Stories of Childhood | Page 6

streets the many dogs who
toiled from daybreak into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses,
and loosened from the shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best
they might,--Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and
thought it the fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he
was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he
had to work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of
winter dawns; though his feet were often tender with wounds from the
sharp edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks
beyond his strength and against his nature,--yet he was grateful and
content: he did his duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved
smiled down on him. It was sufficient for Patrasche.
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 amidst 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, and
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 water, 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 arise 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.
It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre,--so quiet, save only
when the organ peals and the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the
Kyrie Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that
pure marble sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birthplace in the
chancel of St. Jacques.
Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart,
which no man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do
business on its wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a
sacred name, a sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of Art saw light, a
Golgotha where a god of Art lies dead.
O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them
alone will the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been
wise. In his life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death
she magnifies his name. But her wisdom is very rare.
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, whilst Patrasche, left without upon
the pavement, would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the
charm which thus allured from him his inseparable and beloved

companion. 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 remained couched patiently before the
churches until such time as the boy reappeared. It was not the fact of
his going into them which disturbed Patrasche: he knew that people
went to church: all the village went to the small, tumble-down, gray
pile opposite the red windmill. What troubled him was that little Nello
always looked strangely when he came out, always very flushed or very
pale; and whenever he returned home after such visitations would sit
silent and dreaming, not caring to play, but gazing out at the evening
skies beyond the line of the canal, very subdued and almost sad.
What was it? wondered Patrasche. He thought it could not be good or
natural for the little lad to be so grave, and in his dumb fashion he tried
all he could to keep