

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Kerry Tani, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 35966-h.htm or 35966-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35966/35966-h/35966-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35966/35966-h.zip)





[Illustration: LOVELINESS]


LOVELINESS

A Story

by

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS



  "Be my benediction said,
   With my hand upon thy head,
     Gentle fellow-creature!"
            E. B. BROWNING.







Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1900

The Illustrations Are by Sarah S. Stilwell

Copyright, 1899, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
and Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
All Rights Reserved




_For the smoke of their torment ascendeth._




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                       PAGE

    LOVELINESS                              _Frontispiece_

    THE MAID STOOD LOOKING IDLY ABOUT                   14

    "TILL LOVELINESS COMES HOME"                        20

    THROUGH THE BENDING SHRUBBERY                       40




LOVELINESS.


Loveliness sat on an eider-down cushion embroidered with cherry-
puppies on a pearl satin cover. The puppies had gold eyes. They were
drinking a saucer of green milk. Loveliness wore a new necktie, of
cherry, a shade or two brighter than the puppies, and a pearl-gray, or
one might call it a silver-gray jacket. He was sitting in the broad
window sill, with his head tipped a little, thoughtfully, towards the
left side, as the heads of nervous people are said to incline. He was
dreamily watching the street, looking for any one of a few friends of
his who might pass by, and for the letter-carrier, who was somewhat
late.

Loveliness had dark, brilliant eyes, remarkably alert, but reflective
when in repose. Part of their charm lay in the fact that one must watch
for their best expression; for Loveliness wore bangs. He had a small and
delicate nose, not guiltless of an aristocratic tip, with a suspicion of
a sniff at the inferior orders of society. In truth, Loveliness was an
aristocrat to the end of his tongue, which curled daintily against his
opalescent teeth. At this moment it lay between his teeth, and hung
forward as if he held a roseleaf in his lips; and this was the final
evidence of his birth and breeding.

For Loveliness was a little dog; a silver Yorkshire, blue of blood and
delicately reared,--a tiny creature, the essence of tenderness; set,
soul and body, to one only tune. To love and to be beloved,--that was
his life. He knew no other, nor up to this time could he conceive of any
other; for he was as devotedly beloved as he was passionately loving.
His brain was in his heart. In saying this one does not question the
quality of the brain, any more than one does in saying a similar thing
of a woman. Indeed, considered as an intellect, his was of the highest
order known to his race. Loveliness would have been interesting as a
psychological study, had he not been absorbing as an affectional
occupation. His family and friends often said, "How clever!" but not
until after they had said, "How dear he is!" The order of precedence in
this summary of character is the most enviable that can be experienced
by human beings. But the dog took it as a matter of course.

This little creature loved a number of people on a sliding scale of
intimacy, carefully guarded, as the intimacies of the high-born usually
are; but one he loved first, most, best of all, and profoundly. I have
called him Loveliness because it was the pet name, the "little name,"
given to him by this person. In point of fact, he answered to a variety
of appellations, more or less recognized by society; of these the most
lawful and the least agreeable to himself was Mop. It was a disputed
point whether this were an ancestral name, or whether he had received it
from the dog store, whence he had emerged at the beginning of
history,--the shaggiest, scrubbiest, raggedest, wildest little terrier
that ever boasted of a high descent.

People of a low type, those whose imagination was bounded by menial
similes, or persons of that too ready inclination to the humorous which
fails to consider the possible injustice or unkindness that it may
involve, had in Mop's infancy found a base pleasure in attaching to him
such epithets as window-washer, scrubbing-brush, feather-duster, and
footmuff. But these had not adhered. Loveliness had. It bade fair, at
the time of our story, to outlive every other name.

The little dog had both friends and acquaintances on the street where
the professor lived; and he watched for them from his cushion in the
window, hours at a time. There was the cabman, the academic-looking
cabman, who was the favorite of the faculty, and who hurrahed and
snapped his whip at the Yorkshire as he passed by; there was the newsboy
who brought the Sunday papers, and who whistled at Loveliness, and made
faces, and called him Mop.

To-day there was a dark-faced man, a stranger, standing across the
street, and regarding the professor's house with the unpleasant look of
the foreign and ill-natured. This man had eyebrows that met in a
straight, black line upon his forehead, and he wore a yellow jersey. The
dog threw back his supercilious little head and barked at the yellow
jersey severely. But at that moment he saw the carrier, who ran up the
steps laughing, and brought a gumdrop in a sealed envelope addressed to
Loveliness. There was a large mail that afternoon, including a pile of
pamphlets and circulars of the varied description that haunts
professors' houses. Kathleen, the parlor maid,--another particular
friend of the terrier's--took the mail up to the study, but dropped one
of the pamphlets on the stairs. The dog rebuked her carelessness (after
he had given his attention to the carrier's gumdrop) by picking the
pamphlet up and bringing it back to the window seat, where he opened
and dog-eared it with a literary manner for a while, until suddenly
he forgot it altogether, and dropped it on the floor, and sprang,
bounding. For the dearest person in the world had called him in a
whisper,--"Love-li-ness!" And the dearest face in the world appeared
above him and melted into laughing tenderness. "Loveliness! Where's my
_Love_-li-ness?"

A little girl had come into the room, a girl of between five and six
years, but so small that one would scarcely have guessed her to be
four,--a beautiful child, but transparent of coloring, and bearing in
her delicate face the pathetic patience which only sick children, of all
human creatures, ever show. She was exquisitely formed, but one little
foot halted and stepped weakly on the thick carpet. Her organs of speech
were perfect in mechanism, but often she did not speak quite aloud.
Sometimes, on her weaker days, she carried a small crutch. They called
her Adah.

She came in without her crutch that afternoon; she was feeling quite
strong and happy. The little dog sprang to her heart, and she crooned
over him, sitting beside him on the window seat and whispering in her
plaintive voice: "Love-li-ness! I can't live wivout you anover _min_ute,
Loveliness! I can't _live_ wivout you!"

She put her head down on the pearl-gray satin pillow with the cherry
puppies, and the dog put his face beside hers. He was kept as sweet and
clean as his little mistress, and he had no playfellow except herself,
and never went away from home unless at the end of a gray satin ribbon
leash. At all events, the two _would_ occupy the same pillow, and all
idle effort to struggle with this fact had ceased in the household.
Loveliness sighed one of the long sighs of perfect content recognized by
all owners and lovers of dogs as one of the happiest sounds in this sad
world, and laid his cheek to hers quietly. He asked nothing more of
life. He had forgotten the world and all that was therein. He looked no
longer for the cabman, the newsboy, or the carrier, and the man with the
eyebrows had gone away. The universe did not exist; he and she were
together. Heaven had happened. The dog glanced through half-closed,
blissful eyes at the yellow hair--"eighteen carats fine"--that fell
against his silver bangs. His short ecstatic breath mingled with the
gentle breathing of the child. She talked to him in broken rhapsodies. She
called him quaint, pet names of her own,--"Dearness" and "Daintiness,"
"Mopsiness" and "Preciousness," and "Dearest-in-the-World," and who knew
what besides? Only the angels who are admitted to the souls of children
and the hearts of little dogs could have understood that interview.

No member of the professor's household ever interfered with the
attachment between the child and the dog, which was set apart as one of
the higher facts in the family life. Indeed, it had its own page of
sacred history, which read on this wise:--

When Adah was a walking baby, two and a half years before the time of
which we tell, the terrier was in the first proud flush of enthusiasm
which an intelligent dog feels in the mastery of little feats and
tricks. Of these he had a varied and interesting repertoire. His
vocabulary, too, was large. At the date of our story it had reached one
hundred and thirty words. It was juvenile and more limited at the time
when the sacred page was written, but still beyond the average canine
proficiency. Loveliness had always shown a genius for the English
language. He could not speak it, but he tried harder than any other dog
I ever knew to do so; and he grew to understand with ease an incredibly
large part of the usual conversation of the family. It could never be
proved that he followed--or did not follow--the professor of psychology
in a discussion on the Critique of Pure Reason; but his mental grasp of
ordinary topics was alert and logical. He sneezed when he was cold and
wanted a window shut, and barked twice when his delicate china water-cup
was empty. When the fire department rang by, or a stove in the house was
left on draught too long, and he wished to call attention to the
circumstance, he barked four times. Besides the commonplace
accomplishments of turning somersaults, being a dead dog, sitting up to
beg for things, and shaking hands, Loveliness had some attainments
peculiar to himself.

One of these was in itself scientifically interesting. This luxurious,
daintily fed little creature, who had never known an hour's want nor any
deprivation that he could remember, led by the blind instinct of
starving, savage ancestors skulking in forests where the claw and tooth
of every living thing were against every other, conscientiously sought
to bury, against future exigencies, any kind of food for which he had no
appetite. The remnants of his dog biscuit, his saucer of weak tea, an
unpalatable dinner, alike received the treatment given to the bare bone
of his forefathers when it was driven into the ground.

Anything served the purpose of the earth,--the rough, wild earth of
whose real nature the house pet knew so little. A newspaper, a glove, a
handkerchief, a sheet of the professor's manuscript, a hearth brush, or
a rug would answer. Drag these laboriously, and push them perseveringly
to their places! Cover the saucer or the plate from sight with a solemn
persistence that the starving, howling ancestor would have respected!
Thus Loveliness recognized the laws of heredity. But the corners of rugs
were, and remained, the favorite burying sod.

On that black day when the baby girl had used her white apron by way of
blowers before the reluctant nursery fire, the little dog was alone in
the room with her. It had so happened.

Suddenly, through the busy house resounded four shrill, staccato barks.
In the vocabulary of Loveliness this meant, "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!"
Borne with them came the terrible cries of the child. When the mother
and the nursemaid got to the spot, the baby was ablaze from her white
apron to her yellow hair. She was writhing on the floor. The terrier,
his own silver locks scorching, and his paws in the flame, was trying to
cover his young mistress with the big Persian rug, in itself a load for
a collie. He had so far succeeded that the progress of the flames had
been checked.

For years the professor speculated on the problems raised by this
tremendous incident. Whether the Yorkshire regarded the fire as a
superfluity, like a dinner one does not want,--but that was far-fetched.
Whether he knew that wool puts out fire,--but that was incredible.
Whether this, that, or the other, no man could say, or ever has. Perhaps
the intellect of the dog, roused to its utmost by the demand upon his
heart, blindly leaped to its most difficult exertion. It was always hard
to cover things with rugs. In this extremity one must do the hardest. Or
did sheer love teach him to choose, in a moment that might have made a
fool or a lunatic of a man, the only one or two of several processes
which could by any means reach the emergency?

At all events, the dog saved the child. And she became henceforth the
saint and idol of the family, and he its totem and its hero. The two
stood together in one niche above the household altar. It was impossible
to separate them. But after that terrible hour little Adah was as she
was: frail, uncertain of step, scarred on the pearl of her neck and the
rose of her cheek; not with full command of her voice; more nervously
deficient than organically defective,--but a perfect being marred. Her
father said, "She goeth lame and lovely."

On the afternoon when our story began, the child and the Yorkshire sat
cuddled together in the broad window seat for a long time. Blessedness
sat with them. Adah talked in low love tones, using a language as
incomprehensible to other people as the tongue in which the dog replied
to her. They carried on long conversations, broken only by caresses, and
by barks of bliss or jets of laughter. The child tired herself with
laughing and loving, and the dog watched her; he did not sleep; he
silently lapped the fingers of her little hand that lay like a cameo
upon the silken cushion.

Some one came in and said in a low voice: "She is tired out. She must
have her supper and be put to bed."

Afterwards it was remembered that she clung to Loveliness and cried a
little, foolishly; fretting that she did not want her supper, and
demanding that the dog should go up to bed with her and be put at once
into his basket by her side. This was gently refused.

"You shall see him in the morning," they told her. Kathleen put the
little dog down forcibly from the arms of the child, who wailed at the
separation. She called back over the balusters: "_Love_-li-ness!
Good-by, Loveliness! When we're grown up, we'll _al_ways be togever,
Loveliness!"

The dog barked rebelliously for a few minutes;