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Updated: May 24, 2025
At the cry appeared the muffled woman. She stepped over us, the beast and myself, where we lay struggling in the narrow passage, took up the child, and carried it away. Returning, she lifted me off the animal, opened the door, and pushed me gently out. At my heels followed the leopardess. "She too has failed me!" thought I; " given me up to the beast to be settled with at her leisure!
It consoled Lona, however, to learn which he was, for she had been expecting him to grow a bad giant, from which worst of fates death had saved him. The leopardess sprang upon his murderer, took him by the throat, dragged him into the street, and followed Lona with him, like a cat with a great rat in her jaws. "Let us leave the horrible place," said Lona; "there are no mothers here!
Odu, catching sight of the leopardess on the feet of the princess, bounded to her next, and throwing an arm over the great sleeping head, fondled and kissed it. "Wake up, wake up, darling!" he cried; "it is time to wake!" The leopardess did not move. "She has slept herself cold!" he said to Mara, with an upcast look of appealing consternation.
We stopped to see the result; when suddenly a small boy, called Odu, remarkable for his speed and courage, who had heard me speak of the goodness of the white leopardess, leaped from the back of his bear, which went shambling after him, and ran to meet her.
Even in the naming of other animals we have taken the male as the race type, and put on a special termination to indicate "his female," as in lion, lioness; leopard, leopardess; while all our human scheme of things rests on the same tacit assumption; man being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant, merely essential to the making of people.
I ran to it, and found a pulpy mass, with just form enough left to show it the body of a woman. It must have been thrown from some neighbouring window! I looked around me: the Shadow was walking along the other side of the way, with the white leopardess again at his heel! I followed and gained upon them, urging in my heart for the leopardess that probably she was not a free agent.
No one took the least notice of me as I wandered hither and thither seeking her. At length losing hope, I turned away to look elsewhere. Finding the wall, and keeping to it with my hand, for even then I could not see it, I came, groping along, to a curtained opening into the vestibule. Dimly moonlighted, the cage of the leopardess was the arena of what seemed a desperate although silent struggle.
I stood and watched the last gleam of the white leopardess melt away, then turned to follow my guide but reluctantly. What had I to do with sleep? Surely reason was the same in every world, and what reason could there be in going to sleep with the dead, when the hour was calling the live man?
Partly this arose from the conflict between herself in the character of hostess, and herself as a loyal daughter of Christian faith; she shuddered, in a degree almost incontrollable and beyond her power to dissemble, at the unfeminine intrepidity with which "the leopardess" conducted her assaults upon the sheepfolds of orthodoxy; and partly, also, this internal conflict arose from concern on behalf of her own servants, who waited at dinner, and were inevitably liable to impressions from what they heard.
"Simply because there happens to be a touch of the wild beast in my nature, and I have not a doubt that if the doctrine of metempsychosis be true, I was a tawny dappled leopardess or a green-eyed cougar in the last stage of my existence.
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