Murph staggered off, and fell panting on the rug that formed his bed.
Then Jack came to help him; but, alas! even Jack could not console him just at first. Murph rejected his friend’s ministrations, so bitter was his rancour against mankind. But his pique was soon over, and his wounded heart found healing under the gentle hand of his lifelong companion.
XI
But the fatal hour had struck; old age was upon him. Murph had grown infirm; he would take a dozen steps, crawling from one corner to another, and then sink down helplessly. His legs, once so prodigiously strong and active, tottered and stumbled from sheer weakness. In vain his master’s voice called him to show his tricks; he would struggle to his feet, for an instant his head would recover its proud carriage of old days; then suddenly, his momentary strength exhausted, his limbs tingling with rheumatic pains that cut like whip-lashes, he would slink away to fall back again into the lifeless attitude of an aged invalid.
A cloud floated before his eyes, he could no longer see things clearly, and a growing deafness filled his head with a buzz-buzzing that never stopped. Life was slowly dying down in the old body. He would lie torpid for hours and doze away the time in dark corners, under tables, where nothing would wake him, neither the yapping of the other dogs nor the chattering of the monkeys, neither the noise of footsteps coming and going nor the shrill trumpetings of the clown’s cornet-à-piston playing “Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre!”
It was a deep, dreamless sleep. Jack did not like it, and would crouch down beside him, watching him with sad eyes, like a friend at a sick man’s bedside. Poor beast, he could make nothing of this new state of affairs. Some change he could not comprehend had come over his chum and laid him low. He seemed to be mutely questioning him, asking him why he never nowadays trotted about behind the scenes. But it was all Murph could do to see his little anxious, sorrowful face; he could only view him as if through a fog, an indistinct shape of sympathy hardly distinguishable from surrounding objects.
Nevertheless, he still tried hard to make out in the dusk of his blindness his kindly comrade of yore; he would raise his palsied head, and from the depths of his dim eyes, veiled by a milky film, dart a pale look of infinite gentleness.
Sometimes the two bushy tufts on his forehead dropped right over his eyes and further confused his vision. But Jack would put them back lightly with the tips of his delicate fingers. Indeed he never left his side, tickling his ears to amuse him, tapping and stroking him, ever on the watch, a tender-hearted nurse of inexhaustible care and foresight.
This lowly being had learnt to love like a mother; his little dim soul had emerged from its darkness to answer his dying comrade’s need, and now, shining bright in the light of day, was working deeds of charity.