Part 1 (1/2)
A Dog of Flanders
by Louisa de la Rame
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world
They were friends in a friendshi+p closer than brotherhood Nello was a little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleth 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 sa of the tie between thethened day by day, and had groith their growth, firreatly Their hoe--a Fleue from Antwerp, set a 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 horeen or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sun like snow In the centre of the village stood a windrown 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 round 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 rheue, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it alrain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the ray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang e, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seeral part of its melody
Within sound of the little melancholy clock alether, 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 froeless 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 fro 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 hiacy her two-year-old son The old man could ill contrive to support hily, 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 sround that yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins They were very poor, terribly poor-- 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 ood 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 alith them, since without Patrasche where would they have been?
For Patrasche was their alpha and oold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and one 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
[Illustration]
A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of head and lis bowed and feet widened in the enerations of hard service
Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly from sire to son in Flanders s 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, as accustomed to wander over the land north and south, froreen mountains They sold hi
This man was a drunkard and a brute The life of Patrasche was a life of hell To deal the tortures of hell on the ani their belief in it His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his cart full with pots and pans and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he ed idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, s at every wineshop or cafe on the road
Happily for Patrasche--or unhappily--he was very strong: he ca born and bred to such cruel travail; so that he did not die, buton 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 hich the Fles repay the most patient and laborious of all their four-footed victiony, Patrasche was going on as usual along one of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that lead to the city of Rubens It was full h 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 athus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was far worse to hi blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the ered and foamed a little at the mouth, and fell
He fell in the lare of the sun; he was sick unto death, and ave him the only medicine in his pharel 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 su it useless to assail his ribs with punish life gone in hi so nearly that his carcass was forever useless, unless indeed soloves--cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off the leathern bands of the harness, kicked his body aside into the grass, and, groaning andthe 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 andanimal, and because he hi 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 hi alone out of sight of its , and for two long, cruel years had made him toil ceaselessly in his service froh suot a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being hu to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they ht be by the birds, whilst he hi and to steal, to eat and to drink, to dance and to sing, in theof 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 onquickly and joyously on to Louvain Some saw hianywhere in the world
[Illustration]
After a ti the holiday-makers, there came a little old uise for feasting: he was very poorly and h the dust a 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 ith him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a few years old, who pattered in a with a pretty seriousness upon the poor, great, quiet beast
Thus it was that these two firstPatrasche