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          A Dog of Flanders

by Louisa de la Rame' (Ouida), 1909

                  I

    NELLO and Patrasche were left all
alone in the world.

    They were friends in a friendship
closer than brotherhood. Nello was a
little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big
Fleming. They were both of the same
age by length of years, yet one was
still young, and the other was
already old. They had dwelt together
almost all their days: both were
orphaned and destitute, and owed
their lives to the same hand. It had
been the beginning of the tie between
them, their first bond of sympathy;
and it had strengthened day by day,
and had grown with their growth, firm
and indissoluble, until they loved
one another very greatly.

    Their home was a little hut on
the edge of a little village--a
Flemish village a league from
Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of
pasture and corn-lands, with long
lines of poplars and of alders
bending in the breeze on the edge of
the great canal which ran through it.
It had about a score of houses and
homesteads, with shutters of bright
green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red
or black and white, and walls white-
washed 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.

                  II

    A DOG of Flanders--yellow of
hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and
legs bowed and feet widened in the
muscular development wrought in his
breed by many generations of hard
service, Patrasche came of a race
which had toiled hard and cruelly
from sire to son in Flanders many a
century--slaves of slaves, dogs of
the people, beasts of the shafts and
the harness, creatures that lived
straining their sinews in the gall of
the cart, and died breaking their
hearts on the flints of the streets.

    Patrasche had been born of
parents who had labored hard all
their days over the sharp-set stones
of the various cities and the long,
shadowless, weary roads of the two
Flanders and of Brabant. He had been
born to no other heritage than those
of pain and of toil. He had been fed
on curses and baptized with blows.
Why not? It was a Christian country,
and Patrasche was but a dog. Before
he was fully grown he had known the
bitter gall of the cart and the
collar. Before he had entered his
thirteenth month he had become the
property of a hardware-dealer, who
was accustomed to wander over the
land north and south, from the blue
sea to the green mountains. They sold
him for a small price, because he was
so young.

    This man was a drunkard and a
brute. The life of Patrasche was a
life of hell. To deal the tortures of
hell on the animal creation is a way
which the Christians have of showing
their belief in it. His purchaser was
a sullen, ill-living, brutal
Brabantois, who heaped his cart full
with pots and pans and flagons and
buckets, and other wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrasche
to draw the load as best he might,
whilst he himself lounged idly by the
side in fat and sluggish ease,
smoking his black pipe and stopping
at every wineshop or cafe on the
road.

    Happily for Patrasche--or
unhappily-- he was very strong: he
came of an iron race, long born and
bred to such cruel travail; so that
he did not die, but managed to drag
on a wretched existence under the
brutal burdens, the scarifying
lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the
blows, the curses, and the exhaustion
which are the only wages with which
the Flemings repay the most patient
and laborious of all their four-
footed victims. One day, after two
years of this long and deadly agony,
Patrasche was going on as usual along
one of the straight, dusty, unlovely
roads that lead to the city of
Rubens. It was full midsummer, and
very warm. His cart was very heavy,
piled high with goods in metal and in
earthenware. His owner sauntered on
without noticing him otherwise than
by the crack of the whip as it curled
round his quivering loins. The
Brabantois had paused to drink beer
himself at every wayside house, but
he had forbidden Patrasche to stop a
moment for a draught from the canal.
Going along thus, in the full sun, on
a scorching highway, having eaten
nothing for twenty-four hours, and,
which was far worse to him, not
having tasted water for near twelve,
being blind with dust, sore with
blows, and stupefied with the
merciless weight which dragged upon
his loins, Patrasche staggered and
foamed a little at the mouth, and
fell.

    He fell in the middle of the
white, dusty road, in the full glare
of the sun; he was sick unto death,
and motionless. His master gave him
the only medicine in his pharmacy--
kicks and oaths and blows with a
cudgel of oak, which had been often
the only food and drink, the only
wage and reward, ever offered to him.
But Patrasche was beyond the reach of
any torture or of any curses.
Patrasche lay, dead to all
appearances, down in the white powder
of the summer dust. After a while,
finding it useless to assail his ribs
with punishment and his ears with
maledictions, the Brabantois--deeming
life gone in him, or going so nearly
that his carcass was forever useless,
unless indeed some one should strip
it of the skin for gloves--cursed him
fiercely in farewell, struck off the
leathern bands of the harness, kicked
his body aside into the grass, and,
groaning and muttering in savage
wrath, pushed the cart lazily along
the road 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.

                 III

    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, 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 labor for which
Nature never formed them. But
Patrasche would not be gainsaid:
finding they did not harness him, he
tried to draw the cart onward with
his teeth.

    At length Jehan Daas gave way,
vanquished by the persistence and the
gratitude of this creature whom he
had succored. He fashioned his cart
so that Patrasche could run in it,
and this he did every morning of his
life thenceforward.

    When the winter came, Jehan Daas
thanked the blessed fortune that had
brought him to the dying dog in the
ditch that fair day of Louvain; for
he was very old, and he grew feebler
with each year, and he would ill have
known how to pull his load of milk-
cans over the snows and through the
deep ruts in the mud if it had not
been for the strength and the
industry of the animal he had
befriended. As for Patrasche, it
seemed heaven to him. After the
frightful burdens that his old master
had compelled him to strain under, at
the call of the whip at every step,
it seemed nothing to him but
amusement to step out with this
little light green cart, with its
bright brass cans, by the side of the
gentle old man who always paid him
with a tender caress and with a
kindly word. Besides, his work was
over by three or four in the day; and
after that time he was free to do as
he would--to stretch himself, to
sleep in the sun, to wander in the
fields, to romp with the young child,
or to play with his fellow-dogs.
Patrasche was very happy.

    Fortunately for his peace, his
former owner was killed in a drunken
brawl at the Kermesse of Mechlin, and
so sought not after him nor disturbed
him in his new and well-loved home.

                  IV

    A FEW years later, old Jehan
Daas, who had always been a cripple,
became so paralyzed with rheumatism
that it was impossible for him to go
out with the cart any more. Then
little Nello, being now grown to his
sixth year of age, and knowing the
town well from having accompanied his
grandfather so many times, took his
place beside the cart, and sold the
milk and received the coins in
exchange, and brought them back to
their respective owners with a pretty
grace and seriousness which charmed
all who beheld him.

    The little Ardennois was a
beautiful child, with dark, grave,
tender eyes, and a lovely bloom upon
his face, and fair locks that
clustered to his throat; and many an
artist sketched the group as it went
by him--the green cart with the brass
flagons of Teniers and Mieris and Van
Tal, and the great tawny-colored,
massive dog, with his belled harness
that chimed cheerily as he went, and
the small figure that ran beside him
which had little white feet in great
wooden shoes, and a soft, grave,
innocent, happy face like the little
fair children of Rubens.

    Nello and Patrasche did the work
so well and so joyfully together that
Jehan Daas himself, when the summer
came and he was better again, had no
need to stir out, but could sit in
the doorway in the sun and see them
go forth through the garden wicket,
and then doze and dream and pray a
little, and then awake again as the
clock tolled three and watch for
their return. And on their return
Patrasche would shake himself free of
his harness with a bay of glee, and
Nello would recount with pride the
doings of the day; and they would all
go in together to their meal of rye
bread and milk or soup, and would see
the shadows lengthen over the great
plain, and see the twilight veil the
fair cathedral spire; and then lie
down together to sleep peacefully
while the old man said a prayer. So
the days and the years went on, and
the lives of Nello and Patrasche were
happy, innocent, and healthful.

    In the spring and summer
especially were they glad. Flanders
is not a lovely land, and around the
burgh of Rubens it is perhaps least
lovely of all. Corn and colza,
pasture and plough, succeed each
other on the characterless plain in
wearying repetition, and save by some
gaunt gray tower, with its peal of
pathetic bells, or some figure coming
athwart the fields, made picturesque
by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's
fagot, there is no change, no
variety, no beauty anywhere; and he
who has dwelt upon the mountains or
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 bring 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.

                  V

    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.

    It is so quiet there by that
great white sepulchre--so quiet, save
only when the organ peals and, the
choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or
the Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist
ever had a greater gravestone than
that pure marble sanctuary gives to
him in the heart of his birthplace in
the chancel of St. Jacques.

    Without Rubens, what were
Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling
mart, which no man would ever care to
look upon save the traders who do
business on its wharves. With Rubens,
to the whole world of men it is a
sacred name, a sacred soil, a
Bethlehem where a god of Art saw
light, a Golgotha where a god of Art
lies dead.

    O nations! closely should you
treasure your great men, for by them
alone will the future know of you.
Flanders in her generations has been
wise. In his life she glorified this
greatest of her sons, and in his
death she magnifies his name. But her
wisdom is very rare.

    Now, the trouble of Patrasche was
this. Into these great, sad piles of
stones, that reared their melancholy
majesty above the crowded roofs, the
child Nello would many and many a
time enter, and disappear through
their dark arched portals, 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 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.



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