WHISKIE
One warm summer evening, the family was sitting on the front steps, after a refreshing shower of rain, when Whiskie saw a cat in the street, picking its dainty way among the little puddles of water. With [p 63]
a muttered curse he dashed after the cat without discovering, until within a few feet of it, that it was the cat who belonged to him. He tried to stop himself in his impetuous career, he put on all his brakes, literally skimming along the street railway-track as if he were out simply for a slide, passing the cat, who gave him a half-contemptuous, half-pitying look; and then, after inspecting the sky to see if the rain was really over and how the wind was, he came back to his place between the father and The Boy as if it were all a matter of course and of every-day occurrence. But he knew they were laughing at him; and if ever a dog felt sheepish, and looked sheepish—if ever a dog said, “What an idiot I’ve made of myself!” Whiskie was that dog.
The cat was a martinet in her way, and she demanded all the privileges of her sex. Whiskie always gave her precedence, and once when he, for a moment, forgot himself and started to go out of the dining-room door before her, she deliberately slapped him in the face; whereupon he drew back instantly, like the gentleman he was, and waited for her to pass.
Whiskie was fourteen or fifteen years of age in 1882, when the mother went to join the father, and The Boy was taken to Spain by a good aunt and cousins. Whiskie was left at home to keep house with the two old servants who had known him all his [p 64]
life, and were in perfect sympathy with him. He had often been left alone before during the family’s frequent journeyings about the world, the entire establishment being kept running purely on his account. Usually he did not mind the solitude; he was well taken care of in their absence, and he felt that they were coming back some day. This time he knew it was different. He would not be consoled. He wandered listlessly and uselessly about the house; into the mother’s room, into his master’s room; and one morning he was found in a dark closet, where he had never gone before, dead—of a broken heart.
He had only a stump of a tail, but he will wag it—when next his master sees him!
PUNCH