A Dog of Flanders by Louisa de la Rame)
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Louisa de la Rame) >> A Dog of Flanders
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, rapt 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.
[Illustration: tree]
[Illustration: scenery]
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 risen, 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, nameless 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 couldst own this hut and the little plot of ground, and
labor for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbors," 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
neighbors 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 trodden 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 travelled 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's grandson
and his dog.
[Illustration: child]
[Illustration: NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL]
[Illustration: couple walking]
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 corn-flowers 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 colored 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 color died out of the face of the young Ardennois; 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 field.
"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 naught 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 occasion, 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.
[Illustration: ]
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 cornfields by the canal, ran
to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the morrow 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," 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 portray
him as the old man is portrayed 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's 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 sure 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 head
over the bed.
"Tut! tut! Mother Nulette 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 color 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.
[Illustration]
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; colors 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 labor 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.
[Illustration: ]
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 labor. 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
labor 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.