Love stories; Poor -- Fiction; Violinists -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
When she was alone, Molly's anger decreased. She had an ally now worth
having. She smiled delicately as she passed up the stairs to her room,
and the smile was brought to her lips because she remembered having
begged Jordan to help her in this matter several times before. Then he
had had no incentive, but to-day----Ah, now he would give her a
divorce quietly! The social world in which she hoped to move would
know nothing of her youthful indiscretion.
* * * * *
That night Jinnie and Peg were bending anxiously over a basket near
the kitchen stove. All that human hands and hearts could do had been
done for the suffering barn-cat. He had given no sign of
consciousness, his breath coming and going in long, deep gasps.
"He'll die, won't he, Peg?" asked Jinnie, sorrowfully.
"Yes, sure. An' it'll be better for the beast, too." Peg said this
tempestuously.
"I'd like to have him live," replied Jinnie. "Milly Ann mightn't love
him, but she got used to Happy Pete, didn't she?"
"This feller," assured Peggy, wagging her head, "won't get used to
anything more on this earth."
"Poor kitty," mourned Jinnie.
She was thinking of the beautiful world, the trees and the flowers,
and the wonderful songs of nature amidst which the dying animal had
existed.
"I hope he'll go to some nice place," she observed sadly, walking away
from Mrs. Grandoken.
Later, after cogitating deeply, Jinnie expressed herself to the
cobbler.
"Lafe, Lafe dear," she said, "it's all true you told me, ain't it?...
All about the angels and God?... The poor kitty's suffering awful.
He's got the Christ too, hasn't he, Lafe?"
The man looked into the agonized young face.
"Yes, child," he replied reverently, "he's got the Christ too, same's
you an' me. God's in everything. He loves 'em all."
That night the girl sat unusually long with paper and pencil. Just
before going to bed she placed a paper on the cobbler's knee.
"I wrote that hurt kitty some poetry," she said shyly.
Lafe settled his spectacles on his nose, picked up the sheet, and
read:
"I'm nobody's cat and I've been here so long,
In this world of sorrow and pain,
I've no father nor mother nor home in this place,
And must always stay out in the rain.
"Hot dish water, stones at me have been thrown,
And one of my hind legs is lame;
No wonder I run when I know the boys
Come to see if I'm tame.
"I've a friend in the country, and he's nobody's dog,
And his burdens're heavy as mine,
He told me one day the boys had once tied
A tin can to his tail with a line.
"Now they talk in the churches of God and his Son,
Of Paradise, Heaven and Hell;
Of a Savior who came on earth for mankind,
And for His children all should be well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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