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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Stories by English Authors in Germany
+#6 in our series of authors collected by Scribners
+
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+STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS: GERMANY, ETC.
+
+By Various Authors, Selected by Scribners
+
+February, 2000  [Etext #2071]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Stories by English Authors in Germany
+*******This file should be named sbeag10.txt or sbeag10.zip******
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+
+
+
+
+STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS: GERMANY, ETC.
+By Various Authors, Selected by Scribners
+
+
+
+
+
+STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS
+
+GERMANY, ETC.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+THE BIRD ON ITS JOURNEY, Beatrice Harraden
+KOOSJE: A STUDY OF DUTCH LIFE, John Strange Winter
+A DOG OF FLANDERS, Ouida
+MARKHEIM, R. L. Stevenson
+QUEEN TITA'S WAGER, William Black
+
+
+
+
+THE BIRD ON ITS JOURNEY
+
+BY
+
+BEATRICE HARRADEN
+
+
+
+It was about four in the afternoon when a young girl came into the
+salon of the little hotel at C---- in Switzerland, and drew her chair
+up to the fire.
+
+"You are soaked through," said an elderly lady, who was herself trying
+to get roasted. "You ought to lose no time in changing your clothes."
+
+"I have not anything to change," said the young girl, laughing. "Oh, I
+shall soon be dry!"
+
+"Have you lost all your luggage?" asked the lady, sympathetically.
+
+"No," said the young girl; "I had none to lose." And she smiled a
+little mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her
+companion's sympathy would at once degenerate into suspicion!
+
+"I don't mean to say that I have not a knapsack," she added,
+considerately. "I have walked a long distance--in fact, from Z----."
+
+"And where did you leave your companions?" asked the lady, with a
+touch of forgiveness in her voice.
+
+"I am without companions, just as I am without luggage," laughed the
+girl.
+
+And then she opened the piano, and struck a few notes. There was
+something caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever
+she was, she knew how to make sweet music; sad music, too, full of
+that undefinable longing, like the holding out of one's arms to one's
+friends in the hopeless distance.
+
+The lady bending over the fire looked up at the little girl, and
+forgot that she had brought neither friends nor luggage with her. She
+hesitated for one moment, and then she took the childish face between
+her hands and kissed it.
+
+"Thank you, dear, for your music," she said, gently.
+
+"The piano is terribly out of tune," said the little girl, suddenly;
+and she ran out of the room, and came back carrying her knapsack.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked her companion.
+
+"I am going to tune the piano," the little girl said; and she took a
+tuning-hammer out of her knapsack, and began her work in real earnest.
+She evidently knew what she was about, and pegged away at the notes as
+though her whole life depended upon the result.
+
+The lady by the fire was lost in amazement. Who could she be? Without
+luggage and without friends, and with a tuning-hammer!
+
+Meanwhile one of the gentlemen had strolled into the salon; but
+hearing the sound of tuning, and being in secret possession of nerves,
+he fled, saying, "The tuner, by Jove!"
+
+A few minutes afterward Miss Blake, whose nerves were no secret
+possession, hastened into the salon, and, in her usual imperious
+fashion, demanded instant silence.
+
+"I have just done," said the little girl. "The piano was so terribly
+out of tune, I could not resist the temptation."
+
+Miss Blake, who never listened to what any one said, took it for
+granted that the little girl was the tuner for whom M. le Proprietaire
+had promised to send; and having bestowed on her a condescending nod,
+passed out into the garden, where she told some of the visitors that
+the piano had been tuned at last, and that the tuner was a young woman
+of rather eccentric appearance.
+
+"Really, it is quite abominable how women thrust themselves into every
+profession," she remarked, in her masculine voice. "It is so
+unfeminine, so unseemly."
+
+There was nothing of the feminine about Miss Blake; her horse-cloth
+dress, her waistcoat and high collar, and her billycock hat were of
+the masculine genus; even her nerves could not be called feminine,
+since we learn from two or three doctors (taken off their guard) that
+nerves are neither feminine nor masculine, but common.
+
+"I should like to see this tuner," said one of the tennis-players,
+leaning against a tree.
+
+"Here she comes," said Miss Blake, as the little girl was seen
+sauntering into the garden.
+
+The men put up their eye-glasses, and saw a little lady with a
+childish face and soft brown hair, of strictly feminine appearance and
+bearing. The goat came toward her and began nibbling at her frock. She
+seemed to understand the manner of goats, and played with him to his
+heart's content. One of the tennis players, Oswald Everard by name,
+strolled down to the bank where she was having her frolic.
+
+"Good-afternoon," he said, raising his cap. "I hope the goat is not
+worrying you. Poor little fellow! this is his last day of play. He is
+to be killed to-morrow for /table d'hote/."
+
+"What a shame!" she said. "Fancy to be killed, and then grumbled at!"
+
+"That is precisely what we do here," he said, laughing. "We grumble at
+everything we eat. And I own to being one of the grumpiest; though the
+lady in the horse-cloth dress yonder follows close upon my heels."
+
+"She was the lady who was annoyed at me because I tuned the piano,"
+the little girl said. "Still, it had to be done. It was plainly my
+duty. I seemed to have come for that purpose."
+
+"It has been confoundedly annoying having it out of tune," he said.
+"I've had to give up singing altogether. But what a strange profession
+you have chosen! Very unusual, isn't it?"
+
+"Why, surely not," she answered, amused. "It seems to me that every
+other woman has taken to it. The wonder to me is that any one ever
+scores a success. Nowadays, however, no one could amass a huge fortune
+out of it."
+
+"No one, indeed!" replied Oswald Everard, laughing. "What on earth
+made you take to it?"
+
+"It took to me," she said simply. "It wrapped me round with
+enthusiasm. I could think of nothing else. I vowed that I would rise
+to the top of my profession. I worked day and night. But it means
+incessant toil for years if one wants to make any headway."
+
+"Good gracious! I thought it was merely a matter of a few months," he
+said, smiling at the little girl.
+
+"A few months!" she repeated, scornfully. "You are speaking the
+language of an amateur. No; one has to work faithfully year after
+year; to grasp the possibilities, and pass on to greater
+possibilities. You imagine what it must feel like to touch the notes,
+and know that you are keeping the listeners spellbound; that you are
+taking them into a fairy-land of sound, where petty personality is
+lost in vague longing and regret."
+
+"I confess I had not thought of it in that way," he said, humbly. "I
+have only regarded it as a necessary every-day evil; and to be quite
+honest with you, I fail to see now how it can inspire enthusiasm. I
+wish I could see," he added, looking up at the engaging little figure
+before him.
+
+"Never mind," she said, laughing at his distress; "I forgive you. And,
+after all, you are not the only person who looks upon it as a
+necessary evil. My poor old guardian abominated it. He made many
+sacrifices to come and listen to me. He knew I liked to see his kind
+old face, and that the presence of a real friend inspired me with
+confidence."
+
+"I should not have thought it was nervous work," he said.
+
+"Try it and see," she answered. "But surely you spoke of singing. Are
+you not nervous when you sing?"
+
+"Sometimes," he replied, rather stiffly. "But that is slightly
+different." (He was very proud of his singing, and made a great fuss
+about it.) "Your profession, as I remarked before, is an unavoidable
+nuisance. When I think what I have suffered from the gentlemen of your
+profession, I only wonder that I have any brains left. But I am
+uncourteous."
+
+"No, no," she said; "let me hear about your sufferings."
+
+"Whenever I have specially wanted to be quiet," he said--and then he
+glanced at her childish little face, and he hesitated. "It seems so
+rude of me," he added. He was the soul of courtesy, although he was an
+amateur tenor singer.
+
+"Please tell me," the little girl said, in her winning way.
+
+"Well," he said, gathering himself together, "it is the one subject on
+which I can be eloquent. Ever since I can remember, I have been
+worried and tortured by those rascals. I have tried in every way to
+escape from them, but there is no hope for me. Yes; I believe that all
+the tuners in the universe are in league against me, and have marked
+me out for their special prey."
+
+"/All the what/?" asked the little girl, with a jerk in her voice.
+
+"All the tuners, of course," he replied, rather snappishly. "I know
+that we cannot do without them; but good heavens! they have no tact,
+no consideration, no mercy. Whenever I've wanted to write or read
+quietly, that fatal knock has come at the door, and I've known by
+instinct that all chance of peace was over. Whenever I've been giving
+a luncheon party, the tuner has arrived, with his abominable black
+bag, and his abominable card which has to be signed at once. On one
+occasion I was just proposing to a girl in her father's library when
+the tuner struck up in the drawing-room. I left off suddenly, and fled
+from the house. But there is no escape from these fiends; I believe
+they are swarming about in the air like so many bacteria. And how, in
+the name of goodness, you should deliberately choose to be one of
+them, and should be so enthusiastic over your work, puzzles me beyond
+all words. Don't say that you carry a black bag, and present cards
+which have to be filled up at the most inconvenient time; don't--"
+
+He stopped suddenly, for the little girl was convulsed with laughter.
+She laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks, and then she dried
+her eyes and laughed again.
+
+"Excuse me," she said; "I can't help myself; it's so funny."
+
+"It may be funny to you," he said, laughing in spite of himself; "but
+it is not funny to me."
+
+"Of course it isn't," she replied, making a desperate effort to be
+serious. "Well, tell me something more about these tuners."
+
+"Not another word," he said, gallantly. "I am ashamed of myself as it
+is. Come to the end of the garden, and let me show you the view down
+into the valley."
+
+She had conquered her fit of merriment, but her face wore a settled
+look of mischief, and she was evidently the possessor of some secret
+joke. She seemed in capital health and spirits, and had so much to say
+that was bright and interesting that Oswald Everard found himself
+becoming reconciled to the whole race of tuners. He was amazed to
+learn that she had walked all the way from Z----, and quite alone,
+too.
+
+"Oh, I don't think anything of that," she said; "I had a splendid
+time, and I caught four rare butterflies. I would not have missed
+those for anything. As for the going about by myself, that is a second
+nature. Besides, I do not belong to any one. That has its advantages,
+and I suppose its disadvantages; but at present I have only discovered
+the advantages. The disadvantages will discover themselves!"
+
+"I believe you are what the novels call an advanced young woman," he
+said. "Perhaps you give lectures on woman's suffrage, or something of
+that sort?"
+
+"I have very often mounted the platform," she answered. "In fact, I am
+never so happy as when addressing an immense audience. A most
+unfeminine thing to do, isn't it? What would the lady yonder in the
+horse-cloth dress and billycock hat say? Don't you think you ought to
+go and help her drive away the goat? She looks so frightened. She
+interests me deeply. I wonder whether she has written an essay on the
+feminine in woman. I should like to read it; it would do me so much
+good."
+
+"You are at least a true woman," he said, laughing, "for I see you can
+be spiteful. The tuning has not driven that away."
+
+"Ah, I had forgotten about the tuning," she answered, brightly; "but
+now you remind me, I have been seized with a great idea."
+
+"Won't you tell it to me?" he asked.
+
+"No," she answered; "I keep my great ideas for myself, and work them
+out in secret. And this one is particularly amusing. What fun I shall
+have!"
+
+"But why keep the fun to yourself?" he said. "We all want to be amused
+here; we all want to be stirred up; a little fun would be a charity."
+
+"Very well, since you wish it, you shall be stirred up," she answered;
+"but you must give me time to work out my great idea. I do not hurry
+about things, not even about my professional duties; for I have a
+strong feeling that it is vulgar to be always amassing riches! As I
+have neither a husband nor a brother to support, I have chosen less
+wealth, and more leisure to enjoy all the loveliness of life! So you
+see I take my time about everything. And to-morrow I shall catch
+butterflies at my leisure, and lie among the dear old pines, and work
+at my great idea."
+
+"I shall catch butterflies," said her companion; "and I too shall lie
+among the dear old pines."
+
+"Just as you please," she said; and at that moment the /table d'hote/
+bell rang.
+
+The little girl hastened to the bureau, and spoke rapidly in German to
+the cashier.
+
+"/Ach, Fraulein/!" he said. "You are not really serious?"
+
+"Yes, I am," she said. "I don't want them to know my name. It will
+only worry me. Say I am the young lady who tuned the piano."
+
+She had scarcely given these directions and mounted to her room when
+Oswald Everard, who was much interested in his mysterious companion,
+came to the bureau, and asked for the name of the little lady.
+
+"/Es ist das Fraulein welches das Piano gestimmt hat/," answered the
+man, returning with unusual quickness to his account-book.
+
+No one spoke to the little girl at /table d'hote/, but for all that
+she enjoyed her dinner, and gave her serious attention to all the
+courses. Being thus solidly occupied, she had not much leisure to
+bestow on the conversation of the other guests. Nor was it specially
+original; it treated of the short-comings of the chef, the
+tastelessness of the soup, the toughness of the beef, and all the many
+failings which go to complete a mountain hotel dinner. But suddenly,
+so it seemed to the little girl, this time-honoured talk passed into
+another phase; she heard the word "music" mentioned, and she became at
+once interested to learn what these people had to say on a subject
+which was dearer to her than any other.
+
+"For my own part," said a stern-looking old man, "I have no words to
+describe what a gracious comfort music has been to me all my life. It
+is the noblest language which man may understand and speak. And I
+sometimes think that those who know it, or know something of it, are
+able at rare moments to find an answer to life's perplexing problems."
+
+The little girl looked up from her plate. Robert Browning's words rose
+to her lips, but she did not give them utterance:
+
+  God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
+  The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.
+
+"I have lived through a long life," said another elderly man, "and
+have therefore had my share of trouble; but the grief of being obliged
+to give up music was the grief which held me longest, or which perhaps
+has never left me. I still crave for the gracious pleasure of touching
+once more the strings of the violoncello, and hearing the dear, tender
+voice singing and throbbing, and answering even to such poor skill as
+mine. I still yearn to take my part in concerted music, and be one of
+those privileged to play Beethoven's string-quartettes. But that will
+have to be in another incarnation, I think."
+
+He glanced at his shrunken arm, and then, as though ashamed of this
+allusion to his own personal infirmity, he added hastily:
+
+"But when the first pang of such a pain is over, there remains the
+comfort of being a listener. At first one does not think it is a
+comfort; but as time goes on there is no resisting its magic
+influence. And Lowell said rightly that 'one of God's great charities
+is music.' "
+
+"I did not know you were musical, Mr. Keith," said an English lady.
+"You have never before spoken of music."
+
+"Perhaps not, madam," he answered. "One does not often speak of what
+one cares for most of all. But when I am in London I rarely miss
+hearing our best players."
+
+At this point others joined in, and the various merits of eminent
+pianists were warmly discussed.
+
+"What a wonderful name that little English lady has made for herself!"
+said the major, who was considered an authority on all subjects. I
+would go anywhere to hear Miss Thyra Flowerdew. We all ought to be
+very proud of her. She has taken even the German musical world by
+storm, and they say her recitals at Paris have been brilliantly
+successful. I myself have heard her at New York, Leipsic, London,
+Berlin, and even Chicago."
+
+The little girl stirred uneasily in her chair.
+
+"I don't think Miss Flowerdew has ever been to Chicago," she said.
+
+There was a dead silence. The admirer of Miss Thyra Flowerdew looked
+much annoyed, and twiddled his watch-chain. He had meant to say
+"Philadelphia," but he did not think it necessary to own to his
+mistake.
+
+"What impertinence!" said one of the ladies to Miss Blake. "What can
+she know about it? Is she not the young person who tuned the piano?"
+
+"Perhaps she tunes Miss Thyra Flowerdew's piano!" suggested Miss
+Blake, in a loud whisper.
+
+"You are right, madam," said the little girl, quietly. "I have often
+tuned Miss Flowerdew's piano."
+
+There was another embarrassing silence; and then a lovely old lady,
+whom every one reverenced, came to the rescue.
+
+"I think her playing is simply superb," she said. "Nothing that I ever
+hear satisfies me so entirely. She has all the tenderness of an
+angel's touch."
+
+"Listening to her," said the major, who had now recovered from his
+annoyance at being interrupted, "one becomes unconscious of her
+presence, for she /is the music itself/. And that is rare. It is but
+seldom nowadays that we are allowed to forget the personality of the
+player. And yet her personality is an unusual one; having once seen
+her, it would not be easy to forget her. I should recognise her
+anywhere."
+
+As he spoke, he glanced at the little tuner, and could not help
+admiring her dignified composure under circumstances which might have
+been distressing to any one; and when she rose with the others he
+followed her, and said stiffly:
+
+"I regret that I was the indirect cause of putting you in an awkward
+position."
+
+"It is really of no consequence," she said, brightly. "If you think I
+was impertinent, I ask your forgiveness. I did not mean to be
+officious. The words were spoken before I was aware of them."
+
+She passed into the salon, where she found a quiet corner for herself,
+and read some of the newspapers. No one took the slightest notice of
+her; not a word was spoken to her; but when she relieved the company
+of her presence her impertinence was commented on.
+
+"I am sorry that she heard what I said," remarked Miss Blake; "but she
+did not seem to mind. These young women who go out into the world lose
+the edge of their sensitiveness and femininity. I have always observed
+that."
+
+"How much they are spared then!" answered some one.
+
+Meanwhile the little girl slept soundly. She had merry dreams, and
+finally woke up laughing. She hurried over her breakfast, and then
+stood ready to go for a butterfly hunt. She looked thoroughly happy,
+and evidently had found, and was holding tightly, the key to life's
+enjoyment.
+
+Oswald Everard was waiting on the balcony, and he reminded her that he
+intended to go with her.
+
+"Come along then," she answered; "we must not lose a moment."
+
+They caught butterflies; they picked flowers; they ran; they lingered
+by the wayside; they sang; they climbed, and he marvelled at her easy
+speed. Nothing seemed to tire her, and everything seemed to delight
+her--the flowers, the birds, the clouds, the grasses, and the
+fragrance of the pine woods.
+
+"Is it not good to live?" she cried. "Is it not splendid to take in
+the scented air? Draw in as many long breaths as you can. Isn't it
+good? Don't you feel now as though you were ready to move mountains? I
+do. What a dear old nurse Nature is! How she pets us, and gives us the
+best of her treasures!"
+
+Her happiness invaded Oswald Everard's soul, and he felt like a
+school-boy once more, rejoicing in a fine day and his liberty, with
+nothing to spoil the freshness of the air, and nothing to threaten the
+freedom of the moment.
+
+"Is it not good to live?" he cried. "Yes, indeed it is, if we know how
+to enjoy."
+
+They had come upon some haymakers, and the little girl hastened up to
+help them, laughing and talking to the women, and helping them to pile
+up the hay on the shoulders of a broad-backed man, who then conveyed
+his burden to a pear-shaped stack. Oswald Everard watched his
+companion for a moment, and then, quite forgetting his dignity as an
+amateur tenor singer, he too lent his aid, and did not leave off until
+his companion sank exhausted on the ground.
+
+"Oh," she laughed, "what delightful work for a very short time! Come
+along; let us go into that brown chatlet yonder and ask for some milk.
+I am simply parched with thirst. Thank you, but I prefer to carry my
+own flowers."
+
+"What an independent little lady you are!" he said.
+
+"It is quite necessary in our profession, I can assure you," she said,
+with a tone of mischief in her voice. "That reminds me that my
+profession is evidently not looked upon with any favour by the
+visitors at the hotel. I am heartbroken to think that I have not won
+the esteem of that lady in the billycock hat. What will she say to you
+for coming out with me? And what will she say of me for allowing you
+to come? I wonder whether she will say, 'How unfeminine!' I wish I
+could hear her!"
+
+"I don't suppose you care," he said. "You seem to be a wild little
+bird."
+
+"I don't care what a person of that description says," replied his
+companion.
+
+"What on earth made you contradict the major at dinner last night?" he
+asked. "I was not at the table, but some one told me of the incident;
+and I felt very sorry about it. What could you know of Miss Thyra
+Flowerdew?"
+
+"Well, considering that she is in my profession, of course I know
+something about her," said the little girl.
+
+"Confound it all!" he said, rather rudely. "Surely there is some
+difference between the bellows-blower and the organist."
+
+"Absolutely none," she answered; "merely a variation of the original
+theme!"
+
+As she spoke she knocked at the door of the chalet, and asked the old
+dame to give them some milk. They sat in the /Stube/, and the little
+girl looked about, and admired the spinning-wheel and the quaint
+chairs and the queer old jugs and the pictures on the walls.
+
+"Ah, but you shall see the other room," the old peasant woman said;
+and she led them into a small apartment which was evidently intended
+for a study. It bore evidences of unusual taste and care, and one
+could see that some loving hand had been trying to make it a real
+sanctum of refinement. There was even a small piano. A carved book-
+rack was fastened to the wall.
+
+The old dame did not speak at first; she gave her guests time to
+recover from the astonishment which she felt they must be
+experiencing; then she pointed proudly to the piano.
+
+"I bought that for my daughters," she said, with a strange mixture of
+sadness and triumph. "I wanted to keep them at home with me, and I
+saved and saved, and got enough money to buy the piano. They had
+always wanted to have one, and I thought they would then stay with me.
+They liked music and books, and I knew they would be glad to have a
+room of their own where they might read and play and study; and so I
+gave them this corner."
+
+"Well, mother," asked the little girl, "and where are they this
+afternoon?"
+
+"Ah," she answered sadly, "they did not care to stay; but it was
+natural enough, and I was foolish to grieve. Besides, they come to see
+me."
+
+"And then they play to you?" asked the little girl, gently.
+
+"They say the piano is out of tune," the old dame said. "I don't know.
+Perhaps you can tell."
+
+The little girl sat down to the piano, and struck a few chords.
+
+"Yes," she said; "it is badly out of tune. Give me the tuning-hammer.
+I am sorry," she added, smiling at Oswald Everard, "but I cannot
+neglect my duty. Don't wait for me."
+
+"I will wait for you," he said, sullenly; and he went into the balcony
+and smoked his pipe, and tried to possess his soul in patience.
+
+When she had faithfully done her work she played a few simple
+melodies, such as she knew the old woman would love and understand;
+and she turned away when she saw that the listener's eyes were moist.
+
+"Play once again," the old woman whispered. "I am dreaming of
+beautiful things."
+
+So the little tuner touched the keys again with all the tenderness of
+an angel.
+
+"Tell your daughters," she said, as she rose to say good-bye, "that
+the piano is now in good tune. Then they will play to you the next
+time they come."
+
+"I shall always remember you, mademoiselle," the old woman said; and,
+almost unconsciously, she took the childish face and kissed it.
+
+Oswald Everard was waiting in the hay-field for his companion; and
+when she apologised to him for this little professional intermezzo, as
+she called it, he recovered from his sulkiness and readjusted his
+nerves, which the noise of the tuning had somewhat disturbed.
+
+"It was very good of you to tune the old dame's piano," he said,
+looking at her with renewed interest.
+
+"Some one had to do it, of course," she answered, brightly, "and I am
+glad the chance fell to me. What a comfort it is to think that the
+next time those daughters come to see her they will play to her and
+make her very happy! Poor old dear!"
+
+"You puzzle me greatly," he said. "I cannot for the life of me think
+what made you choose your calling. You must have many gifts; any one
+who talks with you must see that at once. And you play quite nicely,
+too."
+
+"I am sorry that my profession sticks in your throat," she answered.
+"Do be thankful that I am nothing worse than a tuner. For I might be
+something worse--a snob, for instance."
+
+And, so speaking, she dashed after a butterfly, and left him to
+recover from her words. He was conscious of having deserved a reproof;
+and when at last he overtook her he said as much, and asked for her
+kind indulgence.
+
+"I forgive you," she said, laughing. "You and I are not looking at
+things from the same point of view; but we have had a splendid morning
+together, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. And to-morrow I go on
+my way."
+
+"And to-morrow you go," he repeated. "Can it not be the day after
+to-morrow?"
+
+"I am a bird of passage," she said, shaking her head. "You must not
+seek to detain me. I have taken my rest, and off I go to other
+climes."
+
+
+
+They had arrived at the hotel, and Oswald Everard saw no more of his
+companion until the evening, when she came down rather late for /table
+d'hote/. She hurried over her dinner and went into the salon. She
+closed the door, and sat down to the piano, and lingered there without
+touching the keys; once or twice she raised her hands, and then she
+let them rest on the notes, and, half unconsciously, they began to
+move and make sweet music; and then they drifted into Schumann's
+"Abendlied," and then the little girl played some of his
+"Kinderscenen," and some of his "Fantasie Stucke," and some of his
+songs.
+
+Her touch and feeling were exquisite, and her phrasing betrayed the
+true musician. The strains of music reached the dining-room, and, one
+by one, the guests came creeping in, moved by the music and anxious to
+see the musician.
+
+The little girl did not look up; she was in a Schumann mood that
+evening, and only the players of Schumann know what enthralling
+possession he takes of their very spirit. All the passion and pathos
+and wildness and longing had found an inspired interpreter; and those
+who listened to her were held by the magic which was her own secret,
+and which had won for her such honour as comes only to the few. She
+understood Schumann's music, and was at her best with him.
+
+Had she, perhaps, chosen to play his music this evening because she
+wished to be at her best? Or was she merely being impelled by an
+overwhelming force within her? Perhaps it was something of both.
+
+Was she wishing to humiliate these people who had received her so
+coldly? This little girl was only human; perhaps there was something
+of that feeling too. Who can tell? But she played as she had never
+played in London, or Paris, or Berlin, or New York, or Philadelphia.
+
+At last she arrived at the "Carnaval," and those who heard her
+declared afterward that they had never listened to a more magnificent
+rendering. The tenderness was so restrained; the vigour was so
+refined. When the last notes of that spirited "Marche des
+Davidsbundler contre les Philistins" had died away, she glanced at
+Oswald Everard, who was standing near her almost dazed.
+
+"And now my favourite piece of all," she said; and she at once began
+the "Second Novelette," the finest of the eight, but seldom played in
+public.
+
+What can one say of the wild rush of the leading theme, and the
+pathetic longing of the intermezzo?
+
+     . . . The murmuring dying notes,
+     That fall as soft as snow on the sea;
+
+and
+
+     The passionate strain that, deeply going,
+     Refines the bosom it trembles through.
+
+What can one say of those vague aspirations and finest thoughts which
+possess the very dullest among us when such music as that which the
+little girl had chosen catches us and keeps us, if only for a passing
+moment, but that moment of the rarest worth and loveliness in our
+unlovely lives?
+
+What can one say of the highest music except that, like death, it is
+the great leveller: it gathers us all to its tender keeping--and we
+rest.
+
+The little girl ceased playing. There was not a sound to be heard; the
+magic was still holding her listeners. When at last they had freed
+themselves with a sigh, they pressed forward to greet her.
+
+"There is only one person who can play like that," cried the major,
+with sudden inspiration--"she is Miss Thyra Flowerdew."
+
+The little girl smiled.
+
+"That is my name," she said, simply; and she slipped out of the room.
+
+The next morning, at an early hour, the bird of passage took her
+flight onward, but she was not destined to go off unobserved. Oswald
+Everard saw the little figure swinging along the road, and she
+overtook her.
+
+"You little wild bird!" he said. "And so this was your great idea--to
+have your fun out of us all, and then play to us and make us feel I
+don't know how, and then to go."
+
+"You said the company wanted stirring up," she answered, "and I rather
+fancy I have stirred them up."
+
+"And what do you suppose you have done for me?" he asked.
+
+"I hope I have proved to you that the bellows-blower and the organist
+are sometimes identical," she answered.
+
+But he shook his head.
+
+"Little wild bird," he said, "you have given me a great idea, and I
+will tell you what it is: /to tame you/. So good-bye for the present."
+
+"Good-bye," she said. "But wild birds are not so easily tamed."
+
+Then she waved her hand over her head, and went on her way singing.
+
+
+
+
+KOOSJE: A STUDY OF DUTCH LIFE
+
+by JOHN STRANGE WINTER
+
+
+
+Her name was Koosje van Kampen, and she lived in Utrecht, that most
+quaint of quaint cities, the Venice of the North.
+
+All her life had been passed under the shadow of the grand old Dom
+Kerk; she had played bo-peep behind the columns and arcades of the
+ruined, moss-grown cloisters; had slipped up and fallen down the steps
+leading to the /grachts/; had once or twice, in this very early life,
+been fished out of those same slimy, stagnant waters; had wandered
+under the great lindens in the Baan, and gazed curiously up at the
+stork's nest in the tree by the Veterinary School; had pattered about
+the hollow-sounding streets in her noisy wooden /klompen/; had danced
+and laughed, had quarrelled and wept, and fought and made friends
+again, to the tune of the silver chimes high up in the Dom--chimes
+that were sometimes old /Nederlandsche/ hymns, sometimes Mendelssohn's
+melodies and tender "Lieder ohne Worte."
+
+But that was ever so long ago, and now she had left her romping
+childhood behind her, and had become a maid-servant--a very dignified
+and aristocratic maid-servant indeed--with no less a sum than eight
+pounds ten a year in wages.
+
+She lived in the house of a professor, who dwelt on the Munster
+Kerkhoff, one of the most aristocratic parts of that wonderfully
+aristocratic city; and once or twice every week you might have seen
+her, if you had been there to see, busily engaged in washing the red
+tile and blue slate pathway in front of the professor's house. You
+would have seen that she was very pleasant to look at, this Koosje,
+very comely and clean, whether she happened to be very busy, or
+whether it had been Sunday, and, with her very best gown on, she was
+out for a promenade in the Baan, after duly going to service as
+regularly as the Sabbath dawned in the grand old Gothic choir of the
+cathedral.
+
+During the week she wore always the same costume as does every other
+servant in the country: a skirt of black stuff, short enough to show a
+pair of very neat-set and well-turned ankles, clad in cloth shoes and
+knitted stockings that showed no wrinkles; over the skirt a bodice and
+a kirtle of lilac, made with a neatly gathered frilling about her
+round brown throat; above the frilling five or six rows of unpolished
+garnet beads fastened by a massive clasp of gold filigree, and on her
+head a spotless white cap tied with a neat bow under her chin--as
+neat, let me tell you, as an Englishman's tie at a party.
+
+But it was on Sunday that Koosje shone forth in all the glory of a
+black gown and her jewellery--with great ear-rings to match the clasp
+of her necklace, and a heavy chain and cross to match that again, and
+one or two rings; while on her head she wore an immense cap, much too
+big to put a bonnet over, though for walking she was most particular
+to have gloves.
+
+Then, indeed, she was a young person to be treated with respect, and
+with respect she was undoubtedly treated. As she passed along the
+quaint, resounding streets, many a head was turned to look after her;
+but Koosje went on her way like the staid maiden she was, duly
+impressed with the fact that she was principal servant of Professor
+van Dijck, the most celebrated authority on the study of osteology in
+Europe. So Koosje never heeded the looks, turned her head neither to
+the right nor to the left, but went sedately on her business or
+pleasure, whichever it happened to be.
+
+It was not likely that such a treasure could remain long unnoticed and
+unsought after. Servants in the Netherlands, I hear, are not so good
+but that they might be better; and most people knew what a treasure
+Professor van Dijck had in his Koosje. However, as the professor
+conscientiously raised her wages from time to time, Koosje never
+thought of leaving him.
+
+But there is one bribe no woman can resist--the bribe that is offered
+by love. As Professor van Dijck had expected and feared, that bribe
+ere long was held out to Koosje, and Koosje was too weak to resist it.
+Not that he wished her to do so. If the girl had a chance of settling
+well and happily for life, he would be the last to dream of throwing
+any obstacle in her way. He had come to be an old man himself; he
+lived all alone, save for his servants, in a great, rambling house,
+whose huge apartments were all set out with horrible anatomical
+preparations and grisly skeletons; and, though the stately passages
+were paved with white marble, and led into rooms which would easily
+have accommodated crowds of guests, he went into no society save that
+of savants as old and fossil-like as himself; in other words, he was
+an old bachelor who lived entirely for his profession and the study of
+the great masters by the interpretation of a genuine old Stradivari.
+Yet the old professor had a memory; he recalled the time when he had
+been young who now was old--the time when his heart was a good deal
+more tender, his blood a great deal warmer, and his fancy very much
+more easily stirred than nowadays. There was a dead-and-gone romance
+which had broken his heart, sentimentally speaking--a romance long
+since crumbled into dust, which had sent him for comfort into the
+study of osteology and the music of the Stradivari; yet the memory
+thereof made him considerably more lenient to Koosje's weakness than
+Koosje herself had ever expected to find him.
+
+Not that she had intended to tell him at first; she was only three and
+twenty, and, though Jan van der Welde was as fine a fellow as could be
+seen in Utrecht, and had good wages and something put by, Koosje was
+by no means inclined to rush headlong into matrimony with undue hurry.
+It was more pleasant to live in the professor's good house, to have
+delightful walks arm in arm with Jan under the trees in the Baan or
+round the Singels, parting under the stars with many a lingering word
+and promise to meet again. It was during one of those very partings
+that the professor suddenly became aware, as he walked placidly home,
+of the change that had come into Koosje's life.
+
+However, Koosje told him blushingly that she did not wish to leave him
+just at present; so he did not trouble himself about the matter. He
+was a wise man, this old authority on osteology, and quoted
+oftentimes, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
+
+So the courtship sped smoothly on, seeming for once to contradict the
+truth of the old saying, "The course of true love never did run
+smooth." The course of their love did, of a truth, run marvellously
+smooth indeed. Koosje, if a trifle coy, was pleasant and sweet; Jan as
+fine a fellow as ever waited round a corner on a cold winter night. So
+brightly the happy days slipped by, when suddenly a change was
+effected in the professor's household which made, as a matter of
+course, somewhat of a change in Koosje's life. It came about in this
+wise.
+
+Koosje had been on an errand for the professor,--one that had kept her
+out of doors some time,--and it happened that the night was bitterly
+cold; the cold, indeed, was fearful. The air had that damp rawness so
+noticeable in Dutch climate, a thick mist overhung the city, and a
+drizzling rain came down with a steady persistence such as quickly
+soaked through the stoutest and thickest garments. The streets were
+well-nigh empty. The great thoroughfare, the Oude Gracht, was almost
+deserted, and as Koosje hurried along the Meinerbroederstraat--for she
+had a second commission there--she drew her great shawl more tightly
+round her, muttering crossly, "What weather! yesterday so warm, to-day
+so cold. 'Tis enough to give one the fever."
+
+She delivered her message, and ran on through Oude Kerkhoff as fast as
+her feet could carry her, when, just as she turned the corner into the
+Domplein, a fierce gust of wind, accompanied by a blinding shower of
+rain, assailed her; her foot caught against something soft and heavy,
+and she fell.
+
+"Bless us!" she ejaculated, blankly. "What fool has left a bundle out
+on the path on such a night? Pitch dark, with half the lamps out, and
+rain and mist enough to blind one."
+
+She gathered herself up, rubbing elbows and knees vigorously, casting
+the while dark glances at the obnoxious bundle which had caused the
+disaster. Just then the wind was lulled, the lamp close at hand gave
+out a steady light, which shed its rays through the fog upon Koosje
+and the bundle, from which, to the girl's horror and dismay, came a
+faint moan. Quickly she drew nearer, when she perceived that what she
+had believed to be a bundle was indeed a woman, apparently in the last
+stage of exhaustion.
+
+Koosje tried to lift her; but the dead-weight was beyond her, young
+and strong as she was. Then the rain and the wind came on again in
+fiercer gusts than before; the woman's moans grew louder and louder,
+and what to do Koosje knew not.
+
+She struggled on for the few steps that lay between her and the
+professor's house, and then she rang a peal which resounded through
+the echoing passages, bringing Dortje, the other maid, running out;
+after the manner of her class, imagining all sorts of terrible
+catastrophes had happened. She uttered a cry of relief when she
+perceived it was only Koosje, who, without vouchsafing any
+explanation, dashed past her and ran straight into the professor's
+room.
+
+"O professor!" she gasped out; but, between her efforts to remove the
+woman, her struggle with the elements, and her race down the passage,
+her breath was utterly gone.
+
+The professor looked up from his book and his tea-tray in surprise.
+For a moment he thought that Koosje, his domestic treasure, had
+altogether taken leave of her senses; for she was streaming with
+water, covered with mud, and head and cap were in a state of disorder,
+such as neither he nor any one else had ever seen them in since the
+last time she had been fished out of the Nieuwe Gracht.
+
+"What is the matter, Koosje?" he asked, regarding her gravely over his
+spectacles.
+
+"There's a woman outside--dying," she panted, "I fell over her."
+
+"You had better try to get her in then," the old gentleman said, in
+quite a relieved tone. "You and Dortje must bring her in. Dear, dear,
+poor soul! but it is a dreadful night."
+
+The old gentleman shivered as he spoke, and drew a little nearer to
+the tall white porcelain stove.
+
+It was, as he had said a minute before, a terrible night. He could
+hear the wind beating about the house and rattling about the casements
+and moaning down the chimneys; and to think any poor soul should be
+out on such a night, /dying/! Heaven preserve others who might be
+belated or houseless in any part of the world!
+
+He fell into a fit of abstraction,--a habit not uncommon with learned
+men,--wondering why life should be so different with different people;
+why he should be in that warm, handsome room, with its soft rich
+hangings and carpet, with its beautiful furniture of carved wood, its
+pictures, and the rare china scattered here and there among the grim
+array of skeletons which were his delight. He wondered why he should
+take his tea out of costly and valuable Oriental china, sugar and
+cream out of antique silver, while other poor souls had no tea at all,
+and nothing to take it out of even if they had. He wondered why he
+should have a lamp under his teapot that was a very marvel of art
+transparencies; why he should have every luxury, and this poor
+creature should be dying in the street amid the wind and the rain. It
+was all very unequal.
+
+It was very odd, the professor argued, leaning his back against the
+tall, warm stove; it was very odd indeed. He began to feel that, grand
+as the study of osteology undoubtedly is, he ought not to permit it to
+become so engrossing as to blind him to the study of the greater
+philosophies of life. His reverie was, however, broken by the abrupt
+reentrance of Koosje, who this time was a trifle less breathless than
+she had been before.
+
+"We have got her into the kitchen, professor," she announced. "She is
+a child--a mere baby, and so pretty! She has opened her eyes and
+spoken."
+
+"Give her some soup and wine--hot," said the professor, without
+stirring.
+
+"But won't you come?" she asked.
+
+The professor hesitated; he hated attending in cases of illness,
+though he was a properly qualified doctor and in an emergency would
+lay his prejudice aside.
+
+"Or shall I run across for the good Dr. Smit?" Koosje asked. "He would
+come in a minute, only it is /such/ a night!"
+
+At that moment a fiercer gust than before rattled at the casements,
+and the professor laid aside his scruples.
+
+He followed his housekeeper down the chilly, marble-flagged passage
+into the kitchen, where he never went for months together--a cosey
+enough, pleasant place, with a deep valance hanging from the mantel-
+shelf, with many great copper pans, bright and shining as new gold,
+and furniture all scrubbed to the whiteness of snow.
+
+In an arm-chair before the opened stove sat the rescued girl--a
+slight, golden-haired thing, with wistful blue eyes and a frightened
+air. Every moment she caught her breath in a half-hysterical sob,
+while violent shivers shook her from head to foot.
+
+The professor went and looked at her over his spectacles, as if she
+had been some curious specimen of his favourite study; but at the same
+time he kept at a respectful distance from her.
+
+"Give her some soup and wine," he said, at length, putting his hands
+under the tails of his long dressing-gown of flowered cashmere. "Some
+soup and wine--hot; and put her to bed."
+
+"Is she then to remain for the night?" Koosje asked, a little
+surprised.
+
+"Oh, don't send me away!" the golden-haired girl broke out, in a voice
+that was positively a wail, and clasping a pair of pretty, slender
+hands in piteous supplication.
+
+"Where do you come from?" the old gentleman asked, much as if he
+expected she might suddenly jump up and bite him.
+
+"From Beijerland, mynheer," she answered, with a sob.
+
+"So! Koosje, she is remarkably well dressed, is she not?" the
+professor said, glancing at the costly lace head-gear, the heavy gold
+head-piece, which lay on the table together with the great gold spiral
+ornaments and filigree pendants--a dazzling head of richness. He
+looked, too, at the girl's white hands, at the rich, crape-laden gown,
+at their delicate beauty, and shower of waving golden hair, which,
+released from the confinement of the cap and head-piece, floated in a
+rich mass of glittering beauty over the pillows which his servant had
+placed beneath her head.
+
+The professor was old; the professor was wholly given up to his
+profession, which he jokingly called his sweetheart; and, though he
+cut half of his acquaintances in the street through inattention and
+the shortness of his sight, he had eyes in his head, and upon
+occasions could use them. He therefore repeated the question.
+
+"Very well dressed indeed, professor," returned Koosje, promptly.
+
+"And what are you doing in Utrecht--in such a plight as this, too?" he
+asked, still keeping at a safe distance.
+
+"O mynheer, I am all alone in the world," she answered, her blue misty
+eyes filled with tears. "I had a month ago a dear, good, kind father,
+but he has died, and I am indeed desolate. I always believed him rich,
+and to these things," with a gesture that included her dress and the
+ornaments on the table, "I have ever been accustomed. Thus I ordered
+without consideration such clothes as I thought needful. And then I
+found there was nothing for me--not a hundred guilders to call my own
+when all was paid."
+
+"But what brought you to Utrecht?"
+
+"He sent me here, mynheer. In his last illness, only of three days'
+duration, he bade me gather all together and come to this city, where
+I was to ask for a Mevrouw Baake, his cousin."
+
+"Mevrouw Baake, of the Sigaren Fabrijk," said Dortje, in an aside, to
+the others. "I lived servant with her before I came here."
+
+"I had heard very little about her, only my father had sometimes
+mentioned his cousin to me; they had once been betrothed," the
+stranger continued. "But when I reached Utrecht I found she was dead--
+two years dead; but we had never heard of it."
+
+"Dear, dear, dear!" exclaimed the professor, pityingly. "Well, you had
+better let Koosje put you to bed, and we will see what can be done for
+you in the morning."
+
+"Am I to make up a bed?" Koosje asked, following him along the
+passage.
+
+The professor wheeled round and faced her.
+
+"She had better sleep in the guest room," he said, thoughtfully,
+regardless of the cold which struck to his slippered feet from the
+marble floor. "That is the only room which does not contain specimens
+that would probably frighten the poor child. I am very much afraid,
+Koosje," he concluded, doubtfully, "that she is a lady; and what we
+are to do with a lady I can't think."
+
+With that the old gentleman shuffled off to his cosey room, and Koosje
+turned back to her kitchen.
+
+"He'll never think of marrying her," mused Koosje, rather blankly. If
+she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have
+received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of
+osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this
+workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his
+fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a child of sixteen or seventeen.
+
+However, on the morrow matters assumed a somewhat different aspect.
+Gertrude van Floote proved to be not exactly a gentlewoman. It is true
+that her father had been a well-to-do man for his station in life, and
+had very much spoiled and indulged his one motherless child. Yet her
+education was so slight that she could do little more than read and
+write, besides speaking a little English, which she had picked up from
+the yachtsmen frequenting her native town. The professor found she had
+been but a distant relative of the Mevrouw Baake, to seek whom she had
+come to Utrecht, and that she had no kinsfolk upon whom she could
+depend--a fact which accounted for the profusion of her jewellery, all
+her golden trinkets having descended to her as heirlooms.
+
+"I can be your servant, mynheer," she suggested. "Indeed, I am a very
+useful girl, as you will find if you will but try me."
+
+Now, as a rule, the professor vigorously set his face against
+admitting young servants into his house. They broke his china, they
+disarranged his bones, they meddled with his papers, and made general
+havoc. So, in truth, he was not very willing to have Gertrude van
+Floote as a permanent member of his household, and he said so.
+
+But Koosje had taken a fancy to the girl; and having an eye to her own
+departure at no very distant date,--for she had been betrothed more
+than two years,--she pleaded so hard to keep her, promising to train
+her in all the professor's ways, to teach her the value of old china
+and osteologic specimens, that eventually, with a good deal of
+grumbling, the old gentleman gave way, and, being a wise as well as an
+old gentleman, went back to his studies, dismissing Koosje and the
+girl alike from his thoughts.
+
+Just at first Truide, poor child, was charmed.
+
+She put away her splendid ornaments, and some lilac frocks and black
+skirts were purchased for her. Her box, which she had left at the
+station, supplied all that was necessary for Sunday.
+
+It was great fun! For a whole week this young person danced about the
+rambling old house, playing at being a servant. Then she began to grow
+a little weary of it all. She had been accustomed, of course, to
+performing such offices as all Dutch ladies fulfil--the care of china,
+of linen, the dusting of rooms, and the like; but she had done them as
+a mistress, not as an underling. And that was not the worst; it was
+when it came to her pretty feet having to be thrust into klompen, and
+her having to take a pail and syringe and mop and clean the windows
+and the pathway and the front of the house, that the game of maid-
+servant began to assume a very different aspect. When, after having
+been as free as air to come and go as she chose, she was only
+permitted to attend service on Sundays, and to take an hour's
+promenade with Dortje, who was dull and heavy and stupid, she began to
+feel positively desperate; and the result of it all was that when Jan
+van der Welde came, as he was accustomed to do nearly every evening,
+to see Koosje, Miss Truide, from sheer longing for excitement and
+change, began to make eyes at him, with what effect I will endeavour
+to show.
+
+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.
+
+"I could have seen them with that franc," he murmured to Patrasche,
+"but I could not sell her picture--not even for them."
+
+Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his mind. "That
+lad must not be so much with Alois," he said to his wife that night.
+"Trouble may come of it hereafter; he is fifteen now, and she is
+twelve; and the boy is comely of face and form."
+
+"And he is a good lad and a loyal," said the housewife, feasting her
+eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney
+with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.
+
+"Yea, I do not gainsay that," said the miller, draining his pewter
+flagon.
+
+"Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass," said the wife,
+hesitatingly, "would it matter so much? She will have enough for both,
+and one cannot be better than happy."
+
+"You are a woman, and therefore a fool," said the miller, harshly,
+striking his pipe on the table. "The lad is naught but a beggar, and,
+with these painter's fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that
+they are not together in the future, or I will send the child to the
+surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred Heart."
+
+The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not
+that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her
+favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of
+cruelty to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty. But
+there were many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her
+chosen companion; and Nello, being a boy proud and quiet and
+sensitive, was quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps and
+those of Patrasche, as he had been used to do with every moment of
+leisure, to the old red mill upon the slope. What his offence was he
+did not know; he supposed he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by
+taking the portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the child who
+loved him would run to him and nestle her hand in his, he would smile
+at her very sadly and say with a tender concern for her before
+himself, "Nay, Alois, do not anger your father. He thinks that I make
+you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that you should be with me. He
+is a good man and loves you well; we will not anger him, Alois."
+
+But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not
+look so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise
+under the poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche. The old red
+mill had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by it,
+going and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little
+flaxen head rose above the low mill wicket, and her little rosy hands
+had held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche. Now the dog looked
+wistfully at a closed door, and the boy went on without pausing, with
+a pang at his heart, and the child sat within with tears dropping
+slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her little stool by the
+stove; and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his mill-gear,
+would harden his will and say to himself, "It is best so. The lad is
+all but a beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries. Who knows what
+mischief might not come of it in the future?" So he was wise in his
+generation, and would not have the door unbarred, except upon rare and
+formal occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth nor mirth in
+them to the two children, who had been accustomed so long to a daily
+gleeful, careless, happy interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime,
+with no other watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies than
+Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen bells of his collar and
+responding with all a dog's swift sympathies to their every change of
+mood.
+
+All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney
+in the mill kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary; and
+sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that while his gift was
+accepted, he himself should be denied.
+
+But he did not complain; it was his habit to be quiet. Old Jehan Daas
+had said ever to him, "We are poor; we must take what God sends--the
+ill with the good; the poor cannot choose."
+
+To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his
+old grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as
+beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, "Yet the
+poor do choose sometimes--choose to be great, so that men cannot say
+them nay." And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when
+the little Alois, finding him by chance alone among the corn-fields by
+the canal, ran to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because
+the morrow would be her saint's day, and for the first time in all her
+life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper and romp
+in the great barns with which her feast-day was always celebrated,
+Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith, "It shall be
+different one day, Alois. One day that little bit of pine wood that
+your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver; and he
+will not shut the door against me then. Only love me always, dear
+little Alois; only love me always, and I will be great."
+
+"And if I do not love you?" the pretty child asked, pouting a little
+through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.
+
+Nello's eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where, in the
+red and gold of the Flemish night, the cathedral spire rose. There was
+a smile on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was awed
+by it. "I will be great still," he said under his breath--"great
+still, or die, Alois."
+
+"You do not love me," said the little spoiled child, pushing him away;
+but the boy shook his head and smiled, and went on his way through the
+tall yellow corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair future when
+he should come into that old familiar land and ask Alois of her
+people, and be not refused or denied, but received in honour; while
+the village folk should throng to look upon him and say in one
+another's ears, "Dost see him? He is a king among men; for he is a
+great artist and the world speaks his name; and yet he was only our
+poor little Nello, who was a beggar, as one may say, and only got his
+bread by the help of his dog." And he thought how he would fold his
+grandsire in furs and purples, and portray him as the old man is
+portrayed in the Family in the chapel of St. Jacques; and of how he
+would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and place
+him on his right hand, and say to the people, "This was once my only
+friend;" and of how he would build himself a great white marble
+palace, and make to himself luxuriant gardens of pleasure, on the
+slope looking outward to where the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell
+in it himself, but summon to it, as to a home, all men young and poor
+and friendless, but of the will to do mighty things; and of how he
+would say to them always, if they sought to bless his name, "Nay, do
+not thank me--thank Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?" And
+these dreams--beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all
+selfishness, full of heroical worship--were so closely about him as he
+went that he was happy--happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois's
+saint's day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the
+little dark hut and the meal of black bread, while in the mill-house
+all the children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big
+round cakes of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced
+in the great barn to the light of the stars and the music of flute and
+fiddle.
+
+"Never mind, Patrasche," he said, with his arms round the dog's neck,
+as they both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds of the mirth
+at the mill came down to them on the night air; "never mind. It shall
+all be changed by-and-by."
+
+He believed in the future; Patrasche, of more experience and of more
+philosophy, thought that the loss of the mill supper in the present
+was ill compensated by dreams of milk and honey in some vague
+hereafter. And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas Cogez.
+
+"This is Alois's name-day, is it not?" said the old man Daas that
+night, from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking.
+
+The boy gave a gesture of assent; he wished that the old man's memory
+had erred a little, instead of keeping such sure account.
+
+"And why not there?" his grandfather pursued. "Thou hast never missed
+a year before, Nello."
+
+"Thou art too sick to leave," murmured the lad, bending his handsome
+head over the bed.
+
+"Tut! tut! Mother Nulette would have come and sat with me, as she does
+scores of times. What is the cause, Nello?" the old man persisted.
+"Thou surely hast not had ill words with the little one?"
+
+"Nay, grandfather, never," said the boy quickly, with a hot colour in
+his bent face. "Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked
+this year. He has taken some whim against me."
+
+"But thou hast done nothing wrong?"
+
+"That I know--nothing. I took the portrait of Alois on a piece of
+pine; that is all."
+
+"Ah!" The old man was silent; the truth suggested itself to him with
+the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the
+corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways
+of the world were like.
+
+He drew Nello's fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer
+gesture. "Thou art very poor, my child," he said, with a quiver the
+more in his aged, trembling voice; "so poor! It is very hard for
+thee."
+
+"Nay, I am rich," murmured Nello; and in his innocence he thought so;
+rich with the imperishable powers that are mightier than the might of
+kings. And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the quiet
+autumn night, and watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars bend
+and shiver in the wind. All the casements of the mill-house were
+lighted, and every now and then the notes of the flute came to him.
+The tears fell down his cheeks, for he was but a child; yet he smiled,
+for he said to himself, "In the future!" He stayed there until all was
+quite still and dark; then he and Patrasche went within and slept
+together, long and deeply, side by side.
+
+Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little
+outhouse to the hut which no one entered but himself--a dreary place,
+but with abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned
+himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on a great gray sea
+of stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable
+fancies which possessed his brain. No one had ever taught him
+anything; colours he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread
+many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles that he had here;
+and it was only in black or white that he could fashion the things he
+saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an
+old man sitting on a fallen tree--only that. He had seen old Michel,
+the woodman, sitting so at evening many a time. He had never had a
+soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow;
+and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet
+patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given
+them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there
+meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the
+descending night behind him.
+
+It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults, no doubt; and
+yet it was real, true in nature, true in art, and very mournful, and
+in a manner beautiful.
+
+Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation
+after the labor of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a
+hope--vain and wild perhaps, but strongly cherished--of sending this
+great drawing to compete for a prize of two hundred francs a year
+which it was announced in Antwerp would be open to every lad of
+talent, scholar or peasant, under eighteen, who would attempt to win
+it with some unaided work of chalk or pencil. Three of the foremost
+artists in the town of Rubens were to be the judges and elect the
+victor according to his merits.
+
+All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this
+treasure, which if triumphant, would build him his first step toward
+independence and the mysteries of the art which he blindly,
+ignorantly, and yet passionately adored.
+
+He said nothing to any one; his grandfather would not have understood,
+and little Alois was lost to him. Only to Patrasche he told all, and
+whispered, "Rubens would give it me, I think, if he knew."
+
+Patrasche thought so too, for he knew that Rubens had loved dogs or he
+had never painted them with such exquisite fidelity; and men who loved
+dogs were, as Patrasche knew, always pitiful.
+
+The drawings were to go in on the first day of December, and the
+decision be given on the twenty-fourth, so that he who should win
+might rejoice with all his people at the Christmas season.
+
+In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a beating heart, now
+quick with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture
+on his little green milk-cart, and took it, with the help of
+Patrasche, into the town, and there left it, as enjoined, at the doors
+of a public building.
+
+"Perhaps it is worth nothing at all. How can I tell?" he thought, with
+the heart-sickness of a great timidity. Now that he had left it there,
+it seemed to him so hazardous, so vain, so foolish, to dream that he,
+a little lad with bare feet who barely knew his letters, could do
+anything at which great painters, real artists, could ever deign to
+look. Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral; the lordly form
+of Rubens seemed to rise from the fog and the darkness, and to loom in
+its magnificence before him, while the lips, with their kindly smile,
+seemed to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak
+heart and by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon
+Antwerp."
+
+Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted. He had done his
+best; the rest must be as God willed, he thought, in that innocent,
+unquestioning faith which had been taught him in the little gray
+chapel among the willows and the poplar-trees.
+
+The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they reached the
+hut, snow fell, and fell for very many days after that; so that the
+paths and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all
+the smaller streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon
+the plains. Then, indeed, it became hard work to go round for the milk
+while the world was all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the
+silent town. Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage of
+the years that were only bringing Nello a stronger youth were bringing
+him old age, and his joints were stiff and his bones ached often. But
+he would never give up his share of the labour. 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 play-fellows so
+long. There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement; he
+climbed it and tapped softly at the lattice; there was a little light
+within. The child opened it and looked out half frightened.
+
+Nello put the tambourine player into her hands. "Here is a doll I
+found in the snow, Alois. Take it," he whispered; "take it, and God
+bless thee, dear!"
+
+He slid down from the shed roof before she had time to thank him, and
+ran off through the darkness.
+
+That night there was a fire at the mill. Out-buildings and much corn
+were destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling-house were
+unharmed. All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing
+through the snow from Antwerp. The miller was insured, and would lose
+nothing; nevertheless, he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud
+that the fire was due to no accident, but to some foul intent.
+
+Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest. Baas Cogez
+thrust him angrily aside. "Thou wert loitering here after dark," he
+said roughly. "I believe, on my soul, that thou dost know more of the
+fire than any one."
+
+Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one
+could say such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any
+one could pass a jest at such a time.
+
+Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his
+neighbours 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 humour 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 suspicions, 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 neighbours. 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 neighbours 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.
+
+Noel 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 Jesus. 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 where he smoked by the
+hearth.
+
+Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he hardened his heart, and would not
+unbar his door as the little, humble funeral went by. "The boy is a
+beggar," he said to himself; "he shall not be about Alois."
+
+The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when the grave was closed
+and the mourners had gone, she put a wreath of immortelles into
+Alois's hands and bade her go and lay it reverently on the dark,
+unmarked mound where the snow was displaced.
+
+Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts. But even of that
+poor, melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation.
+There was a month's rent overdue for their little home, and when Nello
+had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He
+went and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who went
+every Sunday night to drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas
+Cogez. The cobbler would grant no mercy. He was a harsh, miserly man,
+and loved money. He claimed in default of his rent every stick and
+stone, every pot and pan, in the hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche be
+out of it on the morrow.
+
+Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense miserable enough,
+and yet their hearts clove to it with a great affection. They had been
+so happy there, and in the summer, with its clambering vine and its
+flowering beans, it was so pretty and bright in the midst of the sun-
+lighted fields! Their 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
+while 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 while 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 neighbour'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 clamour. 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 burg 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, sunburnt 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
+honoured 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; neighbours 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 favourite
+companion; the house-mother sat with calm, contented face at the
+spinning-wheel; the cuckoo in the clock chirped mirthful hours. Amidst
+it all Patrasche was bidden with a thousand words of welcome to tarry
+there a cherished guest. But neither peace nor plenty could allure him
+where Nello was not.
+
+When the supper smoked on the board, and the voices were loudest and
+gladdest, and the Christ-child brought choicest gifts to Alois,
+Patrasche, watching always an occasion, glided out when the door was
+unlatched by a careless new-comer, and, as swiftly as his weak and
+tired limbs would bear him sped over the snow in the bitter, black
+night. He had only one thought--to follow Nello. A human friend might
+have paused for the pleasant meal, the cheery warmth, the cosey
+slumber; but that was not the friendship of Patrasche. He remembered a
+bygone time, when an old man and a little child had found him sick
+unto death in the wayside ditch.
+
+Snow had fallen freshly all the evening long; it was now nearly ten;
+the trail of the boy's footsteps was almost obliterated. It took
+Patrasche long to discover any scent. When at last he found it, it was
+lost again quickly, and lost and recovered, and again lost and again
+recovered, a hundred times or more.
+
+The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were
+blown out; the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid
+every trace of habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the
+cattle were housed, and in all the huts and homesteads men and women
+rejoiced and feasted. There was only Patrasche out in the cruel cold--
+old and famished and full of pain, but with the strength and the
+patience of a great love to sustain him in his search.
+
+The trail of Nello's steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new
+snow, went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was
+past midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town
+and into the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark
+in the town, save where some light gleamed ruddily through the
+crevices of house shutters, or some group went homeward with lanterns
+chanting drinking-songs. The streets were all white with ice; the high
+walls and roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound
+save the riot of the winds down the passages as they tossed the
+creaking signs and shook the tall lamp-irons.
+
+So many passers-by had trodden through and through the snow, so many
+diverse paths had crossed and 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 burg 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 footfalls
+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.
+
+Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them; the tears of a
+passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face. "I have seen
+them at last!" he cried aloud. "O God, it is enough!"
+
+His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing
+upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the
+light illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so long
+--light clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the
+throne of Heaven. Then suddenly it passed away; once more a great
+darkness covered the face of Christ.
+
+The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog. "We shall
+see His face--/there/," he murmured; "and He will not part us, I
+think."
+
+On the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of Antwerp
+found them both. They were both dead; the cold of the night had frozen
+into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas
+morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying
+thus on the stones together. Above, the veils were drawn back from the
+great visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the
+thorn-crowned head of the Christ.
+
+As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man who wept as
+women weep. "I was cruel to the lad," he muttered; "and now I would
+have made amends,--yea, to the half of my substance,--and he should
+have been to me as a son."
+
+There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
+world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit. "I seek one who
+should have had the prize yesterday had worth won," he said to the
+people--"a boy of rare promise and genius. An old wood-cutter on a
+fallen tree at eventide--that was all his theme; but there was
+greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and take him
+with me and teach him art."
+
+And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bitterly as she
+clung to her father's arm, cried aloud, "Oh, Nello, come! We have all
+ready for thee. The Christ-child's hands are full of gifts, and the
+old piper will play for us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by the
+hearth and burn nuts with us all the Noel week long--yes, even to the
+Feast of the Kings! And Patrasche will be so happy! Oh, Nello, wake
+and come!"
+
+But the young pale face, turned upward to the light of the great
+Rubens with a smile upon its mouth, answered them all, "It is too
+late."
+
+For the sweet, sonorous bells went ringing through the frost, and the
+sunlight shone upon the plains of snow, and the populace trooped gay
+and glad through the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked
+charity at their hands. All they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden.
+
+Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been.
+It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the
+innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and
+for faith no fulfilment.
+
+All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were
+not divided; for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded
+too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the
+people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a
+special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest
+there side by side--forever!
+
+
+
+
+MARKHEIM
+
+by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+
+"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some
+customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior
+knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so
+that the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he
+continued, "I profit by my virtue."
+
+Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes
+had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the
+shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the
+flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.
+
+The dealer chuckled. "You come to me on Christmas Day," he resumed,
+"when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and
+make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for
+that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be
+balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of
+manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of
+discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot
+look me in the eye, he has to pay for it."  The dealer once more
+chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still
+with a note of irony, "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how
+you came into the possession of the object?" he continued. "Still your
+uncle's cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!"
+
+And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe,
+looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with
+every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of
+infinite pity, and a touch of horror.
+
+"This time," said he, "you are in error. I have not come to sell, but
+to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to
+the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock
+Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my
+errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a
+lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech
+he had prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus
+disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected
+yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you
+very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected."
+
+There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this
+statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious
+lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near
+thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.
+
+"Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an old customer after
+all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far
+be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,"
+he went on, "this hand-glass--fifteenth century, warranted; comes from
+a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my
+customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole
+heir of a remarkable collector."
+
+The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had
+stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a
+shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a
+sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as
+swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of
+the hand that now received the glass.
+
+"A glass," he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more
+clearly. "A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?"
+
+"And why not?" cried the dealer. "Why not a glass?"
+
+Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. "You ask
+me why not?" he said. "Why, look here--look in it--look at yourself!
+Do you like to see it? No! nor I--nor any man."
+
+The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly
+confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing
+worse on hand, he chuckled. "Your future lady, sir, must be pretty
+hard favoured," said he.
+
+"I ask you," said Markheim, "for a Christmas present, and you give me
+this--this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies--this hand-
+conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me.
+It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I
+hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man."
+
+The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim
+did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an
+eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.
+
+"What are you driving at?" the dealer asked.
+
+"Not charitable?" returned the other, gloomily. "Not charitable; not
+pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a
+safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?"
+
+"I will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with some sharpness,
+and then broke off again into a chuckle. "But I see this is a love
+match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady's health."
+
+"Ah!" cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. "Ah, have you been in
+love? Tell me about that."
+
+"I," cried the dealer. "I in love! I never had the time, nor have I
+the time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?"
+
+"Where is the hurry?" returned Markheim. "It is very pleasant to stand
+here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry
+away from any pleasure--no, not even from so mild a one as this. We
+should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a
+cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it--a cliff a
+mile high--high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of
+humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each
+other; why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who
+knows? we might become friends."
+
+"I have just one word to say to you," said the dealer. "Either make
+your purchase, or walk out of my shop."
+
+"True, true," said Markheim. "Enough fooling. To business. Show me
+something else."
+
+The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the
+shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so.
+Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his
+greatcoat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time
+many different emotions were depicted together on his face--terror,
+horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through
+a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.
+
+"This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer. And then, as he began
+to rearise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long,
+skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen,
+striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a
+heap.
+
+Time had some score of small voices in that shop--some stately and
+slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried.
+All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.
+Then the passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement,
+broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the
+consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The
+candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught;
+and by that inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with
+noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows
+nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with
+respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing
+and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and
+peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like
+a pointing finger.
+
+From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body
+of his victim, where it lay, both humped and sprawling, incredibly
+small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly
+clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much
+sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And
+yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began
+to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the
+cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion; there it must lie
+till it was found. Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh
+lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with
+the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy.
+"Time was that when the brains were out," he thought; and the first
+word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished--
+time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and
+momentous for the slayer.
+
+The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another,
+with every variety of pace and voice--one deep as the bell from a
+cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a
+waltz,--the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.
+
+The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered
+him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle,
+beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance
+reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from
+Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were
+an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of
+his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And
+still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with
+a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should
+have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he
+should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and
+only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have
+been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all
+things otherwise. Poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the
+mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to
+be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all
+this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted
+attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the
+hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves
+would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the
+dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.
+
+Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a
+besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of
+the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their
+curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them
+sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned
+to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now
+startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties
+struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised
+finger--every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own
+hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang
+him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the
+clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and
+alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the
+clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the
+very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to
+strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and
+bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with
+elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own
+house.
+
+But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one
+portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on
+the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong
+hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside
+his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the
+pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through
+the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But
+here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched
+the servant set forth sweet-hearting, in her poor best, "out for the
+day" written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course;
+and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a
+stir of delicate footing; he was surely conscious, inexplicably
+conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of
+the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless
+thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of
+himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired
+with cunning and hatred.
+
+At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which
+still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small
+and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to
+the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the
+threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness,
+did there not hang wavering a shadow?
+
+Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to
+beat with a staff on the shop door, accompanying his blows with shouts
+and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by
+name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he
+lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows
+and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name,
+which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm,
+had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted
+from his knocking and departed.
+
+Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth
+from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London
+multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of
+safety and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had come; at any
+moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the
+deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a
+failure. The money--that was now Markheim's concern; and as a means to
+that, the keys.
+
+He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was
+still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the
+mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his
+victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-
+stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the
+floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and
+inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance
+to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its
+back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had
+been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all
+expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with
+blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing
+circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain
+fair-day in a fishers' village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd
+upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal
+voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried overhead
+in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out
+upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great
+screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured--Brownrigg
+with her apprentice, the Mannings with their murdered guest, Weare in
+the death-grip of Thurtell, and a score besides of famous crimes. The
+thing was as clear as an illusion He was once again that little boy;
+he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt,
+at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the
+drums. A bar of that day's music returned upon his memory; and at
+that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a
+sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and
+conquer.
+
+He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these
+considerations, looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his
+mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a
+while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that
+pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable
+energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been
+arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the
+beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more
+remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before
+the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best,
+he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all
+those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one
+who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a
+tremor.
+
+With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the
+keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had
+begun to rain smartly, and the sound of the shower upon the roof had
+banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house
+were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled
+with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door,
+he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of
+another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated
+loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his
+muscles, and drew back the door.
+
+The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and
+stairs; on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the
+landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung
+against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of
+the rain through all the house that, in Markheim's ears, it began to
+be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the
+tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the
+counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to
+mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of
+the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him
+to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by
+presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop,
+he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a
+great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and
+followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how
+tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening
+with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense
+which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His
+head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting
+from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half
+rewarded as with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four
+and twenty steps to the first floor were four and twenty agonies.
+
+On that first story, the doors stood ajar--three of them, like three
+ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could
+never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's
+observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
+bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
+wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
+they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
+least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
+and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of
+his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious
+terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some
+wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on
+the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as
+the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould
+of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said)
+when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might
+befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal
+his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might
+yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch.
+Ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him; if, for
+instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of
+his victim, or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen
+invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense,
+these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against
+sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless
+exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there,
+and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.
+
+When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind
+him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite
+dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing-cases and
+incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld
+himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures,
+framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine
+Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with
+tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good
+fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this
+concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
+packing-case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys.
+It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome,
+besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and
+time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him.
+With the tail of his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it from time
+to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good
+estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling
+in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other
+side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and
+the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately,
+how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices!
+Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his
+mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images: church-going
+children, and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers
+by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the
+windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the
+hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and
+the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to
+recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the
+Ten Commandments in the chancel.
+
+And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his
+feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went
+over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted
+the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the
+knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.
+
+Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not--whether the
+dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some
+chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But
+when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room,
+looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and
+then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke
+loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the
+visitant returned.
+
+"Did you call me?" he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the
+room and closed the door behind him.
+
+Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a
+film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new comer seemed to
+change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light
+of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he
+thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of
+living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing
+was not of the earth and not of God.
+
+And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood
+looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added, "You are looking
+for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday politeness.
+
+Markheim made no answer.
+
+"I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has left her
+sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim
+be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences."
+
+"You know me?" cried the murderer.
+
+The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favourite of mine," he said;
+"and I have long observed and often sought to help you."
+
+"What are you?" cried Markheim; "the devil?"
+
+"What I may be," returned the other, "cannot affect the service I
+propose to render you."
+
+"It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not
+by you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!"
+
+"I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or
+rather firmness. "I know you to the soul."
+
+"Know me!" cried Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty
+and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do;
+all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles
+them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have
+seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control--if you
+could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would
+shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more
+overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I
+could disclose myself."
+
+"To me?" inquired the visitant.
+
+"To you before all," returned the murderer. "I supposed you were
+intelligent. I thought--since you exist--you would prove a reader of
+the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of
+it--my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants
+have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother--the
+giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you
+not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me?
+Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never
+blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can
+you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity--
+the unwilling sinner?"
+
+"All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, "but it regards
+me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care
+not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so
+as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the
+servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures
+on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it
+is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the
+Christmas streets! Shall I help you--I, who know all? Shall I tell you
+where to find the money?"
+
+"For what price?" asked Markheim.
+
+"I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the other.
+
+Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.
+"No," said he, "I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of
+thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should
+find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing
+to commit myself to evil."
+
+"I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the
+visitant.
+
+"Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim cried.
+
+"I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on these things
+from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls.
+The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of
+religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course
+of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his
+deliverance, he can add but one act of service: to repent, to die
+smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous
+of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me; accept
+my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please
+yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the
+night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for
+your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your
+quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God.
+I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere
+mourners, listening to the man's last words; and when I looked into
+that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it
+smiling with hope."
+
+"And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?" asked Markheim. "Do
+you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin and sin and
+sin and at last sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is
+this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me
+with red hands that you presume such baseness? And is this crime of
+murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?"
+
+"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins
+are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving
+mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and
+feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of
+their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death, and to
+my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking
+graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore
+than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I
+follow virtues also. They differ not by the thickness of a nail; they
+are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I
+live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to
+me, not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough
+down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more
+blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you
+have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offer to
+forward your escape."
+
+"I will lay my heart open to you," answered Markheim. "This crime on
+which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many
+lessons; itself is a lesson--a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been
+driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,
+driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these
+temptations; mine was not so; I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,
+and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches--both the power
+and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor
+in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the
+agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of
+the past--something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the
+sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over
+noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies
+my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city
+of destination."
+
+"You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" remarked
+the visitor; "and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some
+thousands?"
+
+"Ah," said Markheim, "but this time I have a sure thing."
+
+"This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor quietly.
+
+"Ah, but I keep back the half!" cried Markheim.
+
+"That also you will lose," said the other.
+
+The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well then, what matter?" he
+exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall
+one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override
+the better? Evil and good run strong in me, hailing me both ways. I do
+not love the one thing; I love all. I can conceive great deeds,
+renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as
+murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows
+their trials better than myself? I pity and help them. I prize love; I
+love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth
+but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life,
+and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the
+mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts."
+
+But the visitant raised his finger. "For six and thirty years that you
+have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune
+and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen
+years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you
+would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is
+there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil? Five years
+from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your
+way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you."
+
+"It is true," Markheim said huskily, "I have in some degree complied
+with evil. But it is so with all; the very saints, in the mere
+exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their
+surroundings."
+
+"I will propound to you one simple question," said the other; "and as
+you answer I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in
+many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any
+account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in
+any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with
+your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?"
+
+"In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration.
+"No," he added, with despair; "in none! I have gone down in all."
+
+"Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, for you
+will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are
+irrevocably written down."
+
+Markheim stood for a long while silent, and, indeed, it was the
+visitor who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, "shall
+I show you the money?"
+
+"And grace?" cried Markheim.
+
+"Have you not tried it?" returned the other. "Two or three years ago
+did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not
+your voice the loudest in the hymn?"
+
+"It is true," said Markheim; "and I see clearly what remains for me by
+way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are
+opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am."
+
+At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the
+house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for
+which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.
+
+"The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I forewarned you, and
+there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you
+must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather
+serious countenance; no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you
+success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity
+that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last
+danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening--the
+whole night, if needful--to ransack the treasures of the house and to
+make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of
+danger. Up!" he cried; "up, friend. Your life hangs trembling in the
+scales; up, and act!"
+
+Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. "If I be condemned to evil
+acts," he said, "there is still one door of freedom open: I can cease
+from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I
+be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can
+yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My
+love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I
+have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling
+disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and
+courage."
+
+The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
+change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even
+as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
+watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
+downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
+before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
+random as chance medley--a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
+it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a
+quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into
+the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was
+strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he
+stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient
+clamour.
+
+He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.
+
+"You had better go for the police," said he; "I have killed your
+master."
+
+
+
+
+QUEEN TITA'S WAGER
+
+by WILLIAM BLACK
+
+
+
+I
+FRANZISKA FAHLER
+
+It is a Christmas morning in Surrey--cold, still and gray, with a
+frail glimmer of sunshine coming through the bare trees to melt the
+hoar-frost on the lawn. The postman has just gone out, swinging the
+gate behind him. A fire burns brightly in the breakfast-room; and
+there is silence about the house, for the children have gone off to
+climb Box Hill before being marched to church.
+
+The small and gentle lady who presides over the household walks
+sedately in, and lifts the solitary letter that is lying on her plate.
+About three seconds suffice to let her run through its contents, and
+then she suddenly cries:
+
+"I knew it! I said it! I told you two months ago she was only flirting
+with him; and now she has rejected him. And oh! I am so glad of it!
+The poor boy!"
+
+The other person in the room, who had been meekly waiting for his
+breakfast for half an hour, ventures to point out that there is
+nothing to rejoice over in the fact of a young man having been
+rejected by a young woman.
+
+"If it were final, yes! If these two young folks were not certain to
+go and marry somebody else, you might congratulate them both. But you
+know they will. The poor boy will go courting again in three months'
+time, and be vastly pleased with his condition."
+
+"Oh, never, never!" she says. "He has had such a lesson! You know I
+warned him. I knew she was only flirting with him. Poor Charlie! Now I
+hope he will get on with his profession, and leave such things out of
+his head. And as for that creature--"
+
+"I will do you the justice to say," observes her husband, who is still
+regarding the table with a longing eye, "that you did oppose this
+match, because you hadn't the making of it. If you had brought these
+two together they would have been married ere this. Never mind; you
+can marry him to somebody of your own choosing now."
+
+"No," she says, with much decision; "he must not think of marriage. He
+cannot think of it. It will take the poor lad a long time to get over
+this blow."
+
+"He will marry within a year."
+
+"I will bet you whatever you like that he doesn't," she says,
+triumphantly.
+
+"Whatever I like! That is a big wager. If you lose, do you think you
+could pay? I should like, for example, to have my own way in my own
+house."
+
+"If I lose you shall," says the generous creature; and the bargain is
+concluded.
+
+Nothing further is said about this matter for the moment. The children
+return from Box Hill, and are rigged out for church. Two young people,
+friends of ours, and recently married, having no domestic circle of
+their own, and having promised to spend the whole Christmas Day with
+us, arrived. Then we set out, trying as much as possible to think that
+Christmas Day is different from any other day, and pleased to observe
+that the younger folk, at least, cherish the delusion.
+
+But just before reaching the church I say to the small lady who got
+the letter in the morning, and whom we generally call Tita:
+
+"When do you expect to see Charlie?"
+
+"I don't know," she answers. "After this cruel affair he won't like to
+go about much."
+
+"You remember that he promised to go with us to the Black Forest?"
+
+"Yes; and I am sure it will be a pleasant trip for him."
+
+"Shall we go to Huferschingen?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Franziska is a pretty girl."
+
+Now you would not think that any great mischief could be done by the
+mere remark that Franziska was a pretty girl. Anybody who had seen
+Franziska Fahler, niece of the proprietor of the "Goldenen Bock" in
+Huferschingen, would admit that in a moment. But this is nevertheless
+true, that our important but diminutive Queen Tita was very thoughtful
+during the rest of our walk to this little church; and in church, too,
+she was thinking so deeply that she almost forgot to look at the
+effect of the decorations she had nailed up the day before. Yet
+nothing could have offended in the bare observation that Franziska was
+a pretty girl.
+
+At dinner in the evening we had our two guests and a few young fellows
+from London who did not happen to have their families or homes there.
+Curiously enough, there was a vast deal of talk about travelling, and
+also about Baden, and more particularly about the southern districts
+of Baden. Tita said the Black Forest was the most charming place in
+the world; and as it was Christmas Day, and as we had been listening
+to a sermon all about charity and kindness and consideration for
+others, nobody was rude enough to contradict her. But our forbearance
+was put to a severe test when, after dinner, she produced a
+photographic album and handed it round, and challenged everybody to
+say whether the young lady in the corner was not absolutely lovely.
+Most of them said that she was certainly very nice-looking; and Tita
+seemed a little disappointed.
+
+I perceived that it would no longer do to say that Franziska was a
+pretty girl. We should henceforth have to swear by everything we held
+dear that she was absolutely lovely.
+
+
+
+II
+ZUM "GOLDENEN BOCK"
+
+We felt some pity for the lad when we took him abroad with us; but it
+must be confessed that at first he was not a very desirable travelling
+companion. There was a gloom about him. Despite the eight months that
+had elapsed, he professed that his old wound was still open. Tita
+treated him with the kindest maternal solicitude, which was a great
+mistake; tonics, not sweets, are required in such cases. Yet he was
+very grateful, and he said, with a blush, that, in any case, he would
+not rail against all women because of the badness of one. Indeed, you
+would not have fancied he had any great grudge against womankind.
+There were a great many English abroad that autumn, and we met whole
+batches of pretty girls at every station and at every /table d'hote/
+on our route. Did he avoid them, or glare at them savagely, or say
+hard things of them? Oh no! quite the reverse. He was a little shy at
+first; and when he saw a party of distressed damsels in a station,
+with their bewildered father in vain attempting to make himself
+understood to a porter, he would assist them in a brief and
+businesslike manner as if it were a duty, lift his cap, and then march
+off relieved. But by-and-by he began to make acquaintances in the
+hotel; and as he was a handsome, English-looking lad, who bore a
+certificate of honesty in his clear gray eyes and easy gait, he was
+rather made much of. Nor could any fault be decently found with his
+appetite.
+
+So we passed on from Konigswinter to Coblenz, and from Coblenz to
+Heidelberg, and from Heidelberg south to Freiburg, where we bade adieu
+to the last of the towns, and laid hold of a trap with a pair of
+ancient and angular horses, and plunged into the Hollenthal, the first
+great gorge of the Black Forest mountains. From one point to another
+we slowly urged our devious course, walking the most of the day,
+indeed, and putting the trap and ourselves up for the night at some
+quaint roadside hostelry, where we ate of roe-deer and drank of
+Affenthaler, and endeavoured to speak German with a pure Waldshut
+accent. And then, one evening, when the last rays of the sun were
+shining along the hills and touching the stems of the tall pines, we
+drove into a narrow valley and caught sight of a large brown building
+of wood, with projecting eaves and quaint windows, that stood close by
+the forest.
+
+"Here is my dear inn!" cried Tita, with a great glow of delight and
+affection in her face. "Here is /mein gutes Thal! Ich gruss' dich ein
+tausend Mal!/ And here is old Peter come out to see us; and there is
+Franziska!"
+
+"Oh, this is Franziska, is it?" said Charlie.
+
+Yes, this was Franziska. She was a well-built, handsome girl of
+nineteen or twenty, with a healthy, sunburnt complexion, and dark hair
+plaited into two long tails, which were taken up and twisted into a
+knot behind. That you could see from a distance. But on nearer
+approach you found that Franziska had really fine and intelligent
+features, and a pair of frank, clear, big brown eyes that had a very
+straight look about them. They were something of the eyes of a deer,
+indeed; wide apart, soft, and apprehensive, yet looking with a certain
+directness and unconsciousness that overcame her natural girlish
+timidity. Tita simply flew at her and kissed her heartily and asked
+her twenty questions at once. Franziska answered in very fair English,
+a little slow and formal, but quite grammatical. Then she was
+introduced to Charlie, and she shook hands with him in a simple and
+unembarrassed way; and then she turned to one of the servants and gave
+some directions about the luggage. Finally she begged Tita to go
+indoors and get off her travelling attire, which was done, leaving us
+two outside.
+
+"She's a very pretty girl," Charlie said, carelessly. "I suppose she's
+sort of head cook and kitchen-maid here."
+
+The impudence of these young men is something extraordinary.
+
+"If you wish to have your head in your hands," I remarked to him,
+"just you repeat that remark at dinner. Why, Franziska is no end of a
+swell. She has two thousand pounds and the half of a mill. She has a
+sister married to the Geheimer-Ober-Hofbaurath of Hesse-Cassel. She
+had visited both Paris and Munich, and she has her dresses made in
+Freiburg."
+
+"But why does such an illustrious creature bury herself in this
+valley, and in an old inn, and go about bareheaded?"
+
+"Because there are folks in the world without ambition, who like to
+live a quiet, decent, homely life. Every girl can't marry a Geheimer-
+Ober-Hofbaurath. Ziska, now, is much more likely to marry the young
+doctor here."
+
+"Oh, indeed! and live here all her days. She couldn't do better. Happy
+Franziska!"
+
+We went indoors. It was a low, large, rambling place, with one immense
+room all hung round with roe-deers' horns, and with one lesser room
+fitted up with a billiard-table. The inn lay a couple of hundred yards
+back from Huferschingen; but it had been made the headquarters of the
+keepers, and just outside this room there were a number of pegs for
+them to sling their guns and bags on when they came in of an evening
+to have a pipe and a chopin of white wine. Ziska's uncle and aunt were
+both large, stout, and somnolent people, very good-natured and kind,
+but a trifle dull. Ziska really had the management of the place, and
+she was not slow to lend a hand if the servants were remiss in waiting
+on us. But that, it was understood, was done out of compliment to our
+small Queen Tita.
+
+By-and-by we sat down to dinner, and Franziska came to see that
+everything was going on straight. It was a dinner "with scenery." You
+forgot to be particular about the soup, the venison, and the
+Affenthaler when from the window at your elbow you could look across
+the narrow valley and behold a long stretch of the Black Forest
+shining in the red glow of the sunset. The lower the sun sank the more
+intense became the crimson light on the tall stems of the pines; and
+then you could see the line of shadow slowly rising up the side of the
+opposite hill until only the topmost trees were touched with fire.
+Then these too lost it, and all the forest around us seemed to have a
+pale-blue mist stealing over it as the night fell and the twilight
+faded out of the sky overhead. Presently the long undulations of fir
+grew black, the stars came out, and the sound of the stream could be
+heard distantly in the hollow; and then, at Tita's wish, we went off
+for a last stroll in among the soft moss and under the darkness of the
+pines, now and again starting some great capercailzie, and sending it
+flying and whirring down the glades.
+
+When we returned from that prowl into the forest, we found the inn
+dark. Such people as may have called in had gone home; but we
+suspected that Franziska had given the neighbours a hint not to
+overwhelm us on our first arrival. When we entered the big room,
+Franziska came in with candles; then she brought some matches, and
+also put on the table an odd little pack of cards, and went out. Her
+uncle and aunt had, even before we went out, come and bade us good-
+night formally, and shaken hands all round. They are early folk in the
+Black Forest.
+
+"Where has that girl gone now?" says Charlie. "Into that lonely
+billiard-room! Couldn't you ask her to come in here? Or shall we go
+and play billiards?"
+
+Tita stares, and then demurely smiles; but it is with an assumed
+severity that she rebukes him for such a wicked proposal, and reminds
+him that he must start early next morning. He groans assent. Then she
+takes her leave.
+
+The big young man was silent for a moment or two, with his hands in
+his pockets and his legs stretched out. I begin to think I am in for
+it--the old story of blighted hopes and angry denunciation and
+hypocritical joy, and all the rest of it. But suddenly Charlie looks
+up with a businesslike air and says:
+
+"Who is that doctor fellow you were speaking about! Shall we see him
+to-morrow?"
+
+"You saw him to-night. It was he who passed us on the road with the
+two beagles."
+
+"What! that little fellow with the bandy legs and the spectacles?" he
+cries, with a great laugh.
+
+"That little fellow," I observe to him, "is a person of some
+importance, I can tell you. He--"
+
+"I suppose his sister married a Geheimer-Ober-under--what the dickens
+is it?" says this disrespectful young man.
+
+"Dr. Krumm has got the Iron Cross."
+
+"That won't make his legs any the straighter."
+
+"He was at Weissenburg."
+
+"I suppose he got that cast in the eye there."
+
+"He can play the zither in a way that would astonish you. He has got a
+little money. Franziska and he would be able to live very comfortably
+together."
+
+"Franziska and that fellow?" says Charlie; and then he rises with a
+sulky air, and proposes we should take our candles with us.
+
+But he is not sulky very long; for Ziska, hearing our footsteps, comes
+to the passage and bids us a friendly good-night.
+
+"Good-night, Miss Fahler!" he says, in rather a shamefaced way; "and I
+am so awfully sorry we have kept you up so late. We sha'n't do it
+again."
+
+You would have thought by his manner that it was two o'clock, whereas
+it was only half-past eleven!
+
+
+
+III
+DR. KRUMM
+
+There was no particular reason why Dr. Krumm should marry Franziska
+Fahler, except that he was the most important young man in
+Huferschingen, and she was the most important young woman. People
+therefore thought they would make a good match, although Franziska
+certainly had the most to give in the way of good looks. Dr. Krumm was
+a short, bandy-legged, sturdy young man, with long, fair hair, a
+tanned complexion, light-blue eyes not quite looking the same way,
+spectacles, and a general air of industrious common sense about him,
+if one may use such a phrase. There was certainly little of the lover
+in his manner toward Ziska, and as little in hers toward him. They
+were very good friends, though, and he called her Ziska, while she
+gave him his nickname of Fidelio, his real name being Fidele.
+
+Now on this, the first morning of our stay in Huferschingen, all the
+population had turned out at an early hour to see us start for the
+forest; and as the Ober-Forster had gone away to visit his parents in
+Bavaria, Dr. Krumm was appointed to superintend the operations of the
+day. And when everybody was busy renewing acquaintance with us,
+gathering the straying dogs, examining guns and cartridge-belts, and
+generally aiding in the profound commotion of our setting out, Dr.
+Krumm was found to be talking in a very friendly and familiar manner
+with our pretty Franziska. Charlie eyed them askance. He began to say
+disrespectful things of Krumm: he thought Krumm a plain person. And
+then, when the bandy-legged doctor had got all the dogs, keepers, and
+beaters together, we set off along the road, and presently plunged
+into the cool shade of the forest, where the thick moss suddenly
+silenced our footsteps, and where there was a moist and resinous smell
+in the air.
+
+Well, the incidents of the forenoon's shooting, picturesque as they
+were, and full of novelty to Tita's protege, need not be described. At
+the end of the fourth drive, when we had got on nearly to luncheon-
+time, it appeared that Charlie had killed a handsome buck, and he was
+so pleased with this performance that he grew friendly with Dr. Krumm,
+who had, indeed, given him the /haupt-stelle/. But when, as we sat
+down to our sausages and bread and red wine, Charlie incidentally
+informed our commander-in-chief that, during one of the drives, a
+splendid yellow fox had come out of the underwood and stood and stared
+at him for three or four seconds, the doctor uttered a cry of despair.
+
+"I should have told you that," he said, in English that was not quite
+so good as Ziska's, "if I had remembered, yes! The English will not
+shoot the foxes; but they are very bad for us; they kill the young
+deer. We are glad to shoot them; and Franziska she told me she wanted
+a yellow fox for the skin to make something."
+
+Charlie got very red in the face. He /had/ missed a chance. If he had
+known that Franziska wanted a yellow fox, all the instinctive
+veneration for that animal that was in him would have gone clean out,
+and the fate of the animal--for Charlie was a smart shot--would have
+been definitely sealed.
+
+"Are there many of them?" said he, gloomily.
+
+"No; not many. But where there is one there are generally four or
+five. In the next drive we may come on them, yes! I will put you in a
+good place, sir, and you must not think of letting him go away; for
+Franziska, who has waited two, three weeks, and not one yellow fox not
+anywhere, and it is for the variety of the skin in a--a--I do not know
+what you call it."
+
+"A rug, I suppose," said Charlie.
+
+I subsequently heard that Charlie went to his post with a fixed
+determination to shoot anything of yellow colour that came near him.
+His station was next to that of Dr. Krumm; but of course they were
+invisible to each other. The horns of the beaters sounded a warning;
+the gunners cocked their guns and stood on the alert; in the perfect
+silence each one waited for the first glimmer of a brown hide down the
+long green glades of young fir. Then, according to Charlie's account,
+by went two or three deer like lightning--all of them does. A buck
+came last, but swerved just as he came in sight, and backed and made
+straight for the line of beaters. Two more does, and then an absolute
+blank. One or two shots had been heard at a distance; either some of
+the more distant stations had been more fortunate, or one or other of
+the beaters had tried his luck. Suddenly there was a shot fired close
+to Charlie; he knew it must have been the doctor. In about a minute
+afterward he saw some pale-yellow object slowly worming its way
+through the ferns; and here, at length, he made sure he was going to
+get his yellow fox. But just as the animal came within fair distance,
+it turned over, made a struggle or two, and lay still. Charlie rushed
+along to the spot: it was, indeed, a yellow fox, shot in the head, and
+now as dead as a door-nail.
+
+What was he to do? Let Dr. Krumm take home this prize to Franziska,
+after he had had such a chance in the afternoon? Never! Charlie fired
+a barrel into the air, and then calmly awaited the coming up of the
+beaters and the drawing together of the sportsmen.
+
+Dr. Krumm, being at the next station, was the first to arrive. He
+found Charlie standing by the side of the slain fox.
+
+"Ha!" he said, his spectacles fairly gleaming with delight, "you have
+shotted him! You have killed him! That is very good--that is
+excellent! Now you will present the skin to Miss Franziska, if you do
+not wish to take it to England."
+
+"Oh no!" said Charlie, with a lordly indifference. "I don't care about
+it. Franziska may have it."
+
+Charlie pulled me aside, and said, with a solemn wink:
+
+"Can you keep a secret?"
+
+"My wife and I can keep a secret. I am not allowed to have any for
+myself."
+
+"Listen," said the unabashed young man; "Krumm shot that fox. Mind you
+don't say a word. I must have the skin to present to Franziska."
+
+I stared at him; I had never known him guilty of a dishonest action.
+But when you do get a decent young English fellow condescending to do
+anything shabby, be sure it is a girl who is the cause. I said
+nothing, of course; and in the evening a trap came for us, and we
+drove back to Huferschingen.
+
+Tita clapped her hands with delight; for Charlie was a favourite of
+hers, and now he was returning like a hero, with a sprig of fir in his
+cap to show that he had killed a buck.
+
+"And here, Miss Franziska," he said, quite gaily, "here is a yellow
+fox for you. I was told that you wanted the skin of one."
+
+Franziska fairly blushed for pleasure; not that the skin of a fox was
+very valuable for her, but that the compliment was so open and marked.
+She came forward, in German fashion, and rather shyly shook hands with
+him in token of her thanks.
+
+When Tita was getting ready for dinner I told her about the yellow
+fox. A married man must have no secrets.
+
+"He is not capable of such a thing," she says, with a grand air.
+
+"But he did it," I point out. "What is more, he glories in it. What
+did he say when I remonstrated with him on the way home! '/Why/,' says
+he, '/I will put an end to Krumm! I will abolish Krumm! I will
+extinguish Krumm!/' Now, madame, who is responsible for this? Who had
+been praising Franziska night and day as the sweetest, gentlest,
+cleverest girl in the world, until this young man determines to have a
+flirtation with her and astonish you?"
+
+"A flirtation!" says Tita, faintly. "Oh no! Oh, I never meant that."
+
+"Ask him just now, and he will tell you that women deserve no better.
+They have no hearts; they are treacherous. They have beautiful eyes,
+but no conscience. And so he means to take them as they are, and have
+his measure of amusement."
+
+"Oh, I am sure he never said anything so abominably wicked," cried
+Tita, laying down the rose that Franziska had given her for her hair.
+"I know he could not say such things. But if he is so wicked--if he
+has said them--it is not too late to interfere. /I/ will see about
+it."
+
+She drew herself up as if Jupiter had suddenly armed her with his
+thunderbolts. If Charlie had seen her at this moment he would have
+quailed. He might by chance have told the truth, and confessed that
+all the wicked things he had been saying about woman's affection were
+only a sort of rhetoric, and that he had no sort of intention to flirt
+with poor Franziska, nor yet to extinguish and annihilate Dr. Krumm.
+
+The heartbroken boy was in very good spirits at dinner. He was
+inclined to wink. Tita, on the contrary, maintained an impressive
+dignity of demeanour; and when Franziska's name happened to be
+mentioned she spoke of the young girl as her very particular friend,
+as though she would dare Charlie to attempt a flirtation with one who
+held that honour. But the young man was either blind or reckless, or
+acting a part for mere mischief. He pointed the finger of scorn at Dr.
+Krumm. He asked Tita if he should bring her a yellow fox next day. He
+declared he wished he could spend the remainder of his life in a Black
+Forest Inn, with a napkin over his arm, serving chopins. He said he
+would brave the wrath of the Furst by shooting a capercailzie on the
+very first opportunity, to bring the shining feathers home to
+Franziska.
+
+When Tita and I went upstairs at night the small and gentle creature
+was grievously perplexed.
+
+"I cannot make it out," she said. "He is quite changed. What is the
+matter with him?"
+
+"You behold, madam, in that young man the moral effects of vulpicide.
+A demon has entered into him. You remember, in 'Der Freischutz,'
+how--"
+
+"Did you say vulpicide?" she asks, with a sweet smile. "I understood
+that Charlie's crime was that he did /not/ kill the fox."
+
+I allow her the momentary triumph. Who would grudge to a woman a
+little verbal victory of that sort? And, indeed, Tita's satisfaction
+did not last long. Her perplexity became visible on her face once
+more.
+
+"We are to be here three weeks," she said, almost to herself, "and he
+talks of flirting with poor Franziska. Oh, I never meant that!"
+
+"But what did you mean?" I ask her, with innocent wonder.
+
+Tita hangs down her head, and there is an end to that conversation;
+but one of us, at least, has some recollection of a Christmas wager.
+
+
+
+IV
+CONFESSIO AMANTIS
+
+Charlie was not in such good spirits next morning. He was standing
+outside the inn, in the sweet, resinous-scented air, watching
+Franziska coming and going, with her bright face touched by the early
+sunlight, and her frank and honest eyes lit up by a kindly look when
+she passed us. His conscience began to smite him for claiming that
+fox.
+
+We spent the day in fishing a stream some few miles distant from
+Huferschingen, and Franziska accompanied us. What need to tell of our
+success with the trout and the grayling, or of the beautiful weather,
+or of the attentive and humble manner in which the unfortunate youth
+addressed Franziska from time to time?
+
+In the evening we drove back to Huferschingen. It was a still and
+beautiful evening, with the silence of the twilight falling over the
+lonely valleys and the miles upon miles of darkening pines. Charlie
+has not much of a voice, but he made an effort to sing with Tita:
+
+  "The winds whistle cold and the stars glimmer red,
+  The sheep are in fold and the cattle in shed;"
+
+and the fine old glee sounded fairly well as we drove through the
+gathering gloom of the forest. But Tita sang, in her low, sweet
+fashion, that Swedish bridal song that begins:
+
+  "Oh, welcome her so fair, with bright and flowing hair;
+  May Fate through life befriend her, love and smiles attend her;"
+
+and though she sang quietly, just as if she were singing to herself,
+we all listened with great attention, and with great gratitude too.
+When we got out of Huferschingen, the stars were out over the dark
+stretches of forest, and the windows of the quaint old inn were
+burning brightly.
+
+"And have you enjoyed the amusement of the day?" says Miss Fahler,
+rather shyly, to a certain young man who is emptying his creel of
+fish. He drops the basket to turn round and look at her face and say
+earnestly:
+
+"I have never spent so delightful a day; but it wasn't the fishing."
+
+Things were becoming serious.
+
+And next morning Charlie got hold of Tita, and said to her, in rather
+a shamefaced way:
+
+"What am I to do about that fox? It was only a joke, you know; but if
+Miss Fahler gets to hear of it, she'll think it was rather shabby."
+
+It was always Miss Fahler now; a couple of days before it was
+Franziska.
+
+"For my part," says Tita, "I can't understand why you did it. What
+honour is there in shooting a fox?"
+
+"But I wanted to give the skin to her."
+
+It was "her" by this time.
+
+"Well, I think the best thing you can do is to go and tell her all
+about it; and also to go and apologise to Dr. Krumm."
+
+Charlie started.
+
+"I will go and tell her, certainly; but as for apologising to Krumm,
+that is absurd!"
+
+"As you please," says Tita.
+
+By-and-by Franziska--or rather Miss Fahler--came out of the small
+garden and round by the front of the house.
+
+"O Miss Fahler," says Charlie, suddenly,--and with that she stops and
+blushes slightly,--"I've got something to say to you. I am going to
+make a confession. Don't be frightened; it's only about a fox--the fox
+that was brought home the day before yesterday; Dr. Krumm shot that."
+
+"Indeed," says Franziska, quite innocently, "I thought you shot it."
+
+"Well, I let them imagine so. It was only a joke."
+
+"But it is of no matter; there are many yellow foxes. Dr. Krumm can
+shoot them at another time; he is always here. Perhaps you will shoot
+one before you go."
+
+With that Franziska passed into the house, carrying her fruit with
+her. Charlie was left to revolve her words in his mind. Dr. Krumm
+could shoot foxes when he chose; he was always here. He, Charlie, on
+the contrary, had to go away in little more than a fortnight. There
+was no Franziska in England; no pleasant driving through great pine
+woods in the gathering twilight; no shooting of yellow foxes, to be
+brought home in triumph and presented to a beautiful and grateful
+young woman. Charlie walked along the white road and overtook Tita,
+who had just sat down on a little camp-stool, and got out the
+materials for taking a water-colour sketch of the Huferschingen
+Valley. He sat down at her feet on the warm grass.
+
+"I suppose I sha'n't interrupt your painting by talking to you?" he
+says.
+
+"Oh dear, no," is the reply; and then he begins, in a somewhat
+hesitating way, to ask indirect questions and drop hints and fish for
+answers, just as if this small creature, who was busy with her sepias
+and olive greens, did not see through all this transparent cunning.
+
+At last she said to him, frankly:
+
+"You want me to tell you whether Franziska would make a good wife for
+you. She would make a good wife for any man. But then you seem to
+think that I should intermeddle and negotiate and become a go-between.
+How can I do that. My husband is always accusing me of trying to make
+up matches; and you know that isn't true."
+
+"I know it isn't true," says the hypocrite; "but you might only this
+once. I believe all you say about this girl; I can see it for myself;
+and when shall I ever have such a chance again?"
+
+"But dear me!" says Tita, putting down the white palette for a moment,
+"how can I believe you are in earnest? You have only known her three
+days."
+
+"And that is quite enough," says Charlie, boldly, "to let you find out
+all you want to know about a girl if she is of the right sort. If she
+isn't you won't find out in three years. Now look at Franziska; look
+at the fine, intelligent face and the honest eyes; you can have no
+doubt about her; and then I have all the guarantee of your long
+acquaintance with her."
+
+"Oh," says Tita, "that is all very well. Franziska is an excellent
+girl, as I have told you often--frank, kind, well educated, and
+unselfish. But you cannot have fallen in love with her in three days?"
+
+"Why not?" says this blunt-spoken young man.
+
+"Because it is ridiculous. If I meddle in the affair I should probably
+find you had given up the fancy in other three days; or if you did
+marry her and took her to England you would get to hate me because I
+alone should know that you had married the niece of an innkeeper."
+
+"Well, I like that!" says he, with a flush in his face. "Do you think
+I should care two straws whether my friends knew I had married the
+niece of an innkeeper? I should show them Franziska. Wouldn't that be
+enough? An innkeeper's niece! I wish the world had more of 'em, if
+they're like Franziska."
+
+"And besides," says Tita, "have you any notion as to how Franziska
+herself would probably take this mad proposal?"
+
+"No," says the young man, humbly. "I wanted you to try and find out
+what she thought about me; and if, in time something were said about
+this proposal, you might put in a word or two, you know, just to--to
+give her an idea, you know, that you don't think it quite so mad,
+don't you know?"
+
+"Give me your hand, Charlie," says Tita, with a sudden burst of
+kindness. "I'll do what I can for you; for I know she's a good girl,
+and she will make a good wife to the man who marries her."
+
+You will observe that this promise was given by a lady who never, in
+any circumstances whatsoever, seeks to make up matches, who never
+speculates on possible combinations when she invites young people to
+her house in Surrey, and who is profoundly indignant, indeed, when
+such a charge is preferred against her. Had she not, on that former
+Christmas morning, repudiated with scorn the suggestion that Charlie
+might marry before another year had passed? Had she not, in her wild
+confidence, staked on a wager that assumption of authority in her
+household and out of it without which life would be a burden to her?
+Yet no sooner was the name of Franziska mentioned, and no sooner had
+she been reminded that Charlie was going with us to Huferschingen,
+than the nimble little brain set to work. Oftentimes it has occurred
+to one dispassionate spectator of her ways that this same Tita
+resembled the small object which, thrown into a dish of some liquid
+chemical substance, suddenly produces a mass of crystals. The
+constituents of those beautiful combinations, you see, were there; but
+they wanted some little shock to hasten the slow process of
+crystallisation. Now in our social circle we have continually observed
+groups of young people floating about in an amorphous and chaotic
+fashion--good for nothing but dawdling through dances, and flirting,
+and carelessly separating again; but when you dropped Tita among them,
+then you would see how rapidly this jellyfish sort of existence was
+abolished--how the groups got broken up, and how the sharp,
+businesslike relations of marriage were precipitated and made
+permanent. But would she own to it? Never! She once went and married
+her dearest friend to a Prussian officer; and now she declares he was
+a selfish fellow to carry off the girl in that way, and rates him
+soundly because he won't bring her to stay with us more than three
+months out of the twelve. There are some of us get quite enough of
+this Prussian occupation of our territory.
+
+"Well," says Tita to this long English lad, who is lying sprawling on
+the grass, "I can safely tell you this, that Franziska likes you very
+well."
+
+He suddenly jumps up, and there is a great blush on his face.
+
+"Has she said so?" he asks, eagerly.
+
+"Oh yes! in a way. She thinks you are good-natured. She likes the
+English generally. She asked me if that ring you wear was an engaged
+ring."
+
+These disconnected sentences were dropped with a tantalising slowness
+into Charlie's eager ears.
+
+"I must go and tell her directly that it is not," said he; and he
+might probably have gone off at once had not Tita restrained him.
+
+"You must be a great deal more cautious than that if you wish to carry
+off Franziska some day or other. If you were to ask her to marry you
+now she would flatly refuse you, and very properly; for how could a
+girl believe you were in earnest? But if you like, Charlie, I will say
+something to her that will give her a hint; and if she cares for you
+at all before you go away she won't forget you. I wish I was as sure
+of you as I am of her."
+
+"Oh I can answer for myself," says the young man, with a becoming
+bashfulness.
+
+Tita was very happy and pleased all that day. There was an air of
+mystery and importance about her. I knew what it meant; I had seen it
+before.
+
+Alas! poor Charlie!
+
+
+
+V
+"GAB MIR EIN' RING DABEI"
+
+Under the friendly instructions of Dr. Krumm, whom he no longer
+regarded as a possible rival, Charlie became a mighty hunter; and you
+may be sure that he returned of an evening with sprigs of fir in his
+cap for the bucks he had slain, Franziska was not the last to come
+forward and shake hands with him and congratulate him, as is the
+custom in these primitive parts. And then she was quite made one of
+the family when we sat down to dinner in the long, low-roofed room;
+and nearly every evening, indeed, Tita would have her to dine with us
+and play cards with us.
+
+You may suppose, if these two young folk had any regard for each
+other, those evenings in the inn must have been a pleasant time for
+them. There were never two partners at whist who were so courteous to
+each other, so charitable to each other's blunders. Indeed, neither
+would ever admit that the other blundered. Charlie used to make some
+frightful mistakes occasionally that would have driven any other
+player mad; but you should have seen the manner in which Franziska
+would explain that he had no alternative but to take her king with his
+ace, that he could not know this, and was right in chancing that. We
+played three-penny points, and Charlie paid for himself and his
+partner, in spite of her entreaties. Two of us found the game of whist
+a profitable thing.
+
+One day a registered letter came for Charlie. He seized it, carried it
+to a window, and then called Tita to him. Why need he have any secret
+about it? It was nothing but a ring--a plain hoop with a row of
+rubies.
+
+"Do you think she would take this thing?" he said, in a low voice.
+
+"How can I tell?"
+
+The young man blushed and stammered, and said:
+
+"I don't want you to ask her to take the ring, but to get to know
+whether she would accept any present from me. And I would ask her
+myself plainly, only you have been frightening me so much about being
+in a hurry. And what am I to do? Three days hence we start."
+
+Tita looked down with a smile and said, rather timidly:
+
+"I think if I were you I would speak to her myself--but very gently."
+
+We were going off that morning to a little lake some dozen miles off
+to try for a jack or two. Franziska was coming with us. She was,
+indeed, already outside, superintending the placing in the trap of our
+rods and bags. When Charlie went out she said that everything was
+ready; and presently our peasant driver cracked his whip, and away we
+went.
+
+Charlie was a little grave, and could only reply to Tita's fun with an
+effort. Franziska was mostly anxious about the fishing, and hoped that
+we might not go so far to find nothing.
+
+We found few fish anyhow. The water was as still as glass, and as
+clear; the pike that would have taken our spinning bits of metal must
+have been very dull-eyed pike indeed. Tita sat at the bow of the long
+punt reading, while our boatman steadily and slowly plied his single
+oar. Franziska was for a time eagerly engaged in watching the progress
+of our fishing, until even she got tired of the excitement of rolling
+in an immense length of cord, only to find that our spinning bait had
+hooked a bit of floating wood or weed. At length Charlie proposed that
+he should go ashore and look out for a picturesque site for our
+picnic, and he hinted that perhaps Miss Franziska might also like a
+short walk to relieve the monotony of the sailing. Miss Franziska said
+she would be very pleased to do that. We ran them in among the rushes,
+and put them ashore, and then once more started on our laborious
+career.
+
+Tita laid down her book. She was a little anxious. Sometimes you could
+see Charlie and Franziska on the path by the side of the lake; at
+other times the thick trees by the water's side hid them.
+
+The solitary oar dipped in the lake; the boat glided along the shores.
+Tita took up her book again. The space of time that passed may be
+inferred from the fact that, merely as an incident to it, we managed
+to catch a chub of four pounds. When the excitement over this event
+had passed, Tita said:
+
+"We must go back to them. What do they mean by not coming on and
+telling us? It is most silly of them."
+
+We went back by the same side of the lake, and we found both Franziska
+and her companion seated on the bank at the precise spot where we had
+left them. They said it was the best place for the picnic. They asked
+for the hamper in a businesslike way. They pretended they had searched
+the shores of the lake for miles.
+
+And while Tita and Franziska are unpacking the things, and laying the
+white cloth smoothly on the grass, and pulling out the bottles for
+Charlie to cool in the lake, I observe that the younger of the two
+ladies rather endeavours to keep her left hand out of sight. It is a
+paltry piece of deception. Are we moles, and blinder than moles, that
+we should continually be made the dupes of these women? I say to her:
+
+"Franziska, what is the matter with your left hand?"
+
+"Leave Franziska's left hand alone," says Tita, severely.
+
+"My dear," I reply, humbly, "I am afraid Franziska has hurt her left
+hand."
+
+At this moment Charlie, having stuck the bottles among the reeds,
+comes back, and, hearing our talk, he says, in a loud and audacious
+way:
+
+"Oh, do you mean the ring? It's a pretty little thing I had about me,
+and Franziska has been good enough to accept it. You can show it to
+them, Franziska.
+
+Of course he had it about him. Young men always do carry a stock of
+ruby rings with them when they go fishing, to put in the noses of the
+fish. I have observed it frequently.
+
+Franziska looks timidly at Tita, and then she raises her hand, that
+trembles a little. She is about to take the ring off to show it to us
+when Charlie interposes:
+
+"You needn't take it off, Franziska."
+
+And with that, somehow, the girl slips away from among us, and Tita is
+with her, and we don't get a glimpse of either of them until the
+solitude resounds with our cries for luncheon.
+
+In due time Charlie returned to London, and to Surrey with us in very
+good spirits. He used to come down very often to see us; and one
+evening at dinner he disclosed the fact that he was going over to the
+Black Forest in the following week, although the November nights were
+chill just then.
+
+"And how long do you remain?"
+
+"A month," he says.
+
+"Madam," I say to the small lady at the other end of the table," a
+month from now will bring us to the 4th of December. You have lost the
+bet you made last Christmas morning; when will it please you to resign
+your authority?"
+
+"Oh, bother the bet," says this unscrupulous person.
+
+"But what do you mean?" says Charlie.
+
+"Why," I say to him, "she laid a wager last Christmas Day that you
+would not be married within a year. And now you say you mean to bring
+Franziska over on the 4th of December next. Isn't it so?"
+
+"Oh, no!" he says; "we don't get married till the spring."
+
+You should have heard the burst of low, delightful laughter with which
+Queen Tita welcomed this announcement. She had won her wager.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Stories by English Authors in Germany
+
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