid them both good-night; and always, when I did so, Agrippina would lift her charming head, purr drowsily for a few seconds, and then nestle closer still to her first-born, with sighs of supreme satisfaction. The zenith of her life had been reached. Her cup of contentment was full.
It is a rude world, even for little cats, and evil chances lie in wait for the petted creatures we strive to shield from harm. Remembering the pangs of separation, the possibilities of unkindness or neglect, the troubles that hide in ambush on every unturned page, I am sometimes glad that the same cruel and selfish blow struck both mother and son, and that they lie together, safe from hurt or hazard, sleeping tranquilly and always, under the shadow of the friendly pines.
AT THE NOVELIST’S TABLE.
“Compare,” said a friend to me recently, “the relative proportion of kissing and venison pasties in Scott’s novels and Miss Rhoda Broughton’s,”—and I did. It was a lame comparison, owing to my limited acquaintance with part of the given text; but I pursued my investigations cheerfully along the line of Waverley, and was delighted and edified by the result. Years ago, a sulky critic in Blackwood, commenting acrimoniously on Miss Susan Warner’s very popular tales, asserted that there was more kissing in one of these narratives than in all the stories Sir Walter ever wrote. Probably the critic was right. As far as I can recollect Miss Warner’s heroines,—and I knew several of them intimately when a child,—they were always either kissing or crying, and occasionally they did both together. Ellen Montgomery, dissolved in tears because John has forgotten to kiss her good-night, was as cheerless a companion as I ever found in the wide world of story-book life.
But Scott’s young people never seem to hunger for embraces. They allow the most splendid opportunities to slip by without a single caress. When Quentin Durward rescues the Countess Isabella at the siege of Liége, he does not pause to passionately kiss her cold lips; he gathers her up with all possible speed, and makes practical plans for getting her out of the way. When Edith Bellenden visits her imprisoned lover, no thought of kissing enters either mind. Henry Morton is indeed so overcome by “deep and tumultuous feeling” that he presses his visitor’s “unresisting hands;” but even this indulgence is of brief duration. Miss Bellenden quickly recovers her hands, and begins to discuss the situation with a great deal of sense and good feeling. Henry Bertram does not appear to have stolen a single kiss from that romantic and charming young woman, Julia Mannering, in the whole course of their clandestine courtship; and the propriety of Lord Glenvarloch’s behavior, when shut up in a cell with pretty Margaret Ramsay, must be remembered by all. “Naething for you to sniggle and laugh at, Steenie,” observes King James reprovingly to the Duke of Buckingham, when that not immaculate nobleman betrays some faint amusement at the young Scotchman’s modesty. “He might be a Father of the Church, in comparison of you, man.”
In the matter of venison pasties, however, we have a different tale to tell. There are probably ten of these toothsome dishes to every kiss, twenty of them to every burst of tears. Compare Quentin Durward as a fighter to Quentin Durward as a lover, and then, by way of understanding how he preserved his muscle, turn back to that delightful fourth chapter, where the French King plays the part of host at the famous inn breakfast. So admirably is the scene described in two short pages, so fine is the power of Scott’s genial human sympathy, that I have never been able, since reading it, to cherish for Louis XI. the aversion which is his rightful due. In vain I recall the familiar tales of his cruelty and baseness. In vain I remind myself of his treacherous plans for poor Durward’s destruction. ’Tis useless! I cannot dissociate him from that noble meal, nor from the generous enthusiasm with which he provides for, and encourages, the splendid appetite of youth. The inn breakfast has but one peer, even in Scott’s mirthful pages, and to find it we must follow the fortunes of another monarch who masquerades to better purpose than does Maître Pierre, whose asylum is the hermitage of St. Dunstan, and whose host is the jolly Clerk of Copmanhurst. The gradual progress and slow development of the holy hermit’s supper, which begins tentatively with parched pease and a can of water from St. Dunstan’s well, and ends with a mighty pasty of stolen venison and a huge flagon of wine, fill the reader’s heart—if he has a heart—with sound and sympathetic enjoyment. It is one of the gastronomic delights of literature. Every step of the way is taken with renewed pleasure, for the humors of the situation are as unflagging as the appetites and the thirst of the revelers. Even the quarrel which threatens to disturb the harmony of the feast only adds to its flavor. Guest and host, disguised king and pretended recluse, are as ready to fight as to eat; and, with two such champions, who shall say where the palm of victory hides? Any weapon will suit the monk, “from the scissors of Delilah, and the tenpenny nail of Jael, to the scimitar of Goliath,” though the good broadsword pleases him best. Any weapon will suit King Richard, and he is a match for Friar Tuck in all. Born brothers are they, though the throne of England waits for one, and the oaks of Sherwood Forest for the other.
“But there is neither east, nor west, border, nor breed, nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”