Part 3 (1/2)

Vastly rejoiced was Lad, and inordinately proud of himself. And the plaudits of the Master and the Mistress were music to him.

Indefinably, he understood he had done a very wonderful thing and that everybody on The Place was talking about him, and that all were trying to pet him at once.

This promiscuous handling he began to find unwelcome. And he retired at last to his ”cave” under the piano to escape from it. Matters soon quieted down; and the incident seemed at an end.

Instead, it had just begun.

For, within an hour, the Mistress--who, for days had been half-sick with a cold--was stricken with a chill, and by night she was in the first stages of pneumonia.

Then over The Place descended Gloom. A gloom Lad could not understand until he went upstairs at dinner-time to escort the Mistress, as usual, to the dining-room. But to his light scratch at her door there was no reply. He scratched again and presently Master came out of the room and ordered him down-stairs again.

Then from the Master's voice and look, Lad understood that something was terribly amiss. Also, as she did not appear at dinner and as he was for the first time in his life forbidden to go into her room, he knew the Mistress was the victim of whatever mishap had befallen.

A strange man, with a black bag, came to the house early in the evening; and he and the Master were closeted for an interminable time in the Mistress' room. Lad had crept dejectedly upstairs behind them; and sought to crowd into the room at their heels. The Master ordered him back and shut the door in his face.

Lad lay down on the threshold, his nose to the crack at the bottom of the door, and waited. He heard the murmur of speech.

Once he caught the Mistress' voice--changed and m.u.f.fled and with a puzzling new note in it--but undeniably the Mistress'. And his tail thumped hopefully on the hall floor. But no one came to let him in. And, after the mandate to keep out, he dared not scratch for admittance.

The doctor almost stumbled across the couchant body of the dog as he left the room with the Master. Being a dog-owner himself, the doctor understood and his narrow escape from a fall over the living obstacle did not irritate him. But it reminded him of something.

”Those other dogs of yours outside there,” he said to the Master, as they went down the stairs, ”raised a fearful racket when my car came down the drive, just now. Better send them all away somewhere till she is better. The house must be kept perfectly quiet.”

The Master looked back, up the stairway; at its top, pressed close against the Mistress' door, crouched Lad. Something in the dog's heartbroken att.i.tude touched him.

”I'll send them over to the boarding-kennels in the morning,” he answered. ”All except Lad. He and I are going to see this through, together. He'll be quiet, if I tell him to.”

All through the endless night, while the October wind howled and yelled around the house, Lad lay outside the sick-room door, his nose between his absurdly small white paws, his sorrowful eyes wide open, his ears alert for the faintest sound from the room beyond.

Sometimes, when the wind screamed its loudest, Lad would lift his head--his ruff a-bristle, his teeth glinting from under his upcurled lip. And he would growl a throaty menace. It was as though he heard, in the tempest's racket, the strife of evil gale-spirits to burst in through the rattling windows and attack the stricken Mistress.

Perhaps--well, perhaps there are things visible and audible to dogs; to which humans were deaf and blind. Or perhaps they are not.

Lad was there when day broke and when the Master, heavy-eyed from sleeplessness, came out. He was there when the other dogs were herded into the car and carried away to the boarding-kennels.

Lad was there when the car came back from the station, bringing to The Place an angular, wooden-faced woman with yellow hair and a yellower suitcase--a horrible woman who vaguely smelt of disinfectants and of rigid Efficiency, and who presently approached the sick-room, clad and capped in stiff white. Lad hated her.

He was there when the doctor came for his morning visit to the invalid. And again he tried to edge his own way into the room, only to be rebuffed once more.

”This is the third time I've nearly broken my neck over that miserable dog,” chidingly announced the nurse, later in the day, as she came out of the room and chanced to meet the Master on the landing. ”Do please drive him away. _I've_ tried to do it, but he only snarls at me. And in a dangerous case like this----”

”Leave him alone,” briefly ordered the Master.

But when the nurse, sniffing, pa.s.sed on, he called Lad over to him. Reluctantly, the dog quitted the door and obeyed the summons.

”Quiet!” ordered the Master, speaking very slowly and distinctly. ”You must keep quiet. _Quiet!_ Understand?”

Lad understood. Lad always understood. He must not bark. He must move silently. He must make no unnecessary sound. But, at least, the Master had not forbidden him to snarl softly and loathingly at that detestable white-clad woman every time she stepped over him.

So there was one grain of comfort.