Source: The End: I am not Here (Music for Toy Pianos) by Aestrid Byrne.
Cecil and the Little Lord (Excerpt)
The little lord stood before his looking glass, regaling his fine form. And it was not an arrogant waif wearing oversize breeches and an absurdly fancy hat that he saw (such as a less biased observer might report) but an elegant Napoleon set for conquest. He noted with pride the pink blush of his cheeks and the nonchalant toss of his hair while ignoring his grubby face and uncombed locks; he smiled at the sheen of his white pants and the cut of his tails rather than note both were in dire need of an ironing; and he bathed in the commanding glory of the whole effect, not admitting of the possibility there may be nothing more staring back at him than a snot-faced little rascal in want of a hiding.
Presently, he spoke, still looking in the mirror.
“It was but a trifle to lead the rabbit this far up the path. The simple carrot of rhetoric he consumed as it consumed him. But what when our darker thoughts we reveal to acquit our purpose? Will not then the ethical foolery we have fed him make him vomit at our deeper cause? Will not…”
He paused and looked distractedly to his dresser on which several books lay. He had extended his research on the ways of villainy to readings of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Shakespeare, but his powers of concentration were waning, and he was still at a loss as to how he could fully transform this principled animal into his evil pawn.
And then a thought.
“The dish need not be eaten at once, but a bite at a time, and this patsy’s soul will we so corrupt, morsel by morsel, that not until he has lost it completely will he know we have made a meal of him.”
He paused again. He could no longer tell his own ideas from those of his books, and yet such confusion was overcome by a renewed confidence that he could fully mould the rabbit (as he still thought of him, having now lost the mangled sweet paper on which he had scribbled Cecil’s name) and rid himself once and for all of the tyrannical Dame.
“And on that day”, he announced with finality, “I shall have four sugar cubes in my tea even if it makes me sick.”
He smiled then with a childish glee, looking for all the world the innocent boy he perhaps once was but never again would be.
§
Cecil—who was feeling rather uncomfortable with the affair but was certainly not expecting to have his soul or any other part of him eaten, least of all by a nine-year-old boy—lay on his bed reading Schiller.
“We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the two impulsions that the action of the one establishes and limits at the same time the action of the other, and that each of them, taken in isolation, does arrive at its highest manifestation just because the other is active.”
Cecil nodded sagely and put the book down. His philosophical readings had certainly made him more erudite, and though they were not the sole source of his moral leanings—for he had been a caring soul since he was a kit—they emboldened his sense of justice and helped him feel less alone in his ethical uprightness. Cecil was a rabbit you could trust and he was proud of this fact. Unfortunately, Cecil was a rabbit anyone could trust and therein lay the danger.
It was not from the goodness of the world, we note, that Cecil had yet to be harshly punished for his naivety, for Rabbiton was no better or worse a place in the moral purity of its denizens than anywhere else. Life was but the usual chaotic mixture of charity and malice, truth and mendacity, and gentleness and cruelty that one should expect, and only that fate had sheltered Cecil from the worse of these antipodes and warmed him in the buxom of the best, he might have been altogether a less vulnerable soul.
As it was, it was only a mild intuition of danger that now discomfited him, and, every time it returned, he read or thought it away—Schiller this, Kant that, Spinoza, the other. The thoughts of the great thinkers elevated or, perhaps, haunted his mind, and there was little room for anything else. So, he read and mused and, occasionally, worried, but within a day or two had almost forgotten the little lord.
Then came the letter.
Source: Cecil and the Little Lord – Paul R. Buckle Archive
