Landseer’s Dogs and their Stories
[Illustration]
Landseer’s Dogs
and their Stories
by
Sarah Tytler
Author of
“Childhood a hundred years Ago.”
Chronographs of Paintings
BY
Sir Edwin Landseer.
Marcus Ward & Co. London &
Belfast.
LANDSEER’S DOGS
AND THEIR STORIES
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF “PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS,” “CHILDHOOD A HUNDRED
YEARS AGO,” &C., &C.
With Six Chromographs
AFTER PAINTINGS BY SIR EDWIN LANDSEER
[Illustration]
London:
MARCUS WARD & CO., 67 & 68, CHANDOS STREET, STRAND
AND ROYAL ULSTER WORKS, BELFAST
1877
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
[Illustration]
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 7
I.—“LOW LIFE” (_Chromograph_) 13
II.—“HIGH LIFE” _ditto_ 40
III.—“SUSPENSE” _ditto_ 66
IV.—“THE HUMBLE FRIEND” _ditto_ 88
V.—“THE CAVALIER’S PETS” _ditto_ 95
VI.—“DIGNITY AND IMPUDENCE” _ditto_ 115
VII.—MY EARLY FRIENDS 131
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
LANDSEER’S DOGS AND THEIR STORIES.
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTORY.
A PORTION of Sir Edwin Landseer’s strength and of his weakness lay in
the human element which he introduced into his pictures of animals.
Each of his pictures tells a story—not only of animal characteristics,
but of those characteristics as they approach most closely to men’s
qualities, and as they are blended most inseparably with men’s lives.
The dog is the humble friend of man, and man has been called the god of
the dog; a sorry god at the best—often a perverse and cruel divinity.
In very many of Landseer’s pictures it is impossible to dissolve the
relationship. You cannot look at the animal without thinking of the
absent master and mistress. The hero or the heroine of the scene is
strongly influenced by the man or the woman in the background. It is a
little drama of blended human and animal life, as well as the spirited
and faithful likeness of an animal which you gaze upon.
A good deal of what is unique in Landseer belongs to this peculiarity,
and much of his great popularity is due to it. Men are charmed not only
by contemplating the representations of their four-footed favourites,
but by having a genius to interpret to them the beautiful and gracious
ties which bind together God’s higher and humbler creatures. After all,
God put man at the head of His creatures in this world, and perhaps man
is not so far wrong as he has sometimes been said to show himself, in
seeing in the lower animals a reflection of his own hopes, aims, and
destiny.
The selfish and sympathetic instincts are strong in us; and neither
grown man nor child will, unless in very exceptional cases, feel either
long or deep concern in a kingdom from which he himself is banished.
Our familiarity, our fellow-feeling, is to a large extent the measure
of our interest in any subject. If we cannot put ourselves in the place
of our neighbour, let him have two feet or four, we will not continue
long to care for him; and, _vice versa_, if we have not imagination
enough to endow our neighbour with some of our own attributes, so that
he may stand, in a way, in our place, our regard for him will be but
partial and fleeting.
People speak of the charm in unlikeness and the attraction in reverses;
but there must be a more profound underlying harmony for such a charm
and attraction to exist. The fact is, we can only appreciate what we
understand in a degree at least, and there is no understanding without
some points of union. If I may venture reverently to employ such an
analogy, though man was made in the image of his Maker, when he had
done all he could to deface that image, he became so incapable of
having God in all his thoughts, that God, in His divine mercy, had
compassion upon man’s miserable incapacity, and, taking upon Him the
form of a man, restored the lost link in the chain which binds the
whole universe to the throne of God.
Children have no difficulty in mentally putting themselves in the place
of animals, or in putting animals in their place. Some of my readers
may be inclined to say this is because the child is itself a little
animal, with its higher faculties undeveloped; but none will refuse
to admit that the moral and intellectual faculties are there, however
much in abeyance. For my part, I believe that it is rather from the
essential gifts of a child, its immense power of believing beyond what
it sees, its ready sympathy and boundless trust, than from its defects
of ignorance, that it has the happy capacity of identifying itself with
its pets, and even its toys, either by transferring to them its own
possessions, or by appropriating their experience. Curious instances of
such application occur to me. A little child was heard gravely rebuking
her dog. “If you are so naughty, Floss, your Uncle Tom and your Aunt
Anne” (bestowing in all simplicity of heart her own relations on the
dog) “will be vexed; you know they will.”
The second instance is given by an accomplished writer in a recent
story, but I am persuaded it is from real life. I quote from memory.
“Why are you crying, Emily? What is the matter?” a mother asked her
little daughter in tears.
“Oh, mamma! I am not Emily just now,” the child explained through her
sobs; “I am the parrot the cat has been after, and I cannot get over
the loss of my best tail feathers.”
A little child lisping its evening prayers startled its human hearers
by adding an impromptu petition:—“God bless Ducky-daidles;” referring
to an ugly little wooden duck which the child had received into the
inmost circle of its affections.
It is a well-known fact that there is sometimes developed in men and
women from childhood an extraordinary relation to animals, a capability
of communicating with them, and exerting influence over them which
does not commonly exist. With this abnormal alliance is doubtless
connected the old myth of Orpheus gathering a brute audience to listen
to the music of his lyre, and the more modern stories of bird and
snake charmers and horse-tamers. I imagine this is only an extreme and
abiding manifestation of an ordinary characteristic of childhood; and
I believe it to be the inheritance, more or less, of all great animal
painters.
But Sir Edwin Landseer possessed his animals in another sense from that
in which the expression is used of other eminent animal painters, and
especially with regard to the animal painters of the French and Belgian
schools. He possessed them not merely as an artist, but as a man—I had
almost said a brother—certainly in the light in which Robert Burns
employed, with perfect manly tenderness, the term “fellow-mortal” to
the field-mouse whose nest his ploughshare had turned up; and in the
meaning which Sir Walter Scott intended to convey, when, on the day of
the death of his dog, he wrote an apology to a host who expected Sir
Walter’s company at dinner, on the plea of “the loss of an old friend.”
Sir Edwin Landseer possessed animals—not simply in an accurate
knowledge of their bodily traits, their hoofs, horns, and tails, the
red fire or the luminous brown discs of their eyes, the symmetry of
their loins, the glassy texture of their coats, or the soft sheen of
their feathers—but in the chivalrous insight into those instincts in
animals which in their sagacity and devotion sometimes put to shame the
boasted wisdom and constancy of man.
I cannot help thinking that the wide-spread popularity of Sir Edwin
Landseer in England is not only a credit to that manliness of national
character which expresses itself in a love of out-of-door sports, and
of the animals which share in these sports, but is also honourable as
an evidence of the kindly satisfaction with which a matter of fact and
plain-spoken race recognise in their four-footed allies attributes
which constitute them far more than useful dependants—privileged and
cherished comrades.
I should like to say a word on the other side of the question—I
mean with regard to the sense in which Sir Edwin Landseer’s lively
interpretation of the characters of animals—dogs in particular—has been
an element of weakness in his power.
It has been alleged by those critics least affected by his second sight
into the motives of animals, and most enamoured of the painters of
brutes in their entirety—brutes as apart from men, while each specimen
is distinct and individual in itself, and while it has a relation
to the nature, if not the human nature, around it—that Sir Edwin
sacrificed truth to sentiment till it became fantastic, and that in the
pursuit he lost, not any grain of his popularity among his multitude of
admirers, but something of his technical skill. It would be presumption
in me to defend Sir Edwin; neither, in truth, am I inclined to write
that he was never guilty of an exaggeration or fantasticalness—that he
never failed in effect. But I am quite clear in the statement that it
was the truth of his interpretation—not subtle, but transparent—of the
dumb speech of animals which caused it to be accepted with unqualified
delight by their masters, high and low; and that nothing short of the
most exquisite perception of propriety on Sir Edwin’s part could have
enabled him to give innumerable versions of the inner life of animals,
with so little of the exaggeration and fantasticalness which would have
easily become repugnant to the common sense of Englishmen.
The great English animal painter was a marvellous poet in his own
department, and it ought to be simply a source of thankfulness to us
that he painted poetry which those who run can read.
Yet I am about to attempt to tell again the stories which some of his
animals tell me, since it may well be they have other tales for other
admirers, and that, therefore, my experience may not be quite uncalled
for and too much. But if in any respect I cumber with words or mar by
false rendering the suggestive text which I am seeking to illustrate
lovingly, I can only hope that my blunder may be forgiven.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
“LOW LIFE.”
I DARE not say that the bull-terrier, my hero, was pure bred. I
am strongly disposed to think that he was mongrel—of the hardy,
self-reliant, incorrigible type which some mongrel races assume, until
their very mongrelness, like their ugliness, becomes almost respectable
by its manly independence and stoical indifference.
He was not by any means a dog of fine feelings, though no doubt he
had his weak side, which had nothing to do with the question of his
personal appearance. He was a democrat to the backbone, with so little
pretension to be what he was not, that if it had not been for a
large stock of coarse stolidity, and of self-confidence amounting to
impudence, a total incapacity to comprehend a higher range of character
than he himself possessed, and a certain scurrilous tongue of his own,
he would have been, in his unvarnished low life, still tolerably free
from vulgarity.
If you will examine him narrowly, you will find clear indications of
the qualities I have referred to in his general aspect. I do not say
anything of the shortness of his ears, as I suspect they have been
cropped, and he is certainly not accountable for an operation performed
against his will. But remark and admire his small piggish eyes, the
broad brevity of his nose, and the equal brevity of his tail, the width
of his jowl, the thickness of his neck—even in his clumsy conformation,
and the peculiar dogmatic obstinacy with which his substantial paws
are turned inwards. I am afraid I cannot call him anything except a
plain-looking dog, with no nonsense about him.
But he is not destitute of solid advantages, on which he justly piques
himself, in that big body scarred with the traces of many a combat in
which he has come off the victor.
He may be little to boast of where speed, agility, keenness of scent,
quickness and sureness of sight, discipline, docility, and splendid
sagacity are desired, but he has always his vigour and endurance to
fall back upon, and they are a tower of strength in themselves.
That bullet-head and those close-shut jaws can thrust like a
battering-ram and grip like a vice. His capacious chest and hind
quarters, and his posts of legs, offer a great field of resistance, and
are as hard to uproot as a stout young sapling. His hide is well-nigh
as thick as that of a rhinoceros, and can stand a perfect hail-storm
of blows without flinching. Many a rival dog he has throttled, many a
man and boy he has threatened successfully to “pin.” His scowl and his
growl are enough to repel all, save the boldest and most dauntless of
assailants.
If he is not a dog of brilliant parts, he knows a thing or two where
self-preservation is concerned. He is perfectly capable of looking
after number one—the only number which he feels himself called upon to
reckon; in fact, poor fellow, he has been accustomed to that reckoning,
and to dwelling upon it with dull, degrading reiteration from his
earliest years.
If you could ask himself, he would tell you decidedly that he has no
relations, and he would imply with an inarticulate murmur, between a
grunt and a growl, that the question is one of perfect indifference to
him; he does not mind the privation in the least—he is sufficient for
himself.
“He cares for nobody, no, not he,
If nobody cares for him.”
For that matter, ancestors, contemporaries, descendants would have been
a considerable incumbrance to him in his circumstances, which he will
not hesitate to admit have been for the most part precarious, and in
what has usually been his hand-to-mouth mode of picking up a living.
Not that he is a dog of no calling, or that he merely works on the job
principle. You may notice that he has a collar round his neck, and is
therefore of sufficient consequence to own a master. Indeed, he has
nothing of the shirking, hang-dog air, alternating with the savage
expression of the dog-tramp or pauper. His very heavy assurance and
thorough mastery of the situation altogether contradict his belonging
to that grade.
He may be low—one of the rudest and surliest of working dogs, but he is
still a working dog, a trusty watch in the absence of his master from
his place of work, a ratter of some renown. He is, to do him justice,
removed from the deepest gulf into which dogs and men can sink.
But he is in error on that point of his relations without knowing it;
for his truth and honesty, unless under overwhelming temptations, are
among his best claims on our regard. Dog of the people as he is, he is
not without distinguished kindred. We need not mention his unfortunate
great-grand-uncle, who was the avenging shadow over the garret roofs of
a certain ruffianly Bill Sykes, and who met the fate which is generally
the portion of avenging shadows. He has other claims to a much more
distant connection, certainly, but as they are to carry him into the
upper regions of society, let them be counted. He has an ancestor in
a dog named Trump, who was altogether in a superior position in life,
and on his death received the honour of having a monument erected to
his memory in the garden of the house at Chiswick which belonged to
his attached master, the great painter. Our friend had also a canny
Scotch cousin, who bore a part in a famous dialogue delivered in the
district of Kyle, in the county of Ayr, and preserved and handed down
to posterity.
It is time that we recorded our hero’s name, and began to give some
particulars of his not uneventful plebeian history. I dare say my
readers conjecture that his name was plebeian too, like all the rest
about him—that it was “Jim,” or “Ned,” or “Crab,” or “Pickles,” or
“Seize ’em,” or “Tear ’em.” Not at all. In spite of his democratic
antecedents and proclivities, he had an aristocratic, nay, a royal
designation. My own observation tends to prove that this inconsistent
appellation was according to a law of human nature. In the various
households belonging to the humblest ranks with which he had any
acquaintance, there were to be found specimens of the finest, most
sonorous titles in the English nomenclature. There was generally a
Gussy or a Louie, and there were twice Fredericks and once a Marmaduke.
The dog’s first master styled the waif, either in high-reaching
ambition or in smouldering satire, “Prince;” and Prince, not President,
he is likely to continue till the day of his death.
It is no reproach to Prince’s powers of memory—which, at the same
time, were only remarkable in what were to him the parallel lines of
meals and feuds—that they could not carry him back beyond that era in
puppyhood when he was found, in one of the back slums of London, doing
brave battle with a dog twice his size and age for a gnawed crust.
Unquestionably, Prince had not first seen the light in such a dainty
kennel as might have impressed his juvenile imagination, and the loss
of which would have made a crisis in his early history. The probability
was that he was the puppy of some poor working dog, such as he himself
became in after-life; and that the dog’s proprietor, after having
tolerated him for a few weeks—during which he showed no signs of
growing up of any particular value, and when no fellow-workman fancied
the “pup”—had either separated him from his parent, and cast him adrift
on the world, or had suffered him to be lost in the street, and thrown
on the tender mercies of the police, as the easiest solution of the
difficulty—happily less insurmountable than that of Ginx’s spare baby.
But the finder of Prince was not a policeman. He was a little boy
named Jack, who was almost as audacious and reckless as the puppy,
with the delight of a child in a young dog—especially in a young dog
which is treasure-trove, and when there is the fraction of a chance he
may be permitted to retain it for his own property. He decoyed Prince,
still a nameless little cur, from the fray in which he was engaged,
christened him Prince, with a splendid disregard of the proprieties, on
the spot, and prepared to convey him home, tucked tightly within Jack’s
ragged jacket.
Poor little Prince! pugilistic as he had already shown himself, and as
he was doomed to prove throughout his career, he responded then, as he
always did, in his gruff fashion, to the scant kindness which was shown
him. He did not nestle to Jack’s heart or lick his dirty hand, for he
was never a demonstrative dog, but he cocked the ears—short even then,
before they had undergone the hideous process of cropping—looked up
with his small beads of eyes in his captor’s face, as if acknowledging
his master, and then gave one short, stiff wag of his stump of a tail,
as if appending his signature—the signature of the puppy-father to the
dog whose word was his bond—to the bargain.
That slightly ungracious, yet expressive wag of the tail did Jack’s
business, and rendered him ten times more bent on retaining the
puppy, in spite of sundry obstacles which he saw looming ahead of the
connection, in the prejudices which might be entertained by his father
and mother regarding their small means—of which Jack, boy as he was,
did not fail to be aware—their limited house accommodation, and the
number of his little brothers and sisters.
But if Prince the puppy was father to Prince the dog, so Jack the
boy was father to Jack the man. A certain jolly self-indulgence and
ignoring of consequences, so long as they could be shelved, were from
first to last marked features in his character. When Jack, with his
captive, reached the small, swarming, reeking family-room, in which
there was always a washing going on, at some stage of the process, his
mother did say that they had already as many dogs as there was bran
for. And his father, coming in from his last odd job, told the boy to
get along, and asked him reproachfully if his father’s dog, Bully, a
lame, cantankerous old bull-terrier of dubious origin, and his mother’s
birds—canaries and goldfinches, which were her “fad”—were not, together
with his numerous little brothers and sisters, pets enough for him?
But Jack was his father and mother’s own boy, and, as it was rather
a prosperous time with them, they could not find it in their
hearts to baulk him in an inclination with which they had really
so much sympathy. So Prince was suffered to become a member of the
happy-go-lucky family. The only serious opposition he met with came
from his dog-brother, Bully, who assumed a hostile attitude of tooth
and claw. However, Bully was old and incapable, so that a tolerably
active young dog could manage to escape from the execution of his
menaces. Besides, a street accident soon afterwards disposed of the
canine patriarch, to the unaffected grief of his master.
Prince grew to dog’s estate in the household, sharing its very
fluctuating, but inevitably downward-tending, fortunes, scrambling with
it for a livelihood—feasting the one day, fasting the next—receiving a
cuff, or a spendthrift dole, as humour and the family purse inclined.
Prince acquired stores of knowledge and experience of a mixed sort at
this stage of his existence. He was accustomed to go everywhere with
Jack in his spare time—above all, on his half-holidays. Prince enlarged
his acquaintance with London; he was not only a regular attendant on
all the bird sales and rat-pits in the neighbourhood, but travelled
into the suburbs and to the verge of the country. He followed Punch and
Judys, and joined in the festivities of Guy Fawkes’ and chimney-sweeps’
days. He went a-palming on the Saturday before Palm Sunday; he was on
Hampstead Heath, in Greenwich Park, and Epping Forest, and saw the
coloured paper-streamers, and the brilliant crimson and green false
beards on successive Easter and Whit Mondays. The wide open spaces, the
green grass, the shady trees puzzled him a good deal, but not nearly
so much as did the sea, which he once saw in a cheap trip to Brighton,
when Jack’s family were in exceptional funds, and spending them like
princes.
Prince was never absent from the Boat Race. Year after year, as the
day came round, he was to be found stationed by Jack’s side on the
Hammersmith Bridge, not half so much incommoded, on account of the
pressure—which, indeed, he could keep off by the use of natural
weapons—as he had been startled by the wide world of waters, on the
edge of which he had stood, with his tail uncertain whether to droop or
to curl, at Brighton.
I question whether any dog belonging to the two universities took a
greater interest in the race, even though he had been rowed for hours
by his attentive master on the Isis or the Cam, than did Prince, in all
impartiality; for, though he had a rag of ribbon tied duly round his
neck by Jack, Prince at least had no bet either on the light or the
dark blue. No more had he any, save the simplest friendly interest, in
the winner of the Derby, when he accompanied Jack in an overflowing
costermonger’s cart to Epsom Downs. His temper was sorely tried on the
way, not merely by the traffic and the clouds of dust, but by the
flour warfare, which powdered him white like a miller’s dog. As Prince
could not wear a veil, his small eyes were filled till he could hardly
blink at the flying hedges, or, after his arrival, at the grand stand,
the starting-point, the negro serenaders, and the gipsy fortune-tellers.
On the whole, Prince had a tolerably happy youth, for a dog of his
condition, under Jack’s auspices. It might not have been so improving
as one could wish, but he learnt some proficiency in shifting for
himself, and being philosophical when nothing better offered—a valuable
lesson for more than dogs.
Everything comes to an end, and few things sooner, alas! than the
hand-to-mouth drifting with the tide of careless, improvident working
people. There came a time, at no distant date in Jack’s and Prince’s
household, in which there were no longer treats and dainties going.
Bacon, buttered toast, and saveloys vanished from the board. Meals
became intermittent. Bit after bit of furniture, and every scrap of
clothing that could be spared, were put in pawn at one of the shops
with the three golden balls above the doorway. The mother of the family
was laid down with typhus, and removed to the nearest hospital. Young
Gussy and Fred shared the same fate.
Poor Jack, hanging his head, began to speak of parting with Prince. He
had often wished he could put him in pawn with the rest of the pledged
goods, and borrow a little money on Prince’s capabilities of keeping
guard and ratting. Jack had joked in his half-rueful, half-rough
fashion on the dogs not eating his head off, since he could hardly tell
on what Prince, together with his master’s family, had fed for the
last fortnight. Jack knew very well how he and Prince had gone out, in
company and separately, after nightfall and in broad day, on the hunt;
how they had constituted themselves amateur chiffonniers, and burrowed
in the dust heaps for cast-away fragments; how they had hung about the
doors of eating-houses and bakers shops for chance crumbs; how they had
picked up garbage and been thankful.
But it was one thing to joke and another to dispose, for good and
all, of the old dog—he was an old dog now in Jack’s eyes—and that to
a customer who was hard-fisted and cross-grained, whose bite and sup
Prince would not share, and who could no more be trusted to let old
friends meet than he could be expected to redeem the forfeited articles
and restore the fallen fortunes of the family gone to the wall.
But Jack, who had been, in his humble way, self-willed and extravagant
from his cradle, had already parted with more precious possessions than
Prince, and it is to be feared would part with still more before his
history was ended. Anyhow, he sold Prince for the merest trifle to a
hard buyer; and as tears were in Jack’s dull eyes when he closed the
bargain, we will dismiss him with the reluctant reflection that, if he
or his progenitors had only owned a single germ of noble self-denial,
manly, womanly forethought, plucky, cheery diligence, he might not
merely have kept the dog—he and his might have been as independent and
well-to-do, and risen as far above want, with its terrible temptations,
as any of the gentlefolks in the land.
The inducement which Prince’s new master, Mr. Jerry Noakes, had for
the purchase, was that he had enjoyed some opportunity of remarking
Prince’s tenacity of purpose and literal discharge of a commission,
which he was convinced would render the dog a good watch; while Mr.
Jerry was satisfied, from Prince present appearance, that he could be
put off with as shabby quarters and meagre fare as will suffice to keep
a dog in life. In fact, Mr. Jerry Noakes’ principle, which he found
to work well for his ends, was—don’t pamper your dependants on any
consideration, if you wish them to be of use to you—on the contrary,
grind them down to the last extremity, and all that is in them will be
stimulated to do battle with the world on their and your account.
Mr. Jerry Noakes owned a small coal-yard—very small and very little
frequented, though its possessor was a man of some substance—but he
drew his means from other sources. Still he was not inclined that these
slatey-looking, dusty, crumbling piles of coals which were his property
should disappear under the predatory attacks of the loafers in a low
neighbourhood. Therefore he procured Prince at a cheap rate, inducted
him into a couch—which, as it had been knocked together by Mr. Jerry
Noakes’ own hands from some rickety deals, was as poor an affair and as
wretched a shelter from the weather as could well be imagined—and put
him in charge of the yard.
It might be promotion, but it was also a great reverse for Prince.
True, he had now a regular meal once a-day, a moderate mess of bran and
food for poultry, with the parings of cats’ meat, administered by Mr.
Jerry, in place of Prince’s being called upon to forage for himself,
with the not uncommon conclusion of finding himself both breakfastless
and dinnerless, as had been the case lately in Jack’s family circle.
But not only was the gain not large, there was the sentiment of the
thing. I hope none of my readers suppose that Prince, though a coarse
brute, thick-skinned and obtuse, was destitute of feeling.
In Jack’s home the dog was one of the family; indeed from his very
doghood he had rather the best of it. For if men and women, responsible
beings, will live, like animals, along with animals, the last—the real
Simon Pures—have generally the advantage. Jack’s race, reckless as they
were, must surely have been visited with some doubts, some anxieties,
some pricking sense that they were wasting their capital of time and
capacity for work as well as of wages. But of course Prince was never
harassed by such a reminder that he had a conscience, and was at once
mortal and immortal. He had his little work to do, and did it to the
best of his ability. He was occasionally left to keep house, and did
not fail in his trust. He sat beside the tools of Jack’s trade many a
day, never offering to stir till Jack released him. He entered with
pride and zest into his calling as a rat-catcher whenever he had the
chance. But all the time he was largely his own master, for he could
hardly call it servitude to roam the world of London at Jack’s heels.
It was another matter for Prince to be a prisoner himself, while
prepared to take others prisoners, in this dreary yard—to spend day and
night there—to have no change of scene, no comradeship, though it might
result in scuffles and single combats with other dogs—to see nobody
for a stretch of twenty-four hours, perhaps, except Mr. Jerry Noakes.
He always spoke gruffly, never encouragingly, to Prince; and the dog,
though he was gruff himself, with little tenderness or humour, so that
he was impatient of fondling, and had no great aptitude for fun, yet
knew and appreciated what fidelity and good-fellowship meant.
That parting from his first master, Jack, had been a great wrench
to Prince’s whole nature; and while the strain of the pull, and the
ache of the void, were still in full force, the dog was condemned for
his sins to solitary confinement, on the lowest diet, and with no
satisfaction of his social instincts, except the brief interview with
Mr. Jerry Noakes, his gaoler, who never said, “Hie! old dog,” or “What
are you arter to-day, you duffer?” or “Shan’t we have a rove to-night,
my beauty?”
Sometimes Prince was so depressed in his spirits that he could not
find it in his heart to make a spring, worry, and have done with a cat
which, from scrambling idly down on the wall, ventured imprudently to
descend into his territory. He contented himself with growling at her,
just that she might escape to the wall again, and stand there raising
her back and spitting at him, which was an approach to company.
It was a positive relief when the sun was right overhead, blazing
down into the little black hole, threatening to produce spontaneous
combustion among the materials for fuel which seemed then so
unnecessary, and to grill the bones of Prince, lying panting with
his tongue out in that couch of his, which neither kept out heat nor
cold, and was very far from water-tight—that he could divert his mind
from sad thoughts by watching the blue-bottle flies which, for some
reason Prince could not divine—if he had got his choice, he would not
have selected such quarters—congregated and buzzed lazily about the
enclosure. Prince only watched the flies; he was by far too practical
and mature a dog to descend—even in his dulness, and although he had
not been weak from deficiency of food and overcome by the heat—to
anything so childish as catching flies.
I think it was Sir Edwin Landseer himself who said that no dog could
endure being kept strictly on the chain for a longer period than three
years; that his heart would break, or his reason give way in the
interval.
I believe Prince was nearly three years Mr. Jerry Noakes property
without either dying or going mad; but then he was a dog of singular
powers of endurance, as I have signified; besides, after the first few
months of his joint experience of being a gaoler and gaoled, there
were modifications introduced into the system which rendered it more
bearable to him.
Mr. Jerry Noakes discovered that by the sheer force of habit, and of
that defective imagination which prevents some men and dogs, though
driven to extremity, from breaking out into independent enterprise,
Prince, if let loose for a season, would return doggedly, of his own
accord, to his durance on the expiry of a reasonable time. Therefore,
when Mr. Jerry was himself on duty at the yard, he would free the dog,
and send him out of the gates for a scamper, reflecting with a grin
that he saved Prince’s feed that morning—since the dog was sure to nose
out some booty in his outing—as well as preserved him in good health.
Even if Prince had, with keen canine sagacity and a yearning heart,
sought out his former home, he would still have missed his old
protector, for, in sinking lower and lower, the humble street where
Jack and his family had dwelt in Prince’s day now knew them no more.
The seniors and the younger children had gravitated without fail to the
House; while Jack had become peripatetic in his vocation, and moved
rapidly from one wretched lodging-house to another.
But, truth to tell, Prince did not attempt to make the discovery. He
was too stupid, and too prostrated by slow starvation, to do more than
prowl about the immediate neighbourhood of his yard, and stump—for
Prince no more slank, not even when he was greatly in the wrong, than
he stalked—back to his den when he was weary, or when some occult
instinct told him that his leave was up.
Prince was not in some important respects the dog he looks in his
picture when he was living with Mr. Jerry Noakes. He is a fairly
well-fed dog, and in excellent condition, as we see him; but in those
hard times he was reduced to skin and bone, his ribs could be counted,
his mongrel disproportions were exposed in all their ugliness, and
there was a wild look—that of a creature at bay, and which struck
people as unsafe—about the dog.
Yet the lamentable change on the outer dog was not the worst result of
Prince’s residence with Mr. Jerry Noakes; the inner dog was undergoing
as sure a deterioration. Any good that had been in Prince was being
stamped out of him. He was hardening back into the original savage wolf
or jackal. His truth and honesty, which had been his best domestic
qualities, were being corrupted and sapped to the foundation.
With Jack’s family Prince had been—well, free and easy in his
practices; but the whole family had been free and easy in their
ways, and anything like deliberate, premeditated larceny was unknown
to the dog. There was all the difference that there is between
manslaughter and murder in Prince’s helping himself occasionally
when the opportunity came unexpectedly in his way, and when he knew
that there was no great offence in the deed, and in his craftily
planning and brazenly carrying out, in utter impenitence, the
series of roll-liftings from the baskets on bakers’ counters, and
trotter-snatchings from behind butchers’ doors, in spite of the
butchers’ dogs, whose vigilance he managed to evade—by which Prince
signalised his absences from the shed.
Mr. Jerry Noakes was right, that Prince needed no regular meal on
the day of his temporary release. Indeed, if Mr. Jerry had known how
liberally the dog fared on these occasions, the man might have sought
covertly to share in the spoil, and might have been tempted, though
he had no need, to run the risk of constituting Prince a professional
thief and a permanent provider, in a dishonest manner, for the material
wants of both.
But Prince’s diabolical cunning, that new and alarming feature in
the dog’s character, was too much for his master. Prince took care
to despatch every crumb and hair, and get rid of all traces of his
unlawful proceedings, before he returned sullenly to his master.
It is all very well to laugh; but the dog, with all his craft, would
have been caught red-handed some day and made a public example of,
perishing miserably by a violent death, had not Mr. Jerry Noakes’ own
death suddenly dissolved the connection between him and Prince. Mr.
Jerry Noakes was removed at a moment’s notice from all his grubbing
and grinding, and Prince, after narrowly escaping being forgotten and
starved to death in the yard, fell into the hands of Mr. Miles Noakes,
Mr. Jerry’s nephew and nearest surviving relation.
Mr. Miles was a family man settled in the country, and was called on
to sustain the trouble and expense of a journey to London in order to
discharge the last duties to Mr. Jerry, and possibly to be rewarded
by entering on his inheritance. Those who had known Mr. Jerry said
“possibly” advisedly, while they were aware that Mr. Miles was the
nearest surviving relation; and the cautious wording of the phrase was
vindicated by the sequel. Mr. Jerry had left a will, and bequeathed his
gains in two parts—to a more distant relation than Mr. Miles, and who
was comparatively rich and in no want of money, and to a charitable
institution.
It was just after Mr. Miles had been made acquainted with the
disposal of the funds that he, still acting in the character of the
representative of the dead man, seeing that the favoured kinsman had
not put himself about to attend the funeral, looked into the yard and
remarked Prince.
The dog, faithful to the single principle of duty that was left in him,
threatened the intruder as furiously as if Prince himself were not an
arrant rogue, or as if he were acting out the adage, “Set a thief to
catch a thief.”
The dog looked such a miserable object, there was so little to
steal, the idea of his revenging himself for being deprived of the
succession by pilfering these mouldy coals—if coals can ever be called
mouldy—tickled the stranger’s fancy, though this was no laughing
occasion, neither was he in any laughing mood.
Mr. Miles, while he had stood in the relation of nephew to Mr. Jerry,
was nearly as old a man as his uncle, and, as he lounged there in
his rusty black, he bore a certain resemblance to his late father’s
brother. He appeared crusty, if not grim, but he possessed what Mr.
Jerry had certainly been devoid of—an imagination to take in the
ludicrousness of the situation; and he was not altogether selfish
and inhuman, for even, while smarting under the injury which had been
inflicted on him, and as Prince was flying at him as far as his chain
would permit, Mr. Miles said to himself, “I must see that beast put out
of pain before I go.”
Then the humour of the man, which had been stirred in him, took a new
direction. “I should not care, just for the fun of the thing, to take
him down with me to Westbarns and show him to Nanse as our share of
Uncle Jerry’s goods. I heard the landlord of the Hare and Hounds say
he wanted a serviceable dog to replace his young Newfoundland which
he had been induced to sell. I’ll go bail that Uncle Jerry’s dog is
serviceable.”
The whim found favour with a whimsical poor man, and so Prince, not
without difficulty and danger, was removed to the railway station
and consigned to a dog-box. There he was so dazed and confounded by
the darkness and the rapid motion—which he had only once experienced
before, and that was on that far-away trip to Brighton, when he
had been smuggled in Jack’s arms among a hilarious company into an
open van—that he came out, in the course of an hour and a half,
comparatively subdued, and condescended, without extreme pressure, to
accompany Mr. Miles Noakes to his cottage.
It was evening when the two arrived, jaded by travel, excitement, and
disappointment. A much younger looking woman than Mr. Miles was a man,
was gazing eagerly along the road in expectation of their arrival.
She stood at the gate of a well-kept little garden, sweet with spring
flowers—blue hyacinths, primroses, polyanthuses. She had lively hazel
eyes and smooth dark hair, and wore a neat cap and clean apron. She
might have been a capable, prized maid-servant in her day; she was
still an active, tidy matron in her early prime.
“You are come at last, Miles; you must be clean done up, but the
children are a-bed, and your supper is ready,” she said hurriedly,
while she kissed her husband, as if feeling it a relief to welcome him
first before she asked the question with which her heart was beating,
her breath coming fast and her lips quivering, while she had no
attention to spare for his four-footed attendant.
“All right, Nanse,” said Mr. Miles, entering the cottage before he
vouchsafed any explanation.
Perhaps his mind misgave him, or his heart smote him with regard to
the jest he was about to make, as he looked round on the familiar
dwelling—small, not without evidence of narrow means, but scrupulously
clean and well ordered, from the gay patched quilt on the crib, in
which the two children slept, to the well-scoured pewter mug with his
beer flanking the plate of cold bacon, the better part of the dinner
saved for his supper.
It would be no jesting matter to Nanse to hear that the property of
which he had been summoned to take possession had gone past them. When
they had parted, she had not been able to help building on it, in her
impulsive woman’s fashion, as what should render them easy in their
worldly affairs, lighten the load on their backs, provide a welcome
substitute when his strength must fail, and, above all, supply better
schooling for the children, and raise them above all fear of want when
she alone was left to labour for them.
But Mr. Miles Noakes was not a man easily turned from a purpose, and,
it might be, he thought the quip would break the weight of the fall.
He said at last, as he took off his hat and placed it carefully beyond
the reach of damage, while he gave a jerk of his elbow in the direction
of Prince, standing uncertain on the threshold, a most unattractive
object in his skeleton leanness, his unthrifty coat, and the greed
which the glimpse of the victuals called up—in spite of his clumsy
efforts to conceal his feelings—in his winking eyes and sniffing
nose—“Well, Nanse, there is our legacy.”
The woman stood bewildered; her colour went and came. “Oh, Miles! you
cannot mean it?” she cried at last; “Uncle Jerry and you could not be
so cruel?”
“Woman, I had nothing to do with it,” he said, flinging himself heavily
into the chair set for him; “and was it not better than to come back
empty-handed?”
She understood now that he was in earnest—that he and she had been
defrauded, as she called it in her hot heart, of the time, trouble, and
expense of his journey, as well as of their justifiable expectations,
and that there was nothing left for Miles but to be grimly merry at her
expense.
She hesitated, for she was a quick-tempered woman, prone to resent fun
of which she was the butt, and any advantage taken of her ignorance.
Yet she had loved her husband for the very oddity which expressed
itself in this shape. She had been proud of her conquest of him when
she had been a pretty, smart, popular servant-girl, and he had enjoyed
the reputation of being the most “humoursome,” no less than the most
long-headed, steady, middle-aged bachelor in the place. His humour,
even in company with his long-headedness and steadiness, had not
brought him great worldly prosperity, yet she had never regretted her
choice. There must have been a strain of something uncommon in Nanse
herself, which had enabled her, in the first instance, to appreciate
what was remarkable in her future husband and to triumph in astonishing
the world by accepting him from her host of wooers, and, in the second,
to remain content with her bargain.
But it is one thing to relish a queer fish’s cranky wit played off on
other people and on things in general, and quite another to value the
same rare quality turned against one’s self in a supreme moment of
mortification and vexation.
Nanse stood motionless for an instant, and was on the verge of getting
into a white heat and saying something she would have regretted
afterwards, when the corner of her eye caught sight of her husband’s
grey hairs, while her ears seemed to take in the echo of a break in
his voice. Her heart was as warm as her temper was quick. With a flash
of sympathy she realised all his fatigue and chagrin, and pain for her
pain, which he was seeking to carry off by his poor joke. She was at
his side in a moment, entering into his humour, though with a lump in
her throat and a dimness before her eyes.
“Dear heart alive!” she exclaimed, borrowing one of her old mother’s
expressions; “it must be a rare monster, Miles; I should have said it
was not worth the carriage, but Uncle Jerry and you must know best. In
the meantime, let it be, and eat your supper like a good man. I’m right
down thankful to have you safe home again, and the children are both
pretty well, and fell asleep an hour ago wearying for your kisses.”
“You’re a good soul, Nanse,” muttered Mr. Miles down in his throat
in the pauses between bolting mouthfuls of bacon. “Come and have
your supper with me, lass, and I’ll kiss you again as soon as I have
finished.”
Mr. and Mrs. Miles had no thought save of disposing of Prince to the
landlord of the Hare and Hounds the first thing next morning, though
they gave him, as a matter of course also, the scraps of their supper
and leave to sleep at their hearth.
But the new day brought new ideas. Little Freddy—named proudly for
Nanse’s little master in the last situation she had filled—fell sick in
the night, and was still ill and cross in the morning when Nanse rose
to light the fire and prepare the breakfast. Mr. Miles, who kept the
child while the mother was thus engaged, thought to divert the boy, and
partly succeeded, by drawing his attention to the strange bow-wow which
daddy had brought home while Freddy was asleep last night.
“You had better leave the brute all the morning, Miles, since Freddy is
so taken with him,” suggested the anxious mother. “Pretty dear! he has
left off crying to watch the dog. I suppose the creature will be quiet
enough if nobody meddles with him, and I shall take care that neither
Freddy nor Louie teases him. You will be in and out, and you can take
the dog away at dinner-time quite as well as now. Perhaps the child
will be better then.”
When the dinner hour came the child was not better, but worse, lying
listlessly with flushed face and heavy eyes, which, however, still
lightened a little as they followed the entrancing apparition of the
dog. Mr. and Mrs. Miles could not bear to remove the solace of their
sick child, and hour by hour and day by day the departure of Prince was
deferred.
In this period of probation I am glad to say that Prince’s conduct
was irreproachable. As Nanse fed the dog regularly, that the child,
who could not eat himself, might have the pleasure of seeing the dog
eat, and with a faint hope that Freddy might be induced to follow the
“doggie’s” example, Prince was not exposed to the temptation of hunger,
which had already proved too much for his virtue. For that matter he
had not stolen in private houses, his depredations had been committed
in shops, and his dulness was in his favour at this epoch, as it did
not suggest an analogy between Nanse’s little larder and the regions
from which he had been wont to pick and steal.
Then it was found true here, as elsewhere, that if there is any
lingering remnant of good in the rudest, most brutalised man or dog,
a helpless little child will call it forth. Prince, as a rule, hated
fondling, but he had some experience of children. Though Jack had been
twice Freddy’s age when he appropriated the dog—a strong puppy in the
street, Jack had always possessed, more or less, small brothers and
sisters, with whom Prince had been on friendly, familiar terms. Prince
knew, therefore, that fondlings and sundry other liberties—such as
clutching him round the neck, or pulling him by the tail—must be put up
with from senseless little children, although no dog of spirit would
stand them for a moment from grown-up, rational people.
Prince sat like patience on a monument, and permitted Freddy to stroke
his bristly hair backwards with hot little hands, or to hold on by
his ears, without uttering one note of protest, till Mrs. Miles cried
out of her full heart to her husband, “Miles, let us keep the dog
ourselves; we’re not so hard up or so near that we’ll miss his bite.
We’ve had no cat since poor Kitty was took in the rabbit warren. He may
earn something for his living if he can be got to go out and do a turn
at ratting for a neighbour at a time. Anyway, he can always watch your
dinner till you’re ready, when you carry it with you to your place of
work; and he is good to the child. I feel as if dear little Freddy will
get well again, and that the dog may bring luck to the house, though he
came to it at an unlucky time.”
Of course, and very properly, Mr. Miles laughed and scouted at Prince’s
bringing luck; and it was not in consequence of any such vain womanish
superstition, but because families like Mr. Miles’ are tolerably
sure on the whole, and in spite of troubles, to rise in the social
scale—just as families like poor Jack’s are as certain to decline, that
the occupants of the cottage did begin to prosper from the hour that
Prince crossed their threshold.
Prince himself knew when he was in good quarters, and showed the
knowledge satisfactorily, by continuing to be on his best behaviour,
till he commenced to forget his worst, and to be good as if goodness
were a second nature to him. He thawed manifestly in his surliness to
more than the children, whose trusty play-fellow he was. He showed
himself faithful, obedient, attentive, as far as his understanding
went, and decently civil and discreet.
I wish I could state that Prince became in all respects a superior dog,
or at least that he lost his overweening opinion of himself, and became
capable of reverencing, at a humble distance, really great dogs—instead
of cracking vulgar jokes at their expense, and seeking to drag them
down to his own level—or that he even altogether got rid of that
lowered moral standard and grave deterioration which he suffered during
his stay in Mr. Jerry Noakes’ yard.
I am sorry to say I can make no such assertion. On the contrary, it
was a great shock to Mrs. Miles, who was pre-eminently an honest
woman, to discover that Prince—fairly to be relied upon at home—could
not come within a hundred yards of the baker’s and butcher’s shops in
the village without undergoing a distressing transformation. He would
slip away from his mistress’ side, if he happened to be out marketing
with her, dodge about with an evident disreputable assumption of an
incognito, for he was but a fifth-rate actor after all, till he saw
his opportunity, then improve it by darting to the scene of action,
seizing the coveted twopenny loaf or sheep’s liver, though he had made
an excellent breakfast that very morning, and making off with it like
the wind.
It was to no purpose that he was pursued, convicted, punished; the next
time temptation met him, he fell without fail, repeating the offence.
It was as if the temptation, once habitually indulged in, had become
irresistible to poor stupid Prince.
Mrs. Miles had a struggle whether she ought to keep a dog with such
a disgraceful propensity, and one day she was very nearly giving him
up, when by his gross self-indulgence he covered not only her but his
master with ridicule and shame.
It was on a Sunday at noon, of all times, but Mrs. Miles had not been
to church—she had sat up, the night before, with a sick neighbour.
She had carried the younger child with her on her errand of mercy,
while Mr. Miles had taken care of the elder, and been at church with
him, leaving Prince to keep house, which he did with sufficient
uprightness, in the family’s absence.
Mr. Miles had gone home when the service was over, and liberated the
dog, permitting him to join the little party, in their Sunday clothes,
that set out to meet and greet the wife and mother on her expected
return.
Mrs. Miles had appeared duly, and been gratified by her husband’s
attention. The group were proceeding in the most exemplary and
agreeable fashion along the village street, when the heads of the
household were startled by the nudges and sniggles, rising into
roars of laughter, which their progress drew forth—not only from
the loiterers about the ale-house door, but from the more decorous
passers-by, carrying home their Sunday’s dinner from the baker’s oven.
Mrs. Miles glanced round indignantly at her husband and two children,
and could discover nothing—unless a pleasing picture of domestic
felicity, which ought to have excited admiration or envy, not
contempt—to account for the derision with which even some of her own
particular friends were regarding the family, till she looked behind
her, and then Mrs. Miles saw it all.
To her horror, Mrs. Miles found that Prince was scouring along close
to heel, bearing a whole roast duck by his teeth in its back. He had
been unable to pass the baker’s door, though the shutter was on the
window: having entered, his nose had beguiled him into a more daring
and serious crime than the petty pilfering which was the usual extent
of his delinquencies. And Mrs. Miles could not create the scandal on
the Sunday, with the parson coming out of the rectory at her back, of
having the dog pursued and deprived of his prey.
That night, while Mr. Miles—though he had not liked the laugh when it
was sounding in his ears any better because he had often raised such
himself—after he had escaped the cackle, took the matter easily, like a
philosopher, Mrs. Miles was, as she would have described it, “in a sad
way;” she felt as if her own and her husband’s good name were at stake,
and that they might be unjustly accused of sharing in the toothsome
dainty, basely come by, and for which some Sunday dinner had waited in
vain. She renounced Prince with a groan. But next morning, when the dog
stood letting Freddy harness him with pack-thread, Nanse thought better
of it. She judged correctly that Prince was only a dumb brute; when the
worst came to the worst, she was not certain whether Uncle Jerry were
not accountable for Prince’s bad tricks, and whether she and Miles, as
Uncle Jerry’s representatives, did not owe the dog some reparation for
the cruel wrong done him.
At the same time, she was careful to relieve her conscience and clear
her credit by solemnly warning the baker and butcher, and going so
far as to offer to pay for any amount of plunder with regard to which
it could be proved that it had not been left carelessly, after her
caution, in the dog’s way.
The tradesmen, to whom Mrs. Miles always paid her bills to a day, took
her communication in good part, and even generously tossed to Prince
an occasional crust or bone, which, nevertheless, had not the effect
of curing him of his culpable weakness. But Mrs. Miles left him as few
chances as possible of lapsing into his one inveterate vice.
With this, alas! flagrant exception, Prince ended by being a tolerably
respectable character, in the favourable circumstances to which he was
so fortunate as to attain at last.
[Illustration]