A DOG OF FLANDERS
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
AND OTHER STORIES
ELEVENTH IMPRESSION
“Stories All Children Love”
A SET OF CHILDREN’S CLASSICS THAT SHOULD BE IN EVERY WINTER HOME AND
SUMMER COTTAGE
Mäzli
BY JOHANNA SPYRI
Translated by ELISABETH P. STORK
Cornelli
BY JOHANNA SPYRI
Translated by ELISABETH P. STORK
A Child’s Garden of Verses
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The Little Lame Prince and Other Stories
BY MISS MULOCK
Gulliver’s Travels
BY JONATHAN SWIFT
The Water Babies
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
Pinocchio
BY C. COLLODI
Robinson Crusoe
BY DANIEL DEFOE
Heidi BY JOHANNA SPYRI
Translated by ELISABETH P. STORK
The Cuckoo Clock
BY MRS. MOLESWORTH
The Swiss Family Robinson
EDITED BY G. E. MITTON
The Princess and Curdie
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
The Princess and the Goblin
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
At the Back of the North Wind
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
A Dog of Flanders BY “OUIDA”
Bimbi BY “OUIDA”
Mopsa, the Fairy BY JEAN INGELOW
Tales of Fairyland
BY FERGUS HUME
Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales
_Each Volume Beautifully Illustrated in Color. Decorated Cloth.
Other Books in This Set are in Preparation._
[Illustration: THEN LITTLE NELLO TOOK HIS PLACE BESIDE THE CART]
A DOG OF FLANDERS
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ
(OUIDA)
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY_
MARIA L. KIRK
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
_Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company
The Washington Square Press, Philadelphia, U. S. A._
CONTENTS
PAGE
A DOG OF FLANDERS 9
THE NÜRNBERG STOVE 61
IN THE APPLE-COUNTRY 131
THE LITTLE EARL 171
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THEN LITTLE NELLO TOOK HIS PLACE BESIDE THE CART _Frontispiece_
NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL 31
“IT IS A SIN; IT IS A THEFT; IT IS AN INFAMY,” HE SAID 83
AUGUST OPENED THE WINDOW, CRAMMED THE SNOW INTO HIS
MOUTH AGAIN AND AGAIN 98
“LET US REST A LITTLE AND EAT” 133
SHE ONLY RAN ON, STUMBLING OFTEN AND FEELING FOR THE
MATCHES IN THE BOSOM OF HER UGLY GRAY COTTON FROCK 159
“LITTLE GIRL, WHY DO YOU CRY?” HE SAID 196
HE SHARED IT WILLINGLY 221
A DOG OF FLANDERS
A STORY OF NOËL.
NELLO and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was
a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the
same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other
was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both
were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand.
It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond
of sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with
their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very
greatly.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village—a Flemish
village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture
and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in
the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it. It
had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright
green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and walls
white-washed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of
the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope:
it was a landmark to all the level country round. It had once been
painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its infancy, half
a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of
Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It
went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the
joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have
thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any
other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar
of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood
opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night
with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs
in the Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth
upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little
hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp
rising in the north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass
and spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless,
changeless sea. It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man—of
old Jehan Daas who in his time had been a soldier, and who remembered
the wars that had trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows,
and who had brought from his service nothing except a wound, which had
made him a cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died
in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her
two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself,
but he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon
became welcome and precious to him. Little Nello—which was but a pet
diminutive for Nicolas—throve with him, and the old man and the little
child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and white
as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden-ground that yielded
beans and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly poor—many
a day they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any chance had
enough: to have had enough to eat would have been to have reached
paradise at once. But the old man was very gentle and good to the
boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-natured
creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage,
and asked no more of earth or heaven; save indeed that Patrasche should
be always with them, since without Patrasche where would they have been?
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary;
their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and
minister; their only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from
them, they must have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche
was body, brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was
their very life, their very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple,
and Nello was but a child; and Patrasche was their dog.
A dog of Flanders—yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the
muscular development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard
service. Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly
from sire to son in Flanders many a century—slaves of slaves, dogs of
the people, beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived
straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their
hearts on the flints of the streets.
Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their
days over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long,
shadowless, weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been
born to no other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been
fed on curses and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian
country, and Patrasche was but a dog. Before he was fully grown he had
known the bitter gall of the cart and the collar. Before he had entered
his thirteenth month he had become the property of a hardware-dealer,
who was accustomed to wander over the land north and south, from the
blue sea to the green mountains. They sold him for a small price,
because he was so young.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of Patrasche was a life
of hell. To deal the tortures of hell on the animal creation is a way
which the Christians have of showing their belief in it. His purchaser
was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his cart full
with pots and pans and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he
might, whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish
ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or café on
the road.
Happily for Patrasche—or unhappily—he was very strong: he came of
an iron race, long born and bred to such cruel travail; so that he
did not die, but managed to drag on a wretched existence under the
brutal burdens, the scarifying lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the
blows, the curses, and the exhaustion which are the only wages with
which the Flemings repay the most patient and laborious of all their
four-footed victims. One day, after two years of this long and deadly
agony, Patrasche was going on as usual along one of the straight,
dusty, unlovely roads that lead to the city of Rubens. It was full
midsummer, and very warm. His cart was very heavy, piled high with
goods in metal and in earthenware. His owner sauntered on without
noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it curled
round his quivering loins. The Brabantois had paused to drink beer
himself at every wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrasche to stop
a moment for a draught from the canal. Going along thus, in the full
sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four
hours, and, which was far worse to him, not having tasted water for
near twelve, being blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with
the merciless weight which dragged upon his loins, Patrasche, for once,
staggered and foamed a little at the mouth, and fell.
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare
of the sun; he was sick unto death, and motionless. His master gave
him the only medicine in his pharmacy—kicks and oaths and blows with
a cudgel of oak, which had been often the only food and drink, the
only wage and reward, ever offered to him. But Patrasche was beyond
the reach of any torture or of any curses. Patrasche lay, dead to all
appearances, down in the white powder of the summer dust. After a
while, finding it useless to assail his ribs with punishment and his
ears with maledictions, the Brabantois—deeming life gone in him, or
going so nearly that his carcass was forever useless, unless indeed
some one should strip it of the skin for gloves—cursed him fiercely in
farewell, struck off the leathern bands of the harness, kicked his body
heavily aside into the grass, and, groaning and muttering in savage
wrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road up-hill, and left the
dying dog there for the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.
It was the last day before Kermesse away at Louvain, and the Brabantois
was in haste to reach the fair and get a good place for his truck of
brass wares. He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been a
strong and much-enduring animal, and because he himself had now the
hard task of pushing his charette all the way to Louvain. But to stay
to look after Patrasche never entered his thoughts: the beast was dying
and useless, and he would steal, to replace him, the first large dog
that he found wandering alone out of sight of its master. Patrasche had
cost him nothing, or next to nothing, and for two long, cruel years
had made him toil ceaselessly in his service from sunrise to sunset,
through summer and winter, in fair weather and foul.
He had got a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being human,
he was wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the
ditch, and have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the
birds, whilst he himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat
and to drink, to dance and to sing, in the mirth at Louvain. A dying
dog, a dog of the cart—why should he waste hours over its agonies at
peril of losing a handful of copper coins, at peril of a shout of
laughter?
Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass-green ditch. It was a busy road
that day, and hundreds of people, on foot and on mules, in wagons or in
carts, went by, tramping quickly and joyously on to Louvain. Some saw
him, most did not even look: all passed on. A dead dog more or less—it
was nothing in Brabant: it would be nothing anywhere in the world.
After a time, among the holiday-makers, there came a little old man who
was bent and lame, and very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting:
he was very poorly and miserably clad, and he dragged his silent way
slowly through the dust among the pleasure-seekers. He looked at
Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the
rank grass and weeds of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly
eyes of pity. There was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed
child of a few years old, who pattered in amidst the bushes, that were
for him breast-high, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon
the poor, great, quiet beast.
Thus it was that these two first met—the little Nello and the big
Patrasche.
The upshot of that day was, that old Jehan Daas, with much laborious
effort, drew the sufferer homeward to his own little hut, which was a
stone’s throw off amidst the fields, and there tended him with so much
care that the sickness, which had been a brain seizure, brought on by
heat and thirst and exhaustion, with time and shade and rest passed
away, and health and strength returned, and Patrasche staggered up
again upon his four stout, tawny legs.
Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless, sore, near to death;
but all this time he had heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch,
but only the pitying murmurs of the little child’s voice and the
soothing caress of the old man’s hand.
In his sickness they too had grown to care for him, this lonely old man
and the little happy child. He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of
dry grass for his bed; and they had learned to listen eagerly for his
breathing in the dark night, to tell them that he lived; and when he
first was well enough to essay a loud, hollow, broken bay, they laughed
aloud, and almost wept together for joy at such a sign of his sure
restoration; and little Nello, in delighted glee, hung round his rugged
neck with chains of marguerites, and kissed him with fresh and ruddy
lips.
So then, when Patrasche arose, himself again, strong, big, gaunt,
powerful, his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishment in them
that there were no curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and
his heart awakened to a mighty love, which never wavered once in its
fidelity whilst life abode with him.
But Patrasche, being a dog, was grateful. Patrasche lay pondering long
with grave, tender, musing brown eyes, watching the movements of his
friends.
Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could do nothing for his living but
limp about a little with a small cart, with which he carried daily the
milk-cans of those happier neighbors who owned cattle away into the
town of Antwerp. The villagers gave him the employment a little out of
charity—more because it suited them well to send their milk into the
town by so honest a carrier, and bide at home themselves to look after
their gardens, their cows, their poultry, or their little fields. But
it was becoming hard work for the old man. He was eighty-three, and
Antwerp was a good league off, or more.
Patrasche watched the milk-cans come and go that one day when he had
got well and was lying in the sun with the wreath of marguerites round
his tawny neck.
The next morning, Patrasche, before the old man had touched the cart,
arose and walked to it and placed himself betwixt its handles, and
testified as plainly as dumb show could do his desire and his ability
to work in return for the bread of charity that he had eaten. Jehan
Daas resisted long, for the old man was one of those who thought it a
foul shame to bind dogs to labor for which Nature never formed them.
But Patrasche would not be gainsaid: finding they did not harness him,
he tried to draw the cart onward with his teeth.
At length Jehan Daas gave way, vanquished by the persistence and the
gratitude of this creature whom he had succored. He fashioned his cart
so that Patrasche could run in it, and this he did every morning of his
life thenceforward.
When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the blessed fortune that had
brought him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair-day of Louvain; for
he was very old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would ill
have known how to pull his load of milk-cans over the snows and through
the deep ruts in the mud if it had not been for the strength and the
industry of the animal he had befriended. As for Patrasche, it seemed
heaven to him. After the frightful burdens that his old master had
compelled him to strain under, at the call of the whip at every step,
it seemed nothing to him but amusement to step out with this little
light green cart, with its bright brass cans, by the side of the gentle
old man who always paid him with a tender caress and with a kindly
word. Besides, his work was over by three or four in the day, and after
that time he was free to do as he would—to stretch himself, to sleep
in the sun, to wander in the fields, to romp with the young child, or
to play with his fellow-dogs. Patrasche was very happy.
Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was killed in a drunken
brawl at the Kermesse of Mechlin, and so sought not after him nor
disturbed him in his new and well-loved home.
A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who had always been a cripple,
became so paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for him
to go out with the cart any more. Then little Nello, being now grown
to his sixth year of age, and knowing the town well from having
accompanied his grandfather so many times, took his place beside
the cart, and sold the milk and received the coins in exchange, and
brought them back to their respective owners with a pretty grace and
seriousness which charmed all who beheld him.
The little Ardennois was a beautiful child, with dark, grave, tender
eyes, and a lovely bloom upon his face, and fair locks that clustered
to his throat; and many an artist sketched the group as it went by
him—the green cart with the brass flagons of Teniers and Mieris and Van
Tal, and the great tawny-colored, massive dog, with his belled harness
that chimed cheerily as he went, and the small figure that ran beside
him which had little white feet in great wooden shoes, and a soft,
grave, innocent, happy face like the little fair children of Rubens.
Nello and Patrasche did the work so well and so joyfully together that
Jehan Daas himself, when the summer came and he was better again, had
no need to stir out, but could sit in the doorway in the sun and see
them go forth through the garden wicket, and then doze and dream and
pray a little, and then awake again as the clock tolled three and watch
for their return. And on their return Patrasche would shake himself
free of his harness with a bay of glee, and Nello would recount with
pride the doings of the day; and they would all go in together to their
meal of rye bread and milk or soup, and would see the shadows lengthen
over the great plain, and see the twilight veil the fair cathedral
spire; and then lie down together to sleep peacefully while the old man
said a prayer.
So the days and the years went on, and the lives of Nello and Patrasche
were happy, innocent, and healthful.
In the spring and summer especially were they glad. Flanders is not a
lovely land, and around the burgh of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely
of all. Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the
characterless plain in wearying repetition, and save by some gaunt gray
tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart
the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner’s bundle or a woodman’s
fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who
has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed
as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast
and dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide
horizons that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness
and monotony; and among the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow,
and the trees rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their
great hulks black against the sun, and their little green barrels and
vari-colored flags gay against the leaves. Anyway, there is greenery
and breadth of space enough to be as good as beauty to a child and a
dog; and these two asked no better, when their work was done, than to
lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the canal, and watch the
cumbrous vessels drifting by and bringing the crisp salt smell of the
sea among the blossoming scents of the country summer.
True, in the winter it was harder, and they had to rise in the darkness
and the bitter cold, and they had seldom as much as they could have
eaten any day, and the hut was scarce better than a shed when the
nights were cold, although it looked so pretty in warm weather, buried
in a great kindly-clambering vine, that never bore fruit, indeed, but
which covered it with luxuriant green tracery all through the months of
blossom and harvest. In winter the winds found many holes in the walls
of the poor little hut, and the vine was black and leafless, and the
bare lands looked very bleak and drear without, and sometimes within
the floor was flooded and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the
snow numbed the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the
brave, untiring feet of Patrasche.
But even then they were never heard to lament, either of them. The
child’s wooden shoes and the dog’s four legs would trot manfully
together over the frozen fields to the chime of the bells on the
harness; and then sometimes, in the streets of Antwerp, some housewife
would bring them a bowl of soup and a handful of bread, or some kindly
trader would throw some billets of fuel into the little cart as it went
homeward, or some woman in their own village would bid them keep some
share of the milk they carried for their own food; and then they would
run over the white lands, through the early darkness, bright and happy,
and burst with a shout of joy into their home.
So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well; and Patrasche,
meeting on the highway or in the public streets the many dogs who
toiled from daybreak into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses,
and loosened from the shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best
they might—Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and
thought it the fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though
he was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he
had to work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of
winter dawns; though his feet were often tender with wounds from the
sharp edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks
beyond his strength and against his nature—yet he was grateful and
content: he did his duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved
smiled down on him. It was sufficient for Patrasche.
There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in
his life, and it was this. Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full
at every turn of old piles of stones dark and ancient and majestic,
standing in crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising
by the water’s edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever
and again out of their arched doors a swell of music pealing. There
they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst the
squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce
of the modern world, and all day long the clouds drift and the birds
circle and the winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their
feet there sleeps—RUBENS.
And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp, and
wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that
all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through
the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through
the noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of
his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps
and bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices.
For the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him,
and him alone.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre—so quiet, save only
when the organ peals and the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the
Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that
pure marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birthplace in
the chancel of St. Jacques.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which
no man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business
on its wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred
name, a sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of Art saw light, a
Golgotha where a god of Art lies dead.
O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them
alone will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been
wise. In his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his
death she magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.
Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this. Into these great, sad piles of
stones, that reared their melancholy majesty above the crowded roofs,
the child Nello would many and many a time enter, and disappear through
their dark arched portals, whilst Patrasche, left without upon the
pavement, would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm
which thus allured from him his inseparable and beloved companion. Once
or twice he did essay to see for himself, clattering up the steps with
his milk-cart behind him; but thereon he had been always sent back
again summarily by a tall custodian in black clothes and silver chains
of office; and fearful of bringing his little master into trouble, he
desisted, and remained couched patiently before the churches until
such time as the boy reappeared. It was not the fact of his going into
them which disturbed Patrasche: he knew that people went to church:
all the village went to the small, tumbledown, gray pile opposite the
red windmill. What troubled him was that little Nello always looked
strangely when he came out, always very flushed or very pale; and
whenever he returned home after such visitations would sit silent and
dreaming, not caring to play, but gazing out at the evening skies
beyond the line of the canal, very subdued and almost sad.
What was it? wondered Patrasche. He thought it could not be good or
natural for the little lad to be so grave, and in his dumb fashion he
tried all he could to keep Nello by him in the sunny fields or in the
busy market-place. But to the churches Nello would go: most often of
all would he go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without
on the stones by the iron fragments of Quentin Matsys’s gate, would
stretch himself and yawn and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in
vain, until the doors closed and the child perforce came forth again,
and winding his arms about the dog’s neck would kiss him on his broad,
tawny-colored forehead, and murmur always the same words: “If I could
only see them, Patrasche!—if I could only see them!”
What were they? pondered Patrasche, looking up with large, wistful,
sympathetic eyes.
One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar,
he got in for a moment after his little friend and saw. “They” were two
great covered pictures on either side of the choir.
Nello was kneeling, rapt as in an ecstasy, before the altar-picture
of the Assumption, and when he noticed Patrasche, and rose and drew
the dog gently out into the air, his face was wet with tears, and he
looked up at the veiled places as he passed them, and murmured to his
companion, “It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just because
one is poor and cannot pay! He never meant that the poor should not
see them when he painted them, I am sure. He would have had us see
them any day, every day: that I am sure. And they keep them shrouded
there—shrouded in the dark, the beautiful things!—and they never feel
the light, and no eyes look on them, unless rich people come and pay.
If I could only see them, I would be content to die.”
But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to
gain the silver piece that the church exacts as the price for looking
on the glories of the Elevation of the Cross and the Descent of the
Cross was a thing as utterly beyond the powers of either of them as it
would have been to scale the heights of the cathedral spire. They had
never so much as a sou to spare: if they cleared enough to get a little
wood for the stove, a little broth for the pot, it was the utmost they
could do. And yet the heart of the child was set in sore and endless
longing upon beholding the greatness of the two veiled Rubens.
The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an
absorbing passion for Art. Going on his ways through the old city in
the early days before the sun or the people had risen, Nello, who
looked only a little peasant-boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell
from door to door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the
god. Nello, cold and hungry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes,
and the winter winds blowing among his curls and lifting his poor thin
garments, was in a rapture of meditation, wherein all that he saw
was the beautiful fair face of the Mary of the Assumption, with the
waves of her golden hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of an
eternal sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and
buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters and unheeded by men, had
the compensation of the curse which is called Genius.
No one knew it. He as little as any. No one knew it. Only indeed
Patrasche, who, being with him always, saw him draw with chalk upon
the stones any and every thing that grew or breathed, heard him on
his little bed of hay murmur all manner of timid, pathetic prayers to
the spirit of the great Master; watched his gaze darken and his face
radiate at the evening glow of sunset or the rosy rising of the dawn;
and felt many and many a time the tears of a strange, nameless pain and
joy, mingled together, fall hotly from the bright young eyes upon his
own wrinkled yellow forehead.
“I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when
thou growest a man thou couldst own this hut and the little plot of
ground, and labor for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbors,”
said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed. For to own a bit of
soil, and to be called Baas—master—by the hamlet round, is to have
achieved the highest ideal of a Flemish peasant; and the old soldier,
who had wandered over all the earth in his youth, and had brought
nothing back, deemed in his old age that to live and die on one spot
in contented humility was the fairest fate he could desire for his
darling. But Nello said nothing.
The same leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens and
Jordaens and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in times
more recent begat in the green country of the Ardennes, where the Meuse
washes the old walls of Dijon, the great artist of the Patroclus, whose
genius is too near us for us aright to measure its divinity.
Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little
rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas
by neighbors a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The
cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening
skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things to him
than this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike,
his fancies in the dog’s ear when they went together at their work
through the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at their rest among
the rustling rushes by the water’s side.
For such dreams are not easily shaped into speech to awake the slow
sympathies of human auditors; and they would only have sorely perplexed
and troubled the poor old man bedridden in his corner, who, for his
part, whenever he had trodden the streets of Antwerp, had thought the
daub of blue and red that they called a Madonna, on the walls of the
wine-shop where he drank his sou’s worth of black beer, quite as good
as any of the famous altar-pieces for which the stranger folk travelled
far and wide into Flanders from every land on which the good sun shone.
There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at
all of his daring fantasies. This other was little Alois, who lived at
the old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was
the best-to-do husbandman in all the village. Little Alois was only
a pretty baby with soft round, rosy features, made lovely by those
sweet dark eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish
face, in testimony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish art has left
broadsown throughout the country majestic palaces and stately courts,
gilded house-fronts and sculptured lintels—histories in blazonry and
poems in stone.
[Illustration: NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL]
Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the
fields, they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries,
they went up to the old gray church together, and they often sat
together by the broad wood-fire in the mill-house. Little Alois,
indeed, was the richest child in the hamlet. She had neither brother
nor sister; her blue serge dress had never a hole in it; at Kermesse
she had as many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her hands could
hold; and when she went up for her first communion her flaxen curls
were covered with a cap of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her
mother’s and her grandmother’s before it came to her. Men spoke
already, though she had but twelve years, of the good wife she would
be for their sons to woo and win; but she herself was a little gay,
simple child, in nowise conscious of her heritage, and she loved no
playfellows so well as Jehan Daas’s grandson and his dog.
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but somewhat stern, came on
a pretty group in the long meadow behind the mill, where the aftermath
had that day been cut. It was his little daughter sitting amidst the
hay, with the great tawny head of Patrasche on her lap, and many
wreaths of poppies and blue cornflowers round them both: on a clean
smooth slab of pine wood the boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick
of charcoal.
The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes,
it was so strangely like, and he loved his only child closely and
well. Then he roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her
mother needed her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid: then,
turning, he snatched the wood from Nello’s hands. “Dost do much of such
folly?” he asked, but there was a tremble in his voice.
Nello colored and hung his head. “I draw everything I see,” he murmured.
The miller was silent: then he stretched his hand out with a franc in
it. “It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time: nevertheless, it is
like Alois, and will please the house-mother. Take this silver bit for
it and leave it for me.”
The color died out of the face of the young Ardennois; he lifted his
head and put his hands behind his back. “Keep your money and the
portrait both, Baas Cogez,” he said, simply. “You have been often good
to me.” Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away across the
field.
“I could have seen them with that franc,” he murmured to Patrasche,
“but I could not sell her picture—not even for them.”
Bass Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his mind. “That
lad must not be so much with Alois,” he said to his wife that night.
“Trouble may come of it hereafter: he is fifteen now, and she is
twelve; and the boy is comely of face and form.”
“And he is a good lad and a loyal,” said the housewife feasting her
eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney
with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.
“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the miller, draining his pewter
flagon.
“Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass,” said the wife,
hesitatingly, “would it matter so much? She will have enough for both,
and one cannot be better than happy.”
“You are a woman, and therefore a fool,” said the miller, harshly,
striking his pipe on the table. “The lad is naught but a beggar, and,
with these painter’s fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that
they are not together in the future, or I will send the child to the
surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred Heart.”
The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not
that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from
her favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme
of cruelty to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty.
But there were many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her
chosen companion; and Nello, being a boy proud and quiet and sensitive,
was quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps and those of
Patrasche, as he had been used to do with every moment of leisure, to
the old red mill upon the slope. What his offence was he did not know:
he supposed he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by taking the
portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the child who loved him would
run to him and nestle her hand in his, he would smile at her very sadly
and say with a tender concern for her before himself, “Nay, Alois, do
not anger your father. He thinks that I make you idle, dear, and he is
not pleased that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves you
well: we will not anger him, Alois.”
But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look
so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under
the poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche. The old red mill
had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by it, going
and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little flaxen
head rose above the low mill-wicket, and her little rosy hands had
held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche. Now the dog looked wistfully
at a closed door, and the boy went on without pausing, with a pang at
his heart, and the child sat within with tears dropping slowly on the
knitting to which she was set on her little stool by the stove; and
Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his mill-gear, would harden his
will and say to himself, “It is best so. The lad is all but a beggar,
and full of idle, dreaming fooleries. Who knows what mischief might not
come of it in the future?” So he was wise in his generation, and would
not have the door unbarred, except upon rare and formal occasions,
which seemed to have neither warmth nor mirth in them to the two
children, who had been accustomed so long to a daily gleeful, careless,
happy interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other
watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche,
sagely shaking the brazen bells of his collar and responding with all a
dog’s swift sympathies to their every change of mood
All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney
in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and
sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was
accepted he himself should be denied.
But he did not complain: it was his habit to be quiet: old Jehan Daas
had said ever to him, “We are poor: we must take what God sends—the ill
with the good: the poor cannot choose.”
To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his
old grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as
beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, “Yet the
poor do choose sometimes—choose to be great, so that men cannot say
them nay.” And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when
the little Alois, finding him by chance alone among the cornfields by
the canal, ran to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because
the morrow would be her saint’s day, and for the first time in all her
life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper and romp
in the great barns with which her feast-day was always celebrated,
Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith, “It shall be
different one day, Alois. One day that little bit of pine wood that
your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver; and he
will not shut the door against me then. Only love me always, dear
little Alois, only love me always, and I will be great.”
“And if I do not love you?” the pretty child asked, pouting a little
through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.
Nello’s eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where in the
red and gold of the Flemish night the cathedral spire rose. There was a
smile on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was awed by
it. “I will be great still,” he said under his breath—“great still, or
die, Alois.”
“You do not love me,” said the little spoilt child, pushing him away;
but the boy shook his head and smiled, and went on his way through
the tall yellow corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair future
when he should come into that old familiar land and ask Alois of her
people, and be not refused or denied, but received in honor, whilst the
village folk should throng to look upon him and say in one another’s
ears, “Dost see him? He is a king among men, for he is a great artist
and the world speaks his name; and yet he was only our poor little
Nello, who was a beggar, as one may say, and only got his bread by
the help of his dog.” And he thought how he would fold his grandsire
in furs and purples, and portray him as the old man is portrayed in
the Family in the chapel of St. Jacques; and of how he would hang the
throat of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and place him on his right
hand, and say to the people, “This was once my only friend;” and of
how he would build himself a great white marble palace, and make to
himself luxuriant gardens of pleasure, on the slope looking outward
to where the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell in it himself, but
summon to it, as to a home, all men young and poor and friendless,
but of the will to do mighty things; and of how he would say to them
always, if they sought to bless his name, “Nay, do not thank me—thank
Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?” And these dreams,
beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all selfishness, full of
heroical worship, were so closely about him as he went that he was
happy—happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois’s saint’s day, when
he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and
the meal of black bread, whilst in the mill-house all the children of
the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of Dijon and
the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to the
light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle.
“Never mind, Patrasche,” he said, with his arms round the dog’s neck as
they both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds of the mirth at
the mill came down to them on the night air—“never mind. It shall all
be changed by and by.”
He believed in the future: Patrasche, of more experience and of more
philosophy, thought that the loss of the mill supper in the present was
ill compensated by dreams of milk and honey in some vague hereafter.
And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas Cogez.
“This is Alois’s name-day, is it not?” said the old man Daas that night
from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking.
The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that the old man’s memory
had erred a little, instead of keeping such sure account.
“And why not there?” his grandfather pursued “Thou hast never missed a
year before, Nello.”
“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured the lad, bending his handsome
young head over the bed.
“Tut! tut! Mother Nulette would have come and sat with me, as she does
scores of times. What is the cause, Nello?” the old man persisted.
“Thou surely hast not had ill words with the little one?”
“Nay, grandfather—never,” said the boy quickly, with a hot color in his
bent face. “Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked this
year. He has taken some whim against me.”
“But thou hast done nothing wrong?”
“That I know—nothing. I took the portrait of Alois on a piece of pine:
that is all.”
“Ah!” The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with
the boy’s innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the
corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways
of the world were like.
He drew Nello’s fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer gesture.
“Thou art very poor, my child,” he said with a quiver the more in his
aged, trembling voice—“so poor! It is very hard for thee.”
“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; and in his innocence he thought
so—rich with the imperishable powers that are mightier than the might
of kings. And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the quiet
autumn night, and watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars
bend and shiver in the wind. All the casements of the mill-house were
lighted, and every now and then the notes of the flute came to him. The
tears fell down his cheeks, for he was but a child, yet he smiled,
for he said to himself, “In the future!” He stayed there until all
was quite still and dark, then he and Patrasche went within and slept
together, long and deeply, side by side.
Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little
out-house to the hut, which no one entered but himself—a dreary place,
but with abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned
himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here on a great gray
sea of stretched paper he had given shape to one of the innumerable
fancies which possessed his brain. No one had ever taught him anything;
colors he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread many a time to
procure even the few rude vehicles that he had here; and it was only
in black or white that he could fashion the things he saw. This great
figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an old man sitting on
a fallen tree—only that. He had seen old Michel the woodman sitting so
at evening many a time. He had never had a soul to tell him of outline
or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had given all the
weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged,
careworn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old lonely
figure was a poem, sitting there, meditative and alone, on the dead
tree, with the darkness of the descending night behind him.
It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults, no doubt; and
yet it was real, true in nature, true in art and very mournful, and in
a manner beautiful.
Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation
after the labor of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a
hope—vain and wild perhaps, but strongly cherished—of sending this
great drawing to compete for a prize of two hundred francs a year which
it was announced in Antwerp would be open to every lad of talent,
scholar or peasant, under eighteen, who would attempt to win it with
some unaided work of chalk or pencil. Three of the foremost artists in
the town of Rubens were to be the judges and elect the victor according
to his merits.
All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this
treasure, which, if triumphant, would build him his first step toward
independence and the mysteries of the art which he blindly, ignorantly,
and yet passionately adored.
He said nothing to any one: his grandfather would not have understood,
and little Alois was lost to him. Only to Patrasche he told all, and
whispered, “Rubens would give it me, I think, if he knew.”
Patrasche thought so too, for he knew that Rubens had loved dogs or he
had never painted them with such exquisite fidelity; and men who loved
dogs were, as Patrasche knew, always pitiful.
The drawings were to go in on the first day of December, and the
decision be given on the twenty-fourth, so that he who should win might
rejoice with all his people at the Christmas season.
In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a beating heart, now
quick with hope, now faint with fear Nello placed the great picture on
his little green milk-cart, and took it, with the help of Patrasche,
into the town, and there left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a public
building.