“We had a tortoise-shell cat on the farm when I was a little girl,” remarked Mrs. Lorraine quietly with a gentler look in her eyes than Anna would have believed possible. “Alice, perhaps the kitten would like some milk,” she added.
Alice fetched a saucer and put it on the hearth. Mrs. Lorraine placed the kitten beside it as gently as if it had been a fragile egg shell and the three hung over it eagerly. The kitten put his nose in so far that he spluttered amusingly and once he dipped a paw in; but it was too light to overturn the dish and he drank enough to prove himself of sufficient age to be taken from his mother.
“Now he’d like a nap,” remarked Anna, picking him up. She wanted to give him to Alice (sweet name, Alice Lorraine!) who hadn’t had a chance at him at all; but she put him into Mrs. Lorraine’s lap and he curled into a yet rounder ball and was asleep at once.
“Speaking of tramp cats,” Anna remarked, though as a matter of fact the subject hadn’t come up, “you probably know that Reuben Cartright once lived in this house?”
“Reuben Cartright—is he a musician?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.
“Dear me, no. His father was a musician, though he wasn’t noted. He was organist at the church for a long time. He built this house, though not with his own hands. Did you ever wonder what that platform was for?”
“I thought this was a very old house and that perhaps that was a trundle bed,” said Alice. Anna laughed and Mrs. Lorraine had to smile.
“Mr. Cartright had the floor raised so that when he got rich he could have a pipe organ put in,” Anna explained. “I believe the clothes-press in the chamber above is right over the platform and the same size and they say he planned to tear out the floor of that so that the space would go way up to the roof. But it never came to that. His wife died and he took to booze and that was the last of him as well as of the pipe organ.”
“Is the son musical?” asked Mrs. Lorraine, speaking softly as if the sleeping kitten were a baby.
“Yes’m, in a way, though he’s never had much chance. He has beautiful hands, slim with long fingers, and his father gave him lessons up to the time Reuben was nine and his mother died. Since then Reuben has never had time for music. He has worked his own way, and besides—as pa says, ever since he rescued that tramp cat from the pine tree in the common at the Hollow, he’s been on the look out for that sort of extra jobs. It’s a sort of private joke between me and myself, the story of that rescue is, though I shouldn’t dare let Miss Penny know it, or pa or Rusty, my sister. I was away from home five years—ran away to seek my fortune and never caught up to it—and this happened in my absence. Pa told me the story the day after I got home and then Miss Penny. Ma told me, too, and no end of other people offered to. And to this day, pa or Miss Penny will ask me whether I happened to hear this or that particular and even if I say yes are likely to go on as if they suspected I didn’t get it straight or whole. But I will say it’s a good story and will bear repeating.”