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. Outbuildings 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 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 smoking 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
sunlighted 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 tolled 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 Stephen 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.
[Illustration: The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the
Midnight Mass]
So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so many
diverse paths had crossed and recrossed 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."
In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young
boy's breast. The great tears stood in his brown, sad eyes: not for
himself--for himself he was happy.
They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over
the Flemish dikes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which
froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense
vault of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than
the snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the
shadows--now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven
figures. Under the Rubens they lay together quite still, and soothed
almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold.
Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each
other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden
in the tall bulrushes by the water's side, watching the boats go seaward
in the sun.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through
the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken
through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected
from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through
the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his
entrance had flung back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the
Cross were for one instant visible.