“SUSPENSE.”
FLORA was a species of dog that had a dash of the bloodhound in
her. She was a great, somewhat gaunt creature, standing high on the
legs, and with a broad sagacious jowl, as different as possible from
Carlo’s fine, supercilious, pensive mouth. Flora, like many of her
sex—especially those of them whose personal qualities are not their
great distinction, and who have not, therefore, been followed and
fawned upon by a crowd of fools—was a dog of strong affections. It was
for her capacity in this respect, together with her admirable patience
and a kind of broad good sense, that she was valued.
In the picture, Flora is sitting waiting, as she so often sat,
expectation and longing in every bristling hair, but without a single
demonstration of violence or obstreperous appeal. The door is closed,
and it is not for her to batter it, as Flora knows right well, neither
will she disturb her friends and owners by intruding her wishes on them
in barking and yelping. It is not that she has tried the artillery and
found it fail; it is that she is too reasonable, too long-suffering,
too unexacting and unselfish to practice with the weapons of a
smaller dog in every way.
[Illustration]
There she is, a great, not over-comely, and somewhat uncouth dog,
but loyal and loving to the heart’s core—as considerate as a dog can
be—full of a great trust in and an absolute submission to her master,
who is her lord and king, and in her master’s absence to his family and
representatives. She is so strong that she can afford to dispense with
bullying, and is meek in her strength and mild in her power.
She sits to the artist, full of the anxiety and desire which you can
read in a thousand signs—by her wide-apart legs, the one foot slightly
raised, as on tiptoe—by the head bent in the attitude of intent
listening—by the fixed eyes, a little mournful, as deeply-loving eyes
are apt to be—by the hair rising on the crest of the back—by the very
squat of the haunches, and the utterly flat and flaccid condition
of the great tail laid at rest on the floor; for you will please to
observe that Flora, though hearkening with all her ears, does not
catch the faintest murmur of sound. It is the dog’s instinct and
affection—whatever she has for a mind—that is on the rack, and not
her nerves or her senses. She remains perfectly still and silent—a
monument of watching and hope, which are not undashed with fear and
doubt, almost despair; for the dog is capable of very keen and constant
attachment, and she has little knowledge wherewith to lighten the
apprehensions and solace the pangs of devotion put on its hardest
trial. But should Flora’s hope deferred sink in the end into fathomless
despondency, the dog will still contain herself. She will be no burden
to anybody. She will not add to the grief of others, who have a better
right than she has to mourn. She will wear a decent veil of reserve
over her anguish. What is she that she should cry out against destiny?
She will go about her usual avocations, and even faintly wag her tail
and make a formal show of joy at her friends’ advances, or on any
occasion of hilarity. There will be no idle baying at the moon, or wild
howling in the dead of night, causing the blood of other watchers to
curdle, in Flora’s case; she knows how to suffer and be silent, nay,
to put the best face on suffering. Only the old dog’s tread will grow
heavier and heavier, in proportion to the increasing heaviness of her
heart, as she stalks about her business. She will get ever gaunter,
without attracting much notice to her spectral condition, until one
day she will be found stretched stark and still on some spot, hallowed
by association, where her master was wont to whistle her to his side
to start for the day’s sport—where he cleaned his gun on their return,
and she, after lapping the cold tea which his care provided for her
refreshment, sat and looked on, not too tired to enter with interest
and admiration into the operation. Or she will be discovered on the
mat by the closed door—opening no more—of his room; dying without
complaint, and seeking to cause no trouble in her death, as she had
tried to give as little as possible in her life.
Flora was brought up in a middle station of life to that of Prince or
of Carlo. She was not the next thing to an outcast, neither was she a
pampered dog of high degree. She was one of a litter of puppies that
arrived at a country parsonage, when there was no great need of such
an addition to the family. Neither was she, nor her mother before
her, particularly precious for purity or excellence of breed, though
they were members of a race of stout serviceable dogs which could be
turned to account in various ways, and could be trained to prove of
considerable use, both as setters and retrievers, among the turnips and
clover, and in the young plantations. But the perpetual curate who was
master of the parsonage was an elderly man, and no great sportsman, and
one dog was quite enough for him and his friends.
Flora was sentenced to death along with her brothers and sisters, and
if it had not been for Master Harry her history would have been of the
briefest. He was not the sole hope of the house, like De Vaux; neither
had he any honours beyond an honest name to succeed to. But he was the
youngest born of his family. He was growing up in a healthy, hardy,
happy boyhood, after the elder members had gone out into the world, and
were married and settled in households of their own. Master Harry was
the last young bird that kept the parent nest tenanted by more than the
old pair. He was the Benjamin of their mature years, and therefore it
was difficult to deny him a small request—not that Harry’s father and
mother did not strive to do their duty by him, in contradicting and
correcting him, as they had dealt by their elder children, in order
to bring him up in the way he should go. His mother, who was a tall
gaunt woman, as gaunt as Flora became in later days, and yet as active
and managing as if she had been one of your little boneless, tireless
women, and the apple of whose eye Harry was, especially laboured
conscientiously to mortify her own inclinations and hold her youngest
son in check. Even in the matter of Flora, though she yielded to let
the dog be reared, it was always under protest and with reservations—if
the dog proved a thoroughly good dog, and was in every respect well
conducted from her puppyhood; if Mrs. Bloomfield saw no reason to
change her mind at any point of Flora’s career, and cause the dog to be
consigned, after all, to the water-hole in the furze quarry, by common
consent—the grave of all the criminal, mangy, forsaken dogs in the
parish of Rushbrook.
As the best of dogs, like the best of men, are fallible, Flora may be
said to have grown up under a sentence of death, and was only spared
by a succession of reprieves from the execution of the warrant. Once
or twice she made very narrow escapes, and perhaps her rescue was
due to more than Harry’s powers of piteous pleading. She had been
gradually, by the pertinacious efforts of her master, introduced into
the house, instead of living at the stables with her mother, according
to Mrs. Bloomfield’s original decree, and so had established a claim of
familiarity on the regard of the stern censor herself.
Two marked instances of Flora’s rubbing shoulders with that eminence
above the water-hole in the quarry, which may be compared to the
Tarpeian Rock, are on record.
Mrs. Bloomfield, who prided herself on her success in her poultry yard,
had to listen at one period to various mysterious and doleful accounts
from her cook and boy-of-all-work on the inexplicable disappearance of
new-laid eggs and newly-fledged chickens. As there were no disreputable
characters about, and neither fox nor hawk in the vicinity, and
as the innocence of Flora’s mother was as well established as the
incorruptibility of the parsonage servants who brought the reports, a
grave suspicion attached from the beginning to Flora as the depredator.
But in the absence of positive proof, and in the face of Harry’s
indignant denial, the dark suggestion only hovered in the light of a
suspicion, and did not settle in the form of a conviction in people’s
minds.
As good or ill luck would have it, Harry had a half-holiday, and
proposed gallantly to escort his mother round the offices, offering her
his arm for the purpose. The two proceeded, chatting easily, the best
of friends, past the kitchen garden, the paddock where the Guernsey cow
and her calf fed, the shed where the pony phaeton stood, and the stable
which held the curate’s cob, and his wife and Harry’s ponies. The pair
came in course of time opposite the door of the well-ordered hen-house,
or the hennery, as some ladies of Mrs. Bloomfield’s acquaintance,
ambitious of euphemism, preferred to term it. There was an unusual
commotion about the place; the door, with its crescent hole for hens
to enter or issue at pleasure, had been forced ajar, and at the very
moment when Mrs. Bloomfield and her son appeared on the scene it was
driven still more violently open. There rushed out a loudly protesting,
terrified hen-mother, with all her black feathers ruffled, and some
of them half pulled out, hanging by the tips of the pens. Behind her
tore along Flora, not subdued and decorous, as we have seen her, but
inflamed with riot and in hot pursuit. Her jaws were dripping yellow
with the yolks of eggs, to which was added, in horrid significance, a
fringe of the fluffy down which is the covering of recently hatched
chickens.
The sight struck Mrs. Bloomfield and Harry dumb. She had too much
feeling for her son, as the master of Flora, to say a word to him at
first. He could not bring forward a syllable in defence of the dog,
caught red-handed, or yellow and feathery jawed—which came to the same
thing—in this instance.
Though Mrs. Bloomfield said nothing, she let her hand, which had been
resting lightly on Harry’s jacket sleeve, tighten its grasp. Thus she
marched the boy to the house. Flora, who had taken guilt to herself,
stopped short in her headlong career, let the plundered and insulted
hen go, and slunk at a safe distance after the mother and son to the
parsonage.
“Now, Harry, what have you to say for yourself and that brute of
yours?” asked Mrs. Bloomfield, in the tone of a righteous and
relentless judge.
“I had nothing to do with it, mother,” cried Harry in desperation; “and
Flo is only a dog.”
“Flo is only a dog,” echoed his mother severely; “and those who should
know better, and keep her to the injury of poor helpless fowls, and the
destruction of as fine a brood of chickens as cook ever set, have the
more to answer for. Harry, Flora goes this very night.”
“Mother, it is the first time,” pled Harry faintly.
“The first and the last,” said his mother. “I have heard that a taste
for eggs, not to say chickens, is never eradicated in a dog.”
“Oh no, mother, you are wrong there,” cried Harry eagerly. “Tom
Cartright’s Juno was as destructive a beast to turkeys and geese, even
to lambs, when he was half-grown——”
“Hold your tongue, Harry, and don’t contradict your mother.”
Harry was cut short in his argument, and submitted more unresistingly
than usual.
“I cannot have the dog about the place for another night,” went on
Mrs. Bloomfield, in a high authoritative key. “Hoppus,” naming the
gardener, “will take her away quietly, and put an end to her without
any unnecessary pain. It must be done, Harry; there is no help for it,
and you must bear it like a man. You know I have often told you, when
you would insist on keeping pets, that you must be prepared for their
coming to grief, and causing you to suffer in your turn.”
“I don’t mind my own sufferings,” muttered Harry indignantly; “but I’ll
tell you what, mother, if Flo is to be killed, I—I’ll kill her myself,”
he said, with quivering lips and a husky voice, but making a manful
fight to keep down his feelings. “I have a right to be let do it.
Nobody will care so much that she shall not suffer as I will. And Flo
will do anything for me. She will even jump over the quarry when I tell
her, and not believe her senses that it can hurt her, because it is I
who bid her do it,” he ended, unable to restrain a sob.
Mrs. Bloomfield hesitated, while she was conscious of some troublesome
moisture in her eyes. It was true what Harry urged, that he had a
right—and she was the last woman to deny a right, if he claimed it—to
save Flora from pain, and make her death as inconceivable to her to the
last moment as was possible. But could she condemn her boy to such a
task? She would consult his father.
The curate, like his wife, shrank from making Harry his dog’s
executioner. Harry stood firm. The matter was argued, and the
fulfilment of the sentence delayed, till at last it was commuted to a
sound whipping, and _that_ Harry consented to relegate to the hands of
the gardener. So faithfully did Hoppus discharge his mission, and so
susceptible was Flora, from these early days, to reason—whether it was
conveyed in kind careful instruction or wholesome chastisement—that
from that hour she respected the poultry yard, and always looked
another way when she had to pass a nest, or when a chicken crossed her
path. So magnanimous did she become in her age, that she has been known
to allow a daring young cock, or stolid middle-aged hen, to advance and
peck at the bone beside which she lay reposing.
The next perilous crisis through which Flora passed occurred later in
time, and in Harry’s absence from home—which proved, nevertheless, a
fortunate circumstance. Flora was grown, and had her first litter of
puppies, which were taken from her and destroyed. Ill, sad—missing
Harry as well as her puppies—the ordinarily quiet, well-behaved dog
fretted herself into a very frenzy of destructiveness, under the
influence of which she roamed in secret all over the house, gratifying
her gnawing and tearing propensities. She got possession of a visitor’s
ermine boa, and rent it in fragments. She was found ensconced in a
spare bedroom, and established in the bed, the Marseilles quilt of
which she had chewed till it was riddled with holes. Finally, she
managed to secure a bandbox, containing two maid-servants’ Sunday
bonnets, and made short work with the pink ribbons and the artificial
flowers.
Mrs. Bloomfield replaced the wholesale wreck; but she could stand such
conduct no longer, though she was too well-informed a woman to fall
into a panic, under the impression that the dog was mad. In reference
to the right in Flora stringently asserted by Harry when he was a mere
boy, she could not—now that her son was a big lad—do more than order
the dog to be tied up, while she waited word from Harry in answer to
her inquiry as to how his _protegée_ was to be disposed of. It happened
to be the end of the week, when Harry frequently returned home from his
public school to remain over the Sunday. And it had been noticed before
that the dog was cognizant of these stated visits, and looked eagerly
out for the arrival of her master.
In the season allowed to Flora for cooling down and contrition, while
she had the knowledge forced upon her that she could no longer rush
to greet Harry with an open face and a clear conscience, but must
be sought out by the lad, smarting under a fellow-feeling with her
disgrace, Flora became so overpowered by the consequences of her
previous self-indulgence of restless grief and longing, that she cast
to the winds the silent endurance which had been from her youth a
marked feature in the big, brave dog’s character. She refused to eat
and sleep, and expressed her poignant regret and repentance, in a mode
most unlike herself, by filling the air with her howls and moans.
At the end of two days and nights Flora had howled herself perfectly
hoarse, until Mrs. Bloomfield’s—not to say the curate’s—ears and hearts
ached with the dog’s husky distress. In sheer self-defence they sent
instructions to loose her, but to detain her a prisoner on parole,
banished from their presence.
But Flora did not understand anything about parole, or reservations
in pardon. With a succession of joyous bounds at her release, she
spurned all efforts to detain her, and never stopped till she had
pushed her way, worn and dishevelled as she was with unrest, hunger,
and the constant agitation of eight-and-forty hours, into her offended
judge’s august presence, leaping upon her and the curate—up to their
very shoulders and heads—in her fond gladness, licking the hem of Mrs.
Bloomfield’s garment, falling grovelling at her feet, whining in a very
passion of gratitude and delight.
What was to be done? It was not in hearts which were not steel to
resist such unbounded dependence on their regard and their goodness.
Mrs. Bloomfield professed to frown and pull away her gown from the
dog’s touch; Mr. Bloomfield pshawed and read on at his paper; but I
believe both secretly caressed the confiding culprit. Certainly no more
notice was taken of her misdemeanours. As for Master Harry, on his
return he had the coolness to take high ground, and maintain that the
accidents were all owing to the ignorance and carelessness of the dog’s
keepers, and that if he had been at home, and had Flora in charge, not
a single misadventure would have happened.
Soon after this escapade, changes occurred in the curate’s family which
established Flora’s position there so firmly that nothing short of
a capital crime could have dislodged her. Flora’s character was far
removed from a capital crime; she was an honest, worthy dog, noble
and sterling in her unaffected humility and steadfast attachment. She
had laid aside her youthful indiscretions—whether the probations and
penalties of these days had anything to do with the peculiar staidness
and propriety which ultimately, except on rare and exceptional
occasions, distinguished her bearing. The dog, that was at first
permitted to live as a favour, and brought up under protest, reached at
last to as high honour as ever dog attained.
However, it was long previous to this climax that Flora had many happy
days with Harry, attending him sedulously, and assisting him with all
her ability in his raids on rabbits, hares, pheasants, wild ducks, or
rats in the barn. Flora was not particular; any game came right to her,
which was one advantage of her mixed descent. Harry averred that she
would have gone at a deer had she got the chance of deer-stalking. He
was proud of her skill in pointing and in bringing him the game, though
he was free to admit that she was not probably just such a dog as that
which the poet Earl of Surrey—with the true poetic insight into animal
nature, and power of drawing forth and tutoring animal gifts—first
taught to point.
I don’t know whether Harry or Flora enjoyed most those early autumn
mornings, when the silvery white mist drew a bridal veil over the
orange and tawny woodlands, when the young man’s foot crushed out the
aromatic fragrance from the thyme and mint in the pasture; or those
winter and spring afternoons, when the sunset reddened the prevailing
gray, and the two crouched, stiff but staunch, among the frozen sedges
by the silent brook, and trudged home content—although they had got
but a single green-necked duck, or were empty-handed—in the gathering
darkness, with the stars coming out and twinkling over their heads. The
two were excellent company, and in room of speech Harry whistled—oh!
with what untiring wind, and how cheerily—in a way that it would have
done Lady Margaret’s heart good to hear, leaving echoes which rang
pathetically in other hearts throughout the long years.
The first great change which made good Flora’s footing in the curate’s
family, was Harry’s ultimate choice of the navy for a profession. He
had delayed his resolve out of a regard to his father and mother’s
reluctance to grant their consent. They were quite elderly people, and
were loath to agree to the son of their old age following a rough and
dangerous vocation, which, at the best, would take him far from those
who had not much time left to spend on earth. But Harry’s bent was too
strong, and his father and mother were too wise and kind long to resist
the clear inclination, or to call on their son to sacrifice it, with
its inspiration of hearty liking, to the growing timidity of their
years, and the very clinging love they bore him.
It was not the less a trial, which so broke down even the younger and
stronger of the two, that Mrs. Bloomfield, who had been known as a
highly practical woman, actually took to discoursing to Flora on the
subject, doubtless since she could not trust herself to speak to more
responsive auditors—least of all to her equally interested old husband.
“We’ll miss him, Flora. Ay, you need not wag your tail; there will be
few waggings of the tail in the dull days that are coming. I thought
you had more sense, old dog. But perhaps you mean that he’ll serve
his Maker and his fellow-men as well in a ship as in an office, even
as in a church, where I would fain have seen my Harry—only Providence
has settled it otherwise, and Providence knows best. We are following
unerring guidance; that is one thing to be thankful for. Some old
sailor—I daresay Harry could tell me his name and all about him—said he
was as near heaven on sea as on land, and so it will be with my boy.”
It was after the wrench of Harry’s departure, for many months, that
Flora was first seen to assume that attitude of supreme watching
and expectation in which she has been painted. She had been shut up
to keep her from running off to the railway station—just as I have
known another faithful dog go regularly and take up his position at a
particular hour, in order to be present on the arrival of a coach by
which his master had been wont to return home. The dog was under the
impression that the man would make his appearance in the old accustomed
fashion, and, although he was doomed to disappointment night after
night, he kept up the bootless practice for weeks.
The attitude expressive of suspense became frequent, almost habitual,
with Flora. In the early days of Harry’s service, he happened to have
tolerably frequent opportunities of coming home, so that his dog
grew familiar with arrivals and departures. And Harry’s father and
mother, now cherishing Flora as a relic of their absent son, were fain
to allege that she showed marvellous, certainly superhuman, if not
supernatural, discrimination in detecting the most distant signs of
her master’s approach; and that they were often made aware of Harry’s
unexpected nearness, before they could otherwise have known it, simply
by the actions of the dog.
In addition, Flora had her susceptibilities keenly alive to any
trace of Harry, or any association with him, so that on the sight of
some article which had belonged to him, such as his cap or his old
overcoat, or even on her catching the distant sound of the sportsmen’s
dropping shots on the first of September, Flora would fall into an
expectant position, and sit motionless and listening for hours. The
last expression of her remembrance unquestionably detracted from the
correctness of her premonitions of Harry’s reappearance; but his
father and mother argued that there was a perceptible difference
between Flora’s air when she sat thus waiting for her master, without
any hope of seeing him, and her whole gait and manner when she flung
up her bent head triumphantly before she made a bolt at the door or
the open window, crying as plainly as if she had made the remark in so
many words—“Ah! don’t you know Master Harry is at the gate?” Either
expression was clear to Harry’s father and mother, who had a sympathy
with the dog, and whose own dim eyes showed a reflection of the aimless
wistfulness which was creeping into Flora’s brighter orbs.
A sore test was in store for all Harry’s friends, human and canine. In
the course of honourable promotion he became a person of importance,
and his absences were much longer, his returns briefer and less
unfailing. At last there came a day when he had the pride of showing a
lieutenant’s uniform; but as a qualification to the satisfaction, where
his friends were concerned, he sailed for a distant station, from which
he could not return for a period of years.
Slowly the days passed in the quiet parsonage, where the snows of
winter had gathered thickly on the old curate’s head, and he was seldom
fit to totter up the stairs to his pulpit, and where Mrs. Bloomfield
had at last to avail herself of spectacles; and to own to a touch of
rheumatism, so that she had to employ young deputies to do the entire
decorations of the church at Christmas, and even to teach in the Sunday
school, and undertake, under the old lady’s superintendence, her
district visiting. Flora herself, by far the youngest of the household,
was neither so young nor so active as she had been.
But whatever powers of seeing, hearing, and discharging professional
duties were passing away from the members of the little party, there
was one thing they were still fit for—to count the hours and look out
for the appointed time of Harry’s return.
Alas! the hours were counted in vain. Although the long-desired season
came duly round, it did not herald the event which was to have rendered
it illustrious in one remote spot in Great Britain. Harry did not walk
into the old house and rouse its slumberous inmates. His cutter was not
even heard of; it had not been reported for many months.
Gradually misgivings and apprehensions, the sickness of hope deferred,
the agony of the worst forebodings, gathered and darkened over the
parsonage.
Everybody in the parish shook his or her head, and commiserated the
bereaved parents: surely they were bereaved, though it was natural in
them to cling to the last chance, and refuse to give up hope. Still,
it would be better for them if they could resign their son, with his
messmates, to an unknown death and a nameless grave.
Harry had been a favourite in the parish, and there was sincere
mourning for his untimely fate, as well as real sympathy with his aged
father and mother, even when their grief took a trying phase, and they
shut themselves up—not to say refusing to be comforted, but declining
to believe in their loss. “We won’t give him up so soon, old dog,” Mrs.
Bloomfield was heard to say to Flora. “You still look out for him;
don’t you? You would teach people, who ought to know better, greater
confidence in God and His mercy, and more fidelity to their friends,
instead of calling us afflicted, whom God has not afflicted.” And she
refused to put on mourning.
Then people began to say it was a bad example from those who should
be the first to show resignation to the Divine will, and that Mrs.
Bloomfield was guilty of lamentable weakness and superstitious folly in
paying heed to Harry’s dog and its ways. It was the grossest absurdity
to suppose that a dumb animal could be aware whether its master had
perished, or was sailing in strange waters, or had been cast away on a
virgin island. It was well known that the Admiralty had given up the
cutter. The speakers would not have expected such inconsistency in poor
old Mrs. Bloomfield, who had been a clever, sensible woman in her day,
though she was breaking up fast.
Harry’s mother got all the blame with reason, since the curate had
grown so feeble in mind, as well as in body, that he was only able
to take in what his wife told him; and if she had assured him that
Harry had never been away at all, but had been all this while in the
cricket-ground, or off with his gun and Flora, he would have called for
his hat and stick, and claimed her arm, to go out and chide the boy for
his thoughtless delay.
The elder sons and daughters of the family, middle-aged people, with
growing-up children of their own, put themselves about to come from
various distances to condole and remonstrate gently with their mother,
until poor Mrs. Bloomfield’s forlorn hope was at its last tremulous
gasp. Even Flora threatened to fail her, for the old dog began, not so
much to sit listening, as to crouch down, it seemed in despair.
But one April day, when the country air was full of the scent of
blossoming furze bushes and the songs of birds, awakening to the
knowledge that summer was at hand, Flora pricked her ears, started up,
and pawed eagerly at the door.
“There! I told you; there is Harry at last,” cried a shrill quavering
voice, and then Mrs. Bloomfield fell back in a dead faint; for, even
as she had spoken, she had recognised that it was only the postman who
was advancing to give his accustomed rap, and her strained nerves and
breaking heart could not stand the bitter disappointment.
“This delusion will kill my mother,” said one of the daughters,
hurrying to attend to Mrs. Bloomfield, while one of the sons received
the letters. “That wretched dog of poor Harry’s must be taken away from
the place.”
“Yes, Conty,” said her brother hastily; “but this is very like—it
cannot be—good Heavens! it is Harry’s handwriting, and see”—pointing to
the end of a letter he had torn open—“here is his signature. Could the
brute have scented it a hundred yards off?”
“Oh! never mind, if dear Harry be only alive and well. Find out all
about it, that we may tell mamma the first thing after she knows what
we are saying. There, the red is coming into her poor lips again; but
I am sure nothing will bring her back like such good news. No, Jem, I
have no fear for the shock; it is sorrow and not joy which drains the
blood from the heart; and the knowledge that she and Flora have been
proved right, and all the rest of us wrong, will help to steady her.
Don’t you know so much of human nature?” demanded the half-laughing,
half-crying, middle-aged daughter.
Harry’s story was one not altogether strange to men’s experience, and
which occurs once and again in a generation, but when it happens is
always regarded as a marvel with the attributes of a romance.
The cutter had been lost in a stormy night on a coral reef in the
southern seas; but a boat’s-load of the crew, among whom was the junior
lieutenant, had managed to land on an uninhabited island, and make good
a living there for four dreary months. “If I had only got Flora with
me,” Harry wrote in the letter—in which he was at last able to announce
his rescue, and in which he sought to make light of the hardships he
and his companions had undergone—to his father and mother, “the old
lass would have found plenty to do among the rabbits and a kind of
partridge. She would have been invaluable, if her very value had not
proved the ruin of her, and if she had not fallen a victim to her
general gaminess, as other poor beggars were like to do; but that is
all over now.”
When the castaway men were at last taken off the island, it was by a
foreign ship that carried them thousands of miles out of their track;
but the sufferers had been treated with every attention and kindness
by good Samaritans in the guise of Brazilian sailors, and by the time
Harry’s letter should reach the parsonage, to disperse any little
anxiety that might be entertained there, the writer would be far on his
way home.
Mrs. Bloomfield had enough spirit to undertake a journey to Portsmouth,
in order to be the first of all the friends who accompanied her to
greet her son. Her husband was not able to escort her; he waited
placidly with Flora, satisfied to be taken to the railway station to
meet the appointed train.
I need not say that the old dog was an object of great interest,
while she comported herself with her own exemplary sobriety. If she
had an intuition that her master was on the road, she did not betray
it on this occasion. She had no call to announce to the idle world
of Rushbrook—and it was rather an idle holiday world, with a marked
inclination to congregate at the railway station on another fine spring
morning—that Master Harry was coming. Withal, Flora’s sagacity and
devotion could hardly be expected to compass the fact that late events
had intensified the importance of such information. She submitted
to have a sailor’s blue ribbon tied round her neck, in honour of
the day and her master; but she wore the decoration rather with
imperturbability than with conscious pride, and she took no notice of
the flags and evergreens which were displayed with kindly zeal.
When the train steamed into the station, and a brown face appeared
at the window of a carriage, crowded with brothers and sisters, in
addition to an old mother, Flora did strain violently at the chain
by which Hoppus, for greater precaution, held her, and it was with
difficulty that she was induced to have the grace to permit Harry to
pay his respects first to his father—who, as by an involuntary motion,
uncovered his white head to receive his lost son—before she sprang upon
her master in a rapture of welcome, which Harry’s “Hold on, old dog;
don’t worry me outright!” only raised to a higher pitch of ecstasy.
But Flora was not naturally a demonstrative, far less a forward dog.
She soon controlled herself, and recalled the superior claims of
others, falling respectfully, and with a shadow of shamefacedness for
her late unwonted ebullition, to heel, and following decorously, for
the rest of the way, in the little procession.
Only one trouble occurred with the dog. It had been arranged that the
reunited family, with their friends and the parishioners present,
should proceed first to the church, in order to join together in a
solemn service of thanksgiving for a great act of mercy vouchsafed by
Almighty God to some of His children—a ceremony which is touching in
proportion to its rarity in this world of care and discontent.
Flora, who had never been to church before, and who was, as I said,
walking in her place in the procession just behind Harry, who was
between his father and mother, showed no sign of stopping short in the
porch.
There was considerable hesitation in the breasts of the brothers and
sisters, who noticed the dog’s proceedings, and in the mind of Hoppus,
who considered that he had her particularly in charge. Indeed, that
consequential functionary had been giving himself sundry airs on
account of the guardianship, seeing that if Master Harry were the hero
of the day, Master Harry’s dog, which had never ceased to look out for
him, might surely be regarded as playing second fiddle to her master,
reflecting glory on her keeper for the next twelve hours at least. But
what would become of the glory if Flora were let get into a scrape?
The official spirits of the clerk, beadle, and pew-opener were also
sensibly stirred by the _contretemps_.
Was the harmony to be broken, and a disturbance to be created, by the
forcible arrest and expulsion of the dog?—no easy task if Flora made up
her mind to stick closely to her newly-found master. Would a scandal
be created if a dog were suffered to make one of the congregation in a
thanksgiving service?
The matter settled itself. As the principals concerned walked
unconsciously within the sacred walls, and Harry took the old place
he had occupied when a boy in the family pew, Flora did not wait till
the objectors had formed a resolution; she advanced steadily in her
line of march in the rear of her master, and lay down in her festival
blue ribbon at his feet, with the coolness of unchallengeable right. It
would have been impossible to dislodge her then. As it was, she soon
stilled the alarm she had raised, by remaining perfectly quiet, and
behaving as if she had attended church every Sunday from her puppyhood;
like Scotch collies that wait discreetly on the diets of worship in
pastoral Presbyterian kirks. But I am bound to confess that was the
first and last occasion on which Flora went to church.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]