times; a deep-toned, weary bell, that tolled for every quarter, and must
often have been heard, at dead of night, by dying men, drowning
unshriven and unhouselled.
Suddenly the sand about us, so fawn-hued, smooth, and beautifully
ribbed, grew moist, and glistened with a gleam of water, like eyes that
fill with tears.
Bronze never saw: he only watched the boat. A little later the water
gushed above the sand, and, gathering in a frail rippling edge of foam,
rolled up and broke upon the rock.
And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.
Awhile, and the water grew in volume, and filled the mouse's pool till
it brimmed over, and bathed the dull grasses till they glowed like
flowers; and drew the sea-crabs and the tiny dwellers of the shells back
once more into its wondrous living light.
And all around the fresh tide rose, silently thus about the rocks and
stones; gliding and glancing in all the channels of the shore, until the
sands were covered, and the grasses gathered in, and all the creeping,
hueless things were lost within its space; and in the stead of them, and
of the bronzed palm-leaves of weed, and of the great brown boulders
gleaming in the sun, there was but one vast lagoon of shadowless bright
water everywhere.
And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.
By this time the tide, rolling swiftly in before a strong sou'-wester,
had risen midway against the rock on which we had been left, and was
breaking froth and foam upon the rock's worn side. For this rock alone
withstood the passage of the sea: there was naught else but this to
break the even width of water. All other things save this had been
subdued and reapen.
It was all deep water around; and the water glowed a strange emerald
green, like the green in a lizard or snake. The shore, that had looked
so near, now seemed so far, far off; and the woods were hidden in mist,
and the cottages were all blurred with the brown of the cliff, and there
came no sound of any sort from the land--no distant bell, no farm-bird's
call, no echo of children's voices. There was only one sound at all;
and that was the low, soft, ceaseless murmuring of the tide as it glided
inward.
The waters rose till they touched the crest of the rock; but still he
never moved. Stretched out upon the stone, guarding the things of her
trust, and with his eyes fastened on the sail which rose against the
light, he waited thus--for death.
I was light, and a strong swimmer. I had been tossed on those waves from
my birth. Buffeted, fatigued, blind with the salt sea-spray, drenched
with the weight of the water, I struggled across that calm dread width
of glassy coldness, and breathless reached the land.
By signs and cries I made them wot that something needed them at sea.
They began to get ready a little boat, bringing it down from its wooden
rest on high dry ground beneath the cliff. Whilst they pushed and
dragged through the deep-furrowed sand I gazed seaward. The shore was
raised; I could see straight athwart the waters. They now were level
with the rock; and yet he had never moved.
The little skiff had passed round the bend of a bluff, and was out of
his sight and ours.
The boat was pushed into the surf; they threw me in. They could see
nothing, and trusted to my guidance.
I had skill enough to make them discover whither it was I wanted them to
go. Then, looking in their eagerness whither my eyes went, they saw him
on the rock, and with a sudden exercise of passionate vigour, bent to
their oars and sent the boat against the hard opposing force of the
resisting tide. For they perceived that, from some cause, he was
motionless there, and could not use his strength; and they knew that it
would be shame to their manhood if, within sight of their land, the
creature who had succoured their brethren in the snow, and saved the
two-year child from the storm, should perish before their sight on a
calm and unfretted sea and in a full noon sun.
It was but a furlong to that rock; it was but the breadth of the beach,
that at low water stretched uncovered; and yet how slowly the boat sped,
with the ruthless tide sweeping it back as fast as the oars bore it
forward!
So near we seemed to him that one would have thought a stone flung from
us through the air would have lit far beyond him; and yet the space was
enough, more than enough, to bar us from him, filled as it was with the
strong adverse pressure of those low, swift, in-rushing waves.
The waters leaped above the summit of the rock, and for a moment covered
him. A great shout went up from the rowers beside me. They strained in
every nerve to reach him; and the roll of a fresh swell of water lifted
the boat farther than their uttermost effort could achieve, but lifted
her backward, backward to the land.
When the waters touched him he arose slowly, and stood at bay like a
stag upon a headland, when the hounds rage behind, and in front yawns
the fathomless lake.
He stood so that he still guarded the things of his trust; and his eyes
were still turned seaward, watching for the vanished sail.
Once again the men, with a loud cry to him of courage and help, strained
at their oars, and drove themselves a yard's breadth farther out. And
once again the tide, with a rush of surf and shingle, swept the boat
back, and seemed to bear her to the land as lightly as though she were a
leaf with which a wind was playing.
The waters covered the surface of the rock. It sank from sight. The foam
was white about his feet, and still he stood there--upon guard.
Everywhere there was the brilliancy of noontide sun; everywhere there
was the beaming calmness of the sea, that spread out, far and wide, in
one vast sheet of light; from the wooded line of the shore there echoed
the distant gaiety of a woman's laugh. A breeze, softly stirring through
the warm air, brought with it from the land the scent of myrtle thickets
and wild flowers. How horrible they were--the light, the calm, the
mirth, the summer fragrance!
For one moment he stood there erect; his dark form sculptured,
lion-like, against the warm yellow light of noon; about his feet the
foam.
Then, all noiselessly, a great, curled, compact wave surged over him,
breaking upon him, sweeping him away. The water spread out quickly,
smooth and gleaming like the rest. He rose, grasping in his teeth the
kreel of weed and shells.
He had waited until the last. Driven from the post he would not of
himself forsake, the love of life awoke in him; he struggled against
death.
Three times he sank, three times he rose. The sea was now strong, and
deep, and swift of pace, rushing madly in; and he was cumbered with that
weight of osier and of weed, which yet he never yielded, because it had
been her trust. With each yard that the tide bore him forward, by so
much it bore us backward. There was but the length of a spar between us,
and yet it was enough!
He rose for the fourth time, his head above the surf, the kreel uplifted
still, the sun-rays full upon his brown weary eyes, with all their
silent agony and mute appeal. Then the tide, fuller, wilder, deeper with
each wave that rolled, and washing as it went all things of the shore
from their places, flung against him, as it swept on, a great rough limb
of driftwood. It struck him as he rose; struck him across the brow. The
wave rushed on; the tide came in; the black wood floated to the shore;
he never rose again.
And scarcely that span of the length of a spar had parted us from him
when he sank!
All the day through they searched, and searched with all the skill of
men sea-born and sea-bred. The fisher, whose little child he had saved
in the winter night, would not leave him to the things of the deep. And
at sunset they found him, floating westward, in the calm water where the
rays of the sun made it golden and warm. He was quite dead; but in his
teeth there still was clenched the osier kreel, washed empty of its
freight.
They buried him there; on the shore underneath the cliff, where a great
wild knot of myrtle grows, and the honeysuckle blooms all over the sand.
And when Lord Beltran in that autumn came, and heard how he had died in
the fulfilling of a trust, he had a stone shapen and carved; and set it
against the cliff, amongst the leafage and flowers, high up where the
highest winter tide will not come. And by his will the name of Bronze
was cut on it in deep letters that will not wear out, and on which the
sun will strike with every evening that it shall pass westward above the
sea; and beneath the name he bade three lines be chiselled likewise, and
they are these:
"HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS.
HE KNEW NO BETTER.
HE WAS A DOG."
"They are all words. Creatures that take out their grief in crape and
mortuary tablets can't feel very much."
"There are many lamentations, from Lycidas to Lesbia, which prove that
whether for a hero or a sparrow--" I began timidly to suggest.
"That's only a commonplace," snapped my lady. "They chatter and
scribble; they don't feel. They write stanzas of 'gush' on Maternity;
and tear the little bleating calf from its mother to bleed to death in
a long, slow agony. They maunder twaddle about Infancy over some ugly
red lump of human flesh, in whose creation their vanity happens to be
involved; and then go out and send the springtide lamb to the slaughter,
and shoot the parent birds as they fly to the nest where their
fledglings are screaming in hunger! Pooh! Did you never find out the
value of their words? Some one of them has said that speech was given
them to conceal their thoughts. It is true that they use it for that
end; but it was given them for this reason. At the time of the creation,
when all except man had been made, the Angel of Life, who had been
bidden to summon the world out of chaos, moving over the fresh and yet
innocent earth, thought to himself, 'I have created so much that is
doomed to suffer for ever, and for ever be mute; I will now create an
animal that shall be compensated for all suffering by listening to the
sound of its own voluble chatter.' Whereon the Angel called Man into
being, and cut the _frænum_ of his tongue, which has clacked incessantly
ever since, all through the silence of the centuries."
* * *
There was once a dog, my dear, that was hit by three men, one after
another, as they went by him where he lay in the sun; and in return he
bit them--deep--and they let him alone then, and ever after sought to
propitiate him. Well, the first he bit in the arm, where there was a
brand for deserting; and the second he bit in the throat, where there
was a hideous mole; and the third he bit in the shoulder, where there
was the mark of a secret camorra. Now, not one of these three durst
speak of the wounds in places they all wished to hide; and whenever
afterwards they passed the dog, they gave him fair words, and sweet
bones, and a wide berth. It is the dogs, and the satirists, and the
libellers, and the statesmen who know how to bite like that--in the
weak part--that get let alone, and respected, and fed on the fat of the
land.
* * *
For him by whom a thirsty ear is lent to the world's homage, the tocsin
of feebleness, if not of failure, has already sounded.
The gladness of the man is come when the crowds lisp his name, and the
gold fills his hand, and the women's honeyed adulations buzz like golden
bees about his path; but how often is the greatness of the artist gone,
and gone for ever!
Because when the world denies you it is easy to deny the world; because
when the bread is bitter it is easy not to linger at the meal; because
when the oil is low it is easy to rise with dawn; because when the body
is without surfeit or temptation it is easy to rise above earth on the
wings of the spirit. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills your
soul in you sometimes; but it is like the northern blast that lashes men
into Vikings; it is not the soft, luscious south wind that lulls them
into lotos-eaters.
* * *
I have grave doubts of Mrs. Siddons. She was a goddess of the age of
fret and fume, of stalk and strut, of trilled R's and of nodding plumes.
If we had Siddons now I fear we should hiss; I am quite sure we should
yawn. She must have been Melpomene always; Nature never.
* * *
Oh, how wise you are and how just!--if there be a spectacle on earth to
rejoice the angels, it is your treatment of the animals that you say God
has given unto you!
It is not for me, a little dog, to touch on such awful mysteries;
but--sometimes--I wonder, if ever He ask you how you have dealt with His
gift, what will you answer then?
If all your slaughtered millions should instead answer for you--if all
the countless and unpitied dead, all the goaded, maddened beasts from
forest and desert who were torn asunder in the holidays of Rome; and all
the innocent, playful, gentle lives of little home-bred creatures that
have been racked by the knives, and torn by the poisons, and convulsed
by the torments, of your modern Science, should, instead, answer, with
one mighty voice, of a woe no longer inarticulate, of an accusation no
more disregarded, what then? Well! Then, if it be done unto you as you
have done, you will seek for mercy and find none in all the width of the
universe; you will writhe, and none shall release you; you will pray,
and none shall hear.
* * *
"These fine things don't make one's happiness," I murmured pensively to
Fanfreluche.
"No, my dear, they don't," the little worldling admitted. "They do to
women; they're so material, you see. They are angels--O yes, of
course!--but they're uncommonly sharp angels where money and good living
are concerned. Just watch them--watch the tail of their eye--when a
cheque is being written or an _éprouvette_ being brought to table. And
after all, you know, minced chicken is a good deal nicer than dry bread.
Of course we can easily be sentimental and above this sort of thing,
when the chicken _is_ in our mouths where we sit by the fire; but if we
were gnawing wretched bones, out in the cold of the streets, I doubt if
we should feel in such a sublime mood. All the praises of poverty are
sung by the minstrel who has got a golden harp to chant them on; and
all the encomiums on renunciation come from your _bon viveur_ who never
denied himself aught in his life!"
* * *
Emotions are quite as detrimental to a dog's tail as they are to a
lady's complexion. Joseph Buonaparte's American wife said to an American
gentleman, whom I heard quote her words, that she "never laughed because
it made wrinkles:" there is a good deal of wisdom in that cachinatory
abstinence. There is nothing in the world that wears people (or dogs) so
much as feeling of any kind, tender, bitter, humoristic, or emotional.
How often you commend a fresh-coloured matron with her daughters, and a
rosy-cheeked hunting squire in his saddle, who, with their half-century
of years, yet look so comely, so blooming, so clear-browed, and so
smooth-skinned. How often you distrust the weary delicate creature, with
the hectic flush of her rouge, in society; and the worn, tired,
colourless face of the man of the world who takes her down to dinner.
Well, to my fancy, you may be utterly wrong. An easy egotism, a
contented sensualism, may have carried the first comfortably and
serenely through their bank-note-lined paradise of commonplace
existence. How shall you know what heart-sickness in their youth, what
aching desires for joys never found, what sorrowful power of sympathy,
what fatal keenness of vision, have blanched the faded cheek, and lined
the weary mouth, of the other twain?
* * *
"Sheep and men are very much alike," said Trust, who thought both very
poor creatures. "Very much alike indeed. They go in flocks, and can't
give a reason why. They leave their fleece on any bramble that is strong
enough to insist on fleecing them. They bleat loud at imagined evils,
while they tumble straight into real dangers. And for going off the
line, there's nothing like them. There may be pits, thorns, quagmires,
spring-guns, what not, the other side of the hedge, but go off the
straight track they will--and no dog can stop them. It's just the sheer
love of straying. You may bark at them right and left; go they will,
though they break their legs down a limekiln. Oh, men and sheep are
wonderfully similar; take them all in all."
* * *
Ah! you people never guess the infinite woe we dogs suffer in new homes,
under strange tyrannies; you never heed how we shrink from unfamiliar
hands, and shudder at unfamiliar voices, how lonely we feel in unknown
places, how acutely we dread harshness, novelty, and scornful treatment.
Dogs die oftentimes of severance from their masters; there is
Greyfriars' Bobby now in Edinboro' town who never has been persuaded to
leave his dead owner's grave all these many years through. You see such
things, but you are indifferent to them. "It is only a dog," you say;
"what matter if the brute fret to death?"
You don't understand it of course; you who so soon forget all your own
dead--the mother that bore you, the mistress that loved you, the friend
that fought with you shoulder to shoulder; and of course, also, you care
nothing for the measureless blind pains, the mute helpless sorrows, the
vague lonely terrors, that ache in our little dumb hearts.
* * *
Lucretius has said how charming it is to stand under a shelter in a
storm, and see another hurrying through its rain and wind; but a woman
would refine that sort of cruelty, and would not be quite content
unless she had an umbrella beside her that she refused to lend.
* * *
"Oh, pooh, my dear!" cried Fanfreluche. "He has robbed his host at
cards, and abused his host behind his back; to fulfil the whole duty of
a nineteenth century guest it only remains for him to betray his host in
love!"
"You think very ill of men?" I muttered; I was, indeed, slightly weary
of her sceptical supercilious treatment of all things; your
pseudo-philosopher, who will always think he has plumbed the ocean with
his silver-topped cane, is a great bore sometimes.
"I think very well of men," returned Fanfreluche. "You are mistaken, my
dear. There are only two things that they never are honest about--and
that is their sport and their women. When they get talking of their
rocketers, or their runs, their pigeon-score, or their _bonnes
fortunes_, they always lie--quite unconsciously. And if they miss their
bird or their woman, isn't it always because the sun was in their eyes
as they fired, or because she wasn't half good-looking enough to try
after?--bless your heart, I know them!"
"If you do, you are not complimentary to them," I grumbled.
"Can't help that, my dear," returned Fanfreluche. "Gracious! whatever is
there that stands the test of knowing it well? I have heard Beltran say,
that you find out what an awful humbug the Staubbach is when you go up
to the top and see you can straddle across it. Well, the Staubbach is
just like everything in this life. Keep your distance, and how well the
creature looks!--all veiled in its spray, and all bright with its
prismatic colours, so deep, and so vast, and so very impressive. But
just go up to the top, scale the crags of its character, and measure the
height of its aspirations, and fathom the torrent of its passions, and
sift how much is the foam of speech, and how little is the well-spring
of thought. Well, my dear, it is a very uncommon creature if it don't
turn out just like the Staubbach."
* * *
I think if you knew what you did, even the most thoughtless amongst you
would not sanction with your praise, and encourage with your coin, the
brutality that trains dancing-dogs.
Have human mimes if you will; it is natural to humanity to caper and
grimace and act a part: but for pity's sake do not countenance the
torture with which Avarice mercilessly trains us "dumb beasts" for the
trade of tricks.
"The Clown-dog draws throngs to laugh and applaud," says some
advertisement: yes, and I knew a very clever clown-dog once. His feet
were blistered with the hot irons on which he had been taught to dance;
his teeth had been drawn lest he should use his natural weapons against
his cowardly tyrants; his skin beneath his short white hair was black
with bruises; though originally of magnificent courage, his spirit had
been so broken by torture that he trembled if a leaf blew against him;
and his eyes--well, if the crowds that applauded him had once looked at
those patient, wistful, quiet eyes, with their unutterable despair,
those crowds would have laughed no more, unless they had indeed been
devils.
Who has delivered us unto you to be thus tortured, and martyred?
Who?--Oh, that awful eternal mystery that ye yourselves cannot explain!
* * *
Believe me, it is the light or the darkness of our own fate that either
gives "greenness to the grass and glory to the flower," or leaves both
sickly, wan, and colourless. A little breadth of sunny lawn, the
spreading shadow of a single beech, the gentle click of a little
garden-gate, the scent of some simple summer roses--how fair these are
in your memory because of a voice which then was on your ear, because of
eyes that then gazed in your own. And the grandeur of Nile, and the
lustre of the after-glow, and the solemn desolation of Carnac, and the
wondrous beauty of the flushed sea of tossing reeds, are all cold, and
dead, and valueless, because in those eyes no love now lies for you;
because that voice, for you, is now for ever silent.
* * *
For, write as you will of the glory of poverty, and of the ennui of
pleasure, there is no life like this life, wherein to the sight and the
sense all things minister; wherefrom harsh discord and all unloveliness
are banished: where the rare beauty of high-born women is common; where
the passions at their wildest still sheathe themselves in courtesy's
silver scabbard; where the daily habits of existence are made graceful
and artistic; where grief, and woe, and feud, and futile longing for
lost loves, can easiest be forgot in delicate laughter and in endless
change. Artificial? Ah, well, it may be so! But since nevermore will you
return to the life of the savage, to the wigwam of the squaw, it is
best, methinks, that the Art of Living--the great _Savoir Vivre_--should
be brought, as you seek to bring all other arts, up to uttermost
perfection.
* * *
Men are very much in society as women will them to be. Let a woman's
society be composed of men gently born and bred, and if she find them
either coarse or stupid, make answer to her--"You must have been coarse
or stupid yourself."
And if she demur to the _tu quoque_ as to a base and illogical form of
argument, which we will grant that it usually is, remind her that the
cream of a pasturage may be pure and rich, but if it pass into the hands
of a clumsy farm serving-maid, then shall the cheese made thereof be
neither Roquefort nor Stilton, but rough and flavourless and uneatable,
"like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring." Now, the influence of a
woman's intelligence on the male intellects about her is as the churn to
the cream: it can either enrich and utilise it, or impoverish and waste
it. It is not too much to say that it almost invariably, in the present
decadence of the salon and parrot-jabbering of the suffrage, has the
latter effect alone.
* * *
Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his
resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. My father used to say
to me, "Child, when you grow to womanhood, whether you be rich or poor,
gentle or simple, as the balance of your life may turn for or against
you, remember always this one thing--that no one can disgrace you save
yourself. Dishonour is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows, it can
only poison if it be plucked." They call the belladonna Aaron's Beard in
the country, you know; and it is true that the cattle, simple as they
are, are never harmed by it; just because, though it is always in their
path, they never stop and taste it. I think it may just be so with us;
with any sort of evil.
* * *
"Every pleasure has its penalty. If a woman be celebrated, the world
always thinks she must be wicked. If she's wise, she laughs. It is the
bitter that you must take with the sweet, as you get the sorrel flavour
with the softness of the cream, in your soup à la Bonne Femme. But the
cream would clog without it, and the combination is piquant."
"Only to jaded palates," I retorted; for I have often tasted the Bonne
Femme, and detest it.
By the way, what exquisite irony lies in some of your kitchen
nomenclature!
* * *