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A dog of Flanders. Nello and Patruski were leftall alone in the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer thanbrotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennas, Patruskiwas
a big Fleming. They were both of the same age bylength of years, yet one was still young,
and the other was already old. They had dwelttogether almost all their days, both were orphaned
and destitute, and owe their lives to the samehand. It had been the beginning of the tie between
them, their first bond of sympathy, and it hadstrengthened day by day, and had grown with their
growth, firm and indissoluble, until they lovedone another very greatly. Their home was a little
hot on the edge of a little village, a Flemishvillage a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat
breaths of pasture and cornlands, with long linesof 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, androofs rose red or black and white,
and walls whitewashed until they shone in the sun-like snow. In the centre of the village
stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grownslope, 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 groundwheat for the soldiers of Napoleon,
and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind andweather. It went queerly by fits and starts,
as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints fromage, but it served the whole neighbourhood,
which would have thought it almost as impious tocarry grain elsewhere as to attend any other
religious service than the Mass that was performedat the altar of the little old grey church,
with its conical steeple, which stood opposite toit, and whose single bell rang morning,
noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollowsadness which every bell that hangs
in the low country seems to gain as an integralpart of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almostfrom their birth upward,
they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrusky, inthe little hut on the edge of the village,
with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in thenorth-east, beyond the great green plain
of seeding grass and spreading corn that stretchedaway from them like a tideless,
changeless sea. It was the hut of a very old man,of a very poor man, of old Jehan Doss,
who in his time had been a soldier, and whoremembered the wars that had trampled the
country as oxen tread down the furrows, and whohad brought from his service nothing except awound,
which had made him a cripple. When old Jehan Dosshad 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 contriveto support himself, but he took up the additional
burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcomeand precious to him. Little Nello,
which was but a pet diminutive for Nicholas, drovewith him, and the old man and the little
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child lived in the poor little hut contentedly. Itwas a very humble little mud hut indeed,
but it was clean and white as a seashell, andstood in a small plot of garden ground that yielded
herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terriblypoor, many a day they had nothing at all to eat.
They never by any chance had enough, to have hadenough to eat would have been to have reached
Paradise at once. But the old man was very gentleand good to the boy, and the boy was a beautiful,
innocent, truthful, tender-hearted creature, andthey were happy on a crust and a few leaves of
cabbage, and asked no more of earth or heaven,save indeed that Patrusky should be always with
them, since without Patrusky where would they havebeen? For Patrusky was their Alpha and Omega
their treasury and granary, their store of goldand want of wealth, their breadwinner andminister,
their only friend and comforter. Patrusky dead orgone from them, they must have laid themselves
down and died likewise. Patrusky was body, brains,hands, head, and feet to both of them,
Patrusky was their very life, their very soul. ForJehandas was old and a cripple,
and Nello was but a child, and Patrusky was theirdog. A dog of Flanders, yellow of hide,
large of head and limb, with wolf-like ears thatstood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in
the muscular development wrought in his breed bymany generations of hard service.
Patrusky came of a race which had toiled hard andcruelly 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 ofthe cart, and died breaking their hearts on the
flints of the streets. Patrusky had been born ofparents who had laboured hard all their days over
the sharp-set stones of the various cities and thelong, shadowless, weary roads of the two
Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to noother heritage than those of pain and of toil.
He had been fed on curses and baptised with blows.Why not? It was a Christian country,
and Patrusky was but a dog. Before he was fullygrown 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 wanderover the land north and south,
from the Blue Sea to the Green Mountains. Theysold him for a small price,
because he was so young. This man was a drunkardand a brute. The life of Patrusky was a life of
hell. To deal the tortures of hell on the animalcreation is a way which the Christians have of
showing their belief in it. His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabant was,
who heaped his cart full with pots and pans andflagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrusky to draw theload as best he might, whilst he himself lounged
idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smokinghis black pipe and stopping in every
wine-shop or café on the road. Happily for Patrusky, or unhappily, he was very strong,
he came of an iron race, long-born and bred tosuch cruel travail, so that he did not die,
but managed to drag on a wretched existence underthe brutal burdens, the scarifying lashes,
the hunger, the thirst, the blows, the curses, andthe exhaustion which are the only wages with
which the Flemings repay the most patient andlaborious of all their four-footed victims.
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One day, after two years of this long and deadlyagony, Patrusky was going on as usual along one
of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that leadto the city of Rubens. It was full midsummer,
and very warm. His cart was very heavy, piled highwith goods in metal and in earthenware.
His owner sauntered on without noticing himotherwise than by the crack of the whip as it
curled round his quivering loins. The Brabant washad paused to drink beer himself at every
wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrusky tostop a moment for a draft from the canal.
Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorchinghighway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four
hours, and, which was far worse to him, not havingtasted water for near twelve, being blind
with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with themerciless weight which dragged upon his loins,
Patrusky staggered and foamed a little at themouth, 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 hispharmacy, kicks and oaths and blows with a
cudgel of oak, which had been often the only foodand drink, the only wage and reward,
ever offered to him. But Patrusky was beyond thereach of any torture or of any curses.
Patrusky lay, dead to all appearances, down in thewhite powder of the summer dust.
After a while, finding it useless to assail hisribs with punishment and his ears with
maledictions, the Brabant was, deeming life gonein him, or going so nearly that his carcass
was for ever useless, unless indeed some oneshould strip it of the skin for gloves,
cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off theleathern 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 uphill, andleft the dying dog for the ants to sting and
for the crows to pick. It was the last day beforeKermessa away at Levon, and the Brabant was
in haste to reach the fair and get a good placefor his truck of brasswares. He was in fiercewrath,
because Patrusky had been a strong and much-enduring animal, and because he himself had
now the hard task of pushing his charrette all theway to Levon. But to stay to look after Patrusky
never entered his thoughts, the beast was dyingand useless, and he would steal, to replace him,
the first large dog that he found wandering aloneout of sight of its master. Patrusky 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 andwinter, and fair weather and foul. He had got
a fair use and a good profit out of Patrusky,being human, he was wise, and left the dog to
draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and havehis bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by
the birds, whilst he himself went on his way tobeg and to steal, to eat and to drink, to danceand to
sing, in the mirth at Levon. A dying dog, a dog ofthe cart, why should he waste hours over its
agonies at peril of losing a handful of coppercoins, at peril of a shout of laughter? Patruskylay
there, flung in the grass-green ditch. It was abusy road that day, and hundreds of people,
on foot and on mules, in wagons or in carts, wentby, tramping quickly and joyously on to Levon.
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Some saw him most did not even look, all passedon. A dead dog more or less, it was nothing in
Brabant, it would be nothing anywhere in theworld. After a time, among the holidaymakers,
there came a little old man who was bent and lameand very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting,
he was very poorly and miserably clad, and hedragged his silent way slowly through the dust
among the pleasure-seekers. He looked at Patrusky,paused, wondered, turned aside,
then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds ofthe 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 patted in amidst the bushes, for him breasthigh, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness
upon the poor, great, quiet beast. Thus it wasthat these two first met, the little Nello and
the big Patrusky. The upshot of that day was, thatold Jehan Doss, 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 thesickness, which had been a brain seizure brought
on by heat and thirst and exhaustion, with timeand shade and rest passed away, and health and
strength returned, and Patrusky staggered up againupon his forced-out, tawny legs.
Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless,sore, near to death, but all this time he hadheard
no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, but onlythe pitying murmurs of the child's voice and the
soothing caress of the old man's hand. In hissickness they too had grown to care for him,
this lonely man and the little happy child. He hada 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 waswell enough to essay aloud, hollow, broken bay,
they laughed aloud and almost wept together forjoy at such a sign of his sure restoration,
and little Nello, in delighted glee, hung roundhis rugged neck with chains of margarites,
and kissed him with fresh and ruddy lips. So then,when Patrusky arose, himself again,
strong, big, gaunt, powerful, his great wistfuleyes had a gentle astonishment in them that there
were no curses to rouse him and no blows to drivehim, and his heart awakened to a mighty love,
which never wavered once in its fidelity whilstlife abode with him.
But Patrusky, being a dog, was grateful. Patruskylay pondering long with grave,
tender, musing brown eyes, watching the movementsof his friends. Now, the old soldier,
Jehan Das, could do nothing for his living butlimp about a little with a small cart,
with which he carried daily the milk cans of thosehappier neighbours who owned cattle away
into the town of Antwerp. The villagers gave himthe employment a little out of charity,
more because it suited them well to send theirmilk into the town by so honest a carrier,
and by it at home themselves to look after theirgardens, their cows, their poultry,
or their little fields. But it was becoming hardwork for the old man. He was eighty-three,
and Antwerp was a good league off, or more. Patrusky watched the milk cans come and go that
one day when he had got well and was lying in thesun with the wreath of marguerites round
his tawny neck. The next morning, Patrusky, beforethe old man had touched the cart,
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arose and walked to it and placed himself betwixtits handles, and testified as plainly as
Dumbshow could do his desire and his ability towork in return for the bread of charity that he
had eaten. Jehan Das resisted long, for the oldman was one of those who thought it a foul shame
to bind dogs to labour for which nature neverformed them. But Patrusky would not be gainsaid,
finding they did not harness him, he tried to drawthe cart onward with his teeth.
At length Jehan Das gave way, vanquished by thepersistence and the gratitude of this creature
whom he had succoured. He fashioned his cart sothat Patrusky could run in it, and this he did
every morning of his life thenceforward. When thewinter came, Jehan Das thanked the blessed
fortune that had brought him to the dying dog inthe ditch that fair day of Louvain,
for he was very old, and he grew feebler with eachyear, and he would ill have known how to
pull his load of milk cans over the snows andthrough the deep ruts in the mud if it had not
been for the strength and the industry of theanimal he had befriended. As for Patrusky,
it seemed heaven to him. After the frightfulburdens that his old master had compelled him to
strain under, at the call of the whip at everystep, it seemed nothing to him but amusement to
step out with this little light green cart, withits bright brass cans, by the side of the gentle
old man who always paid him with a tender caressand with a kindly word. Besides, his work was over
by three or four in the day, and after that timehe was free to do as he would, to stretch himself,
to sleep in the sun, to wander in the fields, toromp with the young child,
or to play with his fellow dogs. Patrusky was veryhappy.
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