Journeys Through Bookland Volume Iv Part 7

A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of limb, with wolflike ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular development wrought in his breed by the 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 harness, creatures that lived training their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the flints of the street.

Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter gall of the cart and 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 abuse.

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 bra.s.s and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might while he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wine shop or cafe on the road.

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 exceedingly warm. His cart was heavy, piled high with goods in metal and earthenware. His owner sauntered on without noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it curled around his quivering loins.

The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrasche to stop for a moment for a draft from the ca.n.a.l. Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was far worse for him, not having tasted water for nearly twelve; being blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless weight which dragged upon his loins, Patrasche, for once, 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 the oak cudgel--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. His master, with a parting kick, pa.s.sed on and left him.

After a time, among the holiday makers, there came a little old man who was bent, and lame, and feeble. He was in no guise for feasting. He was poor 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 gra.s.s 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 amid the bushes, that were 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. They carried Patrasche home; and when he recovered he was harnessed to the cart that carried the milk cans of the neighbors to Antwerp. Thus the dog earned the living of the old man and the boy who saved him.

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 amid 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.

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 waters, 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 rise 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.

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, while Patrasche, left upon the pavement, would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm which allured from him his inseparable and beloved companion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RESCUE OF PATRASCHE]

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 crouched patiently before the church until such time as the boy reappeared.

What was it? wondered Patrasche.

He thought it could not be good or natural for the 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 places.

But to the church Nello would go. Most often of all he would go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the stones by the iron fragments of the 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, tawny-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.

One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar, he got in for a moment after his friend, and saw. "They" were two great covered pictures on either side of the choir.

Nello was kneeling, wrapt as in an ecstasy, before the altar picture of the "a.s.sumption," 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 pa.s.sed 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. And they keep them shrouded there--- shrouded in the dark---the beautiful things! And they never feel the light, and no eyes look upon 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 for looking on the glories of the "Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent from 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.

The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an absorbing pa.s.sion for art.

Going on his way through the old city in the early daybreak before the sun or the people had seen them, 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 G.o.d. 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 rapture of meditation wherein all that he saw was the beautiful face of the Mary of "a.s.sumption," 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.

"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 plat of ground and labor for thyself and be called Baas by thy neighbors," said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed.

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 morning, 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 amongst the rustling rushes by the water's side.

There was only one other besides Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at all of his daring fancies. This other was little Alois, who lived at the old red mill on the gra.s.sy mound, and whose father, the miller, was the best-to-do husbandman in all the village.

Little Alois was 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.

Little Alois often was 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 millhouse.

One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but stern, came on a pretty group in the long meadow behind the mill.

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 cornflowers 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 own 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed the wood from Nello's hands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NELLO AND PATRASCHE]

"Dost much of such folly?" he asked. But there a tremble in his voice.

Nello colored and hung his head. "I draw everything I see," he murmured.

Baas Cogez went into his millhouse sore troubled in his mind. "This 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 lad is comely." And from that day poor Nello was allowed in the millhouse no more.

Nello had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little outhouse to the hut, which no one entered but himself--a dreary place but with an abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on the great sea of stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies which possessed his brain.

No one ever had taught him anything; colors he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread many a time to procure even the poor vehicles that he had there; and it was only in black and 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 never had 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 descending night behind him.

It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults no doubt; and yet it was real, true to nature, true to art, mournful, and, in a manner, beautiful.