Stories of Childhood | Page 2

had left him in legacy her
two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but
he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became
welcome and precious to him. Little Nello--which was but a pet
diminutive for Nicolas--throve with him, and the old man and the little
child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and white
as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden-ground that yielded
beans and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly
poor,--many a day they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any
chance had enough; to have had enough to eat would have been to have
reached paradise at once. But the old man was very gentle and good to
the boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-natured
creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage,
and asked no more of earth or Heaven; save indeed that Patrasche
should be always with them, since without Patrasche where would they
have been?
For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary;
their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister;
their only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from them, they
must have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was body,

brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was their very
life, their very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello
was but a child; and Patrasche was their dog.
A dog of Flanders,--yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the
muscular development wrought in his breed by 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 the harness, creatures that
lived straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking
their hearts on the flints of the streets.
Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days
over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long, shadowless,
weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to
no other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed on
curses and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country,
and Patrasche was but a dog. Before he was fully grown 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 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
hell. To deal the tortures of hell on the animal creation is a way which
the Christians have of showing their belief in it. 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
brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might,
whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease,
smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or cafe on the
road.
Happily for Patrasche--or unhappily--he was very strong: he came of an
iron race, long born and bred to such cruel travail; so that he did not die,
but managed to drag on a wretched existence under the brutal burdens,
the scarifying lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the blows, the curses, and
the exhaustion which are the only wages with which the Flemings
repay the most patient and laborious of all their four-footed victims.

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 very warm. His
cart was very heavy, piled high with goods in metal and in earthenware.
His owner sauntered on without noticing him otherwise than by the
crack of the whip as it curled round his quivering loins. The Brabantois
had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house, but he had
forbidden Patrasche to stop a moment for a draught from the canal.
Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten
nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was