Part 19 (1/2)
”Bide a wee, Bobby. Before he goes I want you all to see his beautiful eyes. In most breeds of dogs with the veil you will find the hairs of the face discolored by tears, but the Skye terrier's are not, and his eyes are living jewels, as sunny a brown as cairngorms in pebble brooches, but soft and deep and with an almost human intelligence.”
For the third time that day Bobby's veil was pushed back. One shocked look by this lover of dogs, and it was dropped. ”Get him back to that grave, man, or he's like to die. His eyes are just two cairngorms of grief.”
In the hush that fell upon the company the senior officer spoke sharply: ”Take him down at once, Sergeant. The whole affair is most unfortunate, and you will please tender my apologies at the churchyard and the restaurant, as well as your own, and I will see the Lord Provost.”
The military salute was given to Bobby when he leaped from the table at the sergeant's call: ”Come awa', Bobby. I'll tak' ye to Auld Jock i' the kirkyaird noo.”
He stepped out onto the lawn to wait for his pa.s.s. Bobby stood at his feet, quivering with impatience to be off, but trusting in the man's given word. The upper air was clear, and the sky studded with stars.
Twenty minutes before the May Light, that guided the s.h.i.+ps into the Firth, could be seen far out on the edge of the ocean, and in every direction the lamps of the city seemed to fall away in a shower of sparks, as from a burst meteor. But now, while the stars above were as numerous and as brilliant as before, the lights below had vanished. As the sergeant looked, the highest ones expired in the rising fog. The Island Rock appeared to be sinking in a waveless sea of milk.
A startled exclamation from the sergeant brought other men out on the terrace to see it. The senior officer withheld the pa.s.s in his hand, and scouted the idea of the sergeant's going down into the city. As the drum began to beat the tattoo and the bugle to rise on a crescendo of lovely notes, soldiers swarmed toward the barracks. Those who had been out in the town came running up the roadway into the Castle, talking loudly of adventures they had had in the fog. The sergeant looked down at anxious Bobby, who stood agitated and straining as at a leash, and said that he preferred to go.
”Impossible! A foolish risk, Sergeant, that I am unwilling you should take. Edinburgh is too full of pitfalls for a man to be going about on such a night. Our guests will sleep in the Castle, and it will be safer for the little dog to remain until morning.”
Bobby did not quite understand this good English, but the excited talk and the delay made him uneasy. He whimpered piteously. He lay across the sergeant's feet, and through his boots the man could feel the little creature's heart beat. Then he rose and uttered his pleading cry. The sergeant stooped and patted the s.h.a.ggy head consolingly, and tried to explain matters.
”Be a gude doggie noo. Dinna fash yersel' aboot what canna be helped. I canna tak' ye to the kirkyaird the nicht.”
”I'll take charge of Bobby, Sergeant.” The dog-loving guest ran out hastily, but, with a wild cry of reproach and despair, Bobby was gone.
The group of soldiers who had been out on the cliff were standing in the postern a moment to look down at the opaque flood that was rising around the rock. They felt some flying thing sweep over their feet and caught a silvery flash of it across the promenade. The sergeant cried to them to stop the dog, and he and the guest were out in time to see Bobby go over the precipice.
For a time the little dog lay in a clump of hazel above the fog, between two terrors. He could see the men and the lights moving along the top of the cliff, and he could hear the calls. Some one caught a glimpse of him, and the sergeant lay down on the edge of the precipice and talked to him, saying every kind and foolish thing he could think of to persuade Bobby to come back. Then a drummer boy was tied to a rope and let down to the ledge to fetch him up. But at that, without any sound at all, Bobby dropped out of sight.
Through the smother came the loud moaning of fog-horns in the Firth.
Although nothing could be seen, and sounds were m.u.f.fled as if the ears of the world were stuffed with wool, odors were held captive and mingled in confusion. There was nothing to guide a little dog's nose, everything to make him distrust his most reliable sense. The smell of every plant on the crag was there; the odors of leather, of paint, of wood, of iron, from the crafts shops at the base. Smoke from chimneys in the valley was mixed with the strong scent of horses, hay and grain from the street of King's Stables. There was the smell of furry rodents, of nesting birds, of gus.h.i.+ng springs, of the earth itself, and something more ancient still, as of burned-out fires in the Huge ma.s.s of trap-rock.
Everything warned Bobby to lie still in safety until morning and the world was restored to its normal aspects. But ah! in the highest type of man and dog, self-sacrifice, and not self-preservation, is the first law. A deserted grave cried to him across the void, the anguish of protecting love urged him on to take perilous chances. Falling upon a narrow shelf of rock, he had bounded off and into a thicket of thorns.
Bruised and shaken and bewildered, he lay there for a time and tried to get his bearings.
Bobby knew only that the way was downward. He put out a paw and felt for the edge of the shelf. A thorn bush rooted below tickled his nose. He dropped into that and scrambled out again. Loose earth broke under his struggles and carried him swiftly down to a new level. He slipped in the wet moss of a spring before he heard the tinkle of the water, lost his foothold, and fell against a sharp point of rock. The shadowy spire of a fir-tree looming in a parting of the vapor for an instant, Bobby leaped to the ledge upon which it was rooted.
Foot by foot he went down, with no guidance at all. It is the nature of such long, low, earth dogs to go by leaps and bounds like foxes, calculating distances nicely when they can see, and tearing across the roughest country with the speed of the wild animals they hunt. And where the way is very steep they can scramble up or down any declivity that is at a lesser angle than the perpendicular. Head first they go downward, setting the fore paws forward, the claws clutching around projections and in fissures, the weight hung from the stout hindquarters, the body flattened on the earth.
Thus Bobby crept down steep descents in safety, but his claws were broken in crevices and his feet were torn and pierced by splinters of rock and thorns. Once he went some distance into a cave and had to back up and out again. And then a promising slope shelving under suddenly, where he could not retreat, he leaped, turned over and over in the air, and fell stunned. His heart filled with fear of the unseen before him, the little dog lay for a long time in a clump of whins. He may even have dozed and dreamed, to be awakened with starts by his misery of longing, and once by the far-away barking of a dog. It came up deadened, as if from fathoms below. He stood up and listened, but the sound was not repeated. His lacerated feet burned and throbbed; his bruised muscles had begun to stiffen, so that every movement was a pain.
In these lower levels there was more smoke, that smeared out and thickened the mist. Suddenly a breath of air parted the fog as if it were a torn curtain. Like a shot Bobby went down the crag, leaping from rock to rock, scrambling under thorns and hazel shrubs, dropping over precipitous ledges, until he looked down a sheer fall on which not even a knot of gra.s.s could find a foothold. He took the leap instantly, and his thick fleece saved him from broken bones; but when he tried to get up again his body was racked with pain and his hind legs refused to serve him.
Turning swiftly, he snarled and bit, at them in angry disbelief that his good little legs should play false with his stout heart. Then he quite forgot his pain, for there was the sharp ring of iron on an anvil and the dull glow of a forge fire, where a smith was toiling in the early hours of the morning. A clever and resourceful little dog, Bobby made s.h.i.+ft to do without legs. Turning on his side, he rolled down the last slope of Castle Rock. Crawling between two buildings and dropping from the terrace on which they stood, he fell into a little street at the west end and above the Gra.s.smarket.
Here the odors were all of the stables. He knew the way, and that it was still downward. The distance he had to go was a matter of a quarter of a mile, or less, and the greater part of it was on the level, through the sunken valley of the Gra.s.smarket. But Bobby had literally to drag himself now; and he had still to pull him self up by his fore paws over the wet and greasy cobblestones of Candlemakers Row. Had not the great leaves of the gate to the kirkyard been left on the latch, he would have had to lie there in the alcove, with his nose under the bars, until morning. But the gate gave way to his push, and so, he dragged himself through it and around the kirk, and stretched himself on Auld Jock's grave.
It was the birds that found him there in the misty dawn. They were used to seeing Bobby scampering about, for the little watchman was awake and busy as early as the feathered dwellers in the kirkyard. But, in what looked to be a wet and furry door-mat left out overnight on the gra.s.s, they did not know him at all. The throstles and skylarks were shy of it, thinking it might be alive. The wrens fluffed themselves, scolded it, and told it to get up. The blue t.i.tmice flew over it in a flock again and again, with much sweet gossiping, but they did not venture nearer. A redbreast lighted on the rose bush that marked Auld Jock's grave, c.o.c.ked its head knowingly, and warbled a little song, as much as to say: ”If it's alive that will wake it up.”
As Bobby did not stir, the robin fluttered down, studied him from all sides, made polite inquiries that were not answered, and concluded that it would be quite safe to take a silver hair for nest lining. Then, startled by the animal warmth or by a faint, breathing movement, it dropped the s.h.i.+ning trophy and flew away in a shrill panic. At that, all the birds set up such an excited crying that they waked Tammy.
From the rude loophole of a window that projected from the old Cunzie Neuk, the crippled laddie could see only the shadowy tombs and the long gray wall of the two kirks, through the sunny haze. But he dropped his crutches over, and climbed out onto the vault. Never before had Bobby failed to hear that well-known tap-tap-tapping on the graveled path, nor failed to trot down to meet it with friskings of welcome. But now he lay very still, even when a pair of frail arms tried to lift his dead weight to a heaving breast, and Tammy's cry of woe rang through the kirkyard.
In a moment Ailie and Mistress Jeanie were in the wet gra.s.s beside them, half a hundred cas.e.m.e.nts flew open, and the piping voices of tenement bairns cried-down: