A terrific thunder-clap, louder than the report of a hundred guns, followed almost instantaneously upon the flash, and the shock was so violent that I was nearly thrown to the ground.
The storm passed away shortly after that frightful explosion, but, on reaching the arbour, I found the thirty-two rats, toes up, killed by the one and same stroke of lightning. No doubt the iron wires of their cage had attracted the electric fluid and acted as a conductor.
Thus died together, as they had lived, the thirty-two Norway rats,—an enviable death, not often vouchsafed by fate!
III
THE BLACK DYNASTY
Don Pierrot of Navarre, being a native of Havana, required a hot-house temperature, and he enjoyed it in the house; round the dwelling, however, stretched great gardens, separated by open fences through which a cat could easily make its way, and rose great trees in which twittered, warbled, and sang whole flocks of birds; so that sometimes Pierrot, profiting by a door left open, would go out at night and start on a hunt, rambling through the grass and flowers wet with dew. In such cases he would have to await daylight to be let in, for although he would come and miaoul under our windows, his appeals did not always awaken the sleepers in the house. He had a delicate chest, and one night, when it was colder than usual, he caught a cold which soon turned into consumption. After coughing for a whole year poor Pierrot became thin and emaciated, and his coat, formerly so silky, had the mat whiteness of a shroud. His great transparent eyes had become the most important feature in his poor shrunken face; his red nose had turned pale, and he walked with slow steps, in a melancholy fashion, by the sunny side of the wall, watching the yellow autumn leaves whirling and twisting. One could have sworn he was reciting to himself Millevoye’s elegy. A sick animal is a very touching object, for it bears suffering with such gentle and sad resignation. We did all we could to save him; I called in a very skilful physician who tested his chest and felt his pulse. Ass’s milk was prescribed, and the poor little creature drank it willingly enough out of his tiny china saucer. He would remain for hours at a time stretched out on my knee like the shadow of a sphinx; I could feel his vertebræ like the grains of a chaplet, and he would try to acknowledge my caresses with a feeble purr that sounded like a death-rattle. On the day he died, he lay on his side gasping, but got himself up by a supreme effort, came to me, and opening wide his eyes, fixed upon me a glance that called for help with intense supplication. He seemed to say to me, “You are a man; do save me.” Then he staggered, his eyes already glazed, and fell to the ground, uttering so woeful, so despairing, so anguished a cry that it filled me with mute horror. He was buried at the foot of the garden, under a white rosebush that still marks the place of his tomb.
Séraphita died two or three years later, of croup, which the physician was unable to master. She rests not far from Pierrot.
With her ended the White Dynasty, but not the family. From that pair of snow-white cats had sprung three coal-black kittens, a mystery the solution of which I leave to others. Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” were then all the rage, and the names of the characters in the novel were in every one’s mouth. The two little male cats were called Enjolras and Gavroche, and the female Eponine. They were the sweetest of kittens, and we trained them to fetch and carry pieces of paper thrown at a distance just as a dog would do. We got so far as to throw the paper ball on the top of wardrobes, or to hide it behind boxes or in tall vases, and they would retrieve it very prettily with their paws. On attaining years of discretion, they forsook these frivolous sports and resumed the dreamy, philosophical calm which is the real characteristic of cats.
All negroes are alike to people who land in a slave-owning country in America, and it is impossible for them to tell one from another. So, to those who do not care for them, three black cats are three black cats and nothing more. But an observing eye makes no such mistake. The physiognomies of animals are as different as those of men, and I could always tell to which particular cat belonged the black face, as black as Harlequin’s mask, and lighted by emerald disks with golden gleams.