“Yes: we encourage the cats about here to come to the home so that if ever they are left homeless they will know where to come,” said the Terror, looking at Lady Ryehampton with eyes that were limpid wells of guilelessness.
“Now that’s a very clever idea!” she exclaimed. “I must tell the managers of my other homes about it and see whether they can’t do it, too. But what are these cats doing?”
“It sounds as if they were quarreling,” said the Terror calmly.
It did sound as if they were quarreling; at the door of the home the din was ear-splitting, excruciating, fiendish. It was as if the voices of all the cats in the county were raised in one piercing battle-song.
The Terror bade his kinsfolk stand clear; then he threw open the door—wide. Cats did not come out.… A large ball of cats came out, gyrating swiftly in a haze of flying fur. Ten yards from the door it dissolved into its component parts, and some thirty cats tore, yelling, to the four quarters of the heavens.
After that stupendous battle-song the air seemed thick with silence.
The Terror broke it; he said in a tone of doubting sadness: “I sometimes think it sets a bad example to the kittens.”
Sir Maurice turned livid in the grip of some powerful emotion. He walked hurriedly round to the back of the home to conceal it from human ken. There with his handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, he leaned against the wall, and shook and rocked and kicked the irresponsive bricks feebly.
But the serene Terror firmly ushered Lady Ryehampton into the home with an air of modest pride. A little dazed, she entered upon a scene of perfect, if highly-scented, peace. Twenty-three kittens and eight cats sat staring earnestly through bars of their hutches in a dead stillness. Their eyes were very bright. By a kindly provision of nature they had been able, in the darkness, to follow the fortunes of that vociferous fray.
In three minutes Lady Ryehampton had forgotten the battle-song. She was charmed, lost in admiration of the home, of the fatness and healthiness of the blinking kittens, the neatness and the cleanliness. She gushed enthusiastic approbation. “To think,” she cried, “that you have done this yourself! A boy of thirteen!”