Just at first Koosje noticed nothing. She herself was of so faithful a
nature that an idea, a suspicion, of Jan's faithlessness never entered
her mind. When the girl laughed and blushed and dimpled and smiled,
when she cast her great blue eyes at the big young fellow, Koosje only
thought how pretty she was, and it was must a thousand pities she had
not been born a great lady.

And thus weeks slipped over. Never very demonstrative herself, Koosje
saw nothing, Dortje, for her part, saw a great deal; but Dortje was a
woman of few words, one who quite believed in the saying, "If speech is
silver, silence is gold;" so she held her peace.

Now Truide, rendered fairly frantic by her enforced confinement to
the house, grew to look upon Jan as her only chance of excitement and
distraction; and Jan, poor, thick-headed noodle of six feet high, was
thoroughly wretched. What to do he knew not. A strange, mad, fierce
passion for Truide had taken possession of him, and an utter distaste,
almost dislike, had come in place of the old love for Koosje. Truide
was unlike anything he had ever come in contact with before; she was so
fairy-like, so light, so delicate, so dainty. Against Koosje's plumper,
maturer charms, she appeared to the infatuated young man like--if he had
ever heard of it he would probably have said like a Dresden china image;
but since he had not, he compared her in his own foolish heart to an
angel. Her feet were so tiny, her hands so soft, her eyes so expressive,
her waist so slim, her manner so bewitching! Somehow Koosje was
altogether different; he could not endure the touch of her heavy hand,
the tones of her less refined voice; he grew impatient at the denser
perceptions of her mind. It was very foolish, very short-sighted; for
the hands, though heavy, were clever and willing; the voice, though a
trifle coarser in accent than Truide's childish tones, would never tell
him a lie; the perceptions, though not brilliant, were the perceptions
of good, every-day common sense. It really was very foolish, for what
charmed him most in Truide was the merest outside polish, a certain ease
of manner which doubtless she had caught from the English aristocrats
whom she had known in her native place. She had not half the sterling
good qualities and steadfastness of Koosje; but Jan was in love, and
did not stop to argue the matter as you or I are able to do. Men in
love--very wise and great men, too--are often like Jan van der Welde.
They lay aside pro tem. the whole amount, be it great or small, of
wisdom they possess. And it must be remembered that Jan van der Welde
was neither a wise nor a great man.

Well, in the end there came what the French call _un denouement_,--what
we in forcible modern English would call a _smash_,--and it happened
thus. It was one evening toward the summer that Koosje's eyes were
suddenly opened, and she became aware of the free-and-easy familiarity
of Truide's manner toward her betrothed lover, Jan. It was some very
slight and trivial thing that led her to notice it, but in an instant
the whole truth flashed across her mind.

"Leave the kitchen!" she said, in a tone of authority.

But it happened that, at the very instant she spoke, Jan was furtively
holding Truide's fingers under the cover of the table-cloth; and when,
on hearing the sharp words, the girl would have snatched them away, he,
with true masculine instinct of opposition, held them fast.

"What do you mean by speaking to her like that?" he demanded, an angry
flush overspreading his dark face.

"What is the maid to you?" Koosje asked, indignantly.

"Maybe more than you are," he retorted; in answer to which Koosje
deliberately marched out of the kitchen, leaving them alone.

To say she was indignant would be but very mildly to express the state
of her feelings; she was _furious_. She knew that the end of her romance
had come. No thoughts of making friends with Jan entered her mind; only
a great storm filled her heart till it was ready to burst with pain and
anguish.

As she went along the passage the professor's bell sounded, and Koosje,
being close to the door, went abruptly in. The professor looked up in
mild astonishment, quickly enough changed to dismay as he caught sight
of his valued Koosje's face, from out of which anger seemed in a moment
to have thrust all the bright, comely beauty.

"How now, my good Koosje?" said the old gentleman. "Is aught amiss?"

"Yes, professor, there is," returned Koosje, all in a blaze of anger,
and moving, as she spoke, the tea-tray, which she set down upon the
oaken buffet with a bang, which made its fair and delicate freight
fairly jingle again.

"But you needn't break my china, Koosje," suggested the old gentleman,
mildly, rising from his chair and getting into his favourite attitude
before the stove.

"You are quite right, professor," returned Koosje, curtly; she was
sensible even in her trouble.

"And what is the trouble?" he asked, gently.

"It's just this, professor," cried Koosje, setting her arms akimbo and
speaking in a high-pitched, shrill voice; "you and I have been warming
a viper in our bosoms, and, viper-like, she has turned round and bitten
me."

"Is it Truide?"

"Truide," she affirmed, disdainfully. "Yes, it is Truide, who but for
me would be dead now of hunger and cold--or _worse_. And she has been
making love to that great fool, Jan van der Welde,--great oaf that he
is,--after all I have done for her; after my dragging her in out of the
cold and rain; after all I have taught her. Ah, professor, but it is a
vile, venomous viper that we have been warming in our bosoms!"

"I must beg, Koosje," said the old gentleman, sedately, "that you will
exonerate me from any such proceeding. If you remember rightly, I was
altogether against your plan for keeping her in the house." He could not
resist giving her that little dig, kind of heart as he was.

"Serves me right for being so soft-hearted!" thundered Koosje. "I'll be
wiser next time I fall over a bundle, and leave it where I find it."

"No, no, Koosje; don't say that," the old gentleman remonstrated,
gently. "After all, it may be but a blessing in disguise. God sends all
our trials for some good and wise purpose. Our heaviest afflictions are
often, nay, most times, Koosje, means to some great end which, while the
cloud of adversity hangs over us, we are unable to discern."

"Ah!" sniffed Koosje, scornfully.

"This oaf--as I must say you justly term him, for you are a good clever
woman, Koosje, as I can testify after the experience of years--has
proved that he can be false; he has shown that he can throw away
substance for shadow (for, of a truth, that poor, pretty child would
make a sad wife for a poor man); yet it is better you should know it now
than at some future date, when--when there might be other ties to make
the knowledge more bitter to you."

"Yes, that is true," said Koosje, passing the back of her hand across
her trembling lips. She could not shed tears over her trouble; her eyes
were dry and burning, as if anger had scorched the blessed drops up ere
they should fall. She went on washing up the cups and saucers, or at
least _the_ cup and saucer, and other articles the professor had used
for his tea; and after a few minutes' silence he spoke again.

"What are you going to do? Punish her, or turn her out, or what?"

"I shall let him--_marry_ her," replied Koosje, with a portentous nod.

The old gentleman couldn't help laughing. "You think he will pay off
your old scores?"

"Before long," answered Koosje, grimly, "she will find him out--as I
have done."

Then, having finished washing the tea-things, which the professor had
shuddered to behold in her angry hands, she whirled herself out of the
room and left him alone.

"Oh, these women--these women!" he cried, in confidence, to the pictures
and skeletons. "What a worry they are! An old bachelor has the best of
it in the main, I do believe. But oh, Jan van der Welde, what a donkey
you must be to get yourself mixed up in such a broil! and yet--ah!"

The fossilised old gentleman broke off with a sigh as he recalled the
memory of a certain dead-and-gone romance which had happened--goodness
only knows how many years before--when he, like Jan van der Welde, would
have thrown the world away for a glance of a certain pair of blue eyes,
at the bidding of a certain English tongue, whose broken _Nederlandsche
taal_ was to him the sweetest music ever heard on earth--sweeter even
than the strains of the Stradivari when from under his skilful fingers
rose the perfect melodies of old masters. Ay, but the sweet eyes had
been closed in death many a long, long, year, the sweet voice hushed
in silence. He had watched the dear life ebb away, the fire in the
blue eyes fade out. He had felt each day that the clasp of the little
greeting fingers was less close; each day he had seen the outline of the
face grow sharper; and at last there had come one when the poor little
English-woman met him with the gaze of one who knew him not, and
babbled, not of green fields, but of horses and dogs, and of a brother
Jack, who, five years before, had gone down with her Majesty's ship
_Alligator_ in mid-Atlantic.

Ay, but that was many and many a year agone. His young, blue-eyed love
stood out alone in life's history, a thing apart. Of the gentler sex, in
a general way, the old professor had not seen that which had raised it
in his estimation to the level of the one woman over whose memory hung a
bright halo of romance.


Fifteen years had passed away; the old professor of osteology had passed
away with them; and in the large house on the Domplein lived a baron,
with half a dozen noisy, happy, healthy children,--young _fraulas_ and
_jonkheers_,--who scampered up and down the marble passages, and fell
headlong down the steep, narrow, unlighted stairways, to the imminent
danger of dislocating their aristocratic little necks. There was a new
race of neat maids, clad in the same neat livery of lilac and black,
who scoured and cleaned, just as Koosje and Dortje had done in the
old professor's day. You might, indeed, have heard the selfsame names
resounding through the echoing rooms: "Koos-je! Dort-je!"

But the Koosje and Dortje were not the same. What had become of Dortje I
cannot say; but on the left-hand side of the busy, bustling, picturesque
Oude Gracht there was a handsome shop filled with all manner of cakes,
sweeties, confections, and liquors--from absinthe to Benedictine,
or arrack to chartreuse. In that shop was a handsome, prosperous,
middle-aged woman, well dressed and well mannered, no longer Professor
van Dijck's Koosje, but the Jevrouw van Kampen.

Yes; Koosje had come to be a prosperous tradeswoman of good position,
respected by all. But she was Koosje van Kampen still; the romance which
had come to so disastrous and abrupt an end had sufficed for her life.
Many an offer had been made to her, it is true; but she had always
declared that she had had enough of lovers--she had found out their real
value.

I must tell you that at the time of Jan's infidelity, after the first
flush of rage was over, Koosje disdained to show any sign of grief or
regret. She was very proud, this Netherland servant-maid, far too proud
to let those by whom she was surrounded imagine she was wearing the
willow for the faithless Jan; and when Dortje, on the day of the
wedding, remarked that for her part she had always considered Koosje
remarkably cool on the subject of matrimony, Koosje with a careless
out-turning of her hands, palms uppermost, answered that she was right.

Very soon after their marriage Jan and his young wife left Utrecht for
Arnheim, where Jan had promise of higher wages; and thus they passed, as
Koosje thought, completely out of her life.

"I don't wish to hear anything more about them, if--you--please," she
said, severely and emphatically, to Dortje.

But not so. In time the professor died, leaving Koosje the large legacy
with which she set up the handsome shop in the Oude Gracht; and several
years passed on.

It happened one day that Koosje was sitting in her shop sewing. In the
large inner room a party of ladies and officers were eating cakes and
drinking chocolates and liquors with a good deal of fun and laughter,
when the door opened timidly, thereby letting in a gust of bitter wind,
and a woman crept fearfully in, followed by two small, crying children.

Could the lady give her something to eat? she asked; they had had
nothing during the day, and the little ones were almost famished.

Koosje, who was very charitable, lifted a tray of large, plain buns, and
was about to give her some, when her eyes fell upon the poor beggar's
faded face, and she exclaimed:

"Truide!"

Truide, for it was she, looked up in startled surprise.

"I did not know, or I would not have come in, Koosje," she said, humbly;
"for I treated you very badly."

"Ve-ry bad-ly," returned Koosje, emphatically. "Then where is Jan?"

"Dead!" murmured Truide, sadly.

"Dead! so--ah, well! I suppose I must do something for you. Here Yanke!"
opening the door and calling, "Yanke!"

"_Je, jevrouw_," a voice cried, in reply.

The next moment a maid came running into the shop.

"Take these people into the kitchen and give them something to eat.
Put them by the stove while you prepare it. There is some soup and that
smoked ham we had for _koffy_. Then come here and take my place for a
while."

"_Je, jevrouw_," said Yanke, disappearing again, followed by Truide and
her children.

Then Koosje sat down again, and began to think.

"I said," she mused, presently, "_that_ night that the next time I
fell over a bundle I'd leave it where I found it. Ah, well! I'm not
a barbarian; I couldn't do that. I never thought, though, it would be
Truide."

"_Hi, jevrouw_," was called from the inner room.

"_Je, mynheer_," jumping up and going to her customers.

She attended to their wants, and presently bowed them out.

"I never thought it would be Truide," she repeated to herself, as
she closed the door behind the last of the gay uniforms and jingling
scabbards. "And Jan is dead--ah, well!"

Then she went into the kitchen, where the miserable children--girls both
of them, and pretty had they been clean and less forlornly clad--were
playing about the stove.

"So Jan is dead," began Koosje, seating herself.

"Yes, Jan is dead," Truide answered.

"And he left you nothing?" Koosje asked.

"We had had nothing for a long time," Truide replied, in her sad,
crushed voice. "We didn't get on very well; he soon got tired of me."

"That was a weakness of his," remarked Koosje, drily.

"We lost five little ones, one after another," Truide continued. "And
Jan was fond of them, and somehow it seemed to sour him. As for me, I
was sorry enough at the time, Heaven knows, but it was as well. But Jan
said it seemed as if a curse had fallen upon us; he began to wish you
back again, and to blame me for having come between you. And then he
took to _genever_, and then to wish for something stronger; so at last
every stiver went for absinthe, and once or twice he beat me, and then
he died."

"Just as well," muttered Koosje, under her breath.

"It is very good of you to have fed and warmed us," Truide went on, in
her faint, complaining tones. "Many a one would have let me starve, and
I should have deserved it. It is very good of you and we are grateful;
but 'tis time we were going, Koosje and Mina;" then added, with a shake
of her head, "but I don't know where."

"Oh, you'd better stay," said Koosje, hurriedly. "I live in this big
house by myself, and I dare say you'll be more useful in the shop than
Yanke--if your tongue is as glib as it used to be, that is. You know
some English, too, don't you?"

"A little," Truide answered, eagerly.

"And after all," Koosje said, philosophically, shrugging her shoulders,
"you saved me from the beatings and the starvings and the rest. I owe
you something for that. Why, if it hadn't been for you I should have
been silly enough to have married him."

And then she went back to her shop, saying to herself:

"The professor said it was a blessing in disguise; God sends all our
trials to work some great purpose. Yes; that was what he said, and he
knew most things. Just think if I were trailing about now with those
two little ones, with nothing to look back to but a schnapps-drinking
husband who beat me! Ah, well, well! things are best as they are. I
don't know that I ought not to be very much obliged to her--and she'll
be very useful in the shop."




A DOG OF FLANDERS, by Ouida


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 whitewashed 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 northeast, 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,
while he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease,
smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or cafe 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 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 aside into
the grass, and, groaning and muttering in savage wrath, pushed the cart
lazily along the road uphill, and left the dying dog for the ants to
sting and for the crows to pick.

It was the last day before kermess 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 he 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 waggons 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 amid 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 child's voice and the soothing
caress of the old man's hand.

In his sickness they two had grown to care for him, this lonely 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 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 while 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 neighbours 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 kermess 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 burg 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 amid 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 waterside 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-coloured 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 a share
of the milk they carried for their own food; and 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 amid 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, while 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, tumble-down, 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 or 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 neighbours,"
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 neighbours 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 altarpieces for which the stranger folk traveled 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 broad-sown
throughout the country majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded
house-fronts and sculptured lintels--histories in blazonry and poems in
stone.

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 kermess 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 no wise
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 amid the hay,
with the great tawny head of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of
poppies and blue corn-flowers 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 while 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 coloured 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 colour 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
fields.