Rondebosch, February 12, 18—.
My dear May—I have had a great sorrow. Togo is dead. My maid and I fought for his life so hard that I thought he must live. I could have borne it better if I could have felt that it was really inevitable—but the shocking ignorance we have had to contend with has been incredible. From the first moment of our seeing anything wrong we sought in every possible direction for help. They always said it was malaria, and that I was to nurse him up and feed him as his only chance. When at last I got hold of a vet who did know his business, he said the poor little thing was dying of pleurisy—temperature a hundred and five! He said it was too late for tapping, and he gave him a little whiff of chloroform which sent him quietly to his last sleep. I could not bear that he should go through any more doubtful cruel remedies. If my maid had lost an only child she could not have felt it more, after having nursed that cat night and day for so long. It has made me quite ill. I do always love things so passionately, and this was more than a pet. He was with me constantly, and I knew he was turning into a baby! Over and over again I have said, 'He is too good, he will never live to grow up!' He was like Hans Andersen's Mermaid, he was getting a soul, and indeed he won it at last, in the only way possible, through love and well-borne pain. The last fortnight he was almost human, his eyes had lost the mere animal stare, and looked up constantly into ours for love and help, which we could not give, alas! He lay most of the time in my arms or in my maid's, and had grown so thin we had to carry him about in a shawl. He lost two and a half pounds in three weeks—
It was here that Rosamond broke down and the letter was put away. Auntie May settled to give Mrs. Dillon another kitten, a brother of Togo's, so perhaps he might be as nice.
But the new family of kittens were rather wretched-looking little things, and I sniffed over them a great deal, till mother told me that I myself had looked neither better nor worse than they did. I enjoyed helping to mind them, and often I was trusted to get into the basket and keep them warm while mother stretched her legs. A day or two after they were born mother said:
'I shall never have any more, so I mean to do my duty by these!' I think that meant she fancied she was going to die soon, and I have no doubt Auntie May knew it too, and told Mr. Fox so.
Then Beatrice came to stay in London with us for a week, and she spoke to Auntie May very severely about Mr. Fox.
'May, you are a fool,' she said. 'I am fond of animals myself, but I shouldn't let them interfere with things of real importance.'
'It is unfortunate,' said Auntie May in a cold, horrid tone, 'that I should happen to fall in love with the only man I know who cannot be in the same room with a cat. It is too absurd. But what can I do?'
'Do, silly girl? Sell all this lot of kittens before you have time to get fond of them; leave Petronilla with Dad, and they can be the prop of each other's declining years—that is Dad's phrase, not mine, he said it to me only this morning—and I—yes, I will have Loki, and Tom shall take up every blessed trap on the place—I'll make him. There, will that suit you?'
'But I have got so used to having cats about. Must I be condemned to live without a cat for all the rest of my life?'