A Dog of Flanders
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Louisa de la Rame) >> A Dog of Flanders
Juliet Sutherland, S. R. Ellison, Ted Garvin, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
A DOG OF FLANDERS
BY
LOUISA DE LA RAME
(OUIDA)
_ILLUSTRATED IN COLOR BY_
MARIA L. KIRK
ILLUSTRATIONS
NELLO, AWAKENED FROM HIS SLEEP, RAN TO HELP WITH THE REST
THEN LITTLE NELLO TOOK HIS PLACE BESIDE THE CART
NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL
THE PORTALS OF THE CATHEDRAL WERE UNCLOSED AFTER THE MIDNIGHT MASS
A DOG OF FLANDERS
A STORY OF NOEL
[Illustration]
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a
little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same
age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already
old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and
destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the
beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it
had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and
indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly. Their home was a
little hut on the edge of a little village--a Flemish village a league
from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with
long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of
the great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses and
homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red
or black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sun
like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a
little moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round.
It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its
infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the
soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and
weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff
in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would
have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend
any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar
of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood
opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with
that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the
Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth
upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on
the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the
north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading
corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. It was
the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man--of old Jehan Daas, who in
his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampled
the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from his
service nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died in
the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her
two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but
he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became
welcome and precious to him. Little Nello---which was but a pet diminutive
for Nicolas--throve with him, and the old man and the little child lived
in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and white as
a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden-ground that yielded beans
and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly poor--many a day
they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any chance had enough: to
have had enough to eat would have been to have reached paradise at once.
But the old man was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy was a
beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-hearted creature; and they were
happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth
or heaven; save indeed that Patrasche should be always with them, since
without Patrasche where would they have been?
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary; their
store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister; their
only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from them, they must
have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was body, brains,
hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was their very life,
their very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello was but a
child; and Patrasche was their dog.
[Illustration]
A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with wolf-like
ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular
development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard service.
Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly from sire to
son in Flanders many a century--slaves of slaves, dogs of the people,
beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived straining their
sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the
flints of the streets.
Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days
over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long, shadowless,
weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to no
other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed on curses
and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country, and
Patrasche was but a dog. Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter
gall of the cart and the collar. Before he had entered his thirteenth
month he had become the property of a hardware-dealer, who was accustomed
to wander over the land north and south, from the blue sea to the green
mountains. They sold him for a small price, because he was so young.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of Patrasche was a life of
hell. To deal the tortures of hell on the animal creation is a way which
the Christians have of showing their belief in it. His purchaser was a
sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his cart full with pots
and pans and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery and brass
and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might, whilst he
himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his
black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or cafe on the road.
Happily for Patrasche--or unhappily--he was very strong: he came of an
iron race, long born and bred to such cruel travail; so that he did not
die, but managed to drag on a wretched existence under the brutal burdens,
the scarifying lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the blows, the curses, and
the exhaustion which are the only wages with which the Flemings repay the
most patient and laborious of all their four-footed victims. One day,
after two years of this long and deadly agony, Patrasche was going on as
usual along one of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that lead to the
city of Rubens. It was full midsummer, and very warm. His cart was very
heavy, piled high with goods in metal and in earthenware. His owner
sauntered on without noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip
as it curled round his quivering loins. The Brabantois had paused to drink
beer himself at every wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrasche to
stop a moment for a draught from the canal. Going along thus, in the full
sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours,
and, which was far worse to him, not having tasted water for near twelve,
being blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless
weight which dragged upon his loins, Patrasche staggered and foamed a
little at the mouth, and fell.
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare of the
sun; he was sick unto death, and motionless. His master gave him the only
medicine in his pharmacy--kicks and oaths and blows with a cudgel of oak,
which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and reward,
ever offered to him. But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or
of any curses. Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white
powder of the summer dust. After a while, finding it useless to assail his
ribs with punishment and his ears with maledictions, the
Brabantois--deeming life gone in him, or going so nearly that his carcass
was forever useless, unless indeed some one should strip it of the skin
for gloves--cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off the leathern bands
of the harness, kicked his body aside into the grass, and, groaning and
muttering in savage wrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road up-hill,
and left the dying dog for the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.
It was the last day before Kermesse away at Louvain, and the Brabantois
was in haste to reach the fair and get a good place for his truck of brass
wares. He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been a strong and
much-enduring animal, and because he himself had now the hard task of
pushing his charette all the way to Louvain. But to stay to look after
Patrasche never entered his thoughts: the beast was dying and useless, and
he would steal, to replace him, the first large dog that he found
wandering alone out of sight of its master. Patrasche had cost him
nothing, or next to nothing, and for two long, cruel years had made him
toil ceaselessly in his service from sunrise to sunset, through summer and
winter, in fair weather and foul.
He had got a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being human, he
was wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and
have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the birds, whilst
he himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to drink, to
dance and to sing, in the mirth at Louvain. A dying dog, a dog of the
cart--why should he waste hours over its agonies at peril of losing a
handful of copper coins, at peril of a shout of laughter?
Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass-green ditch. It was a busy road
that day, and hundreds of people, on foot and on mules, in wagons or in
carts, went by, tramping quickly and joyously on to Louvain. Some saw him,
most did not even look: all passed on. A dead dog more or less--it was
nothing in Brabant: it would be nothing anywhere in the world.
[Illustration]
After a time, among the holiday-makers, there came a little old man who
was bent and lame, and very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting: he
was very poorly and miserably clad, and he dragged his silent way slowly
through the dust among the pleasure-seekers. He looked at Patrasche,
paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and
weeds of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes of pity. There
was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a few years
old, who pattered in amidst the bushes, for him breast-high, and stood
gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the poor, great, quiet beast.
Thus it was that these two first met--the little Nello and the big
Patrasche.
The upshot of that day was, that old Jehan Daas, with much laborious
effort, drew the sufferer homeward to his own little hut, which was a
stone's throw off amidst the fields, and there tended him with so much
care that the sickness, which had been a brain seizure, brought on by heat
and thirst and exhaustion, with time and shade and rest passed away, and
health and strength returned, and Patrasche staggered up again upon his
four stout, tawny legs.
Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless, sore, near to death;
but all this time he had heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, but
only the pitying murmurs of the child's voice and the soothing caress of
the old man's hand.
In his sickness they too had grown to care for him, this lonely man and
the little happy child. He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of dry
grass for his bed; and they had learned to listen eagerly for his
breathing in the dark night, to tell them that he lived; and when he first
was well enough to essay a loud, hollow, broken bay, they laughed aloud,
and almost wept together for joy at such a sign of his sure restoration;
and little Nello, in delighted glee, hung round his rugged neck with
chains of marguerites, and kissed him with fresh and ruddy lips.
So then, when Patrasche arose, himself again, strong, big, gaunt,
powerful, his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishment in them that
there were no curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and his heart
awakened to a mighty love, which never wavered once in its fidelity whilst
life abode with him.
But Patrasche, being a dog, was grateful. Patrasche lay pondering long
with grave, tender, musing brown eyes, watching the movements of his
friends.
Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could do nothing for his living but limp
about a little with a small cart, with which he carried daily the
milk-cans of those happier neighbors who owned cattle away into the town
of Antwerp. The villagers gave him the employment a little out of
charity--more because it suited them well to send their milk into the town
by so honest a carrier, and bide at home themselves to look after their
gardens, their cows, their poultry, or their little fields. But it was
becoming hard work for the old man. He was eighty-three, and Antwerp was a
good league off, or more.
Patrasche watched the milk-cans come and go that one day when he had got
well and was lying in the sun with the wreath of marguerites round his
tawny neck.
The next morning, Patrasche, before the old man had touched the cart,
arose and walked to it and placed himself betwixt its handles, and
testified as plainly as dumb show could do his desire and his ability to
work in return for the bread of charity that he had eaten. Jehan Daas
resisted long, for the old man was one of those who thought it a foul
shame to bind dogs to labor for which Nature never formed them. But
Patrasche would not be gainsaid: finding they did not harness him, he
tried to draw the cart onward with his teeth.
At length Jehan Daas gave way, vanquished by the persistence and the
gratitude of this creature whom he had succored. He fashioned his cart so
that Patrasche could run in it, and this he did every morning of his life
thenceforward.
When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the blessed fortune that had
brought him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair-day of Louvain; for he
was very old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would ill have
known how to pull his load of milk-cans over the snows and through the
deep ruts in the mud if it had not been for the strength and the industry
of the animal he had befriended. As for Patrasche, it seemed heaven to
him. After the frightful burdens that his old master had compelled him to
strain under, at the call of the whip at every step, it seemed nothing to
him but amusement to step out with this little light green cart, with its
bright brass cans, by the side of the gentle old man who always paid him
with a tender caress and with a kindly word. Besides, his work was over by
three or four in the day, and after that time he was free to do as he
would--to stretch himself, to sleep in the sun, to wander in the fields,
to romp with the young child, or to play with his fellow-dogs. Patrasche
was very happy.
Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was killed in a drunken brawl
at the Kermesse of Mechlin, and so sought not after him nor disturbed him
in his new and well-loved home.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who had always been a cripple, became
so paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for him to go out with
the cart any more. Then little Nello, being now grown to his sixth year of
age, and knowing the town well from having accompanied his grandfather so
many times, took his place beside the cart, and sold the milk and received
the coins in exchange, and brought them back to their respective owners
with a pretty grace and seriousness which charmed all who beheld him.
The little Ardennois was a beautiful child, with dark, grave, tender eyes,
and a lovely bloom upon his face, and fair locks that clustered to his
throat; and many an artist sketched the group as it went by him--the green
cart with the brass flagons of Teniers and Mieris and Van Tal, and the
great tawny-colored, massive dog, with his belled harness that chimed
cheerily as he went, and the small figure that ran beside him which had
little white feet in great wooden shoes, and a soft, grave, innocent,
happy face like the little fair children of Rubens.
Nello and Patrasche did the work so well and so joyfully together that
Jehan Daas himself, when the summer came and he was better again, had no
need to stir out, but could sit in the doorway in the sun and see them go
forth through the garden wicket, and then doze and dream and pray a
little, and then awake again as the clock tolled three and watch for their
return. And on their return Patrasche would shake himself free of his
harness with a bay of glee, and Nello would recount with pride the doings
of the day; and they would all go in together to their meal of rye bread
and milk or soup, and would see the shadows lengthen over the great plain,
and see the twilight veil the fair cathedral spire; and then lie down
together to sleep peacefully while the old man said a prayer. So the days
and the years went on, and the lives of Nello and Patrasche were happy,
innocent, and healthful. In the spring and summer especially were they
glad. Flanders is not a lovely land, and around the burgh of Rubens it is
perhaps least lovely of all. Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed
each other on the characterless plain in wearying repetition, and save by
some gaunt gray tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure
coming athwart the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a
woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and
he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed
as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and
dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons
that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony;
and among the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees
rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their great hulks black
against the sun, and their little green barrels and vari-colored flags gay
against the leaves. Anyway, there is greenery and breadth of space enough
to be as good as beauty to a child and a dog; and these two asked no
better, when their work was done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses
on the side of the canal, and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by and
bring the crisp salt smell of the sea among the blossoming scents of the
country summer.
True, in the winter it was harder, and they had to rise in the darkness
and the bitter cold, and they had seldom as much as they could have eaten
any day, and the hut was scarce better than a shed when the nights were
cold, although it looked so pretty in warm weather, buried in a great
kindly clambering vine, that never bore fruit, indeed, but which covered
it with luxuriant green tracery all through the months of blossom and
harvest. In winter the winds found many holes in the walls of the poor
little hut, and the vine was black and leafless, and the bare lands looked
very bleak and drear without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded
and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the snow numbed the little
white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the brave, untiring feet of
Patrasche.
But even then they were never heard to lament, either of them. The child's
wooden shoes and the dog's four legs would trot manfully together over the
frozen fields to the chime of the bells on the harness; and then
sometimes, in the streets of Antwerp, some housewife would bring them a
bowl of soup and a handful of bread, or some kindly trader would throw
some billets of fuel into the little cart as it went homeward, or some
woman in their own village would bid them keep a share of the milk they
carried for their own food; and they would run over the white lands,
through the early darkness, bright and happy, and burst with a shout of
joy into their home.
So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well; and Patrasche, meeting
on the highway or in the public streets the many dogs who toiled from
daybreak into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses, and loosened
from the shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best they might--
Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and thought it the
fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he was often very
hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to work in the
heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his
feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp edges of the jagged
pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his strength and against
his nature--yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each
day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down on him. It was sufficient for
Patrasche.
[Illustration]
There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his
life, and it was this. Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every
turn of old piles of stones, dark and ancient and majestic, standing in
crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's
edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of
their arched doors a swell of music pealing. There they remain, the grand
old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst the squalor, the hurry, the
crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce of the modern world, and all
day long the clouds drift and the birds circle and the winds sigh around
them, and beneath the earth at their feet there sleeps--RUBENS.
And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp, and
wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that all
mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through the
winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the
noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of his
visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and bore
his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For the city
which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him, and him alone.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre--so quiet, save only
when the organ peals and the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the
Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that pure
marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birthplace in the
chancel of St. Jacques.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which no
man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business on its
wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred name, a
sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of Art saw light, a Golgotha where a
god of Art lies dead.
O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them alone
will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been wise. In
his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death she
magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.
Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this. Into these great, sad piles of
stones, that reared their melancholy majesty above the crowded roofs, the
child Nello would many and many a time enter, and disappear through their
dark arched portals, whilst Patrasche, left without upon the pavement,
would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm which thus
allured from him his inseparable and beloved companion. Once or twice he
did essay to see for himself, clattering up the steps with his milk-cart
behind him; but thereon he had been always sent back again summarily by a
tall custodian in black clothes and silver chains of office; and fearful
of bringing his little master into trouble, he desisted, and remained
couched patiently before the churches until such time as the boy
reappeared. It was not the fact of his going into them which disturbed
Patrasche: he knew that people went to church: all the village went to the
small, tumbledown, gray pile opposite the red windmill.
What troubled him was that little Nello always looked strangely when he
came out, always very flushed or very pale; and whenever he returned home
after such visitations would sit silent and dreaming, not caring to play,
but gazing out at the evening skies beyond the line of the canal, very
subdued and almost sad.
What was it? wondered Patrasche. He thought it could not be good or
natural for the little lad to be so grave, and in his dumb fashion he
tried all he could to keep Nello by him in the sunny fields or in the busy
market-place. But to the churches Nello would go: most often of all would
he go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the stones by
the iron fragments of Quentin Matsys's gate, would stretch himself and
yawn and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in vain, until the doors
closed and the child perforce came forth again, and winding his arms about
the dog's neck would kiss him on his broad, tawney-colored forehead, and
murmur always the same words: "If I could only see them, Patrasche!--if I
could only see them!"