Loveliness Part 1

Loveliness.

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Loveliness sat on an eider-down cushion embroidered with cherry-colored puppies on a pearl satin cover. The puppies had gold eyes. They were drinking a saucer of green milk. Loveliness wore a new necktie, of cherry, a shade or two brighter than the puppies, and a pearl-gray, or one might call it a silver-gray jacket. He was sitting in the broad window sill, with his head tipped a little, thoughtfully, towards the left side, as the heads of nervous people are said to incline. He was dreamily watching the street, looking for any one of a few friends of his who might pa.s.s by, and for the letter-carrier, who was somewhat late.

Loveliness had dark, brilliant eyes, remarkably alert, but reflective when in repose. Part of their charm lay in the fact that one must watch for their best expression; for Loveliness wore bangs. He had a small and delicate nose, not guiltless of an aristocratic tip, with a suspicion of a sniff at the inferior orders of society. In truth, Loveliness was an aristocrat to the end of his tongue, which curled daintily against his opalescent teeth. At this moment it lay between his teeth, and hung forward as if he held a roseleaf in his lips; and this was the final evidence of his birth and breeding.

For Loveliness was a little dog; a silver Yorkshire, blue of blood and delicately reared,--a tiny creature, the essence of tenderness; set, soul and body, to one only tune. To love and to be beloved,--that was his life. He knew no other, nor up to this time could he conceive of any other; for he was as devotedly beloved as he was pa.s.sionately loving.

His brain was in his heart. In saying this one does not question the quality of the brain, any more than one does in saying a similar thing of a woman. Indeed, considered as an intellect, his was of the highest order known to his race. Loveliness would have been interesting as a psychological study, had he not been absorbing as an affectional occupation. His family and friends often said, "How clever!" but not until after they had said, "How dear he is!" The order of precedence in this summary of character is the most enviable that can be experienced by human beings. But the dog took it as a matter of course.

This little creature loved a number of people on a sliding scale of intimacy, carefully guarded, as the intimacies of the high-born usually are; but one he loved first, most, best of all, and profoundly. I have called him Loveliness because it was the pet name, the "little name,"

given to him by this person. In point of fact, he answered to a variety of appellations, more or less recognized by society; of these the most lawful and the least agreeable to himself was Mop. It was a disputed point whether this were an ancestral name, or whether he had received it from the dog store, whence he had emerged at the beginning of history,--the s.h.a.ggiest, scrubbiest, raggedest, wildest little terrier that ever boasted of a high descent.

People of a low type, those whose imagination was bounded by menial similes, or persons of that too ready inclination to the humorous which fails to consider the possible injustice or unkindness that it may involve, had in Mop's infancy found a base pleasure in attaching to him such epithets as window-washer, scrubbing-brush, feather-duster, and footm.u.f.f. But these had not adhered. Loveliness had. It bade fair, at the time of our story, to outlive every other name.

The little dog had both friends and acquaintances on the street where the professor lived; and he watched for them from his cushion in the window, hours at a time. There was the cabman, the academic-looking cabman, who was the favorite of the faculty, and who hurrahed and snapped his whip at the Yorkshire as he pa.s.sed by; there was the newsboy who brought the Sunday papers, and who whistled at Loveliness, and made faces, and called him Mop.

To-day there was a dark-faced man, a stranger, standing across the street, and regarding the professor's house with the unpleasant look of the foreign and ill-natured. This man had eyebrows that met in a straight, black line upon his forehead, and he wore a yellow jersey. The dog threw back his supercilious little head and barked at the yellow jersey severely. But at that moment he saw the carrier, who ran up the steps laughing, and brought a gumdrop in a sealed envelope addressed to Loveliness. There was a large mail that afternoon, including a pile of pamphlets and circulars of the varied description that haunts professors' houses. Kathleen, the parlor maid,--another particular friend of the terrier's--took the mail up to the study, but dropped one of the pamphlets on the stairs. The dog rebuked her carelessness (after he had given his attention to the carrier's gumdrop) by picking the pamphlet up and bringing it back to the window seat, where he opened and dog-eared it with a literary manner for a while, until suddenly he forgot it altogether, and dropped it on the floor, and sprang, bounding. For the dearest person in the world had called him in a whisper,--"Love-li-ness!" And the dearest face in the world appeared above him and melted into laughing tenderness. "Loveliness! Where's my _Love_-li-ness?"

A little girl had come into the room, a girl of between five and six years, but so small that one would scarcely have guessed her to be four,--a beautiful child, but transparent of coloring, and bearing in her delicate face the pathetic patience which only sick children, of all human creatures, ever show. She was exquisitely formed, but one little foot halted and stepped weakly on the thick carpet. Her organs of speech were perfect in mechanism, but often she did not speak quite aloud.

Sometimes, on her weaker days, she carried a small crutch. They called her Adah.

She came in without her crutch that afternoon; she was feeling quite strong and happy. The little dog sprang to her heart, and she crooned over him, sitting beside him on the window seat and whispering in her plaintive voice: "Love-li-ness! I can't live wivout you anover _min_ute, Loveliness! I can't _live_ wivout you!"

She put her head down on the pearl-gray satin pillow with the cherry puppies, and the dog put his face beside hers. He was kept as sweet and clean as his little mistress, and he had no playfellow except herself, and never went away from home unless at the end of a gray satin ribbon leash. At all events, the two _would_ occupy the same pillow, and all idle effort to struggle with this fact had ceased in the household.

Loveliness sighed one of the long sighs of perfect content recognized by all owners and lovers of dogs as one of the happiest sounds in this sad world, and laid his cheek to hers quietly. He asked nothing more of life. He had forgotten the world and all that was therein. He looked no longer for the cabman, the newsboy, or the carrier, and the man with the eyebrows had gone away. The universe did not exist; he and she were together. Heaven had happened. The dog glanced through half-closed, blissful eyes at the yellow hair--"eighteen carats fine"--that fell against his silver bangs. His short ecstatic breath mingled with the gentle breathing of the child. She talked to him in broken rhapsodies. She called him quaint, pet names of her own,--"Dearness" and "Daintiness,"

"Mopsiness" and "Preciousness," and "Dearest-in-the-World," and who knew what besides? Only the angels who are admitted to the souls of children and the hearts of little dogs could have understood that interview.

No member of the professor's household ever interfered with the attachment between the child and the dog, which was set apart as one of the higher facts in the family life. Indeed, it had its own page of sacred history, which read on this wise:--

When Adah was a walking baby, two and a half years before the time of which we tell, the terrier was in the first proud flush of enthusiasm which an intelligent dog feels in the mastery of little feats and tricks. Of these he had a varied and interesting repertoire. His vocabulary, too, was large. At the date of our story it had reached one hundred and thirty words. It was juvenile and more limited at the time when the sacred page was written, but still beyond the average canine proficiency. Loveliness had always shown a genius for the English language. He could not speak it, but he tried harder than any other dog I ever knew to do so; and he grew to understand with ease an incredibly large part of the usual conversation of the family. It could never be proved that he followed--or did not follow--the professor of psychology in a discussion on the Critique of Pure Reason; but his mental grasp of ordinary topics was alert and logical. He sneezed when he was cold and wanted a window shut, and barked twice when his delicate china water-cup was empty. When the fire department rang by, or a stove in the house was left on draught too long, and he wished to call attention to the circ.u.mstance, he barked four times. Besides the commonplace accomplishments of turning somersaults, being a dead dog, sitting up to beg for things, and shaking hands, Loveliness had some attainments peculiar to himself.

One of these was in itself scientifically interesting. This luxurious, daintily fed little creature, who had never known an hour's want nor any deprivation that he could remember, led by the blind instinct of starving, savage ancestors skulking in forests where the claw and tooth of every living thing were against every other, conscientiously sought to bury, against future exigencies, any kind of food for which he had no appet.i.te. The remnants of his dog biscuit, his saucer of weak tea, an unpalatable dinner, alike received the treatment given to the bare bone of his forefathers when it was driven into the ground.

Anything served the purpose of the earth,--the rough, wild earth of whose real nature the house pet knew so little. A newspaper, a glove, a handkerchief, a sheet of the professor's ma.n.u.script, a hearth brush, or a rug would answer. Drag these laboriously, and push them perseveringly to their places! Cover the saucer or the plate from sight with a solemn persistence that the starving, howling ancestor would have respected!

Thus Loveliness recognized the laws of heredity. But the corners of rugs were, and remained, the favorite burying sod.

On that black day when the baby girl had used her white ap.r.o.n by way of blowers before the reluctant nursery fire, the little dog was alone in the room with her. It had so happened.

Suddenly, through the busy house resounded four shrill, staccato barks.

In the vocabulary of Loveliness this meant, "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!"

Borne with them came the terrible cries of the child. When the mother and the nursemaid got to the spot, the baby was ablaze from her white ap.r.o.n to her yellow hair. She was writhing on the floor. The terrier, his own silver locks scorching, and his paws in the flame, was trying to cover his young mistress with the big Persian rug, in itself a load for a collie. He had so far succeeded that the progress of the flames had been checked.

For years the professor speculated on the problems raised by this tremendous incident. Whether the Yorkshire regarded the fire as a superfluity, like a dinner one does not want,--but that was far-fetched.

Whether he knew that wool puts out fire,--but that was incredible.

Whether this, that, or the other, no man could say, or ever has. Perhaps the intellect of the dog, roused to its utmost by the demand upon his heart, blindly leaped to its most difficult exertion. It was always hard to cover things with rugs. In this extremity one must do the hardest. Or did sheer love teach him to choose, in a moment that might have made a fool or a lunatic of a man, the only one or two of several processes which could by any means reach the emergency?

At all events, the dog saved the child. And she became henceforth the saint and idol of the family, and he its totem and its hero. The two stood together in one niche above the household altar. It was impossible to separate them. But after that terrible hour little Adah was as she was: frail, uncertain of step, scarred on the pearl of her neck and the rose of her cheek; not with full command of her voice; more nervously deficient than organically defective,--but a perfect being marred. Her father said, "She goeth lame and lovely."

On the afternoon when our story began, the child and the Yorkshire sat cuddled together in the broad window seat for a long time. Blessedness sat with them. Adah talked in low love tones, using a language as incomprehensible to other people as the tongue in which the dog replied to her. They carried on long conversations, broken only by caresses, and by barks of bliss or jets of laughter. The child tired herself with laughing and loving, and the dog watched her; he did not sleep; he silently lapped the fingers of her little hand that lay like a cameo upon the silken cushion.

Some one came in and said in a low voice: "She is tired out. She must have her supper and be put to bed."

Afterwards it was remembered that she clung to Loveliness and cried a little, foolishly; fretting that she did not want her supper, and demanding that the dog should go up to bed with her and be put at once into his basket by her side. This was gently refused.

"You shall see him in the morning," they told her. Kathleen put the little dog down forcibly from the arms of the child, who wailed at the separation. She called back over the bal.u.s.ters: "_Love_-li-ness!

Good-by, Loveliness! When we're grown up, we'll _al_ways be togever, Loveliness!"

The dog barked rebelliously for a few minutes; then sighed, and accepted the situation. He ran back and picked up the pamphlet which Kathleen had dropped, and carried it upstairs to the professor's study, where he laid it on the lowest shelf of the revolving bookcase. The professor glanced at the dog-eared pages and smiled. The pamphlet was one of the innumerable throng issued by some philanthropic society devoted to improving the condition of animals.

When Kathleen came downstairs she found the dog standing at the front door, patiently asking that it might be opened for him. She went down the steps; for it was the rule of the house never to allow the most helpless member of the family at liberty unguarded. The evening was soft, and the maid stood looking idly about. A man in a yellow jersey, and with straight, black eyebrows, was on the other side of the street; but he did not look over. The suburban town was still and pleasant; advancing spring was in the air; no one was pa.s.sing; only a negro boy lolled on the old-fashioned fence, and shouted: "Hi! Yi! Yi! Look a' dem crows carryin' off a b'iled pertater 'n' a piecer squushed pie!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MAID STOOD LOOKING IDLY ABOUT]

Kathleen, for very vacuity of mind, turned to look. Neither potatoes nor squash pie were to be seen careering through the skies; nor, in fact, were there any crows.

"I'll have yez arrested for sa.r.s.e and slander!" cried Kathleen vigorously.

But the negro boy had disappeared. So had the man in the yellow jersey.

"Where's me dog?" muttered Kathleen. It was dipping dusk; it was deepening to dark. She called. Loveliness was an obedient little fellow always; but he did not reply. The maid called again; she examined the front yard and the premises,--slowly, for she was afraid to go in and tell. With the imbecility of the timid and the erring, she took too much time in a fruitless and unintelligent search before she went, trembling, into the house. Kathleen felt that this was the greatest emergency that had occurred since the baby was burned. She went straight to the master's door.

"G.o.d have mercy on me, but I've lost the little dog, sir!"

The professor wheeled around in his study chair.

"There was a n.i.g.g.e.r and a squashed crow--but indeed I never left the little dog, as you bid me, sir--I never left him for the s.p.a.ce of me breath between me lips--and when I draws it in the little dog warn't nowhere.... Oh, whatever'll _she_ say? Whatever'll _she_ do? Mother of G.o.d, forgive me soul! Who'll tell _her_?"

Who indeed?

The professor of psychology turned as pale as the paper on which he was about to write his next famous and inexplicable lecture. He pushed by Kathleen and sprang for his hat.

But the child's mother had already run out, bareheaded, into the street, calling the dog as she ran. Nora, the cook, left the dinner to burn, and followed. Kathleen softly shut the nursery door, "So _she_ won't hear,"

and, sobbing, crept downstairs. The family gathered as if under the black wing of an unspeakable tragedy. They scoured the premises and the street, while the professor rang in the police call. But Loveliness was not to be found.

The carrier came by, on his way home after his day's work was over.

"Great Scott!" he cried. "I'd rather have lost a month's pay. Does _she_ know?"

The newsboy trotted up, and stopped whistling.

"Hully gee!" he said. "What'll the little _gell_ dew?"

The popular cabman came by; he was driving the president, who let down the window and asked what had happened. The driver uttered a mild and academic oath.

"Me 'n' my horse, we're at your disposal as soon as me and the president have got to faculty meeting."