the heart-sickness of a great timidity. Now that he had left it there,
it seemed to him so hazardous, so vain, so foolish, to dream that he,
a little lad with bare feet, who barely knew his letters, could do
anything at which great painters, real artists, could ever deign to
look. Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral: the lordly form
of Rubens seemed to rise from the fog and the darkness, and to loom in
its magnificence before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile,
seemed to him to murmur, “Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart
and by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp.”
Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted. He had done his
best: the rest must be as God willed, he thought, in that innocent,
unquestioning faith which had been taught him in the little gray chapel
among the willows and the poplar-trees.
The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they reached the
hut, snow fell; and fell for very many days after that, so that the
paths and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all
the smaller streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon
the plains. Then, indeed, it became hard work to go round for the
milk while the world was all dark, and carry it through the darkness
to the silent town. Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the
passage of the years, that were only bringing Nello a stronger youth,
were bringing him old age, and his joints were stiff and his bones
ached often. But he would never give up his share of the labor. Nello
would fain have spared him and drawn the cart himself, but Patrasche
would not allow it. All he would ever permit or accept was the help
of a thrust from behind to the truck as it lumbered along through the
ice-ruts. Patrasche had lived in harness, and he was proud of it. He
suffered a great deal sometimes from frost, and the terrible roads, and
the rheumatic pains of his limbs, but he only drew his breath hard and
bent his stout neck, and trod onward with steady patience.
“Rest thee at home, Patrasche—it is time thou didst rest—and I can
quite well push in the cart by myself,” urged Nello many a morning;
but Patrasche, who understood him aright, would no more have consented
to stay at home than a veteran soldier to shirk when the charge was
sounding; and every day he would rise and place himself in his shafts,
and plod along over the snow through the fields that his four round
feet had left their print upon so many, many years.
“One must never rest till one dies,” thought Patrasche; and sometimes
it seemed to him that that time of rest for him was not very far off.
His sight was less clear than it had been, and it gave him pain to rise
after the night’s sleep, though he would never lie a moment in his
straw when once the bell of the chapel tolling five let him know that
the daybreak of labor had begun.
“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet together, you and I,” said
old Jehan Daas, stretching out to stroke the head of Patrasche with the
old withered hand which had always shared with him its one poor crust
of bread; and the hearts of the old man and the old dog ached together
with one thought: When they were gone, who would care for their darling?
One afternoon, as they came back from Antwerp over the snow, which had
become hard and smooth as marble over all the Flemish plains, they
found dropped in the road a pretty little puppet, a tambourine-player,
all scarlet and gold, about six inches high, and, unlike greater
personages when Fortune lets them drop, quite unspoiled and unhurt by
its fall. It was a pretty toy. Nello tried to find its owner, and,
failing, thought that it was just the thing to please Alois.
It was quite night when he passed the mill-house: he knew the little
window of her room. It could be no harm, he thought, if he gave her
his little piece of treasure-trove, they had been playfellows so long.
There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement: he climbed
it and tapped softly at the lattice: there was a little light within.
The child opened it and looked out half frightened.
Nello put the tambourine-player into her hands. “Here is a doll I found
in the snow, Alois. Take it,” he whispered—“take it, and God bless
thee, dear!”
He slid down from the shed-roof before she had time to thank him, and
ran off through the darkness.
That night there was a fire at the mill. Out-buildings and much corn
were destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling-house were
unharmed. All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing
through the snow from Antwerp. The miller was insured, and would lose
nothing: nevertheless, he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud that
the fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.
Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest: Baas Cogez
thrust him angrily aside. “Thou wert loitering here after dark,” he
said roughly. “I believe, on my soul, that thou dost know more of the
fire than any one.”
Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one could
say such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any one could
pass a jest at such a time.
Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his
neighbors in the day that followed; and though no serious charge was
ever preferred against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had
been seen in the mill-yard after dark on some unspoken errand, and
that he bore Baas Cogez a grudge for forbidding his intercourse with
little Alois; and so the hamlet, which followed the sayings of its
richest landowner servilely, and whose families all hoped to secure the
riches of Alois in some future time for their sons, took the hint to
give grave looks and cold words to old Jehan Daas’s grandson. No one
said anything to him openly, but all the village agreed together to
humor the miller’s prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello
and Patrasche called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast
glances and brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and
cheerful greetings to which they had been always used. No one really
credited the miller’s absurd suspicion, nor the outrageous accusations
born of them, but the people were all very poor and very ignorant, and
the one rich man of the place had pronounced against him. Nello, in his
innocence and his friendlessness, had no strength to stem the popular
tide.
“Thou art very cruel to the lad,” the miller’s wife dared to say,
weeping, to her lord. “Sure he is an innocent lad and a faithful, and
would never dream of any such wickedness, however sore his heart might
be.”
But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, having once said a thing held to
it doggedly, though in his innermost soul he knew well the injustice
that he was committing.
Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against him with a certain
proud patience that disdained to complain: he only gave way a little
when he was quite alone with old Patrasche. Besides, he thought, “If it
should win! They will be sorry then, perhaps.”
Still, to a boy not quite sixteen, and who had dwelt in one little
world all his short life, and in his childhood had been caressed and
applauded on all sides, it was a hard trial to have the whole of that
little world turn against him for naught. Especially hard in that
bleak, snow-bound, famine-stricken winter-time, when the only light and
warmth there could be found abode beside the village hearths and in the
kindly greetings of neighbors. In the winter-time all drew nearer to
each other, all to all, except to Nello and Patrasche, with whom none
now would have anything to do, and who were left to fare as they might
with the old paralyzed, bedridden man in the little cabin, whose fire
was often low, and whose board was often without bread, for there was
a buyer from Antwerp who had taken to drive his mule in of a day for
the milk of the various dairies, and there were only three or four of
the people who had refused his terms of purchase and remained faithful
to the little green cart. So that the burden which Patrasche drew had
become very light, and the centime-pieces in Nello’s pouch had become,
alas! very small likewise.
The dog would stop, as usual, at all the familiar gates which were now
closed to him, and look up at them with wistful, mute appeal; and it
cost the neighbors a pang to shut their doors and their hearts, and let
Patrasche draw his cart on again, empty. Nevertheless, they did it, for
they desired to please Baas Cogez.
Noël was close at hand.
The weather was very wild and cold. The snow was six feet deep, and the
ice was firm enough to bear oxen and men upon it everywhere. At this
season the little village was always gay and cheerful. At the poorest
dwelling there were possets and cakes, joking and dancing, sugared
saints and gilded Jésus. The merry Flemish bells jingled everywhere on
the horses; everywhere within doors some well-filled soup-pot sang and
smoked over the stove; and everywhere over the snow without laughing
maidens pattered in bright kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going to and
from the mass. Only in the little hut it was very dark and very cold.
Nello and Patrasche were left utterly alone, for one night in the week
before the Christmas Day, Death entered there, and took away from life
forever old Jehan Daas, who had never known of life aught save its
poverty and its pains. He had long been half dead, incapable of any
movement except a feeble gesture, and powerless for anything beyond a
gentle word; and yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror
in it: they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in
his sleep, and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement,
unutterable solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had
long been only a poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, who could not raise a
hand in their defence, but he had loved them well: his smile had always
welcomed their return. They mourned for him unceasingly, refusing to
be comforted, as in the white winter day they followed the deal shell
that held his body to the nameless grave by the little gray church.
They were his only mourners, these two whom he had left friendless upon
earth—the young boy and the old dog.
“Surely, he will relent now and let the poor lad come hither?” thought
the miller’s wife, glancing at her husband where he smoked by the
hearth.
Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he hardened his heart, and would not
unbar his door as the little, humble funeral went by. “The boy is a
beggar,” he said to himself: “he shall not be about Alois.”
The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when the grave was closed
and the mourners had gone, she put a wreath of immortelles into Alois’s
hands and bade her go and lay it reverently on the dark, unmarked mound
where the snow was displaced.
Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts. But even of that
poor, melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation.
There was a month’s rent over-due for their little home, and when Nello
had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He
went and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who went every
Sunday night to drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas Cogez. The
cobbler would grant no mercy. He was a harsh, miserly man, and loved
money. He claimed in default of his rent every stick and stone, every
pot and pan, in the hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche be out of it on
the morrow.
Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense miserable enough,
and yet their hearts clove to it with a great affection. They had
been so happy there, and in the summer, with its clambering vine and
its flowering beans, it was so pretty and bright in the midst of
the sun-lighted fields! There life in it had been full of labor and
privation, and yet they had been so well content, so gay of heart,
running together to meet the old man’s never-failing smile of welcome!
All night long the boy and the dog sat by the fireless hearth in the
darkness, drawn close together for warmth and sorrow. Their bodies were
insensible to the cold, but their hearts seemed frozen in them.
When the morning broke over the white, chill earth it was the morning
of Christmas Eve. With a shudder, Nello clasped close to him his only
friend, while his tears fell hot and fast on the dog’s frank forehead.
“Let us go Patrasche—dear, dear Patrasche,” he murmured. “We will not
wait to be kicked out: let us go.”
Patrasche had no will but his, and they went sadly, side by side, out
from the little place which was so dear to them both, and in which
every humble, homely thing was to them precious and beloved. Patrasche
drooped his head wearily as he passed by his own green cart: it was no
longer his—it had to go with the rest to pay the rent, and his brass
harness lay idle and glittering on the snow. The dog could have lain
down beside it and died for very heart-sickness as he went, but whilst
the lad lived and needed him Patrasche would not yield and give way.
They took the old accustomed road into Antwerp. The day had yet scarce
more than dawned, most of the shutters were still closed, but some
of the villagers were about. They took no notice whilst the dog and
the boy passed by them. At one door Nello paused and looked wistfully
within: his grandfather had done many a kindly turn in neighbor’s
service to the people who dwelt there.
“Would you give Patrasche a crust?” he said, timidly. “He is old, and
he has had nothing since last forenoon.”
The woman shut the door hastily, murmuring some vague saying about
wheat and rye being very dear that season. The boy and the dog went on
again wearily: they asked no more.
By slow and painful ways they reached Antwerp as the chimes toiled ten.
“If I had anything about me I could sell to get him bread!” thought
Nello, but he had nothing except the wisp of linen and serge that
covered him, and his pair of wooden shoes.
Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the lad’s hand, as
though to pray him not to be disquieted for any woe or want of his.
The winner of the drawing-prize was to be proclaimed at noon, and to
the public building where he had left his treasure Nello made his way.
On the steps and in the entrance-hall there was a crowd of youths—some
of his age, some older, all with parents or relatives or friends. His
heart was sick with fear as he went among them, holding Patrasche close
to him. The great bells of the city clashed out the hour of noon with
brazen clamor. The doors of the inner hall were opened; the eager,
panting throng rushed in: it was known that the selected picture would
be raised above the rest upon a wooden dais.
A mist obscured Nello’s sight, his head swam, his limbs almost failed
him. When his vision cleared he saw the drawing raised on high: it was
not his own! A slow, sonorous voice was proclaiming aloud that victory
had been adjudged to Stephan Kiesslinger, born in the burgh of Antwerp,
son of a wharfinger in that town.
When Nello recovered his consciousness he was lying on the stones
without, and Patrasche was trying with every art he knew to call him
back to life. In the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were
shouting around their successful comrade, and escorting him with
acclamations to his home upon the quay.
The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into his embrace. “It is
all over, dear Patrasche,” he murmured—“all over!”
He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak from fasting, and
retraced his steps to the village. Patrasche paced by his side with his
head drooping and his old limbs feeble from hunger and sorrow.
The snow was falling fast: a keen hurricane blew from the north: it
was bitter as death on the plains. It took them long to traverse the
familiar path, and the bells were sounding four of the clock as they
approached the hamlet. Suddenly Patrasche paused, arrested by a scent
in the snow, scratched, whined, and drew out with his teeth a small
case of brown leather. He held it up to Nello in the darkness. Where
they were there stood a little Calvary, and a lamp burned dully under
the cross: the boy mechanically turned the case to the light: on it
was the name of Baas Cogez, and within it were notes for two thousand
francs.
The sight roused the lad a little from his stupor. He thrust it in his
shirt, and stroked Patrasche and drew him onward. The dog looked up
wistfully in his face.
Nello made straight for the mill-house, and went to the house-door and
struck on its panels. The miller’s wife opened it weeping, with little
Alois clinging close to her skirts. “Is it thee, thou poor lad?” she
said kindly through her tears. “Get thee gone ere the Baas see thee. We
are in sore trouble to-night. He is out seeking for a power of money
that he has let fall riding homeward, and in this snow he never will
find it; and God knows it will go nigh to ruin us. It is Heaven’s own
judgment for the things we have done to thee.”
Nello put the note-case in her hand and called Patrasche within the
house. “Patrasche found the money to-night,” he said quickly. “Tell
Baas Cogez so: I think he will not deny the dog shelter and food in his
old age. Keep him from pursuing me, and I pray of you to be good to
him.”
Ere either woman or dog knew what he meant he had stooped and kissed
Patrasche: then closed the door hurriedly, and disappeared in the gloom
of the fast-falling night.
The woman and the child stood speechless with joy and fear: Patrasche
vainly spent the fury of his anguish against the iron-bound oak of the
barred house-door. They did not dare unbar the door and let him forth:
they tried all they could to solace him. They brought him sweet cakes
and juicy meats; they tempted him with the best they had; they tried to
lure him to abide by the warmth of the hearth; but it was of no avail.
Patrasche refused to be comforted or to stir from the barred portal.
It was six o’clock when from an opposite entrance the miller at last
came, jaded and broken, into his wife’s presence. “It is lost forever,”
he said with an ashen cheek and a quiver in his stern voice. “We have
looked with lanterns everywhere: it is gone—the little maiden’s portion
and all!”
His wife put the money into his hand, and told him how it had come to
her. The strong man sank trembling into a seat and covered his face,
ashamed and almost afraid. “I have been cruel to the lad,” he muttered
at length: “I deserved not to have good at his hands.”
Little Alois, taking courage, crept close to her father and nestled
against him her fair curly head. “Nello may come here again, father?”
she whispered. “He may come to-morrow as he used to do?”
The miller pressed her in his arms: his hard, sunburned face was very
pale and his mouth trembled. “Surely, surely,” he answered his child.
“He shall bide here on Christmas Day, and any other day he will. God
helping me, I will make amends to the boy—I will make amends.”
Little Alois kissed him in gratitude and joy, then slid from his knees
and ran to where the dog kept watch by the door. “And to-night I may
feast Patrasche?” she cried in a child’s thoughtless glee.
Her father bent his head gravely: “Ay, ay: let the dog have the best;”
for the stern old man was moved and shaken to his heart’s depths.
It was Christmas Eve, and the mill-house was filled with oak logs and
squares of turf, with cream and honey, with meat and bread, and the
rafters were hung with wreaths of evergreen, and the Calvary and the
cuckoo clock looked out from a mass of holly. There were little paper
lanterns, too, for Alois, and toys of various fashions and sweetmeats
in bright-pictured papers. There were light and warmth and abundance
everywhere, and the child would fain have made the dog a guest honored
and feasted.
But Patrasche would neither lie in the warmth nor share in the cheer.
Famished he was and very cold, but without Nello he would partake
neither of comfort nor food. Against all temptation he was proof, and
close against the door he leaned always, watching only for a means of
escape.
“He wants the lad,” said Baas Cogez. “Good dog! good dog! I will go
over to the lad the first thing at day-dawn.” For no one but Patrasche
knew that Nello had left the hut, and no one but Patrasche divined that
Nello had gone to face starvation and misery alone.
The mill-kitchen was very warm: great logs crackled and flamed on the
hearth; neighbors came in for a glass of wine and a slice of the fat
goose baking for supper. Alois, gleeful and sure of her playmate back
on the morrow, bounded and sang and tossed back her yellow hair. Baas
Cogez, in the fulness of his heart, smiled on her through moistened
eyes, and spoke of the way in which he would befriend her favorite
companion; the house-mother sat with calm, contented face at the
spinning-wheel; the cuckoo in the clock chirped mirthful hours. Amidst
it all Patrasche was bidden with a thousand words of welcome to tarry
there a cherished guest. But neither peace nor plenty could allure him
where Nello was not.
When the supper smoked on the board, and the voices were loudest
and gladdest, and the Christ-child brought choicest gifts to Alois,
Patrasche, watching always an occasion, glided out when the door was
unlatched by a careless new-comer, and as swiftly as his weak and tired
limbs would bear him sped over the snow in the bitter, black night. He
had only one thought—to follow Nello. A human friend might have paused
for the pleasant meal, the cheery warmth, the cosey slumber; but that
was not the friendship of Patrasche. He remembered a bygone time, when
an old man and a little child had found him sick unto death in the
wayside ditch.
Snow had fallen freshly all the evening long; it was now nearly ten;
the trail of the boy’s footsteps was almost obliterated. It took
Patrasche long to discover any scent. When at last he found it, it was
lost again quickly, and lost and recovered, and again lost and again
recovered, a hundred times or more.
The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were blown
out; the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every
trace of habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the cattle
were housed, and in all the huts and homesteads men and women rejoiced
and feasted. There was only Patrasche out in the cruel cold—old and
famished and full of pain, but with the strength and the patience of a
great love to sustain him in his search.
The trail of Nello’s steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new
snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was
past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town
and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in
the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices
of house-shutters or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting
drinking-songs. The streets were all white with ice: the high walls and
roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound save the riot
of the winds down the passages as they tossed the creaking signs and
shook the tall lamp-irons.
So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so many
diverse paths had crossed and re-crossed each other, that the dog had a
hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on
his way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice
cut his feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat’s teeth. He
kept on his way, a poor gaunt, shivering thing, and by long patience
traced the steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up to
the steps of the great cathedral.
“He is gone to the things that he loved,” thought Patrasche: he
could not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the
art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass.
Some heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast
or sleep, or too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright,
had left one of the doors unlocked. By that accident the foot-falls
Patrasche sought had passed through into the building, leaving the
white marks of snow upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white
thread, frozen as it fell, he was guided through the intense silence,
through the immensity of the vaulted space—guided straight to the gates
of the chancel, and, stretched there upon the stones, he found Nello.
He crept up and touched the face of the boy. “Didst thou dream that I
should be faithless and forsake thee? I—a dog?” said that mute caress.
The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close. “Let us
lie down and die together,” he murmured. “Men have no need of us, and
we are all alone.”