Schwartz: A History | Page 3

of the huge old lime-trees of Lorette, and my lonely feet on the thick carpet of dead leaves below made the sole sound I heard there except the ceaseless musical tinkle of chisel and stone from the distant granite quarries--a succession of notes altogether rural in suggestion--like the tinkle of many sheep-bells. Even in that first week of December I could sit in the open air there, where the mild winter sunlight flashed the huge crucifix and the colossal Christ of painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved out of the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a lime-tree avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond strict local knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great of girth. You climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the rock-carved chapel lies a precipice--not an Alpine affair at all, but a reasonable precipice for Belgium--say, two or even three hundred feet, and away and away and away, the golden-dimpled hills go changing from the yellowish green of winter grass to the variously-toned grays of the same grass in mid-distance, and then to a blue which grows continually hazier until it melts at the sky-line, and seems half to blend with the dim pallid sapphire of a December sky.
Here, 'with an ambrosial sense of over-weariness falling into sleep,' would I often sit at the foot of the great crucifix, and would smoke the pipe of idleness, a little unmindful, perhaps, of the good London doctor's caution against the misuse of tobacco. It was here that I awoke to the fact one day that the man with the axe was absent. He had slipped away with no good-byes on either side, and I was blissfully alone again. The sweet peace of it, and the quiet of it no tongue or pen can tell. The air was balsamic with the odours of the pines which clothed the hillsides for miles and miles and miles in squares and oblongs and a hundred irregular forms of blackish green, sometimes snaking in a thin dark line, sometimes topping a crest with a close-cropped hog-mane, and sometimes clustering densely over a whole slope, but always throwing the neighbouring yellows and greens and grays into a wonderful aerial delicacy of contrast. The scarred lime trunks had a bluish gray tone in the winter sunlight, and the carpet at their feet was of Indian red and sienna and brown, of fiercest scarlet and gold and palest lemon colour, of amber and russet and dead green. And everywhere, and in my tired mind most of all, was peace.
I had been a fortnight at Janenne when my intrusive phantom left me on Lorette. I had made no acquaintances, for I was but feeble at the language, and did not care to encounter the trouble of talking in it. The first friendship I made--I have since spent three years in the delightful place, and have made several friendships there--was begun within five minutes of that exquisite moment at which I awoke to the fact that my phantom was away.
There was not a living creature in sight, and there was not a sound to be heard except the distant tinkle of chisel and stone, and the occasional rustle of a falling leaf, until Schwartz, the subject of this history, walked pensively round a corner eighty yards down the avenue, and paused to scratch one ear with a hind foot. He stood for a time with a thoughtful air, looked up the avenue and down the avenue, and then with slow deliberation, and an occasional pause for thought, he walked towards me. When within half a dozen yards he stopped and took good stock of me, with brown eyes overhung by thick grizzled eyebrows. Then he offered a short, interrogative, authoritative bark, a mere monosyllable of inquiry.
'A stranger,' I responded. 'An invalid stranger.' He seemed not only satisfied, but, for some unknown reason, delighted. He wagged the cropped stump of a gray tail, and writhed his whole body with a greeting that had an almost slavish air of charmed propitiation; and then, without a word on his side or on mine, he mounted the steps which led to the great crucifix, sate down upon the topmost step beside me, and nestled his grizzled head in my lap. I confess that he could have done nothing which would have pleased me more. I have always thought the unconditional and immediate confidence of a dog or a child a sort of certificate to character, though I know well that there is a kind of dog whose native friendliness altogether outruns his discretion, and who is doomed from birth to fall into error, and to encounter consequent rebuffs which must be grievous to