Whereupon Lally would declare she “wadn’t bad tild, and she wouldn’t be tissed back and bue; Lally has had more tisses than ze liked these days; Lally tired of ladies tissing of her.”
“You little ungrateful monkey!”
“Big fat ooman tissed Lally, and hurt her with her beard,” the child complained, “and Lally did not like her sweet-sweets; they were nasty.”
“You ought not to have had any, you know, you dreadful child!”
“Lally ought; Lally would like some this minute, if they was dood, and not mortar. Issy said they were mortar, and that Mrs. Aidsford had no business to bring them: but Issy says wicked things, and Lally isn’t to ’tend to her.”
Having finished which speech, Lilian Dudley nestled her head in her pillow, and thought over her various visitors.
“I’d like to have Muff,” she said at last, as a consolatory conclusion; and, accordingly, Muff was brought; and from that day forth the cat rarely left its little mistress’s side. By some mysterious means, the creature seemed to understand there was a terrible fight going on in the silent room, and it would lie for hours quietly beside the child, purring vigorously, never moving, unless Lally said, tenderly, “poor titty,” or “poor puss,” in which case it would open its eyes and blink at her gratefully, or else march backwards and forwards over her breast, rubbing sides, and head, and tail against the pinched, changed face of the little child.
There was nothing much sadder, in those days, than the contemplation of Lally and “pussens,” as she styled her cat.
There was the meek, unassuming, yet intense sympathy of the dumb creature, not unmixed, it might be, with a perfect appreciation of the physical comforts which Lally’s illness provided for her. There was, on the other hand, the irritable and unreasonable affection of the higher creature—the exacting fondness of a mistress who expected Muff continually to get up out of her sleep, to rub against and make much of her.
Which Muff did—greatly to her credit, as I consider.