“He is a faithful creature, a faithful creature, and I don’t care who knows it. And the curry he makes! Ah!” It will be noted that Ben would be alluding thus to Pedro, not to Cockie the cockatoo. “Yes, that curry, why, the very flavour of it takes ten years off my life at least. Calls me as regular of a morning as a bo’s’n’s pipe. Eight bells, and there I am; clothes all brushed and folded; bath waiting for me; clean white shirt laid out, and never a button missing off my waistcoat. Breakfast served nice and comfortable soon’s I go down; letters alongside my plate, and Cockie’s cage as sweet as nuts. A faithful creature indeed, although he isn’t much to look at!”
No. Ben spoke the truth, for certainly Pedro was not much to look at; not much to admire. He wore the same dress apparently winter and summer; a very short blue-cloth sailor’s jacket, under this a checked shirt, no necktie, no collar, no waistcoat. The continuations of his dress downwards did not reach to his low-heeled shoes by inches, so he always showed a goodly amount of blue-ribbed stocking, but his shoes were always nicely polished, and his long lean hands were clean. In complexion Pedro was sallow, almost saffron-hued, and his eyes were like this jet; while his hair, which was black, of course, was scarcely half-an-inch long all over, and stood on end like the bristles of a blacking brush. People used to say that at some period of his life Pedro must have seen a ghost, and that his hair had never fallen flat again.
“But he is good to the birds,” Ben would have told you.
“God’s birds, I mean,” he would have added. “The birds that cheer us and charm us in the sweet spring-time, you know, and all the summer through.
“‘All thro’ the sultry hours of June,
From morning blithe to golden noon,
And till the star of evening climbs
The grey-blue zest, a world too soon,
There sings a thrush among the limes.’
“Ay, and that bird, and our blackbirds with their mellow music, and bold lilting chaffie and tender-songed cock-robin know Pedro, and when the winter snows are on the lawn they will almost feed out of his hand. They know me, too, and they know Cockie, and they know Colonel Clarkson’s cat Shireen.”
And that, reader, is the very cat that is now slowly and wearily crossing the road towards the good old sailor’s bungalow. Shireen, it will therefore be observed, did not belong to Ben. She was simply an occasional visitor, for cats very soon find out who loves them and who does not.
But Ben’s bungalow was not the only place to which Shireen was in the habit of paying a visit. No, not by very many. Indeed, everybody knew Shireen, and there were few houses in the village that this strange cat did not walk into now and then. Very coolly, too; but always with a little fond cry or expression of friendliness and goodwill to the inmates.
She was always welcome, and many a saucerful of creamy milk was put down to her on these occasions. Not that Shireen paid the visit for sake of being fed, for often she would not touch the milk-offering. But she had formed this wandering habit somehow. The fact is, Shireen, like her owner, the Colonel, was a very far-travelling cat, and cats, like old soldiers and old sailors who have been here and there in many lands, find it difficult to settle in one place or one home.
If ever a cat was a village favourite, this droll puss Shireen was.