



Produced by 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 NOeEL

[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 <DW72>: 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 <DW36>.

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 <DW36>, 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 <DW36>, 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