by Unknown
Smith was as good as his word. Zero was sufficiently and properly fed, and given plenty of exercise. He mixed with some very aristocratic canine society, where the sweetness of his temper was much commended and imposed upon. After two months his master called for him, and Zero once more behaved like an ecstatic bullock.
“Yes,” said Smith, “he’s in good condition, as you say. Otherwise, he’s not much changed. He’s as big a fool as ever he was. If a toy Pom growls at him, he runs away; and if a collie tries to get past him alive—well, it can’t. He’d tear the throat out of any man as struck you, and if the cat next door spits at him he goes and hides in the rhubarb.”
“Seen any more of that wonderful instinct of his?”
“No, sir, I have not. But I should have done if there had been any occasion for it. It’s a fact that I never feel so safe as I do when I’ve got that dog here. Don’t you believe in it yourself, sir?”
“Sometimes I do—Mrs Staines does absolutely. If there’s nothing in it, then there has been the most extraordinary lot of coincidences I ever came across.”
Richard Staines and his wife had agreed that they would live principally in the country, and one day during their engagement Jane took Richard down to Selsdon Bois to show him the house of her dreams, known to the Post Office as Midway. Then, when he came to select, he would know the kind of thing to look for. Jane had known Midway in her childhood, and had loved its wide and gentle staircases, its fine Jacobean panelling, its stone roof, and its old garden with the paved walks between yew hedges.
“Well,” said Richard, “if you are so keen on the place, why shouldn’t we wait for a chance to get it, instead of looking for something more or less like it?”
“Because you can’t,” said Jane. “We’re general public, and general public is never allowed to buy a place like Midway. People live in it till they die, and then leave it to the person they love best, and that person lives in it till he dies. And so on again. It never comes into the market. Things that are really valuable hardly ever do.”
The conversation took place in the train which was conveying them to Selsdon Bois.
“Ah, well,” said Richard, “what is there? It needn’t be very big to be too big for us.”
“Not a big house at all. I never counted, but I should think about twenty rooms.” She made guesses as to acreage of garden, orchard, and grass-land. She admitted that they were merely guesses.
“The only thing that I really remember is that it was thirty-six acres in all. Could we do it?”
“Yes,” said Richard; “we ought to be able to do that.”
“Still, it doesn’t matter,” said Jane despondently, “because, of course, places like that are never to be got.”
Then they stepped out on to the platform of Selsdon Bois Station, where a man was busily pasting up a bill. It announced the sale by auction, unless previously disposed of, of Midway.
“Miracle!” said Jane, subsiding gracefully on to a milk-can. “It’s ours!”
And a fortnight later it was really theirs. The house was as delightful as Jane had said, but it was an old house, and during the last ten years had not been well kept up. There was a good deal to be done to make it quite comfortable and satisfactory. The work was to have been finished by the time Richard and his wife returned from the honeymoon.
“It’s been simply funny the way we’ve been kept back,” said the builder cheerfully. “But you might be able to get in, say, in another week or so.”
They remained for a month in town, and this gave Jane time to discover that it was not possible to teach Zero to do trust-and-paid-for, and to look up a really admirable train by which Richard might travel from Selsdon Bois to the city every weekday morning.
“Yes,” said Richard, a little doubtfully, “it’s quite a good train, but——”
“But what?”
“Oh, nothing. I shall probably take it whenever I go up, though it’s a bit earlier than is absolutely necessary. You see, I don’t regard my presence at the office as so essential as I once did. My partners are most able and trustworthy men, and they like the work. Of course, I shall keep an eye on things.”
“Then how many days a week will you go up?”
“Well, just at first I shall go up—er—from time to time.”
“Come here, Zero,” said Jane. “See that man? He’s idle. Kill him!”
“Idle? Why, I shall have any amount of things to do down at Midway! Gardeners and grooms want a deal of looking after at first, until they pick up the way you want things done. Then there’s that car your father gave us. I’ve got to learn how to drive it; I’ve got to know all about its blessed works right up to the very last word. The man who don’t is open to be robbed and fooled by his chauffeur. That won’t be done in a week. Then I’ve had an idea that we might lay out a golf-course—quite a small affair, just for practice.”
“Richard, you’re a genius! (You needn’t bite him after all, Zero.) That will be the very thing for guests on Sunday afternoons—not to mention us ourselves.”
“I was thinking principally of us ourselves.”
“Where is that big-scale plan of the land? We’ll pin it down flat on the table, and start arranging it now. We shall probably have to alter it all afterwards, but that don’t matter.”
V
Six years had passed; and Zero had got a new master, a somewhat dictatorial gentleman, but with genuine goodness of heart, aged five, bearing the same name as his father, Richard Staines, but never by any chance addressed by it. His father called him Dick. His mother called him by various fond and foolish appellations. He was known to the servants of the household as the Emperor. He had two sisters, whom he always spoke of collectively as “the children.” He always spoke of Zero as “my dog.”
Zero was rather an old dog now, but hale and hearty. In his own circle he was highly valued, but his formidable appearance still struck terror among strangers, willing though he was to make friends with them. The tradespeople, who had at first approached very delicately, had now grown used to him; but the tramp or hawker who entered the garden at Midway, and found Zero looking at him pensively, as a rule retired quickly to see if the road was still there. No further instance had occurred of Zero’s mysterious powers, and in consequence they tended to become legendary. Richard Staines had now definitely adopted the theory of coincidence.
“Zero’s a good old friend of mine, and I love him,” he said; “but we must give up pretending he’s a miracle.” Jane’s faith, however, remained unshaken.
And then, one summer evening, Dick came into the drawing-room with determination in his face.
“Mother,” he said, “I want a stick or whip, please.”
“Well, now,” said Jane, “what for?”
“To beat my dog with. He’s got to be punished.”
“That’s a pity, Dickywick. What’s he been doing?”
“He won’t let me go out into the road. Every time he caught hold of my coat and pulled me back. He’s most frightfully strong, and he pulled me over once. He wants a lamming.”
“I wonder if he would let me go out,” said Jane. “Let’s go and see, shall we?”
“Right-oh,” said Dick, perfectly satisfied.
In the garden they found Zero cheerful and quite unrepentant. As a rule, he rushed to the gate in the hopes of being taken out for a run. But this evening, as Jane neared the gate, he became disquieted. He caught hold of her dress and tried to drag her back. He ran round and round her, whimpering. He flung himself in front of her feet.
“Now, you see,” said Dick triumphantly.
“Yes, I see.”
“Well, I shall go and fetch a stick.”
“Oh, no. Zero does not want us to go out because he believes there’s some danger on the road.”
“O-o-oh! Do you really mean it?”
“Honest Injun.”
“Then he’s not a bad dog at all, and I told him he was. Come here, Zero.” He patted the dog’s head. “You’re a good dog really. My mistake. Sorry. What are you laughing at, mother? That’s what Tom always says. Now let’s go and see the danger on the road.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be quite fair to Zero, after all the trouble he’s taken. Besides, I want to see the rabbits at their games. They ought to be out just now.”
“All right,” said Dick. “You follow me, and I’ll show you them. But you mustn’t make the least sound. You must be very Red-Indian.”
Dick’s mother followed him obediently, and was very Red-Indian. The rabbits lived in a high bank just beyond the far end of the garden, and what the gardener had said about them before the wire-netting came could not be printed. Jane watched the rabbits, and conversed about them in the hoarse whisper enjoined by her son, but she was thinking principally about Zero.
Then Dick went to bed, and his father came back from the city. He went up at least one day a week, and came back full of aggressive virtue and likely to refer to himself as a man who earned his own living, thank Heaven.
At dinner Richard said: “By the way, I’d been meaning to speak of it—what’s the matter with Zero?”
“Why?”
“He won’t leave the gate. He was there when I drove in. I called him in, but he went back almost directly. I saw him through the window as I was dressing, and he was still there—lying quite still, with his eyes glued on the road.”
And then Jane recounted the experience of Dick and herself.
“You may laugh, Richard, but something is going to happen, and Zero knows what it will be.”
“Well,” said Richard, “if anybody is proposing to burglarise us to-night, I don’t envy him the preliminaries with Zero. But, of course, it may be nothing. All the same I’ve always said there ought to be a lodge at that gate.”
But to this Jane was most firmly opposed. A new semi-artistic red-brick lodge would be out of keeping with Midway altogether. “And what are you going to do about Zero?”
“Oh, anything you like. What do you propose?”
“I don’t know what to say. Whatever is going to happen, apparently Zero thinks he can tackle it by himself. Still, you might have your revolver somewhere handy to-night.”
“I will,” said Richard.
Zero remained at his post until the dawn, and then came a black speck on the white road. Zero stood up and growled. The skin on his back moved.
Down the road came the lean, black retriever, snapping aimlessly, foam dropping from his jaws. Zero sprang at him and was thrown down and bitten. At his second spring he got hold and kept it. The two dogs rolled off the road, and into the ditch.
At breakfast, next morning, Richard was innocuously humorous on the subject of revolvers, burglars, and clairvoyant bulldogs. He was interrupted by a servant, who announced that Mr Hammond wished to speak to him for a moment.
“Right,” said Richard. “Where is he?”
“He is just outside, sir,” said the man. “Mr Hammond would not come in.”
Hammond was a neighbour of Richard’s, a robust and heavily built man. As a rule he was a cheerful sportsman, but this morning his countenance was troubled. His clothes were covered with dust, and he looked generally dishevelled.
“Hallo, Jim,” said Richard cheerily. “How goes it? You look as if you’d been out all night.”
“I have,” said Hammond grimly. “So have several other men.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“Outbreak of rabies at Barker’s farm. He shot one of the dogs, but the other got away. There must have been some damned mismanagement. A lot of us have been out trying to find the brute all night.”
“But, by Jove, this is most awfully serious. Can’t I help? I’m ready to start now if you like.”
“Thanks, but I found the dog five minutes ago—dead in a ditch not twenty yards from your gate. He’s there still.”
“Who shot him?”
“Nobody. That’s the trouble. He had been killed by another dog, as you’ll see when you look at his windpipe. The chances are the other dog got bitten or scratched, and he’ll carry on the infection. It’s the other dog we’ve got to hunt.”
“Could it be——” Richard paused.
“I’m afraid so,” said Hammond. “Not many dogs would tackle a mad retriever, but your bulldog would. And it was close to your gate that the retriever was killed.”
“If you’ll wait half a minute, I’ll see where Zero is.”
But the dog was not to be found. Nobody had seen him that morning. In truth, Richard had not expected to find him. He left word that if the dog came back he was to be shut up in an empty stable. And then he and Hammond went out together.
“You’ve got a revolver, I suppose,” said Richard.
“I don’t hunt mad dogs without one. This is most awfully hard lines on you, Richard. He was a ripping good dog, Zero was.”
“He was. It’s Dick I’m thinking about. The dog was a great pal of his.”
They found young Barker watching by the dead retriever. He explained gloomily that he had sent a boy for a cart. The body would be taken back and buried in lime. “And even then, sir, we’ve not got the dog that killed him.”
“We’re just going to get him,” said Richard quietly.
They walked on in silence for a mile and then at a turn of the road they saw Zero, apparently asleep in the sunlight in the white dust.
“I ought to do this,” said Richard, “but I wish you would.”
“Right, old chap. It’ll be over in a moment, and he’ll be dead before he knows he’s hurt. Look the other way.”
“Richard turned round and waited, as it seemed to him, for a long time, waiting for the shot. Suddenly he heard Hammond’s voice behind him.
“No need to shoot. The poor beggar’s dead—been run over by a motor-car, I should say. It’s a lucky accident.”
“I wonder,” said Richard.
“Wonder what?”
“Wonder if it was really an accident.”
The Widower
THE decision of Edward Morris to marry again was one of the few practical things of his record. He had married first at the age of eighteen without the knowledge of his parents. His wife died two years later. He had no children by her. At her death he was desolate.
He was as desolate, that is, as one can be at twenty. He was free from the annoying minor-poet habit of advertising his afflictions, but it was quite clear to himself that there was nothing more left. Yet it is idle for a man to say he will stop when Nature, his proprietor, says that he will go on. There is no comedy at ninety, and there is no tragedy at twenty. After he had deposited the remains of his wife in Brompton cemetery—she had a strong aversion to cremation and inwardly believed that it destroyed the immortal soul—he went off into the country, selecting a village where he knew nobody. Here he learned by heart considerable portions of the poems of Heine, neglected to return the call of the rector, and bored himself profusely. It must not be understood that he resented the boredom. That was what life was to be in futur
e, a continuous dreariness.
After a brief stay in the village he went off to Paris to study art. At the time when he thought of giving himself to music all noticed his ability in painting. When he took to art they remembered that he had musical talent. A year later, when he returned to England to live the life of a hermit, to teach in song what he had learned in sorrow, some said that he was a lost artist, and some that he was a lost musician, and others that he was a well-defined case of dilettantism. It is, however, difficult to be a hermit in London. London has many tentacles; it puts them out and draws you into the liveliest part of itself. A claim of relationship, an old friendship, a piece of medical advice, a chance meeting—anything may become a tentacle. Almost before he knows it the misanthropical hermit is dragged from his shell and is writing that he has much pleasure in accepting her very kind invitation for the thirteenth, and wonders if that man in Sackville Street will be able to make him some evening clothes in time, his others being not so much clothes as a relic of those pre-hermit days when his wife, his only love, still lived and took him out to dinners, and would have the glass down in the hansoms. The thought that he resented this last action at the time saddens him, but the acceptance is posted. He is drawn into the vortex.
Once in, Edward Morris had to explain to himself how he got there. Nobody else wanted any explanation. Nobody else knew that the first time he took his hostess in to dinner he looked down the long table towards his host’s right hand and remembered. His explanation to himself was that he did it to avoid comment. One could not wear one’s heart on one’s coat sleeve. One must go somewhere and must do something. One must unfortunately live, even when the savour of life has gone. So he lived, and in living the savour of life came back again.
It was on a muggy December evening that he accompanied Lady Marchsea and her eminent husband to a first-night performance. When the eminent man was grumbling at the draught, and Lady Marchsea was, with justification, admiring herself, her dress, and everything that was hers, Edward Morris looked up. Out of the gloom of the box above him a brown-faced girl with dark eyes, her chin leaning on her white gloves, bent forward and looked down.