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(front)
BY
(front)
LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
(contents)
(illustrations)
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 bad 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
north-east, 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-hearted 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.
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, whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or café 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 fourfooted
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 up hill, and left the dying dog for the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.
It was the last day before Kermesse 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 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 wagons 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 amidst 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 too 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 with 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 whilst
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 neighbors 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 labour 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 succoured. 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 kermesse 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 milk, and the great
tawny-coloured, 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.
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
faggot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has
dwelt upon the mountains or amidst 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 water-side 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-colored 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 amidst
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.
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.
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 birth-place
in the chancel of St. Jacques?
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, whilst 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, tumbledown, 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 not 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,
tawney-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, wrapt 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 seen them, 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,
name-
less 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 could'st own this hut and the little
plot of ground, and labour 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 trod 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 altar-pieces 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 broadsown 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
kermesse 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 nowise conscious of her heritage, and she loved no playfellows so well
as Jehan Daas' 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 amidst the hay, with the great tawny
head of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of poppies and blue
cornflowers 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 whilst 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 Arden-
nois; 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 nought 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 whilst 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
mor-
row 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 then!" said the little spoilt 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 honor, whilst 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
pourtray him as the old man is pourtrayed 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' saint's day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread, whilst 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 exact
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 young head over the bed.
"Tut! tut! Mother Vulette 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 out- house 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, careworn 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 labour 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, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile, seemed
to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart and
by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp."
Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted.
He had done his best: the rest must be as God willed, he thought, in that innocent, unquestioning faith which had been taught him in the little gray chapel among the willows and the poplar-trees.
The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they reached the
hut, snow fell; and fell for very many days after that, so that the paths
and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the smaller
streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon the plains. Then,
indeed, it became hard work to go round for the milk, while the world was
all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the silent town.
Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage of the years, that
were only bringing Nello a stronger youth, were bringing him old age, and
his joints were stiff, and his bones ached often. But he would never give
up his share of the 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 labour 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 suspicion, nor the outrageous accusations born of
them, but the people were all very poor and very ignorant, and the one rich
man of the place had pronounced against him. Nello, in his innocence and
his friendlessness, had no strength to stem the popular tide.
"Thou art very cruel to the lad," the miller's wife
dared to say, weeping, to her lord. "Sure he is an innocent lad and a
faithful, and would never dream of any such wickedness, however sore his
heart might be."
But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, having once said a thing, held to
it doggedly, though in his innermost soul he knew well the injustice that
he was committing.
Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against him with a certain
proud patience that disdained to
complain: he only gave way a little when he was quite alone with old Patrasche. Besides, he thought, "If my picture 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
paralysed, 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.
Noël was close at hand.
The weather was very wild and cold. The snow was six feet deep, and the
ice was firm enough to bear oxen and men upon it everywhere. At this season
the little village was always gay and cheerful. At the poorest dwelling
there were possets and cakes, joking and dancing, sugared saints and gilded
Jésus. The merry Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the horses;
everywhere within doors some well-filled soup-pot sang and
smoked over the stove; and everywhere over the snow without laughing
maidens pattered in bright kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going to and from
the mass. Only in the little hut it was very dark and very cold.
Nello and Patrasche were left utterly alone, for one night in the week
before the Christmas Day, Death entered there, and took away from life
forever old Jehan Daas, who had never known life aught save its poverty and
its pains. He had long been half dead,
incapable of any movement except a feeble gesture, and powerless for anything beyond a gentle word; and yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror in it: they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in his sleep, and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement, unutterable solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had long been only a poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, who could not raise a hand in their defence, but he had loved them well: his smile had always welcomed their return. They mourned for him unceasingly, refusing to be comforted, as in the white winter day they followed the deal shell that held his body to the nameless grave by the little gray church. They were his only mourners, these two whom he had left friendless upon earth--the young boy and the old dog.
"Surely, he will relent now and let the poor lad come
hither?" thought the miller's wife, glancing at her husband
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' hands and bade
her go and lay it reverently on the dark, unmarked mound where the snow was displaced.
Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts. But even of that poor,
melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation. There was a
month's rent over-due for their little place, and when Nello
had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He went
and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who went every Sunday
night to drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas Cogez. The cobbler
would grant no mercy. He was a harsh, miserly man, and loved money. He
claimed in default of his rent every stick and stone, every pot and pan, in
the hut, and bade Nello and Patrasche be out of it on the morrow.
Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense miserable enough, and
yet their hearts clove to it with a great affection. They had been so happy
there, and in the summer, with its clambering vine and its flowering beans,
it was so pretty and bright in the midst of the sun-lighted fields!
There life in it had been full of labour 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 to-
gether 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, 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 in the dues of debt, and his brass
harness lay idle and glittering on the snow. The dog could have lain down
beside it and died for very heart-sickness as he went, but whilst
the lad lived and needed him Patrasche would not yield and give way.
They took the old accustomed road into Antwerp. The day had yet scarce
more than dawned, most of the shutters were still closed, but some of the
villagers were about. They took no notice whilst the dog and the boy passed
by them. At one door Nello paused and
looked wistfully within: his grandfather had done many a kindly turn in 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 that wheat
and rye were very dear that season. The boy and the dog went on again
wearily: they asked no more.
By slow and painful ways they reached Antwerp as the chimes tolled
ten.
"If I had anything about me I could sell to get him bread!"
thought Nello, but he had nothing except the wisp of linen and serge that
covered him, and his pair of wooden shoes.
Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the lad's hand, as
though to pray him not to be disquieted for any woe or want of his.
The winner of the drawing prize was to be proclaimed at noon, and to the
public building where he had left his treasure Nello made his way. On the
steps and in the entrance-hall there was a crowd of
youths--some of his age, some older, all with parents or relatives or
friends. His heart was sick with fear as he went among them, holding
Patrasche close to him. The great bells of the city clashed out the hour
of noon with brazen clamor. The doors of the inner hall were opened; the eager, panting throng rushed in: it was known that the selected picture would be raised above the rest upon a wooden dais.
A mist obscured Nello's sight, his head swam, his limbs almost
failed him. When his vision cleared he saw the drawing raised on
high: it was not his own! A slow, sonorous voice was proclaiming
aloud that victory had been adjudged to Stephen Kiesslinger, born in the
burgh of Antwerp, son of a wharfinger in that town.
When Nello recovered his consciousness he was lying on the stones
without, and Patrasche was trying with every art he knew to call him back
to life. In the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were shouting
around their successful comrade, and escorting him with acclamations to his
home upon the quay.
The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into his embrace.
"It is all over, dear Patrasche," he murmured--"all
over!"
He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak from fasting, and
retraced his steps to the village. Patrasche paced by his side with his
head drooping and his old limbs feeble from hunger and sorrow.
The snow was falling fast: a keen hurricane blew
from the north: it was bitter as death on the plains. It took them long to traverse the familiar path, and the bells were sounding four of the clock as they approached the hamlet. Suddenly Patrasche paused, arrested by a scent in the snow, scratched, whined, and drew out with his teeth a small case of brown leather. He held it up to Nello in the darkness. Where they were there stood a little Calvary, and a lamp burned dully under the cross: the boy mechanically turned the case to the light: on it was the name of Baas Cogez, and within it were notes for six 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 signed 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 on him, 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 for ever," 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 hold, and told him how it had come back
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, sun-burned
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. In my greed I sinned, and the Lord chastened me
gently: 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 red mass of holly. There were
little paper-lanterns, too, for Alois, and toys of various fashions
and sweetmeats in bright-pictured papers. There were light and
warmth and abundance everywhere, and the child would fain have made the dog
a guest honored and feasted.
But Patrasche would neither lie in the warmth nor share in the cheer.
Famished he was and very cold, but without Nello he would partake neither
of comfort nor food. Against all temptation he was proof, and close against
the door he leaned always, watching only for a means of escape.
"He wants the lad," said Baas Cogez. "Good dog! good
dog! I will go over to the lad the first thing at
day-dawn."
For no one but Patrasche knew that Nello had left the hut, and no one
but Patrasche divined that Nello had left him there, to 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, and he would not. 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 cosy 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 and arduous labour to discover any scent by which to guide
him in pursuit. When at last he found it, it was lost again quickly; and
lost and recovered, and again lost and again recovered, a hundred times,
and 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. Now and then 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 divers 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, drooping thing, that no one
pitied as he went--and by long patience traced the steps he loved into
the very heart of the burgh and up to the steps of the great cathedral.
"He is gone to the things that he loved," thought
Patrasche: he could not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of
pity for the art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet
so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep, or
too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one of the
doors unlocked. By that accident the foot-falls Patrasche sought had
passed through into the
building, leaving the white marks of snow upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity of the vaulted space--guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and, stretched there upon the stones, he found Nello. He crept up noiselessly, 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 dykes 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.
No anger had ever separated them; no cloud had ever come between them;
no roughness on the one side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever
obscured their perfect love and trust. All through their short lives they
had done their duty as it had come to them, and had been happy in the mere
sense of living, and had begrudged nothing to any man or beast, and had
been quite content because quite innocent. And in the faintness of famine
and of the frozen blood that stole dully and slowly through their veins, it
was of the days they had spent together that they dreamed, lying there in
the long watches of the night of Noël.
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; He will have
mercy."
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 earth and burn nuts with us all the Noël 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--for ever.
All for a branch of lilac. You do not believe? Chut! Men have been shot
many a time for as little. A glance, a smile, a tear, a withered flower. So
little. And yet so much when they are a woman's. So much. All
one's present, all one's past, all one's future.
There is the lilac--look! There is no colour, no fragrance, no
loveliness in it now. It is so pale, so faded, so scentless. So
faded--just like a love that is dead.
People say that men cannot love in these days. It is a lie. Rich
men--perhaps not. But the poor!--Then, women do not care for
that.
You asked me my story. Why? To have a history is a luxury for the rich.
What use can one be to the
poor? If they tell it, who listens? And I have been very poor, always. Yet I was happy till that lilac blossomed one fair spring day.
I am a comedian. My mother was one before me. My father--oh,
ta-ta-ta! That is another luxury for the wealthy.
My mother was quite obscure always. A little humble player. She passed
with a little wandering troupe, at certain seasons, from town to town, from
province to province.
I remember, when I was very small, being carried on her shoulders or
about her waist along the dusty roads, and catching at the butterflies in
the sunshine as we went.
I was a little, round, brown, mischievous child--very ugly, I am
sure, as I am now and have ever been. But to her, no doubt--dear
soul!--I had beauty.
I must have plagued her sorely, always on the move as she was; but she
never made me think myself a nuisance. However tired she might be, she was
never too tired to romp and gambol with me. Poor little white, bright,
thin-cheeked mother! I see her now, dancing in her spangles with the
red paint on, and the bird-like eyes of her always seeking the
plump, rough boy who only pulled her dress to pieces when he was hungry, or
pommeled her with his sunburnt fists when
he was cross and tired. And he was often both tired and hungry: that I remember also. But it was not her fault. Poor little mother! She would have danced her feet to the bone to keep me like a baby prince, if it had been possible for dancing to have brought in wealth.
Poor little mother! She had a heavy fall from some scaffolding when I
was five years old; but I can see her now, as though it were yesterday, in
her scarlet bodice and her silvered skirts, running off the stage the
moment she was free to take me in her arms and cover me with kisses.
And, as I remember her, I think she must have been full of
grace--such grace as a bird's is on a bough full of summer leaf;
but if I am right, the people whom she danced for were wrong, for the
public never saw anything particular in her, and she died as she had
lived--a strolling player to the last.
"Piccinino" was the last word she spoke; Piccinino was the
name she always called me; Piccinino I remained. I must have had some other
name, of course, that the law gave me. But the law and I were never close
friends, and I never asked my debts to it.
The little troupe of comedians whom my mother had been associated with
were very good to me. There is so very much goodness in all Bohemians.
They are always kindly, generous, sympathetic, compassionate. I was a little motherless, penniless, desolate wretch of five years old; ugly, too--brown and ugly, as you see me now, very much. I have had a face too good for comedy, too good to make the people laugh, for it ever to have been anything except grotesque and unlovely. But they were as good to me as though I had been beautiful to the sight and had inherited a patrimony.
The old men and the young, the heldames and the pretty women of the
little company, vied with each other in charity and hospitality. True, they
were all very poor, but what they had they never grudged to me. They took
me with them everywhere, and never even dreamed of turning off the cost and
trouble of me upon that bitter stepmother--the state.
As I grew older I took to the stage myself. I could not have imagined
life lived to any other music than that of the little shrill
reed-pipe and deep-rolling drum, that had drowned my first
cries at my birth; and had awakened my laughter so many and many a time
later on, that it seemed to me that their cheery sounds were as needful to
all sense of existence as was the very light of the sun itself.
There were little things that a child could do, little parts that a
child could play, and these I had and
these I did almost from the time my mother left me alone in the world. They said I did them well. I do not know about that. I only know that the boards of our little travelling theatre always seemed the natural home to me, and that I was never afraid of the innumerable eyes of the largest audience: they always seemed to me the eyes of friends--of the only friends that I had upon earth.
It was so pleasant, too, to make them laugh. I, a little child, a little
ugly fellow, whom the children of the towns and villages hooted as I passed
up their streets, could hold all these mature men and women, all these
fathers of families and grandsires and granddames, shaking and shouting
with laughter at the pranks of my mirth and my talent. It was my revenge,
and it was sweet to me. Those children who hooted me, who sometimes stoned
me, who called me "mountebank," and yelled at me for my
ugliness,--they could not make their elders laugh at will. But I
could.
I did not bear the children, my foes, any malice. I was what they called
good-tempered, and whether I were on or off the stage I was gay at
heart almost always at that time, and every other time indeed till that
lilac blossomed two years ago.
It was a merry life we led. Very poor, oh yes, and hard in many ways. We
had to tramp in all weathers
from place to place, timing ourselves to reach this hamlet or that town by such and such a saint's day or festivity. We had to sleep very often in haylofts or even in cattle-sheds, for usually such taverns as we alone could afford to go to were full to overflowing at any feast-time or market-season. At other periods, too, we did not always make enough to leave anything to be divided amongst ourselves after all expenses of setting up and lighting our little portable playhouse were paid; and old Vico Mathurin, our head and chief, was as honest as the day, and would cheat no man of a sou though he starved for it.
But what did that matter? We were a cheerful little fraternity, loving
one another, only vying with each other in good-natured rivalry; and
always ready, each of us, to make the best of all chances and all
circumstances. We often thought, as we went through the towns, how much
happier and freer we were than those were who dwelt in them, bound to one
spot, mewed under one roof, seeing one landscape always, looking always to
find a grave in the self-same place where they were born, whilst we
went and came as we chose, never tarried long enough in one place to grow
weary of it, seldom saw the fruit ripen on the same trees where we saw it
blossom, and had nothing between us and the width of the skies.
I dare say the townspeople pitied us as homeless vagrants. No doubt. But
we never pitied ourselves. So we must have been happy? Wisely or
unwisely?
I was but a little creature when I went first on the stage, but I was
born a Bohemian, and I was content--more than content, full of
joy--as I pattered along by Vico Mathurin's side, my little bare
feet deep in the summer dust or splashing into puddles of the autumn
rain.
Full of joy, for Mathurin would pat me on the head and prophesy wondrous
things of my talent; and then pretty, blue-eyed Euphrasie would kiss
me and weave the roadside grasses into crowns for me, and big Francisque,
her lover, would raise me for a ride on his stout shoulder; and ever and
again a lark would sing, or a rabbit would scud across the path, or an old
peasant would drop me a handful of mulberries or a clump of honeycomb
wrapped in a green leaf; or some other little homely, innocent, simple
pleasure would blossom in my way as the country wild-flowers sprang
up beneath my steps.
In the winter, it is true, it was more severe. Winter tries hardly all
the wandering races: if the year were all summer, all the world would
be Bohemians.
But even in the winter there was so much that
was mirthful and pleasant one could not be sad or despondent. Usually in the winter we tarried in some southerly town; and if one were cold, some good creature sitting at her chestnut-stall in the street would be sure to thrust some fine nuts smoking into my hands with a smile, or pretty Euphrasie would catch me in her arms and warm my cheek upon her beating heart; and then big Francisque would pretend a ferocious jealousy, and take a terrible vengeance by pelting me with gilded gingerbreads from the fairy booths until I cried for quarter, while Vico Mathurin, the gentle good old man, would, if he had a chance to do so unperceived, slip his share of the frugal meal into my plate, and make believe that some friend at a wineshop had so feasted him at breakfast that he had no appetite nor power left for more. Ah, dear people, dear people! are you with the dead? I wonder. I shall know soon.
So my childhood and boyhood went away very happily. Poverty I did not
mind, for it was a poverty so contented and mirthful, and I had never known
anything else; and ugliness I did not regret, for they all told me that my
physiognomy was the most ductile and expressive for the comic mummeries
which were the special vein of my stage-talent.
Only now and then, when the little dark-eyed girls
of some religious procession with their white lilies and their upraised crosses shrank a little from me under their white clouds of muslin,--only then did I wish that I were straight of feature and comely to the eye, as most lads were.
"It is stupid to be as ugly as that," said one little
pretty, fair creature to me once on a confirmation-day, pushing me
aside in the street on to the sharp-set stones of the roadway. I
stumbled and I winced, she was so fair and angel-like.
But that night she came, my little angel, still with her white rosebuds
on her yellow curls, to the theatre which we had set up in the
market-place--came with her parents, who were rich tanners in
the town. I saw her; I saw nothing but her: she laughed, she cried,
she applauded: she was scarlet with wonder, beside herself with
glee.
They told me--Mathurin and Francisque, my teachers and
masters--that I had never played so well, so wonderfully for my years,
as I played that night. I laughed as I heard them, an hysterical, choking
laugh, I remember, not seeing them, only seeing in the sea of faces one
little golden head crowned with white rosebuds.
"Ask her now if it be stupid to be ugly," I
said to them; then I fainted.
You do not care to hear all this. What does it matter? Whether I
suffered or enjoyed, loved or hated, is of no consequence to any one. The
dancing-dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the stick, and
is capable of intense attachment to any one who is merciful enough not to
beat him; but the dancing-dog and his woe and his love are nothing
to the world: I was as little.
There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel, than the waste of
emotion, the profuse expenditure of fruitless pain, which every hour, every
moment, as it passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If it were of
any use who would mind? But it is all waste, frightful waste, to no end, to
no end.
I wander: I cannot help it. I must tell of myself in my own way,
or not at all.
Thus I grew up with these gay, kindly, tendersouled people, who were
outcasts in the sight of most men. When I was about fifteen years of age
the old man died--died of cold, I believe. He gave his
little scaldino and his one thick cloak to
warm
the feet of a poor young creature who had hardly recovered from
child-birth, and who lay shivering on a bed of straw in a wayside
hut; and having done this, saying nothing to any one, he lay shivering all
night in his garret in a bitter frost,
till his heart ceased its slow gentle beating for ever,
His loss broke up the little troop. Its members held loosely together
for a while, but the keystone which had united the whole had fallen when
Mathurin died, and the several pieces of the little structure dropped
asunder one by one. Francisque and Euphrasie bethought themselves late in
the day of getting the sanction of priests on their love, and wedded one
another and went somewhere southward, I forget whither, and together opened
a café and flower-shop, thinking it time to get a roof over
their heads and a place in the reputable world as middle age crept upon
them. The others all went right and left, east and west, as they would. I
went first with some, then with others.
Euphrasie would have had me go to live with them and help to plant her
flower seeds and bind up her carnations, but I would not leave the old ways
of the old life. A roof?--what could that matter to me, young and
strong and gifted with one talent, as all people said?
Besides, I had been born a Bohemian: the wanderer's, the
stroller's blood was in me strong and ardent. I loved the freedom and
the change--ay, I loved the very risks and deprivations--of the
career I had always followed, and I was resolved that there should
never be any music sweeter in my ear than the sounds of the old reed-pipe and the brazen drum which had greeted my young senses in my cradle. I was eighteen: I was full of health and strength. I had a talent that at least was good for this--to make the people laugh. I do not need to say I had no fear of the future: I loved the career of a comedian, and I would not have exchanged its gayety and carelessness and freedom for anything--nay, not for an empire.
My early instructor, Mathurin, although he had remained an obscure
stroller to the last, had been a man of accurate judgment and of genuine
taste. He had reared me to discern the difference between a graceful
fooling and a witless buffoonery: he had taught me to aim always at
raising the pure mirth and the happy glee of the populace by legitimate
means, and not by the vile medium of obscene jests and of lascivious
side-play. I was a comic actor, as he had been: yes, but this
I can say, as he did before me--that never by me were the people the
worse for the laughter I raised.
What does that matter, either? you say. Not much to any one; only, when
one is to die at break of day, it is not unpleasant to remember that no
girl's mind was the baser, no man's impulses were the lewder,
for the way one has followed one's art.
I joined various troops of wandering players after the old band broke up
at Mathurin's death. I was successful, in my way, with the people. I
never attracted notice enough to be called to any city or sought by any
impresario.
I do not think I was ever coarse enough for the famous theatres. Nay, I
speak in sober earnest, not in any irony. The taste of cities requires
indecent gesture, and sees no point in a jest unless it have some foul
meaning hidden in its équivoque. Now,
my
fooling was cleanly and honest in its mirth--simple, I dare say, but,
as far as I could make it, harmless. When the tired hordes of the labouring
classes and the stupid, open-mouthed peasantry crammed the wooden
booth to overflowing, and laughed at me till they lifted the canvas roofing
with the loud gusts of their expanding lungs, they were never the worse for
that momentary oblivion of their hunger and
travail--never:--that I know.
So I spent my life for ten years--spent it till that lilac
bloomed.
Oh, do not think I was a saint. I had plenty of follies, plenty of sins.
I loved a draught of wine, a fling at dominoes, a kiss of ripe lips, a
dance with limber limbs: I loved all these as well as any man, and
had my share of them. But what I would
say is, that in my art I always tried to do good. Vico Mathurin had always led me to see that any career may be ennobled by the leading of it, and he had always held that though the world may rate it low, the art of the comic player may have a noble aim if it aspire ever to make the weary and overtasked multitude forget for a little season the gall of heavy harness and the toil of flinty roads.
"See you here," he would say to me many a time when I was a
boy. "These people come and look at us and hearken to us, and laugh
and are glad for a little space: then, when they go back into their
cabins or their attics, some little trill of our song will stay on their
famished lips, some little bubble of laughter at the memory of one of our
jokes will remain with them amidst their poverty and their hard work; and
these will be like a stray sunbeam in a cellar in the darkness of their
lot. Think of that, think of that, Piccinino, and it will not hurt you when
any scoffer casts at you, as a term of scorn, your title of strolling
player."
And these words of my dear old master abode with me always, and as far
as I could I trod closely in his footsteps; and in many places where he had
been known the people welcomed me and loved me a little for his sake.
I never left France: we who speak only to the
populace cannot go where the populace have another tongue than ours. But France is so wide, and I was for ever on the move--in the north for the harvest, in the centre for the vintage, in the south for the winter season; going whithersoever there was a festival or a bridal or a great market, or a holiday of any sort that made the townsfolk or the villagers in festal trim and in the mood to smile.
When I sit in the gloom here I see all the scenes of that pleasant life
pass like pictures before me.
No doubt I was often hot, often cold, often footsore, often ahungered
and athirst: no doubt: but all that has faded now. I only see
the old, lost, unforgotten brightness; the sunny roads, with the wild
poppies blowing in the wayside grass; the quaint little red roofs and
peaked towers that were thrust upward out of the rolling woods; the clear
blue skies, with the larks singing against the sun; the quiet, cool,
moss-grown towers, with old dreamy bells ringing sleepily above
them; the dull casements opening here and there to show a rose like a
girl's cheek, and a girl's face like the rose; the little
wineshops buried in their climbing vines and their tall,
many-coloured hollyhocks, from which sometimes a cheery voice would
cry, "Come, stay for a stoup of wine, and pay us with a
song."
Then, the nights when the people flocked to us, and the little tent was
lighted, and the women's and the children's mirth rang out in
peals of music; and the men vied with each other as to which should bear
each of us off to have bed and board under the cottage roof, or in the old
mill-house, or in the weaver's garret; the nights when the
homely supper-board was brightened and thought honoured by our
presence; when we told the black-eyed daughter's fortunes, and
kept the children round-eyed and flushing red with wonder at strange
tales, and smoked within the leaf-hung window with the father and
his sons; and then went out, quietly, alone in the moonlight, and saw the
old cathedral white and black in the shadows and the light; and strayed a
little into its dim aisles, and watched the thorn-crowned God upon
the cross, and in the cool, fruit-scented air, in the sweet silent
dusk, moved softly with noiseless footfall and bent head, as though the
dead were there.
Ah, well! they are all gone, those days and nights. Begrudge me not
their memory. I am ugly, and very poor, and of no account; and I die at
sunrise, so they say. Let me remember whilst I can: it is all
oblivion there. So they say.
But happiness depends so much upon one's self. That is a
threadbare saying of the preachers. Yes, I know. But it is true, for all
that.
So long as one has no regret, one can be happy; and as for me, I envied
no man. This was ignorance, no doubt. If I had ever known what wealth and
its powers and its pleasures were like, no doubt I should have hungered for
them like the rest of men. But I had never known, and it was not in my
nature merely to be jealous of possession. If I had been crippled, I should
have passionately envied those who still walked at will straightly and
swiftly whither they would. But it was not in me, whilst I could march as I
pleased, strongly and fast, through the seeding grasses, over the
sun-swept plains, amongst the red and gold leaves of autumn, and
over the white fields of the midwinter snows,--it was not in me then,
I say, to envy the men
who rolled on wheels or were borne by horses. It was not in me: it would have seemed to me peevish, childish, ingrate, mean.
This was my ignorance, no doubt. Men, I have noticed, knowing much, do
envy much--almost always.
One day in the early spring-time, I came with my troop into a
little town that stood on the Loire River--a little old, gray town,
high on a rock, circled by crumbling walls, all blossoming everywhere just
then with bud and leaf, all over its moat and its ramparts, in its streets
and its casements: its very ditches were white with
lilies-of-the-valley, and its very roofs were yellow
with flowering houseleeks, while at every nook and comer over the walls of
its gardens the lilacs, white and purple, were in bloom. I can smell them
now: in the ditch that they will bury me in, I shall smell them
still, I think.
We entered the gates at high noon, and set up our play-house in
the market-square.
The morrow would be a fête-day, and the town was stirred
from the gray torpor and stillness of its extreme old age, and was alive
and gay with country-people and its own small population, all afoot
and thronging the wooden stalls of the fair, and the crooked steep alleys
that crossed and recrossed each other up the slope of the place.
As I went up one of these, bearing my share of the framework and the
canvas of our play-house, with the reed-pipe and the old drum
sounding merrily as ever before our tired steps, I heard a voice above me,
the clear, high voice of a woman.
"How ugly he is, that one!" it cried with a laugh.
"His face alone is a burlesque. He will make the very dogs in the
streets die of laughter."
"Hush!" said a voice that was lower in tone and fuller.
"Who knows? He may hear. And he looks so weary and so
tired!"
The other voice laughed on in its cruel and saucy glee:
"Pooh! He is too ugly to live! Why does God make such
creatures?"
And across the eyes the fragrance of lilac in full blossom struck me a
cool, refreshing blow.
She who spoke last had broken a branch of the sweet spring flower and
cast it down to me in merry scorn, so that it fell across the timber on
which my hands were clasped. There was a little saffron-hued
butterfly upon it, I remember, and one golden-brown bee. The bee
paused a moment upon my wrist and then flew from me; the butterfly remained
upon the blossoms.
I looked up. An old man, a gardener, who had
chidden her and the bright creature who had thrown the sweet blossom and the harsh words at me, leaned over the old gray, moss-grown wall. The lilac boughs were all about her--above, beneath, around. Her golden head glistened in the sunlight. She had a knot of lilacs in her breast.
Can I describe her? No: think of the woman who to you, above all
others of her sex, has meant--Love.
She was but a young girl of the people, the orphan daughter of a poor
wood-carver, simply clad in the garb of her province, spending a
momentary rest from her daily labour in leaning over the old garden wall to
watch the strange strollers pass by with pipe and beat of drum; but to me
she became the world.
It is so strange! We see a million faces, we hear a million voices, we
meet a million women with flowers in their breasts and light in their fair
eyes, and they do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for us life
or death, and plays with them idly so often--as idly as a child with
toys. She is not nobler, better or more beautiful than were all those we
passed, and yet the world is empty to us without her.
I went on up the street. I held the bough of lilac in my hand.
Yes: this bough, poor faded, scentless thing! And that morning it
was so bright, so full of odour, so
eagerly kissed by the butterfly and the bee. Two years ago, just two years ago! Are the lilacs in flower there, I wonder, now? Surely; and she gathers them and throws them to her lover. Why not?
Shall she think of the bough that is dead--of the bough that
blossomed last season--so long ago, so long ago? No. The lilac flowers
live but a day. But that brief day is longer than a woman's memory, I
think.
I went on up the street.
That night!--how I played I cannot tell. I did not know what I did.
All about me was the smell of the lilac trees, and in the sea of faces
below I looked only for hers. She was not there.
When the stage wanted me no longer, and the audience had flocked out,
loud in eager praises of us, I shook myself free of all my comrades and of
the hearty townsfolk, and went back to that little steep street full of the
smell of the lilacs.
There was a clear, full moon. The lilacs were all colourless in it, and
their scent was heavy on the wind. Some rill of water within the garden
walls was falling with musical and even measure. An owl flew by me with
swift white wing gleaming silver-bright in the lustre of the stars.
Why do I speak of these things? They are nothing now. And yet they are with
me always.
I walked there to and fro all night. At sunrise I went away ashamed.
What was a bough of lilac to make me a fool, thus?
At daybreak I asked a stone-cutter, as he went by me to his work,
who dwelt behind those old crumbling walls. He told me no one. They were
the walls of an old monastic garden, into which any one might stray at
pleasure. I asked him no more. I felt a strange silence and shyness upon
me.
I went home to the little miserable tavern where my people had found
lodging, and went up to my garret there, and looked at the lilac bough, and
bent my head and kissed it foolishly. I felt as though it were my fate in
some way.
I had placed it