But the fatal hour had struck; old age was upon him. Murph had grown
infirm; he would take a dozen steps, crawling from one corner to
another, and then sink down helplessly. His legs, once so prodigiously
strong and active, tottered and stumbled from sheer weakness. In vain
his master’s voice called him to show his tricks; he would struggle to
his feet, for an instant his head would recover its proud carriage of
old days; then suddenly, his momentary strength exhausted, his limbs
tingling with rheumatic pains that cut like whip-lashes, he would slink
away to fall back again into the lifeless attitude of an aged invalid.
A cloud floated before his eyes, he could no longer see things clearly,
and a growing deafness filled his head with a buzz-buzzing that never
stopped. Life was slowly dying down in the old body. He would lie torpid
for hours and doze away the time in dark corners, under tables, where
nothing would wake him, neither the yapping of the other dogs nor the
chattering of the monkeys, neither the noise of footsteps coming and
going nor the shrill trumpetings of the clown’s cornet-à-piston playing
“Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre!”
It was a deep, dreamless sleep. Jack did not like it, and would crouch
down beside him, watching him with sad eyes, like a friend at a sick
man’s bedside. Poor beast, he could make nothing of this new state of
affairs. Some change he could not comprehend had come over his chum and
laid him low. He seemed to be mutely questioning him, asking him why he
never nowadays trotted about behind the scenes. But it was all Murph
could do to see his little anxious, sorrowful face; he could only view
him as if through a fog, an indistinct shape of sympathy hardly
distinguishable from surrounding objects.
Nevertheless, he still tried hard to make out in the dusk of his
blindness his kindly comrade of yore; he would raise his palsied head,
and from the depths of his dim eyes, veiled by a milky film, dart a pale
look of infinite gentleness.
Sometimes the two bushy tufts on his forehead dropped right over his
eyes and further confused his vision. But Jack would put them back
lightly with the tips of his delicate fingers. Indeed he never left his
side, tickling his ears to amuse him, tapping and stroking him, ever on
the watch, a tender-hearted nurse of inexhaustible care and foresight.
This lowly being had learnt to love like a mother; his little dim soul
had emerged from its darkness to answer his dying comrade’s need, and
now, shining bright in the light of day, was working deeds of charity.